City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [61]
They knew everyone. Bobby said to us, “It seems we’re staying with the Contessa Grimaldi in June, and then it seems we’re invited to the house of the Della Corte di Montis.”
Jimmy whispered to us, “Those seems are well sewed.”
I was invited with David to their large apartment several times. They’d give us a wonderful dinner, then we’d play charades or Encyclopedia, a grander form of Dictionary in which the guests were asked to write fake entries for a name or event. We were then instructed to guess which version was the real one copied out from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. If anyone already knew the true identity of the person or place, he had to own up to it right away. We were all in stitches when one of the guests, Maita di Niscemi, a Sicilian princess who worked on Robert Wilson’s scripts, kept admitting that almost everyone we mentioned was a cousin or aunt of hers.
At these dinners Tanny Le Clercq in her wheelchair (she was teaching ballet to a company in Harlem), Jerry Robbins, David Kalstone, Maita, Johnny de Cuevas (whose father had been a marquis and had had a ballet troupe and whose mother was a Rockefeller), were all in attendance. It was heady stuff—and they were all so clever at recognizing passages from Shakespeare or the Bible that, as usual, I felt intimidated and kept wishing I’d majored in English rather than Chinese or kept going to Bible-study class. One afternoon Johnny de Cuevas brought along a kilo of caviar from the very same Caviarteria, he said, where his father had bought his supplies.
David had a lingering resentment against Bobby Fizdale for breaking off their affair some time ago. At a Valentine’s Day party Fizdale held up to his sleeve a heart cookie that Maita had baked and asked, “What does this symbolize?” Crossly, David replied, “He who gets slapped.” When David had asked Fizdale why he didn’t want to continue the affair, Bobby had said that he had only one more goal in life and it wasn’t romantic; his only remaining ambition was to meet Mrs. Lytle Hull—a queen of society, as I learned, a rich patron of the opera and the first Mrs. Vincent Astor.
David was going away for the summer. He would be sailing on the Queen Mary with James Merrill. David would spend June, July, and August with Stephen Orgel in Venice. Before leaving he made penne arrabbiata for just the two of us, then we settled in for a long reading of Elizabeth Bishop poems, after which David read me what he’d been writing about Ashbery. We drank a fierce amount of white wine. At the door, as I was leaving, David grabbed me, as I knew he would, and began to give me a long, wet kiss with tongue, as I knew he would. He had a sweet smile while he kissed me, which felt oddly too heterosexual to me—domestic, normal. Everything about the moment I hated. I was as repelled as Diana by Acteon, and in a spontaneous rage I stamped my foot, let out an angry groan, and left. David was deeply offended. He decided not to see me again, which I found out for sure only later but which I sensed right away.
On the ship, however, Jimmy Merrill convinced him that there was too little love in the world to go around, so little that one should not spurn it in whatever form it came. David decided to forgive me and to go on with our friendship—sexless and ultimately satisfying to both of us. Later he referred (not often, only once or twice) to that decisive night as the time I “stamped my foot.” To be sure, I had twice tried to sleep with him but was impotent both times. I decided that was okay, I could just lie there and let him do with me what he would, and hoped that my evident lack of excitement would be more eloquent than words. But somehow that bodily “statement” hadn’t proved my point. He had kept thinking that if he applied himself a bit more strenuously, I would respond, like a stain to scrubbing.
Now David wrote me an eloquent letter from Venice—and entirely characteristic