Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [139]
And finally among the literary set (briefly) was Irwin Shaw, living like a movie star at the Hotel Excelsior and riding around Rome in a chauffeur-driven cream-colored sedan (or “canary-yellow convertible,” as Cheever preferred to describe it). Now that Cheever had finished his novel and gotten a taste from the Hollywood trough, he could afford to laugh at Shaw's zanier excesses, to say nothing of his linguistic facility or lack thereof. “Irwin stopped at the [Excelsior] desk and asked for his mail in Italian,” Cheever wrote a friend.
He spoke such gibberish that [his companion] offered to interpret for him but he said that wouldn't be necessary. The governess of his son, he explained, was Italian and that was why he spoke so fluently. Irwin got his mail—a large bundle of it—and they went out to the chauffeur driven car that Irwin always has in Rome. “I'll ask the chauffeur to hold my mail,” he explained and then made another assault on the bella lingua. “Si, si,” the chauffeur said when Irwin had finished, “si signore.” Then, as Irwin climbed contentedly into the back seat of the car the chauffeur trotted down the street and stuffed Irwin's letters into a mail-box.
Cheever's socializing was a more or less vapid way to kill time (which weighed heavily in the absence of any work), though he longed all the while “for a kind of unicorn”—something more romantic, that is, than a stale friendship or even a pregnant wife. Quite simply he wanted to be in love again, and in that respect he liked the strangeness of Rome. Walking the streets in New York, he was never quite free of “sexual and financial anxiety”: he couldn't help sizing people up and deciding that one or another was richer or more virile or temperate than he. But in Rome he never saw “a recognizable homosexual or alcoholic”: old men bussed one another on the cheeks, and the “coxcombery” of youth seemed to have little to do with class or sexual disposition. The mystery appealed to Cheever—the whole hopeful ethos of “arsehole jokes and golden piety that … adds up to an honest measure of our nature.”
Of course, the pious side of Cheever's nature was devoted to his family, and he was duly grieved by the ordeals of a pregnant woman in a foreign land. Mary noticed that Roman men rarely gave up their seats to her on buses, and her obstetrician was downright “brusque and patronizing.” At one point he diagnosed her with toxemia and told her to eat nothing but spinach (without oil or salt): “She did this for two weeks,” Cheever wrote, “and then protested and the Doctor said: ‘But I have gout and that's all I eat.’ Mary said that he wasn't going to have a baby and he drew himself up and said, ‘It's not my role in life.’ “ The onset of labor (on March 9) came as a blessed relief. The Blumes drove Mary to Salvador Mundi Hospital on the Janiculum, where she lay in a birthing room, along with nine or ten screeching Italians, and read her husband's copy of The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. Cheever, meanwhile, was fretfully pacing the streets of a city whose aspect “seemed pitiless and cruel”: “I went to the zoo for a Campari and found myself surrounded by hyenas, buzzards, wolves and grisley [sic] bears. Then I climbed up the roof of St. Peters but all the prophets had their backs to me.” Arriving at the hospital, he found his wife “in great pain”—and alone, because her bookish decorum had resulted in neglect. A nun was summoned in the nick of time, and twenty minutes later Cheever was told he had “un figlio robusto.” “I don't ever remember loving a child so much,” he wrote in his journal the next day, after visiting the hospital with Susan and Ben. “I have a drink and feel very odd—the cold, I guess—and looking down from my balcony into the street I covet the freedom of young