Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [283]
Cheever's despair was belied somewhat by all the fun he seemed to be having. “I shout myself hoarse at football games,” he wrote Spear, “take young women to concerts, dance the Virginia Reel, play football, lecture on the problems of modern fiction and generally splatter myself over this part of the mid-western landscape.” As one of the most famous writers ever to grace the faculty, Cheever was literally welcomed with open arms wherever he went. One day a stranger embraced him in the elevator, and when Cheever inquired as to whom he owed the pleasure of such a charming salutation, the man introduced himself as the president of the university, Willard “Sandy” Boyd. Cheever became a regular guest in the man's home, where he knew he was dealing with quality because, after all, there was Messiaen on the piano's music stand! When it came to splattering himself around the landscape, though, Cheever preferred the company of young people. Ron Hansen was dating one of the few women in the workshop, Sarah Irwin, whom Cheever found “friendly as a cocker spaniel” and took to a number of football games. Passing a thermos of Scotch and huddling under a lap rug, the two would cheer the hapless Hawkeyes before returning to Iowa House for long, drunken soul-chats. “I'm displaced and lonely,“ Cheever would say (“drawl[ing] out the word with a terribly hollow oh sound—lohnely,” Irwin recalled), telling as ever the saga of his marriage—how there's “always a lover and a beloved” and his wife was decidedly the latter. (“I talk with M[ary] on the phone and these conversations are always poor,” he wrote around that time. “I make the sign of the cross and can barely keep from hanging up.”) Worried that Irwin's boyfriend would get the wrong idea, Cheever proposed they pay him a visit one Saturday afternoon, and the three sat around the floor of his basement apartment drinking wine and popping cashews. The dapper, mannerly Cheever kept startling the couple with the odd bombshell: “I was at Yaddo last month,” he remarked in passing, “and there was this sculptor who kept following me around, so finally I just let him blow me and that was the end of it.” While Hansen and Irwin listened with widening eyes, Cheever added, “Fellatio is the nicest thing one human being can do for another.”
Hansen and Irwin also accompanied their teacher to a bluegrass festival, where he managed to disconcert them for a different reason. Joining a touch-football game, Cheever frisked about, howling with laughter and gasping for air, while his minders wondered if they should do something before it was too late. Fortunately, Cheever noticed that (as Irwin put it) “the other players were moving around him like something fragile as an egg, and he did not wish to spoil the game.” Next he jumped on a picnic table and began dancing a jig, then scampered up the hill to join a Virginia reel. As he noted in his journal, “I romped into this with such enthusiasm that I damned near had a heart attack, and ended up (happily) sitting on a pile of horse buns.” Even in quieter circumstances, Cheever hardly behaved like an old man nearing the end of his journey. The night after the festival, Irwin stopped by his room for a drink—perhaps to make sure he was still breathing—and at one point Cheever tenderly kissed her foot and placed it against his chest. Things began to go further (“I had a great deal of admiration and affection for John,” said Irwin—”that plus the Scotch”), but both had qualms about Hansen and decided to keep things on a platonic basis.
Cheever's most constant female companion, however, was not Irwin. One day he was reading beside