The Journals of John Cheever (Vintage International) (6 page)

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On Christmas Eve, a little before dark, I took my son over to see the skating rink in Central Park. Young and made timid by the strangeness of the place and hour, he held my hand firmly and was a model of docile obedience and agreement. In the dark I seized him and kissed him with forlorn love. I can remember when my daughter was younger and could be made by darkness and strangeness to be as docile. He looked to me for everything. What I did, he did. When I exclaimed about the lighted rink and the music he repeated my words. When, waiting for a bus, I crossed my legs, he crossed his legs. I have never seen the city before on Christmas Eve, I think. There were jocular groups on street corners, people going off to parties in evening dress, a young man with a package and a dozen roses hailed a cab—but, perhaps because of my own mood, whole neighborhoods seemed desolate and forsaken and I felt myself sad and alone.

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The sense of fear—or at least the sense of lacking courage—associated with retracing courses of thought and action is probably linked to the fear that one will destroy one’s usefulness as an artist. But th
usefulness of the artist varies from time to time, and since these are hours and days out of one’s life, can there be any other course but to look back into them, even though at times they seem like waste? You have been lost in a wood. You know how the mind works. When you realize that you are lost, the mind is instantly animated with a kind of stoic cheerfulness. How much worse it could be, you think. You have warm clothes, dry matches, and half a cup of water left in the canteen. If you have to spend two or three days out you will surely survive. You must avoid panic. You must keep your eyes and your mind in the most accommodating and relaxed condition. Within an hour your calmness is rewarded. There is the trail! A new kind of blood seems suddenly to be let into your heart. Your strength and your wind are refreshed and off you go. There has been a delay, of course, but if you keep to a decent pace you will be back to the shore where the boat is by dark. You hold to the pace. You keep your eye sharply on the thread of trail. You do not stop to drink or smoke or rest at all. You hike until the end of the afternoon and, seeing that the light has begun to go, you stop to see if you can pick out the noise of the waves that you should, by now, be able to hear. The place where you stop seems to be familiar. You have seen that dead oak before; that wall of rock, that stump. Then you look around. There is the heavy creel that you discarded at noon. You are back at the point where you discovered that you were lost. The lightness of your heart, your refreshed strength, the illusion of walking toward water that has heartened you all afternoon was illusory. You are lost; and it is getting dark. This is a situation in which I find too many of my characters. Presently one makes camp for the night, thinking that things could be much worse. But I never seem able to bring them out of the woods, on the one hand, or to transform the world into a forest. My children are indeed lost, but they are lost in a world in which almost everyone else seems to know the way. They rebel passionately at being set apart as the lost. They seem to have been victimized by an imbalance of courage and wisdom. The specious cheerfulness of the lost, their fetid compassion, their devotion to deep chords of laughter, to kindly faces in lighted rooms, seem not to be a competent moral or aesthetic resolution.

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The strain of debt; the difficulty of trying to write one’s way out of it. There are seven more days, six more days, etc. Once in New Hampshire
for three months I tried unsuccessfully to rip a story out of my brain or to patch together a series of incisive notes with no success at all. I have at times been able to sweat out a story, at times I’ve failed.

It helps to be relaxed.

   The lonesome road. You drive for twenty-five or thirty miles on a spring night along a strange road without meeting another car. A few houses are lighted, but most of them are dark. You hear peepers as you drive—the spring night sound swells in your ears and then fades—as you pass a marsh or a pond. There seems to be a lot of water in the neighborhood—ponds and brooks. The road turns, drops, and you see a sign, “7 T
ONS
M
AX
. L
OAD
,” and then a little bridge. Most of the houses must be summer cottages; that would account for their being dark. But it’s a lonesome road. You see the headlights of another car—the first in an hour—coming toward you. It is a big, high-bodied interstate bus and as it passes you can see that most of the passengers are sleeping. Then it is gone and you are alone again on the dark road. The noise the peepers make sounds sad.

Yesterday a beautiful day. You sweat in the sun; shiver in the shade. Walked to the station, thinking of the story. The sense of light pouring into the mind. The noise of an outboard motor and its multitude of associations. The sense of the day as if it were reflected in a piece of bull’s-eye glass. Spherical, as round as an apple. To the movies last night; the bizarreness of the village. The façades bent into the streetlight like masks on a stage, grotesque, lighted fronts. The twilight, the afterglow standing behind them, a clear and stormy light. The lobby stinks of peanuts and stales. The old woman who sells you a ticket wears a dress that glitters with brilliants. She wears a necklace of brilliants; her fingers are loaded with rings. You look from her to the twilight, the paper buildings. The picture was “Come Back, Little Sheba.” I thought it was very good. The library at Beechwood was lighted when I drove home. I seem to hold the mirror up to a lot of foolishness. There should be nothing to worry about if you tell the truth.

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These green, these fragrant, these carven cavernous and not cold days of spring. The smell of fish skin and bloodworms; the chill water.

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One of the children had a toothache in the middle of the night. Mary got water and aspirin. Her patient, sleepy voice. The sense, then, that one was face-to-face with transcendent patience. Many of the promises have been broken, etc., but here, like the ability to rise to love, like the strength summoned in the throes of childbirth, there is a patience, there is a calmness of spirit and mind that seems womanly and transcendent. It is two in the morning. She gets an aspirin and draws a glass of water. Everything is unhappy, broken, insubstantial, but for an hour it doesn’t matter at all. And for Eben the rain falls on the roofs of the houses where his enemies are asleep. Under the roofs on which he hears the rain fall strangers and enemies are sleeping. In the noise of the rain he hears the slippers coming downstairs and the boots mounting. For Eben the rain, even the rain, falls into the grass of a hostile and foreign country.

   New York on a summer night. How many lights are burning? A man sits on the front steps of the public library wearing no coat and no shoes and a dark felt hat. His shoes are beside him on the marble step.

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Now I resent the tiredness of my mind, from having drunk too much; I resent the craving for some erotic tenderness that is the only end, the only beauty for these days. Seeing an elderly man and woman having breakfast with their son—who may be taking summer courses at N.Y.U.—I yearned to discharge with competence and strength the responsibilities of a family man, to carve for my children something that has moral splendor—I glimpsed the lacks I show in turning my daughter’s loneliness into a poor anecdote—in asking advice everywhere. And with my mouth tasting of old wine, and with this gray sky, I find it so hard not to be incredulous in recalling the wonderful hours and days in the mountains, the cleanliness, P. coming back to the house with her flowers, the breadth of the view, swimming in cold water, making love under a thin roof; and I think now of the months that I have longed to write a story that will be fine, that will be singing, that will have in it all kinds of lights and pleasures.

As for failure and despair, they seem aggravated by the climate o
New York and the suburbs. Both New York and Scarborough seem in some cases to produce an egotism that needs the health and vigor of youth and an imitation of these energies when they are gone themselves. In both places there are portents of the abyss, and now and then you hear the voices and glimpse the faces of the fallen. Waiting to get your fried egg in a dirty cafeteria, you see, through the window between the counter and the kitchen, an old man bent over a stove. He is dressed in a loose white shift—prisoner’s garb—and his face is sullen and bitter. “It is quite cool out,” the baby-sitter says, handing you her seamy furs, and you recognize at once in the grayness of her face and the elegance of her voice that she has come to you from the abyss. The house that the A.s rented at the corner of Alewives Lane is empty again. They struggled for a year and left in the middle of the night, leaving unpaid bills everywhere. But in New Hampshire there are no portents, no manifestations of the abyss, no obligations to imitate the energies of youth, no dread of falling, of loneliness and disgrace, and the smell of wood smoke and the noise of the wind have a direct bearing on our lives. There we understand calmly how we live and how we change. Think of the autumn twilights; think of the old woman cutting her flowers, think of the roar of the purple sea on the island beaches.

A Sunday afternoon; a little rain in the village. A man practicing a violin. On the heels of the rain, dense humidity. Walking over to the C.s’ for dinner. A young man with a suitcase, hurrying down Fifth Avenue. A dressy Englishwoman imperiously hurrying her husband across the street. Cocktails and supper. Farther east a Puerto Rican carrying a suitcase up the steps of a rooming house. Past the Lafayette, now half demolished. Light pours from the sky through the collapsed ceilings of the dining room, the lobby, and the bar. It is easy to remember these rooms on a spring night when the big windows were open, when the room was full of light, friends, the smell of chicken and wine, and that these rooms where we used to come to celebrate arrivals and departures are half demolished and flooded with the light of the sky makes a cheerful memory a poignant one. On Third Avenue a man carrying a suitcase. In a dirty window a Cuban girl in a white skirt that must be new since she seems so delighted with it that her pleasure can be seen as you walk past this rooming house. Later thunder; then a flood, a gorging rain.

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Driving for seven hours, straight into the sun, tired my eyes. “How lush and green it is here,” my wife said, and I saw how the lawns were shining but I was not particularly happy to be back. It was coming back to offices, back to Grand Central Station, back to the evening train home, back to the discomfort of a full suit on a hot day, back to tiredness, back to parochialism, back to a small part of the world, back to a lack of excitement. That there are no heroes here does not mean that there are no heroes anywhere. I would like to keep the sense of being away from New York, away from the noise and excitement there. I would like to keep the sense of what a small part of the world this is; to master it, not to take it too seriously.

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Labor Day; storm warning up; a hurricane. The end of the season on the islands and the mountains; the tentative sunlight. The end of the year. Dark and humid here; a little rain. The kind of dim hangover that I haven’t experienced all summer. I am homesick for the islands or the mountains, for something other than this valley, this suburb. It seems to have the subtle power over my spirit of a baneful light—the return, in spite of myself, of passiveness. I still have not satisfied myself as far as discipline and concentration go.

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Every time I read a review of Saul Bellow I get the heaves. Oh this big, wild, rowdy country, full of whores and prizefighters, and here I am stuck with an old river in the twilight and the deterioration of the middle-aged businessman.

Into New York—frowzy—the men working to form a concept of race—their hair cut so short that it fits over their scalp like a cap of felt—a woman, and through her veils, her feathers, her furs, her pearls and brilliants, there shines a smile of perfect plainness and sweetness. Over to
The New Yorker
, where there are mixed opinions about the suburbs. Walked up Fifth Avenue. A fine procession; it is a procession. At the Fifty-seventh Street crossing the crowds seemed to group themselves for a second to form the features of a matriarchy. It was an ugly thought and it passed. A lot of homosexuals drifting around in midmorning.
Up along the edge of the Park to the museum. The Assyrian kings. Some early Aegean grave figures—the sense of early time—lions. The exclamatory Etruscan warrior; Mars; a sad athlete with a fillet. All the things found in rivers. The treasure of Constantinople, found in the Rhône, plates and belt buckles found in the Loire, swords found in the Danube, Venus in the Tiber. Aphrodite, fair and still. Some of Constantine’s jewelry, some of the Albanian treasure, Morgan’s thing. My feeling for sumptuousness has changed. At one time these things seemed precious, idle, adolescent, foolish. Now sumptuousness seems to be a legitimate need. Some sallets, visors, basinets, long snouts, idiot grins, old gods. Some swords of great weight and beauty, swords of meaning chivalrous, his heralds of glory, lethal symbols or worship. Waiting for a bus; the general lack of humor with which we regard one another. The tense atmosphere of an economic and a sexual content. Barring the admiration that follows pretty women, there is a good deal of tension—true ignorance—in the scrutiny New Yorkers give one another. There is not much geniality or trust in the looks on Madison Avenue. In the morning the river looked cold; it had an inhospitable gleam. Of the families that have been strung along the banks all summer—the mamas and papas and grandpapas and children—sitting in their underwear on folding chairs, swimming and eating and basking in the heat of the sun—there are now left only a few men, most of them old, with scarves around their necks, their hats pulled down to keep their ears warm.

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Yesterday, cold and rainy. A dark day, a black house, the exacerbating worries of indebtedness. Today the burnished light makes your eyes smart. Polished blue and burnished gold, brimming with brilliance. The north wind, the air smells of water, purple here, green there. The wind came around before dawn. The leaves are piling down. A tumultuous, a harmless wind.