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By Root 4083 0

a couple: buzzing around the countryside in Cheever's roadster, having picnics together and chatting about one thing and another while Cheever gulped gin from a thermos. “[He] was obsessed with homosexuality,” Rorem later wrote, “as though hoarding lost time. Learning about my orgasm fantasies (squalid, narrow and sadomasochistic), he was anxious to show that his were elating, like being on a crimson staircase toward a silver tower that bursts open to a sky of golden stars.” With Rorem's assistance, Cheever ascended those stairs three or four times a day, and his long struggle with impotence was nowhere in evidence. Nor was he very discreet about things—once they did it under a Ping-Pong table—seeming almost to invite discovery: “My God, there's Hortense [Calisher]! … They know! … But I'm glad. … No I'm not.” Several years hence, while writing The Later Diaries, Rorem described the liaison and likened Cheever to Proust's Baron de Charlus, though he deleted these bits on the advice of his publisher's lawyer. “I wouldn't have minded,” Cheever remarked, once the book had been safely expurgated.

His infatuation with Rorem ended almost the moment he left the “precious and unreal environment” of Yaddo; amid his dogs and souvenirs, Cheever rationalized his behavior as little more than an attempt “to offend [his] elders.” “I want to get back into the rousing, rainswept country of love,” he wrote—meaning heterosexual love—but where to begin? Ruefully he reflected that “perhaps fifty women” had offered their favors in recent years; for various reasons, though (“firstly because I might be incompetent”), he'd turned them all down. And whoever the fifty were, they'd certainly vanished by then, as Cheever found himself at an almost total loss. For a moment he thought he might marry Sharman Douglas, but then he had to admit he'd only met her once in his life and had already forgotten what she looked like. As for Mrs. Zagreb (“a matron in her fifties, whose feet are killing her”), she hardly seemed a suitable mistress for a world-famous author, and truth be known it wasn't a very torrid affair: “He beseeches her to love him and she sometimes kisses him, roughs his hair and fondles his whatsis but if he tries to go further she says: be good, be good, now please be good.” And finally, if he were perfectly honest with himself, he didn't want a mistress at all—quite simply, he wanted to be a proper husband with a loving wife. “I am sad,” he wrote that fall; “I am weary; I am weary of being a boy of fifty; I am weary of my capricious dick, but it seems unmanly of me to say so. I say so, and Mary most kindly and gently takes me into her arms. I don't make out, but lie there like a child. Patience, courage, cheerfulness.”

Things got better, for a while, when Susan called from Colorado to say she was quitting her job and coming home to marry Malcolm Cowley's son, Robert, a thirty-two-year-old divorcé with two children. Cheever was bemused—it almost seemed “a little incestuous”—and not quite inclined to celebrate until he'd received confirmation from the prospective groom, whom he promptly invited to lunch at the Century. When he asked Cowley what his intentions were, the man began to stammer: “A you, you sound comes into his speech,” Cheever noted. “He asks me to tell him about my daughter. It seems to me a strange question for a man in love and my answers are inconclusive.” Even stranger, perhaps, was what appeared to be Cheever's genuine puzzlement on that point: “I seem to know so much about her that I know nothing,” he wrote the senior Cowley. “She doesn't break promises, tell lies or read the newspaper over one's shoulder at breakfast. She's intelligent, unpunctual, fearless and plays the record player very loud. It's about all I know.” But really it hardly mattered—she was getting married, and what a relief. That would be the end (Cheever hoped) of her quixotic interest in civil rights and such, nor would there be any more scenes like the one that had spoiled the holidays the year before. Indeed, when he saw the couple together at Christmas,