City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [54]
David Kalstone was not only the warmest and most entertaining person I knew, he was also an expert in maneuvering in the world of academics and intellectuals. If I’d say something arrogant in an essay I was showing him that was destined for print, he’d write a tiny question mark in tentative pencil in the margin, and I’d instantly eliminate the offense. We went over every word the other one wrote.
I longed to have him as my best friend forever, but I recognized that his love for me was a constant source of anguish for him. I was ready to attribute my reluctance to sleep with him to a “neurosis” on my part, an inability to become intimate with the person I liked best, but I was fed up with conversations in which I was made to feel guilty for my tastes and aversions to begin with. David, I knew, nursed hopes that if he was patient enough, I’d overcome my “hang-ups” about “intimacy.” I just wasn’t attracted to him, putting us on a collision course.
Once we got terribly drunk and I asked David if as a Jew he considered himself superior to me as a gentile. He said yes. I was surprised since I must secretly have always considered WASPs to be superior to everyone else. I knew that Jews traditionally considered themselves the chosen people, but I hadn’t suspected they actually believed in that high claim. David was an entirely secular Jew, but even he retained this in-the-bone sense of orthodox superiority. He could be humorously dismissive about the “dear Jews,” and the sobriety of his clothes, the hushed elegance of his manners, his indifference to money (except as a means of financing his summer trips to Venice), all attested to his assiduity in avoiding the caricatural image of the Jew, but nevertheless he sometimes indicated that he considered his fellow Jews to be less alcoholic, better family men, more intellectually acute, warmer, kinder, and saner than all these slightly batty and cruel and dirty gentiles running about. Of course the whole Jew/gentile paradigm seemed almost far-fetched to us as friends since our intimacy defied all categories.
Our happiness together remains one of my most vivid and fructifying memories; when we are young and literary, we often experience things in the present with a nostalgia-in-advance, but we seldom guess what we will truly prize years from now. I always placed a high value on friendship, but even I had no way of guessing back then that it was more fun to get drunk with a friend than with a lover. Love is a source of anxiety until it is a source of boredom; only friendship feeds the spirit. Love raises great expectations in us that it never satisfies; the hopes based on friendship are milder and in the present, and they exist only because they have already been rewarded. Love is a script about just a few repeated themes we have a hard time following, though we make every effort to conform to its tone. Friendship is a permis de séjour that enables us to go anywhere and do anything exactly as our whims dictate.
The last few months that I was in the Bay Area in early 1972 I lived in Stephen Orgel’s house. An ex-lover of David’s from Harvard days, Stephen embraced me as a friend because David vouched for me. With what I later discovered would be his usual generosity Stephen allowed me to stay there and drive his car for the two months he was away. I’d come home late at night driving across the Bay Bridge and head up to the Berkeley Hills where I’d enter through the little garden gate beside the Princess plant and go into the low-eaved Arts and Crafts cottage with its ceramics from the period and its big, melodramatic Victorian prints of scenes from Shakespeare.
One night a young couple who worked with me—he was a Rhodes scholar and former football player, she was a blond gymnast and talented illustrator—followed me home. They were shocked by how drunkenly I’d weaved my way across the bridge and said they were worried about my chances for survival. They wanted to have sex with me, but I wasn’t sure that I was ready for a three-way with a woman, not even such a beautiful, friendly,