Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [301]
His last month in Boston was a free fall. Raphael Rudnik—who'd heard of Cheever's distress and had an intuition that he was about to kill himself—tried to cheer up his old friend with a visit, but found him “unreachable.” The only thing Cheever wanted to think or talk about was drinking. When Rudnik tried to get him to eat, Cheever said, “If I eat, can we go out to drink?” Rudnik pointed out that he was already on the verge of passing out. “Yes,” said Cheever, “but you're not.” Perhaps the last social engagement (formal) that Cheever kept was a dinner with Sally Swope at her father's house on Louisburg Square. He arrived an hour late in pouring rain, slipped on the steps and cracked his head on a newel post; a maid bandaged the gaping wound, and Cheever tardily joined the others at table. From that point on, he tended to decline invitations and discourage visitors. “I'd love to see you here but I can't think of anything more selfish,” he wrote Coates. “There's nothing much to see or do and I am very gloomy. Your remarks about a tragedy may in the end be right.” Meanwhile, if indeed he was dying, then he supposed he might as well indulge the rest of his appetites, too. Buying a “cock magazine” struck him as “a blow for common sense” (though he couldn't quite decide how to dispose of the thing), and he also brought at least one male prostitute back to his apartment, “hurry[ing] him out the door” once their business was concluded.
Around this time, he sat next to that bum in the park and asked for a “pull” from the man's bottle,* and soon he began hoping he'd be hit by a car while walking in traffic. When Rick Siggelkow stopped for a visit, Cheever insisted on giving the (much taller) student a pair of dark, lightweight Brooks Brothers suits: “Now you have two suits to use for a summer funeral,” he remarked. (Siggelkow mused that this was a “very Cheever” thing to say: “Everything was always evocative of something else. In other words, he didn't just give me two suits, he gave me ‘two suits to use for a summer funeral,’ and the way he said it, you could see yourself standing at that funeral wearing those suits.”) While the two were drinking, Cheever began to cough and gasp for breath, finally asking the young man to call for an ambulance—then, quite adamantly, changing his mind. “You really have to go,“ he said, closing his eyes and sitting rigidly back in his chair, “or something's going to happen we're both going to regret.” Siggelkow (“terrified”) protested, but Cheever demanded he leave immediately, and when the student glanced up from the bottom of the stairs, Cheever was looking down at him with a forced, cordial, miserable smile (this a matter of “New England breeding,” Siggelkow figured).
At his brother's insistence, Cheever resigned his teaching position in late March, though not before calling the department head a “delinquent asshole.” His bitterness was general, and when a man came by his apartment to collect the telephone, Cheever ripped it out of the wall and threw it at him. Toward his students, however, he was nothing but apologetic: speaking with averted eyes, he allowed that he'd been treated shabbily by the university, but his problems ran deeper and he simply couldn't go on; for the remaining six weeks of the semester, he told them, Updike would take his classes and the students would be far better off.
Free at last, Cheever spent his final days on Bay State Road in the usual manner. The Sunday before his departure, he gave Ivan Gold a call: “I'm faring rather poorly,” he announced, asking whether he might borrow a bottle of gin. Gold happened to have an almost untouched fifth of Gordon's