Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [364]
What Cheever wanted, or sometimes thought he wanted, was his own New York apartment—an idea he'd been kicking around for a year or so, even before he'd broached the subject with John Leonard in New Hampshire. No longer would he have to worry (insofar as he worried) about sneaking around his wife and children and neighbors; he could start all over. On the other hand, starting over at age sixty-eight was a terrifying thought. He pictured himself (à la his days on Bay State Road) sitting alone in his apartment, “chain-smoking over [his] third martini,” an elderly homosexual stood up by some young cock or another. And it was essentially a gay lifestyle he'd be leading, since he'd finally come to admit, once and for all, that he and Hope Lange were nothing but good friends. “You don't understand the first thing about women,” she'd been telling him for years, and he'd done little to change her mind. The decisive episode had occurred after a recent lunch when, returning to her apartment, Cheever had dropped his pants and waited. “I can't help you,” she said, and made a phone call. Cheever pulled his pants up, rushed downstairs, bought three dozen roses, and rushed back. Said Max (bleakly familiar with the incident and the basic MO): “It was like, ‘What's wrong? Women like flowers. Now you're supposed to fuck me.’ “ Hope continued to chat on the phone, and presently Cheever got the message and left. The larger message, of course, was that home was where he belonged after all. His wife might not speak to him (much less sleep with him), but she was a warm body and rarely failed to have dinner waiting—”one of the great labors of history,” as Cheever gratefully acknowledged: “She has often served me with bitterness … but night after night for a decade less than half a century she has brought food to the table.”
Hope's retirement from the scene may have served as a catalyst for Cheever to start work on a novel he'd long been considering about “the erotic loneliness of an old man.” Perhaps the most inhibiting factor had been the issue of bisexuality (“the astonishing iridescence of my nature,” as Cheever liked to say), which if anything had become more momentous in recent years—and yet, another such book after Falconer would be tantamount to a public confession, and Cheever hadn't forgotten by a long shot the way Dennis Coates (for one) had glibly connected the life and work. But then, too, he had an obligation as an artist—a great artist—to be emotionally honest: “What I come on is that I am writing the annals of my time and my life and that any deceit or evasiveness is, by my lights, criminal.” So that settled the point about bisexuality. Still, Cheever was loath to write about erotic matters only, and he cast about for some other, nobler aspect of life that had given comfort over the years, that had reminded him of the “intrinsic largeness of the human spirit” no matter what the sordid facts—which brought him back to nature, of course, and one of his favorite ways of communing with it, skating. Groping to begin, he explained the gist of his novel as follows: “I mean it's about what it's like to fuck a woman and then a man because the woman won't fuck you. But then there's