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By Root 3841 0

sharply, “No, Max. You go off and get your dinner.” Flustered, hurt, and somewhat disoriented, Max picked up some takeout chicken and returned to Cedar Lane, but the two were still inside; Max circled around waiting for them to leave, and finally bolted his chicken on the shoulder of Route 134. At length he was able to return to the house and fall into bed, exhausted, but at some point he felt a tugging at his toes. “He's home, he's here,” Cheever said to Edgar; then, to Max, “I hope I didn't seem uncivil to you this evening. It's just that he was such a handful I didn't feel comfortable with both of you here.” Max couldn't get back to sleep after that, because his heart kept “racing, stopping, idling, jumping,” and he worried that he was having a bad reaction to the alcohol and Percodan. First thing in the morning, then, he went to the hospital for an EKG, and was happy to learn that there was nothing wrong with his heart after all.

Once Cheever felt a little better, and Max had gone, he wrote a note to Tom Smallwood reporting that he was now “well enough to walk to the dam.” The two hadn't met in many months and were delighted to see each other. As usual, they ate a good lunch and then walked along the aqueduct to a familiar outcropping, where Cheever was “rewarded with that vast serenity [he enjoyed] after a huge orgasm”: “These young men, and there have been perhaps ten, who treat my sexual drives rather as if this were a condition of being wounded, have contributed greatly to my life in these last years. Traditionally these are felons, blackmailers and thieves but I have never known such innocence and generosity.” And Tom, at least, regarded it as an even exchange: he didn't care much for the sex (“[I] kind of blocked [it] in my own mind”), but Cheever was marvelous company and loved having a congenial audience (“[Tom] has not heard any of the old, old stories such as that midnight on the Red Arrow express between Leningrad and Moscow when I ordered champagne for everyone on the train”). Crucially, too, Tom knew better than to overstay his welcome, and was generally the first to mention that it was time for him to catch a train back to the city.

Another nice aspect of the friendship was that Cheever could frankly discuss the gay side of his nature (with Max, the illusion of mutual heterosexuality was more imperative), and indeed, toward the end, he struck Tom as being “almost militant” about “mak[ing] up for lost time.” Which appears to have been no idle pose. For a mortally ill man almost seventy years old, Cheever's libido remained intact to a degree that excites awe and even a trace of envy. A few weeks after his right kidney had been “defenestrated,” Cheever complained of getting aroused “at the smell of bacon,” and was quite willing to drag himself up several flights of stairs to a paid assignation in order to relieve this nagging affliction. And now that such encounters had become commonplace, Cheever seemed more and more bemused at all the fuss he'd made about his “androgynous struggle” over the years; reading old journals, he couldn't help finding the whole saga “hilarious” (“This is quite simply my life”):

And so at breakfast [he wrote in September] I think of that chapter in my biography that describes how happily, at this time, he cultivated the friendships of several young men. He intended to encourage their literary aspirations, he enjoyed their company on bicycle trips and long walks and Louise Delshower claims to have encountered them several times in the woods, quite naked and howling loudly with sexual exertions. When cross-questioned he often said: Yes, yes, nothing could be more natural.

The widowed Helen Barolini, who lived near the aqueduct path, did in fact detect something amiss when—having read Falconer—she kept spotting Cheever walking along with some young man, though she never actually overheard their “exertions” (“I would also like to write about having an ejaculation with [Tom] and shouting loudly: ‘This is journey's end’ “).

Perhaps because he was more content in that department