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let the man in. “I don't approve of this kind of sneaky journalism,” she said, “but the truth is that I know a lot about him because I can see him from my windows. I mean to say that I know he's a very heavy drinker and I often see him out there at twelve o’ clock noon with a martini cocktail in his hand. And he sometimes chases his wife through the orchard in full view of my children. And he almost never wears his bathing-suit when he goes swimming and I've always thought there was something peculiar about men who go swimming without their bathing suits. But as I say I don't approve of this kind of gossip and if you'll ask me some suitable questions about his habits I'll try to answer them to the best of my ability.” Then the man said, “Lady, I'm your Fuller Brush representative.”

Cheever's private attitude was far less debonair. Once his face appeared on “four million newsstands” in late March (he fretted), he'd be exposed for all time as “impotent, homosexual,” to say nothing of all the other sins he'd committed in his almost fifty-two years. “So the boundless continents of anxiety appear,” he wrote after one sleepless night. “I will be described as an impostor, a bum sponging off the government and the corporation of Yaddo, a cheap social climber, an imitation gentleman.”

No doubt Kopkind turned up something of that sort, but it was not to be found in Lee's elegant puff piece, “Ovid in Ossining.” Far from being described as (essentially) a snobbish crypto-homosexual, Cheever was praised for the “moral vision”—the pietas—that was everywhere evident in his work: “John Cheever, almost alone in the field of modern fiction, is one who celebrates the glories and delights of monogamy.” The better aspects of The Wapshot Scandal were incisively discussed (Lee was a first-rate critic), and its supposed flaws were explained away as ingenious formal effects: “Cheever is not a great expositor of character. Fiction as character study belongs to the Victorian novel, and this, he believes, is as obsolete as the world it moved in—the tight, homogenous community, before mass communications smoothed out the world and blurred individuality. This tends to make his novels seem disjointed, but he defends it on the ground that disjunction is the nature of modern society.”

Astonished by Lee's “transcendent generosity,” Cheever invited the man over for a celebratory walk to the dam. When Lee complained of the cold, they returned to the house and sat around a fire. “I'm frightfully sorry,” said Lee, lowering his whiskey, “but I'm about to go into the torture of little ease.” Cheever looked puzzled, and Lee clarified that he was about to die and needed to find a bathroom. “He goes to the bathroom, vomits, returns, goes to the bathroom again,” Cheever wrote in his journal. “I hear him spitting out his guts and crying pitifully. When I open the door I find him lying in the bathtub.” Cheever helped the dying man out of the tub and put him to bed with a hot-water bottle, then phoned for an ambulance. “You're not going to die, Alwyn,” he said, taking Lee into his arms. “The tenderness in this scene was marred by the fact that I had a sharp pain in my arse,” Cheever related to a friend. “Standing, I saw that I had sat on his false teeth. ‘Godamn it Alwyn,’ I said, ‘you just can't leave your false teeth anywhere.’ At this The Angel of Death—a conservative and humorless spirit—vanished. The ambulance arrived and he made a miraculous recovery.” Lee's near-fatal attack of pancreatitis had yielded, for Cheever, that choice business about the false teeth, which eventually became a linchpin moment in Falconer.

Another curious outcome of the Time story was a meeting at the Century with his old “boy chum” Fax. “This is no reunion to be turned into a story,” Cheever wrote of the rather melancholy occasion. The middle-aged Fax was a homely man “with a sad song to sing”: his public-relations business was failing, and he seemed to dislike his wife and children. He thought perhaps he'd write a textbook or a television show (“something that will bring in large