Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [52]
By then his romance with Dodie Merwin, though still occasionally carnal, had cooled somewhat; she was an outdoorsy sort who liked going off to the woods and getting dirty, cutting her own firewood and so forth, which perhaps reminded Cheever a little too much of his mother (“flinging up weeds [in her garden] as a dog flings up dirt”). Lila, however, was chic: she and Anton barely made ends meet—he painted murals for nightclubs, and she taught the odd class in costume design—but when she did get a few dollars ahead, she liked to buy stylish high-heeled shoes and silk hats. She admired the same thing in Cheever: “He was a very dapper young man,” she said, remembering his gray flannel trousers, tweed jacket, button-down shirt, and “always polished” shoes. (In regard to the last, Cheever once breached a curious point of etiquette: “I remember Lila … burst into tears after a cyclonic orgasm,” he wrote in his journal, “when she discovered that I had not taken off my shoes.”) The Refregiers had rented a house in Bolton Landing for the summer, and at first Cheever was equally charming to both; but after a while he could hardly be bothered to greet the husband when he asked for Lila on the telephone. Finally the man pressed a mutual friend, Frances Lindley: was Lila in love with John? “I could honestly answer ‘I don't know,’ “ said Lindley, “though of course I knew well they had been sleeping together.” Eventually the romance became more of a comfortable friendship, and, like Merwin, the woman would continue to think fondly of Cheever, with only the faintest unnameable qualm: “Joey was such a nice person,” she said many years later, “a basically decent person, with something in him that kept him from being completely decent.”
Be that as it may, the first phase of the fling ended with the summer of 1936. Suddenly everyone was gone—the Refregiers, the college girls, even Eugene Joffe. Cheever wanted badly to leave, but he was broke again and still hadn't heard from Simon and Schuster; and even if he could afford gas, his car's steering gear was shot. “I woke one morning with a hangover and not a red cent,” he wrote Herbst, “and God only knows how I'll get out of this place.”
As ever, he tried writing his way out, but Katharine White at The New Yorker wasn't making it easy for him. “I am sorry that we don't like this story of John Cheever's at all,” she wrote of “Frère Jacques,” about an engagé man (“interested in the Spanish trouble”) and his fey mistress, who treats bundles of cornmeal, flour, or laundry as if they were the baby she longs for. “It is meant to be very serious and sad,” Mrs. White went on, “and somehow the child mistress … seems more ridiculous and half-witted than touching.” This is perhaps too harsh, but anyway the story's interest is stylistic. Like “Play a March” and other stories Cheever wrote around this time, it owes much to Hemingway's “Hills Like White Elephants”—a short two-character sketch written almost entirely in elliptical dialogue. In “Frère Jacques,” the man and woman banter awhile to no apparent purpose—this while the man tries to read a newspaper (“anxious to find who was holding Madrid”)—before the reader learns they aren't married, which somewhat explains the woman's loony determination, at the end, to sing “Frère Jacques” to a laundry bundle: “He was frightened, then, for … if she had been screaming and crying and drumming her heels on the floor, her words couldn't have held more finality and estrangement than the simple persistent words of that song.” Cheever was eventually able to sell the story to The Atlantic Monthly, and Mrs. White may have been surprised when it was selected for The Best