City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [113]
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