Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  One problem was that his working day was getting shorter and shorter, and of course he worked in the midst of ghastly hangovers. Still, coming down to breakfast at the start of each day, he tried to capitalize on the brief interval of sobriety by wishing his wife a pleasant “Good morning,” and it was disconcerting when even this was answered with contempt. For his son's benefit, he tried to mitigate such darkness by engaging the boy in a kindly patter of jokes, and persevering with a patient smile when his wife maintained her stony, unamused silence—but for what, he wondered, was he being punished? He hardly ever raised his voice, he didn't rant or rave, though perhaps he'd remark in passing, oh, on the quality of the roast, or some fatuous intellectualism on her part. “I was the grown-up in the house,” said Federico, “and I wasn't a very successful grown-up. I remember saying, ‘Okay, I've got a piece of paper and I'm going to put a black checkmark next to each of you whenever you say something mean to the other one.’ After half an hour he had about twenty-five checkmarks and she had about three.”

  Both parents asserted that they stayed together for the boy's sake, and in fact the boy seemed unhappy in almost every department of life. As he recalled, “I was fat and unpopular and dyslexic and smart—an incredibly deadly combination.” Like his brother before him, Federico had to repeat a grade at Scarborough Country Day, where he was a laughingstock on the soccer field and often got in locker-room fist-fights, which he always lost. Miserable beyond words, he couldn't help bursting into tears from time to time, whereupon his father would invoke their ancient lineage: “Fred,” he'd say, with perhaps a heartening jostle, “remember: You are a Cheever.” When this didn't seem to work and—like his brother before him—Federico went on wetting his bed to boot, his parents sent him to Dr. Silverberg. (Despite the ineffectuality of his own recent treatment, Cheever liked the man: he was a good listener and laughed at the right moments.) Silverberg noted that Federico was a “fat rather depressed” child, and was struck by his behavior in the waiting room: for almost an hour he sat there staring into space; he hardly moved; there were magazines to look at, but he didn't seem to notice. As for the boy's observations, they were made with a kind of numb detachment, as if it hardly mattered one way or the other. He had few friends his own age, he said, but had managed to get by on his own, or in the company of adults, mostly his father. And what about his father? “He's fairly nice. He's a good father, but he lives in a world of his own.”

  The adult Federico maintains this view: his father was nice enough, and usually they got along fine. “But you have to realize,” he added, “for most of my childhood I was like a bit part in a Eugene O'Neill play. I was furniture. Certainly I was fat and unpromising, and that was pointed out to me, but he had a wife whose themes were extremely well developed over thirty years; he had my brother, who would come over exclusively to borrow money, and Susan was married to his former editor's son. He could have much more fun with them than he could with me.” Often, to be sure, Cheever would call the boy a gluttonous slob or some such, and the boy would (tacitly or otherwise) concede as much: he was a gluttonous slob. When he wasn't at school, he sat in his room eating and reading, or eating and watching TV—at any rate, eating. “Fred is on a diet which seems to involve eating everything in sight excepting spinach,” Cheever wrote his older son. It was like that—all in good fun, mostly, and well meaning in the sense that it called attention to a real problem. The Lehmann-Haupts have an abiding impression of Federico playing on the library floor while his parents stand over him making ironical comments about his self-sufficiency and their relative ineptitude as parents. The boy seems not to notice. “There was something prodigious about Fred,” said Lehmann-Haupt. “He seemed to build a cocoon. I felt that he was the one who would get out alive.”

  Behind the impassive façade was (among other things) enormous grief and rage, which had to come out on occasion. The first time Federico hit his father was after a soccer match. Exhausted and demoralized as ever, he returned home to find his father being drunkenly cruel to his mother, and when he began to protest, his father walked away. “I think I actually wanted some part of our life to be about me,” Federico remembered. “He was walking away and I said No, no and I hit him on the back.” Another time, Cheever was sitting at the head of the table in a special antique chair, which he smashed by falling over (drunk) when struck in the chest by his son, who was bigger than he as of age thirteen. (“If your father's going to be a drunk, it's good if he's five foot six.”) There were other such incidents, and they always seemed to have a calming effect on Cheever, who would then realize how low he had fallen. Also, he knew the boy loved him; each was pretty much all the other had. Federico had never been particularly close to his mother (“I remember trying to play games with her as a kid, but I couldn't”), whereas his father, if anything, was accessible to a fault: he sat through dreadful TV shows just so he could chat with the boy during commercial breaks; he even helped with homework. “He wanted to be a good father,” said Federico. “He wanted passionately to be a good father.”

  Meanwhile Cheever's wife was becoming more independent than ever. Through her teaching she'd come to realize that others perceived her as charming and intelligent, quite apart from her being Mrs. John Cheever. More and more she was taking pains with her appearance, buying stylish clothes, and openly flirting with other men. “He's looking worse and worse,” said Susan, “and needing more and more nursing, just as she's ready to rock. Sort of a disaster.” At the time, perhaps the greatest tonic for Mary was her poetry writing, which not only served to reassure her that she was creative in her own right, but also brought her in touch with other talented women, most notably the poet-novelist Sandra Hochman. During a session with Dr. Silverberg, Federico pointed out that his father was especially moody of late because his mother was seeing a lot of Hochman, whom his father detested. To this day, however, Hochman is convinced that Cheever was one of her biggest fans. They'd met in the early sixties at a party. Hochman had recently won the Yale Younger Poets Award, and Cheever mentioned he was friendly with Dudley Fitts, one of the judges, who'd encouraged him to read Hochman's work. Then, in 1970, she completed a novel, Walking Papers, which Cheever also professed to admire—in fact, he liked it so much that he was willing to forgo his usual rule against blurb writing and provide her with two, no less, as follows: “I haven't been as thrilled by anything as much as Walking Papers since Jesus Christ Superstar;” “I love this writing. I think Sandra Hochman is terribly funny.” Hochman used the second one. (“Read Sandra,” Cheever noted while scanning her novel. “So what.”)

  As if the woman's literary pretensions weren't bad enough, she was also a devoted feminist and hence a perfect scapegoat for Cheever's marital woes.* Divorced from a successful businessman, the well-heeled Hochman invited Mary to spend a week in St. Croix sans men—a vacation that made Ossining seem, for Mary, bleaker than ever. Greeted by Cheever on her return, Mary sighed: “I'll make myself a rum drink in memory of my happiness.” For weeks she spoke of little else, or so it seemed to her husband, who couldn't help picturing “two undressed women giggling in a bathroom” when Mary mentioned tie-dyeing her friend's underwear. Indeed, this detail struck Cheever as almost definitive, though he couldn't quite bring himself to accuse his wife openly of lesbianism (“I know her reply would be: Are you a fairy?”), nor could he entirely overlook the chance that “this is the fantasy of a tortured neurotic who is drunk most of the time.” Also, he had to admit that Hochman—despite her feminism—hardly behaved like a lesbian. At the time she was seeing an Armenian named Harout, who introduced himself as an architect and played a lot of backgammon with Cheever while the women talked poetry and the like. Hochman always thought the two men were great pals. “I open the door and find Harut [sic]—the unemployed waiter, stud, bore and companion of the flighty poetess,” Cheever wrote. “They often drop in on Sunday night just as the meat is coming out of the oven.” He also described the boyfriend as a “gymnast.”

&nb
sp; Whether because of lesbianism, feminism, other men, or some fiendish combination of the three, the fact remained that Mary was being very unloving, and Cheever was fed up. Since they seemed unable to discuss anything without nastiness, he insisted she see a psychiatrist again—a sympathetic one, that is, who was likely to comprehend his side of things. “He talks about David Hays seeing his wife and telling him she was normal and that he had ruined her life,” Dr. Silver-berg noted during one of his sessions with Cheever. “He resented this, finds me supportive.” Silverberg it was, then—who if anything was even more well disposed to Mary than Hays had been, though frankly he found the whole family a little bizarre:

  Problem [he wrote on Mary's file card]: Patient comes at the urging of her husband, who wants her to be less hostile to him. It is clear that in actuality it is he who is hostile and demeaning to her and has been through the whole marriage. Patient is a sensitive intelligent woman, much spunk, but also strong feelings of inadequacy and … little girlish speech and behavior. … She hasn't been in love with her husband for a long time but has a great sense of loyalty and devotion. Sort of that she's taking care of an important creative person. This is her first line of rationalization for putting up with his anger, narcissism, drinking, etc. The second line is the children, who are very devoted to him and also have her protective attitude towards him. Patient has a fair understanding of her complex husband, [but] is unaware of degree of his homosexual side.

  Mary would go on seeing Silverberg for almost a year—it was nice to talk about herself for a change, without fear of derision or rebuke—though, as she later remarked, “it didn't solve anybody's problems.” As for Cheever, he met with the psychiatrist only once more (roughly a month after his wife's first session), and was nettled to find the man groping, à la Hays, for some tactful way of saying that “he [Cheever] distorts rather than Mary.” Cheever pressed one of his journals on Silverberg, evidently hoping it would prove exculpatory in some way. The doctor warily opened it: “It seems”—he noted—”to be largely an intimate sexual journal and [Cheever is] quite obviously uncomfortable about it.” Perhaps Silverberg hadn't read the right page; in any event, Cheever snatched it back and never returned (though in parting he invited the man, again, to come “see [his] house and meet the maid,” and later he sent Ben to meet with Silverberg, too).

  THAT SUMMER (1970), Cheever was a delegate to the International PEN Congress in Seoul. He'd invited Mary to accompany him, but she worried that her acceptance “implie[d] rapprochement,” and by then she was seriously considering divorce. But finally she relented: not only would she remain in the marriage for at least another year (until they could enroll their son in boarding school), but she would also go to the Far East, with Federico as buffer.

  On June 22, the three Cheevers took a seventeen-hour flight to Tokyo, stopping to refuel in Fairbanks, Alaska, where a large contingent from the University of Akron boarded, each of the faculty wives carrying a bottle of hometown water. Cheever observed them from the back of the airplane (“What a waste of time to ridicule them”), where he situated himself near the liquor station. In Tokyo the smog was so bad that people were wearing surgical masks, and mostly the Cheevers stayed put in their room at the posh Okura. In Seoul, however, Cheever was relegated to the pedestrian Tae Yun Kak, whereas more favored delegates—such as Updike—stayed at the Chosun, where the conference was being held. Because of their different lodgings, Cheever and Updike saw little of each other except for a brief meeting at the Chosun bar, where Updike observed that his colleague's drinking “was beginning to drag on him visibly.” Cheever in turn liked to tell how Updike had dutifully visited tourist sites like the Thirty-eighth Parallel, while Cheever had gone to a high-class geisha house where a beautiful girl named Saw stroked his privates and fed him fish, nuts, and mushrooms.

  The American delegation included a black activist writer who, with his wife, had befriended the Cheevers. Federico found the man “extraordinary”: he (the writer) told a fascinating account of his experience in a segregated army camp during World War II; also, though companionable enough, he was not at all “inclined to be deferential,” like their other black friend, Ralph Ellison. Federico wasn't the only one in the family who'd been impressed. On her return to the States, a radiant Mary Cheever told Silverberg that she'd fallen in love with the man and was now meeting him every so often in New York (“heavenly”). Everything was better now: she and John were getting along because she no longer felt the need to “rise to his every prod or bait;” in fact, she was so mollified that she didn't mind obliging him a little in bed, patiently helping him keep it up long enough to reach climax.

  “I mount my beloved, and off we go for the best ride in a long time,” wrote the ecstatic Cheever, who couldn't believe his luck and wasn't inclined to look deeply into the matter. Susan and Rob Cowley had recently returned from London and were living on Cedar Lane for the time being—reason enough to make both Cheevers happy: John gained an audience, and Mary a confidante for her love affair. “Where's your mother?” Cheever asked Susan, who looked puzzled before remembering “something about a sale at Lord & Taylor's.” Cheever—“blissfully” happy—smiled and went his way. “I walk the dogs in a heavy rain,” he wrote that autumn. “Water lilies grow at the edge of the pond. I want to pick some and take them home to Mary. I decide that this is foolish. I am a substantial man of fifty-eight, and I will walk past the lilies in a dignified manner. Having made this decision, I strip off my clothes, dive into the pond, and pick a lily. I will be dignified tomorrow.”

  It ended with a bang rather than a whimper. “On Tuesday we were lovers and on Wednesday warriors,” Cheever wrote shortly after the lily-picking entry. “I am told that I am an insane shit, that even when I am loving I am a shit.” He simply couldn't fathom it. Was it because she was about to lose her job at Briarcliff? (The academic dean had been fired, and a number of faculty members had threatened to resign in protest.) But no, she seemed almost to welcome that. What, then? The nominal catalyst had been a well-meaning remark he'd made about a screenplay she was writing; as Mary conceded to Silverberg, her husband's advice had been “actually appropriate, but she blew up because she felt it was an unfair inference.” What she meant by that is unclear, but of course the main reason for her distemper was that her lover seemed to be rejecting her, and the sight of Cheever may have been maddening under the circumstances. “What I will forget and never mention is what I heard at dinner,” Cheever wrote. “ ‘What is worse for a woman: to marry a man with a bad prostate or to marry a homosexual?’ But where does this venom originate?”

  He'd never know, and by the end of autumn they were back in their separate bedrooms to stay. Eager to escape on almost any pretext, Cheever accepted an invitation to go to Egypt for a week or two and give a lecture at Cairo University—a lonely, drunken blur, only the broad outlines of which (the Temple of Luxor, a swim in the Nile) Cheever saw fit to retain. Actually, one encounter did prove distinctly memorable. Killing time between a solitary dinner at the Cairo Hilton and a reception of some sort, Cheever went for a walk in a nearby park:

  I was joined almost at once by a young man who asked if he could join me in my walk. I couldn't see him in the fading light but he seemed comely and amiable. … He led me almost at once to a park bench where he unzipped my fly and took out my cock which was all smiles, ready for fun and juicy. I politely did the same for him but his pants were rags, half the fly-buttons were gone and his cock was like a dead bait worm. … When I zipped up my trousers and stood to leave he struck me and made a grab for my wallet. I punched him and got back into the circle of bright light that surrounds the Hilton.

  One might dismiss this as a finger exercise or a fever dream, but eight years later—when such liaisons (minus the violence) had become more common—Cheever revisited the memory in passing: “I see the folly of my loves and that good fortune has kept me from dying of stab wounds in a park in Cairo.”

  * Alexander went on to greater f
ame as an author and, especially, debater—taking the liberal side (opposite James J. Kilpatrick) for the “Point-Counterpoint” segment on 60 Minutes.

  * He took a similar approach to his two previous collections: Some People, Places, and Things opens with two stories rejected by Maxwell—”Justina” and “Brimmer”—while The Brigadier and the Golf Widow opens with the title story, which (one will recall) Maxwell had tried to truncate in galleys.

  * Hochman is perhaps best known for her 1973 documentary, Year of the Woman, a seminal contribution to the then rather nascent Womens’ Rights Movement.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  {1971-1972}

  WHAT CHEEVER REQUIRED in his own fiction, he often said, was a sense of urgency: “Is what I have to say urgent, and do I suppose it would be of any urgency to people who read my books?” Ever since Bullet Park he'd found it hard to write a single urgent sentence, and so he'd inched his way, nonurgently, through “Artemis, the Honest Well Digger,” which he finally completed at the beginning of 1971. It was promptly rejected by The New Yorker, as Cheever must have expected, since he knew the editors were reluctant in those days to run stories with lyrical descriptions of seminal discharge (“like the fireballs from a Roman candle”) or characters who write monographs titled Shit. That aside, the story is soberingly mediocre, especially given that Cheever took almost nine months to write it—that is, to contrive a somewhat random, sprawling plot for his Russian material. Artemis lands in Moscow, of all places, purely by way of escaping an entanglement with his client's wife; then, within forty-eight hours, while Khrushchev is rather incidentally deposed, Artemis gets deported because of an exalting (but perfunctory to the reader) affair with his guide, Natasha. The story works best as travelogue, and is either too long or too short, depending on how you look at it. It's a measure of Cheever's desperation that he considered expanding it into a novel—thus compounding an already long and joyless labor—though artistically he was right in suspecting that the narrative per se was slight, and could only be brought up to snuff by throwing good money after bad, so to speak. Wisely, he decided to cut his losses: “Esquire wants to buy it but they'll only pay fifteen hundred,” he wrote Ben. “Considering the length of time it took, this is less than Susie makes on the Tarrytown paper.* Harpers is out and the Atlantic still doesn't know about orgasims [sic] and that's that.” Not quite: Playboy certainly knew about orgasms and was willing to publish just about anything Cheever wrote; “Artemis,” then, would appear in the January 1972 issue.