• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3858 0

novelist Joseph Caldwell, had suspected Cheever of being bisexual ever since reading “The World of Apples”: “I thought, ‘No straight man would get aroused by the sight of a hairy ass’ “ (as Bas-comb does in the story); then, after reading Falconer, Caldwell was almost convinced. “Is Cheever gay?” he asked Ettlinger, who replied that his old friend was most definitely not (“Anybody else—-James Cagney, whoever—but not Cheever”). And yet Ettlinger was intrigued enough to investigate further—hence his confession in the parking lot. “I got it out of him,” he told Caldwell two weeks later. “He's bisexual all right.” It wasn't information that Cheever had surrendered gladly (“I am not, with Don, disposed to bring in any of my deeper feelings on these matters”), and he continued to squirm at every mention of the subject, especially after Ned Rorem (via Laurents) had enlightened Ettlinger all the more.

But Ettlinger insisted on discussing it, perhaps because his heart went out to Cheever. “Lunching with my old friend Don leaves me quite confused,” Cheever wrote, a few months before his death. “He claims to regret not having led the life of a homosexual. I find this unimaginable.” By then, however, Ettlinger had managed to make inroads with Cheever, regaling him with stories about the life, or lives, he'd led these many years—one in New York, one in Pomona, and a certain amount of happiness with both. After one such conversation, Cheever reflected, “I think that far from being ashamed of my androgynous nature I shall embrace and if possible enjoy this as a gift rather than an infirmity.”

“I LOVE YOU VERY MUCH and my endeavors to dismiss this disconcerting love have been highly unsuccessful,” Cheever wrote Max, after a short-lived attempt to distance himself. Indeed, now that the foundering young man was at his beck and call, Cheever began to introduce him to a widening circle of friends and writers—many of whom did arrive at the logical conclusion. Eugene and Clare Thaw noticed an “obvious intimacy” when the friends came over for one of their frequent swims, though it might have surprised Cheever to learn as much, since he was careful to avoid any public displays of affection. As for Max: “I remember meeting Updike once at some party, and I thought, ‘Maybe they don't really know … but, yeah, they know. They know.’ And again, it seemed okay with them. They acted like, ‘Yeah, so you play with Cheever's cock. It's okay, I've met stranger people.’ The shame was incredible, but I'd put on my good old Mormon-missionary smile and get through it.” Max longed to have friends his own age, to have any “regular friends” period, but above all he wished he could go back to Utah—to a time, that is, before he'd been “swallowed”—so he could rediscover who he'd been and why he'd wanted to write in the first place. At the very least he wanted to get a job, but Cheever insisted he needed the time to write, or anyway to be free at a moment's notice for a trip, a swim, a bicycle ride, a party, or some chore on Cedar Lane.

In fact (though he now considered it “very unlikely”), Cheever had continued to hope that he could somehow railroad Max into print, if only to improve the man's spirits and confer a certain legitimacy on their relationship. But Max hardly knew where to begin anymore. He looked over the stuff he'd written for Cheever and concluded that he “might as well have spent the last two or so years fishing.” Lunching one day in the Reader's Digest cafeteria, Max admitted his frustration to Ben, who kindly pointed out that his father “[wasn't] that great a teacher”: “Some writers have a flotilla of students who follow them into print, but he's not like that.”* Meanwhile Cheever continued to caution Max about his constant, Beckettesque gloom, insisting he write a story “in which suppuration, corruption and decay do not appear. … [R]emember that George Grosz could paint flowers.” But Max had long since digested such advice and found it wanting, not to say “insidious”: “[I]t might be a wholesale dissimulation for him,” he wrote in his journal,