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to wait out a cloudburst: “Then there was an explosion, a smell of cordite, and rain lashed the Japanese lanterns that Mrs. Levy had bought in Kyoto the year before last, or was it the year before that?” Thus the first hint that Ned's mind is blurred—and since the story is, after all, from Ned's point of view, one might begin to wonder (if only half consciously) whether it's really a “midsummer” day at all*: “The rain had cooled the air and he shivered. The force of the wind had stripped a maple of its red and yellow leaves and scattered them over the grass and the water. Since it was midsummer the tree must be blighted, and yet he felt a peculiar sadness at this sign of autumn.” Ned, too, begins to shed leaves as he journeys from past to present, illusion to truth, his strength waning with every step. “We've been terribly sorry to hear about all your misfortunes, Neddy,” says an old friend, vaguely remarking on rumors that he'd sold his house and that something has happened to his “poor children.” Ned hastens away, but the Lucinda River becomes more treacherous, until the natives themselves—first welcoming, then at least sympathetic—rebel and turn nasty. At a parvenu's party he's scorned as a “gate crasher” and snubbed by the bartender (“to be rebuffed by a part-time barkeep meant that [Ned] had suffered some loss of social esteem”), but the harshest wound is inflicted by an old mistress, who ridicules this latest “legendary” exploit with a casual insult compressing a novel's worth of exposition: “Good Christ. Will you ever grow up?” And so the constellations of autumn—”Andromeda, Cepheus, and Cassiopeia”—wheel into the sky, and what the weeping Ned will find at home is now a foregone conclusion: “He shouted, pounded on the door, tried to force it with his shoulder, and then, looking in at the windows, saw that the place was empty.”

The end. The particulars of Ned's calamity—the fate of his “poor daughters,” his financial losses, his housing arrangements (do he and Lucinda live full-time at the Westerhazys’?)—are left to the reader's imagination, such that Ned's darkened house seems all the more haunted. One wants to go back to the beginning and search for clues, see how the trick works, or simply reimmerse oneself in the pleasures of such a perfect story. “‘The Swimmer’ is a masterpiece of mystery, language and sorrow,” said Michael Chabon, who made the nice point that the story has “mythic echoes … and yet is always only the story of one bewildered man, approaching the end of his life, journeying homeward, in a pair of bathing trunks, across the countryside where he lost everything that ever meant something to him.” Years later, when asked about the story's “mythic” content, Cheever laughed and replied that such matters were better left to those who “teach fiction … at the level of veterinary medicine”: “It's much easier for the teacher and easier for the student who has no particular interest in literature to dissect a story than to be moved by it.” By then he'd cheerfully abandoned any thought of “rewrit[ing] Bulfinch;” as “The Swimmer” proved once and for all, his own myths were good enough.

HAVING RECENTLY FINISHED a novel as well as one of the century's finest short stories, Cheever decided to ask The New Yorker for a raise. As a New England gentleman he hated to talk about money, but really the time had come: the upkeep on his picturesque farmhouse was onerous, two of his children were in private schools, and his drunken brother was constantly asking for handouts. Besides, it wasn't as if The New Yorker couldn't afford it. According to a Wall Street Journal article, the magazine was wildly prosperous, having the highest per capita ad rate of any national magazine (twice that of Life), and “probably” the highest profit margin at 10 percent.

What was at issue were the terms of Cheever's “first look” agreement, which paid him a yearly bonus in exchange for a first reading of anything he wrote. It also stipulated a word rate, which varied from author to author and was a matter of considerable secrecy. This was based