City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [18]
The New York School poets (John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler) were hymning the city in the same casual, shrugging, but secretly precise terms. In “An East Window on Elizabeth Street,” Schuyler writes, “I don’t know how/it can look so miraculous and alive/an organic skin for the stacked cubes of air.” Later he writes:
Mutable, delicate, expendable, ugly, mysterious
(seven stories of just bathroom windows)
packed: a man asleep, a woman slicing garlic thinly into oil
(what a stink, what a wonderful smell)
burgeoning with stacks, pipes, ventilators, tensile antennae—
that gristling gray bit is a part of a bridge,
that mesh hangar on a roof is to play games under.
But why should a metal ladder climb, straight
and sky aspiring, five rungs above a stairway hood
up into nothing?
Marilyn had a two-room apartment on the West Side between Riverside and West End that she was endlessly decorating, then stripping and filling up again. Bits of savage finery, a blue feather on a bone, would hang on the burlap wall above a massive bedouin bracelet with its brass welts and multiple locks, like some horrible chastity device. She had a kneehole round table that her father had made her of good pale oak and, in another corner, a drawing board covered with pastels of “famous” lesbians. She liked lace curtains worthy of a concierge from the Pas-de-Calais and a strength-sapping sofa heavy with bolsters and pillows.
I was surely a strange, edgy, difficult friend—excessively polite and docile, patient and indifferent, but then rebellious, on the lam, a master of the disappearing act. Chain-smoking and filling the air with my noxious clouds. Some of my primitive fears of women, based on my dread of my stifling mother, attached to Marilyn—except she was herself elusive, quick to cancel appointments, horrified by the idea of marriage. She made a cult of friendship but scorned the family, though she was wonderfully kind to her own mother and siblings. More than two evenings out in a row spent even in our unintimidating, undemanding society would give her a splitting headache. She loved solitude and needed it as a plant needs light. Marilyn certainly was as full of contradictions as I was—she was a sensualist who loved baths and delicious little meals, but at the same time she was virtually a Stalinist in her politics, as far as I could tell, though at other moments she alternated between a superrational, unforgiving Aristotelianism she’d acquired during years of study at the University of Chicago and a highly Romantic love of lush, swooning verismo operas.
I’ve forgotten to say how funny and affectionate she always was, how much warmth she radiated, what good humor she brought to every occasion, how much interest she lavished on her friends, how forgiving and tolerant she could be. She loved turning her back courtyard into a little vernal paradise in the summer, where she’d serve cold Riesling and warm potato salad.
In the summer we’d fill the tub with ice and thirty bottles of white wine (a bottle per guest) and run about with old friends from the Midwest and a few new ones from the East Coast, men and women, and it seemed those exciting days of youth and independence and exaltation would never end.
Chapter 5
In 1964 Stan and I moved to West Seventy-first Street, to a spacious apartment that cost $175 a month. We each had a bedroom and we shared a living room and a dining room. We furnished it at Goodwill with big, heavy oak pieces that were ugly but that looked solid and respectable to us. The neighborhood itself was run-down. Puerto Ricans would throw beer bottles from the window. On the corner was a big Cuban restaurant that reeked