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By Root 4111 0

episode in which Mary had gotten the wrong mink coat while leaving a formal affair, then returned and exchanged it for the right one: The end. “It's a very silly story,” said Mary, who reluctantly submitted it to Westchester Magazine, where she'd been hired as fiction editor. The hope was that—as Mrs. John Cheever—she'd attract “important” fiction and maybe even an original Cheever story, though Mary herself wanted to submit work from her adult-education class. “John was just cross that I was interested in other people's stories,” she recalled, and for that reason (somewhat in jest) he'd submitted the “Mink” story under his old pseudonym, Mrs. Louisa Spingarn. Westchester rejected it (“They thought it was terrible”), and the editors may or may not have noticed when the same story appeared in The New Yorker a few months later. Such was Cheever's prestige.

“My wife's detestation of me seems at a high point,” Cheever observed around the time of his penultimate New Yorker appearance. What passed for discourse between the two were curt rejoinders on Mary's part whenever Cheever attempted (disingenuously, she thought) to break the silence between them, though generally she tended to be as oblique as possible in expressing hostility (“This cookbook is a pack of lies!” she declared of a cookbook he'd given her), since she'd long ago despaired of any sort of fruitful remonstrance. According to Cheever's journal, “six months or even longer” had gone by until, one night, she ventured to speak to him directly at the dinner table, and then afterward—miraculously—sat “for a minute or two” on the same sofa where he himself was sitting: “This has not happened for years. … She does not actually sit beside me but she does sit near me in order to say that a book, given to me, is in her bedroom and that I am free to read this during the daylight hours. I thank her and we part. This is my union.”

At the same time, he was finding less solace in his friendship with Max, who returned from Southampton in May 1980 and took a basement apartment with his girlfriend in Westchester. His time on Long Island had not been a success: he was now so blocked that he could hardly finish a paragraph, much less a story, and the ramifications had left him “frightened witless.” He felt utterly at Cheever's mercy. Fast approaching middle age, he'd burned his bridges in the hope of becoming a writer—a New Yorker writer—and without Cheever's sponsorship it was a far-fetched prospect, to say the least. Plus he had to eat. Working as an occasional factotum on Cedar Lane—feeding dogs, watering plants, other more sordid chores—Max had begun to grate a little on his master's nerves, since Cheever could no longer quite persuade himself that his protégé's affection was disinterested. He longed, however, not to succumb to “meanness of spirit” (the essence of which was, as he put it, “I don't want to play with you because you don't really love me”), but amid other frustrations it was a lot to ask. “Oh Max fuck off,” he snapped one day, when Max was drinking too much Scotch (increasingly the case, for his host all but demanded it), and Cheever, meanwhile, had been waiting for a load of firewood to be delivered so he could leave for the airport. Around dusk, the wood finally arrived and the man began unloading it, but Cheever stopped him and said he wanted to inspect it first. As Max recorded the scene in his journal:

“Green,” [Cheever] said. “You can't sell me green wood.” “It's not green. … It's been seasoned a year.” … “It's green. Don't come here under cover of darkness and tell me it's not green. Get out of here.” “Well, you motherfucker,” yells the woodman. “You goddamn little cocksucker.” … Then I realize that I am stunned from drinking Scotch and from being told to fuck off and from hearing the woodman cuss out Cheever.

Max jumped to work on the woodpile, praying that Cheever would “like [him] again” when it was all over. As he remembered twenty-five years later, “I thought, ‘Now I've done it. Now he's going to finish me.’ “ As a matter of fact, some such thought