Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [199]
By July, however, the “dog days” had returned to the Hudson Valley: “I have the disposition of an adder,” Cheever reported. This had become a yearly cycle, ever since Cheever had decided that Treetops was “an inbred group of neurotics”—no longer mitigated, even, by the presence of a few charming Whitneys, since they'd been banished after Winter's death. Still, Mary insisted on making the trip (and taking Federico and the dogs), though she tried to mollify Cheever by filling the freezer with precooked meals and reminding friends that he'd be in need of their hospitality. To no avail: “Alone, alone,” he brooded in his journal, “eating boiled eggs while you [Mary] stuff yourself and play mahjong with your mad sister.” Such was his restless desolation that he entertained friends whom he could scarcely bear anymore, or never much liked in the first place. Art Malsin (“Bomb Cuba!”) made an appearance one night, and wanted to discuss Negro writers vis-à-vis the Civil Rights Act: “[James] Baldwin is a homosexual,” Cheever recorded the gist of it. “Baldwin is a negro. Ergo most negros are homosexual. One of the results of the civil rights bill will be to legitimize homosexuality.” Which, of course, was another sore subject: lonely, bored, and drunk, Cheever felt as vulnerable as ever to unsavory temptations, and the more he tried to distract himself, the more the world conspired to remind him. When Alwyn Lee went back into the hospital, Cheever volunteered to give his wife rides from the train station: “My motives are 1 to occupy myself and 2 to help her. She gets into the car with a newspaper clipping that says gin-drinkers are determinedly married to conceal their homosexuality.”
Fortunately, a rather wholesome alternative was right across Cedar Lane, at the lovely hilltop “chateau” (as Cheever described it) of a merry divorcée named Sara Spencer. For years the woman had combed The New Yorker each week to see if Cheever's name appeared at the end of any stories, and was therefore delighted to learn in 1961 that her favorite writer had become a neighbor. Soon they had struck up a friendship of sorts, but only recently had things become really interesting. One day Spencer had taken the liberty of carrying a large bundle of Cheever's mail down to his house, and while he sorted through it, he remarked, “I get letters from all over the world, and yet I'm desperately lonely.” Appalled that this wonderful, witty man—this world-famous writer who'd recently graced the cover of Time!—had been abandoned by a callous wife, Spencer gave Cheever the run of her house and somewhat acceded to his overwhelming “appetite for sexual tenderness,” as he put it. That summer he'd published a story titled “Marito in Città,” about a married man who has a larky affair with an aging seamstress named Mrs. Zagreb, which was how he invariably referred to Spencer in his journal.* “I take Mrs. Zagreb to a restaurant in Peekskill and have a jolly wrestling match on her sofa,” he wrote of a night in August. “You could use a young man, say I. I could use three or four young men, says she.” The two could talk about almost anything, it seemed: Spencer was a shrewd businesswoman who owned several apartment buildings in the Bronx, and sometimes, amid the afterglow of whatever went on between them, she gave Cheever financial advice. Indeed, he felt so comfortable with this kindly, worldly matron that he even mentioned his “homosexual instincts”: “Oh baby, she said, you're not queer; you love women more than any man I ever knew, you're all man, all male.