by Tad Friend
Giovanna was a shocking lash to all my senses — around her I felt alert, giddy, anxious, and weak. Having never been in love before, I had no notion of how to hide my doglike devotion, how to conduct myself. Years later, she told me that my acerbic moodiness had worried her and her sisters: “They were saying, ‘Tad’s a grumposaurus, so it’s okay if you don’t rush into his arms.’ ” I believed that my cheerfulness in the face of discouragement would eventually be rewarded, that every good boy deserves favor. In fact, I had adopted our family trick of bearing up so conspicuously it was tantamount to a public sulk.
Pablo’s friend Billy had a party on the seventy-seventh floor of the Empire State Building, in an office where he used to work, and we sneaked the stereo and the liquor up in gym bags. Giovanna and I sat in a window bay by the file cabinets and the dancers pulsating to “Wishing Well” and “Need You Tonight.” This was our moment, our fated youth, and we enjoyed sitting alongside and watching, the glimmer of respite. In those days, I wore hard contact lenses and one of them was killing me, so I took it out and rubbed it like a pebble between my thumb and forefinger as we kissed, seeing with my nearsighted eye her mouth and ear and a loose lock of hair, while over her shoulder my corrected eye saw the blazing and magnificent city: close-up zooming to master shot, the way New York can suddenly lay itself open to you, for a time, when you’re young.
THAT SEPTEMBER of 1987, I had dinner with my parents and with Grandma Jess and her third husband, John Merrick, who were visiting Manhattan from Florida. We met at their hotel, the Parker Meridien, and went into its restaurant. The Maurice was the kind of place where great care is given to the impress on the butter pat. John, broad and garrulous, swapped hellos with our maître d’, Alphonse, remarking that he looked exactly like that old baseball announcer. “Doesn’t Alf look like Joe Garagiola? Alf, people must tell you that every — ”
“Let him show us to the table, John,” Jess said.
“You sure you’re not Joe Garagiola?”
Alphonse winched up a smile. “If I made his money, you think I’d be working in a place like this?”
John gave a raspy belly laugh: “What a killer.” He ordered a bourbon stinger and turned my way: “So they tell me you’re knocking ’em dead in the magazine business.”
“Not exactly,” I said.
He lowered his voice and confided that my uncle Charles, my father’s younger brother, “isn’t going to make it — this is good night. My doctor tells me that having cancer in the lymph nodes and the surrounding tissue is very rare — it happens once in a hundred years. A hundred years.”
“I can’t get any ice water!” Grandma Jess cried. We fell quiet, as she had wished. “Well, it’s a second-class hotel, and that’s what you get.”
“Oh, now, Jess — ” John began.
“I don’t know why we came. The whole city is filthy, and no one speaks English.”
Jess was a beautiful woman still, a Barbara Stanwyck look-alike happiest at the captain’s table aboard the Statendam or the Vistafjord, surrounded by admirers. The Holton overbite and a nose broken playing field hockey only accentuated her flashing smile. My father loved to recall how she came home after a gallbladder operation, showed him and Charlie two gallstones in a jar, then took the boys outside and flung the stones into the driveway gravel.
But she was easily put out of temper. She liked hugs up to the point at which they spoiled her makeup, so you gave her a gingerly embrace and withdrew. When my cousin Daisy was in her mid-twenties, she visited Jess and they breakfasted in silence until Jess asked: “Do you know anything about the stock market?” She followed Merck and Pfizer religiously.
“I don’t,” Daisy confessed.
“Well, I don’t know what we’re going to talk about.” Silent agitation. “Why don’t you have a boyfriend?”
“I’m picky.”
“Yes, you’re much too picky.”
Jess’s fretting seemed to me a way of cultivating reassurance. When she was a young prom trotter in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, she would roller-skate up and down in front of the YMCA, waiting for the inevitable approaches; astounded, still, by the stir her beauty and vivacity aroused, she always feared it might be withdrawn. Her mother had had a wayfaring streak — Mrs. Holton ultimately lived in twenty-six different houses — yet was fiercely censorious. Jess’s older brother Oliver and his wife, Millie, had a son named Tommy who, at age four, wandered near the private zoo on their property, home to ducks and pheasants and prize bulls and a wolf. Someone had left a door open, and the wolf seized Tommy by the neck. After this shocking event, the mourners gathered in their living room, and Millie invited everyone to walk the path up the hill, each with a lighted candle, and make a circle, as the Quakers do. Mrs. Holton stepped forward and said, “That would be un-Christian, barbaric.”
Unaccountably, she sent Jess to a girls’ military school, where her daughter became class treasurer, captain of the basketball team, president of the athletic association, valedictorian, and the Gold Star Girl. In Jess’s valedictory address, she explored the mystery of greatness that had made Rubens and Shakespeare “the fortunates who every man would wish to be…. It cannot be sheer intellect, nor sheer will, which is the solution of this riddle…. Somewhere rests that mystical note of personality which, for lack of a better word, we may call an unseen perfection of adjustment.” And still her mother refused to let Jess go on to college, though she herself had attended Mount Holyoke.
Jess’s beloved father, George Holton, president of the Bryden Horseshoe Company, was not around to countermand these decisions. A smiling, youthful-looking man who brought the first Rolls-Royce to the Lehigh Valley, he was very fond of gaming and got along so well with his colleagues that he was one of eighty-three men indicted in 1911 for constituting a “wire trust” that fixed the price of wire. Shortly afterward, following a gallbladder operation, he died of peritonitis. Jess was four.
In the early nineties, after John Merrick had died of cirrhosis and shortly before my uncle Charles Friend died of cancer, my parents visited Jess at her retirement community in Delray Beach, where she had had a fourth heart attack but still dressed for dinner and insisted upon making an entrance with a man on her arm. They happened to mention a photo in my sister’s room at home, a mournful image of a very young Jess cuddling a black kitten. “Yes,” Jess said, “that was not long after my father died — I never got over it.” And she burst into tears. It takes a lot of heat to run the freezer, too.
I HAD spent my dating life till then backing away from the all too many qualities that I suddenly discovered I didn’t really like. I didn’t really like Waspy women: the sturdy ones like corncob dolls; the garrulous ones who looked up from lines of coke to cry, “Shit, girl, I’m going to be in Greece about then!”; the twinset ones who knew about makeup but who, in bed, steeled themselves for the procedure. I didn’t really like the society blonds in netty fabrics by the pool, idle until you got deep into a book, then pettish: “C’mon, Tad, let’s go have a drink, let’s do something; don’t just sit around.” And I didn’t really like the chain-smoking artists with merry smiles who never washed their sheets — or I did really like them until I found out that they were also fucking a guy named Mel. Just speaking generally here.
I was mostly clueless, worrying that women would find sexual aggression alarming (exactly wrong). My notions were shaped by the dopey songs of my adolescence, like Sammy Johns’s 1975 hit, “Chevy Van”:
’Cause like a princess she was layin’ there
Moonlight dancin’ off her hair
She woke up and took me by the hand
She’s gonna love me in my Chevy van
And that’s all right with me
So I courted sleeping beauties who might awaken and take charge, women who smoked and drank and had a boyfriend. I’d flirt from a distant blind, usually via a purple letter that grandly alluded to my pathos and admiration. When I met a woman who was in an eight-year relationship, I followed up by ma
il:
In the ideal metaphorical context I would be a soldier who had glimpsed you several times in passing as you worked at your flower stand in the market. At last, just before I was mustered out to the front, I would go up to you to buy a bouquet, only to return home with acquired tastes for cigarettes and strong brandy and a white bandage over my eyes as a consequence of mustard gas. Passing your booth one day, tapping in front of myself with a wooden cane, I would prick up my nose at the familiar smell of begonias and narcissi and would then cry out your name.
Hard to believe, on this evidence, but I was no longer a virgin.
I really liked these women until they liked me back. My fade-outs resembled the jump cuts of a ladies’ man, or so I hoped, but I felt like a raccoon frozen by the porch light, paws deep in the bins out back. The girlfriend of a friend, a woman I’d flirted with for years, finally called it off with him and sent me a letter that ended: “It’s time we grew comfortable in one another’s presence. The swallows are circling around the tops of the trees. Night is kneeling down. The lilacs are bursting with color and my rice is plump + perfect + ready.” I parsed the note cautiously: my rice is plump — yes, almost certainly an invitation. When we started sleeping together, she’d ask me things like “Does your desire replace you?” and I’d panic and say, a beat late, “Sometimes.” After I broke up with her, she told me I was like a wet linen sheet that had been crumpled up and left in the freezer.
WHEN I came home from work to our Tribeca apartment, in 1986 and ’87, I’d often find a dinner plan in place for Two Eleven on West Broadway — a dim, noisy bistro studded with champagne buckets — or two dozen people at our long trestle table and our friend Andy in the kitchen, roasting chickens. George and Pablo’s crowd were warm, solvent, a little careless, amused by my background but incurious about it. We all seemed like assholes, probably: interested only in the next party and confident the world would be ours within five years. But it was fun while it lasted, the years of French cuffs without cuff links, of magnums of Domaines Ott rosé: grace notes I admired and adopted or, just as quixotically, rejected as beyond me. From loft to loft we sluiced in a wash of cashmere, among Venezuelan bankers and Spanish guitar players and dark-eyed girls who knew Pablo from Italy and smelled of lilacs and stayed with us for weeks, including the one who broke his heart. We took a photo of ourselves then, the roomies in boxer shorts, our thumbs and forefingers cocked to make L’s, for loser — smiling but stricken or about to be.
I wanted to be more like Pablo Keller Sarmiento, a stocky, spaniel-eyed diplomat’s son who spoke five languages. Having been taught to keep my hands close to my body, the first position in some lost Wasp art of self-defense, I delighted in the scrum of him, the bear hugs, the arm around the shoulder after pickup soccer in the park. At the weeklong wedding of Pablo’s brother, Andreas, on the family’s ranch south of Buenos Aires, we rode galloping across the pampas with only a bridle and a sheepskin ruffle, chasing guanacos that fled with a witchy cackle and startling partridges to flight. I bought black bombachas, the gaucho pants that buttoned at the cuff over riding boots, and wore them around New York until the seams gave way.
If I could not seem Argentine — and Lorenza, an Italian friend of Pablo’s, told me in her syncopated English that I could not, for “You give no inspire to the wounded woman in your First Aid” — then I wanted to attract the kind of women George was always bringing home: slight French stunners with clothes that colonies of silkworms had gratefully died to spin. A chatty, mop-haired beanpole, George liked to rattle his Rolex up and down on his wrist and make sweeping pronouncements: “We should all move to Chile and buy a lodge on the beach.” He could strike you as a preposterous brat; he struck me that way at first. But he was the kind of friend who dropped everything if you wanted to celebrate, or talk something over, or just drive among Tribeca’s black warehouses and mope.
He, too, was always hopelessly in love with someone who was already taken, but he was better at getting the girl. When one lover told him she had to try to make it work with her old boyfriend, he lunged into her bathroom and threw up, then ran a bath and sobbed in it until she got into the tub fully clothed to console him, and they ended up making love on the bathroom floor before reading Pablo Neruda aloud. I could imagine doing all that, if necessary, just not with someone else present.
On paper, George Washington Polk IV seemed the textbook Wasp — a descendant of President James Polk and a nephew of the CBS newsman George Polk, for whom the journalism awards are named; a graduate of St. Paul’s and Harvard, where he joined the Porcellian. But he had spent the formative years of his childhood in Egypt, and his home base, insofar as he had one, was France. When he arrived at St. Paul’s, scrubbed and pressed and determined, he was bewildered to discover that many of his classmates seemed indifferent to their grades and appearance.
It was George’s first exposure to the trick of effortlessness, to the loosely knotted tie and the feet on the sill, the butt palmed as the teacher goes by. Visible striving or seriousness of purpose is unWasp because it suggests that you aren’t yet at — haven’t always been at — the top. Everyone was aiming, not always consciously, for attractiveness: a courtier’s ideal that threads back five hundred years through the English gentleman to Baldassare Castiglione and his ideal of sprezzatura, a perfectly rounded skill with weapons and poetry and courtly conversation that conceals the labor of its own construction. Seymour St. John, the longtime headmaster of Choate, termed this quality of attractiveness “the sheer restfulness of good breeding.”
Even at Harvard, George was still perplexed by the seemingly negligent and distrait, wondering how I could smoke my exams when I never seemed to study and spent all my time watching Star Trek reruns. For my part, I admired his careless way of kicking off his hand-lasted wingtips as he entered the room, even as I more sneakingly envied his clubmates in the Porcellian, tall, slab-faced, mumchance Brahmins whose fathers and grandfathers had been in the Porcellian, too, and who never remembered my name. One had resolved an altercation with a cabdriver in Hong Kong by declaring, “Look here, you little yellow man, you’re to take me where I wish to go.” They were horrible, many of them, yet I wanted what they had — that ultimate sanction — so I could renounce it.
Twenty years on, my father still bridles at the memory of being told, by a Philadelphia matron he’d challenged on a passing remark, “Don’t speak that way to your betters.” Hauteur cows Wasps, too; painfully aware of the chipped dishes and bitten nails beneath their own insouciance, they can’t believe the same insecurities nibble at everyone. No matter how inside they seem, Wasps always sense a further circle just beyond reach. My cousin John Walker, who married the daughter of an earl and became the director of the National Gallery, once told my father that it made him very happy that he’d been able to purchase a plot in Oak Hill Cemetery, in Washington, D.C., that would put him near to Dean Acheson.
I WAS studying, though. Nothing was unstudied. After college, I kept a dictionary nearby when I read, and I’d look up unfamiliar words and note their meanings. That summer and fall every new word summoned up Giovanna:
eidetic: especially vivid but unreal; said of experiences, esp. in childhood
cynosure: an object that serves as a focal point of attention and admiration
anneal: to temper (glass or metal); to subject to a process of heating and slow cooling to reduce brittleness
ravel: to clarify by separating out (threads of cloth); conversely, to tangle or complicate
calvary: the hill near Jerusalem where Christ was crucified; an experience of intense mental suffering
deliquescence: tending to melt or dissolve
Weltschmerz: sentimental sadness from comparing the real world to an ideal one
Lorelei: German sirens who lure Rhine River boatmen to their doom
One night, George pondered my dejected expression and said, “I think it’s time for an expedition.” So we drove up to Barnard, where Giovanna was a freshman, igno
red her protests about an overdue paper, and carried her off. Back at our apartment, she and I had a few beers and started fooling around. This was how the relationship should be conducted: by piracy. Suddenly she jerked upright and said that Shaun was arriving the following day and it all had to stop. Our tolerable rhythm — good dates, then bad ones — had accelerated so that we veered hourly from promise to misery, from deliquescence to Weltschmerz. “This only happened because of my negligence,” she said, “because I’m young and didn’t know how to end it. I’m too young for you, Taddles — don’t you just want to smack me sometimes? I mean, what are you doing with this frustrating girl?”
“You think there might be a reason you’re in my bed just before Shaun arrives?”
“Even if Shaun dropped dead, that wouldn’t necessarily mean I’d be with you.”
I determined on a clean break. The market crash of October 1987 had been like the houselights that signal closing time, and by late the following summer we were all straggling off. There were farewell parties for the South Americans every weekend; Pablo was moving to Tokyo and George to London; and I was going to travel the world for a year. I would draw a line beneath that period and its enthusiasms: bonsai trees, Perry Ellis shirts, holes in my jeans, ratty futons, reading groups, drinking with her, dancing with her, her.
As George and I prepared to decamp, we moved for two months into our friend Loli’s vacant pied-à-terre in a brownstone on East Ninth. The place was majestic, with a wall of books, but the ceiling lights blew out one by one — they were special bulbs, like Erlenmeyer flasks, and we were lazy — and the building was surrounded by white brick towers, so by mid-afternoon you could barely make out the small pond and its neglected goldfish at the foot of the yard. Sting was on the stereo at all hours as fall came on, the days quick and cold, and I hung there in the gloom like meat in a locker, waiting.