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yet dignified, lordly even, in his own home, but a very different Cheever began to emerge on the road to Provincetown. A “perfectly suited” Art Spear went along as a minder of sorts, though both pulled freely from flasks (gin in Cheever's, sherry in Spear's) and were plastered by the time they stopped for lunch at a diner in South Dartmouth, where Cheever indulged in a lot of Fitzgeraldian hazing of the waiter. That night, before the reading, Cook and Skillings had planned to take their guest to dinner at Ciro and Sal's Restaurant, but when the time came he was nowhere to be found. After a frantic search, Skillings spotted him wandering down Commercial Street: “[Cheever] gave me an immense long hug,” Skillings noted, “which gave me the willies because I thought he'd gone to sleep.” An elderly Hazel Hawthorne, one of the great benefactors of Cheever's youth, exuberantly greeted him at the restaurant—“Joey!”—and Cheever responded with a kind of bewildered bonhomie (“he barely knew her,” said Cook). The poet Mary Oliver was supposed to introduce Cheever at the Work Center, which was mobbed for the occasion, but before she could work her way up to the podium, Cheever had already begun: “[H]e read The Death of Justina very well considering,” Skillings related to Kunitz, “but his heart wasn't in it, and then everybody went over to the barn for a party where he kept sticking his tongue in my mouth and asking me how could I resist him.” Cheever explained that he'd “discovered homosexuality at Sing Sing” and wanted to give it a try, but Skillings resisted being pinned to the bed and finally persuaded him to desist. Art Spear was presumably elsewhere.

It got worse. Spear caught a plane the next day, but Cheever gave no sign of leaving: nice people were providing drinks and food, he liked the scenery, and anyway why go home? “We were little drudges,” Cook recalled, “and he expected it. He would thank us politely, but not enthusiastically.” On Sunday, because of the blue laws, Skillings had gone round to friends’ houses borrowing Scotch for Cheever, and very early on Monday Cheever said that he needed a morning drink “for the first time in [his] life.” Guiding him to a liquor store, Skillings observed the visible effort on Cheever's part not to “bolt behind the store and take a belt.” The bottle was empty by noon, and meanwhile Cheever never stopped talking: “He talks mechanically and repeats himself,” said Skillings, “reminiscences without point or perspective …” Expecting dinner, Cheever reported once again that night to Molly Cook and Mary Oliver (both “grey with fatigue”), after which he resumed making passes at Skillings. “Why do you find me so repulsive?” he demanded. “I won't hurt you! I don't even know what the ritual is!” This went on until midnight, when Cook finally coaxed him back to his room and tucked him into bed. “I've lost all my friends,” he said, gazing into her eyes. “I'm lonely.”

They got him a ride back to Ossining the next day. “In Province-town I see the beach, the dunes, the ocean,” he wrote in his journal. “How beautiful it is. I see an old friend [Hawthorne], smoke four joints and have a number of unsuitable erotic spasms. Why should people not respond to my caresses. I'll never know.”

SUSAN CHEEVER APTLY DESCRIBED The World of Apples as “a slim collection of the ten stories [her father] had eked out during the 1960s, in between novels, traveling, and alcoholic interludes.” The title story might almost (but not quite) be ranked among Cheever's best, “The Fourth Alarm” and “The Jewels of the Cabots” are eminently readable and interesting, while the rest are divided between the relatively weak and the nearly embarrassing.* Two reviewers, Thomas R. Edwards in The New York Review of Books and Ronald De Feo in the National Review, summed up the volume with the same phrase—”rather tired”—nor were they alone in wondering at how little Cheever had to show for himself since his previous collection almost ten years before.

That said, The World of Apples received some of the best reviews of Cheever's career, his