3. Colette
An ideal relationship for me is one where I do all the listening and someone else does all the talking. This is usually made easier if the other person is interesting, as I usually have nothing of great importance to say. I think Colette would be someone who wouldn’t mind holding up the conversation, while I just sat on her chaise lounge and stuffed my face with petit fours. My favorite picture of Colette is of her and Audrey Hepburn. She’s reading with great bravado, while Audrey is lying on her bosom, blissful. That could be me!
2. Frank O’Hara
I’m mostly a savage when it comes to poetry, but I like Frank O’Hara. Like all the poetry I read, I was relentlessly attacked by it until finally deciding that it wasn’t all that bad. O’Hara seems like someone I would like to take a walk with. I would just hope he wouldn’t bring along William Carlos Williams because he would intimidate me. I probably don’t find O’Hara scary because we’d probably just talk about “pearls, harmonicas, jujubes, [and] aspirins” while Williams would just start talking smack about T.S. Eliot.
1. Gabriel García Márquez
I want to be friends with Marquez but under the condition that we were friends in a universe in which magical realism was just plain realism. That way, we could meet up for a bit of alchemy in the afternoon, and then spend the evening deciphering bird entrails. I have no interest doing those things in real life, but in Macondo, they’d probably take on a new sense of excitement. But I suppose if we were friends in the real world, I wouldn’t mind taking out him and his Nobels for dinner in the window-seat of a well-known restaurant.
