The Trip to Echo Spring. Olivia Laing

Cheever’s ideal of a cultured life, one of those rites whose correct assumption could protect him from the persistent shadows of inferiority and shame. In a journal entry written the summer before he married Mary, he recorded the following fantasy:

      I found myself driving up the road to Treetops in a large car, creaming the Whitneys at tennis, a game I’ve never learnt to play, giving the head-waiter at Charles’ five dollars and instructing him to get some flowers and ice a monopole of Bollinger, deciding whether to have the Pot au Feu or the trout merinere [sic], I can see myself waiting at the bar in a blue cheviot suit, tasting a martini, decanting a bottle of Vouvray into a thermos bottle to take out to Jones’ Beach, coming back from the beach, burned and salty . . . moving among my charming guests, greeting the late-comers at the door.

      In this pleasant daydream, drinking is not about anything so vulgar as gratifying an appetite, but rather part of an elaborate social code, in which the right thing done at the right time conveys a near-magical sense of belonging. The monopole is ordered and iced, not drunk; the martini only tasted; while the Vouvray is merely transferred from one container to another, more appropriate to the demands of the season and the hour.

      The same note sounds again from another, later diary entry, written in September 1941, when Cheever was on a ten-day furlough from the army. ‘Mary was waiting,’ he writes happily, ‘all shined up and dressed up, the apartment was clean and shining, there were bottles of scotch, brandy, French wine, gin and vermouth in the pantry, and clean sheets on the bed. Also joints, shell-fish, salad-greens, etc., filled the ice-box.’ What’s interesting about this memory, which recalls Ratty’s gleeful iteration of his picnic in Wind in the Willows, is the emphasis on cleanliness as well as largesse. Shined, clean, shining, clean: an antidote to the grubby privations of camp life, perhaps. But in its obsessive repetitions, it also resembles an incantation, a spell for safety and good health (clean, after all, is a hospital word, particularly clean sheets, while the preserving ice-box also has a hospital, even a morgueish, chill about it). As such, it’s hard not to read those ranked bottles as a kind of medicine, a prophylactic against the sense of dirtiness and disorder that would continue to dog Cheever from house to house, from year to year.

      I was jolted out of this line of thought by a man in the bar saying distinctly Ossining. How strange. Ossining is a small town in Westchester County, forty miles up the Hudson River from Manhattan. It’s still best known, years after his death, as Cheever’s adopted hometown (after he died the flags of the public buildings were lowered for ten days). Coincidentally, it’s also where Tennessee Williams’s mentally ill sister Rose spent most of her adult life, in an institution he both chose and paid for. It’s one of those places that exist in the limbo of the reader’s mind, inexorably associated with the melancholy, suburban stories Cheever used to write for the New Yorker.

      I looked up. The Ossining man was sitting with the woman whose blouse I’d coveted. He was balding and wore one of those jaunty navy blazers with gleaming buttons that are supposed to lend one a nautical air. They were evidently cornering into a spectacular row.

      ‘So,’ she said. ‘What is your marriage? Are you happily married? What is your home situation?’

      ‘Happily? Happily would be the right word. I guess I’m happily married. But I’m attracted to you. I can’t control that.’

      ‘I’m just wondering what you’ve been doing since this morning.’

      ‘As a matter of fact I went home around noon. I told work I had a very important client to entertain. Don’t be hurt or confused if I say I have a happy marriage. Really, if I was truly happy I wouldn’t be here with you.’

      Jeez. I wondered for a minute if they could be actors, rehearsing for some rotten soap, though perhaps I’d just seen Tootsie one too many times. The man got up and moved around the table, sliding in beside her on the banquette. ‘I think most men would think they’d have sex with a Russian woman with their wallet in their hand,’ he said. ‘Russian women are crazy about money.’ She looked at him blankly and he added: ‘Oh come on, you’ve heard that before.’ I began to gather my things, and as I did I heard him say: ‘It was the most important moment of my life. I remember every second of it. And now you’ve ruined it for me.’

      If this was a Tennessee Williams play she’d lose the plot and start screaming, or else she’d crush him like Alexandra del Lago in Sweet Bird of Youth, who can’t be made into a victim by anyone, even though her looks are fading and she is terrified of death. And if, on the other hand, it was a John Cheever story, he’d have sex with her and then go home to his wife and children in Ossining, where no doubt someone would be playing a piano. He’d mix a martini and go out on to the porch and look over the orchard to the lake, where the family skate in the winter months. Gazing dreamily into the blue light of evening, he’d see a dog, a dog named Jupiter, who’d come prancing through the tomato vines, ‘holding in his generous mouth the remains of an evening slipper. Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.’

      I’d stolen, of course, the closing scene of ‘The Country Husband’, with its swerve up and away, out of the trenches, the animal earth, as if gravity were just a joke and the yaw and pitch of flight was somehow in our repertoire. Recently, I’d begun to become suspicious of this weightless element in Cheever’s work, to see it as another manifestation of the escapist urge that fuelled his drinking. Now, however, the line seemed very lovely, an antidote to the harshness that is all too present in the world. I folded a few dollars on the table and left the King Cole then, spinning through the revolving door and escaping, a little tipsy myself, into the cold, illuminated air.

      3

      FISHING IN THE DARK

      WHEN I TOLD AN AMERICAN friend I was travelling by train from New York to New Orleans she looked at me incredulously. ‘It’s not like Some Like It Hot any more,’ she said, but I didn’t listen. I love trains. I love gazing out of the window as the cities slide by, and I couldn’t think of anything more pleasurable than taking a sleeper, crossing in darkness through the Blue Ridge Mountains and waking with the dawn in Atlanta or Tuscaloosa.

      In the interests of thriftiness I’d decided that since the journey only took thirty hours I’d do without a cabin, sleeping instead in what was promisingly described as a ‘wide, comfortable reserved coach seat’. Before I left the Elysée for Penn Station I looked again at the route map. New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana: twelve states. Still, I guessed it would be less arduous than Tennessee Williams’s first trip to New Orleans. In December 1938 he travelled by bus from Chicago, stopping off to see his family in St. Louis and arriving in the south just in time to ring in the New Year. It was the Depression and he had no job and hardly any money, but all the same he felt at home immediately, writing in his journal three hours after arrival: ‘Here surely is the place that I was made for if any place in this funny old world.’

      At the station there were people charging in every possible direction, and yet as soon as I worked out which check-in desk I needed, it all proceeded with beautiful efficiency. A uniformed porter took my bags down to the train and advised me against the seats above the wheels. It seemed like a return to a more civilised age and I felt for a moment, if not like Sugar Cane, then at least equal to Jack Lemmon’s Daphne, sashaying along the platform in his ill-fitting heels.

      The first stop was Philadelphia. I took a window seat, stowed my bags and arranged all my little bits and bobs in easy reach: that strange homemaking impulse that overcomes travellers on overnight trips. iPod, notebook, water, a bag of sticky grapes I’d bought after hearing yet another horror story about Amtrak food. I spread my plaid blanket over my knees and as I did a great wave of claustrophobia overtook me. I was at the time at the tail end of a period of chronic insomnia. I could barely sleep in my own bed, with earplugs and an eye mask. My flat had been broken into ages back, and ever since my reticular activation system had locked on red alert.

      Only those who are persistently deprived of sleep can understand the panic that wells up when