10.41. At the prospect of the dinner visit, Marilyn and I had taken out of the Tompkins Square Library (named after Vice President Tompkins, buried over in the churchyard at St. Marks in the Bowery), Nones, Homage to Clio, and The Shield of Achilles (and looked in vain for Kallman’s Storm at Castle-franco), read them over quickly (dwelling on “Primes,” on “In Praise of Limestone,” on “Shorts”), and returned them a few days before the poets arrived — so as not to have them ostentatiously lying about.
Yet if you’d asked me just before that evening, I’d have said I was far more familiar with any number of other poets — Eliot, Pound, Dylan Thomas, Hart Crane, e.e. cummings, George Starbuck (“Oscar Williams fills a need, but a Monkey Ward Catalogue is softer, and gives you something to read. …”—Starbuck’s scathing acrostic was the intellectual secret of every bright fifteen-year-old with poetic leanings in the latter half of the fifties), X. J. Kennedy, Allen Ginsberg, John Crowe Ransom, or Gregory Corso.
10.5. The morning of the eighth, I worked for a few hours on my SF novel, now called The Jewels of Aptor, stopping when the landlord’s carpenters arrived to start work on our bathroom, built into the kitchen’s corner, to go out to the open-front fish store around on Avenue C. Tramping about in the sawdust among the larger, cigar-smoking, rough-languaged men working there, Johnny, the redheaded near-midget fishmonger, measured me out a pound and a half of shrimp. A young man probably no older than I, in a bloody white apron, orange work shoes, thick gray sweater out at the elbows with a rolled-down shawl collar, his small, heavily veined hands sported frantically bitten nails, his fingers translucent from fillets and ice.
Back home, with rice, canned tomatoes, some wine, onions, and curry powder, I got started on dinner as the winter windows darkened to blue, then black. Just before six, Marilyn came home from work. I slipped out of my jeans and flannel shirt to dress.
10.6. Outside, the night was freezing. The apartment was swelteringly overheated. Steam from the saffron rice I was preparing licked up under the blue kitchen cabinets, with their painted-over broken panes.
In my dark brown suit and bright red tie, I was, by my own choice, to be merely the cook and the maker of conversational filler. Though I was certainly as excited as she, it was, of course, Marilyn’s evening. Her two and a half feet of bronze hair were up in a bun; she wore a green wool winter dress, a bronze deco pin on her shoulder from which hung a brazen fringe. Charging in and out of our tiny bathroom off the kitchen, we were about as flustered as a nineteen-year-old couple could be, anticipating such guests, and kept making anxious quips to each other to the effect that we hoped they would be fashionably late, to give us time to get organized. In rather a frenzy, we passed from arguments on how to do this or that to hysterical laughter, then back, minute by minute.
From time to time I glanced at the eye-level hole in the kitchen’s blue, blistered wall, within which sweated the copper pipes.
10.61. About ten minutes before the eight o’clock dinner hour, someone twisted the key outside on our ancient doorbell. I turned to answer it. Unbuttoning overcoats over gray herringbone suits and somber ties, first Kallman, then Auden, stepped in. After I greeted them in our cramped kitchen, with Marilyn somewhat nonplussed behind me (I don’t think she really believed they were coming), I told them, “If we had a schedule, which we don’t, we’d be about twenty minutes behind it.”
“Then perhaps,” Kallman said (as Marilyn finally got out her “Hello,” her smile, her hand …), taking a paper bag from under his arm, “we should all have some of this — ” and broke out a small bottle of gin (not vodka, that night) — “unless you’re serving something else …?”
There was also a small bottle of Noilly Prat in the bag.
10.611. When I shook Auden’s hand, I noticed he was a serious nail-biter and, I think, fell in love with him a little bit.
10.62. I took their coats and put them in the back bedroom. Left over from the housewarming (and we only had two real glasses), paper cups did for the martinis.
Auden and Kallman were both big men, and our apartment was suddenly very small. Beneath the somewhat long, graying hair, Auden’s face had already begun to split into those astonishing crevices from the Touraine-Solente-Golé syndrome he suffered with — though they were not yet so deep as later photographs show them, nor was his increasing fleshiness yet so pronounced. For now, indeed, he was a handsome fifty-four — days away from his fifty-fifth birthday, though we didn’t know it.
Through the opening conversation both men were as complimentary as possible about our apartment. They wanted to know how much we paid for it and told us they paid, I believe, $148 a month for their own St. Marks Place flat — which whispered to us of the luxurious life truly successful writers might lead.
10.63. From Gail, I believe Marilyn and I had borrowed a copy of the 1949 translation, put out in Paris by Editions Morihen, of Genet’s Notre Dame des fleurs, called, rather rakishly, in English, Gutter in the Sky. The black hardcover had an oddly illustrated double-spread title page, which included a drawing of a seventeenth-century French wig in a little circle on the upper right of the recto. In the actual text, each new male character was introduced with a parenthetical aside, e.g., “(Perruque, nine-and-a-quarter inches.)” or “(Perruque, seven-and-a-half inches.)”: perruque means “wig” in French and is also argot for “cock.” (Apparently Genet omitted these bits from the 1952 Gallimard edition from which Bernard Frechtman did the current translation that appeared in 1963—unless they were extra-auctorial interpolations to begin with, inserted to spice up a text that, while lurid as to its depicted social milieu, was, in texture, all but nonerotic.) In the living room the book was lying on the bridge table my mother had given us, and on which we were to eat. Either Auden or Kallman picked it up; one of the other of them hadn’t actually seen the translation before, but I don’t remember which. The perruques were duly chuckled over. As I recall, Genet didn’t linger in the conversation.
10.64. They approved of and cuddled our black kitten, Tamuz.
“He’s a marvelous cat,” Marilyn told them, “except at four o’clock in the morning, when he decides to do his imitation of six dray horses pulling a beer wagon over the living room floor.”
“Dray horses!” Auden declared, laughing. And to Chester, “This cat can imitate a dray horse!”
Auden told a story about a cat of theirs in Ischia, who walked over his typewriter and sat on his papers, and whom I was sure I recognized, from his poems, as “Lucina,/Blue-eyed Queen of white cats …” Her initials, “L. K.-A.”, Marilyn and I had identified only a few days before as “Lucina Kallman-Auden.” After a bit Kallman suggested we three men remove our jackets in the overheated living room. We did — and opened some windows as well.