Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [271]
By then Cheever could hardly afford to lose a stalwart confidante like Zinny, with whom he had more than a few things in common. “The company I used to keep when I was alone has scattered,” he reflected, a few months after her death. The Boyers had moved to Guatemala shortly after his recent visit to Whiskey Island (“when you left you seem to have pulled the plug,” Cheever wrote them), George Biddle was enfeebled and soon to die, and the rest of Cheever's friends could only take him in measured doses, if at all. It wasn't that he was a mean drunk—though he often was—so much as a boring, pathetic one. At parties his drawling accent would become incoherent as he told the same stories over and over, laughing at his own garbled punch lines, and almost invariably lapsing into pidgin Italian. One day his fellow Friday Clubber Tom Glazer came over to say that his friends were worried about him. Cheever had always regarded Glazer as an oaf, but now he was almost touched: “If he is worried about me he must like me. Cha cha.” Subsequently he introduced the folksinger to Mary (who'd known him for many years) as follows: “I'd like you to meet my very great and good friend, Tom Glazer.” Then he whispered, “I have no friends.”
There was little reason to go to New York anymore, though Cheever was sometimes bored and lonely enough to suffer the miseries of train travel. “Wouldn't you rather talk than read?” he'd ask fellow passengers, desperate for any distraction. Usually they preferred to read, though some would pause a moment to point out that Cheever was drunk. And if he made it all the way into New York, the “painful alienation” that had roused him to go in the first place would only grow worse. Maxwell was cold these days, and other friends had gone or changed. “What has happened to this place where I used so happily to pound the sidewalks?” he mused. “Where has my city gone, where shall I look for it? … In the steam room at the Biltmore, in L[ennie Field]'s panelled apartment, in the skating rink, in the Park, in the Plaza … ?”
And so he stayed mostly in Ossining, though summers were almost unbearable, since Mary went to New Hampshire and he didn't have so much as a warm body to cook for him. “I am one of those lonely men you see eating London Broil in Chinese restaurants” was a constant refrain, especially when cadging meals from sympathetic neighbors. “I have entertained John Cheever most of the summer,” Mary Dirks reported in a letter to friends. “[H]e drinks far far too much and one memorable evening I had to pick him up bodily from the terrace and stuff him with food, after which we managed to have a good long talk about American writers and the gossip that surrounds such creatures as Bellow and Updike and poor dead O'Hara.” Cheever loathed Mary Dirks, and it is sobering to reflect just how wretched he must have been to sing for his supper thus. Indeed, he might well have succeeded in drinking himself to death, or having some nasty accident, were it not for the constant shadowing presence of his younger son. More and more, Federico had become the father and John the wayward boy: the latter had to be told not to swim naked in other people's pools, not to use the chainsaw when drunk—on and on—while the former patiently absorbed the insults Cheever inflicted on whosoever presumed to look after him. “Both Susie and I grant [Federico] absolute maturity,” Cheever remarked as a sober man, mindful of the burdens he'd placed on his son. “We both feel that, in his earlier life, he had a successful but unbrilliant business career, married twice and raised seven children.”
In the midst of that endless summer of 1972, Cheever wrote, “What I would like is some nice, clean heterosexual companion. Should I advertise?” What he got was Donald Lang, who fit