Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [240]
Cheever's impromptu ballad would be his last composition for a long time. Toward the end of August, he completed some very minor repairs to Bullet Park, then became so blocked that he even stopped writing in his journal: weeks passed without a single word, perhaps the first time he'd neglected this daily chore since his years in the army. “Ropesville,” he tersely wrote in one of his infrequent entries. “Martinis for breakfast or thereabouts. It takes three to get me fixed.” His days passed in a browned-out fog. When Donadio called to impart the happy news that he'd gotten a large advance from his English publisher, no less, Cheever was able to express a seemly incredulity, but afterward had no idea of the figure in question. A few weeks later, he somehow managed to catch a train to New York, go over his “Percy” galleys with Maxwell, regale a stranger at the Biltmore bar about his career as a jockey, then return to Ossining with only a fleeting recollection of the whole adventure.
His wife was unsympathetic, and it didn't help that she seemed to dislike Bullet Park. “Of course I cannot judge the book,” she said, “because I know in every case the facts on which it is based. Hammer is revolting …” Cheever thought this rather hard, since after all there was “some correspondence” between Hammer and himself. He was still mulling it over when Mary announced that one of her Briarcliff students had run away from home, and needed a place to stay for a while. “So off one goes again to find some spare room, tool shed, office, loft, or garage,” Cheever complained to Exley, though in fact he was allowed to keep his little room off the terrace, while his wife's student, Martha, was installed in a “mouse-infested room behind the kitchen,” as Federico described it. Martha (whom Cheever privately called “the waif” or “stray”) was a thin, prettyish, depressively self-absorbed young woman who seemed mindful nonetheless of the inconvenience she was causing in the midst of an already tense situation—which is to say, she tried to be polite to Cheever, who at the time required a special brand of tact. “What a ghastly color,” she remarked of some medicine Cheever had fetched when she was ill. “I fly into a rage,” he noted, “and say that the least she could do would be to refrain from complaining about the color of her medicine. She cries. I apologize.”
That was during the first, relatively placid stage of Martha's visit. Soon Cheever decided that the girl had a “fleeting bloom of attractiveness” and that he might as well enjoy the arrangement while it lasted: “Dazzy had, after all, been looking for a young mistress and found one sleeping in the spare room. If you behave like a damned fool, he said to Muzzy, you can expect some consequences.” But Martha was impervious to his charm—more so, indeed, than just about anybody he'd ever met. His wit left her stone-cold, she flinched at his caresses, and was amused (in a bad way) when he “prance[d] around in [his] underwear.” At length it occurred to Cheever that she perceived him as a “drunken comical and flabby old man,” and hence he began despising her in earnest. He especially resented the way she distracted Mary from her wifely duties. One evening, when served a dish he'd always affected to like, Cheever roared “Meatballs/