Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [319]
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DISAPPOINTED IN ROMANIA, Cheever agreed to give readings that autumn at Bennington and Cornell with quite the same goal in mind: “I think in terms of the appearance of some lover who will undo me, engorge me and grant me a contentment I have nearly forgotten.” It occurred to him that “close to three years” had passed since he'd actually gone to bed with a willing partner (the occasional piece of quick, hired sex didn't count), and now it seemed that his best hope lay in finding a tractable protégé in some university English department. This involved a great deal of soul-searching, however: “I could not possibly exploit or debauch a young secretary,” he chided himself; “one cannot take this much of another man's life.” But it was, quite definitely now, a man he wanted, though he worried that, once he'd committed himself to that path, it would lead to his destruction. In the past this intuition had always dissuaded him from cultivating long-term homosexual affairs. As he'd reflected some twenty years before:
What is involved is a relaxed acceptance of the bisexual nature of man and the realization of the fact that excesses of perverse love, unlike other forms of love, compounds perversion and spreads it all through the personality, for once you are absorbed in unnatural matters your conduct becomes unnatural, the lures you use to attract your prey are disfiguring, your attitude toward the most rudimentary and vital forms of organized society … become implacably scornful. It is a fine line between the admission of natural bisexuality and the excesses of perversion.
And then, too, what would his family think? What, above all, of his beloved Federico, who Cheever often worried would be approached by the sort of predatory homosexual that Cheever (by his own lights) now considered becoming—what would Federico, having encountered such a person, think of his own father? Quite simply, Cheever could not succumb to his desires without abandoning certain of his fondest convictions; and so, in the end, he decided to abandon them. “I lie in the sun, nearly overwhelmed by the thought of the phantom lover who will destroy my life,” he wrote that October. “For an hour it seems that I must part from all of this; the trees, the clearness of the autumn light, even the old dog.” And yet he felt he had no choice (“this is a destiny”) but to pursue the “darkness in [his] heart” and find his “destroyer.”
Such a person was not to be found at Bennington, though Cheever watched with furtive interest as a tall, dark youth went around the train station approaching the sort of seedy old men who linger on benches once the arriving passengers have dispersed. Cheever had been told to expect a woman, Melissa Fish, but at the last moment Peter Pochna (to whom Cheever had been described as a man “no longer young”) had gone instead; when Pochna approached the dreary codger nearest Cheever, the two finally met. Before his reading, Cheever had dinner with Bernard and Ann Malamud, the poet Stephen Sandy, and other students and literati, whom he regaled again and again with the train-station story (the would-be Cheevers becoming more numerous and decrepit with each telling). Later, he put in a brief appearance at a party in his honor, saw nothing he liked, and retired to his room at the Fruitrich guesthouse, where he drew himself a bath and turned on the TV: “I got into the tub and pretended that the room was full of people. It was full of voices. But I am tired of such loneliness.”
That left Cornell, where Cheever had been the first in a distinguished roster of writers—Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, Brodkey, and others—invited to perform at the Chekhov Festival. “For the master I'll come for bus fare and a roof over my head,” Cheever had replied, though his host, James McConkey, insisted he accept an airline