My Lives by Edmund White

Author:Edmund White [White, Edmund]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-11-20T13:00:00+00:00

In 1949, when I was nine, I accompanied my father to New York for the first time. He liked Asti’s, a Greenwich Village restaurant where the waiters sang opera arias and where famous singers dined. I introduced myself to the bass Jerome Hines, and we ended up sitting in his box the next night to hear him sing the role of the High Priest in The Magic Flute. We also befriended an English soldier who was eating alone at the next table.

I’d read Oscar Wilde and I assumed that because the soldier was English (my first!) he too must speak in constant quips and deliver polished epigrams. With my dull father and stepmother he sounded as tepid as they, but I felt that if I could recall one of Wilde’s remarks he’d light up with recognition and deliver his own cascade of witticisms.

At last I got up my courage, interrupted my father, and said to the soldier, ‘I know a widow who just buried her husband and her hair has gone quite gold with grief.’ My father looked embarrassed at his sissy son’s outburst. My stepmother knew perfectly well I’d never met a widow in my life.

The soldier looked genuinely repulsed. He winced with disgust and turned his attention to his chop.

I blushed bright red. I’d made an effort to communicate with my first European in a language — sophisticated and paradoxical — that I felt sure he would understand and appreciate, but he didn’t get it. He’d been sickened by my effeminacy and crazy interjection. Here was this other continent — wise and humane and devoted to virtuoso conversation — to which I was beaming a signal, but the message hadn’t been picked up.

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