Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [79]
Finally he arrived in Manila—a smoking ruin where “absolutely nothing over waist-high” remained. An old man sat amid the rubble trying to interest Americans in purchasing a ten-year-old magazine; also for sale were monkeys and birds and “a dried fish strong enough to smell up a city block.” Japanese money blew around the streets. The beaches and jungles of Guam—Cheever's next stop—were something of an improvement: the public-address system played Strauss waltzes, and one could get a good milkshake, though liquor was unavailable west of Honolulu. Sober, then, and keenly susceptible, Cheever took his typewriter to the beach and wrote another “Town House” story; he also swam and “crack[ed] coconuts” with a sailor who'd taken a fancy to him. Many years later, Cheever would claim that he'd “changed to another beach” as soon as this friendship had “seemed about to become sentimental;” but his journal implied that he'd stayed put, since that sailor in Guam would become one of the lifelong elect who (however briefly encountered) would “wander at will into [his] dreams, undress and wait to be gentled,” as Cheever noted in 1961.
By mid-June he was back in New York, where he was welcomed with a party at Ettlinger's apartment that didn't break up until three. He and Ettlinger were together again on VJ Day (riding around in a cab shouting “La guerre est finie!”), and a few months later Cheever was mustered out of the army after three and a half years. Except for occasional teaching jobs, it was the last regular employment he'd ever know.
* The origin of that marvelous phrase vis-à-vis Cheever. It was later adopted by friends and family to mock (often rather pointedly) Cheever's reputation among certain of his more admiring critics.
* As a classification specialist, Rothbart was kept off the line, and so lived to send Cheever that poignant journal. When Cheever himself died a few years later, an obituary appeared in the regimental newsletter that would have made him very happy: “John contributed to the IVY LEAF and DOUBLE DEUCER, and although he was even then something of a celebrity, he was a very regular guy who used to drink beer in the PX with the rest of the guys.”
* When asked how he knew Cheever was bisexual, Laurents invoked the play Bell, Book and Candle, by John Van Druten: “They [the witches in the play] know each other simply by looking in the eye. Yo u just know.”
* Mary Cheever and Peggy (McManus) Murray and others have attested to the vagaries of Ruth Denney, who—alive and well and living in Hawaii as of 2004—denies almost everything: “Codfish was not a thing I cooked,” she said, nor did she remember washing her hair in the kitchen sink. And though she was “very sorry” that her child did, in fact, spit at people, “I certainly didn't defend him for spitting.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
{1945-1946}
AFTER A RESTFUL VISIT to Erwinna, the Cheevers returned that summer to the town house and a “saga” of “disorder, hysteria, and vermin”—as Mary wrote Herbst—that “should be sung to the lyre.” One day Mary heard the unmistakable sound of a Flit gun being used in the Denneys’ room, and discovered that Ruth had been spraying a secondhand mattress she'd recently acquired, which explained the sudden infestation of bedbugs. Ruth Denney denied (and still denies) that bedbugs had traveled farther than her own room, but the other couples had already been bitten, and a terrible row ensued. Thus ended the unhappy experiment once and for all (though Cheever, at least, had a theme for his sixth and final “Town House” story).
As luck would have it, the Cheevers managed almost immediately to find a nice, somewhat affordable apartment on East Fifty-ninth near Sutton Place. “Here we are,” wrote