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By Root 3921 0

House, the two telling each other stories about their fellow diners—a game at which Cheever seemed eager to be bested. Gurganus would indicate, say, a plump middle-aged couple eating with their Down-syndrome daughter, and speculate as follows: “His third marriage, her first, the daughter a ‘love-child’ of his youth (first cousin, out of wedlock) who had become an unconscious millstone for him, ruining with her hapless demands marriage after marriage, job after job, since he still refused to have her institutionalized. Today was the day wife number three had found a home for poor Margerie and this was to be her last veal cutlet as a free girl …” Cheever would bunch up in his chair, ecstatically tickled, an ideal audience. “Gosh, but we had fun,” Gurganus recalled. “Sex alone would have spoiled it.”

Even at the best of times, though, Cheever's ambivalence about homosexuality was never entirely forgotten. He often doted quite openly on Gurganus, but if the student responded with some sort of well-meaning tenderness, Cheever would fret over what he perceived to be the young man's sudden effeminacy, not to say his shameless teasing: “[Allan] flirts with me,” he wrote. “The more he flirts, the more he seems like a woman. He shifts his shoulders … and gives me long, bone-making gazes, but we stay within four feet of each other.” It galled Cheever, and would go on galling him to the end: Gurganus could play sandlot football; he was so perfect in many ways—witty, well read, gifted—if only he weren't so homosexual. And, given that he let himself be known as gay, the least he could do—or so Cheever manifestly believed—was go to bed with him! Their relationship was summed up nicely by an encounter (of sorts) that Halloween. Gurganus was at a Gay Liberation costume party in the basement of the Unitarian church; dressed as a German sailor, he was dancing with another costumed youth when he looked up and saw Cheever gazing down at him from the basement window. Years later, Gurganus couldn't help vacillating a little in evoking that look on Cheever's face: on the one hand, he seemed a wistful von Aschenbach, or was it a baneful Peter Quint, or for that matter “some Victorian urchin looking into a bakery through a cloud made with his own breath”? Doubtless it was something of all three.

ONE OF CHEEVER'S MORE INNOCENT overnight guests was the thirty-five-year-old Raymond Carver, who lived on a different floor of the Iowa House but couldn't be bothered to stagger back to the elevator. The two were a very odd pair indeed: Carver was a burly working-class fellow with frazzled hair and sideburns—”a truck-driver or master-sergeant type,” as Leggett put it. They'd become acquainted when Carver sought Cheever's help in tying his necktie prior to a faculty party. What they had in common was a love of literature and drink. Carver had yet to publish his first book of fiction, and was thrilled to meet Cheever and just sit there listening to him (“I'd never heard anyone use the language like that”). He made himself useful by giving Cheever lifts to the liquor store, preferably the moment it opened at ten o'clock. As Carver remembered of one such run, “[T]he clerk was just unlocking the front door. … John got out of the car before I could get it properly parked. By the time I got inside he was already at the checkout stand with a half gallon of Scotch.”*

Cheever had a more temperate friendship with the young John Irving, who, like Carver, was still laboring in relative obscurity at the time (he'd published two novels to little acclaim). He and Cheever had a weekly ritual of watching Monday Night Football and eating homemade pasta, and once they escorted the writer J. P. Donleavy to his reading. (Cheever wrote of The Ginger Man in 1959: “[It] amuses me and has, real or false, the dingdong litany of the Welsh and the Irish.”) Irving had met Donleavy and his wife at the airport, and was startled by the man's absolute lack of civility: Donleavy let him know that he never read living writers, and wondered aloud if they were in Kansas; later he told Irving's