Cheever Country

I was a night watchman in a building oppposite Lincoln Center. “The Collected Sories of John Cheever” had just come out in paperback and I took the book to work. I read “The Swimmer.” Then I read it again.

There was a typewriter there and I decided I had to write to John Cheever. I wanted to thank him.

What should I say? Should I mention the story’s change of seasons within a day or the length of a day within a life? Should I mention the quest of a damaged man, Neddy Merrill, on a homeward journey of suburban swimming pools in the inexplicable growing chill of air and human contact? Or just say, “Thank you”?

“The Swimmer” offers the reader layers of craft and layers of interpretation. It changed my approach to writing and my approach to the other arts I’m involved in. The empirical has parallel texts (as well as subtexts) which can work at once as well as separately. Not unlike a view from kitchen window on a winter day; you can focus on the spaces between the snaggle-toothed back fence, or the snow-flecked screen, or the brilliant blast of color at the bird feeder in between. Putting such choices into a single work of visual or written art where all the approaches exist, struggle, and merge simultaneously is the route and challenge Cheever gave me -- to make work where the woven interactions of the real and its abstractions are worth discovering.

I made my watchman rounds and decided to wax unpoetic. I’d just say, “Thank you for the gift of your stories.”

At the end of “The Swimmer” Neddy Merrill is locked out of his home. He is cold. His family is gone, the house is bare.

I typed my letter, and after work I mailed it outside O’Neal’s Balloon before going inside for a beer. (Lincoln Center had demanded no “saloon” within its view.) Liv Ulman sat down next to me at the bar. In profile she looked a bit like my mother. I did not bother her. Liv and let Liv. I ran the letter to John Cheever back in my mind. “Thank you for the gift of your stories.”

Cheever died two weeks later. I read “The Swimmer” at work again that night. I later learned that Cheever had found many doors locked in his lifetime, and I hoped he had found the last one open.

Before going to work the next day I found a letter in my mailbox. The return address was like a cardinal in the snow: Cedar Lane, Ossining, New York.

John Cheever had written me back to say, “Thank you.”