The Journals of John Cheever

by John Cheever

  This aloneness usually pleases me, but not at this hour. I say that there is too much je ne sais quoi in my affairs and that I will return to drink. That this is a great immoral madness I well know. I see an Alexander Calder on the wall and think that Sandy drank all his life, but I forget that he was not a drunkard as I am. I suffer a gruelling loss of perspective. My beloved daughter comes and she is a sort o paradise. I bask in the many kinds of radiance she seems to bring into the room. But when she leaves I am again tired and humorless. I watch a new TV show and find myself very nearly close to intellectually incompetent. I go to bed unwashed and am forced to settle for an incantatory way of thinking. “I lie naked and warm in a dark room,” I repeat to myself until I fall asleep. When I wake at one I continue this incantation. I seem not to enjoy the intellectual latitude that would allow me anything broader than this chant. Toward dawn I have a clean and boisterous dream about being stranded with some very friendly people in the village of Oristano. So carry on. My dearly beloved wife is coming to visit.

  •

  Rather late on Tuesday night Y. announces that I will go home in the morning and return on Monday for X-rays. M. cheerfully agrees to drive into the city. My feelings are highly confused. At seven in the morning a nurse summons me for a heart scan. I insist on shaving, and after going down to the labyrinthine second floor I find that no one is ready. However, more and more patients are brought in to wait. The sense of waiting, the equilibrium given by the lonely woman behind her desk when she tells some suffering character to sit down and wait, could be investigated by my friend L. When the test is done and I have returned to my room there is another journey to be made. I must have further chest X-rays. Here, again, there are delays, delays that might seem to have been generated by the nature of mass medical examination. I return alone to my room on foot. M. arrives at around eleven and packs up my clean and dirty clothing, my leftover food, my shaving things. It is hard for me to remember anyone’s having done this for me before. It may have been done by one of my sons. As I sit in the lobby waiting for M., a woman, quite badly crippled by illness, says to her husband, “You know, sitting here waiting, I’m having strange thoughts. Just sitting here gives me strange thoughts.” We drive out of the city. I find the return quite overwhelming and look for an old vial of Valium. It is not where I remembered leaving it on the windowsill, and I think then that perhaps I hid it in some clothing. While my beloved wife and my good friend set the table for lunch I conclude that I will simply spend the rest of my life under the happy power of drugs. That this is obscenely self-destructive seems a possibility. The pain in my chest is, at this hour, my main occupation.

  •

  This, my guess, is three days later. I take a chill at around five and go downhill much of the night. I dream that I buy a racing car and date a girl much younger than my daughter. We plan to meet in a discobargello called All You Can Eat for $300. There is a crowd outside. Waking, I see the heavy snow and think first, that while I was never a great skier, the slopes at Stowe were the most professional I ever attacked and that I managed them poorly. There is no inch of maneuverable snow I have ever skied that I don’t cherish. There is no inch of maneuverable snow that I have ever run that I don’t remember with fondness. Then I think that this is the very first snowfall of my long life in which I have not been able to participate in some way. Skiing, or coasting, or shovelling the walks. I say this to the dogs while I drink my coffee and it is perhaps their imperturbability that leads me to ask, Whatever made me think that I would live forever?

  •

  Some lawyers come to talk about my will and my taxes, and I don’t find them tiring. I eat a bowl of chicken soup and sleep, and, when I wake, my chemistry seems, for the first time in months, to have arrived at harmonious proportions. I am given the gift of feeling myself. I tell my wife that at twenty minutes to three on January 21st it was decided that I would not die. I am contented and deeply grateful for this. The sensible thing seems not to exploit the sense of contentment. I stay warm and listen to a “Brandenburg” Concerto. I have a good dinner and then hear the Stern-Perlman-Zuckerman virtuoso piece, which along with my fortunate chemistry genuinely delights me. I sleep well enough, but my chemistry in the morning is a little less than limpid. I am expecting a lover and I think continually of his various organs. It is interesting to observe that a man who is very near to death will lose none of his sexual ardor. If I said to you, “I know an old man who keeps in the crook of some tree photographs of naked young men with stiff pricks,” what would you say? You would not say anything, of course; you would walk away. But I think I do have something to say, and I will say it on yellow paper.

  •

  But on the voyage of this maimed ship I seem to have nothing to enter in the log. I have done my obscenities, which seem to me of som importance, but which this morning bore me. The voyage has, from time to time, been serenely free from the unconscionable boredom of unwanted lewdness. I truly think my health has improved.

  •

  We take a nap after lunch. I accelerate mine with a sleeping pill and enjoy a well-constructed siesta. We climb the treacherous hill together, and I drive Mary to her garage. It will be the second time in a month that I have seen the mountains. Here and there barbershops that call themselves “hair stylists” have opened and Mary asks at one of these if they will cut my hair. The price is fourteen dollars. I find another who asks twelve, and I am agreeable. “I used to be a barber,” he said, “before I became a hair stylist.” In any case, he cuts my hair. On leaving him I drive to find a garage that will repair the Volkswagen windshield wiper. It is a substantial exertion to get my game leg in and out of the car. At the second garage, after earnest research, they conclude that I need a new part. How admirable they are, I think, how dedicated to the maintenance of cars, and I do glimpse a tasteful buttock and wonder, alas, if this may have something to do with my sickness.

  •

  In the morning my whole person is quite precarious. I do drink some coffee and boil M. two eggs. Chance fantasies of sudden death—a truck will wipe out my side of the car, sparing M. and somehow leaving him with the cash in my wallet—cross my mind; they are characterized by vulgarity and by the sentimentality usually arrived at just before the drunkard loses consciousness. We start off. I think that I have written so many stories about men whose very reason depended upon the shadow of a falling leaf that I can’t complain about finding myself here. We do joke about a BMW, and I find that laughter can carry almost any burden. My daughter is at the hospital and I will not approach a description of her helpfulness. Both she and M. support me through rather a difficult interview. The medicine I have been taking for the last month has done nothing to block the cancerous tumors, and on Tuesday I will take up another course of medicine. So we drive home.

  •

  There is very bad news from the doctor, and Mary and I embrace and weep. I seem perhaps unable to type, but if I tried I might be abl to master the engine; I guess it would be some other morning of my life.

  •

  This is two weeks and three cobalt treatments later. These landscapes don’t, I think, lie particularly in my terrain. One could write about an old man or an old woman with a stick waiting out the later afternoons in those outpatient rooms where the music is tireless and vulgar, where the woman whose taste chose the pictures on the walls and subscribed to the dog-eared magazines has long since gone to other pursuits, and where one waits for ever and ever to hear one’s name or number. There is that laundry basket full of toys in that room where tiny children are given curing applications of electricity that would illuminate a large city. If this were all some part of a journey one of my characters was obliged to make I would be fairly well informed.

  •

  The day of the wedding. Federico first calls about the receipt of a telegram, and I am, of course, happy to talk with him. I then wait for the family to call when the ceremony is completed. It is not my best self that reports this. They ca
ll. Mary, to my delight, has been crying. Now they are drinking wine, and there will be a large dinner. I consider my son’s judgment in his choice of a wife to be highly mature. M. and I have a dinner of steak, bright-orange fried onion rings, and a salad with a commercial dressing. I go to bed almost at once and sleep soundly. Of our friendship I can say mostly that we are like travellers who help each other along the way. This is a journey, not a domicile. He helps me much to correct my handicaps and overcome the obstacles in my journey.

  •

  I eat liver for dinner and wake this morning well before dawn with nausea. I plan to rise before Mary, make the coffee, and take the garbage pail up the hill. However, I find that the garbage has already been taken up the hill. I will be obliged to return to the hospital on Monday. This hastening of my schedule is so the doctor can go to Florida for a week. There seems to be no point in complaining.

  •

  This morning I would like to write about victory. It was in the big hospital, and in one of those rooms where we waited, twenty or thirty of us, either to see if our various organs were strong enough to withstand the rigorous medicines that would be prescribed or to get applications of the medicines themselves. The reproductions on the walls had been chosen with that anxious and sensitive care that I had found in all the rooms. There was a Hopper, a Redon, a Grandma Moses, and an Andrew Wyeth; there was something for almost everyone. On the tables were the usual litter of magazines reminding one of the fact that the weekly periodical seems to have a less natural place in things—seems to enjoy less endurance—than the leaves that fall to the ground in autumn. Here on the covers were yesterday’s faces, some of them already forgotten, some of them assassinated, and a few of them crowned.

  We were a mixed company of about twenty—some of us in street clothes but most of us in those ragged hospital overalls. We held the large key rings and crude wooden tags that would make it impossible for us to lose or purloin our locker keys. The music tape being played was simply banal. A woman came in from the street, a well-dressed, good-looking woman. It has seemed to me, in my long life, that all well-dressed, good-looking women share certain fundamentals. There is to such a woman’s carriage, to the cut and hang of her clothing, an inimitable naturalness that is close to classical. The stranger enjoyed this. She gave the congregation a light and general smile and took off her coat and her hat. She was as bald as an egg. So were at least a third of us, but her beauty dramatized her loss. It was not the baldness of this stranger that was most striking, however; it was the look of absolute victory on her face. She had been infected by cancer; she had scourged the infection; and she had simply returned for a checkup. The look on her face, her air of having bested the tumors and carnage of the disease were beautiful. She was called in before the rest of us and politely explained that she was here for a checkup. It was very brief. “Thank you for waiting,” she said when she put on her coat and then her hat, resuming her beauty and her ordinariness. It may have been a turning point in my own cure that I saw this victorious woman.

  •

  And it was Mrs. T. who always spoke enthusiastically of platinum. “In ten days now,” she said, “I go back to the hospital for my platinum.” I don’t know, but my guess is that she would be enthusiastic about almost everything: the local train service, the local vegetables, the local flora. “Of course I’m enthusiastic about platinum,” she exclaimed. “After all, platinum saves my life. It is platinum that can separate, disintegrate, and destroy those tumors that once threatened my life. Platinum in this case is a force of goodness; platinum is a force of life, platinum is quite simply for me the difference between life and death, and I love it.”

  •

  This is the fifth day on which I feel like myself. I imagine that the feeling will continue and that the doctor will conclude that small doses of platinum are what is needed. Once every six weeks.

  •

  I have the news of shrinkage, and this is the best news I’ve put down here in months. My various aches and pains seem not cancerous and thus unimportant. M. is expected on the morning train, and I will be pleased to see him.

  •

  I come here without having seen the Times, which is very sensible of me. I don’t seem able to anticipate the limits on my strength, but it is limited. The doctor says that he thinks he can keep the cancer at the point of remission where it stands today. M. comes out, and to hold his hand is to lighten the pain of my disease. In the literature there is a good deal about the healing powers of love and openness. We are not so much loving as savage together, but the consequence, when he goes off to buy chemical fertilizer, is that I lie in the afternoon sun quite contented and happy. He has a healing power for me. I find nothing mysterious about this, and I like to think that no dependence is involved.

  •

  I might be described as un homme du siècle since I live a short distance from a nuclear reactor that has twice been closed down (for hazardous emissions) by a federal commission; the drinking water from the well that was dug twenty-five years ago by a dear friend has lost its savor and sweetness and taken on the flavor of those pollutants and corrosive chemicals that infect the earth; and I myself am so badly crippled wit bone cancer that I walk with crutches. But to blame this on our time would seem to me an example of destructive and passive pessimism.

  •

  In writing Saul I might say that perhaps you and A. already know—and I might have known myself—but it was only yesterday that I received the news that the man who can cure my cancer is in Bucharest. How stupid I’ve been. He has gray hair en brosse; a vast, unclean stomach; and he lives in a four-story building, the top of which is supported by caryatids. This is owned by his mother, a former policewoman. Entrée is difficult, of course, but I have a friend who has a cousin who was tortured by his mother, and he knows someone who can arrange an appointment. This all has to be kept secret since he is scorned and persecuted by the national medical societies, in spite of the fact that he cured Margaret Thatcher and President Mitterrand of their cancers.

  •

  I choose to see the doctor’s suspension of platinum not as the blessing it is but as an admission of the fact that platinum is not working. This puts me into a profound depression, in which I remain this Saturday morning. I think of the courage of my associates, of my closest associates, but the most I seem able to do is to admire their resources. I shall stay warm and read about maps.

  •

  A very heavy snow begins to fall at a little before midnight. This is the fifth of April. By the next morning, it is a foot or two of powder snow. Legally, it is a legal blizzard. To remember the pleasures of a storm when I was younger, I shovel the stairs and clean the snow off the cars. The snow falls so swiftly that I do this three times in the afternoon. The fall of snow stops about as night falls.

  •

  In the morning I wake feeling that my illness is a thing of the past. I have not felt so well in weeks. This seems not only well-being but an intelligent grasp of the fact that when I am in the best of health I often suffer profound depressions, random and unsuitable erections, and losses of memory. In any case, I feel that the cancer has been defeated; and perhaps it has. So, feeling that I have conquered cancer, I stroll happily around the house. A loaf of bread is needed, and I will search for one. What more simple and universal pursuit could there be than a man looking for a new loaf of bread? The last of the unseasonable snow has melted and there is a curious greenness of fragrance in the air that represents what—death! I have not conquered cancer, I have merely worsened. So off I go to the supermarket, which is closed. The sight of this place without lights, without delivery trucks, and without a full parking lot is like some apocalyptic vision. In this society, in this world, at this time of day, finding the supermarket closed is an upheaval. I go to the lesser, and the losing, market and hope deeply that it will not have been forced to stay open in competition; but it too, happily, is closed. Christ the Lord is risen. It is at the bakery that I fi
nd the new bread. And how for me a bakery is the heart—and sometimes the soul—of a village! I remember the bakery in the little town north of Rome. I remember stopping at a restaurant in Romania with C. and being told that we could not yet have lunch; the bread hadn’t been baked. One smiles at the girls in the bakery and wishes them a happy Easter.

  What I am going to write is the last of what I have to say, and Exodus, I think, is what I have in mind. In the speech on the 27th I will say that literature is the only consciousness we possess, and that its role as a consciousness must inform us of our inability to comprehend the hideous danger of nuclear power. Literature has been the salvation of the damned; literature, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair, and can perhaps, in this case, save the world.

  •

  The second Sunday after Easter, I attend church for the first time since the doctor declared me dead of cancer. I kneel, hoping to enter a larger realm of humility and gratitude than I might find alone. The altar is a blaze of light. How golden is the light of the candles! G. is bossy and stands determinedly during the collection, although this is not one of the rituals of our church.