• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4137 0

the river when a young woman approached: “Good afternoon, Mr. Cheever,” she said, launching into a spiel about how she'd read everything he'd ever written and wanted so badly to be in his class, but she was only a first-year and they wouldn't let her in. (“I sit on the river banks with [Elaine],* an intelligent young woman with a slight gauntness in the face.”) Cheever said he'd take care of it, and got her into his literature class. Meanwhile he began asking her to have drinks and dinner with him. “People were falling all over themselves to have ten minutes with him,” she remembered, “and he wanted to be with me.” Elaine was able to appreciate, vividly, that she was in the presence of greatness, and Cheever did his best to oblige her. Eating a hamburger at their usual hangout, The Deadwood, he began reciting one of his stories from memory; the girl listened, spellbound, and afterward checked the actual text in her room and realized that he'd “told [her] the story literally word for word.”†

Elaine repaid the compliment of Cheever's regard by making herself indispensable. Whatever else she was, she was foremost his keeper. “We set up certain signals,” she said, “like, if we went to someone's house or whatever and I saw that he was getting sloppy, I'd give him the signal that we had to leave, and we'd leave. He'd say, ‘Oh, we have to go. Miss Moody* has another engagement.’ “ Leggett, for one, attested to this peculiar dynamic: in public, at least, Elaine appeared to have the upper hand, almost as if she were “exercising marital rights.” Naturally people began to talk, and perhaps to put the girl at ease, or simply because he wished to unburden himself, Cheever announced one day that he had something very important to tell her. “He was really a wreck,” said Elaine. “I think he thought I was going to reject him or have a fit. He told me he was gay.” As she remembered it, Cheever made a point of emphasizing gay as opposed to bisexual, though Cheever's journal suggests otherwise: “I go back with [Elaine] to her dormitory. My sexual iridescence [Cheever's term for a sort of ravenous versatility] is spread out with more breadth than ever before. … Look, look at grandfather. Leaving a girl's room in a dormitory at half past three in the morning.” Not that Cheever minded being seen in that kind of compromising situation; on the contrary, he made a point of telling his drinking companions at Iowa—and later his family—all about his sexual exploits with the young woman. Then and later, she vehemently denied having sex with Cheever, though it wasn't something she wanted to confront him about. In private, he was very much the master and she the disciple.

It was Gurganus who brought out the boyish swain in Cheever. “You look fantastic!” Cheever would gush when the two met for Sunday strolls along the river. “What a handsome man you are!” In his journal Cheever deplored how this Eagle Scout and Vietnam veteran would “swing his hips” when he walked. As ever, the most admired male evoked the strongest homophobia. But otherwise he found the young man's openness “highly desirable” and relished his company. The two could talk as equals: Gurganus would give his “generational opinion” of Cheever's contemporaries (most urgently Bellow and Updike, the only rivals Cheever cared to acknowledge), and delighted the older man by admiring many of the same books as he.† On one end of their walk they'd feed grass to the buffaloes at the zoo, until finally they came full-circle to Iowa House, where Cheever would try coaxing his protégé upstairs for some Scotch and whatnot. However, if there wasn't any concrete business to accomplish—a manuscript to discuss; a dying man's last request—Gurganus would usually decline. (“We part the student and the teacher,” Cheever noted a little ruefully.) Which is not to say Gurganus failed to reciprocate Cheever's delight in his company. “[John] was so entertaining, he was so wonderful, so alive to the moment,” said Gurganus. One of his fondest memories was sitting with Cheever in the River Room restaurant at the Iowa