Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [330]
They drove there in Cheever's brown VW Rabbit, and after a brief walk alongside the roaring landmark (“in spate”), they returned to the quiet of the car. “This is the second-largest cut-stone mortised structure in the world,” Cheever was saying, “and one of the last things to be seen by Neil Armstrong …” Max, who'd been admiring the structure in question, glanced at his companion and noticed his penis was out of his pants. With a slight tremor of laughter, Cheever left off chatting about the dam and suggested that Max “play with it.” This, the young man realized, was the proverbial turning point:
Here I was. With a man in his Rabbit, in a totally alien place to me. A man I'd pretty much staked everything on at this point. My sisters were down at his house with his wife, one of them was suicidal, and I thought, you know, “What if I say no? We're going to drive back to his place. He's going to raise hell, throw us out of the house, throw my sisters out of the house, and it's going to devastate my sisters, especially the one that I'd been told was suicidal.”
Given what had happened at the Lake City Motel, perhaps this shouldn't have come as a complete surprise, and, truth be known, Cheever was hardly one to “raise hell” when his advances were rejected; still, Max worried he'd somehow be put in the wrong. Also, on whatever level, he sensed he was being punished. He'd left the church and deeply wounded his father—maybe he deserved this. “So anyway,” he bleakly recalled, “I jerked him off. And it was just a gruesome thing to have to do.”
“I say goodbye to Max precisely as I say goodbye to a very good friend,” Cheever noted, benignly enough. “We may never meet again.” Max, meanwhile, drove his sister across the George Washington Bridge in a heavy rain.
* Bellow had been the last (September 1, 1975), because of Humboldts Gift; before that, Joyce Carol Oates had been featured (December 11, 1972) around the time of Marriages and Infidelities.
*”It doesn't seem fitting for me to write John Leonard but if you see him please tell him how accomplished I thought his review,” Cheever wrote Lehmann-Haupt on May i—bearing in mind perhaps that Leonard was a good man to keep in his corner, and after all the success of Falconer was assured by then.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
{1977}
THE DOWNSIDE of Cheever's Falconer fame was that many people did, in fact, assume he was gay. “Is your father a homosexual drug-addict?” people asked Susan (in effect) for years to come. Cheever was disinclined to evade the issue entirely. He didn't consider himself gay, of course, though he freely admitted to Hope Lange that he'd had a homosexual affair once (sic) because he was “terribly lonely,” but didn't care to discuss it. Also, when Dick Cavett suggestively inquired whether he'd “turned a corner in Falconer,“ what with its homosexuality and violence, Cheever manfully pointed out that such themes were hardly new to his work.* But there were times, to be sure, when all the speculation got him down. For one thing, he kept getting calls from members of the Aesthetic Realism movement, devoted in part to the conversion of homosexuals. A young man (one of Cheever's lovers, as it happened) was visiting Cedar Lane when Cheever received such a call: “Look,” he heard Cheever say, “don't you dare call me here again, or I'm going to take action against you!”
Mostly, though, he was deeply gratified by all the attention. Granted, the sound of his “fruity accent” was a little dismaying when he watched himself on Cavett, but then the mail started pouring in—hundreds of letters from discerning, lonely people all over the country. “I'm having a marvelous time,” he wrote Gottlieb, noting that he'd just earned the “undying love of the President of the True Value Hardware Store in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.” When he appeared on Cavett again the following year, he made a point of saying he answered all his