Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [362]
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CONDUCTING AT LEAST TWO gay relationships under the noses of his wife and children did not make Cheever more tolerant or comprehending toward those who presumed to do likewise. One day he felt so tormented that he confided something of the truth to an old Signal Corps buddy, whom he'd met for lunch in New York every so often for three decades. “What's the big deal?” the man said, meaning to console Cheever. “I like to get my cock sucked, too, now and then.” Cheever looked back on the moment with lingering wonder: “When [he] told me that he liked having his cock sucked I decided, before he had completed the sentence, that I would never see him again as a friend and I never did.” (His friend accepted Cheever's excuse that he could no longer bear to be in the city without wanting to drink.) But this was a mild shock compared with what was coming from another, even closer Signal Corps friend. “We dined with the Ettlingers about a month ago and it was like stepping into the crucial chapters of some extraordinary success story,” Cheever had written in 1962. “They are all rich, happy, well-fed, well-staffed, well-dressed and enthusiastically at peace with the world. Don loves his program [Love of Life]. Katrina loves Don. The dogs and cats lie in one another's arms amongst the roses.” So it seemed, and perhaps so it was. In any case, Cheever had fallen out of touch with Ettlinger during the worst of his alcoholism, but in recent years the two had resumed meeting almost weekly at a diner near the Tappan Zee Bridge, where each would bring the other updates about children, grandchildren, and wives. Then one spring day in 1980, as they were saying goodbye in the parking lot, Ettlinger announced that he was bisexual. “I've had hundreds of one night stands in the New York apartment,” he said, or so the horrified Cheever recorded in his journal.
Ettlinger rarely denied the truth to his gay friends (or to himself, for that matter), and his marriage seems to have remained stable in a way Cheever's never was. Katrina once remarked to her husband, as they were pulling into the driveway of their home in Rockland County, “You know, you have this whole other life, and it has to do with men.” Such a moment was surprising enough for Ettlinger to mention it to a friend, who claimed that homosexuality “wasn't an open issue” between the couple otherwise. Arthur Laurents—another gay Signal Corps friend—had been close to the Ettlingers before their marriage, and was “instrumental” in persuading Don to marry his wealthy, charming girlfriend: “Don and Katrina remind me of a scene I wrote in The Way We Were. Robert Redford broke up with Barbra Streisand and she calls him up: ‘It's because I'm not attractive, isn't it?’ I liked Katrina a lot. Don was too weak—he needed someone strong. Katrina wasn't conventionally attractive, but she was very bright and had a great body. He needed her more than she needed him.” Cheever—with the perspicacity he brought to most areas of life—had sensed the truth about Ettlinger all along, but simply could not summon the dreaded word: “I do not mean to judge him,” he wrote in 1954, “but perhaps I can say that here is a temperament … that cannot be judged by the standards our society has evolved. … There is a breadth here—libertinage or infantilism may be what I mean—that does not in any way diminish the love he bears his wife and his children.”
But how could such things be? And why had Ettlinger decided, after so many years, to confide in a friend he knew to be homophobic, thereby losing at least “some particle” of his friend's esteem (“I think him to be a revealed narcissist,” Cheever wrote; “something that I think I and my lover not to be”)? It so happened that a mutual acquaintance, the