The Farewell Symphony

by Edmund White

  Janet had warned me on the phone to keep my mitts off her property. “He’s a het-ero-sex-ual boy,” she emphasized, “and you mustn’t initiate him 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 subtle 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 Sgt. 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, resonantly, 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 owned 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.

  Craig took me by the hand and led me to the window. He pulled back the curtain. “See that guy in the corny trench coat over there? That’s the private eye who follows me everywhere. Hi, George!” Craig gave 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 types. 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 front-page 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 anything more stringent than dynastic loyalty.

  Craig went off shopping, dutifully tailed by George. In three hours he came back carrying four pairs of shoes with 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 would 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 signify, I who feared the mechanical world and considered even crossing the street perilous, obviously 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 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.

  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 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 ba
thed 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-uh-tuh” for what I had pronounced as “thee-yay-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 sixties 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-sufficient 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. Secretly he writes sonnets and reads Tennyson, whose In Memoriam is for him the perfect blend of technical polish and homoerotic Victorian pathos. And, despite his heartiness, there’s a flaw in his regard.

  Even Jamie’s way of finally 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 exactly as his grandfather might have done, with the same hint at naughtiness. We sped downtown 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.

  After that, at the office, 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 startled 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 virtues 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-city 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 millionaires 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 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 wh
ile 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, especially 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 had seemed to me then manifestations of an enviable but unobtainable world; in New York in the 1960s they seemed preposterously irrelevant. Even the White Russians, apparently, treated them 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 thirty 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 styleless integrity.