Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [338]
When he returned from Russia, a seeming reprieve appeared in the form of a letter from Max—the first in months. Cheever plucked it out of the piles of backed-up mail and read it greedily: “He hinted at the indifference of his marriage and hinted—no more—at his love for me.” This changed everything. All at once Cheever decided his life had been a sham (“a competent performance but a performance is always lacking”): He was gay, by God, and happy to say so for the moment, at least, in his journal. He promptly arranged a tryst in Saratoga for the following week, and called Max “twice a day” in the meantime to declare his love, unbothered by any trace of objectivity as to the young man's motives. As Max remembered:
I would try to buy myself time and clarity periodically by procrastinating in answering his letters and phone calls and by putting off any visits for as long as I thought I could get away with. This was true particularly for the period after my marriage. But it always got to where I believed I'd pushed him off dangerously long, long enough to where he would get fed up, end things, and do what he could to punish me.* … I knew that when I wrote the letter [in January] that he would want to see me, and that I was out of reasons for putting him off. … He arranged the rendezvous in Saratoga and I went.
The visit was something of a milestone for Cheever, to whom the greatest taboo about sleeping with a man had always been the actual sleeping with him: back-slapping friends might “get their rocks off” together, but only true homosexuals woke up in one another's arms. This time, however, he crossed the Rubicon. “After spending a night contentedly with you and your cock,” he wrote Max afterward, “I expected to gain two hundred pounds, to make sucking sounds with my mouth when I asked for the pepper at breakfast and to invest in a yellow wig. … We must part, of course, but I think our parting will be as natural and easy as our meeting was.” Cheever was, in fact, relieved to find that he and Max were “quite simply friends” in the morning, but (as he feared) there had been a certain awkwardness about finding himself in bed with a man—that is, once he'd gotten his rocks off. Waking in the middle of the night, Cheever had observed Max drinking whiskey and watching a bad movie, and had to admit that the young man was “far from a figure of any interest” at that moment. He tried to bear this in mind whenever he repeated the mantra—again and again in years to come—We must part: they were married men, after all, and at bottom Cheever had little desire to confess such an affair to the world.
On the other hand: he was still plagued with “capricious erections” and, without Max, what was an old man to do? “There are the matter-of-fact problems of my loneliness and my punctual accruals of semen that must be discharged,” Cheever mused. “These seem as simple as the problems of a car, stuck in deep snow. One gets a shovel.” On balance, then, he decided to postpone any sort of definitive valediction; when the time was right, surely Max himself would say something, and for now they were simply friends who helped each other. “Neither of us is homosexual and yet neither of us are foolish enough to worry about the matter,” he wrote his friend reassuringly. “If I want your cock or your mouth I know I have only to ask and yet I know there is so much better for you in life than my love that I can think of parting from you without pain. This, of course drives