Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [103]
By far the most memorable farewell party was held at the Riverview Terrace apartment of their friend Margot Morrow. Cheever, tipsily complacent, was sitting on a first-story window ledge with his legs dangling outside when, suddenly, he went hurling through space and just missed being impaled on an iron-spiked fence. Ten years later, in an essay for Esquire, Cheever claimed to have jumped “in an exuberance of regret,” but actually he went to his grave believing he'd been pushed by his great friend and New Yorker editor. Maxwell denied it: “I was standing on the sidewalk [at the time], talking to some of the guests,” he said, then cited the testimony of a fellow guest, Jack Huber, who claimed a man from Minneapolis had done the pushing. Jack and this man “were standing at the window, and Mary Cheever joined them, and, indicating John, and in a joking manner, said ‘What a poseur! Why doesn't somebody give him a push.’ … None of them could see the spiked fence.”
To Cheever, however, Maxwell's urge to push him was part of a deep-seated (and potentially deadly) ambivalence. “There's this chap named Marples who keeps saying that he loves me and then he tries to kill me,” Cheever wrote in his journal, refining the episode for fictional use.* “He's a very quiet man, terribly sensitive, but he's a murderer.” Maxwell later told the story for laughs, though he sensed Cheever was rather serious in his suspicions. “There was a paranoid side to him,” he observed. “He was paranoid.”
* A polka tune Mary Cheever still remembered fifty-five years later.
* At the time Cheever was fascinated and appalled by Shaw's flair for being a “money player.” As Newhouse pointed out, Shaw lived in the “real world” of “cause and effect” that dictated the three-act plots of movies and radio serials and best sellers; Cheever, however, “operated in a fantasy world” that was conducive to a more subtle artistic (and social) approach. “Put it this way,” said Michael Bessie, Cheever's future publisher. “What Irwin couldn't have known about John was quite a lot, whereas I don't think there was much about Irwin that John couldn't easily know.”
* Despite (as he wrote in his journal) his wife's finding it “pessimistic and morbid”—piqued, no doubt, by this portrait of wistful losers who bear at least a passing resemblance to her own family.
*I Want You, with a screenplay by Irwin Shaw, no less.
* Finally incorporated in Falconer as one of several attempts at fratricide on the part of Farragut's egregious brother.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
{1951-1952}
THE CHEEVERS MOVED to “the chicken house in Scarborough” on May 28, 1951, and Cheever predicted—with gloomy accuracy—that they'd live there for at least ten years. The house was located in a small corner of a vast estate, Beechwood, purchased in 1906 by the National City Bank tycoon Frank A. Vanderlip, who'd essentially invented the surrounding town of Scarborough. The gatehouse, Beechtwig, had been built as a machine shop and later converted to a cottage, occupied in 1939 by Vanderlip's daughter Virginia (“Zinny”), shortly after her marriage to Dudley Schoales*; the Cheevers, however, paid their monthly rent of $150 (sans utilities) to another daughter, Charlotte, who'd inherited the place “as a sort of booby prize” when her “marriage went blooey,” as Cheever put it. Charlotte had added two upstairs bedrooms and a bath; downstairs were another two bedrooms, one of which was taken by the seven-year-old Susan and the other used as Cheever's workroom. Perhaps the best feature was a spacious living room (spacious because it had once housed two large drop-forges), whose walls would occasionally tremble and crack from the perpetual rumble of traffic on Route 9, the Albany Post Road, separated from the house by a low brick wall.
Cheever felt a little disoriented at first—broke and lonely (“wanting someone, anyone to come and drink my martinis”)—but was heartened as always by the idea of living amid luxury, however paradoxically.