James Schuyler

I went to his sixty-sixth birthday dinner: sixteen years ago this past November. I remember that it was at Chelsea Central (his favorite restaurant: great steaks) on 10th Avenue, and that Ashbery was there, and a few others, including Joe, impeccably dressed and gracious, who picked up what must have been (I thought at the time) an exorbitant bill. I remember him saying more than once, “Joe always picks up the bill,” then smiling a slightly wicked smile. Sitting with him (those excruciating silences!) in his room at the Chelsea, my eyes would wander from his book- shelves (The Portrait of a Lady stood out) to the pan of water on the radiator to the records strewn on the floor to some scraggly plants (ivy? herbs?) in ceramic pots at the base of the French doors that opened to the balcony and balustrade and sound of traffic on 23rd Street six floors below. He read me “White Boat, Blue Boat” shortly after he wrote it, and a poem about Brook Benton singing “Rainy Night in Georgia” that didn’t make it into his Last Poems, though I remember thinking it beautiful. He complained, in a letter to Tom, about how much I smoked, and how emotional I’d get during movies: he must have been referring to Field of Dreams(he had a yen for Kevin Costner). When he took me to see L'Atalante, a film he loved, I was bored. Once, we took the subway (he hadn’t ridden it in years) to the Frick; I remember admiring Romney’s Lady Hamilton. It hurt that he didn’t invite me to the dinner after his Dia reading or to the reception after his reading at the 92nd Street Y, though he did, at the latter, read “Mood Indigo,” dedicated to me. When he said my name from the stage, Joan and Eileen, sitting to my left, turned and stared at me; frozen by the enormity of the moment, I couldn’t look back. When he came to a reading I gave at St. Mark’s, Raymond impressed upon me what an honor it was: Jimmy didn’t go to many poetry readings. What else is there to say? That when I visited him at St. Vincent’s the day before he died Darragh said, “He likes to hear gossip.” So I said, “Eileen and I are talking again.” That at his funeral I sat alone (Ira couldn’t come); that that was the loneliest feeling in the world. That afterwards Doug said “You look so sad.” How should I have looked, Doug! And that a year after he died, I dreamt I saw him in the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel. He was wearing a hospital shift and seemed to have no muscle control over his face—like in inten- sive care after his stroke. He saw me and said, “It’s nice to see some familiar faces.” I approached him, but he disappeared.