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By Root 4080 0

near campus. (Dave Smith had offered to reserve him a room at one of the better hotels in town, three or four miles away, but Cheever wanted to be within walking distance and seemed to enjoy complaining, wittily, about the lack of basic amenities such as a telephone or a bath plug.) Once they were situated—Cheever with a six-pack of sodas, Zimmer with Wild Turkey—they began talking about books and writing and, of course, Zimmer's future. The first thing he had to do, said Cheever, was get out of Utah; one did not make a literary career in Utah. Cheever would be glad to arrange a place for Zimmer at Yaddo that summer—he was a board member; he would take care of everything—and so on, for some four hours. “And I was, like, Wow,” said Zimmer.

Because at this point I was pretty eager to get out of Salt Lake myself. I'd been in school too long, and ever since I'd walked away from the church, my wife, and my engineering degree, my father wouldn't have anything to do with me. Essentially I hadn't had a father in three years at that point, so Cheever really struck a chord. I looked at him and thought, “Boy, here's a guy who's in control and who's an authority in the life I've chosen to lead, as well as a father figure who actually embraces what I'm doing.”

For the rest of Cheever's visit, Zimmer was his companion of choice. “No, thank you, I'll just have Max take me,” he'd say whenever Smith offered a ride to this or that function. On the last day, Zimmer arrived at the Lake City Motel to give Cheever a lift to the airport, but Cheever was tired and wanted to lie down for a while. He asked Zimmer to lie beside him. Zimmer was a little “alarmed,” but did as he was asked; then, while they spoke, Cheever took the young man's hand and guided it to his crotch. Zimmer felt a “slight hardness under the corduroy pants” and tactfully withdrew his hand—forever remembering the moment (as he would write in his journal five years later) “with dizzying revulsion.” (“I have a seizure of lewdness and arrogance that seems to me sinful,” Cheever wrote at the time, “that is deserving of punishment. I am more frightened than remorseful.”) Until then, the sum of Zimmer's gay experience had been an experimental romp in junior high school, as well as a few minutes of mutual masturbation with a fellow Mormon—but those partners had been his own age. He wasn't altogether sure what to make of the present episode, though he prayed it was an aberration, since he'd already set his heart on leaving Utah and going to Yaddo and so forth. In any event, when Cheever asked for a hug as they were leaving, Zimmer obliged him; the embrace lingered until a maid paused in the open doorway. “I experienced a profound stirring of love,” Cheever remembered, while Zimmer felt a further surge of “confusion and revulsion.”

Cheever proceeded to Stanford to visit Federico and give another reading. In a rather fraught coincidence, Gurganus was also at Stanford as a Stegner Fellow, and when Federico showed his father to his room at Dinah's Garden Hotel on El Camino Real in Palo Alto, there was a conspicuous bowl of fruit waiting with a note attached: “Nothing could be finer / than the thought of you at Dinah's / exiled to El Camino / at the mirth of your bambino.” Cheever wasn't much amused, and when the three met for dinner, he seemed determined to put the waggish young man in his place. “Everybody knows that,” he said haughtily, when Gurganus quoted an aperçu from Randall Jarrell's satirical novel, Pictures from an Institution (to wit, how the buildings of a fictional college based on Sarah Lawrence—Gurganus's alma mater—seemed half designed by Bottom the Weaver and half by Mies van der Rohe). Gurganus perhaps had no idea of Cheever's loathing for Jarrell, but the rest of the evening was like that, too: “I was the whipping boy,” he recalled. “He was showing a member of his family that I didn't matter much.” Only once, really, was their old rapport in evidence, when Gurganus eagerly raised his hand after Cheever's reading. “Tell me, Mr. Cheever,” he said. “Do you write with