City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [115]
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 Sauguet 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