City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [62]
As if the gods were punishing me for not loving David, they made me fall in love with the boy across the street, Keith McDermott, an actor who was in his mid-twenties but who looked as if he were seventeen—and someone who wanted my friendship but not my love. I could see Keith struggling with the same revulsion for me that I’d felt for David—and the same strong sense of attachment and friendship. But Keith had a more inventive strategy than I did with David, creating a “chastity club” and naming it after a saint (he was a lapsed Catholic). He invited me to be one of the two charter members. The idea was that we could sleep together and embrace but not have sex. Keith said that he was sick of sex and needed a break from it. Over the many years that I knew him he would often go off on retreats, stop eating meat or give up drink, or enter into a strenuous period he dubbed “health and beauty month.” He was small, blond, beautifully built, an excellent gymnast. He was physically fastidious and conscious; he seemed to have no habits, certainly no bad ones. Every movement he made was willed.
I had met him through Larry Kert, the Broadway star, who’d played Tony in West Side Story and was the lead in Company. Larry would call me up on a rainy day whenever he was horny, and I’d hurry across the street. Keith was also a part-time pillow boy and houseboy.
Larry had a curious way of treating us both like cheap sex toys, completely interchangeable and disposable, but when he engaged with us as people (as artists or just conscious suffering beings), he treated us with an unexpected seriousness and respect.
Soon Keith and I were living together on West Eighty-sixth Street and Columbus Avenue in a large sixth-floor apartment that cost four hundred dollars a month. I had a small bedroom and a study full of light. Keith had a large bedroom. My teenage nephew, Keith Fleming, also came to live with us and had the former maid’s room. His mother (my sister) was hospitalized and was incapable of taking care of him.
There was a kitchen, a storage room, a butler’s pantry, a dining room. I suppose it was an example of what had been called in the late nineteenth century “a classic six,” the standard middle-class apartment of the period, but what by now seemed an unimaginable luxury. Keith McDermott had understood we’d just be roommates and had been explicit about that. But I couldn’t resist tormenting him with my large cow eyes full of tears and yearning.
Those years in the classic six on Eighty-sixth and Columbus were emotionally painful but artistically productive for me. I was so miserably in love with Keith that I started seeing a therapist again—but this one was a gay shrink at least, Dr. Charles Silverstein. Keith was the cause of both the suffering (unrequited love) and the creativity (he was always rehearsing or drawing or writing). He treated every action as an aesthetic occasion. We bought pink and ocher porch furniture but even it was too “heavy” for his tastes and soon he’d dragged it out into the hallway. Nothing short of total Japanese austerity suited him. But I wanted to have people to dinner, a bourgeois failing that awakened his scorn. At three in the morning Keith would be “writing” on large sheets of paper in illegible script. He and another actor would be memorizing scenes from Noël Coward—but backward, reciting the reversed scenes with all the same artificial panache of Coward and Gertrude Lawrence on the few old recordings we owned.
Although Keith was at that time a Broadway actor, he idolized Robert Wilson, the avant-garde theater director. Keith even ended up sleeping with Wilson at our place. Soon I was willingly drawn into the revels. I was so lovesick over Keith that a couple of times I organized orgies, just so that in the melee of bodies I could touch Keith without his knowing it. When Keith moved