Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [357]
As for Max, he wasn't quite sure what to think, though he hoped his affable façade was working, more or less, and he was especially careful to be courteous to Cheever's wife. “Mary, Mary, Mary,” he wrote in his journal; “how difficult it is to be alone with you, eating your pea soup at the table, when our knowledge of one another has such terrible foundations of deceit—and it is raw deceit in spite of any sophistication.” Did Mary know? If so, she never let on, though perhaps she found other ways to express her frustration—like the time she flew into a rage when Max, weeding the stairs leading to the driveway, unwittingly picked some sedum she'd planted. And yet Cheever himself seemed nonchalant about things, and Max “took [his] cues” from Cheever:
If he thought it was okay to parade me in front of Mary and his children, then I guess it was okay. The fact that I didn't feel okay doing it was my problem. … Obviously it's what people in the East do, the way he takes it in stride. Sitting down at the dinner table with his family, an hour after I've given him a hand-job and he still has stains in his corduroys from it, I guess this is okay here. It's tearing my guts out, but Ben's being nice to me, and Susie—who should take a fucking plate and bust it over my head—and poor Mary, you know.
One way Cheever justified things was to remind himself that he'd spent much of his adult life in a state of relative self-denial, supporting his family (and often his brother's family) by grinding out stories for The New Yorker, and what had he gotten in return? Bilked by the magazine and rejected by his wife and even his children at times (the fact that he'd often behaved abominably was all but lost on him in his worst moods of self-pity). “I have courted these responsibilities,” he wrote, “but now it seems that they have eclipsed my truly carefree nature and lying in the arms of Procrustes … I feel a marvelous sweetness of freedom.”
As for the “you sweet thing” episode: Max had been driving home from Ossining—drunk (“being with [Cheever] always included getting drunk”), desperately depressed—and had picked up a young hitchhiker, who put a hand on Max's inner thigh. “And I figured, okay,” Max remembered, “let's see if this is something I really like. Let's see if it's just Cheever's age and the fact that I never had a say in it.” Telling Ben was a tentative way to unburden himself and clear the air, though nothing much changed. Ben kept his own counsel and remained as nice as ever; Susan “sometimes had a flicker of wondering” but finally dismissed it (“I think the violent ups and downs of my father's life had exhausted all of us”). Meanwhile Max went on playing his role, whatever that was, always wondering what the Cheevers really thought of him. The slightest hint of rejection cast him into a panic of self-loathing, such as the time Susan seemed to shrink from a friendly kiss: “[W]hat child no matter how sophisticated wants to complicate his or her life with a kiss on the cheek from her father's homosexual lover,” Max wrote in his journal. “Ben is lovely to me and by the end of dinner I find that I am being restored to some identity of my own, something other than that awkward manifestation of their father's sexual preferences.” When, at the end of the evening, Susan crossed the room to kiss Max goodbye (“she knows, beyond doubt, what she is doing”), he felt almost pathetically grateful.
THAT SPRING Cheever had struck up a far less complicated friendship with Tom Smallwood (not his real name), a former undergraduate at BU. Tom had finished a novel and wanted to show it to Cheever, so he wrote his old teacher a letter mentioning that he'd moved to Manhattan and would love to get together at some point. Cheever replied immediately, and a few days later the two met for the first time in four years at the train station: “Are you Tom?” Cheever was asking another youth when the real Tom tapped him on the shoulder. Cheever apologized,