Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [354]
And so in his own hometown he insisted on doing all his shopping, even though local merchants knew that he'd always pay the sticker price, that he was constitutionally incapable of haggling—that he was, in short (as Federico liked to remind him), “the biggest mark in Ossining.” Once, at a jewelry store in the Arcadian Shopping Center, he pointed to a bracelet he wanted to buy for his wife; the clerk picked up the wrong bracelet, which Cheever hastily purchased lest he embarrass the poor man. “There was a kind of little-boy quality about him,” said Bev Chaney, and perhaps this was simply another aspect of being a Cheever. As he mused in his journal, “I am reminded of the claustrophobia that attacked my mother and my brother in department stores, clothing stores, all sorts of commercial interiors. I will buy anything if you will set me free.” His bonhomie as “Mayor of Ossining” was one way of coping with such deep-seated, nervous uncertainty—part of a determined effort to feel at home in the world. He loved to linger in Barker's, a discount department store that was soothingly cavernous (like “the well-lived interior of an Unidentified Flying Object”), though it seemed to help that he'd struck up a friendship with the manager, Richard Van Tassell. Barker's was such a happy place that he and Natalie Robins would abscond there after the holiday feast, and when Natalie lost a child at birth, Cheever expressed condolences by writing her a long letter about Barker's (“The soapy, oriental perfumes in the air remind me of Woolworths in Quincy”).
Spending time with unpretentious people, away from his usual public ethos, seemed to provide a blessed respite from being the tweedy, bow-tie-wearing John Cheever. Ray Mutter's nurse, Kay, sought to improve herself with courses at the local community college, but hesitated to bother Cheever with questions about a paper she wanted to write on “The Swimmer;” finally, though (at Mary Dirks's urging), she gave Cheever a call, and the two talked for more than an hour. After that, the nurse made a point of discussing Cheever's work with him whenever he came in for an appointment—which suited Cheever fine, since he liked to kill time in the afternoon by reading magazines in the waiting room (after he'd seen the doctor). Sometimes, too, he'd drop by Dom's Friendly Service in Croton just to chat with the owner, Dominick Anfiteatro, who cherished Cheever's company: “I couldn't wait when I'd see him, I'd run out there,” said Anfiteatro. “When he left me, he left me on a high for a good part of the day.” And just as Cheever used to enjoy laconic discussions about communism and whatnot with Peter Wesul at Treetops, he also liked to ride his bicycle to the Ascolis’ farm to buy brown eggs and sit on a stone fence with the superintendent, John Bukovsky, who remembered speaking of “spiritual things.” In church, on his knees, Cheever bitterly rebuked himself for—among other things—his irksome aversion to “unattractive” people (as Polly would have it) like that fat woman in the next pew, who was wearing the kind of mink stole “that used to be raffled off at Fireman's carnivals” (“But here then is my sin … to estrange myself from this stranger”).
One never quite knew when some such sinful impulse would rear its head. Cheever was always happy to sign extra copies of his work for local booksellers—doing so in bed when he was dying from cancer