John Cheever (38 page)

Cheever began to invoke Hope's name in a mantra that enabled him to get out of bed in the morning during spells of depression. “I'm loved and wanted and there's something to get out of bed for,” he assured himself. “Hope is beautiful and she loves me and she's coming to see me.” In his imagination he fancied that they lived together happily in a house by the sea. At times he fantasized about leaving home and family for her.

They saw each other, almost always, for liquid lunches at La Côte Basque or Maxwell's Plum or a French bistro. Sometimes, but by no means always, they made love afterward. Either way they had wonderful fun together, Hope remembers. Like a teenager on a first date, he took her skating at Rockefeller Center. She encouraged his sense of the ridiculous, and was happy when she could make him laugh. “When he threw back his head and really laughed,” she said, “I knew I was giving him something.”

She loved the way he spoke, too, though sometimes when he mumbled she used to think she was partially deaf. And she liked the way he was supportive of her and totally unjudgmental. There was never any jealousy about the men she was seeing. “Whatever I wanted to do was okay,” she said. Theirs was not a “great physical love affair,” however. She was not strongly attracted to him physically, and rather surprised by how highly sexed he was. There was never enough lovemaking for him; he always wanted more. He was, she thought, “the horniest man” she'd ever known, and at times adolescent in his demands. Once, early in their afair, John wanted to make love and she did not. Quite drunk, he completely lost his sense of dignity and lay down on the floor in the hallway outside her hotel room.

No matter how insistent he was, they were both very much aware that he was married. During their afternoons together, it was important for him to leave at four o'clock to catch the four-twenty train. “I certainly loved John, and would do anything for him,” she said, but she realized that he “had to be a hellion to live with”: home a lot, sometimes drunk, terribly moody. She'd known enough writers to understand how difficult they could be. She and Mary met perhaps three times, first when she and Alan Pakula went up to Ossining for lunch, later when Cheever read at the YM-YWHA in New York in 1977, and again at a screening of
The Shady Hill Kidnapping
in 1981, and she could sympathize with the wife's role in those awkward meetings. Certainly she was not out to steal Mary's husband. Though she loved seeing John, she was not prepared to make a full emotional commitment to him. What would happen if she let herself become emotionally dependent on him? She was the one who was single (after 1971), and he'd still be catching the four-twenty to Ossining.

Hope appeared often in the journals he maintained after the fashion of his grandfather and father. As he grew older, he came to depend on his journals “to preserve the keenness of small daily sensations.” They also served as his confessional. As Richard Stern suggests, writing in his journal was “a consolation, a secret repair shop, a magic ring to rub out his enemies and doubts.” If he could write it down, it lost its sting.

So down it went, even to the extent of self-loathing. When he said that he loved his son's track shoes—so he challenged himself—wasn't he really an emotional impostor? Weren't his dream girls a manifestation of “the barrenness of self-love”? And how could he justify the lack of discipline he brought to his work and the cruelties he visited on his family? When Mary—a superlative cook—fixed a roast for dinner, he carved as usual and served her with the choice piece of meat. “I don't want it,” she said, but he insisted that she take it. This pattern was a common one at the dinner table, as he constantly reserved the smallest or least attractive cut of meat for himself. Eeyore, Susan used to call him. He knew what he was doing, and in his journals excoriated himself for doing it. These minuscule sacrifices represented an attempt to salve his conscience for larger betrayals. It was as if he were saying, “See how good I am to you, in this trivial way.”

Astringent as he could be with himself, Cheever sometimes allowed self-pity to intrude into his journals. Early in 1968, he went through a period of considerable discomfort with his teeth. Some had to be extracted. The remainder were capped. “I don't care about my beauty,” he said, “but my dentist does.” The dentist was in New York, and one day he stopped in to see Frances Lindley at Harper & Row before an appointment. They had a drink at “21,” and then he asked her to come along while he had a tooth pulled. Fully cognizant that she was playing a maternal role, she went along, sat with him on the dentist's couch for a while afterward, put him in a cab, and left. Soon thereafter he awoke in pain in the middle of the night. Worse than the toothache was his despairing feeling that the doors of his own house were being shut against him. On another trip to New York, he went to the public baths after lunch and encountered a male whore. “How did you ever get into this fix?” he wondered. And why couldn't men have ideal friendships without any taint of perversion? Meanwhile his addiction to alcohol grew worse. This became poignantly clear when his brother, Fred—well dressed, alert, and cold sober at sixty-two—came to visit on the eve of his departure for Europe. The brothers talked late into the night, Fred sticking to ginger ale while John downed a bottle of bourbon. Which brother was in trouble now?

In the summer of 1968, Cheever took a vacation in Ireland with Mary and son Fred. He was ready for a holiday, having finished
Bullet Park
after a long siege and completed a number of literary obligations as well. As chairman of the grants committee of the National Institute, he recommended an award for Dick Stern and wrote “a beautiful sentence or two” by way of citation. As an NBA judge he was a strong supporter of William Styron's
The Confessions of Nat Turner
, a book he thought “astonishing” from a man in whose work he found “no bluff at all.” He was also lobbying with the institute and the foundations on behalf of Fred Exley, whose poignant
A Fan's Notes
came out in mid-1968.

Happy developments were in prospect for his own work, too, as Cheever left for Ireland. At the Ford Foundation's invitation he applied for a grant to write a play. From Stockholm came a letter from the Nobel Prize people addressed—he said—to “Sir John Cheese, Offining” and revealing the news—he said—that they “wanted to take a look at me and see if I can walk backwards.” And in the Emerald Isle he waited anxiously for a cable from the Book-of-the-Month Club about
Bullet Park
.

In Ireland the mountains were blue and green, and there was wonderful swimming and fishing. The place struck him as “haunted,” in the best sense. Armed with the Shell guide and a letter from old Ireland hand Bill Maxwell, the Cheevers went to Kenmare, County Kerry, where Michael J. O'Connor, a fine figure of a man of seventy who owned a fishing boat called the
Sea-Elf
, took them fishing for mackerel in the estuary and talked a fine “crack” about his World War II experiences with the Eighth Army in North Africa. They then went to Inishmore and stayed in a farmhouse with such primitive amenities that John and Fred had “to face the wall when Mary pumped ship.” Less politely, a horse gazed in at one window, a cow at another.

On the return flight, Cheever stuffed some smoked salmon in the pocket of his sport coat, a subterfuge that led to a terrible midnight scene in customs at Boston's Logan Airport. And for days afterward, he felt violently disoriented, much more so than after trips to Italy. But he loved the Irish people and the Irish gift for language. He and Mary told John and Mary Dirks, then considering a trip to Ireland, that they really had to go and visit Kenmare and look up the brilliant blue-eyed garrulous Michael J. O'Connor and take their tea at Mrs. Hussey's in Sneem.

Though the Ford Foundation and the Nobel Prize Committee and the Book-of-the-Month Club had no good news to report, his agent Candida Donadio had already improved his financial position. She negotiated a new and lucrative contract with Knopf beginning with
Bullet Park
, and so ended eleven years, two novels, and three books of stories with Harper & Row. Cheever felt defensive about a decision so obviously based on financial grounds. It did not suit his image of himself as an author who was “not a money player” like, say, his friend Irwin Shaw. As best he could, he made light of it. So he wrote Frances Lindley that he was changing not just publishers but everything—his lawyer, doctor, dentist, and liquor dealer. And to editor Robert Gottlieb at Knopf he made a mock apology for fussing about money. He hated to admit it, he explained, but he was subject to dreams of envy about such best-selling colleagues as Updike and Roth.

At the same time, he could be like a little boy in the presence of large sums of money. He brought a hefty check from Knopf along to dinner with Connie Bessie one night, and afterward they decided to see if the St. Regis (where they'd dined) would cash the check. When the staff said they wouldn't—or rather couldn't—he was delighted. He was also extraordinarily generous when flush. “When John felt rich,” Mary said, “he'd go out and buy color television sets or Volkswagens. Three Volkswagens.” He did in fact buy Rob and Susie a Mustang, and with the advance from Knopf in the bank, he took the entire family to Curaçao for ten days over the New Year's holiday of 1968–69. Ben had to be persuaded to come along. At twenty-one, he disapproved of people who were tan in January. The following summer, there was a still more expensive family trip to Majorca, Madrid, and Rome, “all first class.” His income for 1969 came to more than sixty-three thousand dollars, and he spent a large fraction of it on those vacations. When he had money he spent it. When funds ran low he was reluctant to part with a dime.

No novel of Cheever's more vividly illustrates his duality of vision than
Bullet Park
. As critic Samuel Coale has noted, a “distinctly Manichean conflict” runs through his fiction. As with a reflex light his writing evokes opposites, flashing back and forth between the polarities of “flesh and spirit, dark and light, the terrestrial and the weightless, land and sea.” He is at once the lyric transcendentalist and the bitter Calvinist. As John Updike expressed it, Cheever “thought fast, saw everything in bright true colors, and was the arena of a constant tussle between the bubbling
joie de vivre
of the healthy sensitive man and the deep melancholy peculiar to American Protestant males.” And John Gardner, writing of
Bullet Park
in particular, observed that the author “sees the world in its totality—not only the fashionable existential darkness but the light older than consciousness, which gives nothingness definition.”

The opening paragraph of the novel at once establishes the poignant tone of the book, fluctuating between celebration and mourning. It begins as a kind of urban pastoral that quickly descends to the sorrowful.

Paint me a small railroad station then, ten minutes before dark. Beyond the platform are the waters of the Wekonsett River, reflecting a somber afterglow. The architecture of the station … resembles a pergola, cottage or summer house although this is a climate of harsh winters. The lamps along the platform burn with a nearly palpable plaintiveness.

Though we travel mostly by plane, the narrator goes on, the spirit of the country is reflected in our railroads.

You wake in a pullman bedroom at three
A.M.
in a city the name of which you do not know and may never discover. A man stands on a platform with a child in his arms. They are waving goodbye to some traveller, but what is the child doing up so late and why is the man crying?

The suggestions are somber, yet this is a novel that will end with the almost miraculous rescue of one of the principal characters from a madman bent on murder.

In its barest outline,
Bullet Park
tells the story of three characters: Eliot Nailles, Paul Hammer, and Nailles's son, Tony. In the first half of the novel, Tony succumbs to a deep sadness and is unable to rouse himself from bed. Neither conventional medicine nor quack doctors can cure his malaise. Finally he is restored to health by the Swami Rutuola, “a spiritual cheerleader” who reinvigorates him by persuading him to repeat cheers of place—“I am in a house by the sea”—and love and hope cheers—“Love, Love, Love …,” “Hope, Hope, Hope.…” In the second half of the book Tony faces another danger in the person of Hammer, who has been sent by his psychotic mother to commit a ritual murder that will arouse the modern world from a torpor induced by drugs and commercialism and rootlessness. At first Hammer plans to kill Nailles, who helps to peddle a mouthwash called Spang. Then he switches to Tony as his victim. In the end, aided by a message from the Swami, Nailles saves his son from Hammer's attempt to immolate him in the chancel of Christ's Church and so “awaken the world.”

Casting this improbable plot into viable fictional form was not easy. Cheever began with the legend of William Tell in mind. He wanted to tell an uncomplicated story of a man's love for his son, but it threatened to turn into an indictment of contemporary existence. In their restless rootlessness, his characters die in rapid transit. One woman has to get stoned before venturing onto the New Jersey Turnpike, where she perishes. A commuter, standing innocently on the station platform, is sucked under the New York-Chicago express as it comes helling through; one highly polished loafer is all that remains to signify his passing. And the action takes place in a suburb, Bullet Park, that is a slightly darker version of Proxmire Manor, which was a slightly darker version of Shady Hill.

In his extensive notes for
Bullet Park
, Cheever revealed his distress about the lack of sensual imagery in the book. “Where are the smells, the lights, the noise, the music?” he asked. More intentionally, he omitted the coarser language of sexual intercourse, leaving it to others to write “about cocks and cunts and arseholes.” But he could not ignore obscene behavior and casual lust, which are as pervasive in
Bullet Park
as in
The Wapshot Scandal
. Eliot Nailles's wife, Nellie, goes to an off-Broadway show one afternoon, where a man appears naked onstage and unselfconsciously scratches himself. On the way home, she witnesses an episode of love play between two homosexuals, and arrives back in Bullet Park shaken.