ONE WEEK after his final session with Hays, Cheever managed the long drive to Yaddo for the annual board meeting, Tappan Zee Bridge and all. He was aghast, however, by what he found there: the eighty» one-year-old Elizabeth Ames was virtually surrounded by homo! sexuals, despite her stern assertions about excluding them whenever possible. This was the same “terrifying ambivalence,” thought Cheever, that he’d detected in his own mother-that is, an impulse to condemn perversion on the one hand, and to castrate her son on the other, the better to ensure “a gentle companion” in her lonely old age. Actually, Cheever wasn’t quite sure about some of Ames’s entourage, but at least one-Ned Rorem-he knew to be “a famous cocksucker”: “N[ed] who I’ve been told claims, in his public confession, to have been blown and buggered by half the French Academy . . .” The “confession” was Rorem’s recently published Paris Dimy, a remarkably candid account of gay culture that had elevated Rorem to the status of “America’s official queer, goyim division,” as the author put it.
That night Rorem had an unexpected visitor: Cheever, festively waving a fifth of Scotch. For three hours or so, he went on and on about his recent psychotherapy, his drinking problem, the link between writing and screwing, and finally, when the bottle was empty, he put a hand on Rorem’s leg. “I was reluctant,” the composer recalled, “since I wasn’t particularly attracted to him physically. But Cheever sort of broke my heart, he was so wistful. ‘I simply have to,’ he said.” Cheever seemed “very naive sexually”---he only wanted oral sex, as if Other possibilities hadn’t occurred to him-and afterward he was “like a high-school boy, romantic in the extreme”: “I’ve never felt this way before,” he said, claiming that he hadn’t been with a man in some thirty years, and meanwhile caressing Rorem in a way that seemed “sort of cursory.”
“Oh what good children we are!” Cheever wrote the next day. “How I rush to present myself at the breakfast table at eight AM, bright, shaven, proof of the fact that I did not get drunk last night and dn something I should not have done.” For the next week or so, at any rate, the two were a couple: buzzing around the countryside in Cheever’s roadster, having picnics together and chatting about one thing and another while Cheever gulped gin from a thermos. “[He] was obsessed with homosexuality,” Rorem later wrote, “as though hoarding lost time. Learning about my orgasm fantasies (squalid, narrow and sadomasochistic), he was anxious to show that bis were elating, like being on a crimson staircase toward a silver tower that bursts open to a sky of golden stars.” With Rorem’s assistance, Cheever ascended those stairs three or four times a day, and his long struggle with impotence was nowhere in evidence. Nor was he very discreet about things-once they did it under a Ping-Pong table-seeming almost to invite discovery: “My God, there’s Hortense [Calisher]! . . . They know! . . . But I’m glad. . . . No I’m not.” Several years hence, while writing THe Later Diaries, Rorem described the liaison and likened Cheever to Proust’s Baron de Charlus, though be deleted these bits on the advice of his publisher’s lawyer. “I wouldn’t have minded,” Cheever remarked, once the book had been safely expurgated.
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Ames’s conduct as director had always been a bit on the peremptory side, and now that she was all but totally deaf and a little demented, too, she’d become a tyrant. “No!” she shouted into the telephone when an eminent critic called (during working hours) and asked to speak with a resident artist. At the time, the critic in question was visiting the ladylike Anne Palamountain, wife of the Skidmore president, who vividly remembers her own first visit to Yaddo. It was late at night, and her new friend Cheever had proposed that she and her husband follow him (amid a lot of antic shushing, lest the despot be roused) to a back door of the Trask mansion; making their furtive way into the main hall, they encountered an equally apprehensive Philip Roth creeping down the stairs. “Ames had everyone terrified,” said Palamountain. It got so bad that Cheever himself had begun to dread the place-“the demesne of a powerful and weary old lady,” whom he blamed, moreover, for cultivating “the company of emasculated men” and hence leaving him at the mercy of Rorem and the like: “There are never any attractive or available women and in my desperation for company I find myself drinking with homosexuals.” Still, a part of him would always be fond of Mrs. Ames, and he took care to relate his decision to her in the most gracious possible terms: “This, of course, has nothing to do with our long and affectionate friendship, or with the fact that you have been my most intimate confident [sic]. Without Yaddo, as you’ve managed it, it would have been impossible for me to be a writer. . . . [But] I am convinced that a change is in order and I know you have the strength and intelligence to assess such an opinion.” At the subsequent board meeting, when Ames conceded her resignation, Cheever spoke movingly of her “imperturbable, humorous and fair” treatment of the (very) odd assortment of artists she’d hosted over the years: “This is a life and a triumph.”
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As it happened, Holmes was also depressed at the time: for twelve years he’d been eclipsed by his lover’s achievements, and it was gratifying to be needed by an even more famous artist, whom he found charming besides-albeit in a “childlike” way, said Rorem. “III, with the air of Florence Nightingale tending the wounded, has seen John often, and found tranquility therein, the way maniacs are said to find tranquility as babysitters.” The two met at various posh hotels (“I like to remember that we have made love in The Drake, the Plaza and the Hilton,” Cheever wrote Holmes, “and I would like to feel your gentle hands on my cock in a hundred more hotels”), and as a result Cheever noted a vast improvement in his general outlook. But Rorem took a dim view. One day Cheever was visiting the Academy when he noticed the secretary chatting with Rorem on the phone, whereupon Cheever asked to say hello to his old friend: “We must have words together,” Rorem said balefully. Cheever hoped to avoid even speculating on such a conversation, and really had to admit that parting with Holmes would be little more than a “physical inconvenience.” But who needed the inconvenience? “That the pleasure I take in Jim’s company should in any way seem destructive is to me unimaginable,” he wrote Rorem. “I know how long your association has been and I can only imagine the depth of your love but I think that neither Jim nor I are inclined to challenge this.”
The beginning of the end came, in any event, when Holmes manifested his “lack of maleness” by commenting on the upholstery of a given hotel’s furniture (“Suddenly an abyss opens between them”)Since, however, the affair had provided Cheever with a crucial degree of equanimity where Max was concerned, he tried for a while to mold Holmes into a more pleasing form: “I think I am not particularly susceptible to the beauty of men,” he wrote Holmes, “but I love your smile because I know it to be genuine and your eyes because I think them level and manly”; as for the paramount purpose of “large orgasims” [sic], they served to “put a man’s feet back on the stern path we know life to be.”
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