The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [119]
At Brushwick the seat beside him was occupied by a gray-haired man who carried one of those green serge book bags that used to be carried in Cambridge. The worn green cloth reminded Coverly of the New England winter—a simple and traditional way of life—going back to the farm for Christmas and the snow-dark as it gathered over the skating pond and the barking of dogs way off. With the book bag between them, the stranger and Coverly began to talk. His companion was a scholar. Japanese literature was his field. He was interested in the Samurai Sagas and showed Coverly a translation of one. It was about some homosexual samurai and when Coverly had absorbed this his traveling companion produced some prints of the samurai in action. Then the valves of Coverly’s heart felt abraded and he seemed to listen at his organs, as we will at a door, to see if there was any guilty arousal there. Then, blushing like Honora—coloring like any spinster who finds the whole sky-high creaking edifice of her chastity shaken—Coverly grabbed for his suitcase and fled to another car. Feeling sick, he went to the toilet, where someone had written on the wall in pencil a homosexual solicitation for anyone who would stand by the water cooler and whistle “Yankee Doodle.” How could he refresh his sense of moral reality; how could he put different words in Pancras’ mouth or pretend that the prints he had been shown were of geisha crossing a bridge in the snow? He stared out of the window at the landscape, seeking in it, with all his heart, some shred of usable and creative truth, but what he looked into were the dark plains of American sexual experience where the bison still roam. He wished that instead of going to the Macllhenney Institute he had gone to some school of love.
He saw the entrance and the pediment of such a school and imagined the curriculum. There would have been classes on the moment of recognition; lectures on the mortal error of confusing worship with tenderness; there would have been symposiums on indiscriminate erotic impulses and man’s complex and demoniac nature and there would have been descriptions of the powers of anxiety to light the world with morbid and lovely colors. Representations of Venus would be paraded before them and they would be marked on their reactions. Those pitiful men who counted upon women to assure them of their sexual nature would confess to their sins and miseries, and libertines who had abused women would also testify. Those nights when he had lain in bed, listening to trains and rains and feeling under his hip bread crumbs and the cold stains of love—those nights when his joy overshot his understanding—would be explained in detail and he would be taught to put an exact and practical interpretation on the figure of a lovely woman bringing in her flowers at dusk before the frost. He would learn to estimate sensibly all such tender and lovely figures—women sewing, their laps heaped with blue cloth—women singing in the early dark to their children the ballads of that lost cause, Charles Stuart—women walking out of the sea or sitting on rocks. There would be special courses for Coverly on the matriarchy and its subtle influence—he would have to do make-up work here—courses in the hazards of uxoriousness that, masquerading as love, expressed skepticism and bitterness. There would be scientific lectures on homosexuality and its fluctuating place in society and the truth or the falsity of its relationship to the will to die. That hair-line where lovers cease to nourish and begin to devour one another; that fine point where tenderness corrodes self-esteem and the spirit seems to flake like rust would be put under a microscope and magnified until it was as large and recognizable as a steel girder. There would be graphs on love and graphs on melancholy and the black looks that we are entitled to give the hopelessly libidinous would be measured to a millimeter. It would be a hard course for Coverly, he knew, and he would be on probation most of