Because real phoniness takes honesty, courage, sincerity, and sensitiveness even.
“Of course I haven’t anything against whores. Except this: some of them may have an honest tongue but they all have dishonest hearts. I mean, you can’t bang the guy and cash his cheques and at least not try to believe you love him. I never have. Even Benny Shacklett and all these rodents. I sort of hypnotized myself into thinking their sheer rattines had a certain allure [… even though… they’re] not my idea of the absolute finito. If I were free to choose from everybody alive […] I’d settle for Garbo any day. Why not? A person ought to be able to marry men or women or – listen, if you came to me and said you wanted to hitch up with Man o’ War, I’d respect your feeling. No, I’m serious. Love should be allowed. I’m all for it […] Good things only happen to you if you’re good [?] Good? Honest is more what I mean. Not law-type honest – I’d rob a grave, I’d steal two-bits of a dead man’s eyes if I thought it would contribute to the day’s enjoyment – but unto-thyself-type honest. Be anything but a coward, a pretender, an emotional crook, a whore: I’d rather have cancer than a dishonest heart. Which isn’t being pious. Just practical.”
Those final weeks, spanning end of summer and the beginning of another autumn, are blurred in memory, perhaps because our understanding of each other had reached that sweet depth where two people communicate more often in silence than in words: an affectionate quietness replaces the tensions, the unrelaxed chatter and chasing about that produce a friendship’s more showy, more, in the surface sense, dramatic moments. Frequently […] we spent entire evenings together during which we exchanged less than a hundred words; once, we walked all the way to Chinatown, ate a chow-mein supper, bought some paper lanterns, and stole a box of joss sticks, then moseyed across the Brooklyn Bridge, and on the bridge, as we watched seaward-moving ships pass between the cliffs of burning skyline, she said: “Years from now, years and years, one of those ships will bring me back, me and my nine Brazilian brats. Because yes, they must see this, these lights, the river – I love New York, even though it isn’t mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it.”
