Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [305]
When Cheever was released on May 7, his prognosis was “guarded” (“Consensus is that p[atien]t is so wrapped up in self that there is no room for anything else”). Ruth Maxwell had laughed out loud when Cheever suddenly announced that he'd never drink again, but Dr. Robert de Veer was convinced Cheever had actually accepted that he was an alcoholic and therefore had no excuse—be it a bad marriage or a banal TV show—for drinking, ever. One of Cheever's students in Boston had been particularly skeptical that such a drunken man could ever get sober, and one day he received a postcard from his old teacher with a terse message:
“See?”
* According to Maxwell, the anniversary party was “staff only not even spouses, much less contributors.”
* See prologue.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
{1975}
TO GO FROM continuous drunkenness to total sobriety is a violent wrench,” Cheever wrote, the day after he'd been “sprung” from Smithers. “Laughter seems to be my principal salvation.” In certain ways, he had plenty to laugh about. There was the sheer absurdity of being sober and nothing but, as well as the fact that he suddenly looked and felt twenty years younger. Lila Refregier, his old girlfriend from forty years ago, had seen the 1969 Sheed article in Life and been saddened by how bloated and boozy Cheever seemed; in 1977, however, she caught his first appearance on The Dick Cavett Show and found him “as young and handsome and well groomed as ever.” Around that time, John Hersey described the sixty-four-year-old Cheever as looking “like a man of 34 who has been to a hilarious but awfully late party the night before.” Until Smithers, he could hardly walk uphill to his mailbox without huffing for air; now he had energy to burn, and before long he breezed into a department store, grabbed a five-speed bicycle off the rack, and rolled it to the checkout counter. The clerk began to protest that he'd grabbed the pre-assembled demonstrator, but Cheever slapped his money down (“This is the one I want!”) and walked out. For the next few years, he took long bicycle rides almost every afternoon: either the five-mile “large circle” or two-and-a-half-mile “small circle” around the extended neighborhood; when he needed a breather, he'd pull up to a random driveway and help himself to the Times, popping it back in the tube after a thorough perusal and pedaling away.
He felt a powerful urge to mend fences, though this would prove something of a mixed blessing. Deeply ashamed of the Boston interlude, he promptly wrote Starbuck “a lovely kind note” (as the latter recalled) regretting that he'd been such a disappointment as a colleague, and also, of course, he thanked Updike, whose “immense kindness” in taking over his classes had undone some of the chaos of his “sinister and obscure departure.” The process of making amends was facilitated, in turn, by the eagerness of “people from the remote past” to resume their friendships with Cheever now that he was sober. Meeting friends again without the benefit of alcohol, however, was practically tantamount to meeting them for the first time—a bit of an ordeal for such a shy and hypersensitive person. Lunching with Newhouse a month after Smithers, Cheever was reminded that his friend was a “very decent man,” yet he found himself becoming “bored to the point of questioning [his] reason.” Tom Glazer, too, if such things were possible, seemed even duller than Cheever remembered—ditto the entire Friday Club, whose members would later speak with great jollity