Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [288]
The reason Mary had to leave so early was that she'd taken a job at the Rockland Country Day School in Nyack, a rather long drive across the bridge. One evening she mentioned that she had to rush off to rehearsal, explaining that they were giving a pantomime to raise money for the school: she was playing Cinderella, while the rest of the cast would appear in drag. Of these rehearsals Cheever noted, “I don't really want her to remain here—she wouldn't speak to me anyhow—but the pantomime sounds bizarre.” The more he thought about it, the more troubling it seemed, and finally he couldn't resist driving all the way to Nyack (unknown to his wife) to attend an actual performance, which proved worse than his most ghastly imaginings. The headmaster (a man Mary considered attractive) came onstage wearing a wig, joined by a female science teacher dressed as a man: “They sang a duet about how you separate the men from the boys on Fire Island,” Cheever observed. “With a crowbar.” By the time Mary appeared for her wedding to Prince Charming (a young woman), Cheever had seen enough; when the stage preacher asked if anyone objected to the union, Cinderella's affronted real-life husband bolted to his feet. “Yes!” he bellowed, stalking up the aisle. “She's already married! To me!” The audience laughed it off, more or less, but Mary was embarrassed all the same.
This was another episode that would someday give Cheever a pang of remorse (“I was a fool”), but at the time it only affirmed his indignant sense of alienation. “I will leave here with no regrets at all,” he wrote a few days later, having accepted a professorship at Boston University for the fall. “I will take nothing, not even my own books, not even my ikon. … I will pack my bag and walk out the door.” In conversation with the poet George Starbuck, head of the writing program at BU, Cheever had candidly mentioned that he'd almost drunk himself to death the previous spring—but all that, he said, was in the past. Meanwhile he told friends that his eventual departure was “a decent way of ending things” with Mary, and though he was privately worried about returning to the part of the earth where he felt most haunted, he liked the idea of being a full professor; besides, Federico would be in nearby Andover.
Still, there were many months to endure until he packed that one small bag, and suddenly it became important again that, almost half a continent away, there were comely young people who cared about him (“Iowa is my life line, my kapok vest and why don't I use it”). Confessing with a great show of sheepishness that he wanted to go to Iowa for a dubious purpose, Cheever asked Caskie Stinnett of Travel & Leisure whether he'd finance the trip in exchange for an article about town and campus. Stinnett was happy to oblige (if a little “uncomfortable” over how “guilt-ridden” the poor man seemed), and thus Cheever returned to Iowa in early February “to celebrate Miss Moody's birthday,” which was actually a month later. Gurganus was then in New Orleans for Mardi Gras (“I rather wish this so”), but Elaine seemed flattered by the visit, albeit a bit on the wary side. As Cheever alleged in his journal—and told various friends and acquaintances, including his physician—she'd asked him to keep his clothes on during sex “so that if [he] dropped dead there would be no embarrassment.” As he wrote