Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [358]
Walking to Croton Dam (“the second largest cut-stone mortised structure …”), Cheever put his arm around Tom, who was taken aback and politely pulled away. Cheever let it go, but on the way back he began talking about homosexuality. He had a male lover, he said, and found it very troubling, since his “upbringing” hadn't made it easy for him; his grandfather Aaron had committed suicide (it wasn't clear whether he was linking this to homosexuality per se), and the disgrace was never mentioned in his family. Back at the house, Cheever kept returning to the subject whenever his wife drifted out of earshot. “Perplexed about what sons will think of him,” Tom wrote in his journal afterward. “Masturbates frequently—messy, we agreed. … We gave each other a hug good-bye, which turned into a kiss.” When Tom returned a month or so later, Cheever proposed another walk to the dam, pausing around the halfway point: “When I put my arm around you last time, you seemed repulsed.” Tom explained that he'd only been a little surprised, and Cheever said he wanted to touch the young man's penis. They ducked behind an outcropping a few yards off the path. “I didn't cum,” Tom noted, “but he certainly did. ‘Felt great.’ Seemed quite beholden to me.”
The two continued to meet now and then for the rest of Cheever's life, and later Tom would look back on the friendship with unadulterated pleasure. Tom wasn't particularly conflicted about his bisexuality—he soon married and started a family—and Cheever seemed easy in his company, more apt to express affection as opposed to lust. The two cuddled and chatted in bed; they hugged and kissed goodbye. Because he knew Cheever to be very affectionate, Tom was bemused by the man's family dynamics. Cheever and his wife lived together like virtual strangers, and in her absence he was both derisive (mocking her high-pitched voice) and a little fearful of her. In spite of this, he affected a kind of disdainful bravado—”Screw them!”—whenever Tom worried about being caught in flagrante at Cedar Lane; however, with respect to his children (who were otherwise included in the dismissal), Cheever expressed remorse over how often they'd seen him at his worst—what a nasty drunk he'd been; all the times he'd promised to stop drinking, or drink less, and failed. Still, it was odd for Tom to observe how formal Cheever was in their presence, this man who loved to be held and kissed. Perhaps the fact that there were no strings attached to his friendship with Tom had something to do with the difference: “I did give him this novel I'd written,” Tom recalled, “and he didn't like it that much, and it was, like, ‘Okay, let's move on.’ I never asked him for anything.”
Meanwhile, now that Max was financially dependent on Cheever, the question of his writing career had assumed greater urgency, and occasionally Cheever betrayed some slight impatience on that point: “If you would write your fucking homework in as commanding and relaxed a tone as I find in your letter and bring into its closing the pace of a man walking easily—as you walk—to a railway station or a mailbox it would make me happy.” And so Max would mull this over (be commanding and relaxed; conclude with an easy walking pace) while studying, again and again, Cheever's own work—since their common goal was getting Max published in The New Yorker, a trick Cheever had managed 119 times. Then, too, despite his initial enthusiasm for Max's work, Cheever had gradually discovered that his protégé was rather drastically on the wrong track. Besides being “a catalogue of alienations,” Max's earlier stories had reminded Cheever “a little of Beckett”—static, impressionistic—and the fact was, he didn't find Beckett all that interesting. “Our differences seem quite simple,” he wrote Max. “I write the fiction of cause and effect. You do not. But it would please me if you found a use for your extraordinary voice that seemed more universal.”
Be universal. Don't write like Beckett. Max did his best to follow this advice