Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [250]
* Cheever got his own back by damning Lehmann-Haupt's journalism with fainter and fainter praise: “Well, Christopher,” he observed a few years later, “you've settled in and become a highly—ah—reliable reviewer.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
{1969-1970}
IN 1968, HOPE LANGE had resumed her career with a starring role in the sitcom The Ghost & Mrs. Muir, about a spirited widow who moves her family into an old New England cottage and befriends its resident ghost. Each week Cheever watched the show and made casual asides to Federico (his perennial TV companion) suggesting that he knew a lot of inside dope about the pretty actress who played Mrs. Muir. By then Lange had separated from Alan Pakula, and in early 1969, during a trip to New York, she gave Cheever a call and the two went skating at Rockefeller Center; either that time or the next, the relationship became carnal—or rather as carnal as Cheever could manage: “We rip off our clothes [at the Biltmore] and spend three or four lovely hours together,” he wrote in his journal, “moving from the sofa to the floor and back to the sofa again. I don't throw a proper hump, which disconcerts no one … so it's all finger-fucking, sucking, tongue-eating, arse-kissing, bone-cracking embraces and earnest declarations of love …” A woman of extravagant candor, Lange would later characterize Cheever as “the horniest man [she] ever met” (impotence withal), if a bit “overly concerned with his own needs”: “[He was] like a high-school quarterback who wants to get his rocks off,” she said, echoing the consensus opinion.
Though meetings with the actress were sporadic at best, Cheever rarely missed a chance to boast about his “mistress” whatever the company, particularly if his wife was in earshot. “I suppose it's possible to love two women,” he sighed, clasping Mary's hand across the dinner table, having returned from a tryst in time to sit down to a nice home-cooked meal. (“He may be unfaithful,” said Mary, “he may be a drunk, but he always came home for dinner.”) Often his references to Lange were merely in passing, though he could be spiteful if he thought the occasion warranted it. “I'll be taking the train back with you,” he announced to some overnight guests (and indirectly his wife) at breakfast; “I have a date with Hope.” One night he even phoned his daughter—as if casting about for a loved one to share his happiness—and said he was leaving her mother at last and marrying “the most beautiful woman in the world.” But of course this was never really in the cards. For one thing, Lange could hardly understand half of what Cheever was saying, because of his muttering accent; besides, he always had to catch an early train back to Ossining. And finally, for all his gloating infatuation, Cheever had to admit (at least to himself) that his feelings didn't run all that deep—Lange was simply “the sunny side of the street,” as he put it: “[Hope's] brightness precludes shadowy and immortal longings. … It is only that [I am] happy and light-hearted in her company.”
Still, he was disgruntled enough at first to consider following his lover to the Coast and starting anew, until one day in March he suffered what seemed a rather minor skiing injury. As he wrote Lange, “Swooping (or so I thought) among the trees in the orchard I went down like a tray of dishes and tore all the ligaments in my left knee.” Fitted with a plaster cast from hip to foot, Cheever was gratified when his wife responded with sweet solicitude (as ever in the case of any stricken creature, be it husband, dog, or deer*), and he supposed it might even prove a good thing, for a while, to “substitute physical pain and infirmity for melancholy.” It didn't, however, work out that way: not only did Cheever's cafará increase (“it fills the house like smoke”), but the injury took a long time to heal, and meanwhile Cheever began to bloat with alcoholic edema. More than ever, writing was out of the question—indeed, he found