The Farewell Symphony (2 page)

As soon as I was back in my room I plunged down through warm, brackish tides to wrest one small yellow pearl from the depths but it was poison, the sea heavy, my oxygen supply compromised. For a long time I was dragged across the shingle, my battered body wound and unwound on a bobbin of white water.

Then I woke up, perhaps it was midnight, my fever was in remission. I was clear-headed and in a panic. I knew that if I didn't do something now I might never emerge from sea-racked dreams. I showered, dressed and descended into the empty streets. Somehow I'd just assumed cabs would be cruising here as in any New York neighborhood. Finally I saw a deserted taxi stand and three people in line ahead of me. Half an hour later I told the driver to take me to the American Hospital—far away in Neuilly, as it turned out. No one but a nurse was awake, but finally an English doctor was aroused. He examined and informed me I had "glandular fever"; had I known what this meant, I would have told him I had already had mononucleosis, the kissing disease. I said I suspected I had hepatitis.

"Oh, nonsense," he yawned. "The shellfish is perfectly good in France."

"But you can get it from sex, too," I said, "and lots of people in New York are coming down with it."

He said he seriously doubted my diagnosis, but a day later I jaundiced. When I went back to Neuilly with my yellow face he said, "But hepatitis isn't a serious disease. Just don't visit more than one museum a day. No reason to cut short your holiday."

In fact there was one museum I wanted to visit before flying home, the Musee Guimet of Oriental art. In college my favorite course had been Buddhist Art and half the things we'd studied had been slides of sculptures from the Guimet. As I struggled up the endless marble staircase I couldn't help but remember Bergotte, the novelist in Proust, who pays a dying visit to a Vermeer exhibit and collapses after seeing a litde patch of yellow wall, presumably in the View of Delft. My goal was a Bodhisattva of the Sui dynasty, a slender figure in hesitant contrapposto, the tenderly modeled body girdled by a low chain over a pleatless gown, a long pearl necklace dangling like a flapper's to a point below the knees. The face was undeniably worldly (after all, the stretched-out ears revealed that the saintly Gautama had once been Siddhartha, a prince who'd worn heavily jeweled earrings), but it was sacred, if to be sacred meant to be Nothing at all. Of course the sculpture wasn't there or was in storage and I wandered, jaundiced, through acres of bad blue and white Ching pottery.

When I flew back to New York, I was the color of old teeth and so thin and indifferent that everyone at the airport spoke to me in French. My doctor in New York hospitalized me. After eleven days he released me and I went home. He prescribed two months of bed rest, six months of sexual abstinence, a year without drink.

At that time I was living alone in the West Village in a ground-floor apartment. Before my illness I'd regarded it as just a pit stop where I'd shower, eat and change before rushing out again into the night to one of the nearby bars. If I came home at two or three in the morning without a trick my heart would pound. I was that afraid of being alone.

But now hepatitis restored me to my adolescence. My gym-built body dwindled back into boyish slimness, my ears stood out from my head. Forbidden sex and drink, I spent whole days and nights alone. I shuffled from the Pullman kitchen to the kidney-shaped couch, took several naps a day, received friends who arrived with groceries or laundry, let a book fall from my hands, contemplated walking to the corner store, listened to the radio. The couch and two armchairs my mother had given me from our old apartment; the bed I'd bought for fifty dollars from the warehouse. Until

The Farewell Symphony

now I'd never felt at home here. The floor had seemed raked to tip the action up at an angle so as to be readily visible to the audience. As the subway rattled I felt the walls might tumble, leaving me naked in a spotlit shower or asleep in the shadowy arms of yet another lover. I read everything, surrounded by the mildly bleak coziness of my couch, comforter, tea and toast. The walls began to thicken, the place to seem authentic. Until now the volumes of Proust had always been like an invitation to a party I was about to attend, but now that I'd gone to Paris and suffered social disgrace, I read Reinembrance of Things Past as a history of past lives rather than as a map leading to my future.

I was depressed, no doubt mainly because my liver was functioning badly but also partially because my curtailed and disastrous holiday and the long stay at home had broken my usual pace. As my face slowly whitened and my feces slowly darkened, I stood back and evaluated what I'd accomplished in almost thirty years of life.

I'd written five novels, but no one wanted to publish them, and four full-length plays, but no one wanted to perform them. I kept on vwiting almost every night in my office. Fd leave with the other employees at the end of the work day, eat a solitary dinner, then come back to the deserted thirty-second floor and write while looking out on the glittering city of empty skyscrapers. (Now that I make my living as a writer I'm glad those novels were never published.)

I'd been to two psychiatrists for several years each but I'd neither gone straight, as I'd hoped, nor accepted my homosexuality, as I'd feared. My job I despised. I had dozens of friends whom I cultivated with tireless assiduity as though they were temperamental home appliances, essential for a civilized existence but always in danger of going on the blink. I listened for hours to their problems, which I begged them to confide, but never mentioned my own, an omission they seldom recognized. I kept thinking I was storing up credit to draw on later.

I'd had sex with my first thousand men but that was a statistic that might sound like an achievement more to someone else than to me. Sex is an appetite that must be fed every day; even a thousand past banquets cannot nourish the body tomorrow. I was longing lor the thousand and first blight whom at last I would marry and with whom I'd live ever after in the strictest fidelity. If marriage was my conscious but still deferred goal, I was less ready to admit I was always on the lookout for adventure.

Yet when I'd been healthy there had been nothing more exciting than to go to the gym after work on the nights I didn't stay late at the office. At

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the gym I'd perform movements in machines designed to stretch and swell muscles someone's hands would later smooth and relax. I'd shower, then hurry home to change into a pair of beltless tight black jeans, the fly half unbuttoned, a loose grey T-shirt and an old leather bomber jacket. Around ten I'd head out into the winter night. I could feel something young and vital pulsing in me, an unfocused exhilaration, as I walked through the slanting snow, my bare hands shoved into my pockets, for if the leather jacket was a concession to the cold, I was ready at a moment's notice to shed it to reveal my summer body- -my ridged stomach beating a slow tam-tam against the T-shirt. If at an intersection I'd see someone similarly dressed and mustachioed accelerating his pace as he came down a side street, I'd stare at him in the most impenitent way. Whether I might want him was a secondary question. For the moment all I needed to do was to attract him. That was what mattered.

Sometimes I'd heard people refer to the pleasures of the chase; they eluded me. The idea of playing hard to get struck me as inexplicably perverse in a world where gestures misfired, voices gave out and everyone was shy. Heterosexuals, who revolved in a closed circle of friends under the brilliant scrutiny of their parents, who turned like the gleaming horses in an indoors training stable, could be sure their slightest signal would be observed. They could afford the luxury of elusiveness. They were accompanied by a reputation—for money, charm, intelligence, achievement, heritage or for poverty, boorishness, idiocy, idleness and obscurity (even the obscurity, paradoxically, was sure to be registered, even pedigreed). But all of my anonymous males—easily spooked, at once pursuer and pursued, stripped of their histories and reduced to the cruel materialism of a face and body and the harsh verity of a first impression—could not risk feigning rejection. Everyone had to be unambiguous, as glowing as a peacock's tail and as towering as a stag's anders, secondary sexual characteristics evolved on the principle that more is more, even if the lyrebird's seductive tail so encumbers him he can no longer escape a predator.

Our immense bodies, nourished at such expense and pumped up so laboriously, were difficult to clothe and awkward to maneuver. In coat and tie we looked either fat or menacing, like Bar Mitzvah boys or nightclub bouncers rather than promising young executives. I became so muscle-bound I could no longer scratch my back or peel off a T-shirt. Gay boys who just ten years earlier had hissed together over cocktails, skinny in black pegged pants and cologne-soaked pale blue angora sweaters, and had disputed Callas vs. Tebaldi now lumbered like innocent

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kindergartners in snowsuits of rosy, inflated flesh from a solitaiy workout to a lonely hour of feeding before toddling off to an athlete's chaste sleep in a narrow bed.

One guy at our gym had become so huge from downing quarts of milk and dozens of rotisserie chickens that he had to be handed up the stairs by his brother, who would lift one leg after another for him as he came back up for yet another four-hour workout. The brother was as self-effacing and solicitous as the boy who leads the blind Samson into the temple. We all raised eyebrows and whispered that Samson had gone too far this time, while inquiring later in private about the exact detaUs of his routine.

For we all knew that discipline and effort paid off, that after a week of strict training we could park a huge ripped body under a spotlight at a bar and if the shoulders were bigger than car fenders, the forearms tlie girth of horse's withers, the waist as slender as a napkin ring, the butt as imposing as a diva's bosom, then no one would notice a lisp, a biscuit-colored false tooth, a balding head or a di-squieting personality flaw. We could have the pick of the lot at the bar Friends and parents could say we'd gone too far, that we were in danger of becoming grotesque, that all this muscle would someday turn to fat, but for mating purposes the Iwe could never be too large.

Living alone meant that I could receive anyone or be anyone I liked at any hour of the day. A complex metal grille outside my windows stenciled on my curtain its circles transected by a bass clef, security posing as decoration. As the curtain billowed, the outline of the bass clef moved out of focus. This pale fabric filled like a lung. It breathed or gasped for me or went tragically inert. Wliile I slept it did my dreaming for me. Wlien someone lay in my arms after sex it became a huge spinnaker propelling us across a moon-scrubbed sea. If I joked and gossiped on the phone with a friend it continued to lead a parallel life that was narrowly romantic, sighing and gesturing. Passersby cast their shadows—foreshortened or elongated according to the hour, full face or in profile according to their orientation—on my puppet screen, which democratically eliminated race, age, sometimes even gender and left nothing but moving forms that stUl managed to excite me. At night the blue vapor street light outside found a silk spider web stitched into my curtain.

One after another men came home with me, usually just once. I suppose most of them are dead now, all those young bodies I touched and undressed and tucked in when they fell asleep, the man with just one ball.

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the undertaker's son with the pale body who smelled of horse manure when I plowed him, he so brave and strong as he clenched the mattress and took his punishment like a man, the sociology professor who wished I was a bit smaller and dumber so he could cherish me, the blond salesman who lived next door and called me whenever it was raining and he didn't have the courage to go out stalking someone new, the famous kept boy who once pulled me into his apartment for thirty minutes of ofT-the-meter pleasure, the small and big penises, sheathed and circumcised, the hairy Italian and hairless Puerto Rican chests, the ardor, the kisses, the whispered secrets.

When the first personal ads for hustlers were printed in the East Village Other I ordered up a "former football player" who promised an "oatmeal massage." I persuaded him to skip the oatmeal and move right on to sex. A few days later I was in a local bar, Danny's. My date, the sociology professor, was drinking too much and becoming belligerent. Confident in my twenty-eight-year-old beauty, I said to him, "If you buy one more beer, I'm going to turn to the first person on my right and go home with him if he'll have me." He ordered another beer, I acted on my threat, and when I was out on the street with my prey, I recognized him and said, "But don't you remember me? The oatmeal rub? Last Wednesday?" I explained to him where I lived, what we'd said and done. At last, round-eyed, he said, "But you were old then."

Old eyes in a young body, with mine I looked at them all, memorized the intricate fittings of their knee bones, felt the burning ears and cold hands, burning scrotum and cold buttocks, kissed their feet and the crease where smooth bum joined hairy leg, dug with my fingers into their intricate ringed anuses too tight, then too loose, and listened there with my touch as one might listen to a pink-lipped shell for the sound of a distant sea, each shell different. The smooth cheeks at night were brisding and rasping at dawn, and button-shiny eyes were lined in the first light with what Cavafy so glamorously called the tell-tale signs of dissipation.

Politely scribbled first names and phone numbers, handed over at parting, were later found crumpled in the gutter just outside the door. These exchanges were required by etiquette and anyone who refused them would have been considered barbarous. All over the world new acquaintances promise to see each other very, very soon and don't, but only in America do they sincerely believe they will, at least at the moment of leave-taking.

Tricking, however, was so conventional, so hidebound, that its very

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