Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [175]
Such congenial locals were a comfort, as Cheever was suffering from “inhibitive megrims” which made it “as difficult for [him] to leave [his] quaint old house in the country as it is difficult for an impacted wisdom tooth to leave its seat in the jaw-bone.” His anxiety over the Kentfield affair would not go away, inflaming an old dread that he was an “impostor” whose iniquity would surely be discovered and his “chosen way of life” destroyed. He became more and more wary of any sort of taxing social encounter. One of his very few outings in 1961 was the Institute lunch in May, a “painful bore” where he found himself acting as minder for John Knowles (“I never dreamed I'd take a leak with Robert Graves and [Fredric] March,” the man quipped) and wincing as Glenway Wescott read award citations (“You have made a GAME of the sport and a sport of the GAME!”); afterward the Cowleys and Blumes came to Cedar Lane for dinner and began chatting about a married football star who, they happened to know, was a pederast. “They continue to talk about married homosexuals,” Cheever fretted in his journal. “I don't seem to know any. … Glenway with his lisp and fancy-work prose gives me a pain in the neck.”
It got so bad that Cheever could scarcely drive across a bridge without suffering a full-blown panic attack, as if he were being physically chastised for leaving the safety of his home. “Poor X,” he wrote.
As he approached the bridge there would be an excruciating tightening of his scrotum, especially his left testicle, and a painful shrinking of his male member. As he began to ascend the curve of the bridge it would become difficult for him to breathe. He could fill his lungs only by gasping. This struggle to breathe was followed by a sensation of weakness in his legs, which would presently become so uncoordinated that he could legitimately worry about being able to apply the brakes. The full force of the attack came at the summit of the bridge when these various disturbances would seem to affect his blood pressure and his vision would begin to darken.
This terrifying experience was evoked in a story he wrote that year, “The Angel of the Bridge,” in which the narrator comes to perceive his phobia as the manifestation of some vague disenchantment with “modern life”—abruptly cured by a young hitchhiker who carries a small harp and serenades the narrator with an old folk song: “She sang me across a bridge that seemed to be an astonishingly sensible, durable, and even beautiful construction designed by intelligent men to simplify my travels, and the water of the Hudson below us was charming and tranquil.” Such a bizarre deus ex machina was the very sort of “marvelous brightness” to which Alfred Kazin would perceptively refer (a few years later) as a dubious effort on Cheever's part “to cheer himself up.” It was an effort that would only become more strenuous, and nothing akin to an angelic hitchhiker was likely to make it otherwise.
Marooned to some extent in Westchester, Cheever continued to see a certain amount of the white-collar crowd, who remained a rich source of material. That was the summer of the Berlin Crisis, a few months after the Bay of Pigs, and one night Cheever spent an evening at the Boyers’ with some banker guests and an architect named Art Malsin whom he'd always despised. “Micks in the White House!” they complained. “Bomb Cuba!” (“On and on it goes,” Cheever wrote Biddle, “and I spend most of my time counting to ten so that I won't be intemperate and expose myself as an enemy agent.”) Around that time, too, Mrs. Vanderlip had decided to