Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [261]
On June 22, the three Cheevers took a seventeen-hour flight to Tokyo, stopping to refuel in Fairbanks, Alaska, where a large contingent from the University of Akron boarded, each of the faculty wives carrying a bottle of hometown water. Cheever observed them from the back of the airplane (“What a waste of time to ridicule them”), where he situated himself near the liquor station. In Tokyo the smog was so bad that people were wearing surgical masks, and mostly the Cheevers stayed put in their room at the posh Okura. In Seoul, however, Cheever was relegated to the pedestrian Tae Yun Kak, whereas more favored delegates—such as Updike—stayed at the Chosun, where the conference was being held. Because of their different lodgings, Cheever and Updike saw little of each other except for a brief meeting at the Chosun bar, where Updike observed that his colleague's drinking “was beginning to drag on him visibly.” Cheever in turn liked to tell how Updike had dutifully visited tourist sites like the Thirty-eighth Parallel, while Cheever had gone to a high-class geisha house where a beautiful girl named Saw stroked his privates and fed him fish, nuts, and mushrooms.
The American delegation included a black activist writer who, with his wife, had befriended the Cheevers. Federico found the man “extraordinary”: he (the writer) told a fascinating account of his experience in a segregated army camp during World War II; also, though companionable enough, he was not at all “inclined to be deferential,” like their other black friend, Ralph Ellison. Federico wasn't the only one in the family who'd been impressed. On her return to the States, a radiant Mary Cheever told Silverberg that she'd fallen in love with the man and was now meeting him every so often in New York (“heavenly”). Everything was better now: she and John were getting along because she no longer felt the need to “rise to his every prod or bait;” in fact, she was so mollified that she didn't mind obliging him a little in bed, patiently helping him keep it up long enough to reach climax.
“I mount my beloved, and off we go for the best ride in a long time,” wrote the ecstatic Cheever, who couldn't believe his luck and wasn't inclined to look deeply into the matter. Susan and Rob Cowley had recently returned from London and were living on Cedar Lane for the time being—reason enough to make both Cheevers happy: John gained an audience, and Mary a confidante for her love affair. “Where's your mother?” Cheever asked Susan, who looked puzzled before remembering “something about a sale at Lord & Taylor's.” Cheever—“blissfully” happy—smiled and went his way. “I walk the dogs in a heavy rain,” he wrote that autumn. “Water lilies grow at the edge of the pond. I want to pick some and take them home to Mary. I decide that this is foolish. I am a substantial man of fifty-eight, and I will walk past the lilies in a dignified manner. Having made this decision, I strip off my clothes, dive into the pond, and pick a lily. I will be dignified tomorrow.”
It ended with a bang rather than a whimper. “On Tuesday we were lovers and on Wednesday warriors,” Cheever wrote shortly after the lily-picking entry. “I am told that I am an insane shit, that even when I am loving I am a shit.” He simply couldn't fathom it. Was it because she was about to lose her job at Briarcliff? (The academic dean had been fired, and a number of faculty members had threatened to resign in protest.) But no, she seemed almost to welcome that. What, then? The nominal catalyst had been a well-meaning remark he'd made about a screenplay she was writing; as Mary conceded to Silverberg, her husband's advice had been “actually appropriate, but she blew up because she felt it was an unfair inference.” What she meant by that is unclear, but of