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him—vaguely—as “cute,” albeit in a decidedly nonsexual way (“a little nut-brown guy with twinkly eyes”). Probably those “three encounters” were the extent of it, more or less, but that was all Cheever needed to contrive an affair of sorts. Besides, the practical side of things tended to be overwhelming, to put it mildly. “I am a man, a free man,” he resolved in the spring of 1970, when Hope finally returned to town: “I will drive into New York, I will take a hotel room, I will screw H[ope], and take S[hana] to the big dancing party. Pow.” Cheever proceeded to make elaborate preparations: he packed “a brown suit for the seduction and a dark suit for the party,” made sure he had enough Seconal and Miltown, bolted a quick TV dinner, wrote a note to Mary, reserved a hotel room—all the while drinking, of course—until at last he lugged his bag out to the car and took off. “[I] observe that my vision is bad, my driving dangerous. … I turn back at the gas station and drive home. I destroy the note, cancel the hotel reservation, unpack my toothbrush and my pills, undress, and climb into bed. I sleep soundly.”

Little wonder he preferred fantasy. Almost everything about his subsequent meeting with Hope, for example, was lovely—except certain aspects of the meeting itself. He got up that morning free of cafará and was able to ignore, serenely, his wife's “contemptuous and weary voice” while he downed “three heavy scoops” to brace himself for the train, where a woman sitting beside him “seem[ed] appalled and terrified by [his] presence and perhaps by the fumes of gin that must roll off [him].” As for Hope, she appears to have done her best as always, but Cheever couldn't entirely deceive himself about his own performance: “It is not as good as it was a year ago. I somehow—hooch and a head cold—can't get quite on the beam. … She laughs at my jokes and says that I look much better than I did. Stoned and with a runny nose, I don't see how this could be possible. We lunch and return to the room, but the kissing is halfhearted, and when I suggest a fuck she says gently that she somehow doesn't feel like it.” But it was worthwhile, perhaps, just to confide in his wife afterward (“I talk freely about H.”) and regale the Friday Club with yarns about Alan Pakula's being “after [him] with a pistol” and so forth. During Hope's divorce proceedings, however, it transpired that she was actually seeing a lot of Frank Sinatra. As Cheever wrote a friend, “Hope and Alan are getting a divorce but I seem, through some sleight of hand, to have ended up with Alan.”

CHEEVER FITFULLY RESUMED WRITING FICTION, though he sensed he'd lost a degree of “keenness” and that his work-in-progress, “The Fourth Alarm,” was little more than an “anecdote.” Perhaps hoping for reassurance to the contrary, he wrote Maxwell that he was “doubtful” about the story and didn't want to publish it under his name (“I don't want to return on these terms”); Maxwell took him at his word, and rejected it. With this in mind, one suspects, Cheever not only went on to publish the story under his name (in the April 1970 Esquire), but even gave it pride of place in his next collection, The World of Apples* Cheever's first story in two years had been somewhat inspired by the nude revue Oh! Calcutta!, which had recently opened Off Broadway; wondering what he'd do with his valuables (wallet, keys, watch) if asked to strip naked and appear onstage, Cheever proceeded to imagine a protagonist whose prosaic wife takes a role in a naked play, Ozymanides II. The man's favorite childhood movie had been a quaint tale about a horse-drawn fire engine that saves the city when other, more modernized engines fail, and he reflects on this while watching his wife simulate copulation in public: “Had nakedness—its thrill—annihilated her sense of nostalgia? … Should I stand up in the theatre and shout for her to return, return, return in the name of love, humor, and serenity?”

The quirky little story is entertaining enough, but hardly the sort of thing to make Cheever's competition stop and take notice. And