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GIOVANNI

Edmund White 

 

What’s left of an ex in my memory? 

He was kind and courtly (as he should have been 

Since he was a Sicilian aristocrat), 

When he wasn’t being horrid if I stepped 

Out of line, then frozen with fury and  

Unforgiving. He taught me one good pasta 

Recipe, Pasta alla Norma, with fried eggplant. He 

Bought me a CD player when mine broke, several  

Cashmere blankets, and he restored a leather 

Club chair that was in tatters. He was a doctor, could play 

The harpsichord, cook a few dishes, entertain 

In his battleship-sized loft, lie and cheat convincingly,  

Make the sort of love a heterosexual Mediterranean  

Male might make, selfish and athletic—and which I liked  

Because it never dwindled away even after we broke up. 

We both cried a lot. He had a black ceramic vase with an 

African face and a crown, until I explained that 

Was unacceptable in politically correct New York. 

Then it was banished, as was I when I told his new  

Lover that Giovanni and I were still having sex. I saw a good shrink 

And got over him. I’ll never have another lover— 

Too much of a bother. Once in a while I wish we could 

Speak on the phone, to find out whether his father’s  

Parkinson’s is progressing, whether his little brother  

Got married, and did he ever discover a cure for that  

Kind of breast cancer. And does he still hate me?  

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Edmund White

Edmund White has written some thirty books. He is perhaps best known for his biography of French writer Jean Genet, for which he won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of a trilogy of autobiographical novels—A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony. He has written brief lives of Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud and a book about unconventional Paris called The Flaneur. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is an officer in the French Order of Arts and Letters and has received a medal from the French Academy. He taught at Princeton and lives in New York City. He won the 2018 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction and received the 2019 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation. His sex memoir, The Loves of My Life, will be published in January, 2025.