Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [29]
His genius validated by The New Republic, “Jon” endeavored to become the sort of idle, brooding bohemian his mother was apt to abhor. Growing his hair to his shoulders and affecting a large amethyst ring, he whiled away the hours in his room playing the accordion amid a pall of incense. (One assumes his mother was duly shocked; certainly Cheever was shocked, many years later, whenever the soigné New Yorker author considered his younger self: “I was some kid in those days,” he told the Times with “horrified amazement,” while privately he wondered how a boy with an amethyst ring had grown into “a decent, likable and healthy man as I think myself.” At other times, suffice to say, he saw the connection more clearly.) Nor was the performance entirely for his mother's benefit, as he'd begun to receive invitations to dine among older, rather distinguished company. Cheever—though he “knew the forks”—was still a small-town boy behind the Wildean façade, so nervous in any sort of sophisticated gathering that he could scarcely lift a spoon to his mouth. It was around this time that he discovered the usefulness of alcohol: “The next engagement that threatened to arouse my shyness I bought a bottle of gin and drank four fingers neat. The company was brilliant, chatty and urbane and so was I.”
He and Fred soon became regulars at raffish saloons like Cohen's and Sharkey's on Howard Street—”the arse-end of the city,” as Cheever put it. Strippers from the Old Howard burlesque theater hung out in such places, and soon Joey was adopted as a mascot of sorts. A venerable stripper named Boots Rush took a particular shine to the lad, letting him lift her off a stool whenever she got tipsy enough to regale the crowd with “Leave It to the Irish.” Mischievously, perhaps, Cheever invited his old neighbor Rollin Bailey to accompany him to a party in the arse-end part of town—an occasion Bailey recalled as being “like a dream,” so alien was it to his genteel Wollaston upbringing. Volatile men and women (“all foreign”) rattled around a dingy walkup apartment, drinking and laughing, and John seemed very much one of them. “Yesterday, sitting in the sun,” Cheever wrote in 1971, “I recalled my life among the burlesk stars. A frightful bore, highly colored with alcohol.”
He preferred being alone with his brother—it was “the most significant relationship in [his] life,” he later told a psychiatrist. “It was like a love affair.” Whether it was an actual love, affair is hard to say, though it appears not to have been entirely platonic. All his life Cheever spoke of an “ungainly closeness” to his brother, describing their attachment in his journal as “a sterile and perverse love,” while certain details he let drop in conversation would seem almost to clinch the matter. Many years later he told Allan Gurganus (on whom he had an open crush) that he and his brother had shared a bed when he was an adolescent and Fred a young man: “He implied it had been the erotic romance of his life,” said Gurganus. Above all, Fred seems to have served as a kind of ideal parent figure—a man he could easily confide in, as he'd never been able to confide in his father, and moreover a source of tenderness that had been all but entirely absent in his relations with either parent. When the brothers showered together, for example, John freely admitted he was worried about his sexual development, and Fred was able to reassure him. That the solace Fred offered was sometimes (in whatever form) physical is not in doubt: “I still