The Farewell Symphony (4 page)

Since I've already made physical comebacks several times in my life, I keep regarding my present disarray as a temporary disgrace. Every day I think at last I'll start my diet, go back to the gym, order new contact lenses, dye my grey hair, but every night I've still not begun to initiate these improvements and I go out to another long rich dinner. I'm living in Paris where everyone is slim but me. Superstitiously, I think that it's the extra bulk that's staved off AIDS all these years (I've been seropositive for a decade). Or perhaps being overweight ensures my fidelity to the dead Brice.

I've always been someone who masturbated while thinking not of ideal, imaginary partners but of actual people I've known in the past. My fantasies are memories as accurate as I can make them of past lovers and what they did to me. These days I find myself fucking the dead most of the time. Once when I asked the ninety-year-old Boris Kochno, Diaghilev's last secretary, if I could interview him, he said, "You must

The Farewell Symphony

understand I don't want to meet new people. I prefer the company of my dead." And although I'm not quite there yet, I know what he means. When I was young I lived a far from satisfactory life thinking it was only a dry run for a better future, but those rehearsals turned out to be the only performances I would know and now I embrace the memories, which I'm afraid of touching up as I write them down, although I long for sleep and dreams. If in a dream I feel a melting tenderness toward one of my dead that I never experienced while he was alive and if I awaken bathed in grateful tears, it doesn't matter. I have no control over my dreams and I can't be held responsible for the improvements they make.

After our trip to Paris, Jamie became still friendlier to me. Our office door would be closed, which permitted us to talk for hours on end without being observed or disturbed. We had so little work to do—just a few picture captions to turn out every week for our glossy national magazine—that we'd invariably panic on Friday morning and work feverishly all day in hushed concentration, trying to make up for a week we'd wasted on long lunches, coffee breaks, phone conversations with friends and social calls on other offices down the hall. Otherwise we were free to talk even if we were chained to our desks.

As a Midwesterner I was used to wide-eyed candor, but Jamie was tricky, reserved, both shy and disdainful. For the longest time I hadn't known if he was gay or straight. In Paris he'd introduced me to all those gay men but still looked blank when I'd mentioned their homosexuality. He had a metallic, upper-class New York voice and, snob that I was, I imitated his Tory pronunciations ("ennuhway" for anyway, ''thee-\i\i-Xu\\' for what I had pronounced as "thee-rqr-terr"); I learned to say "Beth is very social" rather than "Beth is a member of high society," as we had put it, cap in hand, back in Michigan. If I'd bear down on him with what he labeled a "personal question" (in the Midwest, all questions had been personal), he'd shake his head as though pulling himself out of a bad dream, call me by my last name with a thumping, head-prefect's gruffness and tell me, half-seriously, half-affectionately, that I was "impossible."

Today he'd be called a young fogey, but in the sLxties nothing could have been less likely than a young journalist who wore garters to hold up his black lisle stockings and whose one concession to jauntiness was a polka-dot bow tie. He wasn't reviving the fifties, as people do now; he'd never abandoned the style of his adolescence. At twenty-nine he already

had silver hairs scattered becomingly among the black. His eyes were grey-blue and one wasn't quite aligned with the other, especially when he was tired. Jamie played racquetball and always had funny stories to tell about antediluvian members of the Athletic Club, but the stories worked both ways, as a dismissal of outworn standards and as a reminder that those standards were still in full force.

He bit his nails. He lovingly inventoried the mementos on his desk. He slid down the corridors with tense shoulders hunched up around his ears. He flinched if someone called out his name. When the editor just above us summoned him, Jamie would go pale. I couldn't help but picture the lonely, self-suflicient twelve-year-old first-former at a strict prep school famous for its cold showers and rough sports. He had that precocious old-mannishness of the underloved preppie whose mother is nothing but a scented letter that arrives once a month, who ducks whenever addressed because he expects a blow or an insult, who goes through his stamp collection with the meticulousness of a miser, who panics if the school schedule varies by an hour, and is ashamed to admit he has nowhere to go over Thanksgiving break. By the time he's a sixth-former he's picked up a loud, irritating voice, a stock of snappy come-backs and a silver medal in the hundred-yard dash. Secredy he writes sonnets and reads Tennyson, whose In Memoriam is for him the perfect blend of technical polish and ho-moerotic Victorian pathos. And, despite his heartiness, there's a flaw in his regard.

Even Jamie's way of fmally coming out to me was indirect. One evening, a year after our trip to Paris, there was a company party. We both got drunk on vodka and tonic and suddenly at seven we found ourselves only half-fed on pretzels and avocado dip. I myself had downed vast quantities of plump shrimp, loudly declaring that all my years of psychoanalysis had taught me just one thing, to eat my fill of expensive hors d'oeuvres without apologizing—a declaration that was itself an apology, of course. But we were still hungry. "I know an amusing place," Jamie said with a wink exacdy as his grandfather might have done, with the same hint at naughtiness. We sped downtovm in a taxi and there we entered the oldest gay bar in the Village, the ceiling picturesquely hung with cobwebs, sporting pictures in dark wood frames on the walls, brass fixtures on the bar and sawdust on the floor—all providing the right virile alibi. Jamie exaggerated his drunkenness, as though to explain how he'd confusedly ended up in such a louche place, it's all a lark, I'll never remember it tomorrow.

The Farewell Symphony

After that, at the ofiice, I'd catch him looking at me with a combination of desire and complicity. He'd slouch down in his revolving chair, facing me, until I could see the outline of his crotch, and then he'd slowly wag his legs together. A lock of his hair fell over his brow, his voice deepened and his left eye became lazier than usual. Yet when I got up my nerve to tell him I found him attractive, he looked starded and laughed cruelly. Sharing an office is like being in a Beckett play, however, and after everything has been said you still must go on talking.

Jamie told me about a young man from an old Huguenot family whom he was obsessively in love with. With reverent discretion, Jamie was careful not to mention his name. His obsession was so pure, so abstract, that it made him speak constantly and colorlessly about the beloved, who was not a person with quirks but a paragon with neutral virtues, although I recognized the xdrtues were listed to justify a passion that had preceded them.

In those days I used to dance late every night at the Stonewall, where I'd developed a crush on an occasional customer, a high school principal. He was trapped in a loveless marriage with an unhappy Shakespearean actor who was completing his third year as the villainous tycoon in an execrable but well paying daytime soap opera. The principal, the one I liked, was Yugoslav, six foot four inches, and he laughed maniacally over anything. He had just three hairs on his chest, which was as hard and articulated as a cuirass. I'd toss back the vodka and tonic, which glowed blue when the black light was snapped on, and wait for the principal to arrive. He liked me, he took me home twice out of friendliness, but he was himself bewitched by Puerto Ricans, as who was not. Most of his inner-ciry students were Puerto Rican; when he tricked with stand-ins, in his fantasies they were the ones to administer the discipline to Teach. There was nothing profoundly democratic about New York, no one was ready to surrender an inch (of penthouse terrace surface, of office window exposure, of limo length) but having certainly looked feasible to the have-nots during those years when Puerto Rican pizza delivery boys got sucked off" by lonely miUionaiies ordering in for the third time in an afternoon, hoping to get lucky, or when the white store manager of a supermarket elbowed off" his panting assistant so as to be the one to service the Puerto Rican check-out boy during the city-wide black-out, the first friendly one that occurred on a winter's night in the mid-sixties. In our cold grey city Puerto Ricans were the summer, the color; white boys from the Midwest who'd first jerked off at age thirteen while looking at bare-chested

Indians in Westerns on TV movies now could hold in their arms a three-dimensional tropical Indian from the Bronx who melted into smiles and shouted a muted "Ay!" when pinched.

The Stonewall was black and Puerto Rican. Into that hot house drifted a cool white camellia, a lovely pale white face belonging to a lean young man in black tie, Chesterfield, grey gloves, even shiny opera pumps, someone who pulled me wordlessly into his arms and waltzed me through that sweating throng as though the nineteenth century had just hurried through the room and recognized itself in a mirror.

He stared at me unsmilingly and unscrolled a long tongue into my mouth like the angel's words in a medieval Annunciation. I invited him home and found him to be complicated in ways that bored me. I learned he belonged to a group of elegant fags who attended the opera in black tie on Mondays, the "social" night, who dated interlocking sets of debs but fucked each other after hurrying the girls home, who belonged to the Racquet Club, who went fox-hunting together at My Lady's Manor in Monkton, Maryland, who crewed together in the Bermuda Cup. They called themselves the "White Russians," but all seemed to be named Reginald or Colin. They could sing satirical songs about life at Yale while nimbly accompanying themselves at the piano. They were active in an amateur Gilbert and Sullivan club that staged an operetta every spring, all proceeds going to a good Protestant cause such as senility or alcoholism. Two White Russians, in love with each other, had just married a pair of deaf sisters, extremely rich; they'd had the cheek to celebrate a double wedding. They camped it up wickedly with other White Russians on their yacht whenever Antonia and Olympia turned their backs.

My own White Russian was named Richard Smith, had big blue eyes that lingered a full musical beat behind the conversation, a compact, lean blond's body, no longer boyish and somehow indecent, scalded hairless, it seemed. He had an ironically social regard at odds with the endless clean tongue he would suddenly unroll into my mouth, as though his tongue had a will of its own. He'd be chatting away about his upcoming membership in the Century Club when suddenly, between sips of gin, I'd find his tongue lodged between my open jaws. The cool impertinence in his eyes, especiaDy when they were seen up close, was nearly lunatic. He was fascinated by me, perhaps because I was indifferent to him, or probably because he was intrigued by my lack of social ambition. I didn't want to marry a rich woman who would know nothing of my "pranks on the side" (his phrase). The deb parties I'd attended as a teenager in the 1950s

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had seemed to me dien manifestations of an enviable but unobtainable world; in New York in the 1960s they seemed preposterously irrelevant. Even the White Russians, apparendy, treated tliem as nostalgic kitsch. In a provincial town such as Cincinnati or Baltimore, society was small, its rules coherent, its power undeniable, and the annihilating word hip had not yet been pronounced. In New York, however, that three-letter word so intimidated and intoxicated everyone under thirt)' that it had dismantled the old social machinery; the only people who still picked their way through the debris were the dowdy and the dull—and the duplicitous White Russians, who saw the situation as just another occasion for displaying their theatrical powers of mockery and dissimulation. These powers, of course, were about to be rendered meaningless by gay liberation, which represented as much a loss in aesthetic duplicity as a gain in style-less integrity.

One evening, on the way to a cocktail party- being given by a colleague, I was walking alongside Jamie. I was recounting to him aU my thoughts about Richard Smith. "He's driving me crazy. He keeps calling me. I can't bear him, though he if a pretty good fuck. But you must have met him," I said, suddenly putting the pieces together, "somewhere during your social peregrinations." Then I was conscious of the stifled sob at my side. .'\1-though he turned his face away I could see he was crying.

"Oh, Jamie," I said, "Richard is the guy—that guy—the one you . . ."

The hours and hours of Jamie's tormented, spiritually twilit descriptions of his paragon, even his report that his love had recently developed for the first time an infatuation with a ridiculously unsuitable man, a West Village clone, an idiotic bodybuilder who spurned him—all these details came flying back to setde on my shoulders. My callous words ("though he is a pretty good fuck") hung in the air. Here was I, each day listening to Jamie's morose and labyrinthine speculations, while hoping he would eventually find comfort in my arms, whereas the very person he so hopelessly loved was this creepy Richard I was fending off. I longed to comfort Jamie, unsay my words. I hoped he'd find me attractive now that he knew his beloved was pursuing me.

Suddenly Richard seemed much more interesting to me. The becoming aura of unobtainability he'd been lacking until now because he kept hurling himself at me stepped up behind him like the blue shadow a spotlight throws. Now he was haloed, three-dimensional, desirable. The next thing I knew he'd moved to Hong Kong to manage a branch of the family business and I never heard of him again.

Jamie, embarrassed, dried his tears and honited his nose. A few days later (so great was his capacity for secrecy) I discovered yet another aspect of his Hfe he'd not yet mentioned in a year and a half of our sharing an office and daily confessions: he had a lover, whom he'd already been with for five years.