My Lunch with John Cheever.

It was a splendid autumnal morning in Iowa City, Iowa. Although not yet nine o'clock cumulous clouds mushroomed in the western sky, appearing so tall and boundless Jake Lancer thought they might have been skyscrapers, office buildings in a large and important city like New York where he once lived and earned his keep. Those proud, towering clouds, he thought, deserved to have swank addresses like the office towers in which he worked when he resided in New York City.

And now as Jake Lancer enjoyed breakfasting outdoors in the garden with his wife, Lucticia, he read in that morning's Press-Citizen that John Cheever had arrived in Iowa City to teach fiction writing at the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop.

"Look at this, Darling. Look who is teaching at the Workshop this fall—the author of The Wopshot Chronical, The Enormous Radio and The Swimmer."

"And who would that be?" Lucticia Lancer asked while her fingers enclosed the stem of her first glass of the day, orange juice infused with Old Russian Émigré vodka.

"Why it's John Cheever himself, the writer who made The New Yorker famous for fiction. I think I'll ring him up and arrange to have lunch together," said Jake Lacer.

"That's a capital idea, Jake. Maybe he'll introduce you to his literary agent or, even better, his editor, or is it the other way around, I can never remember."

Jake Lancer raised his glass of orange juice infused with Old Russia Émigré, proposing a toast: "Here's to having breakfast in the garden with my beloved Lucricia and lunching with John Cheever."

"Wait, wait," Lucticia Lancer said before Jake could even bring his glass to his meaty lips. "And here's to the luxury of being a Workshop graduate hanger-on in Iowa City who can afford to write fiction only because his wife works full time and has a decent salary," she said.

"I want to thank you very much for that insight into our lives, Lucticia," said Jake, who always preferred fiction over nonfiction. He then held up his glass again, and this time said, "In any case, here's to both our toasts." They both enjoyed downing their orange infused Old Russian Émigrés to the very last drop.

Straightaway Jake Lancer called Mr. Cheever's room at the The Iowa House, a hotel that even today is part of the student union complex on the University of Iowa campus.

Jake informed Mr. Cheever that he had recently graduated from The Writers' Workshop and had decided to remain in Iowa City and write fiction at the antique paneled oak desk he had transported from New York City two years earlier. Previously he had worked at that desk as a writer on Madison Avenue. Now, he said, he was trying his hand at fiction. He had long admired Mr. Cheever's work, he said (from which an innocent might infer he was an ardent fan of Cheever's when in fact Jake had only read some of his more widely collected stories). Jake asked the great writer and would-be teacher if he would be kind enough to read one of Jake's short stories and tell him his opinion of it.

Mr. Cheever, having just arrived in Iowa City days before the start of the semester and not yet weighed down by teaching duties, was agreeable. A date was set to meet for lunch one week hence, and that very afternoon Jake Lancer dropped off for Mr. Cheever one of his short stories (printed on bond paper, double spaced, neatly appointed with a single staple in the upper-left corner) in a plain vanilla envelope at the Workshop office which was then housed in the English-Philosophy building on campus. That was how things got done in those days.

Jake then appeared at the agreed-upon restaurant (to this day part of The Iowa House) on the appointed day at the exact hour, and there he was, John Cheever, looking exactly like the photos of him on his book dust jackets, sitting alone at one of the tables until Jake Lancer introduced himself and shook the famous writer's hand and sat at his table.

Dear Reader, pardon the intrusion, but at this point in my story allow me to dispense with the third-person fiction, and switch to first-person in order to tell you the simple truth of what happened on that day and thereafter.

John Cheever and I had a pleasant lunch talking about life and the semblance of life to fiction, and the urgency we both felt to write lively tales peopled by somewhat believable characters whose lives come off the rails and get lost in the weeds so to speak.

Our conversation—at least for me—yielded rich rewards. More than forty-five years later those rewards are still assisting me with my fiction. I believe we arrived at the heart of it when Mr. Cheever and I discovered we both had older brothers who both hampered us and oddly helped us. As children and young adults both of us carried on anguished relationships with our brothers who were so different from us that they appeared as THE OTHER, or as I now prefer to think of them, as brotherly aliens.

Mr. Cheever had, and, gratefully, I still have an older brother. During our lunch we both agreed how haunting and at times frustrating it could be that no matter what we would write, our brotherly aliens (loved ones with maddeningly different mindsets, personalities and concerns) always seemed to be popping up under various and sometimes strange, sometimes even funny guises in our fiction. One might assume that both of us resented these brotherly aliens when they "party-crashed" our fiction, but I told Mr. Cheever that at the heart of my relationship with my brother, co-existent with all the differences between us, I admired and loved him tremendously. Although, as a result, I have never been at a loss for tension in my fiction, which is, after all, key to any good story.

I told Mr. Cheever that at the most basic level of my psyche (probably in the brain stem) there exists a strong unbreakable bond with THE OTHER that, were it ever to be broken, as some day it might be, would unleash a tremendous outpouring of grief and stand as a forever turning point in my life, the time when henceforth my brotherly alien, THE OTHER, will be no more.

The conversation that I had with John Cheever some forty-five years ago proved to be both poignant and tremendously revealing of the relationship each of us had with life and with our grasp on sanity itself. It's taken me a lifetime to realize that during that single lunch John Cheever not only gave me a key to understanding how to read his work but also to unlocking a mother lode of creativity within my heart.