The Farewell Symphony (3 page)

form streamlined new people into and right out of each other's arms. There was the street cruise with its accelerating rhythm of exchanged glances, the seemingly aimless passing eye contact giving way to prolonged scrutiny, the unvarying choreography bringing the dancers together in a hesitation waltz of longing and fear. There was the embrace just inside the door and the apparendy random caresses that lingered longer on cock or ass to express intention and the softer or louder moans when touched here rather than there to indicate compliance and desire. After sex there were the shower, the drink and the avowal, which began with admitting where one was from and ended with an account of the first time one had ever made love. Anthological and sociological, every account of gay life lists the numbers, notes the nuances, and that enumeration replaces all those tedious genealogies in the Old Testament, that string that begins and ends with "And X begat Y, who in turn begat Z." If poetry requires endless variations on a very few themes, then no existence could have been more poetic than ours. The days were drudgery and I sleepwalked through them, tired and hangover. But the nights were heart quickening—the hunt, the fierce grappling, desultory pillow talk.

I can remember a New Year's Eve, after my year of abstinence following my bout of hepatitis, when a blizzard turned New York into an arctic village. I didn't have a date and felt sorry for myself. I was trudging home through waist-high drifts that the winds built, then blew away. Booted and hooded partygoers shrieked as they slipped, or they delicately picked their way over the mountains that snowplows had already turned back. The words they muttered sofdy to themselves were carried across the snow with surprising fidelity.

On New Year's Eve the bars never close and at every intersection the dull throb of muted jukeboxes and a muffled chorus of voices inside were carried across the wastes. On my corner the windows of the local straight bar were frosted over and glowing with Christmas lights and beer-ad neon. A bare-headed man in a camel's hair coat emerged, saw me, smiled and wordlessly hooked his arm in mine. As snow devils pirouetted around us, snow chains noisily ratded far away, and the stuck traffic light burned a demented red beneath an old man's heavy white eyebrow, we kissed and kissed, bare hands frustrated by layers of clothing, our young faces flushed with drink under hair that was rapidly whitening, aging us alarmingly.

His name was Jim, he was from Virginia, I never saw him again, but as the first dawn of the new year turned the snowbanks outside my window a radioactive blue and the radiator knocked three times as though to an-

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nounce my pale curtain was about to go soaring up, we lay in extravagant ease on the tropical beach of my huge bed, evciy inch of our bodies licked clean. The great romantics always live alone since a long run can only dull the perfection of the opening night.

I don't use this theatrical language lighdy. One young man, silent and bored with my prc-scx chatter, stood, pulled me into his arms wearily, patted my ass and said, "Okay, boys, on stage," as he led me into the bedroom, where indeed he knew all his lines ("Yeah, baby, suck that big dick, talk to it, treat it good"). His dialogue, like mine, like everyone's, had been written by Erskine Caldwell, since in bed we would never have tolerated the grammatical correctness ("treat it welF) or precision ("that fair-to-middling penis") we insisted on elsewhere. The middle-class manner we considered indispensable in this anonymous city where everyone wore jeans after hours we rigorously put aside when making love. Only ten years later did we begin to see the charm of "executive sex," of reaching up under a starched shirt and caressing a nipple or reaching into the fly of grey flannel trousers, or unknotting and tossing a silk rep tie around the neck of a Greek marble bust. . . .

In college I'd known a dandified, spinsterish black woman named Janet who'd idolized me in a manner by turns mocking and motherly. She was emaciated, lighdy bearded, and she had an imperious way of keeping in line the big black men who shared her on"-campus house. They were rowdy football players, she an intellectual and artist, but they were afraid of her frail discipline. She cooked for them and convoked them to table with stern authority, although they could fluster her by flirting with her. Like me she was an aspiring writer and we'd work together all night long on our manuscripts in her room, which had once been the dining room in a ramshackle Victorian mansion and was still separated from the rest of the house by a set of double doors that retracted on runners into the walls.

Janet lived on cold chicken curry soup into which she would slice cold apples. Cactuses lined the windowsills and Indian prints were thrown over the broken-down armchairs out of a sense of respect for the wounded and dying. We would work together all night and I'd fall asleep on her daybed, which now I realize must also have been her night bed. In any event she made a cult out of sleeplessness and seemed offended by the suggestion that she needed anything more than five minutes' meditation

The Farewell Symphony

in an armchair. She would wake me with an old seventy-eight recording of La Boheme sung by Georges Thill in his light, silvery voice. The smeU of freshly concocted curry and stale smoke and the penetrating sound of Georges Thill's French version of 0 soave fanciulla surrounded me those winter mornings or afternoons when I awoke and began almost instandy to correct the hand-written pages scattered across the floor, to down coffee, smoke cigarettes, talk, scribble, pace, read Janet's latest lines, watch the newly risen Michigan sun set.

Now, eight years later, Janet was teaching in a private Chicago school for disturbed children. She phoned me one evening as I was sitting in despair before an expensive, uneaten dinner I'd prepared for a handsome model I'd met on the train and invited to my place for my idea of a real French meal. He was due at eight o'clock. He'd still not arrived at nine-thirty when Janet called to say her favorite student, Craig, was just a block away from my apartment and in need of a place to stay.

"Has he eaten?" I asked.

"What?"

"Has he eaten? If he hasn't eaten he can come."

"You see, he's transferred to a school in upstate New York. He was staying with Maria's friend Beth, but Beth's girlfriend Bunny threw him out because—"

"I don't care about any of that so long as he's not eaten."

"I don't understand anything. Okay, I'U call him back. Poor boy. . . ."

When Craig arrived I seated him almost instandy in the seduction chair I had destined for the French model and fed him the coquilles St.-Jacques in a white wine and mushroom cream sauce, the cognac-soaked sweetbreads and the baba au rhum I'd been laboring over for a day and a half—a boozy menu only a young, fit body such as Craig's could possibly have digested. After my recent bout of hepatitis rich food made me sick.

For months now Janet had been writing me letters about Craig, whom she was in love with, although she was twents-eight and he sLxteen and her student, dyslexic and presumably half-mad. He had shoulder-length straight hair the color of tarnished bronze and a fine gold hoop in his left ear. He trembled so violently that the hoop was constandy spinning. He had very black, thick eyebrows and a stubby, masculine nose at odds with his lean body and his shy way of lowering his face toward the candlelight. The wavering flame danced on the hanging curtain of hair and the trembling earring.

Janet had warned me on the phone to keep my mitts off" her property.

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"He's a het-ero-sex-ual boy," she emphasized, "and you mustn't initiate liim into your filthy vices." She spoke to me with the same tone of" teasing reprimand she'd used to intimidate her burly roommates back in college. Janet knew perfectly well that I had only one bed. She'd been up to her old subde sadism by pushing a trembling heterosexual teen into my bed, one who if I touched would no doubt require extra years of very expensive psychotherapy.

By pouring out plenty of wine and playing the Sergeant Pepper album I had managed to relax Craig and excite myself As bedtime approached, I rushed into the bathroom and swallowed a big sleeping pill. Just to be polite I asked him about his girlfriend and he spoke of several. The pill produced its effect; I yawned cavernously. But once the lights were out and we were in bed this shy, trembling boy became a masterful man planted firmly on top of me, the head of his basalt-hard penis digging into my navel, his hands shackling my wrists to the mattress above my head, then the tent of his hair grazing my forehead, shoulder, stomach, knee as he made a pilgrimage to all the stations of my surprised and grateful body before he laid his head on my chest and I felt the cold gold earring isolating my right nipple and smelled the rum from his baba. He slept while I watched the dawn whiten my nonplused curtain.

I wanted him to stay with me on every weekend away from his new boarding school and I felt sure he'd come back only if I insisted on his freedom. I gave him his own keys and told him to come and go as he liked. But he was in no rush to get away. The daylight metamorphosed him back into a bridle-shy adolescent. He told me he'd discovered two years earlier, when he was fourteen, that he liked men (Oh, I thought, Janet made up all that about his being heterosexual, her own desires crowding out the unwelcome truth). He had run away from home and hitchhiked to San Francisco, where he'd crashed at the pad of a really cool bearded cat in his forties who lived in the Haight and smoked a powerful lot of dope and built harpsichords and just hung loose. Craig's parents tracked him down and one night at three in the morning two hired guns broke the door in, trampled blindly, resonandy over a harpsichord still without legs, and spirited off the groggy, barefoot boy to a waiting private plane.

"Your parents must be loaded," I said in hushed tones.

Craig said his father owTied one of the biggest school textbook publishing houses in the country and admitted that his own inability to read was no doubt an unconscious slap in his father's face.

"Your dad probably would flip if he knew you were here," I said.

The Farewell Symphony

Craig took me by the hand and led me to the window. He pulled back the curtain. "See that g^y in the corny trench coat over there? That's the private eye who follows me everywhere. Hi, George!" Craig ga\e the man a tiny salute. "That's what I call him, George. He's the world's worst gumshoe."

"Do you think armed dicks will come crashing through my door?" I asked, trying to sound coolly bemused, mentally cursing Janet.

"I'm sure my dad would approve— does approve of you," Craig said, a bit too condescendingly for my taste. "He likes white-collar t\pes. And you're not going to kidnap me and hold me for ransom or drag his name through the papers and embarrass him by butt-fucking me during a frontpage drug raid." For the first time I had a glimpse of how the rich are different from you and me—they accommodate our poor little morals without themselves subscribing to an\thing more stringent than d\Tiastic loyalty.

Craig went off shopping, dutifully tailed by George. In three hours he came back carrying four pairs of shoes widi platform heels and multicolored leather facings, buskins worthy of an ugly-customer rock star on speed or an ancient Greek comic on stage.

That night, as we lay in each other's arms, he told me of his dream, to buy a big house in Pacific Heights above San Francisco and live there with all his friends of both sexes. They would discuss life, make love, get high— his friends w^ould be both students in Plato's academy and houris in a psychedelic harem.

We passed a joint back and forth in the dark and I felt my chest and arms light up with jukebox bubbles and my solar plexus swing yet another disc of volatile body music under the waiting needle of my heart, but my words seemed stranded, shunted off on a siding, waiting to be engaged.

Being high meant being in danger. I who'd never trusted my organs to function or my words and gestures to signif^; I who feared the mechanical world and considered even crossing the street perilous, ob\iously I couldn't "go with the flow," as people were saying then. I knew the perfidious flow was nothing but white water buffeting the boat unerringly toward rocks that would splinter it. I feared being unworthy of this young man beside me—my cock too small, my breath corrupt, my skin clammy with too much experience.

But the minute he touched it, warm showers of sparks trailed his hand, as though my flesh were the phosphorescing sea in August. Our bodies were immense, geographical, ideal as those elemental gods, dispersed to

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the flowing elements except where touch quarried out a rich, juicy intricacy of shape and feelings—shame, bliss, sluttishness, awe.

I discovered that when stoned I skipped transitions and suddenly found myself already doing what I longed to do, as though the film had been badly edited and nothing differentiated the dream sequences from reality. It was enough for me to flash on a mental picture of myself as Craig's slave to discover I was already licking his feet. As soon as I saw his head on the pillow, fine straight hair fanning out to expose his jug ears and the powerful architecture of his jaw and skull, I was already straddling his chest and force-feeding his mouth. Fear of disgusting him surfaced for a moment only to be submerged by my own instantly realized fantasies, so powerful I assumed he must share them. Every action was saying something, at least to me, and saying it indelibly, as a brand sears. The tragedy of sex is that one can never know what this most intimate and moving form of communication has actually said to the other person and whether the message, if received, was welcome.

Now no one ever touches my body, which I neglect and let bulge, bloat and sag, although I dress it with more and more care, not yet reconciled to the shabbiness of age. No one ever looks at me on the street and my dreams become more and more erotic. Last night I dreamed that an old friend, a writer who's never done more than peck my cheek, caressed me obscenely and tenderly, promised to take me to his house after the theater, but I couldn't find him in the crowd and when I did I was at the wrong entrance and he was angry with me for having disobeyed his instructions.