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103 In 1960, a few months after I moved in with Neil, Alfred Chester returned from Paris and our old acquaintance immediately turned into firm friendship. He, too, had changed into a new person during his decade abroad. He was still strange-looking with his ratty wig, but now was charged up, high-powered. If he was a callow youth when I last saw him, the years abroad had given him enormous selfcon fidence. He was widely published, had won a Guggenheim Fellowship , and his stormy, live-in relationship with the handsome Israeli pianist had lasted a decade, even while carrying on other romantic affairs. In Paris he had impressed numerous literary Americans , French, and British with his brilliance. Over the next few years I could observe how he operated, as he became one of the hottest figures on the New York literary scene. It had been his growing literary success that gave him the courage to return home. The American publication of his novel Jamie Is My Heart’s Desire in 1958, in tandem with a short story, “As I Was Going Up the Stair,” in The Best American Short Stories of that year, prepared for his return. And the sale to the New Yorker of his short 12 story, “A War on Salamis,” for the then enormous sum of three thousand dollars, provided the funds. In this story, he told about escaping from a Greek island after adopting two wild dogs, considered untamable , even dangerous, by the backward islanders, which put him into conflict with them. In reality, the two dogs, named Columbine and Skoura, accompanied him back to the States and fully justified the apprehensions of the villagers by biting people everywhere and refusing to be house-trained. Later, on the ferry across the Straits from Gibraltar, when Neil and I accompanied Alfred to Tangier for the first time, I watched with horror as Columbine, the larger and fiercer of the two, lunged forward and sank her teeth into the leg of a woman passing by on deck. The dog’s fangs caught in the elastic fabric of the woman’s pedal pushers with an alarming snapping sound. Alfred was not fazed in the slightest—she did that all the time, he said, proudly—and when the husband of the tearful woman came over to berate him he merely thrust out the dog’s papers at him to show she had been tested and inoculated against rabies. The first thing he had to do, he told me on his return to New York, was find somewhere to live, not just for himself and the dogs and a pair of cats as well, but for Arthur, his Israeli pianist boyfriend, who would be coming to join him from Paris, and would need a place big enough for a piano. With half of New York apartments rent-controlled and solidly occupied, and the decontrolled rents out of sight, this wasn’t going to be easy, especially with those dogs. I got an immediate example of how Alfred had learned to operate when he located a spacious floor-through penthouse in a handsome wreck of a building in the Village, south of Washington Square. The only trouble was that the rent the landlord quoted was three hundred a month, which was half of all the money he had left. Undaunted, Alfred looked up the real estate records in City Hall, and found that the building was still listed as rent-controlled at sixty-six dollars a month. Then dressing himself up as an eccentric millionaire in an old velvet jacket from the Marché aux Puces, and with a friend posing as a professional decorator, they went over the apartment pointing out to the landlord the improvements they would make, tearing 104 105 out walls, putting in a Hollywood bathroom, a marble fireplace, and a farmhouse kitchen. The landlord was dazzled. In his greedy mind the place was already magnificently renovated and decorated without him having to invest a penny. As soon as the lease was signed and Alfred had turned over his last six hundred dollars, one month’s rent plus a month’s security, he immediately applied to the municipal rent control office to have the rent reduced to the legal sixty-six dollars a month. After this sleightof -hand the landlord did everything in his power to get Alfred out, of course, but Alfred repeatedly took him to court, and even had the rent...

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