John Cheever (44 page)

While he and Lucy Miner were keeping company in Iowa City, the wife he loved was back in Ossining. When Mary came for a visit, he organized a reception for her at Iowa House, complete with a carved swan on ice. Susan Boyd, wife of the university president, was surprised by the amount of work Cheever put into the reception. “He really wanted it to be something she'd like,” she recalls. Moreover, his friendship with Sarah Irwin, a student in his writing seminar, was based largely on what he characterized as his role of loser in love. Mary was the beloved and he the lover, he told Irwin, and since she felt herself in a similar position, they commiserated with each other over a good many drinks of Scotch. Cheever told her, for instance, that he felt powerless to convey the depth of his love to Mary. (Drinking and infidelity sent a contradictory message.) But he and Irwin enjoyed happy hours together too, most notably during Saturday-afternoon football games at Kinnick Stadium. They walked to the game, the impeccably dressed Cheever carrying a lap robe over one arm and a flask under the other. There they emptied the flask and ate hot dogs and peanuts while watching the Hawkeyes lose time and again. Cheever delighted in the pageantry, and especially in a marching bagpipe band that played at halftime one day and followed them across the bridge after the game, playing all the while. In looking back on their friendship, Irwin is convinced that even at his most melancholy Cheever was always a great lover of life, always anticipating a tiny ray of light on the horizon.

Among the professoriate, Cheever's closest friend was the beautiful Indian critic and scholar Gayatry Spivak. Then in her early thirties, Spivak was going through a divorce; she and Cheever got to know each other when they were paired at dinner parties. As a committed intellectual her approach to literature could hardly have been more different from his. She was lecturing on poetry at the time, and was fascinated by the critical insights of European structuralists and deconstructionists. “Why does no one say Coleridge was a critic who could write poems?” she would challenge him. “Why is it always the writer first, and then the critic?” But the world of contemporary criticism, with its post-Marxist overtones, was one he cordially scorned. Spivak was herself stridently Marxist at the time. “Dear girl,” he told her, “that's the one note of vulgarity in you.” From him as from no one else, she suffered that “dear girl.” Ordinarily she talked back to him, and he spoke openly to her of the most intimate subjects. In early-morning telephone calls, he discussed his writing, his fear of death, his sexual successes and failures. “Well, Gayatry, I couldn't get it up,” he confessed one morning. “That's all right,” she reassured him, “it happens to the best of us.” At Walt's Bar they danced together—“badly, both of us”—and he provided her with an explicit and detailed description of his sexual relations with the black attendant at the garage next door.

It was his student Allan Gurganus and not the black garageman that Cheever most coveted, however. Gurganus rejected his overtures. He was worried about the complications of the dual teacher-lover role. And besides, it was clear that Cheever felt “confused and conflicted” about his own sexual orientation. Theirs remained a platonic relationship, and one that lasted. They took long walks together, often to the park to see the bison tethered in a pen: the West's last stand in Iowa City. Or they strolled on the paths along the river. On one outing, they stopped to watch a sandlot football game at a junior high school. An extra football was lying about, and they passed it around for twenty minutes or so, like father and son. Cheever mentioned that afternoon repeatedly in his letters to Gurganus. It was important to him. It made him happy. Their worst time came the night of the masquerade party for gays at the Unitarian church. Gurganus wore a German sailor's hat and navy uniform, and was dancing with a costumed partner when he looked outside and saw Cheever at the window, gazing in like Peter Quint, a rapt and censorious look on his face. Gurganus was furious, and Cheever was disgusted. Whatever he may have told Spivak or Irwin (“Fellatio,” he said to her rather ambiguously, “is the nicest thing one human being can do for another”), he was a long way from declaring himself publicly as homosexual, or even bisexual. The overtly gay world repelled him.

Considering his compulsive drinking, Cheever remained surprisingly healthy during most of his semester in Iowa. There was acute bursitis in his shoulder in September, but thereafter no trouble until late in the fall when he underwent what he called “a mild heart attack or stroke.” The symptoms were the same as in May, a wildly irregular heartbeat and terrible shortness of breath. He was walking across campus on a mild day when the tangible world seemed to float away. He sank to the grass, unable to cry out, certain that he was dying. He could dimly make out young men and women walking by, and it occurred to him that this vision of youth was the last thing that he would see and that there was a certain appropriateness about that, since it was partly the promise of contact with youth that had brought him to Iowa. Then the spell passed. He made his way back to Iowa House and, a few weeks later, to Ossining.

On December 7, official announcement was made of Cheever's election to the American Academy as the fifth occupant of Chair 17. (The previous occupants, he found, were John Singer Sargent, John Russell Pope, Sinclair Lewis, and Pearl S. Buck.) That was the only cheerful news. Back on Cedar Lane, he was visited by tremendous loneliness. This was not associated with longing for any person or persons, he thought. He simply stood alone, and painfully so. Yet he was writing “love letters to customers of very different flavors” in Iowa. In February he wangled a trip back to Iowa City to write a piece about the town and university for Caskie Stinnett, editor of
Travel & Leisure
. He wanted to be there for Lucy Miner's birthday, he wrote Stinnett (in fact her birthday does not fall in February), and tried to explain how he felt about “flying halfway across the country to see a young girl one-third my age.”

Early in 1974 he agreed to accept a professorship at Boston University in the fall. It seemed time to leave home. At Andover, Fred had been transformed from a shy, overweight youngster into a friendly, handsome youth. Susie and Rob were moving toward divorce. His own marriage, he thought, was virtually ended. Mary was busy teaching at her progressive country day school in Nyack. He planned to move to Boston taking “not a shell, not a stone”—only three suits, half a dozen button-down shirts, and two pairs of loafers.

Cheever's luck with
The New Yorker
had not been running well. The magazine had turned down both “Artemis, the Honest Well-Digger” and “The Jewels of the Cabots,” and in the two years since he'd had little or nothing to submit. So it gave him some pleasure to introduce Maxwell to the work of Allan Gurganus. Early in March
The New Yorker
accepted Gurganus's story “Minor Heroism.” Cheever called Gurganus in Iowa City with the news that he was about to be published in
The New Yorker
and become “the most famous graduate student in the midwest.” He was fortunate to have an editor like Bill Maxwell, Cheever added. Whatever their differences, he thought Maxwell was “the best editor on the scene.”

As for his own writing, he had already begun the prison novel that eventually became
Falconer
, but was making very little progress. Many days he could not stay away from drinking until noon, or until eleven, or even until breakfast. Mary did her best to hold down the supply of liquor around the house, but John found ways of circumventing her attempts. As a fascinated nation watched the Nixon administration self-destruct in the wake of the Watergate revelations, Cheever's family and friends witnessed his private disintegration. On Easter morning he stopped by the Dirkses'. Company was coming, he said, and the liquor cabinet was empty. He was unshaven and stinking of booze, but the Dirkses took him at his word and gave him a bottle of bourbon. Cheever was taking a slug as he drove away. Soon thereafter Mary Cheever called them. “How could you do this?” she asked, and for Mary Dirks that was the last straw. A few days later, she confronted Cheever. “Do you realize what a mess you are? You look like a Bowery bum. You don't care about yourself. All your friends are convinced you're destroying yourself.” He listened, and wanted to know if it was really true that his friends felt that way. “Yes, they do,” she said emphatically.

His body, long toughened by outdoor work and play, began to turn fragile. Early in April he took a walk, stumbled barefoot, and fractured his left second toe. Another day that spring, Aline Benjamin happened upon Cheever at the Books 'n Things store in the Arcadian Shopping Center. He looked awful: seedy, hair uncombed, full of self-abnegation. He came over, put his head on her shoulder, and said—nothing at all.

Dennis Coates came to see him often during the spring and summer of 1974. A Regular Army officer, Coates was teaching at West Point while finishing his doctoral dissertation on Cheever's novels for Duke University. Cheever opened himself up in conversation with the young officer, discussing the most intimate family matters. “I've never gone on so,” he wrote the West Pointer, half in apology. Coates kept telling Cheever that he felt unloved: that was his problem. “Nonsense,” Cheever replied, “just think of all those who love me: the children, the dogs, even Mary.” That might be true, Coates agreed, but “you don't
feel
loved. You need a great deal of love and affection, and it isn't there in your life. Isn't that true?” In response, Cheever launched into a long story of his affair with Hope Lange. He did not understand himself at all, Coates concluded.

One memorable afternoon Cheever read him a story, “The Leaves, the Lion-Fish, and the Bear,” that he had just completed. Coates listened happily as they sat at the dining-room table and his favorite author read a new story to him. “The Leaves” consists of a series of episodes arranged as variations on a theme. The most arresting episode depicts a manly homosexual encounter. “Larry Estabrook,” it begins, “had read about homosexuality in the newspaper and understood that it was confined to biological degenerates and men in prison.” Nonetheless he picks up a hitchhiker on a trip to Colorado, they are that night marooned by a snowstorm, and in their motel room they drink whiskey and make love. In the morning, “Estabrook knew he had done that which by his lights he should not have done but he felt no remorse at all—he felt instead a kind of joy.…” Nor does the encounter affect his own marriage adversely. “When he returned home at the end of the week, his wife looked as lovely as ever—lovelier—and lovely were the landscapes he beheld.” Here, for the first time in his fiction, Cheever overtly suggested that homosexual love might well occur within the context of a normal marriage, and with healthy consequences.

As he read the story, Cheever put his hand over that of Coates. Then he took him for a walk into the hills behind his house. Atop a hill overlooking the Hudson, it was very cold. “Hold me,” Cheever said. That was all right with Coates—he had bundled together for warmth during Ranger training—until Cheever started to move against him and tried to kiss him. “I'm sorry, John,” he said, “but I don't go that way.” Cheever was not immediately put off. “I'm no hard-core homosexual,” he said. “I don't even know what they do. All I know is it opens up a wonderful world of love.” But Coates could not be persuaded, and as they walked back to the house, he began to think about homosexual strains in Cheever's fiction. “It's been in your work all along, hasn't it?” he asked. “Of course it has,” Cheever acknowledged. “It's always been there, for all the world to see.”

On a bright summer evening, on the sun porch of Burnham and Sue Carter's home in Briarcliff, Mary Cheever, standing up very straight, announced that she and John were planning to divorce. There had been talk of divorce before, and most of the guests at the party had heard it, but this time it seemed more serious. Their marriage was on the brink of coming apart. Cheever's life staggered out of control under the influence of alcohol.

Gayatry Spivak came for a dinner party at Cedar Lane and stayed overnight. In the morning, Cheever poured himself a tumblerful of whiskey for breakfast. “Is this a person who cares about the excellence of the writer?” she demanded. “Now hush up,” he told her, gently. “You're in my house now.” To change the subject he started talking about the house and its late-eighteenth-century origins. When Richard Adams, British author of the popular
Watership Down
, came to the United States, he expressed a desire to meet Cheever. A dinner party was arranged, but Cheever passed out during the cocktail hour. He arrived late and very drunk for Christopher Lehmann-Haupt's fortieth-birthday party. As a present he brought along a bush for planting, then lost his balance and dropped the bush out of its pot.

During a trip to Provincetown, he reached an emotional nadir. Molly Cook, Mary Oliver, and Roger Skillings, all yeoman workers for the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, invited Cheever to do a reading as a benefit for the center. Cook and Skillings picked him up in Ossining for the drive to the Cape. Arthur Spear came along “to save Cheever's life”—that is, to try to hold his drinking down. En route, Cheever pulled steadily on his flask and complained bitterly that his work had been neglected, that
The New Yorker
had mistreated him, that other writers were overrated. Despite this spate of ill feeling and competitive bile, it was clear to everyone that Cheever was not so meanspirited as he seemed. The grievances were part of his cry for help, a cry that grew more distinct once they'd arrived in Provincetown.

The reading itself was successful enough. Though Cheever had so much to drink beforehand that he barely recognized his old friend Hazel Hawthorne, he went up on the platform and read beautifully. After that, it was all downhill. Cheever stayed in Provincetown for several days after Spear left, and continued to reach out for nurturing and comfort. He treated Cook “like his mother or something,” crying on her shoulder, wailing that he hadn't any friends, seeking reassurance. At a dinner party Cook and Oliver gave, he persistently showed his affection for Skillings. In front of everyone, he attempted to hold his hand and then pursued him around the house. This seemed amusing at first, but became embarrassing as Cheever did not stop and Skillings did not know what to do. Cheever desperately needed taking care of, Cook decided. One bad day, he told her he'd “lost everything” and sounded suicidal. She called Skillings, who found Cheever on Bradford Street, walking head down, alone and unhappy.