Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [323]
As he left Dinah's to catch a plane to Los Angeles (and Hope Lange), Cheever spotted a wet playing-card facedown on El Camino Real. He turned it over—the two of clubs. “From that moment onward my erotic, familial and financial life would soar,” Cheever wrote eighteen months later. “So much for portents.”
* A vow he kept in his last novel, Oh What a Paradise It Seems (see page 55 re Sears's second wife).
*”I can find nothing in Chekov to quote,” Cheever wrote Gurganus, “I can find almost nothing of Chekov to read and what I've done is to invent a Chekov as I think he would have invented a Lermontov under the same circumstances.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
{1977}
TRUST IN THE LORD,” Cheever noted, once he'd returned from that eventful trip to the West. “Use your intelligence, keep your skin clean.” He tried to reassure himself that his motives were pure where Max was concerned—he simply wished, after all, to “give [Max] some freedom from the darkness of that place”—and he expressed (albeit equivocally) similar sentiments in the letters he began sending the young man at the rate of two or three a week: “Firstly this is a no-shit friendship and I have assumed you into no league. I thought your work first-rate before we met and it is you—whom I scarcely know—and your work that will move the train. That I love you has nothing to do with the case. The young and the old are meant to pool their advantages and with luck this is what we will do.” Cheever promptly endeavored to prove his sincerity. He sent “Utah Died for Your Sins” to McGrath at The New Yorker, even though the story had already been accepted by a little magazine on the other coast, Quarry West—but in any case, and for a number of reasons (one of which was the word “fuck”), the story wasn't right for The New Yorker. Cheever also sent a copy to the president of Yaddo, Curtis Harnack, with a peremptory little note: “The various dead-lines and other formalities don't seem to prevail under the circumstances. Zimmer is thirty-two and I know him to be civil, clean and industrious.”
Meanwhile, back in Utah, the object of all this generosity was at once flattered, puzzled, and not a little anxious. One of the most famous authors in the world was devotedly promoting his work, not to mention writing him constant letters in which he (Cheever) was perfectly willing to “talk about his dick,” among other things: “And I was thinking, ‘God, how'm I gonna answer these letters?’” Max wonderingly remembered.
I'm just a hick from Utah. I could not answer every one he sent me. The hazard was that my letters would be so boring that he'd lose interest in me and that would be the end of the friendship. So it would take me a day to write a letter back to him. Of course I didn't have a model to go by except the letters he'd written me, so I tried to write him back in the same way—the same voice, the same kind of frankness, same kind of cynicism, sophistication and stuff. That was tough.
It was tough for Cheever, too. Determined not to get involved in anything “furtive or compromised,” he repeatedly reminded himself, and Max, that he was as red-blooded as the next fellow … more! He'd been married for thirty-six years, raised three splendid children, and was dating a famous Hollywood actress, who, it so happened, had come to New York just the other day and had lunch with him: “She is terribly pretty and good company but I am not, this afternoon, deeply in love,” he wanly admitted in his journal, while writing Max that the “taste of [Hope's] lipstick on [his] mouth” had helped him endure “a tedious interview with Knopf.” Lange, whether or not she actually excited him, served the imperative purpose of proving that he was “in there swinging” where women were concerned: “I will not abdicate my position in the procreative, heterosexual world,” he rallied himself—but alas, all too often this sort of thing just didn't help much. The facts remained: his marriage was moribund, he rarely saw Hope,