Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [287]
Another subject Cheever pursued in his cups was his sexual prowess. “Mary says I'm impotent,” he'd rail, “but I'm not!” Whether he succeeded in proving as much is a mystery; in public, at any rate, he did his best to appear insatiable. In addition to her role as keeper, Elaine served as a prop for these performances. One of her most vivid memories is the time Cheever was visited by a poor graduate student who lived in nearby Amana and made a pilgrimage in a blizzard, with his wife, to speak with the great man. The young couple sat on one of the narrow beds in Cheever's room, while Elaine and Cheever sat on the other. “So while this guy was trying to talk with him and have a visit,” said Elaine, “John was trying to paw me and kiss me.” At last it came time for their visitors to depart—to hitchhike in the snow, that is, back to Amana. As they waited for the elevator, Elaine took Cheever aside and proposed to give them a lift, but he had other plans and adamantly vetoed the idea. A few days later (“he thought I was out of earshot”), Elaine heard Cheever tell the young man that he wished he'd given them a ride, but “Elaine had things to do.”
Reading Cheever's journal, one would think that December had been an idyllic time for the two. “The last days,” he wrote. “I do not sleep alone at all. We [he and Elaine] embrace strenuously as if we could leave a fossilized impression on one another.” To the end, though, he couldn't make up his mind whom he preferred—Elaine or Allan—until the latter resolved the dilemma, for the time being, by pursuing other interests (“Alan [sic] … has vanished”). Elaine it was, then, who spent a final “sublime” night with Cheever, then drove him to the airport without, it seems, conspicuously checking her watch.
They met for the last time a few years later, when Elaine attended one of Cheever's readings at Harvard. Afterward they walked across campus and then paused to say goodbye. The sober Cheever, at least, seemed quite capable of remembering how badly he'd behaved. “Elaine,” he said, “you really were very kind to me.”
* Her name has been changed here.
† ”One way I can find out if I like something I've done”—Cheever remarked during a 1969 interview—”is if I can tell it and it's all right. … So one day last summer I said, ‘Look, Ben, I've written a novel. Do you want to hear it?’ And Ben said, ‘Yuh.’ And so I went absolutely all the way through it from ‘Paint me a small railway station’ to ‘wonderful, wonderful, wonderful as it had been.’ “
* Last name has been changed, though perhaps it's worth noting that Cheever almost invariably used this form of address: “Miss Moody.”
† To give the most interesting example, J. R. Ackerley's My Father and Myself, in which the author writes with pioneering frankness of his own homosexuality, as well as the discovery of his manly father's louche past. The book would serve as a model, among others, for Susan Cheever's Home Before Dark.
*”Dear Ray,” Cheever wrote in 1977, “I'd be very happy to tell the Guggenheims how good I think you are and having driven with you to the liquor store with a flat tire … I'm happy to hear you're off the sauce.” Carver later dedicated a story to Cheever—a homage titled “The Train,” which picks up where “The Five-Forty-Eight” leaves off: “The woman was called Miss Dent, and earlier that evening she'd held a gun on a man.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
{1974}
FOR A FEW DAYS Cheever mooned over Allan and sometimes Elaine, but what with Christmas and family and so forth, the whole Iowa episode seemed to fade into the mist like Brigadoon (“I remember no one from Iowa and so I think, alas, alas, no one remembers me”). As an irrepressible raconteur, however, Cheever couldn't help regaling his wife and children