City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [128]
David attributed more savoir vivre to me than I really possessed and would often greet my innocent remarks with a sly or knowing smile. He had an affair with Mariana Cook, a photographer who became a friend of mine. Then he fell for Sarah, a complex blond beauty who was the daughter of Peter Matthiessen, the American naturalist and novelist. Matthiessen was some sort of Zen master who’d built a meditation pavilion in his garden, but she made him sound cruel and conceited. His uncle had been F. O. Matthiessen, the famous homosexual Harvard professor who wrote American Renaissance, about Emerson and Whitman—and who committed suicide by jumping from a window in 1950. Sarah complained that her father wouldn’t allow the uncle’s name to be mentioned in his presence, but I have no idea if that was true. Sarah seemed high-strung but was so WASP that David doted on her.
Jamaica Kincaid was a friend of ours in those exciting days—a tall black woman with a much smaller husband, the composer Allen Shawn, brother of the actor and playwright Wally Shawn, and they were of course the sons of the longtime New Yorker editor William Shawn. When I ran into Jamaica recently after two decades of not seeing her, I asked timidly, “Do you remember me?” and she overwhelmed me by saying, “Of course I remember you—those were some of the happiest days of my life!”
They were happy days for me, too. David was attachant and dear. Susan could be impossibly vain and imperious, but she was also protective and generous. She wrote a blurb for my breakthrough novel, A Boy’s Own Story, which she did in her usual serious, thorough, time-consuming way. Just to write a few lines she felt she had to reread all three of my novels as well as States of Desire. She put me up for a seven-thousand-dollar prize at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which I won, and wrote a letter of recommendation for a twenty-thousand-dollar Guggenheim Fellowship, which I received. After A Boy’s Own Story came out she said, “You’ll never be poor again in your life.” And though I’ve often had to scramble to pay the rent, what she said was true—I was never really desperate again.
I liked to cook for Susan, though I lived so far from the nearest good supermarket, Balducci’s, that I wore myself out carrying groceries through the streets. My menus were also so elaborate that I spent too much money buying all those bay scallops and veal cutlets and devoted too many hours to preparing my heavily sauced dishes. Later, after I lived in France, I realized that I could serve much simpler meals—in fact, my heroic dinners of the pre-Paris days were in dubious taste. I’d spend twelve hours preparing a coulibiac (salmon with mushrooms and rice in a dill-and-sour-cream sauce inside puff pastry), or boeuf à la mode, or a dozen Indian dishes. Like Coleman Dowell, I, too, had become a martyr cook, though on a lesser scale. For me the dinner party was a condensed version of social climbing, intimacy, and commemoration.
For Susan all these themes would coalesce into a lunch at a Chinese restaurant. Years later, after I’d broken with Susan, Marina Warner told me that during a visit to New York she’d met Susan and that I was wrong, she was a delight, no one could be warmer or kinder. I was quick to agree with Marina but I astonished her when I said, “But I’ll tell you exactly how you spent your time with her. She invited you to a good Chinese restaurant and ordered for you and paid for it. Then she accompanied you to several bookshops and expressed her scandalized amazement that you’d never read Trelawny’s Adventures of a Younger Son or Aksakov’s Family Chronicle. She bought those books for you and gave them to you in a nice little ceremonious moment. During the unrushed afternoon she talked to you about her struggle with cancer and her love