City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [32]
So at the beginning of the new decade I took Italian lessons in New York for a month and I quit my job—the only real office job I’d ever had and that I’d obtained only after two months of interviews. Maitland Edey, the same New England mandarin who’d asked Sigrid and me about feminism, now said to me that I was foolish to give up my job with Time-Life Books with all its benefits and job security and four- and even five- and six-week vacations thanks to our union, the Writers Guild. But I was determined, if frightened. I withdrew my seven thousand dollars in profit sharing and converted it to traveler’s checks, which the bank officer thought was also rash.
Just before I left, Richard introduced me to a person in New York who would become my best friend: David Kalstone. He was living not far from Howard Moss in a sublet. He was a professor (he’d written a book on Sir Philip Sidney) at Rutgers, but I gathered he was in a state of change—wintering in New York City, summering in Venice, being outfitted with contact lenses and more up-to-date clothes, even writing about contemporary poets such as Bishop and James Merrill.
None of that struck me at the time. What impressed me right away was how subtle and gentle and observant he was, though he was almost legally blind. He had a sweet, wise smile, eyes that blinked into the indistinct void around him, hands that made wonderful rounded gestures. Richard Howard treated him a bit as if he were a distinguished but dim cousin, but I felt right away that he could be a … playmate. Although Richard liked all of us to sit up straight and present to the world our best face and to say right off our cleverest remarks and to speak of our serious reading or our life-transforming experiences (the ballet, Angkor Wat, the Sistine Chapel), David would never jump through that hoop. He was completely obliging, but a slightly goofy sense of humor played over everything he touched. He didn’t write as much as his friends expected, or so I gathered, but I guessed that was partly because he spent a lot of time at friendship. He was a generous, amused man and he liked me a lot, I could see, maybe because in a sense we were both newcomers. Although he was ten years older than I, he’d devoted less time than I had to being a New Yorker, which in those days was something like a religious vocation, full of obvious penances and rarefied rewards.
My time in Rome is not part of this story. I stayed from January to June and ran through all of my savings inviting Italian and American acquaintances out to dinner. We’d sit at long trestle tables in the Piazza Navona and look out at the spotlit lavishness of Bernini’s fountain of the continents (Is that a camel there? A palm tree? A Negro?). We’d eat plates of spaghetti and clams and drink liter after liter of sour white wine poured from those official transparent receptacles that had the exact liter level legally scratched into the glass—which made no sense since the wine could always be watered to bring it up to the right level. I took an Italian lesson nearly every day in a modern brick apartment block near the Vatican. My original apartment building in Trastevere was gutted by a fire after I’d been there for one unhappy month. The English girl Lulu, the agent who’d rented me the apartment, had been sacked for other reasons but we’d stayed friends. Now she told me of Phillip, an acquaintance who needed a roommate and who lived on the Largo Argentina.
I moved in with Phillip and soon met all his friends and played his piano and walked his dog and learned his ways. His two-room apartment had a terrace planted with azaleas and a view of the traffic below and a constant free-flowing source of water that the neighbor lady told me must come from an ancient Roman aqueduct.