Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [120]
WRITING WELL made all the difference to Cheever's mood, and by the summer of 1953 he was far away from the dismal limbo of a year before. After a brief stay at Treetops, he took a room at the Hotel Earle on Washington Square and wrote three stories. Alone in the city—that precarious state—Cheever found it a splendid and even healthy place: “Walking on the streets I have never felt so well,” he wrote in his journal. “The loneliness that seems to have pursued me is over. … [T]he quality of hurt and fear, the feeling of deprivation, all these limitations seem conquered.” Such was his well-being that when he encountered his old, unloved acquaintance, Katherine Anne Porter, looking haggard and forlorn, he invited her to dinner at the Plaza. (“[She] kept chatting about American poetry and looking across the room to where a woman in a pale blue dress was eating watermelon,” he wrote Eleanor Clark.) A few days later, still magnanimous, he left the city and took his family to Cape Cod, and once he got back to Scarborough he began working “so happily” that he hardly gave a thought to moving to Europe.
This lasted until New Year's Eve, when an annual bal masqué was held at the Swopes’ barn on Teatown Lake. It was the community's biggest social event, involving months of preparation. During the Cheevers’ first year in Scarborough, the theme had been “Come as a Clue to ‘52”: Mary had dressed as Pax (white gown and shawl, laurel branch with olives entwined), and Cheever had borrowed a Saracen helmet from Mrs. Vanderlip. This time the theme was “How You See Yourself in Heaven,”* and Mary was chairwoman of the decoration committee. Weeks before Thanksgiving, even, dinner parties were held on the pretext of discussing décor (Heaven and Hell) and arranging such effects as a “wire-recording of the ‘strange tongues, horrible outcries, words of pain, tones of anger, etc’” As for the actual party, it began well and ended in disaster—”a trauma,” as Cheever would always remember it.
That night, as always, there were early cocktails and a sit-down dinner, a stop at the Beechwood gala to pay homage to Mrs. Vanderlip, until finally they arrived at the Swopes’ barn, where Cheever swung the women around in widening circles, the way he'd learned at the Masonic Temple in Wollaston. Shortly after midnight (“moved by profound love and some alcohol”), he asked his wife to dance but was “rudely” repulsed—and the next thing he knew (or thought he knew), she'd disappeared into the parking lot with another man, Rod Swope, Sally's handsome brother-in-law. (“I never did,” said Mary, “but I'd like to.”) Cheever sadly recounted coming home around three, alone, and washing away his makeup and all traces of false beard. In the wan light of dawn Mary herself came home, and, despite Cheever's determination to be “just” and “cheerful,” she regarded him with “looks of aversion and grief “ for weeks and even months to come. “If I ever see R.S. again”—Cheever scrawled in his journal—”I will bash him in the nose.” Such sentiments were promptly transmuted into a story, “Just Tell Me