by John Cheever
•
I have no perspective at all. After the interviewers leave, I drive the maid home and walk with the dogs. My sexuality is highly irritable and distorts my view of things. The last of the light has that splendid and indescribable glow that one finds only in winter twilights. Now, for the first time, I see color in the trees. So, there will be spring and summer. And, walking up the hill carrying the garbage pail, I see a holly leaf on the drive. I am as thrilled as Leander was when he saw the green from Advent on the chancel carpet. The nearly black, hard leaf with its thorns means potency and vigor. That it means nothing at all is unimportant. It is important that I am stirred.
I become myself; and so I will try to review what has contributed to my painful sense of loss. My mortality is what I begin with, manifested by my sexual drives. These excitements have always been random, and when I have refused the love of men it has been, I like to think, a choice and not a force of repression. The present problem, if it is that, began a year ago when I found myself alone in a squalid motel with a young man who had none of the attributes of a sexual irregular. We embraced briefly, declared our love, and parted. We have since then met four or five times, but I have thought of him often. The importanc of this is impossible to judge. It could be compared to an infection that threatens my well-being, but that is dormant much of the time. Such is my injured heart. He married for the second time in December and left my letters unanswered. What I expected from him was easy companionship, lewdness, and some relaxation of the rigors of living with a wife. On my return from Russia, I suffered a violent spasm of alienation. Darkness, for example, offended me. To read a book, I would turn on six lamps. The only house I have ever owned struck me as dirty, confusing, and costly. In the piles of mail, I found a letter from him, and it was the first that I opened. He hinted at the indifference of his marriage and hinted—no more—at his love for me.
It is impossible for me to describe what followed. I am highly susceptible to romantic love. I remember weeping bitterly over D. and L. I became engulfed in the anticipation of an erotic romance that corroded and destroyed that self-possession that defines a man. Yesterday at lunch I experienced that intoxicating arrogance of the self-declared alien, the sexual expatriate. I am unlike you, unlike any of you eating your wretched lunches in a Greek diner. I am queer, and happy to say so. At the same time, the waitress is so desirable that I could eat her hands, her mouth. This is the cardinal sin of pride. I rest, I sleep. How reluctant I am to admit to taking a nap. Somewhere along the line, my thinking, my chemistry, my genitals, and my spirit are restored; and that makes it possible to continue that voyage or pilgrimage that is one’s life. I am not sure of the hour of day. The taste of that given bread and salt that is my life is in my mouth. This would seem to be God’s will. I walk the dogs. I skate and tire very quickly. I cook dinner, drive to church, watch a thrilling movie on TV, and sleep happily in my skin for the first time in what seems to be a year. My most despicable moment, I think, is in the post office. There is a woman there in a very cheap fur coat, with two children. The coat has been sprayed with something that promised to make it gleam like mink, but the skin is the skin of a mongrel. The woman’s eyes are protuberant. So are the eyes of her two small children, and I regard all three with loathing and regard myself as contemptible for scorning these innocents. I experience the arrogance of a man committed to a wayward cock. This morning, eating bacon and toast, my galling otherness has been conquered. I am not at the Connaught, or the Cairo Hilton, or the Bucharest Minerva. I am in my own house. That I will suffer all these agonies again is likely, bu, having come through them so many times, I know that they are not a destination. Even now, writing this, I feel the painful threat of confusion and loss behind the bookshelf and outside the window, but I am happily a man sitting on a chair.
•
It is a week since I waited in this drafty kitchen for my lover. It all seems to have worked out wonderfully, although the composure I enjoy on waking seems not to last deep into the morning. What the hell is a man who made half a million dollars last year doing in an art colony where he sits alone in a room that is obviously furnished in the aftermath of a disaster? The chair he sits in comes from some kitchen. The narrow, threadbare rug belonged in some hall. The bed or cot is one of those expedient surfaces on which we fuck those people whose last names escape us. But what about the white bureau with a keyhole for every drawer, delicate hand pulls, a mirror held up with such narcissistic chasteness that it seems to ask, Who is the fairest of them all? How in hell did this bastion of middle-class chasteness—this repository for sachets, laces, old dance cards, fans, dried flowers, preserved rose leaves, broken beads, and perhaps a pearl-handled revolver—how did this find its way into this bleakest of rooms? There must, of course, have been a flood. Only a natural disaster of unprecedented sweep and violence could account for this feat of dislocation. There must be a chamber pot in the closet, and that half-burned candle in its wretched glass holder is left over from yesterday’s thunderstorms, when all the lights always went out.
•
I seem to have some vision of the waywardness of man and the blessings of velocity. I remember C., driving me to dinner with his wife and sons, blindly stopping the car on the road shoulder, making a wild grab for my cock, and kissing me on the ear. I was polite—no more—and so we continued on to the dinner. And I think of an article in yesterday’s Times in which Ada Huxtable discusses the architecture of roadside restaurants, meant to catch our sympathies at any speed above fifty miles an hour. There was, long ago, the practical decade, followed by the restorations and the progressive architects, working in their own idiom. What she does not observe is that this nomadic, roadside civilizatio is the creation of the loneliest travellers the world has ever seen. Quick-food stands that resemble the House of the Seven Gables, Colonial Williamsburg, and the Parson Capon house are not picked for their charm or their claim to a past; they are picked because we are a homeless people looking at nightfall for a window in which a lamp burns, and an interior warmed by an open fire, where we will be fed and understood and loved. The rash of utterly false mansards, false, small-paned windows, and electric candlesticks is the heart’s cry of a lonely, lonely people. And after opening a thousand rough-hewn doors, with their false, wrought-iron hardware; after warming ourselves at electric fires and reading a menu that is a reproduction of something from the century before last; we feel that the past will not feed and warm and understand and love us; and so we go on to the future; to the space between the stars where our love is waiting; we eat our wretched food in rocket ships, flying saucers, and pieces of Mars and the moon. Surely we will be understood there. And so one sees this great, nomadic nation on roads built by blackmailing unions and the lobbies of contractors, manufacturers, truck-fleet owners, and politicians of all sorts. We see a great people turned nomadic in their passionate search for love.
•
Absolute candor does not suit me, but I will come as close as possible in describing this chain of events. Lonely, and with my loneliness exacerbated by travel, motel rooms, bad food, public readings, and the superficiality of standing in reception lines, I fell in love with M. in a motel room of unusual squalor. His air of seriousness and responsibility, the bridged glasses he wore for his nearsightedness, and his composed manner excited my deepest love, and I called him the next night from California to say how much he meant to me. We wrote love letters for three months, and when we met again we tore at each other’s clothes and sucked each other’s tongues. We were to meet twice again, once to spend some hours in a motel and once to spend twenty minutes naked before a directors’ lunch I had to attend. I was to think of him for a year, continually and with the most painful confusion. I believed that my homosexuality had been revealed to me and that I must spend the rest of my life unhappily with a man. I clearly saw my life displayed as a sexual imposture. When we met here, not long ago, we sped into the nearest bedroom, unbuckled each other’s trousers, groped f
or our cock in each other’s underwear, and drank each other’s spit. I came twice, once down his throat, and I think this is the best orgasm I have had in a year. We slept together, at his insistence, and there was some true pleasure here in discovering, I believe, that neither of us was destined to exhaust the roles we were playing. I remember the acute lack of interest with which I regarded his nakedness in the morning when he returned to bed after having taken a piss. He was merely a man with a small cock, a pair of balls, and a small ass suitable for cushioning a chair or a toilet seat and for nothing else. The remembered exactions of women played some role in this for me. There was no anxiety on my part about whether he had a climax. I took a shit with the door open, snored, and farted with ease and humor, as did he. I was delighted to be free of the censure and responsibility I have known with some women. I could spar with him if I felt like it, feed my cock into his mouth, and complain about how smelly his socks were. And I was determined not to have this love crushed by the stupid prejudices of a procreative society. Lunching with friends who talked about their tedious careers in lechery, I thought: I am gay, I am gay, I am at last free of all this. This did not last for long.
•
To interrogate oneself tirelessly on one’s sexual drives seems to me self-destructive. One can be aroused, for example, by the sight of a holly leaf, an apple tree, or a male cardinal bird on a spring morning. As deeply rooted as they are in our sentimental and erotic lives, we must consider that our genitals can be quite thoughtless. They count on us for discretion, cleanliness, and gratification. Without our considered judgment they wouldn’t have the life span of a butterfly.
•
A bright day—cold, “fresh,” as we say in other languages; me, horny. In the evening paper—in this provincial, small-town newspaper—one reads that a Cuban couple, solitary, hardworking people, who had no friends, lost their son in a drowning accident in the municipal swimming pool and committed double suicide. They closed the garage door, connected a garden hose to the exhaust pipe of the car, and suffocated in each other’s arms. “They were so unhappy after they lost their son,” said the neighbors. “She cried and cried. She used to embroider a lo and knit and crochet, but after they lost the boy she didn’t do anything but cry.” Mr. Nils Jugstrom, returning from his job at the Townsend wire factory, noticed a cedar chest on the road shoulder of Route 23. It was a good-looking chest, nearly new, and he pulled over to the side of the road. Opening the chest, he found the mutilated body of a man with dark hair and a full mustache. It was some time before he could get a car to stop, and call the police. He sat alone by the corpse while hundreds of cars, hastening home, passed him with an indifference that he took personally. Deaths, this afternoon, are confined to the local nursing homes. Mrs. Cherryweather found a burglar in her shower stall, carrying her TV. While she called the police he escaped out a window. The high-school lacrosse team made four scores in the last eight minutes of play and defeated Haverstraw seven to six. I like smalltown papers.
To have been expelled from Thayer Academy for smoking and then to have been given an honorary degree from Harvard seems to me a crowning example of the inestimable opportunities of the world in which I live and in which I pray generations will continue to live.
•
None of us can clearly remember those years at the turn of the century when the exalted arts of painting, sculpture, and music became so chaotic, so lost in an area of metaphysics that they had neither the vision nor the intelligence to exploit, that they surrendered their spiritual responsibilities and left to literature, and to literature alone, the responsibility of continuing that dialogue—vital to the life of the planet—that we and our kind carry on with one another, with our landscapes, with our oceans, and with our gods.
•
When I was a young man, I woke one morning in the unclean bedsheets of squalid furnished rooms, poor and hungry and lonely, and thought that some morning I would wake in my own house, holding in my arms a fragrant bride and hearing from the broad lawn beyond my window the voices of my beloved children. And so I did. But there was in the air some deep, continuous sound that I had not imagined, and, going to the window to see if it was raining, I saw that the day was brilliant and that the sound I heard was the brook—a reward that m most desperate imaginings had overlooked. The bounty of things, as it so often is, had been richer than my imagination of it. And so I wake this morning. I hear again the roar of the brook. I sleep alone these days, having been exiled from my own bed, closet, and washbasin by a troubled wife. All I hold in my arms these days is a memory of the girl on the Murad cigar box. But my children are comely and loving and self-possessed and walking over those parts of the world that interest them; and my daughter once kissed me and said, “You can’t win them all, Daddy.” And so I can’t.
•
I recall coming into Rome on the train at dusk. I can’t remember from where I was returning, but I was returning to a wife or a mistress and a circle of singing children. It was a hot dusk. The train was passing through that shantytown at the edge of the city, where the houses are no more than sheds, redeemed by the wild fertility of their small gardens. In one of these small gardens a naked young man was bathing himself from a pail. I expect he was getting ready to wait on table at some trattoria on the Gianicolo. I saw nothing of him other than his youthfulness, the whiteness of his skin, and the thickness of hair at his armpits and crotch. I loved him. Oh, how I loved him! That he might be a cretin with bad breath and a grating voice would never occur to me. So I entered the city and the circle of friends, deeply saddened to think that I had left my heart in the slums, deeply saddened and walking with the stoop of a guilty impostor. Now that I’m an old, old man, such waywardness seems only some part of life’s richness.
•
M. calls and will likely arrive tomorrow. I could have told him not to come, but the alternatives are sinister. Reading old journals, I convince myself that the constants in my nature are healthy; as a man with a vegetable garden, I simply mean healthy as a plant that answers to its description on the package, that has a practical response to the soil and the climate and produces a surprisingly abundant and nutritious crop. The aberrations in my nature seem to me merely shadows, aberrant and passing storms. That I have homosexual instincts seems to me a commonplace. What is extraordinary, I think, is the force that was brought to crush these instincts and that exacerbated them beyond thei natural importance. Whether or not we spend the night together seems of no great importance. I enjoy his company. I am lonely.
•
So the grail, the grail; and anyone who thinks of this in terms of genitalia is a contemptible noncombatant. The grail, the grail! It fills one’s mind in the early morning as one’s skin is filled with ardor. There is no question of compromise or defeat. One wants only to make an exemplary contribution, and if this is accomplished one’s ending is inconsequential!
•
And there is the face, which is the most important experience for me and which seems to escape me. I am waiting for someone to arrive on the train. It is toward the end of the afternoon. The train is late. The taxi driver leaves his cab. He is youngish. There is really nothing very specific about him. He is, I think, ugly. If he ever went to a dance—which I doubt he would—he would have trouble getting a date. So, to this stranger, whom I very likely will never see again, I bring a bulky and extended burden of anxieties like the baggage train of some early army. Does he live with his wife, his girl, his mother, his drunken father? Does he live alone? Does he have a small bank account, a big cock, is his underwear clean? Does he throw low dice, has he paid his dentist’s bills—or has he ever been to the dentist’s? We see the light of the approaching train in the distance, burning gratuitously in the full light of day. At this sight, he takes a comb out of his pocket and runs it through his hair. Is the comb broken? Is his hair dirty? That is not for me to observe. What I do see in this gesture is the man—his essence, his independence; see in his homely face
the beauty of a velocity that does not apprehend the angle of repose. Here in this gesture of combing his hair is a marvel of self-possession, and the thrill is mutual and is, it seems, the key to this time of life.
•
One wouldn’t want to love oneself. That damages our usefulness. One wouldn’t want to pursue the past. That is bad for the posture. And one wouldn’t want to be one of those old men who take out their cocks and clear their throats as if they were about to write, with their seminal discharge, one of those lengthy postwar treaties that will crush th national spirit, surrender the critical isthmus, and yield the mountain passes to the enemy.
•
My son and his beloved are down when I return to the house. That I should see him enjoy the love of a loving, comely, and intelligent young woman is an enormous contribution to my sense of things. But I have forgotten to mention the light of this day. It is emphatic, terribly clear, and seems in its force and in the force with which it throws shadows to declare the year’s end. “I will not go swimming,” I say to Mary, “because I will cry.” “I understand,” says she. I do not swim (for other reasons) but the pool, dark so early in the afternoon, with its few fallen leaves, would be a powerful experience. Spreading fertilizer on the upper terrace, I think that my son will go and I will never see him again. This is not the worst of my thinking for the day, but it is contemptible; as it will seem contemptible later to think that I should have been born in an earlier period when I would have been better understood. Today is where I live; today gives me my gravel, my essence, the bulk of my usefulness. So I begin by thinking that all I possess is a belief in life’s purposefulness. I have not seen my wife so happy as she has been during these few days with our son. And since I see her happy, can’t I help her to continue to be? Perhaps I fail. I will invite her to go with me tonight. She will refuse. That I could insist is a possibility. If the clash that may lie ahead of me seems merely a misunderstanding of our times, wouldn’t this mean that I must take the posture of one of those stooped trees that stand traditionally beside the water, mournful and a good example of what some young tree would not want to be?
