City Boy

by Edmund White

  Chris hung on my every word and started booking me for every evening. He loved to take pictures of me and shot an author photo for my novel Nocturnes for the King of Naples in which by mistake he used an expensive red filter that brought out the circles under my eyes and turned my hair a shade darker and my skin a shade paler. When he took the picture in Key West for States of Desire two years later, he produced the best photo of me anyone ever did, by which of course I mean the most flattering. I was rested and had just lost twenty pounds.

  Chris had a demonic energy and suddenly it all seemed lavished on me. He quizzed me endlessly about my family and friends. When he met my mother, he called her by her first name, Delilah, and made her many highballs. He listened to her monologues nodding along and murmuring assent like someone in a Pentecostal church, but his eyes were wandering and he couldn’t have repeated a thing beyond the last thing she’d said, still echoing in his ears.

  In the middle of all this, my stepmother phoned me to tell me that my father had died, on January 27, 1979. He’d been born on December 18, 1905. She said that she was going to bury him in two days outside Findlay, Ohio, where her family lived. I called my sister and made plans to rendezvous with her in Toledo, where we’d rent a car and drive to the funeral home. I reserved a seat on a plane to Cleveland with a connecting flight to Toledo. My sister would be coming from Chicago, where she lived.

  Chris held me all night. He could be warm and loving, when he wasn’t subject to jealous rages.

  The next morning at six A.M. I staggered out onto the nearly empty street and hailed the first driver. A Haitian who barely spoke English, he didn’t know where he was going. He had no idea where the airport was. He was high on something. He wasn’t on the highway headed for the airport but rather aimlessly and recklessly roaming the streets of Brooklyn. He looked so crazy that he resembled the devil in a bad Brazilian movie. When I saw another taxi, I leaped out and got into that car.

  I missed my plane. All of my complicated feelings about my father’s death fed into my anxiety about not missing the funeral. I reached my sister and worked out new plans, and eventually we made it to the funeral parlor. Our father seemed to have shrunk and to have been bathed in a white wax, like an expensive white eggplant that the greengrocer fears will go off.

  My father’s death had a much more powerful effect on me than my mother’s many years later, possibly because I was on good terms with her and had supported her for a decade. My father, however, I’d rejected, just as I’d always felt he’d rejected me. I hadn’t seen him for a decade except briefly a few months before he died when I was passing through Cincinnati.

  When I saw him in that open coffin in that tawdry little funeral home, it seemed absurd that I’d ever attributed such satanic powers to him. Here he was, this tiny waxen doll, painted and somehow reconfigured. No wonder they had so many strong-smelling flowers; a distinct odor of rotting meat permeated the room.

  I’d often wondered if I would have had a better understanding with my father if I’d been straight. When in 2003 my nephew wrote a book about my childhood, he interviewed a neighbor boy who said that Mr. White had been a wonderful man who’d introduced him to the Cincinnati Symphony by inviting him to concerts. Perhaps if I’d been straight and played softball with my dad, he would have liked me.

  But if I’d been straight, I would have been an entirely different person. I would never have turned toward writing with a burning desire to confess, to understand, to justify myself in the eyes of others. If I’d been straight, I wouldn’t have been impelled to live in New York and to choose the hard poverty of bohemia over the soft comfort of the business world. My father was disappointed because I didn’t take over his business. He was embarrassed by my homosexuality.

  Once he died, I began to see him more as the misanthropic bore he was rather than the sadist I’d conjured up. He was certainly the dullest man who ever lived—and he seemed half-dead even while he was still living. Before his death I had terrible dreams in the late seventies in which I was trapped inside a series of mummiform coffins that perfectly resembled me but that were inert. I feared that like my father I was already dead to the world, alive but contained within a frame that perfectly resembled me but that was larger and lifeless.

  Chris had been an actor and was still a photographer, but he wanted to be a writer. During our three months in Key West he wrote the first page of a novella 156 times and never got beyond it. He was always angry and frustrated, balling up each rejected page as soon as he ripped it out of the typewriter. His cat was always escaping and going under the house in the crawl space, and Chris was always down there shouting at it. But Key West being a writers’ colony, as soon as important people in the literary world came by, he was all smiles.

  He earned his meager, meager living as the administrative assistant to Virgil Thomson, the composer. Born in 1896, Virgil was in his early eighties by then. He was dumpy and crabby and terribly deaf—a horrible sort of deafness for a composer that transposed some but not all notes a few intervals upward. People had to shout to get through to him, and a concert was torture for him. His usual solution to the babble and screech around him was to fall asleep. He’d doze off at the table unless addressed directly. Then he’d open his eyes and say mildly, “Yes, baby?” without missing a beat.

  The formative influence in Virgil’s life and career had been Gertrude Stein, with whom he’d written two operas. He said that as soon as he and Stein first met in Paris, they got along like two Harvard men. I’d seen The Mother of Us All, which is about Susan B. Anthony, not once but twice, first at Hunter College and once years later at the New York City Opera. When I first met him, Virgil was still licking his wounds after the failure of his first new opera in forty years, Lord Byron, a big conspicuous flop in 1972 at the Juilliard School in New York directed by John Houseman. The Metropolitan Opera had commissioned the work but never put it on. The New York Times’ music critic had slammed it, calling it “cutesy” and complaining, “All those waltzes!” (Funny, no one ever made the same objection to Der Rosenkavalier or A Little Night Music.) The thumbs-down must have been particularly galling since Virgil himself had been the leading critic in New York for many years and had mastered the art of dismissing others, once calling Heifetz’s ultraromantic playing of the violin “silk pajama music.” Once I saw a staged production of another Stein text Virgil had set, Capitals, Capitals, in a small theater on the West Side, where it was teamed up with Erik Satie’s Socrate. In the Satie, the Princess Yasmin Aga Khan, the daughter of Rita Hayworth, sang with a sweet, small voice.

  Chris Cox worshipped Virgil in a nice friendly Southern boy-to-man way. Chris could be deferential without being cringing and was well-informed about every detail of Virgil’s life, including the entire dramatis personae he’d accumulated over many years. Chris was anything but a silly chorus boy, but he did have the actor’s view of life as essentially glamorous, and for him Virgil was the height of sophistication, genius—even history! Chris was sometimes irritated with me because of my big mouth. Once I said in his and Virgil’s company, “Oh, God, that was the era before Balanchine found his way and they were still putting on terrible Americana things like Filling Station, this terrible ballet where—” Chris was violently kicking me under the table; Virgil had written the score, though luckily he was too deaf to have heard me. Another time Chris introduced me to Dominique Nabokov, soon after her husband, the composer Nicholas Nabokov (the writer’s cousin), had died. I was so impressed with the Nabokov name that I chattered hysterically all evening though my shins were black-and-blue the next day. Chris knew the art of small talk, whereas all my talk was big and ponderous or at least gauche and self-serving.

  Virgil was part of history since he’d studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, had first befriended Aaron Copland in the 1920s, and had taught orchestration to Ned Rorem, who’d been Virgil’s copyist in the 1950s. Virgil was friendly with the French violinist Yvonne de Casa Fuerte and the composer Henri Saug
uet and spoke of them often. To Chris, they were all household gods. Especially since he’d traveled to Paris with Virgil and been introduced to them and been invited to dinner by Mary McCarthy, who drew him aside to a window seat and chatted with him for a full twenty minutes (she was a diplomat’s wife).

  Virgil had a high, nasal voice and could deliver some real zingers with a deadpan expression. He called everyone “baby.” When I was working on A Boy’s Own Story in Key West, Virgil came to stay with Chris and me in a big, old-fashioned house with a porch and swings, a living room and a dining room, three bedrooms, and, in the huge garden, a grapefruit tree, an orange tree, and a plant producing tiny bananas. I gave Virgil the first chapter of my novel to read. He spent a day with it, then came shuffling out of his room and screeched, “As we say back in Missouri, baby, ‘a lot of wash and not much hang-out.’” Another Southerner, by then my colleague at Columbia, Elizabeth Hardwick, damned my book by saying with a lilt and a dance step, “Ah don’ know, honey, it’s awfully ‘I did it myyy way!’” In Virgil’s case, I think his only idea of “gay literature” was pornography, and he was disappointed that my book was low on the peter meter.

  I might not have had the courage to work on my novel if I hadn’t been supported by my writers’ group, the Violet Quill. The six or seven of us only met eight times over a year and a half, but the thought that other gay men of one’s age and experience were waiting to read one’s latest chapter gave me, at least, the strength to go on. I felt that in States of Desire I’d written about dozens of other gay men across the country, but now I wanted to write in depth about one child and adolescent: me. It seems hard to believe now but at the time almost no one had written a coming-out story, the tale that each of us told one another in bed as pillow talk. We’d all been telling that story for years and years and to us it seemed banal, but when written down, it seemed brand-new.

  Virgil lived in the Chelsea Hotel in the original wood-paneled manager’s suite. On the wall hung a large portrait of Virgil as a young man by Florine Stettheimer (she’d done the original cellophane sets for Four Saints in Three Acts in 1934 at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford). Virgil was a simple but excellent cook. Chris would do the shopping and chopping, but Virgil knew how to bring it all together into a delicious dinner—a green salad, a tarragon chicken, a purée de pommes de terre (he couldn’t just call it mashed potatoes), and a store-bought dessert. Virgil’s lover of fifty years, Maurice Grosser, who painted blown-up Cézanne-inspired apples, was often in attendance. Though he was up in his late seventies, he still rode a motorcycle and Virgil said of him, admiringly, “He is the only man of my generation who can still undrape becomingly.” Maurice was the oldest person I knew in the 1980s to die of AIDS, which was also a distinction. He was indisputably sexually active. Although Virgil seldom spoke of homosexuality, he had a darting eye and an asp’s tongue and a nice sense of humor. Once when he asked me what a certain boy looked like, I said, “He has a charming body,” and Virgil cracked up over the charming and said, “Not exactly the quality one looks for in a man’s body.” In Key West he would stay in his bedroom in bed all day long, harrumphing and making terrible sounds of eructation. Then at six thirty he’d emerge perfectly dressed in a seersucker suit and a bright yellow bow tie. He’d be shaking the cocktail shaker within seconds. One night we all three got terribly drunk and at a gay disco we sat in the garden, and Virgil, reeling with drink, told us that as a young man he’d been pursued by many virile men because of his beautiful ass. It was the toad recalling his days as a prince.

  Chris was cataloging half a century’s worth of saved letters, scores, program notes, reviews, photos, and memorabilia so that Virgil could sell the lot to Yale. The Beinecke Library there must doubly have valued Virgil’s papers since it already possessed Gertrude Stein’s archives—and even the armchair she mentions in the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, the very piece of furniture that Ezra Pound broke while hectoring Stein and Toklas with his theories and opinions. The chair was especially dear to the ladies because Alice had done the petit-point upholstery following a design Picasso had drawn directly onto the fabric for her. Pound’s bad behavior led Stein to declare that he was a village explainer, which was all very well if one were a village but “if not, not.”

  Virgil invited Chris and me to dinner with Christopher Isherwood and his lover, the artist Don Bachardy. We were all big drinkers in those days and we were soon screaming with merriment. Isherwood was extremely approachable and unpretentious. I stayed friends with him and Don for years (Don and I are still friends). Chris Isherwood didn’t like to receive letters since he had no time or inclination to answer them (he would have liked the e-mail era); he didn’t mind if I called him, however. In fact he always picked up the phone eagerly. He had no hesitation about laughing if one became a bit pompous. I remember once calling him from Key West, where I was reading (in English—I hadn’t yet learned French) Chateaubriand’s Mémoires. I read Chris the closing pages over the phone, all about grabbing the Holy Cross and slowly descending into the tomb. I had tears in my eyes at the grandeur of it all, and Chris burst into uncontrollable laughter. Later when I saw Keith McDermott in the stage adaptation of A Meeting by the River, Chris’s novel about holy men in Asia, the monks were also laughing all the time, falling about with rocking fous rires … Laughter was an essential part of Chris’s idea of sanctity. Back then I specially liked his exuberant irreverence because I had not yet become indifferent to religion. Now I shrug when the subject comes up, but then I still described myself as a “mystical atheist,” as if I were at least impressed by piety—as if I thought it had a place in the world if not in mine. Now I have a Voltairean contempt for it, though Voltaire it seems was actually a pantheist. Isherwood’s struggles to meditate and to embrace Vedanta were always amusingly credible. In the story “Paul” from Down There on a Visit he wrote in such a droll way about his efforts to sit in his Los Angeles apartment with a beautiful drug addict and meditate—neither of them could ever empty his mind of all thought. I flew out to Los Angeles several times to visit Chris and Don. Don drew me and years later had an intense session with my French lover, Hubert, who was already dying of AIDS. As Don drew Hubert’s eyes, Hubert burst into tears. When Don drew the nose, Hubert’s nose started running. When Don drew his mouth, Hubert vomited. To be sure, Hubert was already quite ill, but Don’s intense scrutiny was like a witch doctor’s way of exorcising devils.

  Chris Cox and I invited Isherwood and Bachardy to my place for dinner the very next night after we met them that first time at Virgil’s. I spent the whole hungover day buying the twelve kinds of fish necessary for Julia Child’s recipe of marmite Dieppoise with its complex ivory sauce. It was a triumph and we all screamed with laughter till dawn. Now that I no longer drink, I wonder if I’m capable of such fierce, joyful abandon, such total immersion in the high tides of laughter and forgetting.

  * * *

  Chris Cox became almost pathologically jealous of me. I felt that he was actually envious of my slowly burgeoning and belated “career” (which precisely because it was just beginning, we could still imagine might truly blossom someday). It was easier, however, for him to say he was sexually and romantically jealous and possessive. I would leave his apartment and then walk into mine to hear the phone ringing. “Why did it take you twenty minutes to get home instead of fifteen? What were you doing? Did you duck into a doorway with some tall, dark, and handsome stranger? Come on, you can tell me. That’s what happened, right?” I could hear him inhaling on his cigarette and blowing the smoke out of his nose like some condensed form of rage. “Huh? Is that what happened? Don’t think I’m naïve. I know what a little slut you are. Just can’t pass up a chance of getting fucked, can you?”

  When I’d arrive at his loft, he’d embrace me tightly and I’d be flattered and moved until I realized he was sticking a hand down the back of my pants to see if my asshole was wet from just getting fucked. He’d push me away and say, “How many times you
been fucked today, huh?” He’d be genuinely angry.

  If it had been a sex game once a fortnight, I would have thought it was a turn-on, but as a constant presence in our lives, as if we were in a three-way marriage with his jealousy, it was an intolerable invasion of my sense of freedom. I’d been hopelessly in love with three men and I’d spent all my time suppressing my feelings of jealousy as uncivilized and in any event a fruitless expense of spirit. Now Chris was letting jealousy consume him completely, nor did he question his right to be jealous.

  At first, after my years of being rejected by Keith McDermott, I was starved for even this pathological form of devotion. My shrink said that I had such low self-esteem that only a nutcase could send a strong enough signal to get through to me. But soon I resented Chris’s jealous interrogations and shakedowns, especially since I’d always been an apostle of promiscuity.

  My new editor was Bill Whitehead at Dutton, a funny, handsome man who would die of AIDS at age forty-four in 1987. He developed a new paperback line and brought Chris to work for him as his assistant. Chris was perfect for the job—his meticulousness, his charm, his energy and devotion to Bill and his authors, his savviness about all the names in New York (that’s what New Yorkiness is, primarily: the recognition of a thousand names and faces).

  I had a difficult acquaintance, the Southern Gothic writer Coleman Dowell, whom Chris befriended. When gay men say in their personals, “No drama queens, please,” they are trying to avoid someone like Coleman. He was from a poor family in Kentucky but lied and said he was rich and that his family owned Heaven Hill bourbon. What he didn’t want to admit was that his psychiatrist lover, Bert, was supporting him. Cole wrote elaborately postmodernist novels with Chinese-box narrators, but they were all about spiteful people in positions of power double-dealing one another—or they were rural-Kentucky stories about a farmer cursed with a huge penis, a dick too big for any woman to handle (finally a teenage boy was able to take it all). Ludicrous as these stories were, no one quite saw them in all their pornographic absurdity since they were rendered with such dodgy modernist devices and in an opaque Faulknerian style.