City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [51]
The novel had taken so many years to be published that I was well into another one, called variously Like People in History and Woman Reading Pascal, a much more realistic novel than Forgetting Elena. In the long years before Elena was accepted, I’d thought I’d gone too far toward the difficult and that I should write something about real people leading their lives. Since Richard Howard was by far the most original and colorful person I knew, I decided I should base a character on him and put him into a three-way friendship with “Maria” (based on Marilyn Schaefer) and a young heterosexual woman based on Sigrid, my friend from Time-Life. In fact I made Sigrid the main character from whose point of view everything would be written.
I must have had Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady in mind, because I wanted to write about an heiress who falls into the claws of a fortune hunter. Today, in the era of prenuptial agreements and especially of divorce, an unwise marriage no longer has the same lasting, tragic consequences. Nevertheless, my basic plot idea was that a striking, rich young woman comes to New York from Baltimore (I’d spent a weekend there among the fox hunting set, friends from school). In New York she becomes best friends with a gay man and a lesbian and lives their exciting but (for her) unfulfilling New York gay life. At last, at the advanced age of thirty, she realizes that she wants a husband and children. Seemingly by chance she runs into someone who used to attend the debutante parties in Baltimore, one of those “extra men” so badly needed to keep cutting in during the dances. In American high society, I’d discovered, anxious rich parents do not sufficiently guard against two figures—the extra man and, especially, the riding instructor. If one of them is well mannered and good-looking, he can seduce the seventeen-year-old daughter of the family, and sometimes the mother, even though he hasn’t a penny and his blood is red, not blue. For members of the “horsey set,” the riding instructor is the real Trojan horse, capable of penetrating even the best-defended walls.
In my novel (just as in Eliot’s and James’s), my fortune hunter, Jimmy, is initially charming and accommodating. He once dated my Sigrid character years ago and now they take up where they left off. He weans her away from her friends—and destroys her life.
If truth be told, I’d been a little bit in love with Sigrid and we’d spent some time together, but ultimately I’d confessed to her that I was gay. I remember sitting with her on a Friday night at the Riviera Café in Sheridan Square. Armies of young gay men were marching past, loud and excited, and I wanted to join them—or make them go away. Sigrid said she would not have suspected I was gay and that it didn’t make any difference anyway. The perfect answer. Of course I knew it did make a difference. I told myself that I couldn’t afford children. And then I’d had not one but many cases of gonorrhea over the years. And then I felt claustrophobic if I spent too many evenings in a row with a woman.
I backed out of her life and she married Desmond, whom I didn’t meet till some time later. Together they had a beautiful and talented daughter who resembles tall, blond Sigrid. In my novel the marriage is a disaster, and she discovers too late that he wants only her money. In real life Sigrid might have been a German Baltic baroness, but she had no money and her marriage seems much like another and survives to this day.
The interest of the book, if there was any, was in its presentation of heterosexuals