Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [118]
As long as he was stuck here (he thought), he might as well make the most of it, but how? Sitting at a PTA meeting and listening to friends and neighbors ask silly questions, he couldn't help reflecting—again—how “stupid, depressed, and uncreative” they seemed. Also, in the harsh fluorescent glare, he noticed that one woman's face (a woman he'd always considered pretty) was actually “a wrinkled mask, her gold jewelry rattling and flashing like plumbers gear”—and so it went for them all, himself not excepted: “[H]ow pitifully exposed are all our struggles towards youth and beauty,” he mused. “And if we look like a hobgoblin company … it is because we struggle so to hang onto a youth that is longone [sic].” He'd written about the struggle per se—indeed, he thought “the theme of aging children” was one of the most pervasive in The Enormous Radio—but he wondered whether he really understood, on a level of deep empathy, what was at the bottom of it: “What I want is to live among this in love and charity; and for these feelings to have a clear value; not the vague sentiments of a Christmas card.”
A breakthrough of sorts occurred at a civil-defense meeting. Gathered in a high school gymnasium with “the rayon blanket tycoon, the vice president of the Life insurance company, etc.,” Cheever and the others discussed what they would do, as a community, when the Bomb fell. Cheever sensed, however, that the dire business at hand was little more than a formality, and what was really on their minds was the touch-football game that would follow the meeting—and this, he concluded, was as it should be: a childish, larky escapism had its uses, at least when the alternative was contemplating Doomsday. And of course he fully shared his neighbors’ zest for the games of their youth (or rather, in Cheever's case, what he would have liked his youth to be), and it reminded him, too, of how Dudley was compelled to hurdle sofas when drunk. And finally all this tied nicely with an idea he'd been kicking around (after a creative doldrums that had now stretched on for many months): namely, the middle-aged suburban male as something out of Bulfinch—a Greek god, perhaps, or Narcissus crossing into hell and “lean[ing] from the boat for a last glimpse at his face.”
“O Youth and Beauty!”—the first of Cheever's stories set in the Scarborough-like suburb of Shady Hill—was written a few days after that civil-defense meeting, and, despite a nominal pessimism, it reflects the joyful resurgence of Cheever's powers. This was due in part to a discovery that he didn't have to write an “excoriation of the suburbs” after all, adopting instead a tone of detached gaiety—a tone most characteristic of Cheever's mature greatness, a playfulness that would lead him at last to The Wapshot Chronicle. Having noticed his own boredom in reading the leaden openings of most New Yorker stories, Cheever determined to take an approach that would “refresh the attention of the reader”: “At the tag end of nearly every long, large Saturday-night party in the suburb of Shady Hill,” the story begins, then dives into a whimsical catalogue of tediums, “when almost everybody who was going to play golf or tennis in the morning had gone home hours ago … when the bellicose drunk, the crapshooter, the pianist, and the woman faced with the expiration of her hopes had all expressed themselves …” On it goes, almost half a page, when abruptly the sentence ends and we're brought to the nub of the matter: “Trace Bearden would begin to chide Cash Bentley about his age and thinning hair. The chiding was preliminary to moving the living room furniture.” Once the furniture was arranged, Trace would fire a pistol out the window and Cash would begin hurdling furniture. “It was not exactly a race, since Cash ran it alone, but it was extraordinary to see this man of forty surmount so many obstacles so gracefully.”
Cash, as Narcissus, is at length brought to hell when he breaks his leg and can no longer run the hurdle race; without that pistol shot to look forward