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By Root 3874 0

nude,” Schwartz would meet him several mornings a week to make sure he was properly dressed. Dirty clothes were strewn about the rooms; the butcher-block table in the kitchen was covered with empty bottles and rotting fruit (brought by Mary). Trembling from head to toe, unable to speak, Cheever would walk with Schwartz to a seedy hotel bar on the way to campus, where a rock-faced waitress in a miniskirt would wordlessly bring her only customer a double vodka on the rocks. As Schwartz recalled, “Cheever was like one of those toy birds who peck at a water glass: he'd lower his head, sip, come up, and repeat. Maybe halfway through, he'd finally be able to pick up the glass.” He'd also tentatively attempt speech, and after a few garbled phrases would begin to make some kind of sense, whereupon he'd become tearful, as if his own words were unbearable to hear. His life was such a mess: he had no clean clothes, the proprietor of the Plymouth Rock Laundry was a bandit, and for the last seventeen days he'd subsisted entirely on oranges and hamburgers. On it went. Meanwhile he tried to light a cigarette, the matches falling one after another from twitching fingers; Schwartz, snatching the embers out of Cheever's lap, once counted thirty matches to light a single cigarette. Over and over Schwartz implored the decrepit man to see a doctor, but Cheever seemed more interested in maundering about his woes than in doing much about them. “It was like taking care of a child,” said Schwartz, echoing his various predecessors.

Word traveled fast that Cheever was an all-but-hopeless drunk. The eminent Harvard psychologist Henry A. Murray—creator of the Thematic Apperception Test, as well as a notable Melville enthusiast—had thrown a welcoming party for Cheever, a mistake neither he nor any of his guests was likely to repeat. On arrival, Cheever shoved an armchair into the middle of the living room, where he drooped slack-jawed for the rest of the evening, cigarettes turning to ash in his fingers and crumbling to the carpet. Michael Janeway had found Cheever's condition “heartbreaking.” As a boy he'd received a kindly, encouraging letter from Cheever, who was friends with his mother, Elizabeth. Now a thirty-four-year-old editor at The Atlantic Monthly, Janeway had arranged to meet Cheever at the Ritz Grill with the magazine's editor in chief, Robert Manning, another of Cheever's old acquaintances. Any hope of soliciting a story dissipated over the course of lunch, as their guest emptied multiple mini-carafes of martinis amid a sodden monologue on his ruined marriage and the like. As Janeway recalled, “The message was (his and mine), ‘You don't want to get too close.’ “ Cheever's only putative confidant among peers was the poet John Malcolm Brinnin, a colleague at BU whom he often met for Wednesday lunches at Locke-Ober. “We were intimate but not close,” Brinnin remarked after Cheever's death, perhaps alluding to the evanescent nature of their rapport under the circumstances. “Should I not remember you when next we meet,” Cheever apologetically wrote the poet in 1978, “it will only be an aspect of my clumsiness and will not at all mean that I have forgotten your kindness to me during that trying winter in Boston.”

As for Updike, he too was estranged from a wife named Mary, and living in Back Bay about a mile from Cheever. The similarities ended there. They'd met by accident in September, outside Brooks Brothers, where Cheever had invited Updike to join him while he blithely purchased two pairs of tasseled loafers, though the tassels gave him very slight pause. (He subsequently told Schwartz that he'd “trained” Updike never to inquire about prices when shopping for clothes.) That done, the two adjourned to the Kon-Tiki bar at the Park Plaza, where Cheever instructed the waiter with great urgency to bring him doubles (“as if a drink that was merely single might in its weakness poison him”). Saying goodbye on Commonwealth, Updike paused to watch his “wobbly” colleague walking away under the elms: “I felt badly,” he remembered, “because it was as