Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [371]
SUBDUED BY ILLNESS, Cheever was capable of taking a more lucid view of his friendship with Max. “I sleep alone and wake to think how much happier things would be for Max if I were not around,” he wrote that summer. With the psychiatrist he discussed the problem almost incessantly: Max wanted to take his girlfriend to Utah and perhaps reconcile with his family; Cheever realized he was “infring[ing]” on these plans, and really, under the circumstances, shouldn't he just let Max go? Finally? Van Gordon replied, sensibly enough, that Max would have to make that decision on his own, though Cheever perceived that “some power of decision” lay in his own hands for reasons that might have been hard to convey to a third party. In the meantime he imagined a jovial parting scene, both him and Max laughing: “Goodbye old man,” Max would say. “It's too bad you never learned to change a tire.”* This, Cheever knew, would be best for all concerned—but when it came to the point, he simply couldn't bear it. “If Max does not call by Thursday,” he wrote, quite aware that Max was avoiding him, “I will call him and ask if he can do the driving next week.”
“I am going to say goodbye,” Max wrote in his own journal on July 30. “I am for the simple reason that I need to find the will to live again and the instinct for moving forward.” Just over a week before, when Cheever was released from the hospital, he'd insisted that Max come to get him: Mary had an etching lesson, and Ben would be at work (though he'd offered to take the morning off), and Cheever didn't want to disrupt their routines. He also, of course, wanted to have his cake and eat it too, since he was therefore able to seem magnanimous to his family—a genuine impulse, after all—while at the same time enjoying Max's company. “She needed a vacation,” he told Sara Spencer the following week, when Mary left for Treetops. “It was pathetic,” Spencer remembered, indignantly wondering (years later) what kind of wife would skip off to New Hampshire while her husband recovered—alone!—from cancer surgery. But of course Cheever wasn't alone, and (as Max's journal confirms) Mary had offered repeatedly to stay home and nurse him. For his part, Max had little choice except to go to Ossining. He'd set his heart on a trip to Utah at the end of August, but he was broke and money was hard to come by, since Cheever (as he freely admitted by then) was afraid of paying Max too much, lest he leave for good. “I have never, I think, had a more arduous thing to do in exchange for money, and I have been paid so poorly,” Max wrote. “But what is it you do to rebel against an old man who says that being left by you will certainly not kill him but will make his life terribly hard.” And still Cheever longed to do the right thing. He knew Max wanted nothing better than to go back to the city and be with his girlfriend, and to some extent Cheever wanted the same thing: he found the rituals of domesticity with a man—sitting on the porch reading together, chatting over steaks in a restaurant—“painfully awkward;” besides, he could make do as usual in August, going to AA meetings and watching baseball on TV. However: “I mustn't overlook the fact that I have a wayward cock to accommodate and so, I think, does he.”
One of the drawbacks of lodging on Cedar Lane, for Max, was that he wasn't allowed to smoke; on the other hand, he was constantly encouraged to drink, and now he was also welcome to take as many Percodans as he liked, since Cheever didn't want to get hooked. One night Max took more Percodans than usual. Dr. Schulman was coming to dinner—that is, he and Cheever planned to have a drink at the house, then go to White Plains for dinner—and Cheever had made it clear that Max wasn't invited. As Max was about to clear out, though, Schulman arrived: a short, plump, rather awkward man who put Max in mind of a “very bad Truman Capote.” As it might have seemed rude to leave at that moment, Max joined the two for a drink, but when he rose to refill Cheever's apple juice, Cheever put a hand over his glass and said, a little