Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [241]
The girl was gone by December, and Cheever resolved to treat himself for the holidays. A lot of publicity was scheduled for Bullet Park, and he was worried about his smile: his teeth had always been a disaster—snaggled, capped, and brown—and his dentist advised him to get rid of them once and for all. After the procedure at Phelps Memorial, Cheever remained incoherent long after the anesthesia wore off, hardly recognizing his own family; it was Rob Cowley's impression that “he'd had no alcohol that day and couldn't function.” Once Cheever got used to the dentures, at any rate, he took to flashing them with cheerful regularity. “Wipe that artificial smile off your face,” said his exasperated wife. “The only thing artificial about this smile is the teeth,” he replied.
The day after Christmas, he took his family to Curaçao, where they stayed at a little resort on a remote part of the island. Cheever begged off while the others snorkeled; he claimed that he couldn't put a tube in his mouth “lest [his] smile fall to the bottom of the sea,” but in fact he was terrified of swimming over the abysmal depth of the continental shelf. Mostly he drank gin and tonic, read Graham Greene, and flirted with his wife—the two had entered yet another of their weirdly renascent phases. “We had adjoining terraces,” Susan remembered, “and I looked over and she was sitting on his lap, and I was like whoa.“ The usual status quo became evident, however, when Federico began to sob on the airplane. Ben, sitting beside him, asked what was wrong, but the boy only shook his head. “I thought it was because he'd been stuck with this problem, that we'd deserted him,” said Ben. “I thought, ‘This is bad. This is really bad.’ “
* The unmailed letter may be found in the pocket of one of Cheever's journal notebooks at Harvard.
* To this day Federico remembers his father's song almost word for word (“As they say about ABBA, it's full of hooks”) and is happy to sing it, as follows: “The Duke of Dunraven, he snored in his sleep / He frightened the turkeys, the cows, and the sheep / He drank Irish whiskey from morning to night / And [something something] was a horrible fright. [REFRAIN:] Dunraven, Dunraven, come back to your hearth / Come back to Adare, the place of your birth / The rooks are all grieving / The brooks are in spate / Come back and inherit your broken estate.” Federico stopped there, but explained that a number of further verses tell of the duke's adventures in the New World, where he discovers such delicacies as “dehydrated taties” (potatoes) and “fresh frozen peas.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
{1968-1969}
DAYS AFTER FINISHING Bullet Park, Cheever signed a lucrative two-book contract with Knopf, ending his happy thirteen-year association with Harper & Row. Meeting his new editor, Robert Gottlieb (“A pleasant young man”), Cheever was uncharacteristically insistent that Knopf make it worth his while, since otherwise he had no good reason to leave Harper. “I'm afraid I was a nuisance about money,” he wrote Gottlieb afterward, “but I have this nightmare where I push a super-market wagon across River Street—macaroni and cold cuts—and am either run down by Roth in his Daimler or buzzed by Updike in a new flying machine.” The whole business left him in an awkward position with Harper: Frances Lindley had labored extensively over The Wapshot Scandal (“page after page of ruled paper with comments and queries,” as she recalled); without her efforts, said Cheever, the novel “would have withered and died unknown.” Squeamish as ever to admit that money exerted