Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [53]
A week later, Cheever mailed the magazine another story of no particular distinction (“A Picture for the Home”), which proved to be his ticket off the islands of Triuna. “I haven't appreciated anything as much as I did that, in a long time,” he wrote Wolcott Gibbs, who'd expedited the check. Cheever was glad to leave, but within a month or so he was back at Yaddo: Simon and Schuster had asked—evidently without enthusiasm—for extensive revisions. “I've got to go over the whole novel again, word for word,” he sighed to Herbst. The manuscript, however, is lost to posterity; Cheever rarely mentioned it again, except to say that he'd used his revision notes to write “short things” out of financial necessity.
LILA REFREGIER (AND OTHERS) would sometimes badger Cheever about his dependence on Yaddo: high-school dropout or not, surely he could get some kind of job—and indeed he could. “I have a chance of a WPA job,” he wrote after leaving Lake George in October, “but I sincerely don't want it. And I have another chance of traveling all over the country with Walker Evans. … I'm not crazy about that either.” The fact was, he'd grown used to a freewheeling life, and starvation was no longer an immediate danger. He'd ingratiated himself with Mrs. Ames so successfully that he could come as he pleased to Yaddo or Triuna, and whenever he sold a story he'd simply hop back into his roadster and go spinning along the Hudson for a holiday in Manhattan, where he was entertained by a widening circle of friends.
At the marble tables of the Lafayette Hotel on University Place, he'd spend hours playing backgammon with the artists Niles Spencer and Stuart Davis. Or, in Chelsea, he'd call on the Refregiers—if both were home—and contrive to take Lila away on a cheap date enlivened by the excitement of illicit love: they rode the Staten Island Ferry for a nickel, or walked to the Central Park Zoo, or took the Fifth Avenue bus from Washington Square to Harlem and back. Sometimes, too, they'd go to a boozy salon at the Werners’ apartment or that of his friend Eleanor Clark, who (though a year younger than Cheever) was already a leading light of the intellectual left—a frequent contributor to Partisan Review and The Nation, not to mention Trotsky's translator in Mexico.* Or if Cheever simply wanted to relax and eat a good meal, he'd visit his friend Dorothy Dudley, an easygoing fat lady from Biddeford, Maine, who for many years worked as the registrar at the Museum of Modern Art. Cheever was struck by Dudley's habit of falling for self-destructive heels: maudlin drunks and consumptives who treated her badly despite an unwavering solicitude on her part. “Some day,” Cheever wrote in his journal, “I must write a story about women like Dorothy and call it The Widow.”†
But soon enough the money always ran out, and Cheever would return to Yaddo and live awhile with other perennial guests who enjoyed Mrs. Ames's favor for one reason or another. At the time there was Leonard Ehrlich, her lover, a valetudinarian in his late twenties whose only novel—God's Angry Man, about abolitionist John Brown—was already years in the past. There was also Loyd (Pete) Collins, another one-novel writer, who was then married to Cheever's friend (and future editor at Harper) Frances Lindley; Cheever found Collins “a good drinking companion” and continued the friendship for three decades on that basis. And finally there was the more accomplished Daniel Fuchs, whose novels about his youth in Brooklyn had sold poorly despite wide acclaim.‡ “It was a pretty idyllic time,” said Fuchs, remembering the “wonderful, choice people” at the Trask mansion, the long nights tippling at the Worden, where he once chided his friend John to get more serious about his career. “What are you waiting for?” Fuchs demanded. “For the world and life to get integrated,” Cheever