Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [378]
Mostly, though, Cheever was nothing but grateful toward family and friends, who indeed took every pain to comfort him in these final months. “My beloved daughter calls and she is a sort of paradise,” Cheever wrote of a hospital stay in January 1982. “I bask in the many kinds of radiance she seems to bring into the room.” To be sure, it was a little awkward when family visits coincided with visits from Tom or even Max. When the latter realized that he and Susan would be alone together while Cheever endured some lengthy procedure, he cast about for any excuse to flee; likewise, Tom felt a little superfluous when Susan arrived one day, six months pregnant, and found him sitting in the chair nearest her father. “Aren't you going to give your chair to a pregnant woman?” she asked. Cheever tended to be the calm eye at the center of these imbroglios. He insisted that Tom stay, and at other times would gently inform his daughter that he was expecting a lover (gender unspecified). Though he was too frail to “throw backgammon dice,” as he wrote Clare Thaw, his erotic drives withstood even the worst ravages of cancer and its treatment. At home he would hobble into the woods to look at photographs of naked men, and a nurse once entered his hospital room while he and Tom were “stark naked and engorged on top of one another.”
Cheever himself was “astonished at [his] lewdness”: “That I can be lewd at all is paradoxical in the light of the love I receive these days from the family and one's friends and lovers. The great beauty of this seems in some way to transcend most physical drives and aspirations. It is spiritual.” At best, he attained a kind of golden mean. Determined to be candid and considerate after a fashion, he asked Mary's permission to invite Tom to the house on February 1. The young man kept Cheever company while he answered mail in Ben's old room at the top of the house (“[I] didn't realize how much he talked to himself,” Tom wrote in his journal), after which the two had sex even though Mary was moving around downstairs. When they joined her later, she didn't seem the least annoyed or suspicious. She asked Tom to carry the dying Edgar into the snow so the dog could pee (nobody mentioned the morbid coincidence), and on parting she warmly thanked him for lifting her husband's spirits. Helping Cheever cope was all part of the same benevolent project.
Perhaps the heaviest burden fell to Max, who in January—with Cheever's encouragement—had tried to find more conventional employment in publishing. Wearing a brand-new Brooks Brothers suit that he'd bought with Cheever's credit card, he walked twenty blocks to the Random House offices (“because all I had in my pocket was a nickel”), only to learn, from Rob Cowley, that the best job he could possibly hope for would be entry-level. That left Max with his work on Cedar Lane, which was more plentiful than ever. In addition to chauffeuring duties, he handled Cheever's business correspondence, serviced his VW Rabbit, ran errands of all kinds, and attended to the usual household chores.* Above all, Cheever depended on his simple physical presence, though he reproached himself for imposing on Max's kindness by asking him to stay overnight—yet again—while knowing full well that Max longed to catch a train but could hardly say no. One night, as Cheever was about to retire, he invited Max to occupy himself by reading a couple of journals. “On the day I left,” Max noted, “he told me the reason for letting me read the journals was to give me some notion of cadence.”
CHEEVER'S PROGRESS WAS MIXED after the first month of treatment, though he remained determinedly hopeful. The radiation, at least, appeared to be working: he could walk a little better on his left leg, and the burning in his rib cage had decreased somewhat. Over the same period of time, however, he'd lost twenty pounds, and the chemotherapy had done nothing to shrink his tumors.