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

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.
    •
    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