Frank O’Hara came out for one memorable weekend, and a group decided to drive out to Coney Island for the day. Jimmy was scared and miserable on the famous roller coaster there, but Frank, typically, was exhilarated by it. Driving back, Frank was still somewhat punch-drunk from the park and sped up as he came into the driveway, pretending he was about to run into Fizdale and several others standing there, but stopped just in time. Fizdale and Gold were frightened and angry at this recklessness, and Jimmy assumed that this would be the last time Frank would be invited out to Snedens Landing. On the contrary. At breakfast the next morning, Fizdale sidled up to Schuyler and said, “I very much like your friend, Frank O’Hara!” Later that day, when Jimmy walked into Fizdale’s bathroom, he was surprised to find Bobby and Frank in the tub, happily taking a bath together. For the rest of the summer, to Jimmy’s great delight, Arthur Weinstein was off the scene and O’Hara and Fizdale enjoyed what would turn out to be a summer romance. There was a witty symmetry to the arrangement, noted with amusement at the time: the two poet-roommates having simultaneous affairs with the two duo-piano partners. The tandem love affairs had the incidental effect of bringing Jimmy and Frank closer together, emphasizing a sort of brotherly feeling that they seemed to have shared, particularly around this time.
Frank was an excellent pianist himself, having studied piano and composition in college. When the pair of professionals were not at their instruments, he often played for long periods. Fizdale was astonished one day to hear from the other room “some Rachmaninoff or Liszt piece being dashed off at the piano” and assumed that Gold was playing, only to come in to find that it was Frank, who he hadn’t even realized could play. This summer was the period of Frank’s life when he came closest to reconnecting with his early musical interests, and it shows in some of the references to musical forms, and to piano music in particular, in poems he wrote at the time. Living with the pianists had an influence on Jimmy’s work as well, giving him not just a greater familiarity with the literature of the piano, seen in later poems such as “Hoboken,” “Scriabin,” “Grand Duo,” and others, but also an insider’s view into the workaday practice of pianists, particularly the intimate collaboration, almost amounting to mindreading, required of duo pianists—insights somewhat applicable to his ongoing collaboration with John Ashbery on A Nest of Ninnies.
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