Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [350]
As it happened, Holmes was also depressed at the time: for twelve years he'd been eclipsed by his lover's achievements, and it was gratifying to be needed by an even more famous artist, whom he found charming besides—albeit in a “childlike” way, said Rorem. “JH, with the air of Florence Nightingale tending the wounded, has seen John often, and found tranquility therein, the way maniacs are said to find tranquility as babysitters.” The two met at various posh hotels (“I like to remember that we have made love in The Drake, the Plaza and the Hilton,” Cheever wrote Holmes, “and I would like to feel your gentle hands on my cock in a hundred more hotels”), and as a result Cheever noted a vast improvement in his general outlook. But Rorem took a dim view. One day Cheever was visiting the Academy when he noticed the secretary chatting with Rorem on the phone, whereupon Cheever asked to say hello to his old friend: “We must have words together,” Rorem said balefully Cheever hoped to avoid even speculating on such a conversation, and really had to admit that parting with Holmes would be little more than a “physical inconvenience.” But who needed the inconvenience? “That the pleasure I take in Jim's company should in any way seem destructive is to me unimaginable,” he wrote Rorem. “I know how long your association has been and I can only imagine the depth of your love but I think that neither Jim nor I are inclined to challenge this.”
The beginning of the end came, in any event, when Holmes manifested his “lack of maleness” by commenting on the upholstery of a given hotel's furniture (“Suddenly an abyss opens between them”). Since, however, the affair had provided Cheever with a crucial degree of equanimity where Max was concerned, he tried for a while to mold Holmes into a more pleasing form: “I think I am not particularly susceptible to the beauty of men,” he wrote Holmes, “but I love your smile because I know it to be genuine and your eyes because I think them level and manly;” as for the paramount purpose of “large orgasims” [sic], they served to “put a man's feet back on the stern path we know life to be.” Cheever also mentioned how much he enjoyed things like boxing matches in White Plains, which he attended once a month with members of the Friday Club. But it was no good. Whatever Max's shortcomings, at least he could “pass a football and catch a fish,” whereas Cheever wondered whether Holmes could even ride a bicycle. And yet Max hardly answered his letters or phone calls anymore. “I am an old, old king in love with a silly creature who keeps the pigs clean,” Cheever lamented.
* Technically The World of Apples was still in print, but almost impossible to find.
† Gottlieb's selection included every story published in the five previous collections, as well as two uncollected stories, “The Common Day” (1947) and “Another Story” (1967); he also included two stories from the 1956 Stories with Jean Stafford et al., omitting “The National Pastime.” According to Gottlieb, Cheever's input was minimal: “My vague memory is that there may have been at the fewest one, and at the most three, stories that he wanted included and that I hadn't included.”
* Originally published in The New Yorker (March 7, 1964) as “The Habit,” it appears in The Stories of John Cheever as the last of four sketches in “Metamorphoses.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
{1979}
CHEEVER HAD COME A LONG WAY from the eleven-year-old boy who'd promised