(with a “shuddering sigh”) to the farthest side of their bed, and now Cheever spent most nights in a separate room at the top of the house. Mary claimed this was simply a matter of practical necessity (“he used to scratch me with his toenails; also he was a restless sleeper, and he snored”), but Cheever took it hard: “I think pissily in bed that since we sleep separately, as we do, this fact should be published and not concealed under a bedspread. I think I will tell people that I am forced to sleep alone.”* Not for the first time, he considered divorce—but again he couldn't quite bring it off. Why should he go, after all, when he'd just spent ten thousand dollars repairing the front porch? “And to tell the truth I am, alone, utterly incompetent. I step into a bar where there are some whores and my cock seems to strike an affirmative attitude of limpness. Nothing doing, it says. … It seems to be a homeloving cock, attached to simple food, open fires and licit ejaculations.” Two out of three, however, did not a full marriage make, and Cheever was determined to regain his conjugal rights. “The battle rages on,” he recorded that September. “Is it that you detest me, I ask, or that you detest men? I don't detest men, she laughs. I conclude that she is ghastly, then wicked, then evil.” Still mulling over the breadth of her turpitude, he saw, or thought he saw, Mary and Essie Lee (who'd just given Mary “a present of some trousers,” no less) hugging in a manner that struck him as decidedly peculiar: “Suddenly I conclude that she is a lesbian. This would explain the rebuffs I'm given, the moodiness and melancholy, it would explain everything.” Perhaps, but looking back he couldn't find much in the way of hard evidence—and then, whatever her proclivities, and however much he swore and swore to divorce her, the fact was that he felt “terrified” (when sober) that she'd end up leaving him. “People named John and Mary never divorce,” he wrote, resignedly, as autumn got under way. “For better or for worser, in madness and in sameness, they seem bound together for eternity by their rudimentary nomenclature. They may loathe and despise one another, quarrel, weep, and commit mayhem, but they are not free to divorce.”
Happily there was always the refuge of art, and so Cheever turned to writing a rabidly misogynistic satire titled “The Geometry of Love,” about a mild-mannered “freelance engineer” named Mallory who endeavors to understand his wife's cruelty through Euclidean theorems, but finally sickens and dies. It was the first story Cheever had finished in over a year, and at first he rather liked it. Certainly the opening is among his most memorable: “It was one of those rainy late afternoons when the toy department of Woolworth's on Fifth Avenue is full of women who appear to have been taken in adultery and who are now shopping for a present to carry home to their youngest child.” The “imposture” of adultery among the housewives of Remsen Park, in the story, was somewhat inspired by Cheever's recent suspicions over his wife's constant, wistful sighing, as well as the trouble she took with her appearance whenever she went shopping in town: “She has all the airs and graces of someone involved in a tragic love.” As for the comic viciousness of Mallory's wife as he lies dying in the hospital (“Nobody seems to miss you”), this reflected an earnest concern on the author's part that he might get sick, and then what? “I do not expect M[ary] to have the graces of a nurse,” he wrote, “I only expect her to sit for a little while at the foot of my bed, in a kindly way but this I think I won't have.” These elements of the story, however mean-spirited, are often funny and effective, but the surrealism—Mallory's magical use of geometry (Gary, Indiana, vanishes as a result of his efforts)—is vague and unconvincing, and no wonder: Cheever's knowledge of Euclid was pretty much limited to one year of plane geometry at Quincy High, for which he'd earned a D.
He began to have misgivings as soon as he submitted the story, and for the right reasons: namely,