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By Root 4210 0

Mary and me. In the snowy uplands we were met by throngs in peasant costume who danced and sang and set fire to a small lamb. Zhenya was in top form which is rather like watching a man pitch a no-hitter while playing the Rasamouvsky quartette at a moon-landing. Gore who does not eclipse gracefully, was burning. Anyhow we danced with the peasants and ate the lamb and when we left perhaps a hundred people gathered around Zhenya reciting his poetry and asking him to autograph their shirttails. Gore, who had stopped speaking, was writing postcards to Paul Newman. Our chauffeur, it seemed, was drunk and racing down the mountain we nearly went off a cliff. When some helpful peasants had put the car back on the road Gore said: “Had we gone off the cliff I would have gotten all the headlines.” Zhenya brushed a feather off his knee and said, “only in the west, only in the west.”*

Another memory that became a permanent part of Cheever's repertoire was his trip to the mountains of Macedonia to visit the famed Venga, a fat middle-aged woman who'd been blinded by lightning and given prophetic powers. Entering her cave, Cheever inquired why women didn't understand him and vice versa. “Women are jealous,” the oracle replied in so many words; “you understand them, all right!” Then she gave him a list of prominent Americans (including Jackie Onassis) who needed to stop drinking.

Changing planes in Frankfurt on his way home, Cheever had arranged a brief rendezvous at the airport with Dennis Coates, who waited fruitlessly around the gate before spotting Cheever by chance on a moving walkway. He was alone. “Where's Mary?” asked Coates, and after a moment Cheever pointed to another lone figure some distance ahead of them. “We don't sit together,” he explained to his bemused friend.

SOMETIMES CHEEVER blamed his wife for driving him into “bizarre practices,” and sometimes he thought Max was a surrogate for his dead brother (“I want a friend. I wanna friend”). Whatever the case, he tried very hard to keep things in perspective. As Cheever would have it, he and Max were just good pals who occasionally saw fit to indulge in a bit of “carnal tenderness.” And now that the ice had been broken in that respect, Cheever was all the more willing to “talk about his dick,” as Max discovered with no little foreboding. “If I sounded sinister yesterday morning [on the telephone], I was,” Cheever wrote not long before Max was due to return to Ossining en route to Yaddo. “When I am hard-packed I get quite sinister but after I've ruined the wallpaper I think myself jolly and easy-going.” In public, too, Cheever hinted rather broadly that he was not the conventional family man he seemed, while also stressing that he was worldly enough not to lose sleep about it. As he remarked to John Hersey before hundreds of undergraduates at Yale, “That one is in conflict with oneself—that one's erotic nature and one's social nature will everlastingly be at war with one another—is something I am happy to live with on terms as hearty and fleeting as laughter.” In fact, his laughter was fleeting indeed, and quite often he was “bewildered and apprehensive,” for he couldn't help identifying—now more than ever—with the objects of his lifelong loathing. “Brooding, as I must, about homosexuality,” he wrote Max, “I stepped out of the post-office yesterday morning and saw Them. … The old one was very skinny with a few strands of hair, dyed a marvelous yellow. The youth had all his hair and everything else, I guess, and he might have seemed quite beautiful if he didn't have a mouth like an asshole. The old one would be seen to walk as if his asshole were a mouth. In the back seat was an obligatory Mastaff [sic], a massive, ornamental, brainless dog named after some international cocksucker. ‘He'll keep me company when I am abandoned by Michael,’ the old fairy will tell his guests.”

Max agreed that such a scenario was distasteful, and ever since that episode at the Croton Dam he'd continued to rationalize the matter as best he could: maybe that sort of thing would be a very rare