Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [236]
At the beginning of a hopeful new year, Cheever wrote: “My bowels are open, my balls are ticklish, my work moves, my children are well and unprecedentedly happy, I love my wife, my house is warm, so why should I wake in the throes of melancholy.” Why, indeed. For one thing he worried that word might spread of his tryst with Rorem, who, after all, was hardly celebrated for his discretion (and God only knew what the others at Yaddo had seen or heard). The following summer, anyway, when Rorem asked him to write a blurb for his new book, Cheever saw a chance to distance himself in a decorous way: after the whole Barolini fiasco, he replied, “I resolved never to do this again or to use friendly endorsements on my books.” So that was that. Still, he remained rather fond of Rorem and made a point of lunching with him almost every year at Yaddo, though he found the man's narcissism trying: “[Ned's] ego seems in spate,” he wrote, “crystaline [sic] and uninteresting.”
* Such was Cheever's disdain for the piece that he didn't include it in his next collection, The World of Apples, a slender volume that could have easily accommodated it. That he didn't object to its later inclusion in The Stories of John Cheever was perhaps due to his faith in editor Robert Gottlieb's judgment.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
{1967-1968}
CHEEVER'S TRUCE WITH MARY lasted perhaps a month, before their marriage began to make “its annual journey towards the rocks,” as he wrote Litvinov. Ever more drunken, Cheever was less and less apt to dissemble his bitterness, while Mary continued to refine a subtle method of guerrilla warfare. Arriving separately at a dinner party, Cheever made a point of throwing his wife “a look of implacable hatred,” and when he later sobered up and apologized, she benignly replied that she was “so used to [his] contempt she didn't notice it.” Also, she made a point of conspicuously breathing through her mouth in his presence, and when he solicitously inquired whether she had a cold, she explained that he reeked of gin.
In February 1967 he escaped to Yaddo, and was relieved to find that all the homosexuals had cleared out; in their place was a captivating youngish woman who'd written an acclaimed biography of a great Romantic poet. “I would be a fool to claim that I am falling in love but I am immensely grateful for her company,” Cheever wrote. “Of all the people I have become attached to here this is the only seemly attachment, the only one with promise.” Their attachment appears to have been based on a single meeting (maybe two) at a restaurant near the racetrack, where Cheever exerted his charm and established the sort of instant (if ephemeral) rapport noted by many. For her part, the woman observed that Cheever seemed perhaps a little defensive about his lack of education, and he in turn thought he detected a touch of scholarly “sternness” in her manner, but decided this was relatively slight: “[H]ow natural it is that I, having been surrounded for so long by women who wield their intellectual gifts like battle axes should fall in love with someone whose intellect is of such excellence that she carries it like some simple gift.”
And he was in love. She'd given him a friendly—perhaps even tender—kiss goodbye, and when he came home to his glum wife, Cheever felt “invincible” in his determination to marry the other woman and start a family. They'd made a date to lunch in the city—a meeting so fraught with possibilities that Cheever could scarcely face it without sneaking a lot of gin before and during his morning train, endeavoring to sweat it all out at the Biltmore steam room, where he caught an unhappy glimpse of himself in the mirror: “I see a puffy old man with pink feet, sparse pubic hair and a short cock.” Not surprisingly, the date proved a little anticlimactic for both parties: Cheever was so drunk he could barely follow