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By Root 4074 0

block and dicey domestic situation, Cheever spent almost the entire autumn of 1971 on the road. After a visit to Whiskey Island in September, he proceeded to Yaddo for the annual meeting and had a very satisfactory tryst with a painter exactly half his age. “There's something about a drinking bond,” the woman said, remembering the episode. “I've been sober for twenty years, but I was a bit of a drinker to say the least.” Cheever was in good form and made the woman laugh, and perhaps in tipsy gratitude (since she needed a laugh at the time) she performed fellatio on him—thereby supplanting both Shana Alexander and Hope Lange as Cheever's top dream girl for the next two or three years. “My incantation is that I am lying in a four poster bed with S——,” he wrote almost a year later.* “It is a large bed. This is in her Vermont farmhouse.” And then, the year after that: “I think of S——. Why do I love a girl with such a husky voice, I ask. She kisses me. Why do I love the oldest man in the world.” The woman (like certain others) was bemused to learn that she'd played such a prominent role in Cheever's fantasy life; as she pointed out, their meetings after Yaddo were “casual at best.”

In October, he flew first-class to Chicago—compliments of Hugh Hefner—for the Playboy International Writers’ Convocation, where he joined the likes of Sean O'Faolain, Alberto Moravia, John Kenneth Galbraith, and some sixty other Playboy contributors to discuss such topics as “Paranoia: The New Urban Life Style” and “The Future of Sex.” The gathering was so high-minded that, during parties at the Mansion, Bunnies were chaperoned by a former housemother at Vassar. Cheever availed himself of the good liquor and kept smiling. Buttonholed by an earnest young writer who asked if he'd ever altered his work to suit an editor, Cheever gravely replied, “Not since I came into my inheritance.” Richard Todd, reporting on the event for The Atlantic Monthly, noticed how Cheever “nodded elaborately in approval” when Arthur C. Clarke (of Space Odyssey fame) described a future in which offices would be obsolete: “Don't commute, communicate!” he exhorted the panel, while Cheever sent a paper airplane gliding down the table. Hef presented his guests with Playboy credit cards and VIP International Keys, but the highlight for Cheever was meeting his beloved Bellow at the Riviera Health Club. He arrived while Bellow was still on the racquetball court, and agreed to chat afterward in the steam room—an Olympian encounter that Cheever evoked six years later, while presenting Bellow with yet another award: “Saul appeared from the clouds, stark naked and wearing a copious wreath of steam. I stood in my own cloud. As we shook hands I said, as I am pleased to say tonight, that our friendship is obviously not of this world.”

And finally, in November, Cheever was invited back to the Soviet Union for Dostoevski's 150th-birthday celebration, for which he brought his younger son as companion and caretaker. The two had never been alone together for a long vacation—unchaperoned, as it were—and, looking back, Federico regarded this as perhaps the time he really “got to know [his] father.” On the flight to Moscow, they sat together for as long as it took for the seatbelt light to go off, whereupon Cheever adjourned to the back of the plane for cocktails; when he didn't return, Federico stood peering into the gloom until he spotted his father (animatedly talking) seated beside a female passenger (listening). Landing in a blizzard, they were met by old friends and interpreters, Giorgio Breitburd and Frieda Lurie, who explained that the Dostoevski festival was in Riga and that Cheever would not like it in Riga; rather they would go to Tbilisi. “[A]nd so,” Cheever later recalled, “while the speeches, concerts and parades in honor of Dostoevski raged in snowbound Riga, we swam in the rivers of southwestern Georgia and ate Homeric feasts.” The sheer quantity of food bordered on life-threatening—almost twenty courses at a single meal—but the “primary indoor sport” was drinking, and Federico