couple of weeks later, David called to ask for my help moving furniture for his girlfriend, who had arrived in New York with her roommate. I arrived at the apartment on 73rd and York to discover that the roommate was the girl on the staircase, Hanna. She was both intense and cute, a strange and fascinating combination. In return for carrying their stuff up the stairs, the girls invited me to Thanksgiving dinner at their place. I agreed on the spot, although I wasn’t sure how my parents were going to take the news that I wouldn’t be joining them for the holiday.
As promised, I returned on Thanksgiving to the tiny one-bedroom that was crammed with a dozen or so guests. Hanna hopped up to greet me. I hadn’t eaten all day, but the buffet she pointed out was the last thing on my mind. She looked so lovely in her minidress.
Then she introduced me to her boyfriend.
I was upset, but only for a moment. The boyfriend, another Austen Riggs alum, was a chubby little nerd. Lording all six feet of myself (and full bushy beard), I thought I ought to be able to handle this. Sure enough, at the point that the crowd started to thin, Hanna asked me to stay a while longer.
“What about your boyfriend?” I asked.
“He left,” she said.
I called my parents.
“I’m staying in the city with a friend. I’ll be home tomorrow.”
It was a wonderful night. And then a wonderful next day that turned into another night. I wasn’t going anywhere, so I called my parents again.
When I called my parents on the third night, I got my mom.
“I’m spending the night in the city. But I’m not coming home anymore.”
I had decided to move in with Hanna.
“I’m in love.”
“What do you mean, you’re in love?” my mother cried.
Despite my mother’s initial alarm, my parents put up a small protest, consisting of me coming home to “talk about it,” which was basically a good excuse to collect my things. My mother and father had always given me a lot of latitude.
When I was twelve, I accompanied my parents to a party held by a prominent literary couple in honor of a visiting English publisher at their posh Upper East Side apartment. A live trio played soft standards while members of New York’s cultured elite mingled, drank, and laughed. I jumped undaunted right into the fray, no stranger to this kind of scene because of many a night spent socializing at the home of my parents’ good friends Dagobert and Maria Teresa Runes.
Bob, as the Austro-Hungarian Empire expat was known in America, founded the Philosophical Library to publish the works of great European intellectuals, particularly in the fields of psychology, philosophy, history, and religion, after their displacement by the Nazis and World War II. He palled around with the likes of Albert Einstein and André Gide and once got into a fistfight with Picasso over the publication of the artist’s only play, Desire, which contained pornography with vegetables. When Picasso asked Bob to print it on blue paper because “anything on ‘Picasso Blue’ will sell,” Bob, a true man of letters, was so incensed at the crass comment it came to fisticuffs. Needless to say, there was always a great guest list at the Runes’ parties, which were enhanced by the venue of their spectacular twelve-room triplex with double height ceilings at 44 West 77th Street. Partygoers enjoyed fine Viennese cooking (schnitzel, potato latkes, linzer torte, and gurkensalat) prepared by a Russian chef under the apartment’s enormous windows that overlooked the Museum of Natural History. (In a true Viennese standoff, Bob and Mary never could agree on which curtains to buy, so they lived for fifty-one years without them.)
So I was perfectly at ease when I found myself at this Upper East Side party, sandwiched on a couch between a Channel Thirteen broadcaster and a very attractive woman. In fact, I was having such a good time that when my parents announced around eleven o’clock that it was time to leave, I responded, “I’m not ready to go.”
Twenty minutes later, they reappeared.
“Time to go.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“Well, we’re leaving.”
And they did. At around two o’clock, when the party was wrapping up, I asked the hostess to “tell me where my bedroom is.” I was not only under the assumption that somehow arrangements had been made for me to stay the night but also completely drunk. She apologized that there was no room for me but explained that a few of the guests leaving would drop me at the subway. I got on the subway and spent the rest of the night riding the E train from Manhattan all the way to Jamaica Center, the end of the line, then back to Wall Street. I bounced from end point to end point in a barely conscious state. By the third or fourth time around, the conductor pushed me off the train—thankfully in Queens—and I found my way home just as the light was coming up.
Why did my parents leave me at a party, drinking, while they returned home to bed? Perhaps they thought I could handle it. Maybe I was too strong-willed to fight. Or they were just too worn down by André. Years later, when I was old enough to realize that bad things can happen to you, I asked my mother how she could have let me do that.
“We didn’t know what to do with you.”
She was right. I was the definition of precocious: fifteen years old, my own business, and a live-in girlfriend. And that was why school did not fit into the equation. I just had to make my guidance counselor at Stuyvesant understand that.
I made my case. “My classmates and I are just in different places,” I said. “I think I should leave, drop out.”
She listened, took a thoughtful drag of her cigarette, and then said in her thick outer-borough accent, “You know what? I think you’re right.”
It wasn’t vindictive or insincere; as a counselor and advocate, she recognized that, as insane as my story was, it was true. I respected her for having the guts to do her job. And I dropped out.
My head was pounding when I walked through the agency’s door. Although the fifties were over, there was still a lot of drinking going on—particularly in the tiny 64th Street apartment I lived in with Hanna. When she wasn’t at her job at a graphic design studio or seeing her shrink, it seemed that we were often having a cocktail. Hanna drank scotch, Chivas to be precise, so I did too. Her other roommate, David’s girlfriend from Austen Riggs, started her day with a breakfast of a water glass, filled half with Coca-Cola, half with gin.
The night before had been particularly brutal when some friends stopped by the apartment with some medical-grade pot. But if my father and Leo took note of my delicate state, they didn’t say anything about it. As usual, they were locked in an overly analytic discussion.
“Laurie is leaving the agency,” my father announced when he saw me.
Laurie Colwin, who had responded to a small ad I had put in the New York Times for
