City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [3]
Of course we were still so young that our parents and fellow workers might think we were just roommates. Lots of people our age had roommates, in fact most of them, though it wasn’t that way elsewhere. (When I later moved to Rome in 1970, the only translation for roommate was il ragazzo con cui divido l’appartamento). Most of our gay friends were careful to maintain separate bedrooms, although Stan and I slept on a foldout couch that made into a double bed. We didn’t have many visitors, though Stan would sometimes rehearse in our tiny living room with other actors from his class. If anyone asked, he said he slept on the single bed in the spare room.
We eventually discovered that we weren’t really compatible sexually. But I truly loved Stan. At first because he was so beautiful and I was an idolator of beauty. I didn’t like the way I looked and I was proud to be seen with him. Nor was my admiration of his looks a subjective thing; his beauty was classic and “famous,” or at least generally acknowledged. Two straight male friends of his fell for him; for both he was their only gay experiment. Once one of the best-known dress designers in America stopped Stan on the street and offered to take him to Egypt on a holiday. The man wanted to hand him a plane ticket on the spot. He and Stan hadn’t exchanged a word; for the designer it was “impulse buying.”
But I loved Stan not just as a trophy but because I really cared for him. He was studious and hardworking. At first when he wanted to be an actor, he took acting classes at the Herbert Berghof studio. Then he went back to school and got a master’s degree in English. He enrolled in a course in Henry James from the great James biographer Leon Edel. I paid the rent and I enjoyed having this slight hold over Stan. He needed me, at least for shelter. Of course he was also attached to me but was terribly moody and given to deep depressions.
I had found my first job at Time-Life Books on the thirty-second floor of the Time-Life Building on Sixth Avenue and Fiftieth Street. Every day I’d put on a coat and tie and head uptown from our Village apartment, usually in a taxi I could ill afford. Officially we worked from ten to six but I could never get in until eleven and I kept expecting to be reprimanded or even fired, but nothing ever happened. In fact we had little work, and a whole week’s worth could be dashed off during a panicky Friday afternoon. Our weekly assignment might be to write four picture captions of two lines each, a trivial workload that seemed momentous only because we had so much time to think about it. The editors above us always demanded rewrites since they, too, were underemployed.
I spent the whole day wasting time. A two-hour lunch. Endless coffee breaks with other writers and researchers. A weird man who came by to shine our shoes once told me that for two hundred dollars he could have anyone I wanted bumped off. At noon I’d pay a visit to an art gallery on Fifty-seventh Street or to the Museum of Modern Art around the corner. In those years I saw the first Pop Art works at the Sidney Janis Gallery—a ghostly life-size plaster man by George Segal standing on a ladder changing the letters on a movie marquee, or Roy Lichtenstein’s benday-dot comic-strip panels (“Oh, Brad”). Or I’d go to the Gotham Book Mart down on Forty-seventh, where I’d slump to the floor and read the books that were too expensive for me to buy.
The Gotham was the ideal bookstore with dozens of literary magazines stacked on the counter up close to the front door beside the cash register and, halfway back on the right, a big table full of the newest books of poetry. On the walls were pictures of all the greats who’d read at the Gotham, including Marianne Moore and Cocteau and Dylan Thomas, some of them perched high up on a library ladder, posing above the elegant Frances Steloff (who died at 101 in 1989). Although she sold the “shop,” as she called it, to Andreas Brown in 1967, she was always prowling around, sometimes urging customers to buy. She liked