The Journals of John Cheever

by John Cheever

  •

  Iole, who has worked for us for so many years, who first came to us one rainy evening in Rome, is now troubled by the sickness of her oldest brother in Rome, her thankless job, and the search for a new apartment. She is not a southern Italian—she claims to be a Roman—but when she is troubled her nose seems to take on another dimension, her eyes sink, and her voice is sorrowful and loud. Mary goes to solace her; not I. I am not guilty, and I have nothing but admiration for Mary’s kindness. They will talk mostly about the children, whom Iole has helped to rear. Later, I come into the kitchen and find Mary mending a Roman lamp G. brought me from Jerusalem. It has a relief of a naked man and the flame sprang from his genitals. A cat knocked it to the floor and Mary mends it. She also mends a Japanese bowl that she bought, I think, at Altman’s and a decorated china seashell that might, during the years when people smoked, have been used as an ashtray. She has mended the afternoon for Iole, and now I see her mending with dexterity and cleverness these broken things. Unworthiness is not what I feel, but in watching her mending, in knowing how, these days, mending is of the first importance to her, I know that some part of me is wayward and clings to its sense of brokenness.

  •

  So I think that “Oh What a Paradise It Seems” is completed. I will rewrite the supermarket story and whatever else seems mistaken, photocopy these, and try to find someone to drive me into the city. I do not want to take the train.

  •

  I take the dogs into the rainy woods and fertilize the rhododendrons, and, feeling poorly, I return to the house. The dogs are wet and muddy, and while they dry on the porch I put on the headphones of my tape player and listen to the Bach Concerto for Two Violins. I think the circumstances striking: an old man with two old and muddy dogs. He listens while two violin virtuosi perform one of the great masterpiece of Western civilization. He listens to this with headphones—he is quite alone in his enjoyment, and his aloneness on the rainy landscape is increased when the concerto ends and he hears the hearty applause of thousands, the noise as they get to their feet, and their shouting. He seems to laugh or cry. The dogs, who can hear nothing but the dripping of the rain gutters, look at me with concern. They are afraid, perhaps, that I have gone mad and will forget to feed them. Ben comes. We are both mistaken in thinking that this is Father’s Day.

  •

  This is upon my return from two weeks in the hospital, and I feel as though I had returned from the grave. That the kidney that was removed was cancerous is something, it seems, given the opportunities I possess, that I could pass over lightly, but I am regrettably morose and self-indulgent about the possibility of my death. I pray that this will pass. On my last night in the hospital I slept without medicine. Waking a little before dawn, I went to the window. The room was air-conditioned and the window was sealed. There had been a thunderstorm, and there was some rainwater on the screen. There was light in the sky and there were lights as well as a few lighted boats along the western shore. When I returned to bed it seemed that these were lamps, maintained by some woman of a very gentle and beautiful disposition. Judging from her voluminous dark hair, lightly confined by tortoiseshell pins, I take it she was of my mother’s generation, although she was quite plainly not my mother. I will always remember my mother climbing, fully dressed, into that barrel in which she conquered Niagara Falls. I dwelt on the sweetness of this woman with her lamps, and I prayed for some degree of sexual continence, although the very nature of sexuality is incontinence.

  •

  The doctor removes the stitches. M. is late. One of the disadvantages of homosexual love is waiting for a man. Waiting for a woman seems to be destiny, but waiting for one’s male lover is quite painful. He is twenty minutes late, but when he arrives he packs my things, oversees my departure from the hospital with tenderness and dispatch, points out interesting changes on the drive home while gently caressing my leg, and upon our return removes my clothes, washes and changes my bloody dressing, and delights and engorges my sexuality. The seriousness of this is something I have failed to assess. I hope and pray that the decisions I should make will be revealed. I do feel, this morning, that our being together for two weeks might make our parting intolerable. There are letters to write and bills to pay.

  So the day passes on which I seem to have risen from the dead, but toward the end of the afternoon—well past its apex—I conclude that these are the last weeks or months of my life. There seems to be some genuine fatigue and sadness here, as well as some contemptible narcissism. Self-love, one reads, is characteristic of our time; and here is self-love at its most intense. I will not live to see my dearly beloved son marry in February because I would be more successfully conspicuous if I died. This is, of course, loathsome, but I seem to lack the vitality at 11 A.M. to say so.

  •

  I lunch with my old friend R., who helps to lighten my depression. Perhaps a year ago he spoke openly of his homosexual liaisons, but now the subject is avoided. Sitting on the porch reading in the late afternoon—perhaps at that mysterious hour when one is given an unwanted insight into the tedium of life—I clearly remember being an unwanted child on a hot afternoon when I seemed to find the world more detestable than the world found me. The contempt was mutual. I go to A.A. and I am astonished to realize that this is not a social gathering. Why else should men and women meet with one another but to make friends or find lovers? But we are gathered together to save one another from alcoholic suicide. “I have been in mental institutions four times,” says a woman with a peaked head. Had T. been there she might have said, competitively, that she had been in mental institutions six times, but dear T. was not with us. She is very likely in a mental institution for the seventh time. One might say that these people are failures, and they are indeed—I seek out evidence of their having failed—but these are my most important companions. We do not meet as travellers, as people buying and selling, or as a group galvanized by some profession, or some condition such as poverty or wealth. We do not meet as people would in a museum, or a ruin, we are not thrust together by some natural disaster such as an earthquake, or a flood. We are gathered here together because we are drunkards.

  •

  With M. in the city I write some letters and pay most of the bills. He returns quite late, as I had expected, and we are joined by Ben and go to the Highland diner. The impact of this is something I meant to put down yesterday and seem to have lost. It is an old man going to a Greek diner. In their beginnings these places actually resembled dining cars on the tracks of railroads. A conscientious and exhaustive attempt seems to have been made to correct this impression, and now there are pictures on the walls, curtains at the windows, and the light falls from cut-glass chandeliers with cut-glass prisms. What the old man seems to feel is the loss of some comprehension of the ceremony of having dinner, or breaking bread. These people are not travellers, and a sense of wandering cannot explain the diversity in their appearances. They have driven perhaps no more than ten miles to arrive here, and some of them have very likely not been out of a ten-mile radius in years. There are four examples of clinical obesity. There are three women who have to be eased into their booths by helpful relations and waitresses. A very fat man occupies one stool at the counter and preempts two others. He orders two entrées. Then there is the man whose face seems to be a painful representation of the power of loneliness. He is a white-haired, good-looking man, with perhaps a forty-inch waistline—a fact that seems to concern him. He eats no bread or butter, orders no potatoes, and has no dessert. One feels his diet to be a losing contest with his waist. But it is the absolute humorlessness of his face that is so striking. His wife must have been killed in an automobile accident twenty-eight years ago, and he has never recovered from the blow of her loss. It is not the pain of loneliness one sees in his face, but a statement of how implacable and vast a force loneliness can be. What I mean by a failure here to understand the ceremoniousness of dinner is something he could not explain. Picnics struck him
as perfectly acceptable, frankfurters cooked on sticks, dry sandwiches eaten on mountain summits did not distress him as he was distressed by this Greek diner. These places happened to be run by Greek families, and could it be that their long history as voyagers had brought some incongruity inland? He was happy and willing to meet these strangers as customers, or merchandisers of clothing or groceries, as travellers; or even to share a pew with them in church, but at this hour he joined them for dinner with painful unwillingness.

  •

  I have done the wash, had the oil changed in my car, bought a loaf of French bread, taken the garbage up the hill, and last night I had a dream that a brilliant reviewer pointed out that there was an excess of lamentation in my work. I had, fleetingly, this morning, a sense of the world, of one’s life, one’s friends, and one’s lovers as givens. Here it all is—comprehensible, lovely, a sort of paradise. That this will be taken quite as swiftly as it has been given is difficult to remember.

  •

  For dinner, we go to the B.s’ where we have lobster that leaves us both a little ill. Ill or not, I wake with the full taste of a depression in my mouth. These are good friends, old friends, and I find our host delightful, but we talk mostly, as old people will, about the decline in services—in this case, medical care—during our lifetime, and I am more of an observer than a participant in this, the only world of its kind that I will ever know. In talking I forget what it is that I was talking about. I am very reluctant to say that I have forgotten what I was talking about, but that is the case. The stratifications of memory that are revealed at this time of life can be bewildering. I presently find my way back into my own conversation, but I am embarrassed to have admitted for, I think, the first time that cliché of old age: “And now I have forgotten what I meant to say.”

  •

  Waking around six I think that the damage to my memory—and there has been some—is a matter of fatigue, and that when I am rested I am given the illusion of being in command and feel self-possessed. But then I feel like one of those old men one reads about in the family-interest columns in afternoon papers. Grampa is having a struggle with age. Gramp doesn’t want to grow old. Gramp doesn’t understand that even the stars in heaven have their time of brilliance and then grow old. Oh-ho.

  And, quite differently, one would not want to be the kind of old man who, upon coming down into the kitchen in the morning and finding a few ants on the floor, would notice how, as he stepped on them, their passion for life on any terms was demonstrated. He had read—perhaps in Fabre—or had been told that their civilizations were hermetic, bu there were these adventurers who went out to explore the kitchen sink and the vastness of the floor and to hazard death by poison or being crushed by an old man’s slipper. As they fled to the baseboards, hid cleverly under edges of tables, exploited shadows, displaying some considerable knowledge of the visual capacity of a human adult, the old man was astonished at the intelligence they brought to the means of survival. He might better have cooked himself some breakfast and stepped out to see what the weather amounted to.

  •

  My thinking continues to lack resilience, and I guess it could be my blood count. But when I wake this morning and feel the old dog pushing against this bed I feel some deep and simple love for the animal, and that reminds me of the love one feels for other women and men. The word “dear” is what I use: “How dear you are.” It is the sense of moving the best of oneself toward another person. I think this was done most happily within my marriage, although I do remember being expelled to sofas in the living room, although not before the years had passed. I do recall the feeling of moving, rather like an avalanche, toward Mary.

  •

  Susie and Tad arrive, and we lunch out. I am very pleased with their company. The day is overcast. Now and then it rains. This is officially summer’s end, and have I had a summer’s day? Of course. I have scythed the woods and picked peas. That I can’t, this morning, remember a summer’s day is unimportant. I buy fruit for S., lose my gas cap, and look for it along the road shoulders thinking that I am Johnny Cheever, lucky Johnny Cheever, to whom no harm will ever come. I am tailed by a black who is drinking whiskey out of a bottle in a paper bag. I do not find the gas cap, but I have the luck to be able to purchase one. I bring S. her fruit, and walk the dogs in what seems now to be an early darkness. There are hurricanes in Bermuda and the wind here in the trees seems autumnal. The ballgame is rained out and I, with the old dog, go to bed at nine.

  •

  So the fragrance of Concord grapes at the turning of the stairs here—a strong perfume, and very like the foxy smell of wild grape—reminds me of my youth in southern Massachusetts when this fragrance an the deepening odor of smoke from the leaf fires that were so much a part of our lives in the past established the weeks of autumn and led us into the excitement of an early snow.

  •

  It is a splendid autumn day in the Northeast, and I would like to describe it to my dearly beloved son in California. It is one of those days when the massiveness of the clouds, travelling in what appears to be a northerly direction, gives one the feeling of a military evacuation, a hastening, a change in campaign maneuvers; and the clarity of the light gives the mountains—and later in the day the walls of the city—such an air of revelation that one sees how susceptible we are to the powers of light. We drive to the city. How long has it been since driving was my manifest responsibility? How unnatural it seems for me to be my wife’s passenger! In the city where I have lived for so many years I feel myself a stranger. I remember hearing, when I was a young man, the voice of someone as old and provincial as I saying, “Hurry, hurry, hurry, that’s all they can think of.”

  •

  So my wife seems more depressed this morning than she has seemed since my first epileptic seizure. What a sentence with which to begin a story! One would want to bring to this situation only largeness. I prepare her breakfast tray, as has been the custom for these last months. She stumbles into the kitchen and prepares a second breakfast tray. When I point out that a tray is already prepared she replies in a voice that rises close to a scream, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” But I can recall her father stumbling through his wife’s bridge party in a bathrobe, and her sister’s hysterics. And I remember our younger son saying, “She is not like this.”

  •

  So my wife, unable to speak to me, can now be heard. She opens her window and exclaims, “Oh, beautiful mockingbird! Oh, beautiful mockingbird outside my window!” How very important women are.

  •

  The day is brilliant, and so is the foliage, although much of the color has fallen to the ground. We think of the autumn foliage as beauty limited to the northeastern United States, but surely those countries that introduced brilliantly colored and patterned carpets must have had an autumn with brightly colored fallen leaves. How else could the Persians have hit on the idea of gold and crimson underfoot? On the hill above the old 1840 dam are tall trees, still filled with golden leaves. These are the colors of victory. Victorious armies, emperors, governments, and football teams have raised these colors. Winning is what these colors seem to signify. These conquerors’ colors are carried across the landscape as far as I can see. The redness of the marshes makes the blueness of the water seem to be a thrusting force, and the splendor of the landscape is emphatic; but I am an old, old man—and it was so different in my youth—who finds that the bounty and splendor of the world fail to cleanse the thoughts of his heart. My heart is in some motel room, howling at a consummate lewdness. However, having tried seems to be an accomplishment in itself.

  •

  On waking I think that what has tired me in the last forty-eight hours is the absence of anything that strikes me as truly genuine. The people who interview me are sincere, sympathetic, and interesting, but there is something intrinsically artificial in our meeting. In any case, I find myself greatly fatigued, and I do remember feeling this weary before under the same circumstances.
So I am pleased to make coffee in the kitchen and chat with the old dog. I am Bette Davis and the old dog is Géraldine Fitzgerald in the last scene of “Dark Victory.” “Now we have to learn to live again,” says the old dog, and I say, “If I can laugh I can live.” I then begin to laugh, quite tirelessly, while the crawlcredits—which are, in this case, exhaustive—commence.

  •

  The first day of the new year in New York Memorial Hospital. I am confronted with the fact that I cannot type very well. There is some damage to my dexterity. The confusion of the experiences that I have travelled through in the last month has led me to ask if such truths, mostly dealing with the ardor with which we pursue life at a medical level, are not in some way dim. Now that I know a little more about a life of quiet desperation, lived hourly in fear of death by suffocation, I seem to have learned nothing. What I mean to say is that I associat rapture with truth. Truth has, I think, the sense of revelation and light, and I seem to find no lightness in sitting for hours—hours—in what seem to be basements, dressed in those rags that are mandatory hospital dress, listening to everlasting vulgar and banal music, and waiting my turn at having a bolt of cobalt fired through my diseased bones.

  •

  Long before dawn I hear a voice whisper, “Oh, my love.” It is very faint, that whispered love we give mostly, I think, to children. But I find this morning that it is the woman next door. She wears the sort of high heels Roman prostitutes struggled with ten years ago and her hair is a completely improbable mound of honey-colored glory, but this whisper of love is the closest I will come to reality all night.

  •

  The day seems unilluminated and quite humorless. The cardiac echo is given to me by a couple I will describe as a self-important young black and a homosexual. I have encountered nothing in the force of nature that would explain the homosexual’s pristine boyishness. I can imagine no chain of events that would produce a voice that seemed so caressing. This examination takes close to an hour, and I am told that it was a success. Later, I have a bowel movement, which seems to me of the first importance. R. comes to pay me a call. I then go down to the second floor to have an injection that will make it possible to photograph my bones. In the waiting room we joke about how our hair falls out in clumps. M. pays me a call. I then return to have my bones photographed. It is the end of the day, and I feel deeply depressed. Men and women are going home from work. I see them in the hallway, including an intelligent and charming acquaintance. Those word combinations and tunes that threaten to dislocate my memory begin to appear. I suffer a collapse of vision and humor. I walk alone to the elevator and return alone to my room.