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By Root 3843 0

” And it wasn't just trains, but almost any form of travel whatsoever: “I bitterly resent these infringements on my life,” he wrote. “I can barely walk, I plainly cannot drive, I can't cross bridges and since we have been taught that we received what we deserve I wonder what I have been guilty of to suffer so.” But he never wondered long. On the rare occasion when he was able to goad himself all the way to Manhattan, he'd come face to face with the horror his body had been warning him against (always beginning with a painful, telltale tug in his scrotum): “Walking on Madison Avenue I had been tormented with the thought that my sins would be discovered although I claim to have committed no sins. My children will vilify and disown me, my loving dogs will bark at me, even the cleaning woman will spit in my direction.”

Under the circumstances, the shelter of his marriage was more important than ever, though it was also a humiliating reminder that he was all but incapable now of performing the procreative act. As he wrote in his journal of an aptly named persona, “If he [Fallow] could make love to a woman it proved that he was not the sexual criminal he sometimes thought himself to be. His manhood seemed to reside between Priscilla's legs.” He and Mary still tried from time to time, but it was no use: at best he could get started a bit, but rarely (if ever) finish. To pre-empt failure—and rebel against his wife's terrible power—Cheever adopted the stratagem of insulting her when sex seemed imminent, with the predictable result that she would then refuse to proceed, or at least protest at some length, in which case Cheever was known to quote Moses Wapshot: “You've talked yourself out of a fuck.” (“He liked to say that,” Mary recalled. “Of course, the fallacy of that is, who would want to fuck anybody who talked to them that way?”) By way of reprisal, Mary could be somewhat pre-emptive herself: “I can't bear to be gentled by an impotent man,” she remarked, departing to cook potatoes rather than endure his tentative caresses. “I'm not impotent with other women!” he called after her (admitting in his journal, “This is a damned lie, since all I've done is neck with other women”).

Finally Cheever had had enough of his wife's “needless darkness”—obviously, she was a “castrator” like his mother, and moreover a “serious manic-depressive” like her sister. “She naturally resists this admission and looking around for some other explanation for her profound unhappiness she has settled on me,” he reflected. “This accounts for the depth of her aversion to me, the intensity of her hatred.” Lest he “destroy [him]self “ by “accommodating] her madness,” he decided to present his case to a reputable psychiatrist, David C. Hays. During their first appointment in July 1966, Cheever explained to Hays that he was there for his wife's sake, adverting to the history of insanity in her family and noting her particular resemblance to Buff. He could no longer abide her moodiness and “tongue lashings,” he said, and advised Dr. Hays to have a talk with her and help her understand her problem in clinical terms. “So I go to the shrink,” he wrote. “I feel much better talking to him. He does seem a little angular, a little inclined to contradict and interrupt. … Mary will go see him, and how wonderful it would be if we could clear this up.” Mary was happy to comply. When the doctor inquired about her “moodiness” and so on, she sweetly replied that Cheever was far moodier than she, and though it was true she was cold at times, this was simply a defense (“she has built up an armament,” Hays noted, “so that he can't hurt her anymore”). When Cheever observed how cheerful Mary seemed after chatting with the man, he was delighted: “[T]he trouble seems over, the ice is broken. … I adore her, worship her, love her, live within her and wake in the morning for the first time in weeks without a cafard. I would like to wake her, embrace her, kiss her, screw her, screw her and screw her again but instead I go downstairs and make the coffee.” Meanwhile Dr. Hays had jotted