Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [311]
The improbable success of “The Folding-Chair Set,” whatever its merits, was a great boost to Cheever's morale: he felt as though he'd shaken off a curse, and was eager to make the most of his changing luck. In the old days, when his creative powers and work ethic had been at their best, he'd almost always made a point of getting on with his writing rather than dwelling on some passing triumph. “I must get back to the Cardinal if I have to work in declarative sentences,” he urged himself as soon as “The Folding-Chair Set” was behind him. The “Cardinal” was the late-middle section of Falconer, in which Jody miraculously escapes from prison via the Cardinal's helicopter—one of the first sequences Cheever wrote, and perhaps his favorite. When it was finished, he excitedly gathered his family around the fire and read it aloud (“They were all very pleased with it”). After that, rather to his amazement, the book began to fall into place, even the stray bits he cannibalized from old stories and journals—anything to keep his momentum going. Just to be working again made him so ecstatic that he deliberately rested on Fridays, lest he get so “high” with creative jubilance that he end up “brain[ing] Tom Glazer with a dinner-plate” at their lunches with the Friday Club.
“UP THE RIVER to Yaddo for the first time in many years without the company of alcohol,” Cheever wrote at the outset of a long September stay. As luck would have it, Gurganus was working as special assistant to the president (or “the John Cheever job,” as some called it), and when Cheever arrived in his room at the Trask mansion, he found flowers and presents from his protégé; he couldn't help thinking, however, that if Gurganus really loved him he would have been waiting impatiently at the bus station in Albany. Despite such high expectations, Cheever seemed undismayed when Gurganus again refused (“kindly and politely”) to sleep with him: “I enjoy his company and would enjoy his skin,” Cheever mused, “but I miss neither.”
With Gurganus, he paid his first visit in a long while to the ninety-year-old Elizabeth Ames, who appeared to be waiting for a train—what with her fur stole and tightly clasped handbag—in the parlor of her cottage, Pine Garde. Cheever greeted her with the usual obliging roar (“HELLO THERE, ELIZABETH!”), and she peered up at him with evident pleasure. “John! What a coincidence! Fancy meeting you here!” Evidently thinking it was some time in the distant past, she treated Cheever like the charming young man whom she'd first adopted as a surrogate son, while Gurganus was “the boy in white pants” whose name she could never quite place. As Cheever put it, “she decided that the people she loved and admired—many of them long dead—were alive and working in the mansion, the fools and the bores … were dead.” For a while she politely inquired about Carson McCullers and the like (“Oh, I don't think Carson's doing so well, Elizabeth …”), then, growing tired, she pointedly told her nurse to “put that call through” to her brother, who'd been dead since the Great War. “Well, John, this has been a coincidence,” she said, dismissing him. “If you're ever in Minneapolis again, do stop by.”
Leaving Pine Garde, Cheever seemed all the more eager to attach himself to a younger generation. An abstract artist in her late twenties, Melissa Meyer, found that the only free seat at dinner