The Journals of John Cheever (Vintage International) by Cheever John

Author:Cheever, John [Cheever, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780307790293
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

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My difficulties continue, and I can’t determine where the blame lies. I sit in a chair under a tree. It is raining. The rain is light. I can hear it fall on the leaves, but the leaves of the tree make a shelter. I think—I have been drinking—that I must speak with Mary, make some stab at candor and perhaps approach love. This may be tactless and stupid. In any case, I speak. “You’re just making up one of your little stories,” she says. I say that the remark is spinsterish and irrelevant. I speak of those weeks following my return from Russia when I received, for the first time in my marriage, a vocal declaration of love. I ask if she doesn’t remember this; if it wasn’t true. She replies, “I wish you could have seen your face when you asked that.” I cannot settle on any motive for this. Does she think I despise her so deeply that any declaration of love is ridiculous? Or does she mean to say that I am ugly? She claims not. But how cruel it would be for a woman to call her lover ugly. The children return from the movies and I sit with them in what seems to me a fragrance of reasonableness. Returning to bed, I think I shall suffocate.

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In the morning there is the familiar anxiety. I fear that I have done and said some irrevocable things; that I have ruined my marriage and exiled myself. I feel both tender and horny. But opening a gin bottle at noon I think that the only declaration of love I have ever received has been rescinded. This is merely at the sight of a gin bottle.

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The Skidmore girls, some of them are beautiful. One’s head swims. Watch for the inch or two of thigh you’ll see when they mount their bicycles; watch the bicycle seat press into their backsides. Some of them, much less beautiful, muster a sense of humor and get by on this. Some of them have nothing at all. It is hot, and as in all small towns people complain more bitterly than they would in some larger place. The broad porches are still open, with their straw rugs, wicker furniture, tables with vases full of flowers, copies of the Reader’s Digest, and, at four, a pitcher of nice lemonade. “It’s our outdoors living room,” said Mrs. L. A bridge lamp burns at night. Crossing the park where I once saw a woman steal marigolds I think with sudden love of my son Federico; I think with shame of those quarrels he has overheard. How can he grow straight and courageous as he must in a house where there is so much that is bitter and frigid? I am sorry, I am heartily sorry, my son. I love you and will try to stay at your side. Girls pass with shadowy cheeks, with round cheeks, with no cheeks at all. No dogs bark. Have they passed a leash ordinance? I think of what I may do to C.

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