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By Root 4199 0

spring, the dam was in spate, and Cheever's reluctance to leave the world was keener than ever. “Oh, I wish I were walking across a field in Ireland!” he sighed, while he and Mary watched a movie about Parnell and Kitty O'Shea; seeing the lovers walk among flowers had made him “want to live so.” But gradually he let things go. “I expect we'll renew our connection later,” he wrote in a farewell note to Bellow (having always claimed that they'd met in some other life, and hence didn't need to spend a lot of time together in this one). There was a strong sense of parting, too, in his last meeting with Tom Smallwood. Leafing through an old journal he'd written in Italy, Cheever said, “You might find this interesting”—indicating a passage where he'd described (tormentedly as ever) his arousal at the sight of a handsome soccer player: this, he seemed to suggest, had been part of his life for a very long time. Finally, saying goodbye, he urged Tom to start a family of his own someday, as that was by far the most important aspect of any man's happiness. (Years later, when Tom was reading excerpts from Cheever's journal in The New Yorker, he noticed that one of the last entries was about himself: “He [Tom] is a pleasant young man about whose way of life, whose friends, I know nothing and can imagine nothing.” “I really regretted that,” said Tom, “because I realized I didn't tell him that much about me, because I was so careful to have that relationship exist out of time and out of place. But I adored him, and I miss him a lot. I wish he'd lived and could see the life I live now, because I think he'd be very happy for me.”)

Cheever rapidly weakened during the last weeks of his life. “For the first time in forty years I have failed to keep this journal with any care,” he wrote. “I am sick. That seems to be my only message.” He found himself tiring with “freakish ease” and always felt cold; during a four-hour blood transfusion, he asked Max to hold his hand (“as cold, at first, as any hand I have held”), which gradually warmed as the fresh blood began to circulate. But soon Cheever was beyond such help. He was so exhausted he couldn't bring himself to wind his Rolex (that, too, was Max's job), and when old friends visited, Cheever seemed torn between begging them to stay, lest he never lay eyes on them again, and simply relapsing into blessed oblivion. The last lines of his journal were written in mid-or late May, when he could just muster the strength, still, to drive a guest to the train station:

I have never known anything like this fatigue. I feel it in the middle of dinner. We have a guest to be driven to the train, and I begin to count the number of times it takes him to empty his dessert plate with a spoon. There is his coffee to finish, but happily he has taken a small cup. Even before this is empty I have him on his feet for the train. It will be for me, I know, twenty-eight steps from the table to the car, and, after he has been abandoned at the station, another twenty-eight steps from the car to my room, where I tear off my clothes, leave them in a heap on the floor, turn out the light, and fall into bed.

His friendship with Max did not become any less complicated. “I have been your Sancho Panza,” Max wrote in his journal on May 3, “and I have to stop doing this if I am to get over my longing for your death.” Around this time he began seeing a therapist. At first he discussed the fact that he wasn't able to write anymore, and when the therapist asked how he'd managed to support himself, Max mentioned Cheever—circling back, at last, to a moment at the Lake City Motel in 1977, and painfully working his way forward. At some point he began talking about Mary—how ashamed he felt whenever he kissed her. “That was the moment I started crying.”

Cheever's own remorse, by then, had mostly to do with his children. He felt particularly obliged to confess things to Ben, who, as a boy, had been the main victim of his self-loathing. “My reluctance to describe to [Ben] my sexual conduct originates in part in my own intolerance,” Cheever