Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [170]
After a few days of unwanted leisure, Cheever sensed he was beginning to slip. A casual meeting with the actor Dean Stockwell was a terrible ordeal: though Cheever didn't doubt the actor's heterosexuality (“His tender looks are aimed at girls”), he felt afterward as if his penis “had been put through a mangle.” His dinner with the singer Peggy Lee, however, caused no such consternation. Cheever was intrigued by Lee's Chinese garden, the dwarf trees sagging with Christmas ornaments, as well as the loutishness of Lee's boyfriend, who called her “baby” and kept saying, “It's going to be cool.”
One night, toward the end of his visit, Cheever brought a friend to the Weavers’ house for dinner—a writer in his mid-thirties named Calvin Kentfield. The two had met a decade before at Yaddo, and kept somewhat in touch through Maxwell, who'd edited some of Kentfield's fiction for The New Yorker. At Yaddo, Cheever had been impressed by the young man's looks and charm, but the years had been unkind to Kentfield. His first two books had gained little recognition, and he'd been forced to support his wife and daughter with long stints in the merchant marine—which provided a lot of nautical literary fodder, but was otherwise a strain. A heavy drinker, Kentfield brawled with other sailors, and in 1958 he fell off a gangplank and broke his kneecap on the deck below. By the time he was reunited with Cheever in Hollywood, Kentfield was missing two front teeth and walking with a limp. Also, he was recently divorced from his beloved, long-suffering wife, Veronica (“the true image,” he called her in one book dedication), who only a year before had borne him a son.
Cheever duly noted his friend's defects—the limp, the missing teeth, “the face weathered by whisky and time. … He is late for everything and sometimes doesn't come at all.” One afternoon the two went to a Finnish bath together and sat around chatting “beararse,” and a couple nights later, after dinner, Cheever asked Harriett Weaver if she'd like to read his journal. She accepted the small three-ring binder and read politely for a minute or two, then smiled and returned it to Cheever without comment. Her eyes had fallen on the latest entry:
I spend the night with C, and what do I make of this? … Perhaps sin has to do with the incident, and I have had this sort of intercourse only three times in my adult life.* I know my troubled nature and have tried to contain it along creative lines. It is not my choice that I am alone here and exposed to temptation, but I sincerely hope that this will not happen again. … I trust that I have harmed no one I love. The worst may be that I have put myself into a position where I may be forced to lie.
Let it serve as a measure of Cheever's distress that he felt compelled to seek immediate absolution—even implicitly—from a kindhearted person; nor would it be the first time he went about it in this manner. (Cheever had prepared the Weavers with an amusing spiel about how his “seafaring progenitors” had all kept journals, “secure in the knowledge” that their oldest sons would burn the things once they were dead.)
After his encounter with Kentfield, Cheever was more desperate than ever to escape Hollywood—”he seemed to think he was imprisoned here,” Fuchs recalled—and was almost ecstatically grateful when Wald told him he was free to go. Home in time to spend Christmas with his family, Cheever boasted incessantly of having “bussed” Peggy Lee, and made a point of listening to her records with a lovelorn expression. By then his children were used to odd confidences of one sort or another, and joked about the “stacks of satisfied starlets” he'd left behind in California.
• • •
“AFTER LEAVING C,” Cheever wrote four years later (while engaged in a flirtation with another, better-known writer), “I suffered the worst agonies of my life for a month. Why should I ever let myself in for such pain again?” That winter, after he returned from Hollywood, Cheever was outwardly occupied with