The Farewell Symphony

by Edmund White

  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 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 Remembrance 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 writing almost every night in my office. I’d 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 for the thousand and first knight 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 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 antlers, 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 kindergartners in snowsuits of rosy, inflated flesh from a solitary 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 details 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 the 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 disquieting 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 lyre 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. While I slept it did my dreaming for me. When 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 still
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, 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 off-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 bristling 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 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 apparently 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 hungover. 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 softly 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 rattled 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 announce my pale curtain was about to go soaring up, we lay in extravagant ease on the tropical beach of my huge bed, every 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 lightly. One young man, silent and bored with my pre-sex 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 well”) 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, lightly bearded, and she had an imperious way of keeping in line the big black men who shared her off-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 in an armchair. She would wake me with an old seventy-eight recording of La Bohème sung by Georges Thill in his light, silvery voice. The smell 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 instantly 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’ll call him back. Poor boy….”

  When Craig arrived I seated him almost instantly 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 twenty-eight and he sixteen 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 constantly 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.