City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s Read Online Free PDF Page B

mainly eager to placate people, to amass allies in what I perceived to be a hostile world. I had a character that anticipated disaster, and with that eventuality in mind I was accumulating friends. For me friendship was nothing but an entente cordiale; I didn’t know how to confide. I never shared my doubts with anyone. I’d mastered a fetching way of confessing shocking, colorful details of my life to the initiated, but I never mentioned to anyone any of my seriousdoubts or fears or hopes. Nor any of my ideas, which I knew would bore them; as a result, those ideas remained half-formed because never articulated. Maybe because I spent my forties and fifties in Paris, I later came to embrace the importance of the “milieu.” I could see that our American brand of Romantic individualism didn’t really amount to much; one was only as good as one’s circle, and a superior, stimulating milieu could raise the general level of conversation, of sophistication, even of moral discrimination and esthetic refinement, certainly of ambition and accomplishment.
    In my twenties and thirties, before I left New York for Paris, I might have confided in friends if I’d have thought that would make them like me more, but I was so cynical that I assumed everyone around me was entirely self-absorbed. I’d deflect a question with a question of my own. Like a girl who’s been to a Southern charm school, I knew that one could always count on the other person’s inexhaustible egotism and that no one had any possible motive for unmasking a flatterer. One of my favorite writers of the time was the eighteenth-century cynic Lord Chesterfield, who in his letters to his illegitimate son taught him the amoral arts of the courtier (how to curry favor, how to coerce others to yield up their secrets while remaining discreet oneself, how to make oneself amusing and indispensable to the powerful). I remember one particularly repulsive passage in which Chesterfield’s poor witless illegitimate son is counseled to endear himself to a French hostess by stamping his foot prettily and insisting that some onerous task is his duty and his alone and that he refuses to share it with any of her other cavaliers servants . Chesterfield thought this kind of pretend petulance was particularly charming and attractive.
    I knew several girls at work and two from Ann Arbor who’d moved to New York at the same time. Stan knew two or three girls with whom he rehearsed for the Berghof scene-study classes. Otherwise after work we lived in an entirely male world. It wasn’tthat we were misogynists, though we were probably a bit scared of women and felt some lingering, irrational guilt around them since we had silently, surreptitiously excluded ourselves from the ranks of their potential suitors. I didn’t think of women as horny but as needy. I attributed to all women the loneliness and desperation of my divorced mother. In college I’d dated two or three girls. They were there partly for therapeutic reasons, since I hoped to go straight (slowly) and to get married (eventually), but they were also in my life because they were good bohemian women, physically generous, cozy pot-smokers, artistic—and above all tolerant.
    The one woman who spanned all these years, from 1956 when I met her till now, more than half a century later, was Marilyn Schaefer, whom I’ve written about again and again (often under the name of Maria) from my first published story (“Goldfish and Olives” in 1962, published in New Campus Writing ). She was six or seven years older than me, which now means nothing (she looks much younger than I do), but at the time was of some consequence. I’d met her when I was at Cranbrook, a boy’s boarding school outside Detroit, Michigan. She was a painting student next door at the art academy, one of the five schools that made up the Cranbrook complex at that time.
    She was so far from any of my received ideas about women that I found her to be at once