Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [278]
“I don't think I should, Daddy.”
“Well, then, I'll just get up and do it myself,” he said. …
Then he started to get up. This excited the heart monitor, and I was afraid of what the oxygen tubes would do to his nose, so I grabbed the rail of the bed and made a barrier of myself. First he struggled, then he lay back down. Then he hit me in the chest with his forearm. It didn't hurt, but it did surprise me. He was furious. “You've always been a disappointment as a son,” he said.
Finally, Cheever was moved to a barred bed and placed in a webbed straitjacket. With almost laudable bravado, he managed to fish a razor out of his bedside table and cut himself free, then he laboriously squirmed his way out through a hole at the foot of his bed and collapsed onto the floor. “This brought the cops,” he wrote, “and I was put into a second straitjacket—leather with brass bindings and four padlocks.” When the cardiologist visited that night, Cheever roared, “I've been shackled!”
After some three rocky weeks in the ICU, Cheever's heart began to improve. Applauded for his “spectacular” recovery, he celebrated by wheeling himself into the hall at three in the morning and having a cigarette with his son-in-law. Around this time Jack Leggett called him at the hospital and told him to focus on getting well and forget about coming to Iowa. “Don't be silly,” said Cheever, “of course I'm coming!” In fact he was terrified he'd begin drinking again and end up killing himself, and on his sixty-first birthday he went to see a Phelps psychiatrist named Frank Jewett, whom Cheever dubbed “The Boots” because of the man's preferred form of footwear. His main incitement to drinking, Cheever admitted as usual, was homosexual anxiety, and he went into some detail about his recent encounters with young men. Jewett—intrigued by the whole “Death in Venice plot,” as he put it, and perhaps a little doubtful as to whether the puckish Cheever was entirely serious—couldn't resist discussing the matter with his old med-school pal Ray Mutter, who was convinced that Cheever was toying with the man. Laughing heartily, he related the whole “homosexual” business to Susan, who was both amused and exasperated: how was her father ever going to get better if he didn't quit clowning and level with these people? “Come on, Daddy,” she said. “Why did you go and tell ‘The Boots’ that you were homosexual?” After a pause, her father laughed: “I guess I just don't like psychiatrists.”
Home again after almost a month in the hospital, Cheever felt a happiness at being alive that was “indescribable”: “There is a sinister shrink in the wings who says that my euphoria is regressive,” he wrote Weaver, “that I am high because I'm forbidden to do what I don't like to do (emptying the garbage) and that if I don't take his advice I'll end up in the stews. I've told him to kiss off.” A month of sobriety had wrought a dramatic change: his bloated body seemed to deflate, his blue eyes stood out in his head again, and he treated his family with a sort of wan, remorseful courtesy. He was still a very sick man: his left ventricle remained “unruly,” and his heart did a “clog dance” whenever he tried climbing stairs. Still, in the absence of drinking, he longed to be more productive. Sitting in his wing chair or out on the porch, he sipped iced tea and wrote “on air” bits of Falconer he'd been kicking around for over a year: the protagonist's murder of his brother, the man's love affair with the convict “Joey” (a name he'd understandably change to “Jody” in due course). In the meantime Gottlieb (et al.) knew about his precarious health and what had led up to it, and seemed hesitant to give Cheever another high advance. Nor could Cheever, in good conscience, complain much, since he'd yet to write a single finished word of the novel in question: