Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [317]
In that respect he was disappointed, though he could hardly fault the hospitality of the Romanian government. Provided with a chauffeured Mercedes and “an amiable guide who liked to play backgammon and swim,” Cheever was driven some two thousand miles, from Bucharest to Câmpulung to Suceava along the Russian border—a trek affording him plenty of material for a Travel & Leisure paean to the tree-shaded, two-lane highways of that folksy old country: “In Romania one drives mostly on such roads, and it is not only the past recaptured, it is the return to some serene human scale where one can admire the geraniums in farmhouse windows and wave to strangers.” But Cheever didn't really care about the geraniums, and even the picnics in the mountains, where one ate wild boar and listened to Gypsy music, were spoiled somewhat by vulgar tourists (“drunken Jews from New York”), to say nothing of his own indelible loneliness. “I see loving couples and would love to be among them,” he wrote. “I think, on waking, that I am deserving. And I worry for hours about the temptation of an erotic consummation with a man.” Worry though he might, the object was nowhere in sight, and he returned to Kennedy Airport in a foul humor: “[T]he Customs man threatened to confiscate some Moldavian Easter Eggs I had bought in a nunnery and I told him to shove them up his ass,” he wrote a friend. “Then I shouted at a perfect stranger: ‘If you had a dumb wife who knew you were coming in from Bucharest where do you suppose she'd be?’ Then I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was my beloved Federico.”
But apart from Federico, who left for Stanford that September, there were very few people whose company he much enjoyed anymore—certainly not that of his oldest, “fourth-rate” friends (“What am I doing among them”). There was Newhouse, of course, who kept a well-appointed office with a lovely old desk at which (mercifully, as Cheever would have it) he hadn't written a word of fiction in more than ten years; after one of their tedious lunches, the man settled himself in Cheever's wing chair and, solemnly puffing a pipe, urged his friend to invest in common stocks. “You are,” said Cheever, “a bore.” And what would such bores think, he often wondered, when Falconer (“a romance between a drug addict and a hustler in prison”) was actually published? Would it not confirm their worst suspicions? Watching Art Spear as he brooded over the backgammon board, Cheever realized that his boon companion “would be capable of having [him] burned at the stake.” He also began to suspect that certain members of his old circle had already discovered his secret. Mary Dirks, in particular, was apt to boast (or so it seemed to Cheever) of her ability to detect homosexuality in even the most unlikely people: “She is the provincial sorceress and why, one might ask, with her supernatural powers of divination, has she failed as an actress, a teacher, a lover, a cook and a housekeeper.” Mocking the poor woman as “the provincial sorceress” (or “muse of the provinces”) seemed to comfort Cheever, and he developed the theme at length in his journal. Her dinner parties, he wrote, were like “Stations of the Cross,” involving exhaustive innuendo about homosexuality and ending for the guests around three in the morning, when they retreated en masse to their toilets, “racked with diarrhea” from a rancid lobster mousse. “Some day I will get her down,” Cheever vowed.*
“You are lonely, aren't you?” said Philip Schultz, who'd moved to New York the previous March and become one of Cheever's steadiest and most tolerable companions. (Cheever promptly related Schultz's remark to Dennis Coates—then stationed in Germany—by way of