Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [384]
The final verdict was reflected in sales—less than respectable for a writer of Cheever's fame and critical éclat, though not downright disastrous. A rather modest first printing of thirty thousand sold out in a few weeks, perhaps to the mild surprise of Cheever's publisher, as once again a second printing was slow to reach the stores. By then demand had vanished, and there were no further printings. Cheever was not altogether stoical: “That I am not on the best-seller list and that Ann[e] Tyler is* makes me think myself a forgotten creature in the vast cemetery where the living dead of those who have lost their vogue wait out the last, long year of their time on earth. Up yours.”
AFTER SIX WEEKS OF PLATINUM, Cheever was told that his tumors were shrinking and that he had a “fifty-fifty chance” of survival. He was naturally elated, and could bear a little better the blow of losing his hair. Almost forty years ago his father had written him, “You were bald as billiard ball, for 6 mo[nth]s as a kid—but you caught up later on hair-game—as all the Cheevers—'wear a lot of hair’—till the final curtain.” Cheever had looked forward to the fruits of this inheritance, but one morning in early March he awoke to find most of his hair (only a bit of it gray) on the pillow. Undaunted, he began working again in Ben's room—the best therapy at any time, all the more now that he claimed to be writing stories about cancer survival. Actually, his journal indicates that he was considering a short novel or screenplay (“opening on a slapstick Preston Sturgis tone”) about a space-shuttle evacuation of New York resulting from a nuclear accident. An even more compelling theme, however, was yet another apologia “about the sexual enjoyment and sometimes bewilderment men can find with one another”: “My determination is to make it clear that in the human condition there are discontents, seizures of loneliness and unease that seem only answered by our homosexual loves.”
By the end of March, he was more hopeful than ever (“[I] am determined,” he wrote a friend, “to celebrate my 80th birthday by walking to Croton dam”), but a few days later the doctor announced that he was suspending platinum, which Cheever correctly interpreted as an admission that platinum wasn't working. Instead, they gave him shots of “a pollution that is distilled from the Adriatic,” as Cheever put it, and within a few days he assured himself, once again, that he was feeling much better. “Gaunt, limping and with much of his hair gone,” he gave a clowning interview to the local newspaper, remarking that Dick Cavett had just invited him to do another show: “I asked if I could do it in bed. He didn't think that was funny. I said they could roll the bed out on the set. He thought that was even less funny.” A further surge of hope was provided by the birth of his granddaughter, Sarah Liley Cheever Tomkins, on April 12. “I've kicked it,” he told Susan the next morning. “It's over.”
But more and more he seemed to know better. When his niece Jane Carr sent him a note with a comforting quote from scripture, he took to calling her every so often, mentioning at one point that Fred had died instantly (“what a gift that was”), whereas he himself had to endure this endless agony. Chatting with Hope Lange's brother, David—who owed much of his present sobriety to Cheever—he joked about the hats he wore to cover his baldness, then abruptly became somber: “You know, I can't joke with you,” he said. “I only have a few months to live.” Lange asked if he'd considered drinking again, and Cheever said no: “When I do [die], I want it to be with dignity.” But it was one thing to unburden himself with faraway friends and relations, another