In late summer 1947 he was recuperating at East Hampton. The hepatitis had gradually disappeared. As his appetite returned, he began to reclaim some of the lost thirty pounds. Morose and unfocused, he was happy to have Anaïs at a distance. Over the last year, in Guatemala and New York, he had complained that his life lacked a grand romance, while at the same time he had strong reservations about the value in general of any kind of “romance” at all. Whether he wanted or felt capable of an affair with anyone was a consideration. “Have you the temperament to secure and hold a lover?” a friend had asked him the previous winter. The answer had been the same as it had been to Anaïs. But he now gave a different response to twenty-two-year-old Harold Lang, the California-born ballet and musical-comedy dancer, famous for his pirouettes on- and offstage. “We met,” Vidal wrote in an unpublished 1947 short story, in “a wood-walled bar in the beach town, the bar where the people in the summer theater gathered.”
