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By Root 4091 0

Ben wouldn't have his own “difficult propensities,” which Ben took to mean that his father hoped he wouldn't be burdened with talent—and that was a little wounding. Possibly to elucidate the matter, Cheever invited Ben to read his journals, and once sat beside him while he read; when Ben looked up, he noticed his father had been crying, though at the time he didn't connect this with all the obsessive references to homosexuality he kept encountering: “I didn't quite get it,” he later wrote, “or maybe I didn't want to get it. I was also surprised at how little I appeared in the text. I was surprised at how little any of us appeared, except perhaps my mother, who was not getting the sort of treatment that leads one to crave the limelight.”

Then one day Ben took a bicycle ride with his father and Max. The two young men had pulled ahead, chatting about their respective journals, when Max mentioned that he sometimes liked to use a kind of “shorthand” or “trigger phrase” rather than exhaust a memory by evoking it in detail. While living in Dobbs Ferry, for example, he'd gone to bed with a man who kept saying “you sweet thing,” and so Max's entry for that day was simply: “You sweet thing.” Ben was shocked: Had his father heard? What would happen if he found out? “He's gay!” Ben told his sister over the phone. “Max is gay! He made a pass at me!” Susan mentioned this to Calvin Tomkins, who just shook his head. “Ben is hysterical,” he said.

Whether Max was any more gay than he'd ever been is a matter of conjecture; in any case he was no longer married and had, in fact, suffered a ghastly reversal of fortune. As a popular instructor in Oswego, he'd decided to stay put for another year before moving to Baltimore to be with his wife. Meanwhile he'd talked with some people in the English department at Johns Hopkins, who thought they might be able to find a place for him in the fall of 1979. (“I figured Hopkins is even farther from Ossining than Oswego,” he recalled. “I'd really be free of him then.”) But two weeks before the end of his last semester in Oswego—and not long after he'd tendered his resignation—his wife called and demanded a divorce; stunned, Max drove immediately to Baltimore, and during a long boozy dinner she confessed that she'd been having an affair with an older man.

“Max called on Thursday to say that he had broken with his wife and would be here on Friday,” Cheever noted at the time. Max's lease was about to expire in Oswego, his old job had already been filled, Johns Hopkins had fallen through with a bang, he was estranged from family and church in Utah, and he needed a place to live (not to mention a means of support) as soon as possible. A girl he'd begun seeing in Oswego hailed from Westchester, and was home for the summer, so Max moved to an attic apartment in Dobbs Ferry—a few miles downriver from Ossining. “If the water was right and the tide ebbing I could swim it,” Cheever gleefully wrote his protégé. “Now and then I ask my cock if it can't imagine that Zimmer might like to fuck someone his own age but it doesn't seem to hear me.”*

And so—at Cheever's insistence—Max began coming round Cedar Lane three or four times a week, and for a while nobody seemed to suspect a thing. He and Cheever bantered like a couple of old cronies, as Max wasn't apt to be deferential, at least around others. When Cheever made fun of Glazer, for instance—sneering at the way pizza cheese hung off his chin, or the man's maudlin tendency to recite his many woes—Max (who liked Glazer) called Cheever “a fucking brat.” And everybody laughed, most of all Cheever. Why should anyone see anything amiss? Max wasn't the least effeminate, and he was far from the first young man to hang around the place—there had been Rudnik, Lang, Schultz, to name a few, as well as any number of school chums the children had brought home over the years at a moment's notice. Cheever, qua paterfamilias, had always kept an open-door policy: the more at table, the more he liked it. Even Federico—who was living near San Francisco in the days of Harvey Milk; who