Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [251]
And so the willpower that had driven Cheever to become one of the greatest writers of his time—despite everything—was now reduced to restraining him, a little, from racing to the pantry for his first drink of the day. “First scoop at half past nine,” he'd tabulate, or “Held off this morning until eleven-twenty-two.” Whereas in the past he'd taken care not to let his family see him drinking before lunch, these days it was a little too much to ask. One morning Cheever was pretending as usual to read the Times, his antennae tingling while his wife moved around in the kitchen—arranging flowers, cracking eggs, and finally (just as he thought she was about to go outside and hang laundry) unfolding the ironing board “to [his] absolute horror”: “She seldom, if ever, irons, and this maneuver seemed to me unfair. I supposed she was going to iron the wrinkles out of the dress she would wear to lunch. This oughtn't to take more than five minutes, but five minutes was more than I could wait, and in full view of my wife, and the world, I went in the pantry and mixed a drink. It was eighteen minutes to eleven.” Amid such petty embarrassments and racking hangovers, Cheever wondered and wondered why he drank so murderously much—after all, his wife was being nice to him for a little while, ditto his dogs and children, and there was plenty of money in the bank. At the Yaddo meeting that year, Cheever listened with a lugubrious face while Philip Roth went on about the shortcomings of fame: Since Portnoy's Complaint, he'd been mobbed for autographs wherever he went and could hardly go to the theater anymore, etc. By way of reply, Cheever said he was quitting everything—Yaddo, Institute, Century, everything—and letting younger folk like Roth take his place. “I've had my career,” he sighed, “and now it's over.”*
As Cheever's gloom that autumn suggests, his recent therapy with a new psychiatrist hadn't borne much fruit. “Today I go to see Dr. Silverberg,” he'd written in his journal on May 20, 1969 (his first entry in at least two months). “Hip Hip Hooray.” Next entry: “Hip hip hooray. I see Dr. Silverberg but I am too sauced to remember anything about his appearance beyond the fact that he wears a ring.” Dr. J. William Silverberg's notes serve to corroborate this: “[Patient] seems quite drunk … and forgets what he had said a few minutes before.” One thing the patient definitely (if superfluously) said was that he was “drinking too much,” and the following week he elaborated that he'd been depressed for quite a while. There were a lot of problems in his life—trains, bridges, phobias of one sort and another—but his “most important conflict” was homosexuality: “I've never confessed this to anyone before,” he said, admitting to a total of three encounters in his lifetime, most recently in December.* All this was due, he speculated, to the pressure he felt having to “prove his sexual prowess over and over again”—a statement that led happily to the subject of Hope Lange, who nowadays figured in his ritual for getting out of bed in the morning, thus: “Hope is coming and she's beautiful and loves me and I must get up …” And what about his wife? “At present she's quite rejecting,” Cheever said, adding (with a slight chuckle) that the reason was “unclear” to him.
After the first few sessions, Cheever decided he'd “exhausted [his] secrets” and returned