Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [355]
“He was always at sea,” said Federico. “He didn't understand how the world worked. He was forever cheated by tradesmen, he bought the most ridiculous cars at the most ridiculous prices his entire life. He had no profession. He'd spent his entire career as a writer. He was not a high-school graduate. So he could say [pompous voice], ‘Listen, my good man … !’—and this over time became a habit, second nature, when he was up against the wall.” Being at sea also meant being the fat boy who wanted to be loved by everybody. “You don't even have to answer that kind of mail,” Bev Chaney would say, over and over, when Cheever would anxiously confide that the Newburgh Kiwanis (whatever) wanted him to read but, well, he'd rather not. Once, a man he'd chatted with on the train a couple of times, Martin Amsel, found Cheever's name in the phone book and invited him to “be a speaker” at the local Lions Club. “I'm terribly sorry,” said Cheever in a tired voice, “but I'm quite ill at the moment.” A few weeks later, Amsel opened the newspaper and saw that he was dead.
AS PART OF AN EFFORT to mend fences with Ben and Lynda, Cheever had tried to help their troubled marriage by paying for his son to receive counseling from the family psychiatrist, J. William Silver-berg. (“You're asleep!” Ben indignantly noticed at one point, and the man gave a violent start: “What makes you think that?”) Cheever also invited the couple to join him for a trip to Bulgaria in the summer of 1979. Stopping in London, Cheever gave Lynda some money to go shopping, the better to spend a day getting to know his son again. “Sometimes,” he confided, “I experience a loneliness as painful as intestinal flu.” Ben could relate to that, since his wife rarely slept with him anymore; indeed, it was a little nettling for Ben to discover that their attractive Bulgarian translator, a very young woman named Alexandra, was sleeping with his father (a distinguished guest of the nation, after all). While the two skinny-dipped in the Black Sea, Ben worked out his frustrations with long morning jogs along the byways of Varna. (“The troupe we were traveling with was very bemused, because I had this flirtatious blond wife and yet I was getting up every morning at six to run. They felt I should have been screwing her instead of running so much. Which I also felt.”) By the end of the year, Ben realized his marriage was going nowhere—this at a time, oddly enough, when his frigid wife wanted a second child—and so he decided to take a Reader's Digest junket to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur (“massages and blow jobs”) by way of liberating himself. “On Saturday morning,” his father noted, “our son Ben, after a week in a spiritual retreat where he got fucked, has left his wife and returned home [i.e., to Cedar Lane], for it seems only a few hours.”
Actually he stayed a few months, though he and his father seemed to remain amiable strangers: “I think we do not know one another,” the latter reflected; “I think it is our destiny that we never will.” Ben might have agreed, at least in retrospect. “Well, it's going, and Daddy will be pleased,” he announced to a guest one day, lighting a fire. “He had two great fears about me. The first was that I would not learn how to lay a proper fire, the second was that I would be a homosexual.” Even now his father often remarked that he hoped