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By Root 3974 0

have a beer later on, though Lang usually didn't show, and Cheever would have to find other ways to fill the time. “I write Lincoln Kirstein what I think is an entertaining letter and he returns a brochure with his initials and his address on the envelope,” Cheever noted that November; “and writing to Laurens [Schwartz], because I have little else to do, I think that my epistolary profligacy is a little absurd.” The highlight of Cheever's week was Sunday night, when the miniseries Poldark was aired on public TV: “Poldark! Poldark!” he'd excitedly announce, running around the house. The only drawback to Poldark was its lack of commercials, a genre Cheever had come to find oddly entertaining, even when they were “contrived, banal and obscene.”

What he wanted most of all was a lover, since he could no longer rely on alcohol to drown his ravenous libido. Along with a renascent boyishness, however, sobriety had also brought with it a harshly objective awareness of what it meant to be pushing the age of universal retirement. “I love my son,” he wrote; “my cock can shoot a pint; these facts are as relevant as my daughter saying that I look like one of those old men who celebrate their last birthdays by swimming the river and whose unappetizing photographs are sometimes—but not always—printed in the paper.” Even at the best of times, the aging Cheever didn't think much of his looks: wincing at publicity photos, he'd remark that he had the “face of a ferret” and was, even worse, round-shouldered and short—reminiscent, he thought, of “the small museum guard in a worn uniform who says softly, ‘It is beautiful, isn't it?’ “ This was too bad, as Cheever found that most of his erotic urges were now definitely homosexual, and he was haunted by memories of the middle-aged Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana, shedding his clothes at Craigie Castle almost half a century ago and standing there, plumply nude, while the eighteen-year-old Cheever fought back laughter and ran for the door. Found among Cheever's papers on Bay State Road was a letter from Gurganus, who'd written wistfully of their Sunday walks along the Iowa River and declared that his love was “without precaution or moderation.” The sober Cheever was apt to cast a coldish eye on this sort of thing (“Allan seems to be skirmishing again”), but when Ganymede appeared in person—as he did that summer of 1975 in Ossining—Cheever once again found himself ardently trying to hold hands while working the steering wheel (“A[llan] seems … to magnify the incongruities between my social and my erotic drives to the point of combustion”).

Underlying such autumnal turbulence was a sense that time was short. Perhaps the most disturbing reminder of this was his spells of “otherness,” which, if anything, had gotten worse since he'd given up alcohol. A pre-Smithers CAT scan had indicated “severe atrophy of the brain,” which in Cheever's case seemed to affect his prodigious memory in curious, almost ineffable ways: “A strain of music, heard from upstairs, does not remind me of a moment in my past; it reminds me of a thousand moments in any place I may have been; Asia or southern Massachusetts.” In the midst of these “seizures,” or whatever they were, Cheever would forget where or even who he was; also, a certain elusive hallucination tended to recur, having something to do with Ginny Kahn and Exley standing on a beach in Cape Cod perhaps, the latter singing a forlorn jingle that Cheever couldn't quite parse. If he ever managed to possess the memory, he felt certain he'd go mad. Meanwhile, even on relatively lucid days, he sometimes felt an almost unbearable estrangement from the world: “I am in a bell jar or worse since I seem to respond to nothing that I see,” he wrote. “I remember being as depressed in Rome. A cigaret butt in a cup, a formation of dust under a table seemed to represent the utter futility of staying alive.”

* One can't help pointing out the eerie similarity between Buff's fate and that of “Shinglehouse” in Bullet Park, who, after being sucked under an express train, leaves naught but