Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [206]
By the time Updike wrote these words, he'd read Cheever's shockingly uncharitable account of their trip in the latter's posthumous Letters, which includes that antic fantasy about the lovely Mary Updike hiding Cheever's book under her pillow to read on the train. It was true that Cheever was charmed by Updike's wife and vice versa, though it's unlikely this caused any friction between the Updikes; if anyone was envious it was Cheever, who already felt considerable chagrin over his own Mary's absence.* Nevertheless, Cheever's journal suggests some particle of truth to the train story: “While Mary [Updike] and I danced in Leningrad,” he recalled in 1976, “she told me that [her husband] could not endure having a book of mine in his room …” Whatever Mary had actually said (“why should [Updike] forbid his wife to read my stories or even mention them,” Cheever fretted at the time), no doubt her dancing partner laughed it off amid the relative amity that prevailed in Russia.† Mary Updike remembered how “bereft” she and her husband felt while saying goodbye to Cheever, who was so eager to resume their friendship that he called the couple (“unsober”) as soon as they returned to the States. “He is unyielding, really inscrutable,” Cheever wrote of Updike's phone manner. “Can it be that he dislikes me. How could such a thing come to pass! Chekoslovakia [sic] is worth a good two or three weeks, he says, talking like a travel agent.” Cheever was devastated by the snub (as he saw it), and wondered over its import for months: “I cannot bring [Updike] into focus because I cannot believe that he would take such an instantaneous dislike to me. … He may be so intensely competitive that he finds my existence an exacerbation but I find this difficult, I find it impossible to imagine.” The following summer Cheever and his family vacationed in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, and when he got the impression that Updike was reluctant to visit him there—though Updike did, in fact, visit him there—Cheever made up his mind for the time being: “I would go to considerable expense and inconvenience to avoid [Updike's] company,” he wrote a friend that June. “I think his magnanimity specious and his work seems motivated by covetousness, exhibitionism and a stony heart.”
TOWARD THE END of his Russian visit, Cheever still had a lot of rubles to spend, so one night on a train he bought Romanian champagne for all his fellow passengers. Afterward two men approached him and asked if he'd like to buy something really interesting—a genuine seventeenth-century icon (which hangs in Cheever's house to this day). Later, as he was secreting the sacred artifact in his suitcase along with his fur hats and football, Yevtushenko called at his hotel and said he had a present for Cheever. “No, no,” said the poet, when Cheever indicated his already bulging suitcase, “this is nothing you take with you. This is something special.” The two drove a while to a “sort of slum” outside Moscow, where Cheever was introduced to the artist Oleg Tselkov—in disgrace at the time—who produced a number of paintings for his inspection (“brilliant, progressive, and heretical,” Cheever observed). “So!” said Yevtushenko at last. “He cannot show his painting. He cannot sell his painting. He cannot discuss his painting. My present to you is the invincibility of his painting.”
Cheever left Russia the next day. “When the train from Leningrad crossed the Finnish border