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By Root 4206 0

than ever—the sort of loneliness he used to feel at the Boyers’ compound on Whiskey Island (listening to distant laughter and the soft, disturbing thwock of tennis balls): an odd man out, straining to ingratiate himself. “I seem to be one of those singular … old men who appear in summery reminiscences,” he wrote afterward. “Kind to dogs and children, jolly mostly, sometimes witty, wearing old-fashioned clothes with a moth hole here and there, a fountain head of charming and eccentric memory. … That he hankers for the uncircumcised cock of the fourteen year old farmhand seems to be part of the picture.” Next he spent a couple of weeks with Mary at the Wauwinet House on Nantucket—”as much of my past as I suppose Switzerland and the desert is of yours,” he wrote the inscrutable Max; “although for the first time I feel somewhat estranged.” While the other guests painted watercolors and flew box kites, Cheever rode a bicycle around the island and occasionally sought out backgammon partners (“one could die of boredom”). At one point he kissed an old one-night fling of his named Molly, who gently resisted being wrestled onto the bed, and perhaps it was just as well.

He'd been very excited about “returning to the banks of the Iowa River” for a reading in the fall, but the reality proved rather desolate: his lodgings were “wretched,” and most of the faces had changed. His old student Tom Boyle had stuck around to finish his Ph.D., and after the reading (“Justina” again) Cheever took the young man's hand and sighed, “Well, at least you're here.” Then it was off to Washington, D.C., for a videotaped program with the thirty-two-year-old poet Daniel Halpern—a literary chat between the older and younger generations, sponsored by the United States Information Agency. Each man was convinced he'd disgraced the proceedings. Halpern had a bad case of strep throat and hardly said a word, or so he remembers, whereas Cheever found the young man “composed and articulate” and himself a disaster (“I clutch the arms of my chair, lick my lips nervously and am very slow to respond”). Away from the camera, the two found much to talk about. Cheever invited Halpern to his hotel room, where he poured him a glass of Scotch; when Halpern asked whether Cheever would be joining him, the latter explained that he didn't drink anymore but always kept a bottle on hand when he traveled (“I love to see it sitting there, and when it's empty I get another”). Both men had suffered terribly from phobias, and Halpern was struck by how “amazingly open” Cheever was on the subject, particularly as it touched on his problems with impotence. Afterward, Cheever wrote Halpern a few letters, which reflected the sort of bravura candor he seemed to reserve mostly for congenial strangers (he never saw Halpern again):

Your psychiatrist and mine can't be the same but they entertain the same conclusions. When I told mine that I had happily fucked hundreds of women and quite a few men he said that this was a carapace that all neurotics build to dissemble their impotence.* I thought this over and fucked some more and reported to him that my carapace seemed so successful that I thought I would devote myself to it.

But Cheever did not give Halpern the impression of a man so “happily” engaged: “I remember feeling sorry for Cheever. … There was a wanness about him.”

In January 1978 he took Mary to Russia, stopping in London to see Tanya Litvinov, who also noticed a wanness of sorts—odd, since Cheever seemed to have everything now: money, fame, sobriety. Frieda Lurie met the Cheevers in Moscow and took them to a plush suite at the Sovetskaya, thence to tea with Premier Kosygin's daughter and many cultural events, including a serenade of “Hold That Tiger” as played by the Novgorod High School Band. The whole experience, Cheever wrote Cowley, was “profoundly disturbing”: “Some of the Russians by now are close friends … and to say goodbye there in the snow is an experience that it takes me weeks to comprehend.” At other times he said the trip was simply exhausting—”not worth it”—and indeed