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By Root 4110 0

of his life, Cheever felt all the more beholden to his “venerable marriage,” and wished to make some gesture to that effect. Early that autumn, he approached an architect friend from his Scarborough days, Don Reiman, and hired him to build an addition to the house that would serve as an etching studio for Mary, who'd been taking classes from a local artist and was quite passionate about it. The project cost upward of fifty thousand dollars in a difficult tax year, and while Cheever sometimes groused about wasting money, he always insisted it was something he wanted to do no matter what. Examining this impulse (“[my] gratefulness for Mary's willingness to live with so unstable a husband”), he wrote: “The word ‘dear’ is what I use: ‘How dear you are.’ It is the sense of moving the best of oneself toward another person. I think this was done most happily within my marriage, although I do remember being expelled to sofas in the living room, although not before the years had passed. I do recall the feeling of moving, rather like an avalanche, toward Mary.”

* Remarking, for example, that he'd been determined to finish his novel “even if [his] prick fell off,” as sometimes seemed likely.

* I'd very much like to hear Schulman's side of the story, but he died several years ago in a head-on collision.

* Perhaps an allusion to one of Max's more practical functions on Cedar Lane, since he was an excellent mechanic. But one thinks, too, of that line from “A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not Appear”: “Out with this and all other explicit descriptions of sexual commerce, for how can we describe the most exalted experience of our physical lives, as if—jack, wrench, hubcap, and nuts—we were describing the changing of a flat tire?”

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

{1981-1982}

CHEEVER HAD FINISHED a draft of Oh What a Paradise It Seems in June 1981, and, though uncertain of its merit, he was understandably pleased that he'd managed to write it at all. He expected Knopf to be a little disgruntled about the length (one hundred pages in published form), but he'd written the story he meant to write, more or less, and that would have to serve. As it happened, Gottlieb considered the book “beautiful,” though he suspected the ending was too abrupt and suggested that Cheever write a “last movement” that would bring things to a more definite close. As with Bullet Park, Cheever was inclined to concede the point at first, resolving in his journal to make the “last chapter more dense”—but, once again, he seemed to conclude that the essential form of his novel had already been realized, or at any rate he had nothing to add.*

The other shoe dropped in September, when Cheever received a rather drastic contract amendment from Knopf. As Gottlieb later explained, “We had contracted for a full-length novel, and Oh What a Paradise was hardly that; there was no way it could possibly earn back so huge an advance (huge for the times). I did love it, though, and still do. John's reaction was, I'm afraid, a symptom of his deteriorating condition, something I only came to understand when I was working years later on the Journals.” The amendment called for a second book “approximately 75-100,000 words” (more than twice as long as Paradise), for which Cheever would receive the remaining two hundred thousand dollars of his advance—which is to say, whereas he'd been expected to write one book for five hundred thousand dollars, now he was expected to write two. “Early in the evening I have read, for the first time, the new agreement with Knopf and when I wake at dawn I find myself in a rage,” he wrote. “I remember being underpaid by the New Yorker, I remember being given a check for first-look that turned out to be an advance.”

Cheever's rage would continue for a few days, then fizzle out. He was tired. Van Gordon, the psychiatrist, remarked on a “quality of wispiness” about him—the way he entered a room so quietly, so diffidently, one hardly knew he was there. Lynn Nesbit, his agent, was likewise struck by his “world-weariness” and wanted very much to cheer