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underlining the two men's common instincts on the subject.) Schultz was trying to live off his three-thousand-dollar grant, and Cheever identified with the struggling young poet: he, too, “hadn't a pot to piss in” when he'd moved to Hudson Street more than forty years ago, and yet he'd persevered and was determined to help Schultz do the same. The latter joined perennials such as Rudnik and the Lehmann-Haupts for holiday gatherings on Cedar Lane, and for a while he also came for regular Sunday brunches (Mary had a motherly impulse to feed him), after which he and Cheever would toss a football or take long bicycle rides. Zooming down a hill one day in November, Cheever hit a patch of gravel and “went cock-a-hoop over the handlebars,” badly gashing his forehead. Almost twenty-five years later, Schultz resumed a then-dormant poetry career by writing “The Eight-Mile Bike Ride,” an elegy for Cheever that recounted the “looping red trail eight miles long” that dribbled from Cheever's wound as he walked his bicycle home. Refusing to wash his face, much less see a doctor, Cheever was smeared with gore when his wife and daughter returned from a walk and rushed to comfort the stricken Schultz.

The high point of the friendship came the following year (1977), when Viking accepted Schultz's first book of poems, Like Wings, on Cheever's recommendation. When given the news, Cheever actually jumped up and clicked his heels, and when Falconer and Like Wings were both nominated for National Book Awards, he seemed happier for Schultz than himself. After that, however, the two began to lose touch—or, as Schultz explained, “John became famous again.” In later years, on the rare occasions when they met, Schultz couldn't resist mocking Cheever's self-importance—asking, for example, the same question twice (“Saul wrote to you? … Saul wrote to you?”), whenever Cheever said something pompous. “I flare up at him, call him a horses ass,” Cheever noted in 1980—but then reminded himself, wistfully, that Schultz had been “a great friend when his friendship was needed.”

A friendship perhaps better suited to Cheever's evolving persona was with the prominent art dealer Eugene Thaw and his wife, Clare, the latter of whom he'd met at an AA meeting a few months after Smithers. Clare had noticed Cheever previously (“a gaunt figure in a seersucker coat [with an] unhappy face”), and one night he sat beside her and sighed, “Oh this is so goddamned boring. Why don't we have a cup of coffee?” Thus began a post-meeting ritual of repairing to the Thaws’ splendid Stanford White house in Scarborough, where Cheever would wittily complain about his awful marriage, or eavesdrop on Eugene's long-distance negotiations with, say, Norton Simon in Los Angeles. “Good niiight,” he'd drawl at the end of the evening, then turn to Eugene: “What is it now? One-point-six or one-point-two?” He also delighted in ridiculing the parvenuish Sleepy Hollow Country Club, whose golf course abutted the Thaws’ lawn. One night the three had dinner there, Cheever casting a radiant gaze on the panoply of madras and green; for weeks he mordantly reminisced about his “dinner at Sleepy.”

Not that he was categorically averse to the flashy, nonaristocratic rich. For example, his old friendship with Mrs. Zagreb—whom he'd reverted to calling Sara in his journal—had become “quite humorous and innocent,” now that he was no longer an importunate drunk appearing at random intervals to use her pool and drink her liquor. That summer he was asked by Newsweek to make a few remarks on the occasion of the Bicentennial, and, while pondering the American experiment, he was moved to dash off a note to Sara to the effect that the “love of one's neighbor” was a virtue that seemed to flourish in our democracy: “I think you ought to know this since you are my neighbor.” Cheever's love, in these twilight years, became a cozier, quieter affair. Sunday mornings, after church, he'd buy fresh croissants or brioches at Say Cheese in Ossining Village, then have breakfast with Sara while watching the horse races on television.