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By Root 1167 0

was mostly Puerto Rican and the rents were low. Men in T-shirts sat on their stoops listening to Latin music and drinking beer. David took the subway everywhere in the city, never a cab except late at night, and commuted to his job at Rutgers University by bus rather than train because it was fractionally cheaper. Despite his budget, we’d go out to dinner, dutch—usually to Duff’s on Christopher Street, where we’d sit in a booth and eat our rare sirloin steaks and green beans and drink white wine and bid the waiter, “Take the bread away—we’re dieting!” After a few weeks we’d see the waiter, smiling a mild acknowledgment at us, turning away the busboy carrying the bread basket.

I adored David but he represented the adult, charming, sexless world for me. Though I was thirty I wasn’t quite ready to be a grown-up. I’d get restless as midnight approached. I longed to escape and to run out to the backroom bars or the trucks. I needed to leave the salon before my hands began to sprout hair and my teeth to sharpen.

David was extremely close to the poet James Merrill, and slightly in awe of him. Merrill’s father, Charles Merrill, had been one of the founders of the brokerage firm Merrill Lynch. James Merrill had written a vaguely autobiographical novel, The Seraglio, in which the young hero feels burdened by his wealth and wants to give it away, but it turns out that a legal divestiture of that magnitude is virtually impossible. In real life, Merrill started the Ingram Merrill Foundation (Ingram was the maiden name of Jimmy’s mother), which gave small grants of five or six thousand dollars to many needy writers. Cleverly, Merrill had figured out that if he wanted to spend time with other poets rather than bankers, he needed to share the wealth without making it look like handouts. If a friend put the touch on him, Jimmy could always say, “Apply to the foundation, but remember I’m just one of the board members.” Of course in reality Jimmy had the last say, but no one was supposed to know that (ostensibly he conferred with John Hollander and Irma Brandeis). If someone got money from the foundation, he or she didn’t have to feel beholden to Merrill himself. Nor was it a loan that had to be paid back—or that could potentially create bad blood if, as might have been more likely, it wasn’t paid back.

David arranged for me to meet Merrill over after-dinner drinks. Merrill was a bit lined from excessive dieting but from a distance he had a boyish look and manner. He was partial to purples and heathers and earth tones, to the colors that fall leaves assume on the ground after the first rain. He wore serapes and embroidered jackets and creased linen trousers and sandals, the antidote to the three-piece suits and bluchers his father must have donned. He was clearly a bohemian. Later when I visited his apartment in the fishing village of Stonington, Connecticut (“Jimmy lives in the only ugly building in Stonington,” as catty friends said), I realized that the top two floors he occupied in the old Victorian house above a store and the floor between were crammed with objects he’d described in his poems: the mirror and bat-motif wallpaper and the red bohemian crystal chandelier above a round table for Ouija messages in the bay window and the widow’s walk above, graced with a Roman bust. They were all magical in the eyes of the aficionado, but they didn’t necessarily go together. His friends, of course, nodded sagely when they read:

Backdrop. The dining room at Stonington.

Walls of ready-mixed matte “flame” (a witty

Shade, now watermelon, now sunburn).

Overhead, a turn of the century dome

Expressing white tin wreathes and fleurs-de-lys

In palpable relief to candlelight…

The room breathed sheer white curtains out. In blew

Elm- and chimney-blotted shimmerings, so

Slight the tongue of land, so high the point of view.

Something about Merrill made you want to please him and fear you couldn’t. He alternated between a silken, silly giggle, but one that was boyish and never girlish, and an earnest unsmiling way of nodding agreement