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By Root 3876 0

occurrence, or, better still, Cheever might come to his senses and call it off; he was married, after all, while Max was practically engaged to a fellow graduate student named Marilyn. In any event, the young man loaded his rusty BMW and drove—in triumph, as it seemed to family and friends—forty-five hours straight through to New York, stopping for a night in Ossining. On the way, he tried to think positive thoughts: Cheever had gotten him a place at Yaddo; his intentions were good, at least; he seemed genuinely interested in Max's career. (“I love you because so much green[n]ess lies ahead of you and that I should in any way shadow or darken this would be wicked,” Cheever had written only a few weeks before.) Thus Max consoled himself, pulling into the driveway at Cedar Lane, but alas: “I knew before I left for Saratoga,” he sighed, “that I'd have to give him another hand-job.” (“[Max] seems a gentle fellow,” Cheever wrote afterward, “perhaps no more.”)

For a couple of weeks, Max enjoyed himself at Yaddo—”a bughouse”: “I was just a stable boy from Utah, and everybody was fucking everybody.” To a distinguished poet (female) Max confided his sorrows over his would-be fiancée, Marilyn, with whom he was in a bad patch; the poet listened, sympathized, and took him to bed. Then Cheever arrived for a visit, which was mostly spent with Max in a motel room, and that was something else entirely. In Falconer, Farragut finds that he can “kiss Jody passionately, but not tenderly,” which was quite in accord with Max's memories of Cheever: “He would kiss me, and it was pretty brutal stuff. … Just this raw greed kind of thing.* I'm glad it wasn't gentle, to tell you the truth. I'm glad it was brutal, because that's the way I felt: this is a brutal thing I'm being asked to do, so it should be conducted brutally.” And when it was over, there was little in the way of afterglow. Cheever was happy (“jolly and easy-going”): he'd crack open a soda or pour some tea and go back to whatever they'd been talking about—his work, Max's, baseball, some funny anecdote perhaps.

“What I seem to want,” Cheever noted, shortly after his return from Yaddo, “is a means of getting my rocks off with the least inconvenience, a degree of sentimentality and some decent jokes.” So he hoped. What was supposed to be especially funny was what transpired in those motel rooms (“you know better than the next man that bearass I look like something found on the road-shoulders of route #134”), and indeed it was the larky, laughing, casual aspect of male sex that seemed to appeal most. With Max he needn't worry about his performance (“I was delighted to be free of the censure and responsibility I have known with some women”), or whether he looked bad or said the wrong thing. This was a back-slapping friendship, after all: “I took a shit with the door open, snored, and farted with ease and humor, as did he.” But then if everything was so marvelous, Cheever wondered, why did he feel such “suicidal depression”?

Perhaps it had to do with his stubborn awareness that he was, to be sure, casting an awfully long shadow over Max's “green[n]ess”: “Anyone who caressed and worshipped this old carcass would be someone upon whose loneliness, fear, and ignorance I preyed,” he admitted that summer in his journal. “This would be the exploitation of innocence.” Such a punishing degree of candor, however, could only be taken in moderate doses; usually he tried to persuade himself that Max was as happy (so to speak) as he was, or happy enough, and meanwhile he let it be known that there could be dire consequences if Max disappointed him. Gurganus, for one, was often invoked for Max's benefit, both as the embodiment of true homosexuality (“he suffers acutely from the loss of gravity that seems to follow having a cock up your ass or down your throat once too often”) and as living proof that it was unwise to spurn Cheever's advances. As he told Max more than a few times, he'd helped get “Minor Heroism” published in The New Yorker, but now that he'd withdrawn his patronage, Gurganus would never