City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [74]
David had such terrible vision that he was capable of saluting a passing pigeon on the Giudecca, convinced it was a lady he’d once met. Nevertheless he loved to watch and assess all the little dramas playing out poolside at the Cipriani. On some days before he headed off for the afternoon we’d eat a diet lunch of prosciutto, salad, and a few slices of mozzarella. No bread, no wine, no dessert. Soon we’d be sick with laughter as we played bitchy alta borghese house-proud women, calling out, “Cara!” and typifying everything as carina (“cute”) and casalinga (“spotlessly domestic”), and archly complimenting each other on little flaws one would more likely feel embarrassed by: “O, cara, quanto i tuoi capelli sono bellissimi con questo nuovo colore.” Everything, even the dim matronly prospect of one day succumbing to the vanity of a dye job, sounded brighter and funnier and more tolerable to us couched in a prosperous housewife’s lightly carping, subtly “intimate” Italian.
What were we doing? I could imagine Simon Karlinsky turning away from our campiness with a fart-sniffing scowl of disapproval. Perhaps by impersonating two middle-class, middle-aged Italian women we were celebrating our tentative hold on the language, rehearsing roles that steered us away from the dangerous shoals of spurned love and put-upon chastity, and finally just indulging in the sublimely silly play unique to friendship.
For us Venice was such a complete contrast to New York. In New York, David could scarcely go out at night, too blind to negotiate the ill-lit, dangerous streets. Venice was safe, and a pedestrian city where every bridge step was lined with white stones. No Venetian was going to mug a tourist—how would he run away in a town without cars or motor scooters, where every boat was licensed and known and counted? With so many eyes behind every shutter, he’d be sure to be identified and denounced right away. If he was Venetian, his neighbors would know him. If he was a “foreigner,” that would register as well with the locals.
New York took its duties seriously and shrugged off its pleasures, whereas Venice was devoted to the delights of eating a sherbet, of visiting the tailor, of looking at the latest nouveautés (not all of them hideous) from the glassworks on Murano, of buying fish and vegetables under the Rialto Bridge, of dropping into the pasta shop and purchasing coal-black linguine flavored with squid ink, of watching the flush-faced, black-bearded butcher cut tidy little veal chops in his minuscule shop, of stopping at the drogheria and knowing the words for mustard (senape) and anchovies (acciughe). Even for its part-time residents, Venice represented the pleasure of knowing how to slip through the throngs of tourists (the sheep or pecore, as David called them) following their guide holding aloft a red umbrella and turn into a quiet calle before stepping onto the traghetto, the gondola that ferried people across the Grand Canal. David, usually so fearful and unphysical, knew just how to step onto the boat without slipping, stand all the way across without staggering, leave a few coins for Charon on the gunwale without under- or overtipping.
I can picture David with his face tanned and his hair silvered by the sun, wearing his azure-blue silk shirt and hand-sewn beige silk-and-wool trousers and black gondolier slippers and gold seal ring emblazoned with the Venetian lion. Neither of us was good at sustained conversation in Italian, though both of us could chat with waiters and shopkeepers. I’d stay behind at his apartment in the afternoons writing while he was off at the pool; around six he’d come back with the latest and a fresh bottle of Campari and a lemon. David had always taken a demanding book with him—a new study of Spenser, say, or Ashbery’s Three Poems—though he seldom read more than