City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [73]
Maria Teresa had a lovely, smoky gaze in which, from time to time, the smoke would clear to reveal the fire. She was slender with blond hair and high cheekbones. Someone must have once complimented her on her smoldering glance since she knew just how to work it, when to let it flare forth. She saw more “wickedness” in what the people around her said than they actually intended. Maybe that was her way of keeping herself interested in a fairly routine social life. She had a handsome young lover, Vladimir de Marsano, whose father was an Italian aristocrat living and working as a banker in Switzerland, and whose mother was a Serb. He’d grown up speaking Dutch to the nanny until one day his parents laid down the law and said, “We think it’s time you had a grown-up language of your own, and we suggest French,” and Vladimir was equally proficient in English and Italian. Vladimir was in his early twenties then and Maria Teresa in her forties, and they made a dashing, attractive couple. I suppose it helped that Vladimir, as a count in his impeccably tailored clothes, unlike a lot of young men his age didn’t resemble a willfully sloppy American college boy. He was affectionate, mysterious—we were all dying to know if he might not be a little gay around the edges, but he’d always meet our questions with a delighted laugh and an enigmatic smile. He had plenty of spirit that he usually held in check, and we knew not to press him too far. He, too, thought everyone was joking around him, which I think was less a form of paranoia than a disposition toward leggerezza. What I mean to suggest is that he was wonderfully serviable, polite and patient to a fault, always on the lookout for something fun and new and light, not too cultured himself but cultured just enough to maintain his membership in his upper-class world, affectionate and teasing with everyone, including much older and far less polished friends, capable of sweet friendliness—without ever showing his cards.
Another poolside habitué was Harry Mathews, the experimental novelist and the only American member of Oulipo, the French writers’ club that proposed mathematical models for works of fiction and poetry. He’d had an aristocratic mistress with the lovely first name of Loredana and was often in Venice. He and David were best friends (but who did not count David as his or her best friend?), and they had lots of worldly interests that I could not share—a new Venetian restaurant out by the Arsenale, new Missoni sweater designs, the new director of the Paris Opera, and Maria Teresa’s newest affair with someone they nicknamed Bambu, who would eventually become the most powerful arts bureaucrat in Italy. His real name was Vittorio Sgarbi and he was also, at some point, the Italian equivalent to the British layman’s art-history guru Sister Wendy, since he often discoursed on painting on television.
David had asked me to review one of Harry’s most difficult books, The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium, for the New York Times Book Review, which I’d done before ever meeting Harry (the Times editors didn’t want reviewers to know the authors they were critiquing).
I loved this hilarious, improbable novel and wrote a long essay about a later one, Cigarettes, also funny and utterly original. Harry was and certainly remains a great writer—one of the best I’ve ever known, though he’s never enjoyed the celebrity he deserves. He always had money, though he downplayed that, and later he inherited a large family fortune. Eventually he owned apartments in Paris (next to the prime minister’s hôtel particulier) and in New York (at first on Beekman Place) and houses on Long Island