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was next to Cheever, the most dauntingly famous person in the room. Since the table was discussing quaint towns in the area, Meyer couldn't resist putting in, “Last year I went to Cohoes to buy shoes with Hortense.” Cheever was transported: “Oh, what a wonderful sentence! May I use it?” Thus endeared, Meyer was invited to join him for drinks at the Gideon Putnam Hotel, where a van-and-trucking convention was in progress. After an hour or two of giving her his sober, undivided attention, Cheever guided her back to the convention and slipped two metal signs (“for your studio”) under his jacket: “KENTUCKY“ and “POSITIVELY NO SMOKING IN VAN OR IN RESIDENCE.“ During the same visit, he befriended the poet Philip Schultz, in part because the young man had proved to have a “good wing” while tossing a football with Cheever. One night the two were having a manly chat about women while Gurganus, seated nearby, rolled his eyes and repeated the odd word with broad sarcasm. If Cheever noticed, he gave no sign.

He was reunited with Schultz later that year in Boston, where Cheever had arranged to give a reading at the offices of the Harvard Advocate in order to “strike some sort of peace” with the city. “I must repair my farewell scenes there,” he wrote Laurens Schwartz; “and everything is going so splendidly here that I'm sure I'll be able to weather what I think to be a sinister, provincial and decadent part of the world.” To prove his point, he promptly paid a visit to Kenmore Square, where a bitter wind continued to blow amid the funeral parlors and embalming academy. “That place is asshole,” Cheever reiterated, but the rest of the trip was a lark. Schultz, then living in Cambridge, attended the Advocate reading and laughed in all the right places; then the two got in a taxi and struck up a conversation with the cabbie, who waived his fare once he learned that Cheever was in his car. As the latter reported: “ ‘Hot shit,’ [the cabbie] said, ‘Apples, Bullet Park, the Wapshots.’ I gave him a copy of the Brigadier. Everybody was laughing.” It got better the next day, when Schultz announced (“jumping up and down”) that he'd just won a grant for three thousand dollars. “This is just the beginning of many good things for you,” Cheever said with paternal pride, treating the poet to baked oysters and tournedos at Locke-Ober.

Perhaps the most definitive act of reconciliation came after his lunch with Atlantic editor Robert Manning, who again solicited a story. Cheever wrote it in his head while leaving the restaurant, then typed it up in his hotel room: “I was hot,“ he said later. “When you're hot you can write anything—timetables, grocery lists, stories, anything.” “The President of the Argentine” is more than a timetable or grocery list, though somewhat less than a fully realized story; as a witty confession of the author's fall from grace, however, it serves as an interesting artifact. The piece opens with a quick parody of (and commentary on) old New Yorker fiction: “How like sandpipers were the children on the beach, she thought, as she stood by the rusty screen door of their rented house on Nantucket. Zap. Blam. Pow. Here endeth my stab at yesterday's fiction. No one's been reading it for forty years.” Instead, the reader is told of a desolate day when the narrator was almost arrested in Boston, while trying to put a hat on the president of the Argentine. By way of familial context, he also describes the alcoholic exploits of his eccentric old Yankee father—who once, for instance, drank all the sherry and pissed the decanter full. “[T]he piece is shapeless and self-indulgent,” one Atlantic editor wrote in a circulating memo, “as well as periodically tasteless;” “a lazy exercise,” wrote another, who thought it “boil[ed] down to whether we want Cheever in the magazine that badly. I, for one, don't need him.” Richard Todd, however, found the piece “funny and affecting,” and Michael Janeway agreed: “Also,” he pointed out, “it's in some ways meant for us as ‘a Boston story,’ from the bad Boston season of his life.” For that reason, primarily,