Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [262]
He'd never know, and by the end of autumn they were back in their separate bedrooms to stay. Eager to escape on almost any pretext, Cheever accepted an invitation to go to Egypt for a week or two and give a lecture at Cairo University—a lonely, drunken blur, only the broad outlines of which (the Temple of Luxor, a swim in the Nile) Cheever saw fit to retain. Actually, one encounter did prove distinctly memorable. Killing time between a solitary dinner at the Cairo Hilton and a reception of some sort, Cheever went for a walk in a nearby park:
I was joined almost at once by a young man who asked if he could join me in my walk. I couldn't see him in the fading light but he seemed comely and amiable. … He led me almost at once to a park bench where he unzipped my fly and took out my cock which was all smiles, ready for fun and juicy. I politely did the same for him but his pants were rags, half the fly-buttons were gone and his cock was like a dead bait worm. … When I zipped up my trousers and stood to leave he struck me and made a grab for my wallet. I punched him and got back into the circle of bright light that surrounds the Hilton.
One might dismiss this as a finger exercise or a fever dream, but eight years later—when such liaisons (minus the violence) had become more common—Cheever revisited the memory in passing: “I see the folly of my loves and that good fortune has kept me from dying of stab wounds in a park in Cairo.”
* Alexander went on to greater fame as an author and, especially, debater—taking the liberal side (opposite James J. Kilpatrick) for the “Point-Counterpoint” segment on 60 Minutes.
* He took a similar approach to his two previous collections: Some People, Places, and Things opens with two stories rejected by Maxwell—”Justina” and “Brimmer”—while The Brigadier and the Golf Widow opens with the title story, which (one will recall) Maxwell had tried to truncate in galleys.
* Hochman is perhaps best known for her 1973 documentary, Year of the Woman, a seminal contribution to the then rather nascent Womens’ Rights Movement.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
{1971-1972}
WHAT CHEEVER REQUIRED in his own fiction, he often said, was a sense of urgency: “Is what I have to say urgent, and do I suppose it would be of any urgency to people who read my books?” Ever since Bullet Park he'd found it hard to write a single urgent sentence, and so he'd inched his way, nonurgently, through “Artemis, the Honest Well Digger,” which he finally completed at the beginning of 1971. It was promptly rejected by The New Yorker, as Cheever must have expected, since he knew the editors were reluctant in those days to run stories with lyrical descriptions of seminal discharge (“like the fireballs from a Roman candle”) or characters who write monographs titled Shit. That aside, the story is soberingly mediocre, especially given that Cheever took almost nine months to write it—that is, to contrive a somewhat random, sprawling plot for his Russian material. Artemis lands in Moscow, of all places, purely by way of escaping an entanglement with his client's wife; then, within forty-eight hours, while Khrushchev is rather incidentally deposed, Artemis gets deported because of an exalting (but perfunctory to the reader) affair with his guide, Natasha. The story works best as travelogue, and is either too long or too short, depending on how you look at it. It's a measure of Cheever's desperation that he considered expanding it into a novel—thus compounding an already long and joyless labor—though artistically he was right in suspecting that the narrative per se was slight, and could only be brought up to snuff by throwing good money after bad, so to speak. Wisely,