Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [185]
By then he'd already written “The Ocean” (though it wouldn't appear in print until the following summer), one of his most brilliant and bizarre stories, and perhaps his most cruelly deliberate caricature of Mary Cheever. The wife in the story, named Cora, is an eccentric and possibly mad woman who expresses malice with a “musical voice” pitched “in the octave above middle C.” The narrator—a gentle, well-meaning husband—has reason to think she is trying to murder him: she douses the salad with lighter fluid (“You left the lighter fluid in the pantry,” she explains, “and I mistook it for vinegar”), and seems to have sprayed pesticide on the veal cutlets. In spite of this, her husband feels nothing but tender concern when she stands madly watering the lawn in a rainstorm, and wonders how to coax her back inside before the neighbors see (“Should I say that a friend was on the telephone? She has no friends”). The narrator also has a daughter named Flora, who has dropped out of college “to live in a Lower East Side tenement with a sexual freak;” the couple occupy themselves by artily gluing butterflies to a skeleton purchased from a medical supply house. Finally the narrator rebels against “sadness, madness, melancholy, and despair,” and antically writes the word “luve” all over the house for Cora to see, then magically escapes to a serene English countryside where his wife and daughter are nowhere to be found: “I lay on the grass and fell into a sweet sleep.”
“Maybe he was wicked,” Mary Cheever speculated after her husband's death, though in time she would achieve a remarkably lucid detachment. “No,” she said, when asked whether he'd based certain characters on her. “He used details about me and other women, but his characters came whole out of his own strong feelings. I'm not saying obsession.” She paused. “ ‘His own obsessions’ is correct, actually.” Fair enough. Thirty years before making this observation, however, she decided never to fight with the man again (if possible), since her words would only end up in his fiction.
AFTER READING “THE OCEAN” in typescript, Maxwell called Cheever and told him he was at the top of his form and needed to work very hard. This he did. Before the summer was over, he wrote another story (“Montraldo”) and finished revising The Wapshot Scandal, after which he left for Yaddo and wondered what to do next. “You can kick around Narcissus,” he wrote in his journal, after a hungover day at the pool. Mythography was very much in vogue at the time, particularly applauded by academic critics such as Fiedler and Hassan; Updike's The Centaur had just been published to great acclaim, and Cheever himself had expressed an intention to “rewrite Bulfinch”—which he did to some extent in a series of recent vignettes titled “Metamorphoses,” baldly modernizing the myths of Orpheus and Actaeon and others. But Cheever's imagination was such that he hardly needed recourse to Bulfinch. He was forever going off on “tangents” (as Dodie Merwin had put it), compulsively transforming the world into something more resonant, funny, and meaningful. As for “kick[ing] around Narcissus,” he had in mind a fellow Yaddo guest whom he was meeting for the first time that September, composer Ned Rorem, who'd just broken his ankle and was hobbling about with a little plaster cast. As a reader of Freud, Cheever tended to equate homosexuality with narcissism, and in this respect the (almost) forty-year-old Rorem struck him as a kind of wistful, aging boy: “[H]e seems, in halflights, to represent