Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [270]
But of course Federico had been taking care of his father for years now (finding his glasses and car keys; helping him stagger down the hill from Mrs. Zagreb's house), so that no chore was entirely a surprise, and for the most part they got along fine. In fact, Cheever liked to say that the only serious fight (verbal) they ever had was in Leningrad—on the banks of the Neva, amid swirling gusts of snow—because Federico wanted to see the battleship Aurora and he didn't. “If you think,” Cheever shouted, “that I am unable to abandon a fourteen year old boy in a blizzard in a strange country you are greatly mistaken.” On returning to their hotel, however, Cheever bought “an uncommon display of caviar” and the two embraced, apologized, and tucked in. Also, back in Moscow, Cheever brought his son along for a lavish dinner with Yevtushenko, who appeared in a floor-length otter coat with mink trim and presented the boy with a bottle of pepper vodka to help cure his cold. As ever, the poet served as a wistful reminder that writers were heroic figures in Russia. At the restaurant, he breezed past a line of freezing would-be patrons out on the sidewalk, and while driving in the snow he made a wild U-turn in the middle of a busy street, a maneuver that (in stark contrast to Cheever's recent treatment by the New York State Police) was regarded as little more than a winsome flourish: “Write more poetry!” said an affable traffic cop, once he caught a glimpse of the driver.
By the time Cheever got around to calling Tanya Litvinov, both he and Federico were exhausted. Cheever had been drinking even more than his son realized: “[I] kept ducking into closets, toilets, etc.,” he wrote Exley “Glug, Glug. Even in the Kremlin”—that is, even during a visit with President Nikolai Podgorny, who proudly showed off a shoeshine machine in his office. Unused to drinking himself, and never mind the eating, Federico had come down with raging diarrhea and was glumly consuming large brown tablets pressed on him by Yevtushenko. As for Litvinov, she'd recently lost a front tooth and looked shabby; her mother told her she was “mad” to go out looking like that, but she loved Cheever and thought she'd never see him again, so she stuck a piece of wax to her gums and met him at the Hotel Ukraine. The wax dissolved. “It was awful,” she remembered. “My tooth was missing. John was drunk. The hotel restaurant was miserable. And Fred with his brown pills. Suddenly John opened his pocketbook to show me all his money, which he wanted to give me so I could buy a coat. I was furious. I said, ‘Look, if you want to give me money for samizdat [underground publications], I'll be really glad.’ “ Cheever—obliged to be a good guest of the nation, and always a little worried that he'd be kidnapped and sent to Siberia—clapped his wallet shut.
“The flight back from Moscow is painful,” he wrote. “A gray day.”
A FEW DAYS BEFORE Cheever left for the Playboy conference, Zinny Schoales choked to death while eating a steak sandwich. “The face is haggard,” Cheever noted of his old friend shortly before her death. “Alcohol and pain.” To be sure, Zinny's last days were bleak. She used to say that she stayed interested in life by reading the obituaries first thing in the morning to see how many more of her old friends had died; then, revived somewhat by coffee and cigarettes, she'd spend the rest of the day tippling. Her children were grown up and gone away; her philandering husband traveled the world for months at a time. Zinny told Cheever she considered murdering the man, and once left photographs on the coffee table of a female praying mantis devouring its mate. “Z. is dead,” Cheever wrote in his journal. “It was a relationship in