Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [366]
It fell to Selzer to save his life. The surgeon, staying at Pine Garde, was wearing nothing but pajama bottoms when one of the women banged on his door: “Come quick!” she said. “John Cheever is dying!” Selzer ran barefoot through the woods and burst into Hillside Cottage, where he found Cheever “cyanotic-blue … and looking dead;” Selzer gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation until Cheever started breathing again, and presently (in his pajama bottoms) rode in the ambulance to Saratoga Hospital, where he learned the doctors had gone home for the night. “Get me oxygen, an electrocardiogram, and I want to draw some blood, do some tests,” he ordered a dawdling nurse. “And I want to examine this man. Get me a thalmoscope and a stethoscope and all of that stuff—and shut up!” Finally, when Cheever was “all plugged in and stable” in the ICU, Selzer went back to Yaddo.
Cheever was sitting up in bed when Selzer returned early the next morning. “I'm not going home,” he said, when Selzer urged him to do so. “I'm here at Yaddo, I'm staying.” When Selzer explained what had happened the night before, and mentioned the mouth-to-mouth part, Cheever became enraged. “What right have you?” he demanded. “That's rape! That's a violation of me!” At length Selzer replied that he was sending Cheever home in an ambulance whether he liked it or not (“I'm not going to have another thing to do with you”), and phoned Mary to let her know as much. “Well that's fine,” she said. “Do that.”
Back in Westchester, Cheever was thoroughly examined by Dr. Mutter, who found him in surprisingly decent health except for arteriosclerosis and a “Babinski sign”—the big toe going up instead of down when the bottom of the foot is scratched—indicating active swelling of the brain. The doctor told Cheever that he'd been abusing himself for sixty years (“I said that my scrotum hadn't retracted until I was eight and that I had been abusing myself for only fifty-nine years,” Cheever quipped*) and consequently had a certain amount of scar tissue on the brain, an “irritable focus” which had been triggered by too much caffeine (up to a gallon a day of coffee and tea) as well as overexertion, hence a grand-mal seizure. He was advised to cut down on caffeine and take aspirin for his heart.
“Mr. John is back!” said one of the servants when Cheever arrived to complete his stay at Yaddo. He seemed little changed by his brush with death—tired, certainly, and somewhat embarrassed. “Oh God,” he remarked to Silber, “can you believe Richard helped me?” As for Selzer, he decided to leave now that his tormentor had returned, and late that night, while packing, he heard a knock on the door. “May I come in?” Cheever asked. Selzer went back to packing, and his visitor stepped inside, sat down, and proceeded to speak about his childhood. “Well, John, I'm expected in the Operating Room at eight o'clock this morning,” Selzer said at last. “I'm afraid I must ask you to leave.” Cheever stood up and took a step toward Selzer, staring at him with curious intensity. “Shall I come see you in New Haven?” he asked. “I can't think why,” said Selzer, struck by the notion that Cheever wanted to kiss him. For years he pondered the moment, until he learned of Cheever's bisexuality after his death. “I think, now, that he was attracted to me, and I think to defend himself against that, he abused me,” said Selzer. “I felt guilty, because I thought: ‘Well, I've failed to understand another human being.’ “
“I'M AFRAID THE SEIZURE jarred my perspective and I've not yet dared look at the [pages] I wrote on the day of my collapse,” Cheever noted. When he finally got around to it, his worst fears were confirmed: not only was his recent work poor—even bizarre—but the whole manuscript was a botch and would have to be done over. And he really didn't feel like it. He missed drinking, especially at night, when he seemed to come face to face with Hemingway's “Nada” (“the utter nothingness