Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [336]
He moved to Oswego in August, cutting short his stay at Yaddo, and soon reported to Cheever that he'd reconciled with his fiancée. “Your description of your love for Marilyn pleased me deeply,” Cheever replied, “since it refreshed my sense of that genuineness of heart I so admire in you and made clear the fact that for both of us the love of a woman is without parallel. This seems in no way to diminish the need I feel for your company, in every way.” Whereupon Max's notes became even more sporadic, until around Thanksgiving they stopped altogether: he and Marilyn had gotten married over the holiday. “I'm determined that this should end happily but I don't know where we are,” Cheever had written him a few days before. “Often, when I lie down, I seem to hold you in the crook of my right arm and I wish to hell you wash your hair oftener.”
The fact was, his heart was breaking. He was in love with Max, and if Max was gone, he didn't know where else to turn. “I may have lost the great gift of loving a woman,” he wrote that autumn. “This is a parting of great vastness and why should it be forced upon me. There is my loneliness, the fact that I seem to want to return to the country of my brother's love, forswearing all the lights of the world.” As for Hope Lange—his “golden-haired princess (dyed and well into her second face-lift)”—she now kept an apartment in the city, and sometimes Cheever would bestir himself to have lunch with her; this was good for a few laughs and little else. The city made him nervous, and he was careful to catch an early train, anxious to get home before dark. But home, too, offered less and less comfort. His wife seemed to find him more abhorrent than ever. She told friends that she'd never bothered to read Falconer* and gave its author the silent treatment on almost any pretext. Around the time of Max's defection, Cheever recorded a typical dispute: “Mary does not make coffee. I complain and so there is a quarrel. I cry. I cry because, at the risk of seeming petulant there seems to be nothing in my life but these corridors.”
* A few of the more knowledgeable reviewers made the same point. In The New York Review of Books, Robert Towers wrote that a look back at Cheever's earlier work “reveals numerous occurrences of homosexual material—occurrences to which the straight characters invariably respond with fear or distaste.”
* It is instructive to compare Vidal's version of this episode, which he evidently related without any knowledge of Cheever's more colorful tale. According to Vidal, the key occupants of the bus—not limo—were Cheever, himself, and William Saroyan. Since their driver seemed a bit reckless, Cheever remarked to Vidal, “If this bus overturns, Saroyan will be the only one the Bulgarian papers will feature.” Whereupon the two paused to marvel at Saroyan's enduring fame in communist countries, even though the author of such Depression-era classics as The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze was all but forgotten in the West, which may explain why Cheever never mentioned him in connection with the Bulgarian trip.
*”I know that my need for love can be gross, self-centered, a sort of greed,” Cheever wrote in his journal.
* As it happened, Gurganus did not publish another story in The New Yorker until 1995, though by then he'd become world-famous as the author of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (1989), which spent more than eight months on the Times bestseller list.
* The problem, more likely, was that she had read Falconer—noting the uses to which Cheever had put certain real-life episodes in crafting the villainous Marcia Farragut.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
{1977-1978}
CHEEVER CONSOLED HIMSELF with travel. A month after his return from Saratoga, he accepted an invitation to spend a few days at the Thaws’ dairy farm near Cooperstown. It wasn't a bad trip: He painted a fence with Eugene, danced to the jukebox with Clare at a raffish restaurant, and attended a tea party at the elegant home of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Fenimore Cooper. But he was lonelier