Francesco

Elegant, witty, literary, a superb host—Francesco was all of these things. A short Italian man with silver temples and a lean and wiry build, he would entertain nightly a series of guests in his New York apartment who would lie down in his bed to be served a meal he had prepared for them and be regaled by his delightful intellectual conversation.

You never knew what sort of meal you would get—whether a diminutive lamb chop with baby new potatoes garnished with parsley, or something that looked like it had come straight from the local diner: greasy scrambled eggs with a dollop of ketchup or Welch’s grape jelly.

I was attracted to Francesco and imagined what it would be like to feel his lips pressed on mine. At first I’d suspected that he might be gay, but then as I thought about it, it seemed more likely that he might even marry me. Certainly he would make love to me by the time night fell? We had much in common, if he only knew it. We were both Jewish, both interested in Vedanta. He had just written a little book on Vedanta, in fact. (I would need only to glance at it to determine whether he had really mastered the subject.) But what would it be like being married to him? There would surely be some lonely Saturday nights as he entertained his endless guests.

I had been there a while, enjoying his exclusive attention (wondering whether I was sufficiently interesting to evoke his wit), when one of his other women friends popped in—it was mostly women who popped in—and lay beside me on the bed. She was a brunette, long-haired like me and wearing a similar frock, but she seemed to know him better than I did. She addressed him sometimes as Francesco and sometimes by his last name, which, although it was only two syllables, I was not able to remember. She being the most recently arrived, he turned his attention to her, and I joked weakly about having to keep to the side of the bed now relegated to me.

After a while it seems I “graduated” from the bed as others arrived. First I wandered around the apartment, which was cluttered with books, papers, and wine bottles; I had my eye on one green bottle filled with a pale liquid. An ancient fan with a metal grille clattered noisily away on the table, and I stood before it to cool off—with my long hair I was feeling steamy on this hot summer night. Large windows looked out over a courtyard, and you could wave to people on the other side as you sat on one of the daybeds there—as the brunette now did (she too had now “graduated” to this part of the house).

As I returned to the daybeds after making several circuits of his home, I would find each time a different book he had placed there for me to look at. Once there was a beat-up old copy of the Bhagavad Gita with its yellow and red cover. Then I found a little square book, privately published in Europe, that was in several languages at once—Italian, English, Hebrew. I finally asked Francesco whether he had a copy of his Vedanta book about which I’d heard so much. He lifted his eyebrows. “I’ve got seven.” And he brought them out of a cupboard, adding off-handedly, “I really don’t know much about the subject.”

Now as I sat on a daybed, a stocky young man entered and plopped down, puffing from his climb up the stairs. He dropped a thick manuscript held together with a rubber band next to me, indicating that I should read it. “Are you kidding?” I exploded. “Just look at it!” The faintly printed typescript was barely legible. “What, was it hacked out on an old manual typewriter?” The brunette informed me that this fellow was the editor of the magazine “Bicycle,” evidently an anthology of the literary efforts of bike messengers. He seemed to have some sort of avant-garde reputation. The manuscript before me, however, appeared to have been written by some woman in a camp — what kind of camp?

A summer camp?

A trailer camp?

A concentration camp?

Would I have to read it?

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