City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [79]
She gradually became more irritated with John Hohnsbeen for not spending his evenings with her. John had so many friends everywhere and wanted to go out and not be trailed by Peggy and the babies. She pretended that he was leaving the museum unprotected at night against robbers, but it seemed to us that she was mainly lonely—and that almost by reflex she nursed romantic hopes, or at the very least hoped John would go through the motions of courting her.
Although John lived decades in Paris and Rome, then Venice, he never learned either French or Italian and spoke English to everyone. Peggy could speak several languages, all with a strong accent and in short bursts with the inattention that typified her utterances even in English. She seemed elsewhere most of the time. When people talked to her, she often misunderstood them, or she’d cover her confusion with a habitual widening of her eyes: “Oh, really? How very amusing!” As I was to see with other famous people I came to know later, it didn’t much matter how a “legend” like her behaved. If a friend was bored or alienated and dropped out, the next day there were always new people, attracted by a celebrated name and what amounted to open house.
Chapter 12
David and I became closer and closer, perhaps because we shared these Venetian adventures that would have struck our New York friends as slightly glamorous but decidedly irrelevant and snobbish. New Yorkers constituted a kingdom that recognized no equals, no other powers, and took no prisoners. David’s and my friendship was a strange tree to grow in New York, where so many relationships of all types were corrupted by self-interest. The idea of having important friends who could impress others and predispose them in your favor was a typically New York notion. I remember that when I moved to Paris in 1983, my French editor (Ivan Nabokov, the nephew of the writer) wanted to give me a launch party. I thought I should invite the press and the few famous friends I had in Paris. Embarrassed, Ivan explained that in Paris you could have a party for the press and then on another night one for your friends, but you wouldn’t want to mix them. I was stunned by this idea, and when I’d absorbed it, I felt vulgar for not having known it all along. Now, perhaps, Parisians have become almost as cynical as New Yorkers, but then they still had a cult of friendship that made it sacred and nearly invisible to the public. There’s no word in French for “name-dropping,” and arrivisme isn’t really the same as “social climbing.”
My friendship with David was disinterested—neither of us had anything to gain from knowing each other—or nearly so. He might have paid for some things, but neither of us was ever using the other. David advised me about worldly things and introduced me to people who are still close friends, and once in a while I helped him with the wording of an essay. All the odder that just such a friendship should flourish in a city where people quite openly talked about “networking” and “contacts,” as if anyone moderately clever would devote his time at a party to such admirable activities and not waste it on unprofitable friendships. It was said that you could tell who were someone’s best friends because they were the ones he never saw—only a true friend would accept being endlessly put off. Of course most friendships here in New York are conducted on the telephone (and now, I’ve noticed in supermarkets and movie theaters, on cell phones), and David and I “checked in” with each other three times a day: “My dear, you won’t believe what happened to me on the way home from Mary Ellen’s very dull party!” To be fair, no wonder people social-climb in New York, since it has more genuine social mobility than London or Paris, where clothes, accents, and manners reveal all too much about origins and where there are no more than three degrees of separation between any two people. Everyone already knows every single bad thing about