by John Cheever
•
Irving Howe praises a novel for its brilliant exposure of the nettles that lie inevitably at the heart of family life.
I pay the bills and wonder about the costliness of this modest way of life. I bring brioches for S., and she says that the sight of me on a bicycle is beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. I’m very pleased with this—very pleased, in fact, with this relationship, which has got to be quite humorous and innocent. An old lady comes for lunch, and when she touches at the very edge of my egotism, at its most distant periphery, I blaze for a moment with impatience. Bad marks. I read George Eliot and find myself to be so physical a person, so tactile, so crude, that when anything is touched—when Deronda at last puts his hand around an oar—I am thrilled. I see a TV show on India and think about the importance of leadership; the questionable holiness of a free press; and that the paradise, the true paradise in which the stubborn and irreducible goodness of man reigns, is possible. I think of love, most often as a tragedy. And so try “The Island” for science fiction; and thank God that this planet from which I came is not a vulgar, low-budget, unimaginative dictatorship of women in peplums and men in diving gear, travelling in tubes through a civilization that has the sterility of an endless airport without the lunacy, the sweet uprootedness one finds in Heathrow or Leningrad. The strain of waiting for the publication, I mean the reception, of “Falconer,” and the lack of interest of Paramount and the Book-of-the-Month Club, is not too difficult to bear, but it is, nonetheless, a strain. So the most you can do is fill in the time.
•
It will be close to three years since I have enjoyed any naked, sexual engorgement. This is a painful handicap. Getting into my car after a shower of rain and feeling the wet seat on the skin of my buttocks reminds me of the ecstasies of the skin. The last, I guess, was an Irish girl whose name I can’t recall. She was about twenty, and, dropping her clothes, asked if I had ever seen anything so beautiful. I never had. It would not last, she added; her breasts were not as firm as they had been last year—and there was no true sadness in her observation. Ther was no sadness at all in our night together. She telephoned, not long ago. Thinking about Bennington and now about Ithaca, I thought, I think, in terms of the appearance of some lover who will undo me, engorge me, and grant me a contentment I have nearly forgotten. But after a month or so the sorrow sets in.
And I think of simple and pointless equations such as the Pefferdons. Pefferdon was born on a Midwestern farm in the 1880’s and grew to be a young man of exceptional intelligence, charm, and craft. Owing to his remarkable gifts, he was under-secretary of the Treasury at twenty-four and went on to become one of the world’s leading bankers and attempted, with J. P. Morgan, to corner the world’s currency. He married a striking young blonde, who was a gymnastics instructor. To be a millionaire in those days was great fun. One had yachts, planes, a private dentist, and the deep conviction that one was a recognized prince. His four children were raised in these princely surroundings, and his youngest daughter, very beautiful and truly innocent—determinedly so, perhaps, considering the artificiality of her environment—fell in love with Herbert Dillon. Dillon had something of her father’s giftedness. He was the son of Irish immigrants—domestics. His father was a gardener, and his mother an upstairs maid. He was an extraordinary athlete and had golden hair and that sort of geometric nose that promises great happiness—although there is, in my experience, very little you can do with a nose. Nancy Pefferdon was the lover in this romance. Dillon married her, reinvested her millions to buy partnerships, humiliated and presently destroyed her with his infidelities (highly publicized), and invited his current mistress to her funeral. All the Pefferdons were dead, and the great estate was up for sale. Dillon fastened his trousers long enough to buy the manor and the acreage, sold it to the most unscrupulous developer in the Northeast, who swiftly turned it into a suburban slum. So we have from rags to riches in one generation and from riches to plunder and the proliferation of a vulgarity that the Irish domestics hoped to escape when they fled Galway. But who cares, who really cares?
•
I am depressed for two days—a loss of vitality, perhaps sickness. It is difficult to grasp. It is very cold, and when I am in this humor my memories of cold are vivid. There was the cold of the farm in Hanove where Fred and I gave up hugging the fire and began to drink whiskey. I remember the hired man’s toilet, the wooden seat gleaming with frost. I remember the cold of the furnished rooms I lived in in New York. My unease in the cold comes naturally. I buy sand at the lumberyard and sand the driveway. The cold and the movement please me, but as the afternoon wanes the cold intensifies, and I am tired and uneasy. I sleep and wake and feel fine.
•
Alienation seems to be the word. I feel alienated. This is keen but not painful; no more than a premonition of physical pain, which one has experienced and will again. At church this morning I think that the Mass ends not with a prayer or an amen but with the extinguishing of the candles, like the scattering of fire that closed the congregations of savages. This is close to portentous. Lunching with friends, I may miss some opportunities, as I do in playing backgammon. At around two a fine snow begins to fall. This is the snow that I, as a young skier, literally prayed for. It is very light, but copious; it is the sort of snow that fell on a happy afternoon last year when I skied with P. Night falls; the snow goes on and on—“five inches of powder on a packed base,” one used to read. I shovel the stairs. The snow is like nothing, like air; and yet it holds the light that comes from the windows of the house. My daughter arrives in the middle of the storm after a dangerous journey. I much love her, pray for her happiness, and go to bed in my old bed, where I dream of a love.
•
After—on this shadowy winter morning—a string of harmless negatives, Mary closes with, “Well, you’ve never read any of his poetry.” “I’ve read more than you,” say I. So silence settles over the house and may not be relieved for a day or two. I feel poorly. Yesterday I skated. There are two rough places on the ice that will trip me up, and I worry about these in the middle of the night. I look into the woods for some signs of vitality, and all I find are the clusters of cones on the hemlock. Soon, I think, it will all be a blaze of color, first the dogwood, then the azalea—unpopular with me—then the greenness. I think of summer in terms of sexual discharges and iced gin. The last is impossible, and erotic playmates are not too easy to come by these days. I think that is a sexual discharge the genes and chromosomes are swiftly replenished, but the spiritual commitment is much more lasting.
•
I am galled at my lack of physical bulk and galled that this should concern me. There is really little evidence of this in all the photographs I have, but I fear being taken for an elderly bosun’s mate, that gentle clerk in the hardware store who knows the whereabouts of all the nails, the rifle-company typist, the small museum guard in a worn uniform who says softly, “It is beautiful, isn’t it?” I think of myself in West Berlin, toastmaster at Iole’s wedding—bang-bang, a dynamic, lambent flame. So, having no bulk, one counts on spirit. I skate, shovel the snow, and think that I see in some unidentified tree a trace of greenness and lightness. This seems to be what I’ve been looking for. But on the dark or mysterious end of things I imagine, when I lie down for my nap, that I hold in my arms some unsuitable lover.
•
Waiting for another photographer and interviewer, I operate at a thoughtless level. Phil Roth calls to say that he received “Falconer,” and would I give him John Updike’s address. The rivalry among novelists is quite as intense as that among sopranos.
•
In the long psychoanalytical conversation we have been discussing, it seems to me that we might discuss the importance of our beginnings. To conceive a child, my father told me, is as simple as blowing a feather off your knee. He may have been speaking of my chance conception. Conception also, as we know, can be the consummation of a passionate and ecstatic response to life. A child
demands love, which is easily given under most circumstances; rudimentary care, such as food and clothing; and, in a society with few conspicuous traditions, some broad instruction in good and evil. One’s opportunities are not boundless, but they are not, I think, bounded by the sticks and stones of our beginnings. The most rudimentary genetic construction gives us a chance to improve on Great-Uncle Ebenezer’s career as an inventor, or to continue the career as a concert pianist that was so suddenly ended by Cousin Louisa’s influenza. In our countenances we find a diversity, a richness, and promise that may be impeded but that is surely not crushed by the fact that Grandmother was an exhibitionist. “I think,” I tell Susie, “of the richness you and your brothers have brought into this house.”
•
Up from the meadows, up from the fields of corn, up from the deepest strata of my consciousness, swims my girl, my left knee in her crotch. In the higher strata, closer to waking, the others loiter, and while they may pick my pockets and do other things, I think no lasting damage to either of us will be done. “I wish you were here,” said H. “We could have gone to the Degas show, and I have fresh shad and asparagus.” Lying naked on that broad bed, I would have been very happy. But I do remember that the apartment is a sublet—I see, past the theatrical draperies at the window, the walls and windows of another apartment, and I am keenly aware of the fact that I am sixty-five. I do not seem to miss my youth. There is nothing so graceful as that. My youth seems taken from me. Then M. calls and will call again tonight. And I truly feel that there will be no darkness in this friendship. There is a membrane, a caul of darkness, that I think I recognize in homosexuals, and I think this is not our destiny. There will be in my life pain and grief, I know, but I think there will be no waywardness. That there might be a sexual consummation here seems likely, but it seems no more than a stone in our way.
•
So, you wake at half past six with the mounting hots, and by ten o’clock you could, like a riggish cat, mount a stuffed jaguar or fuck a rusty doorknob. This mounts until half past twelve, when company and lunch have a soothing influence. You drive into the village to get some milk, and the sight of the village, the stab at orderliness with which the buildings are grouped, the thoughtful look in a young woman’s face as she leads her children across the street seem to be the manifest beauty we hope to achieve. Then one is engorged with melancholy—slightly relieved by a dozen pigeons taking off from the roof of an old building. The day is hostile. The sky is gray, a discouragement, but the gray light is strong. The love music in the supermarket is sad, terribly sad. The woman ahead of me, wearing diamond rings and heavily made up, waits patiently to pay for a small bag of potatoes. In the barbersho a brutish and corrupt policeman wearing a mud mask sleeps. Into the barber’s comes a young woman with something to sell in a heavy box. She is very skinny. Her hair, home-dyed and home-waved, is a candy hue that went out of style ten years ago. She has spent the hour after high school on her makeup. “I know that you would be interested in—” “No,” says the barber rudely. I want to give her all the money I have. Half an hour later I see her standing by the highway with her box. She seems not to know where to go. I think she has invested her savings, or some borrowed money, in something she believes to be highly desirable. She dyed her hair and improved her features and, imagining success—oh, so lightheartedly—has been met with rebuffs. I think her experience—standing by the side of the road—is a part of all our lives. I cherish this. And so it is nearly dark, one has nothing, nothing at all, and one has everything. I will answer letters, light a fire, and read.
•
I endure, am forced into, and triumph over exhaustive carnal speculations and fantasies. I feel no guilt. When I announce that I have weeded the upper garden, Mary exclaims over the fact that I must have destroyed her bed of herbs. There is nothing very wrong about this, nor is there anything lovable in her frame of mind. The company of my son does strengthen my position. When a woman exclaims bitterly, “And now, I suppose, I must cook dinner,” the force of the remark is plaintive. How slender is her sense of usefulness. But this is not one’s first response. I seem to be approaching a great crisis in my life, some ampule perhaps of death, and yet I am convinced that a flood of light will save us both. I spend most of the day planting the garden that was destroyed by woodchucks in our absence. This is an occupation I thoroughly enjoy. The only difficulty is that it leaves me with some lameness in my right shoulder, and when I go with my son to see a Woody Allen film I observe that none of the actors seem to have spent the day with a spading fork. The film lacks (I think) the heft and the smell of soil. And I glimpse the inflexibility and the parochialism of my tastes at this time of life. And so as soon as the sun is on the garden today I will return there.
•
The holiday parties we go to might be described as provincial. This would be adequate but not truthful. We go on the night of the Fourt to see the fireworks at the club, something I first did perhaps twenty-five years ago. It is a pleasure to see so much of my life. The vast Palladian façade, built on the bones of murdered workers, and the men and women spread over the lawn are thought to be a show of wealth and privilege (although my friends from prison would say that it ain’t got no class) and I remember, unwillingly, the villa of a papal duchess. But here is the grass, the crowd, the twilight, and the terrible dance band playing “When the Red, Red Robin.” One has heard the same dreary music for so long that one would expect the players to be infirm, but they are youthful, and so what one encounters is enduring vulgarity. The buffet supper is over. The light is dimming. The band begins to struggle with “The Star-Spangled Banner” and very, very slowly the diners get off their chairs and onto their terribly expensive shoes. A little flag, constructed of fire, is ignited. Its sputtering can be heard, and one section of a crimson stripe falls to the grass. There is some applause, some cowboy hoots, and then, with a half-dozen mortared detonations high in the air, the show begins.
I watch the man, barely visible in the darkness, who ignites the mortars with a flare and then runs like hell. There is some enormous universality and excitement in the way he ignites a fuse and takes off. This is youth, this is the excitement of a summer night, this is mischief, this, in fact, is sin. This is also my partiality to a rudimentary participation. I canoe on the Main and in the canals of Amsterdam and Venice.
I get to know the quality of the water, the distances in terms of strength, and enjoy the privileges of a bystander. The fireworks are mortars and set pieces. They seem quite traditional. There is the French school: pale colors that arc at the zenith and give, for half a second, the illusion of a rotunda. There are the Neapolitan extravagances of red and green, and the phosphorus waterfalls. We sigh like lovers at the fire, applaud the fire, estimate the cost of the fire. We are charmed by the fire. “Mother can’t find her largest diamond,” says a young woman. Her “a” is improbably broad. It would excite the suspicions of a busboy. “What do you think someone from a place like Russia would think about this?” a young man asks. Oh-ho. I remember my old-fashioned friends who used to call across theatre lobbies remarks such as, “Lisbon was divine, but the King has laryngitis.” So the last chain of mortars jars our eardrums, fills heaven with fire, and we go back to the exclusive parking lot.
•
So, I feel lost, and doubly lost because I’m not sure where I am. Climbing the hill to get the paper, I seem to be going down a dirt road to swim in some lake. The feel of dirt under my bare feet and the breadth of the kitchen garden on my left—or the cut hayfields on my right—will diminish my sense of being lost, as will my swim in a cold lake. And so here, rather than venting my candor and my amorousness, I spade the fallow garden and weed the stairs. And today I will clip the hedges and fertilize the tomatoes. I think about my aloneness, about the many things that are meant by this. I claim to be thrilled by the indifference of the young because it gives me a sense of my self—my carcass and my intelligence—that has the robust ring of truth. An
d I am of that generation that can remember when every cash register had a small, marble shelf. Suspected coins were flung against this to tell by their ring whether or not they were counterfeit. It was to become for some of us a metaphor for good and evil, with a dependence upon the verb “rang.” So I feed the tomatoes as well as the Swiss chard, and, finding no love letter in the mail, I view both my losses and that which is beyond and above them, that which has always been represented by the mountains. The inclination to sadness is plain; so is the robust laughter from the mountains, and, while I am not quite content with this, it is enough to keep me moving. Pedalling up the long, gradual climb, I see both myself and my adversary. I display a kind of hasty optimism that seems comical. Velocity seems to be all that I’ve ever possessed. I pass a house where the vegetable garden is planted every spring and is always, by July, a thick wilderness of weeds. Is the man always transferred to another job? Do they divorce or simply take a long vacation in Europe? And then I pass the house that stands forever in the darkness of a grove of maples, susceptible to dampness, rot, and human depressions. A homosexual couple once lived there, quarrelling bitterly about hairpieces, etc. I then pass the beautiful garden of the two brothers who used to pump gas at the station. From the open windows of the house I hear two highly cultivated voices discussing the price of fried chicken. These are rich and educated women, and I wonder have the brothers married, do they have successful sisters, what is this foothold in the upper class? A burst of music explains the voices as television, and I shift gears and coast down the long hill with the wind in my face. I remember at Bennington, on an autumn afternoon, drawing a tub of water and turning on the TV. I got into the tub and pretended that the room was full of people. It was full of voices. But I am tired of such loneliness.
