Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [208]
Cheever needed all the love he could get—though it seemed, at first, that absence had made his wife's heart grow fonder. She and Federico had met him at the airport, and the three had stayed up late while Cheever told stories and handed out presents; better yet, Mary had “bounded into bed” with him and “declared her undying love.” “All my anger is idle and a waste of power,” he decided, but not for long. “[I]n a blaze of gin and self importance I announce at the [dinner] table that I will not be harried by … an English instructor,” he wrote in December. All the old problems had briskly returned to the fore: Mary neglected him in favor of grading themes and whatnot, which in turn made him drink too much, and drink made him impotent, and impotence led to an all-purpose paranoia that his wife was less and less apt to pacify. If he wasn't satisfying his wife in bed, Cheever reasoned, then she must be satisfying herself elsewhere, and he applied this syllogism even to the most unlikely scenarios—the way (for instance) his old friend Spear behaved whenever he picked up Mary for choir practice: “A[rt] usually goes through the routine of being a young man taking a young woman away from an old coot. M[ary] usually swings her tail and giggles.” Cheever put up with this unseemly charade for as long as he could decently stand it, then put his foot down in no uncertain terms: “I rail, I swear. … I say that when A[rt] comes I will beat him up, I will disfigure him. She goes to the telephone to warn him. I break the connection. … I roar, oh Christ, decide not to drink anymore, think bitterly that they will make a great couple; the educational junkheap and the Audubon Society of [which] he is president.” Sober, of course, he felt the usual crushing remorse—toward Spear—and apologized. But as for his marriage, he figured it was a goner and considered getting a divorce:
What other dignified course is left to me. I am treated like a wretch, fit to be cooked for a cuckolded, malodorous, supported by a suces fous [sic], comical, impotent, opinionated, uneducated, short-cocked and illbred. But waking at two and three I remember a love so pure and fresh, sighs and cries of pleasure … engorgements and revelations that I think it is this I should remember. To be practical I will always have M[ary]'s lengthy and mysterious depressions to cope with but I can hope that these will diminish.
Meanwhile his brother was becoming a hardship again. In the summer of 1963, that unsinkable man had pulled himself together and gotten a job as advertising manager of Stores, the publication of the National Retail Merchants Association. By then, however, he had borrowed so much money from the bank that his wages were confiscated to pay the debt, and soon he was drinking again and trying to sell subscriptions to Life over the telephone. This was so irrefutably hopeless that his wife, Iris—who'd been working as a clerk in a gift shop—decided to call it quits for good, and Fred began to go under for what appeared to be the last time. “I call Fred who makes no sense,” his brother wrote. “Uds the seet smell of sugsess, he says. … I can only try to imagine the excruciating pain he suffers. I expect he can kill himself or come close to it and I will call this morning to see if he should be taken to a hospital.”
That was August 1964. In mid-November—two weeks after John returned from Russia—Fred