Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [152]
He was also a husband, and his constant intoxication was taking a further toll on his marriage. “I am a solitary drunkard,” he wrote in the summer of 1958.
I take a little painkiller before lunch but I don't really get to work until late afternoon. At four or half past four or sometimes five I stir up a Martini, thinking that a great many men who can't write as well as I can will already have set themselves down at bar stools. After half a glass of gin I decide that I must get a divorce—and, to tell the truth, Mary is depressed, although my addiction to gin may have something to do with her low spirits. The gin flows freely until supper and so do my memories of the most difficult passages in our marriage; and I think of all the letters I have received from literary ladies implying that my experience with the sex must have been unnaturally difficult and that I deserve better. How right they are, I think. … So the gin flows, and after supper the whiskey. I am even a little sly, keeping my glass on the floor where it might not be seen. Mary does not want to speak to me, to be sure. Her looks are dark and impatient. I rustle up a glossary of little jokes to prove the sweetness of my disposition, but she does not laugh. She does not even listen. She does not want to be in the same room with me.
In moments of middling sobriety, at least, Cheever was still able to grasp that his alcoholism “may have something to do” with his wife's depression, but as time passed he was more apt to regard her as “capricious,” and often reminded himself of the insanity in her family. Such instability, he reasoned, would also explain her lack of tenderness in bed: that summer he calculated that she'd rebuffed him (“I ask for what I do not really want and being refused lie contentedly between the sheets”) no fewer than thirty-seven times in a row. “What about the times you couldn't get it up?” she rejoined, lucidly enough, but that was her fault too. She spiked her hair with a lot of uninviting steel curlers; she sighed; she looked “victimized”—and so on. It was just too much trouble: “I think tonight this fortress is not worth the assault, siege, ladder work and sometimes broadsword fighting that might be involved,” he noted.
As if all that weren't enough, Cheever was also worrying about the Bomb. During a visit to Yaddo, he lay awake thinking “that if the world should end [he] would not be with [his] children.” He thought he detected an “unearthly green light” in the west, and was almost convinced that atomic testing had ruptured the atmosphere, both physical and moral: “The most useful image I have today is of a man in a quagmire,” he wrote that year, “looking into a tear in the sky. … Something has gone very wrong, and I do not have the language, the imagery, or the concepts to describe my apprehensions. I come back again to the quagmire and the torn sky.” The “quagmire” was the nihilism that followed from a sense of imminent doom. Reading manuscripts for a fiction contest at Barnard, Cheever was astonished by the decadence—impotent rapists, sadistic homosexuals, and the like—contrived by a lot of well-groomed college women, and he wondered how an affluent nation should be “imitating the moral collapse of Germany in the twenties.