Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [256]
* Notwithstanding Cheever's occasional expressions of self-pity to the contrary.
* Roth had written Cheever a tactful letter enumerating the pages he'd liked in Bullet Park, to which Cheever replied: “[M]any thanks for putting down the page numbers. I checked them all. I thought Portenoy [sic] great from page one straight through to the end.”
* Though of course Cheever had a compulsion to discuss homosexuality—especially with psychiatrists—he tended to fudge the facts. He may have had an encounter in December 1968, but there's no evidence of this in his journal or elsewhere. But even if he were lying about such an episode, his total number of at least semi-verifiable homosexual encounters to that date would number more than “three”: one counts Fax, Walker Evans, Kentfield, Rorem, to name only the most obviously carnal, and bearing in mind his nebulous intimations about Brodkey Fred, and various chums of his youth.
* Brayfield later read Cheever's published Journals, where he found himself described as “barefoot [with] a fan-shaped beard and fuzzy hair.” He found this “wide of the mark”: “I often wore sandals in those days, but never walked around barefoot; I had a full beard, but it was well-groomed and close … and my hair couldn't possibly be described as ‘fuzzy’”
* As Ben noted in the Letters, “I am no longer on speaking terms with my former in-laws, but I must point out in their defense that they each used to smoke a package of Salems every day.”
* On his return from Yellow Springs, Cheever promptly got to work on an early version of “Artemis, the Honest Well Digger,” in which the title character has an affair with the wife of J. P. Filler, scholarly author of the best-selling monograph, Shit.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
{1969-1970}
WHILE BEN WAS GROWING UP, one of his father's most vehement strictures was against masturbation: Never do it, he'd say; it's vanity, self-love, and it ruins you for women. Ben had heard this so many times that he was surprised to find, after his father's death, that the man had not only masturbated quite a lot himself, but recorded the matter almost as copiously. “Jerking off I wonder if I would sooner be between H[ope]'s legs or down N[ed]'s throat,” he wrote around the time of Ben's wedding, when his own marriage was especially stagnant. Cheever was known to make the point that his constitution required at least “two or three orgasms a week”—but where to find them? That indeed was the rub. Even Mrs. Zagreb wasn't putting out these days. She was happy to give him a drink and commiserate about his wife's frigidity—but still (as she reminded him), he was married, and that was that. “It's all your fault,” Cheever told his wife in so many words, mentioning their neighbor's newfound compunction. Every so often he announced to the Friday Club that he'd met a fascinating, attractive woman, and would canvass his cronies as to the advisability of leaving his wife. (Within a week or two, usually, he'd deny having ever considered such a thing: “Oh, nonsense! I couldn't think of leaving Mary …”) That autumn of 1969, his latest dream girl was Shana Alexander, the forty-four-year-old editor of McCall's, whom he'd met through his old friend Zinny.* “I seem, after three encounters, to have fallen in love with S[hana],” he wrote, though he cautioned himself not to get carried away: “I seem to consider the women I love to be my inventions and when they forget or change the parts I've written for them I am disconcerted and at times disinterested.” Alexander may or may not have conformed to Cheever's invention, but in any case she remembered