City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s (16 page)

When eventually I realized that my novel wasn’t going to sell, I wasted another year rewriting it, but even in its newest version everyone was indifferent or allergic to it. The horror of having waited so long to be published and then achieving my goal, only to have my next book turned down flat, filled me with dread. I felt that in choosing literature as a career I’d placed all my money on a single number and it had lost.

When I made this melodramatic declaration to a friend, he said, “What else were you planning to do with your life? Be an accountant? Civil engineer?”

David Kalstone was not only the warmest and most entertaining person I knew, he was also an expert in maneuvering in the world of academics and intellectuals. If I’d say something arrogant in an essay I was showing him that was destined for print, he’d write a tiny question mark in tentative pencil in the margin, and I’d instantly eliminate the offense. We went over every word the other one wrote.

I longed to have him as my best friend forever, but I recognized that his love for me was a constant source of anguish for him. I was ready to attribute my reluctance to sleep with him to a “neurosis” on my part, an inability to become intimate with the person I liked best, but I was fed up with conversations in which I was made to feel guilty for my tastes and aversions to begin with. David, I knew, nursed hopes that if he was patient enough, I’d overcome my “hang-ups” about “intimacy.” I just wasn’t attracted to him, putting us on a collision course.

Once we got terribly drunk and I asked David if as a Jew he considered himself superior to me as a gentile. He said yes. I was surprised since I must secretly have always considered WASPs to be superior to everyone else. I knew that Jews traditionally considered themselves the chosen people, but I hadn’t suspected they actually believed in that high claim. David was an entirely secular Jew, but even he retained this in-the-bone sense of orthodox superiority. He could be humorously dismissive about the “dear Jews,” and the sobriety of his clothes, the hushed elegance of his manners, his indifference to money (except as a means of financing his summer trips to Venice), all attested to his assiduity in avoiding the caricatural image of the Jew, but nevertheless he sometimes indicated that he considered his fellow Jews to be less alcoholic, better family men, more intellectually acute, warmer, kinder, and saner than all these slightly batty and cruel and dirty gentiles running about. Of course the whole Jew/gentile paradigm seemed almost far-fetched to us as friends since our intimacy defied all categories.

Our happiness together remains one of my most vivid and fructifying memories; when we are young and literary, we often experience things in the present with a nostalgia-in-advance, but we seldom guess what we will truly prize years from now. I always placed a high value on friendship, but even I had no way of guessing back then that it was more fun to get drunk with a friend than with
a lover. Love is a source of anxiety until it is a source of boredom; only friendship feeds the spirit. Love raises great expectations in us that it never satisfies; the hopes based on friendship are milder and in the present, and they exist only because they have already been rewarded. Love is a script about just a few repeated themes we have a hard time following, though we make every effort to conform to its tone. Friendship is a
permis de séjour
that enables us to go anywhere and do anything exactly as our whims dictate.

The last few months that I was in the Bay Area in early 1972 I lived in Stephen Orgel’s house. An ex-lover of David’s from Harvard days, Stephen embraced me as a friend because David vouched for me. With what I later discovered would be his usual generosity Stephen allowed me to stay there and drive his car for the two months he was away. I’d come home late at night driving across the Bay Bridge and head up to the Berkeley Hills where I’d enter through the little garden gate beside the Princess plant and go into the low-eaved Arts and Crafts cottage with its ceramics from the period and its big, melodramatic Victorian prints of scenes from Shakespeare.

One night a young couple who worked with me—he was a Rhodes scholar and former football player, she was a blond gymnast and talented illustrator—followed me home. They were shocked by how drunkenly I’d weaved my way across the bridge and said they were worried about my chances for survival. They wanted to have sex with me, but I wasn’t sure that I was ready for a three-way with a woman, not even such a beautiful, friendly, easygoing woman and a handsome athlete with the square-jawed face of the young Hemingway. Eventually, when we were all safely back in New York, we did try a three-way, and he and I later had a two-way, but I was always puzzled by their interest in me and by their sexual virtuosity. They were too beautiful for me. In
those days we always assumed that a bisexual (especially, for some reason, a bisexual man) was really a homosexual in the closet. We would wait with amused smiles till he eventually declared his true colors, which we naturally assumed would be pink and mauve. But as I learned a decade later in Paris, the world is full of genuine bisexuals, though most of them keep a low profile, not because they’re ashamed but because everyone distrusts and fears them. Tribes have only two ways of treating interstitial members; they either make them into gods or banish them. Yet as a trend if not a reality, androgyny and bisexuality were at the time being treated by the Sunday supplements as the taste of the moment. Articles and gossip columns were full of descriptions of just such young people, but I’d never been sure they really existed.

When the
Saturday Review
went under and I returned to New York after less than a year, I felt that I’d missed out on the best parts of California by not driving out of town on the weekends to camp under the redwoods, or beside the hot sulfur-water pools near the Russian River, or in the Zen monastery an hour away. I’d wasted my time smoking in bars and complaining because San Francisco didn’t enjoy exactly the same advantages as New York. Older, more secure people can take pleasure almost anywhere they go, but young people like us—especially recent converts to New York—had to justify our strange, demanding, and by no means obviously rewarding religion by rejecting all other cults and sacred sites.

But God I was happy to be back in New York! I liked being able to find people on the street at two and three in the morning. I liked calling up all my friends and talking for hours on the phone. I liked the feeling that everything in New York was being
observed
. If I saw something strange on the street, it would end up in a cartoon in the
New Yorker
the following week. If the subway stalled, an article about it would be in the
New York Times
the next morning—and
after all it was a national newspaper. If I got up in a restaurant and passed four tables on the way to the loo, there would be at least three conversations I’d be dying to join. The slightly glaucous narcissism of San Francisco had been replaced by the rabid egotism of New York.

Soon I’d stumbled into a part-time job back in New York as an editor and staff writer for the venerable hardcover quarterly
Horizon
. We had to think up articles of general cultural interest, but ones that wouldn’t be dated by the time they finally came out after three months of lead time. It was a good job for me, given my wide-ranging reading, but I suddenly had much less authority than before and the editors were much more hesitant before committing themselves to a story idea. With
Horizon
, the illustrations were as important as the text and we usually started with them. An idea could be nixed out of hand if it didn’t promise sufficient visual richness.

The most interesting story idea I thought up was to have Jan Morris write about Ibn Battuta, the late-medieval Arab traveler who traversed the whole Muslim world from Spain to China, from Turkey to Egypt and on into sub-Saharan Africa. Ibn Battuta made the trip twice—once when that world was still unified and then again decades later when it was beginning to fall apart. I knew that Jan Morris, in her earlier gender incarnation as a man, James Morris, a celebrated travel writer, had made the same trip herself.

Morris had just had her sex-change operation and published her autobiography,
Conundrum
. She came in to discuss the Ibn Battuta assignment, a hearty, middle-aged woman in a wool skirt and sensible shoes. Apparently she was back in Wales with her wife, and the two women were living together as sisters. Just the other day I read that now that civil partnership is permitted in Britain, she and her wife have married again. The English historian J. H. Plumb predicted that within a matter of minutes of arriving at the
offices of
Horizon
, Morris would produce a cherished telegram from her son in India telling her that her plans for gender-reassignment surgery were all right by him. Right on schedule Jan pulled out the telegram. When she left my office, the woman at the next desk asked me, “Who was that?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Well, you can tell she’s a woman who really knows who she is!”

I would see Jan occasionally over the years and she always seemed fearless, hyperproductive, and a bit solitary. Once in Australia a bunch of us writers at the Adelaide Festival were ferried off to the beach, but Jan stayed behind with the bus driver to chat. Later I asked her why she’d hung back with him and she said, “He’s sort of my type.” Once in New York I asked her if she jogged to keep her figure, and she modestly touched her full breasts and said, “It’s rather hard for us older women to jog.” Usually she spoke of her latest writing project; she had a well-organized, well-stocked mind, a capacious curiosity, excellent and penetrating powers of analysis, an eye for the vivid, life-giving detail, and an easy and generous flow of words.

When I first met her at
Horizon
, I told her that one day at the Gotham Book Mart I’d started reading a thick old book published in the 1930s about the first sex change in history,
Man into Woman
. It had so hypnotized me that I’d slumped to the floor and read straight through, never going back to my office at Time-Life as lunch hour became the cocktail hour. This was the book that also inspired David Ebershoff decades later when he wrote his brilliant novel
The Danish Girl
. The haunting 1930s book had black-and-white snapshots of the book’s subject, the painter Lili Elbe (née Einar Wegener), before and after. In the after pictures she looked sickly and bony and nearly transparent in her cloche hat as she staggered around a garden held up by a matronly nurse. It also showed samples of her handwriting before and after, slanted letters
versus round ones, and even of her painting (strong oils versus pretty pastels). She’d been so determined to become a real woman that she’d had a final operation in order to bear children—and this surgery killed her (I always wondered what the procedure could possibly have been). Her diary has heartbreaking entries of deep fear and superficial optimism. The doctor has vanished. She feels weaker and weaker, and her husband (an old family friend) attends her faithfully. Now an infection has set in…

Jan said to me, “If you think the book intrigued you, imagine the effect it had on me!”

But truthfully I couldn’t imagine its having a greater influence on Jan than on me. It opened up a path that I never felt tempted to take but that burned its way right through my imagination. The “pre-op” Danish painter Wegener had never felt tempted by homosexuality, no more than Jan claimed to have been. Yet recently I heard someone, an ignorant young gay man, refer to her as “gay.”

David and I were back to our old New York routine of diet dinners at Duff’s and long evenings of reading. Our latest project was to read all of Dante, passage by passage, starting in Italian and then in English. We had all the books about Dante at our side and tried delving into every stylistic, exegetical, and historical complexity.

But the book never came to life for me. It felt terribly underwritten. Nor could I imagine Dante actually writing it—his account of its semidivine origins was all too convincing. It didn’t seem like an act of brooding and hatching, of becoming. No, it was pure being, or rather it existed in an ungrateful, granitic state of having long already been. I might have said that it was too classical for my tastes, though it had thrilled me as a high school student to work my way through the first four books of
The Aeneid
in Latin. Virgil’s account of Dido’s death had made me weep in a way that Francesca’s sorry fate in
The Divine Comedy
never would. I could
enjoy the chaste beauty of Virgil’s language, but Dante gave me no way in. When I voiced some of these doubts, David said, “Dante is not being judged.”

I knew that. It was an error of judgment on my part, but I wasn’t interested in being a critic, just a novelist. I didn’t have to hand out grades to the classics; my only job was to filch what I needed from any available literary nest. In any event,
The Divine Comedy
seemed too confident, with no wound in its side, no crack in the bell, nothing vulnerable or hesitant, no stuttering. It interested me no more than a big full-dress late-medieval painting of the pietà, highly glazed and full of angels and donors, complete with all three Marys and a skinny, bleeding Christ. To be sure, in Dante Christ had several wounds in his side, but not one of them seemed to bleed my blood, no more than Dante’s harsh judgment of his old teacher Brunetto Latini for having been homosexual seemed humane or feeling to me. I could see nothing in Dante but cold self-confidence and abstract rapture and an unimaginative application of the rules to desires, like stays pressing into bulging flesh.

My own confidence, of course, was worn down to the nub and I trusted none of my opinions. I felt foolish with my part-time job, my failed West Coast adventure, my roach-trap apartment, my minuscule salary, my frayed wardrobe. The government audited me, perhaps because I’d suddenly gone from earning a lot to earning so little and the IRS thought this hardly credible. I remember those two big auditors in their carefully pressed suits and big, polished lace-up shoes sitting on my dirty little mattress on the floor and near the overflowing garbage sack and smelling the roach spray as they opened their briefcases and worked through my records. Quickly convinced that I was concealing nothing, they turned green and hurried away. At that time a highly successful TV producer from England I knew intimidated me into inviting him upstairs to my place, where he forced himself upon me and virtually raped me.
Later he told a mutual friend he’d never seen such poverty. On reflection, I thought my poverty was a good partner to my obvious passivity.