Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  That night Rorem had an unexpected visitor: Cheever, festively waving a fifth of Scotch. For three hours or so, he went on and on about his recent psychotherapy, his drinking problem, the link between writing and screwing, and finally, when the bottle was empty, he put a hand on Rorem's leg. “I was reluctant,” the composer recalled, “since I wasn't particularly attracted to him physically. But Cheever sort of broke my heart, he was so wistful. ‘I simply have to,’ he said.” Cheever seemed “very naïve sexually”—he only wanted oral sex, as if other possibilities hadn't occurred to him—and afterward he was “like a high-school boy, romantic in the extreme”: “I've never felt this way before,” he said, claiming that he hadn't been with a man in some thirty years, and meanwhile caressing Rorem in a way that seemed “sort of cursory.”

  “Oh what good children we are!” Cheever wrote the next day. “How I rush to present myself at the breakfast table at eight AM, bright, shaven, proof of the fact that I did not get drunk last night and do something I should not have done.” For the next week or so, at any rate, the two were a couple: buzzing around the countryside in Cheever's roadster, having picnics together and chatting about one thing and another while Cheever gulped gin from a thermos. “[He] was obsessed with homosexuality,” Rorem later wrote, “as though hoarding lost time. Learning about my orgasm fantasies (squalid, narrow and sadomasochistic), he was anxious to show that his were elating, like being on a crimson staircase toward a silver tower that bursts open to a sky of golden stars.” With Rorem's assistance, Cheever ascended those stairs three or four times a day, and his long struggle with impotence was nowhere in evidence. Nor was he very discreet about things—once they did it under a Ping-Pong table—seeming almost to invite discovery: “My God, there's Hortense [Calisher]! … They know! … But I'm glad. … No I'm not.” Several years hence, while writing The Later Diaries, Rorem described the liaison and likened Cheever to Proust's Baron de Charlus, though he deleted these bits on the advice of his publisher's lawyer. “I wouldn't have minded,” Cheever remarked, once the book had been safely expurgated.

  His infatuation with Rorem ended almost the moment he left the “precious and unreal environment” of Yaddo; amid his dogs and souvenirs, Cheever rationalized his behavior as little more than an attempt “to offend [his] elders.” “I want to get back into the rousing, rainswept country of love,” he wrote—meaning heterosexual love—but where to begin? Ruefully he reflected that “perhaps fifty women” had offered their favors in recent years; for various reasons, though (“firstly because I might be incompetent”), he'd turned them all down. And whoever the fifty were, they'd certainly vanished by then, as Cheever found himself at an almost total loss. For a moment he thought he might marry Sharman Douglas, but then he had to admit he'd only met her once in his life and had already forgotten what she looked like. As for Mrs. Zagreb (“a matron in her fifties, whose feet are killing her”), she hardly seemed a suitable mistress for a world-famous author, and truth be known it wasn't a very torrid affair: “He beseeches her to love him and she sometimes kisses him, roughs his hair and fondles his whatsis but if he tries to go further she says: be good, be good, now please be good.” And finally, if he were perfectly honest with himself, he didn't want a mistress at all—quite simply, he wanted to be a proper husband with a loving wife. “I am sad,” he wrote that fall; “I am weary; I am weary of being a boy of fifty; I am weary of my capricious dick, but it seems unmanly of me to say so. I say so, and Mary most kindly and gently takes me into her arms. I don't make out, but lie there like a child. Patience, courage, cheerfulness.”

  Things got better, for a while, when Susan called from Colorado to say she was quitting her job and coming home to marry Malcolm Cowley's son, Robert, a thirty-two-year-old divorcé with two children. Cheever was bemused—it almost seemed “a little incestuous”—and not quite inclined to celebrate until he'd received confirmation from the prospective groom, whom he promptly invited to lunch at the Century. When he asked Cowley what his intentions were, the man began to stammer: “A you, you sound comes into his speech,” Cheever noted. “He asks me to tell him about my daughter. It seems to me a strange question for a man in love and my answers are inconclusive.” Even stranger, perhaps, was what appeared to be Cheever's genuine puzzlement on that point: “I seem to know so much about her that I know nothing,” he wrote the senior Cowley. “She doesn't break promises, tell lies or read the newspaper over one's shoulder at breakfast. She's intelligent, unpunctual, fearless and plays the record player very loud. It's about all I know.” But really it hardly mattered—she was getting married, and what a relief. That would be the end (Cheever hoped) of her quixotic interest in civil rights and such, nor would there be any more scenes like the one that had spoiled the holidays the year before. Indeed, when he saw the couple together at Christmas, they “seem[ed] so happy that it infect[ed] [them] all”: Cheever beamed and beamed (“I should get to my knees and thank heaven”), while Mary said she wanted to kiss everyone, even her husband, and did so.

  At the beginning of a hopeful new year, Cheever wrote: “My bowels are open, my balls are ticklish, my work moves, my children are well and unprecedentedly happy, I love my wife, my house is warm, so why should I wake in the throes of melancholy.” Why, indeed. For one thing he worried that word might spread of his tryst with Rorem, who, after all, was hardly celebrated for his discretion (and God only knew what the others at Yaddo had seen or heard). The following summer, anyway, when Rorem asked him to write a blurb for his new book, Cheever saw a chance to distance himself in a decorous way: after the whole Barolini fiasco, he replied, “I resolved never to do this again or to use friendly endorsements on my books.” So that was that. Still, he remained rather fond of Rorem and made a point of lunching with him almost every year at Yaddo, though he found the man's narcissism trying: “[Ned's] ego seems in spate,” he wrote, “crystaline [sic] and uninteresting.”

  * Such was Cheever's disdain for the piece that he didn't include it in his next collection, The World of Apples, a slender volume that could have easily accommodated it. That he didn't object to its later inclusion in The Stories of John Cheever was perhaps due to his faith in editor Robert Gottlieb's judgment.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  {1967-1968}

  CHEEVER'S TRUCE WITH MARY lasted perhaps a month, before their marriage began to make “its annual journey towards the rocks,” as he wrote Litvinov. Ever more drunken, Cheever was less and less apt to dissemble his bitterness, while Mary continued to refine a subtle method of guerrilla warfare. Arriving separately at a dinner party, Cheever made a point of throwing his wife “a look of implacable hatred,” and when he later sobered up and apologized, she benignly replied that she was “so used to [his] contempt she didn't notice it.” Also, she made a point of conspicuously breathing through her mouth in his presence, and when he solicitously inquired whether she had a cold, she explained that he reeked of gin.

  In February 1967 he escaped to Yaddo, and was relieved to find that all the homosexuals had cleared out; in their place was a captivating youngish woman who'd written an acclaimed biography of a great Romantic poet. “I would be a fool to claim that I am falling in love but I am immensely grateful for her company,” Cheever wrote. “Of all the people I have become attached to here this is the only seemly attachment, the only one with promise.” Their attachment appears to have been based on a single meeting (maybe two) at a restaurant near the racetrack, where Cheever exerted his charm and established the sort of instant (if ephemeral) rapport noted by many. For her part, the woman observed that Cheever seemed perhaps a little defensive about his lack of education, and he in turn thought he detected a touch of scholarly “sternness” in her manner, but decided this was relatively slight: “[H]ow natural it is that I, having been surrounded for so long by women who wield their intellectual gifts like battle axes should fall in love with someone whose intellect is of such excellence that she carries it like some simple gift.”

  An
d he was in love. She'd given him a friendly—perhaps even tender—kiss goodbye, and when he came home to his glum wife, Cheever felt “invincible” in his determination to marry the other woman and start a family. They'd made a date to lunch in the city—a meeting so fraught with possibilities that Cheever could scarcely face it without sneaking a lot of gin before and during his morning train, endeavoring to sweat it all out at the Biltmore steam room, where he caught an unhappy glimpse of himself in the mirror: “I see a puffy old man with pink feet, sparse pubic hair and a short cock.” Not surprisingly, the date proved a little anticlimactic for both parties: Cheever was so drunk he could barely follow the thread of his own well-worn stories, and lurching to embrace the woman, he almost burned a hole in her chesterfield with his cigarette. Meanwhile he observed that she wasn't as young as he recalled, nor as pretty: “Her backside is broad from all those years in libraries, there is a definite heaviness to her voice and her taste in clothing is dreary.” Alone again with his reveries, though, he decided that these “were trifling and opaque matters that love will cure,” and so wrote her a letter that seemed to lay his cards on the table: “[T]his is a proposal of marriage. … I will dedicate my new novel to you. I expect you to dedicate your book to me. We will appear together on the book jacket, photographed in the garden of our 18th century farmhouse on the grassy banks of the Limpopo River.” Perhaps he figured this was droll enough to be taken as a joke in case it didn't go over, but on second (and doubtless more sober) thought, he decided it was less than realistic, at least for the moment, and put the letter aside for later consideration.*

  Susan and Rob Cowley were to be married on May 6, 1967, and as the date drew near Cheever's own marriage was pretty much at its nadir; he couldn't help wondering about the propriety of playing a principal role in a ceremony that, for him, meant “slander, contumely, mutilation, etc.” Nevertheless, he threw himself into the preparations with admirable zeal. At first he planned to hold the reception at the Century Club, but was reminded of a by-law forbidding such affairs; then he decided the ceremony would take place at St. Mark's in-the-Bowery, where a quaint little graveyard could be used for the reception—though the minister had warned him (said Cheever) “that if he didn't have a squad of policemen every bum in lower New York would crawl into the tent, piss in the punch bowl and throw empty Petri wine bottles at [his] Mother-in-law.” What was important to both Cheever and his daughter was that it be a proper Episcopalian service using the original Cranmer. Rob Cowley was therefore enjoined to write a letter to the bishop of New York “to the effect that [he] wasn't really married [previously] despite [his] two children,” as Cowley recalled.

  The night before the wedding, Cheever and his wife took a hotel room in the city, and the next morning he attempted to engage her in a bit of amorous play: he crawled into her bed and she crawled out the other side and got into his bed; when he invited her to sit on his naked lap, she “[made] an exclamation of distaste” and grimly watched television. Thus rebuffed, Cheever spiked his orange juice with gin and went about his day (solitary martinis in a “dark, pleasant bar;” the pre-wedding lunch at Lüchow's), until the time came to pick up his wife and daughter in a limousine. Driven to the tenement on Waverly Place where Susan was living, Cheever couldn't find her name on the mailboxes and began ringing random doorbells and yelling “Susie! Susie!” from the street. Presently his daughter appeared in her wedding dress—she and her mother had been drinking champagne and getting ready—and at length they arrived at the church and hastily took their places while Purcell's Trumpet Voluntary began to play. Cheever noticed that his daughter seemed frightened (“I don't remember much,” she said, “because I was really lit”), and was glad to offer his arm: “In how many hotel and other lonely beds have I imagined myself greeting her at the church door (Why he might be her brother he looks so young) and leading her, with a superb mixture of ceremoniousness and humor, down the worn red carpet.” So he'd mused years before, and now the thing was happening at last.

  Cheever had hired a fancy caterer who spread a green felt carpet around the graves and erected a tent, into which passing derelicts peeped at the festivities. There were some two hundred guests in all. An elderly Josie Herbst sat chain-smoking in her serape (she had less than two years to live), and Mrs. Zagreb “raked the male guests” and finally pointed to Peter Blume: “That's what I want next.” “Everyone acted in character,” Cheever reported. “Mary's unstable sister seized two vases of flowers and carried them out to her car. Her husband—a shy man—retired to a nearby saloon and got drunk at his own expense. Mary—very chic—upstaged Susie and nearly ran off with the groom. Fred, attended by his Italian [Iole], ate six pieces of cake and I kissed eighty-three women and drank a pint of bourbon.” In fact Cheever had rarely been happier—in marked contrast to the groom's parents, who sat dourly in a far corner of the tent: Muriel Cowley had been ill, and the cold, blustery day wasn't helping, and Malcolm was furious that Rob hadn't visited his mother once in the days prior to the wedding. “What a beautiful party it is!” Cheever kept exclaiming, hoping perhaps that his high spirits would prove infectious. “You,” said his wife, “are the spectre at the feast.”

  THAT SUMMER Cheever was enticed by The Saturday Evening Post to interview Sophia Loren on location in Italy; in exchange for taking his first “hack job,” the magazine offered to pay expenses for him and his family as well as provide them with a car and driver. When Cheever told Mary as much, she agreed to accompany him but “[did] not seem cheered.”

  Cheever was worried that his cafard would ruin the vacation, but it seemed to “miss the plane” and only caught up with him intermittently. Eager to use his Italian, he began “gabbling like a turkey” as soon as he, Mary, and Federico arrived in Rome, where a chauffeur met them at the airport and drove them to the fishing village of Sperlonga: “This is all white-washed staircases leading to the sea,” he wrote Litvinov, “and at six in the morning, American time, we were eating tomatos and mozzarella and sporting in the waves.” Afterward Cheever went his own glamorous way for the most part, leaving Mary to show Federico around the ruins of Pompeii while he chatted up the movie crowd. He found Loren “intelligent and capable,” albeit unwilling to bare her soul for the sake of a little publicity, even at the behest of so famous and charming an author. “She has the tact and discretion of a public figure,” Cheever wrote for the Post. “She will not break the dishes, get stoned, do a belly dance or calumniate Lollobrigida or Mia Farrow.” Hoping to end the visit on a more personal note, he asked Loren for a kiss goodbye and she cheerfully obliged him. “She wrote, she wrote, she loves me,” he gushed to Maxwell that October, when his article appeared and the actress cordially thanked him for same. “Yesterday in the mail-box among the spiders, autumn leaves, bills and magazines was a vast envelope from the Palazzo Colona. … What a lovely child.”

  By then he could ill afford to let himself get too excited about things, as he'd been afflicted by a severe case of prostatitis. For a week or two he weathered the worst of it (burning urination, painful swelling, worrisome discharge), before downing “three scoops of gin” and visiting a venerable urologist in White Plains, who sensibly advised him not to drink so much. Cheever conceded the problem, but wondered whether there was more to it than that—indeed, whether perhaps he'd “suffered from an unstable prostate since adolescence,” as he wrote his regular physician, Ray Mutter.

  The infection seems closely allied to my basic sexual nature and it seems that the blowup could have been caused by alcoholic and other excesses brought on by my anxious and greedy urge to take more than my share of brute pleasure. … It has also occurred, to my uninformed mind that some of the phobias, from which I've suffered in the last years might have some connection with this capricious gland since the pain always begins in the scrotum. … I have felt, since my early twenties that that whole part of me was apt to be foolish.

  One wonders what the amiable Mutter made of all that; in any event, Cheever remain
ed disconcerted by some of the more sinister etiological implications: Was he being punished for his sins? Would he be racked with pain every time he became aroused (licitly or otherwise)? When the illness persisted, he asked Litvinov to say a prayer for him at St. Basil's, which seemed to have some slight mitigating effect. His drinking, however, remained as bad as ever, and he considered the case of Rossini, the composer, whose happiness had been similarly threatened by depression and urinary problems: “What excites me is that after nearly ten years of pain he recovers completely and goes into a robust middle age,” Cheever noted, “as I intend to.”

  But for now he was still in the doldrums, both physically and creatively. Encountering “The Country Husband” in an anthology, Cheever had to admit that his recent efforts in the genre were vastly inferior. The story he was writing at the time, for instance—”Percy”—was little more than straight memoir about his aunt Florence Liley, the painter, whose story he'd considered writing as long as twenty-five years ago: “Thinking idly of Liley on the trainride,” he'd written in his journal at the time, “it seemed that to convert a biography into an anecdote is a kind of terrible perfidy or betrayal for which you should be made to descend into hell.” Amid his present illness, however, he found the reminiscence easy and oddly comforting to write (“It served me as a kind of bedtime story”), and besides he suspected—correctly—that it was the sort of thing The New Yorker would buy. Also, he needed to pause again and regroup in his work on Bullet Park, which he worried was turning into a facile “indictment” of the suburbs: “The admissions committee at the club does not scandalize me. Neither does the fact that D. has sold a bond issue for Franco.” On the other hand, if he wasn't writing an “indictment”—and surely some of the satire (however muddled by irony) was directed against modern suburbia—then what exactly was he writing? Faced with a number of hard-to-solve ambiguities, Cheever steadied himself with the idea that his novel was, at bottom, “an uncomplicated story about a man who loved his son”—a kind of updated William Tell, in other words.