Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [291]
In 1974, he was happy to be writing anything at all, given that he was suffering from fainting spells and washing down his digitalis and Seconal with larger and larger doses of liquor (“a half-pint a day,” he informed Dr. Mutter). Marooned in Ossining, fed up with the vagaries of Donald Lang and the dullness of the Friday Club, Cheever looked forward to regular visits from a handsome young scholar named Dennis Coates, who was writing about Cheever's novels for his dissertation at Duke. The two had met the previous summer, while Cheever was still convalescing from heart failure. Captain Coates was on his way to West Point, where he'd taken a job as an English instructor while continuing to work on his dissertation; since Ossining was only a short drive down the river, he visited his subject every month or so to interview him, then kept visiting because he'd come to regard Cheever as a friend and vice versa.
One day in April, Cheever came downstairs and announced that he'd just finished a story; would Denny like to hear it? The young man was more than honored: it felt “like a gift” being the first person to hear a story by John Cheever. The two sat at the dining-room table, where Cheever covered Coates's hand with his own and began to read “The Leaves, the Lion-Fish and the Bear.” Coates thought the story was wonderful (distracted, perhaps, by the beauty of its prose), and made no connection between his covered hand and the masculine brand of homosexuality evoked in one of the vignettes. Afterward, though it was rather chilly outside, Cheever proposed they take a walk in the woods, and at one point asked the young man to hold him. Coates was happy to give his frail companion a warming embrace, but became flustered when Cheever tried to kiss him: he was fond of John, and certainly wanted to be friends, but not like that! Cheever affected to be almost as innocent as Coates: “To me it's all love,” he said, and the two lay together (chastely) to get out of the wind and go on chatting about things.
When Coates returned in early June, it was warm enough to go swimming, so Cheever suggested they make a round of his neighbors’ pools. He swam naked and urged his friend to do likewise, but Coates went on wearing a pair of baggy, borrowed trunks. As they sat on the edge of a pool, Coates sadly remarked that Cheever seemed “the most unloved man [he'd] ever known”: “I feel like I'm watching a tragedy, and this is the second act.” The naked man indignantly denied it: “I am one of the most loved men on earth!” he protested, elaborating at length about how he'd vied with Sinatra for the heart of Hope Lange, and so forth. “Your crack about my being unloved still rankles,” he wrote Coates. “I ask everybody—everybody—if they love me and they all say yes. The girl from Iowa writes daily to say I'm beautiful. … In any case if I am unloved I shouldn't be forsaken and please come over. The swimming's great.”
In fact, Cheever felt very forsaken and didn't hesitate to say so, at least to his family: he was a dying man, for all they cared! When Cheever wasn't recuperating in bed, he staggered about the house with a drink in his hand, wondering what he'd done to deserve such indifference. One day he suffered a series of painful spasms in his chest, and rather than call his available daughter (“I am cranky with Susie”), he tried instead to reach Coates at West Point, and subsequently implied to his psychiatrist, Jewett, that he drank (and was therefore dying) because of his sad situation at home. Jewett replied that Cheever invented his problems to justify his drinking, and insisted the patient check himself into a dry-out clinic—whereupon Cheever ended their relationship: “The memory of strait jackets and cruelty is still vivid.”
Federico resumed his role as caretaker when he returned that summer from Andover, finding his father both craftier and nastier. Cheever stashed bottles all over the property and sometimes slipped away to get drunk in peace. Calling around to their neighbors one day, Federico located his father