High Life | 9 May 2009

New York

We had a preview of sultry August here last week, with temperatures going as far up as 93° Fahrenheit in Central Park, filled to the brim by girls in their summer dresses, and others less modest in their tiny bikinis. For some strange reason, one doesn’t notice men in their summer best, not that men dress nowadays for a walk among the magnolias and cherry blossom. Summer is etched in my psyche as the time for girls. The acrid tang of heat emanating from the sidewalks, the breezes of late afternoon, the whiff of perfume of a passing beauty all help. Summertime was a dress rehearsal of coming manhood, the realisation that sooner or later one would fall desperately in love and lie drugged with pleasure on the grass with the girl of one’s dreams.

Well, believe it or not that’s how it turned out. One falls in love quicker during summertime. One’s senses are more acute, especially down south. On the beautiful University of Virginia campus, laid out by Thomas Jefferson himself, along the serpentine wall, I used to follow a southern belle around like a dog, quoting from Fitzgerald to no avail.

Then came May, the magnolias went into bloom, and Mary Blair finally came round. Ceiling fans went into overtime, pitchers of lemonade spiked with gin were produced, Mary Blair put on her white crinoline dress, and after tennis we lay out on the grass whispering sweet you-know-whats to each other. I was 19 and she had never been kissed, at least the French way, as it was called back then. She had a fan with an ivory handle, and her skin was the whitest I had come across. A tiny black cross on her chest accentuated her luminosity, as did her Scotch-Irish, blue-black hair and eyes.