City Boy

by Edmund White

  Jimmy whispered to us, “Those seems are well sewed.”

  I was invited with David to their large apartment several times. They’d give us a wonderful dinner, then we’d play charades or Encyclopedia, a grander form of Dictionary in which the guests were asked to write fake entries for a name or event. We were then instructed to guess which version was the real one copied out from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. If anyone already knew the true identity of the person or place, he had to own up to it right away. We were all in stitches when one of the guests, Maita di Niscemi, a Sicilian princess who worked on Robert Wilson’s scripts, kept admitting that almost everyone we mentioned was a cousin or aunt of hers.

  At these dinners Tanny Le Clercq in her wheelchair (she was teaching ballet to a company in Harlem), Jerry Robbins, David Kalstone, Maita, Johnny de Cuevas (whose father had been a marquis and had had a ballet troupe and whose mother was a Rockefeller), were all in attendance. It was heady stuff—and they were all so clever at recognizing passages from Shakespeare or the Bible that, as usual, I felt intimidated and kept wishing I’d majored in English rather than Chinese or kept going to Bible-study class. One afternoon Johnny de Cuevas brought along a kilo of caviar from the very same Caviarteria, he said, where his father had bought his supplies.

  David had a lingering resentment against Bobby Fizdale for breaking off their affair some time ago. At a Valentine’s Day party Fizdale held up to his sleeve a heart cookie that Maita had baked and asked, “What does this symbolize?” Crossly, David replied, “He who gets slapped.” When David had asked Fizdale why he didn’t want to continue the affair, Bobby had said that he had only one more goal in life and it wasn’t romantic; his only remaining ambition was to meet Mrs. Lytle Hull—a queen of society, as I learned, a rich patron of the opera and the first Mrs. Vincent Astor.

  David was going away for the summer. He would be sailing on the Queen Mary with James Merrill. David would spend June, July, and August with Stephen Orgel in Venice. Before leaving he made penne arrabbiata for just the two of us, then we settled in for a long reading of Elizabeth Bishop poems, after which David read me what he’d been writing about Ashbery. We drank a fierce amount of white wine. At the door, as I was leaving, David grabbed me, as I knew he would, and began to give me a long, wet kiss with tongue, as I knew he would. He had a sweet smile while he kissed me, which felt oddly too heterosexual to me—domestic, normal. Everything about the moment I hated. I was as repelled as Diana by Acteon, and in a spontaneous rage I stamped my foot, let out an angry groan, and left. David was deeply offended. He decided not to see me again, which I found out for sure only later but which I sensed right away.

  On the ship, however, Jimmy Merrill convinced him that there was too little love in the world to go around, so little that one should not spurn it in whatever form it came. David decided to forgive me and to go on with our friendship—sexless and ultimately satisfying to both of us. Later he referred (not often, only once or twice) to that decisive night as the time I “stamped my foot.” To be sure, I had twice tried to sleep with him but was impotent both times. I decided that was okay, I could just lie there and let him do with me what he would, and hoped that my evident lack of excitement would be more eloquent than words. But somehow that bodily “statement” hadn’t proved my point. He had kept thinking that if he applied himself a bit more strenuously, I would respond, like a stain to scrubbing.

  Now David wrote me an eloquent letter from Venice—and entirely characteristic of his generosity, he was able to change tactics with me and recast his love for me into friendship. We went on to have twelve years of an unforgettable and inimitable friendship, which ended only with his early death.

  As if the gods were punishing me for not loving David, they made me fall in love with the boy across the street, Keith McDermott, an actor who was in his mid-twenties but who looked as if he were seventeen—and someone who wanted my friendship but not my love. I could see Keith struggling with the same revulsion for me that I’d felt for David—and the same strong sense of attachment and friendship. But Keith had a more inventive strategy than I did with David, creating a “chastity club” and naming it after a saint (he was a lapsed Catholic). He invited me to be one of the two charter members. The idea was that we could sleep together and embrace but not have sex. Keith said that he was sick of sex and needed a break from it. Over the many years that I knew him he would often go off on retreats, stop eating meat or give up drink, or enter into a strenuous period he dubbed “health and beauty month.” He was small, blond, beautifully built, an excellent gymnast. He was physically fastidious and conscious; he seemed to have no habits, certainly no bad ones. Every movement he made was willed.

  I had met him through Larry Kert, the Broadway star, who’d played Tony in West Side Story and was the lead in Company. Larry would call me up on a rainy day whenever he was horny, and I’d hurry across the street. Keith was also a part-time pillow boy and houseboy.

  Larry had a curious way of treating us both like cheap sex toys, completely interchangeable and disposable, but when he engaged with us as people (as artists or just conscious suffering beings), he treated us with an unexpected seriousness and respect.

  Soon Keith and I were living together on West Eighty-sixth Street and Columbus Avenue in a large sixth-floor apartment that cost four hundred dollars a month. I had a small bedroom and a study full of light. Keith had a large bedroom. My teenage nephew, Keith Fleming, also came to live with us and had the former maid’s room. His mother (my sister) was hospitalized and was incapable of taking care of him.

  There was a kitchen, a storage room, a butler’s pantry, a dining room. I suppose it was an example of what had been called in the late nineteenth century “a classic six,” the standard middle-class apartment of the period, but what by now seemed an unimaginable luxury. Keith McDermott had understood we’d just be roommates and had been explicit about that. But I couldn’t resist tormenting him with my large cow eyes full of tears and yearning.

  Those years in the classic six on Eighty-sixth and Columbus were emotionally painful but artistically productive for me. I was so miserably in love with Keith that I started seeing a therapist again—but this one was a gay shrink at least, Dr. Charles Silverstein. Keith was the cause of both the suffering (unrequited love) and the creativity (he was always rehearsing or drawing or writing). He treated every action as an aesthetic occasion. We bought pink and ocher porch furniture but even it was too “heavy” for his tastes and soon he’d dragged it out into the hallway. Nothing short of total Japanese austerity suited him. But I wanted to have people to dinner, a bourgeois failing that awakened his scorn. At three in the morning Keith would be “writing” on large sheets of paper in illegible script. He and another actor would be memorizing scenes from Noël Coward—but backward, reciting the reversed scenes with all the same artificial panache of Coward and Gertrude Lawrence on the few old recordings we owned.

  Although Keith was at that time a Broadway actor, he idolized Robert Wilson, the avant-garde theater director. Keith even ended up sleeping with Wilson at our place. Soon I was willingly drawn into the revels. I was so lovesick over Keith that a couple of times I organized orgies, just so that in the melee of bodies I could touch Keith without his knowing it. When Keith moved to the West Coast, Bob Wilson and I got together a few times alone. He was a tall, handsome Texan who dressed in formal, dark clothes. He was my age, just a little younger, but his demeanor, that of an Eastern European diplomat, was ageless. Paul Schmidt, a poet and Russian scholar, had lived with Wilson for one year right after Wilson got out of the Waco high school and Schmidt finished serving in the army. Schmidt claimed that Wilson spent the whole time arranging their few sticks of furniture down to the last millimeter—and indeed Wilson’s striking stage tableaux depend on precise and innovative lighting and sets and even props.

  Keith and I worshipped everything being done by Bob Wilson, including his 1976 staging of Einstein on the Beach with music by Philip G
lass. It was performed at the Metropolitan Opera House and to us felt like the premiere of an opera by Wagner—something awesomely new and revolutionary, a new chapter in the story of the human spirit. It wasn’t the music so much that impressed us but the ingenuity and grandeur of the stage pictures. I wrote an article about the event for Christopher Street in which I praised the opera at the top of my lungs. I’ve never felt foolish afterward about my enthusiasm; I’m just happy that I had the wit to recognize at the time the advent of one of the great artistic moments of my generation, though I was far from alone in my praise. The opera was five hours long and people were free to come and go as they liked; I recall there was a sound booth from which one could watch and hear the performance while chatting to friends. Many people (stoned, to be sure) stood in the aisles weeping. Yet the whole event was cool—a train, a trial, a rocket launch. In many of the sections the chorus merely sang numbers over and over (“one, two, thirteen…”)—not a bad liturgy for Einstein. The rumor was that the cost of mounting the production burdened Wilson with an enormous debt for the next decade.

  LSD was an occasional part of our lives in the 1970s. I would never have dreamed of dropping acid every weekend or even every month or even every half year. For me it was too big an event, a quasi-religious ceremony, and far too dangerous. Acid was much stronger in those years, lasting for twenty-four hours and sometimes driving people we knew around the bend. I remember one weekend at a house out on Fire Island when our host discovered that he’d invited too many guests and didn’t have enough beds for everyone. His solution was to mix LSD into the drinks, unbeknownst to the guests. Then he pulled a few mattresses and pillows into one room, which he declared the kiddies’ room, and herded us all in there gabbling and sobbing and laughing for the next twenty-four hours. We went on a stroll around the community, which at least had no cars so we couldn’t get tangled up in traffic and damaged, though I suppose we could have gone swimming at midnight and drowned. We visited one house where the house pet was an Irish wolfhound the size of a pony. Though the dog was so sweet he was called Baby, his demonic owner decided to terrorize us by showing us his enormous claws, as big as a pterodactyl’s, and saying, “He could tear you apart with these—just rip out your throat.” We were so infantilized by hallucinogens, we sobbed at the thought and our teeth chattered with fear.

  Everyone, I suppose, has different notions about how much drug use constitutes abuse. In the early 1990s a French psychiatrist interviewed me and wrote an article about me as a typical drug addict of the 1970s. I thought she was overreacting, though I humored her since she was so keen on her article. In the 1970s I almost never bought marijuana but I’d smoke a joint if someone offered it, usually about once a week (not often by human standards though excessive for a presidential candidate, it seems). Over the decade I probably went on twenty acid trips maximum, none of them good but all of them memorable and life-changing. I didn’t know people rich enough to afford cocaine, though occasionally a well-heeled trick would get me high. Most of my drug use was connected to sex. Marijuana and quaaludes (a muscle relaxer) and a glass of wine or two would make me available to almost anyone’s desires. I understood why prostitutes were often high.

  Quaaludes also made me sloppy. One night at Ruskay’s restaurant on Columbus Avenue I must have tucked the tablecloth instead of a napkin into my belt. When I got up to leave, I trailed the plates, glasses, and silverware behind me as I staggered along, saluting friends obliviously, heading for the exit, a big smile on my face.

  My main problem, however, was drink. I never drank during the day, but in the evening I started sipping wine with dinner and kept on until I passed out. I could easily get through two bottles a night. In 1983 when I couldn’t get up the ladder to my loft bed, I decided that I’d become so absurd I should stop drinking forever—which I did. A year before I’d stopped smoking. Soon I’d gone from a skinny, boyish smoker, always talking and grinning drunkenly in the evening, to a fat, old-mannish sobersides who went to bed early. A profile in the newspaper referred to my “matronly” chin.

  * * *

  Keith, like many Americans, had not grown up with classical music, though he was eager to be introduced to it. We were so poor we didn’t have many 33⅓ records but would listen over and over to the few we had, especially a magical recording of Schumann’s Kreisleriana played by Alicia de Larrocha, of all people (since she was Spanish, we thought she was supposed to play Spanish music exclusively, just as gay writers were by then only being allowed to write gay fiction).

  To support my nephew, I had to take a job with a chemical company that had, last time I looked, generated sales of more than six billion dollars in one year. This was by far the worst job I ever had as a grown-up.

  I was in the public relations department and my first task was to try to justify to stockholders and government regulators why the company should be making flammable children’s pajamas. Then I was supposed to justify its extensive holdings in South Africa under apartheid. I was sick to my stomach every day. We were supposed to be in the office from eight A.M. to eight P.M., at least, six days out of seven. I was in charge of shepherding through production the annual report to stockholders, a glossy four-color magazine that was designed to explain why the company was losing money. All of the vice presidents, and there were a great number of them, were tightly guarded by high-paid executive secretaries warding off every disturbance and insuring their constant repose within their calm offices on the highest floor. They struck me as fetuses being maintained in a warm chemical bath under artificial light. I would regularly send around to each of them a request for information that I could include in the annual report. But, invisible in their luxurious offices, each of the twenty vice presidents would then forward my request to the next vice president, making sure that none ever answered. Everyone in the building was afraid to make a decision, and the entire organization was paralyzed with fear. Even the annual report couldn’t be turned out by the company, but must be handed over to an expensive freelance outfit that specialized in business publications. I wanted a brilliant fashion photographer I knew to take the executives’ group picture, jazz it up, but my boss—a duplicitous, angry woman (and the only female vice president)—met my friend Edgar and explained, in a voice shaking with rage, that no gay person was ever to be allowed on the executive floor, and what had I been thinking?

  My only consolation during this difficult period was the two Keiths, my nephew and the actor I was in love with. While living with me, my nephew reawakened to all the beauties of literature and began to write with great fluency and charm. At my suggestion he read Lord Chesterfield’s Letters and the Abbé Prévost’s Manon Lescaut and Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma. He worked hard at after-school jobs and got terrific grades at the private school around the corner where I sent him. But my greatest pleasure came from our long conversations about life and literature—which were of course held under the benign and refined supervision of Proust. My nephew loved music and became an accomplished composer and singer, but his greatest ardor was for literature, in which even as a teenager he was able to find the words he needed for his own life. Although he was just sixteen and his girlfriend fourteen, both of them were reading Lolita and Manon—which were versions of their own loves and passions and misadventures. Although since then I’ve taught creative writing and literature to hundreds of students over three decades, I never had such eager students as those first two. They were able to move quickly beyond the language of the eighteenth century and the nineteenth century or even the elegant ironies of Nabokov to find the unclouded mirror they were searching for. My nephew went on to write a haunting memoir about that time, The Boy with the Thorn in His Side, and Original Youth, a biographical study of my first sixteen years, which was a factually correct version of the period covered by my semiautobiographical novel A Boy’s Own Story.

  When I started work on a new novel, I’d put in little bits here and there just for him—allusions only Keith would get,
funny turns of phrase and sexy descriptions of dark-skinned girls intended for his amusement.

  Keith McDermott was less a reader then than my nephew, less hungry, but he nevertheless rode his own interests hard—his taste for the very first recordings of Steve Reich or for the plays of Robert Wilson or the dance inventions of Lucinda Child. More than my nephew and more than me, he wanted to be original and experimental—and this urgency and formalist absolutism he brought into our big, underfurnished apartment.

  Before I started working at the chemical company I was trying to eke out a living writing managed textbooks. They were histories of the United States or introductory psychology texts designed for college freshmen or sophomores. Well-established academics outlined the content and photocopied numerous articles of the latest research and would present the whole bundle to me along with a cut-and-paste collation of the best passages in already existing competing textbooks. My job was to synthesize all this material into vivid, crystalline prose—for which I’d receive a flat fee of three hundred dollars a chapter. I had a secretary who’d show up every day to whom I’d dictate my synthesis—then, promptly at one, we’d have sex.

  Although I remember nothing of the thousand-page psychology textbook, I wrote not one but two thousand-page histories of the United States. Both of them were lousy and never “took off” in the way that the editors had hoped—never becoming widely adopted, though the second one was a harbinger of “political correctness” and had far more information on African-Americans, Native Americans, Asian-Americans, and Spanish-Americans than was typical for the time. Nevertheless, I learned a lot from them. When I wrote a review of one of Gore Vidal’s books of essays, for instance, I was able to criticize his assumption that all the founding fathers were greedy and acting out of self-interest. I had just read the most recent statistical analyses of what happened to the personal wealth of the founders—and in almost every case the Revolution diminished rather than augmented their fortunes. The founders had clearly been for the most part idealists. Years later when I came to write two historical novels, Fanny: A Fiction and Hotel de Dream, all that American history helped me orient myself into the intricacies of born-again fervor and utopianism and abolitionism in the 1820s (Fanny) or of urbanization and sensational journalism and “vice” in the 1890s (Hotel).