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By Root 4015 0

yellow carpets exhale, the lame conversation, and the pathetic picture my colleagues in numbers of more than five can produce, is more than I can take.” Besides, there was a “good deal more license” at Lake George in terms of “drinking, screwing, etc.” The latter activities—plus water-skiing—took up most of his time. He was having a strenuous affair with an older woman, a gorgeous brunette named Peg Worthington who was on the rebound from a dull marriage. Worthington liked drinking almost as much as Cheever, and “sang [his] praises as a male” more than any woman he'd ever known. The two had befriended a playboy named Comstock who had his own boat, a powerful GarWood that ran rings around the old Fay & Bowen; Cheever never forgot the excitement of skiing into a rain squall at blazing speed—or for that matter the whole heady, hedonistic spree: “That was the summer when I used to screw P[eg] in the old matchboard bedroom and we used to steal [Comstock's] father's scotch,” he reminisced in his journal. “Even today the smell of scotch reminds me of that summer. We used to drink and neck and tear up and down the lake between the narrows and the village.”

The lark ended in apposite fashion for a man who'd been so preoccupied with the fate of his generation: Worthington left for Reno “to divorce a stuffed shirt named Harold,” and a few days later Germany invaded Poland. The news, said Cheever, was “a howling wind that shakes the island;” suddenly Bolton Landing was deserted, the lake was calm, and oddly, elsewhere, the world was sliding toward disaster. For a while, Cheever was grateful for the relative tranquillity. His friend Pete Collins had also come to the lake, and was a good if taciturn companion. (The man's aloofness was later put in perspective when Collins admitted that his wife had left him just prior to his departure for Lake George.) “We got on one another's nerves some,” Cheever wrote Denney, “but we worked all morning, water-skiied all afternoon and worked all evening for three weeks. It was a cold and a lonely stretch, but walking up to the post-office at six in what used to be the football season, playing darts with the mountaineers, watching them shutter the lake houses and draw up the boats, was a lot more memorable than Skidmore's hysterics or those goddamned martinis we used to put away.” Cheever would later reflect on how comfortable he'd felt in Collins's company. They slept “beararse” in the same narrow bed “without any trouble”—indeed, such was the serene asexuality between them that Cheever didn't mind walking from bed to bathroom in a state of rampant (but impersonal) arousal, making Collins laugh by pissing straight up in the air. In the evenings Collins kept him company while he went for a solo swim (“beararse” again) in the cold water, whereupon he'd take a hot bath and report to dinner in coat and tie. Once, he asked Collins, who cooked, why the plates weren't warmed: “That's a very peculiar request,” said Collins, “from a horny, penniless bastard stuck on an island on a mountain lake at the beginning of duck season.”

Cheever might have remained on the island for quite a while longer (and thereby altered his destiny in any number of ways) were it not for the intervention of his new editor at The New Yorker, William Maxwell. One day in 1938—shortly after Maxwell had moved to fiction from the art department—Katharine White had “turned Cheever over to him.” Not only was Maxwell persistent in soliciting Cheever's work, but he tended to suggest revisions rather than rejecting stories outright. The first “casual” he bought, “Washington Boarding House,” was a result of this process. Rejected with encouragement toward the end of Cheever's tenure at the FWP, the piece was later revised and resubmitted to Maxwell, who bought it at a higher rate than Cheever had ever been paid by the magazine. Maxwell's attentiveness was all the more flattering—and his editorial advice valuable—because he himself was already, at age thirty, the author of two well-regarded novels, Bright Center of Heaven and They Came like Swallows.