Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [233]
The couple went together for the next session, the resolution of which Cheever had pictured in terms of “a musical comedy”: “We would embrace, kiss on the threshold of his office and tie on a can after the children had gone to the movies.” But he was brutally disappointed. “The picture, as I saw it, was that I, an innocent and fortunate creature, had married a woman with deep psychic disturbances,” he grimly recorded afterward. “The picture, as it was presented to me, was of a neurotic man, narcissistic, egocentric, friendless, and so deeply involved in my own defensive illusions that I had invented a manic-depressive wife.” While Dr. Hays outlined a program of treatment—individual and group therapy for the husband, whereas the wife needn't return except for an occasional joint session—Cheever mentally impugned the man's credibility. He wore garters, for one, holding up socks that had silly clocks printed on them; he used a lot of “specious jargon” like “meaningful” (fourteen times), “interpersonal” (twelve), “longitudinal” (nine), and “structure” (two); and, worst of all—by far—he'd never read any of Cheever's books!
Mary and Federico departed for Treetops, and Cheever was left to brood alone. It was the “friendless” part that really rankled. By God, just the other day he'd gone to Westport with his great friend Art Spear, and lunched with Burt Lancaster, no less! And even as he sat there brooding (so he reported to Weaver), the telephone rang: “[I]t was Esquire saying that they were doing a spread of Janet Landgard and that Janet had asked if dear Mister Shiffers would please write her captions because she didn't want her captions written by anyone but Shiffers and I said that I would write the captions and that's the way things stand.” Also, as luck would have it, Hope Lange and Alan Pakula were in town with their friend Sharman Douglas—daughter of the former ambassador to the Court of St. James—and the three took Cheever to East Hampton for the weekend. Thus he returned to Dr. Hays with his guns loaded, taking a seat and silently noting the tacky objets all over the office (“Does he know anything about music, literature, painting, baseball? I think not”); then, hearing the word “friendless” again, he returned fire: “I said that I had just had a very friendly weekend with Hope, Alan, and Sharman …” But Hays only shook his head: “He explained that I had developed a social veneer—an illusion of friendship—that was meant to conceal my basic hostility and alienation.” (The next day Cheever wrote his wife, “[Hays's] mouth seems a little blubbery and he is not always successful in keeping his hands away from it.”)
Despite his dislike of Hays's characterizations, Cheever seemed willing to cooperate up to a point. When Hays, a Freudian, asked him about his childhood, Cheever obligingly touched on what seemed the most salient issues: his father had wanted him aborted, and growing up he'd found himself caught in the middle of a “power struggle” between his parents, which his mother had won, thereby planting a fear of women as the “predatory sex.” That said, Cheever wanted to hurry along to what he viewed as the root of his anxieties: “I would like to discuss, to ventilate, my homosexual problems,” he wrote before the subsequent (fourth) session, to which he arrived bearing an autographed copy of The Wapshot Chronicle. As Cheever began (with “some circumspection”) to broach the matter of homosexuality, Hays made it clear that he wanted to talk about the mother more—a lot more. When Cheever mentioned his dalliance with Sara Spencer, for example, Hays speculated that the woman was perhaps his “good mother” and Mary his “bad mother,” or so Cheever might have (unconsciously) conceived it. Be that as it may (“Who profits by concluding that Mrs. Zagreb is my mother?”), the patient tried to retrieve his previous thread, asking if he could speak about his brother, Fred; Hays gave him “a frightfully condescending smile” and suggested