Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [234]
“Some years ago I went to a psychiatrist who told me I was obsessed with my Mother,” he later wrote Litvinov. “When I told him that I liked to swim he said: Mother. When I told him that I liked the rain he said: Mother. When I told him that I drank too much he said: Mother.” Toward the end Cheever began arriving late, tipsy, and tended to be sort of suavely impertinent. “I lost a fifty-dollar bet with Mary about your religion,” he announced at the outset of their penultimate (eighth) session: he thought Hays was an Irish Catholic, but in fact he was Jewish, as Mary had claimed. For his part, Hays would urge the patient, repeatedly, to participate in group therapy too, but the latter refused or simply evaded the subject. Finally—when Hays reiterated that Cheever seemed to project onto his marital relationship certain unresolved conflicts with his mother—Cheever flatly declared, “I don't like to talk about any of these things.” Then (in a “very friendly” way, Hays recalled) he said he wouldn't be coming back anymore, but thanked Hays all the same and said he'd helped a little, which may have been somewhat sincere: “I realize that my own infirmities contribute to [Mary's] unhappiness,” he wrote, after deciding to quit therapy. “The microscopic scrutiny I bring to every note of her voice, every footstep, is a morbid exacerbation of our incompatibility but it cannot account for those weeks and months when I am the object of every disappointment and dislike in her world.” This was a fair synthesis, more or less, and then there were times when Cheever was inclined to accept even the most damning of Hays's insights: “And drunk I think perhaps the shrink is right, perhaps I am capable only of parasitism, dependence and imposture disguised as love …”
ONE WEEK after his final session with Hays, Cheever managed the long drive to Yaddo for the annual board meeting, Tappan Zee Bridge and all. He was aghast, however, by what he found there: the eighty-one-year-old Elizabeth Ames was virtually surrounded by homosexuals, despite her stern assertions about excluding them whenever possible. This was the same “terrifying ambivalence,” thought Cheever, that he'd detected in his own mother—that is, an impulse to condemn perversion on the one hand, and to castrate her son on the other, the better to ensure “a gentle companion” in her lonely old age. Actually, Cheever wasn't quite sure about some of Ames's entourage, but at least one—Ned Rorem—he knew to be “a famous cocksucker”: “N[ed] who I've been told claims, in his public confession, to have been blown and buggered by half the French Academy …” The “confession” was Rorem's recently published Paris Diary, a remarkably candid account of gay culture that had elevated Rorem to the status of “America's official queer, goyim division,” as the author put it.
That night Rorem had an unexpected visitor: Cheever, festively waving a fifth of Scotch. For three hours or so, he went on and on about his recent psychotherapy, his drinking problem, the link between writing and screwing, and finally, when the bottle was empty, he put a hand on Rorem's leg. “I was reluctant,” the composer recalled, “since I wasn't particularly attracted to him physically. But Cheever sort of broke my heart, he was so wistful. ‘I simply have to,’ he said.” Cheever seemed “very naïve sexually”—he only wanted oral sex, as if other possibilities hadn't occurred to him—and afterward he was “like a high-school boy, romantic in the extreme”: “I've never felt this way before,” he said, claiming that he hadn't been with a man in some thirty years, and meanwhile caressing Rorem in a way that seemed “sort of cursory.”
“Oh what good children we are!” Cheever wrote the next day. “How I rush to present myself at the breakfast table at eight AM, bright, shaven, proof of the fact that I did not get drunk last night and do something I should not have done.” For the next week or so, at any rate, the two were