The Farewell Symphony

by Edmund White

  Jimmy lived with his sister, who was two years older than he. Back in Cleveland she’d begun ballet lessons when she was eight, as well brought up little girls did in those days, and Jimmy had been dragooned into the class, since there were ten girls and only one other boy. Their father, disturbed that little Jimmy was so uninterested in sports, was at first pleased when he saw how high his son could jump and how fast he could turn. His pleasure turned into horror when he realized what a sissy the boy was becoming, begging to wear his sister’s tutu, crossing the living room on point with a frozen smile and weaving arms to greet him when he came from the office with a colleague.

  But he and his wife were balletomanes, generally cultured, more than liberal, and he made a lot of money; when Madame Dolinskaya told them six years into their children’s training that their kids were exceptionally gifted and ambitious and should be sent to New York, he and Jimmy’s mother bowed before the curse some previously unnoticed Carabosse must have whispered over the cradle. For the first two years a housekeeper was hired to look after Jimmy and Sara when they came home from a long day at the Manhattan High School of Performing Arts and three ballet classes. But then Sara decided that though she had a certain small talent she was nothing next to Jimmy. She quit dancing, enrolled in a business administration course and started keeping house for her brother.

  On days when he was performing Jimmy attended just one class, in the morning, but on off days he took so many that he crawled home. I was present once when he arrived pale, speechless, and just stretched out on the floor. His sister took off his clothes, unbandaged his poor feet and washed them, then rewrapped those permanent wounds. Finally she propped him up in front of the television and fed him. Within seconds he’d slumped into sleep.

  He was always angry with the chief choreographer and his lover, the manager of the company. They didn’t schedule him often enough, they didn’t assign him the best roles nor create enough new ones. The same nerviness that made him so dazzling on stage rendered him impossible, sometimes nearly insane, in his dealings with his bosses. He did nothing but plot revenge on them, though they seemed harmless enough to me.

  Jimmy’s real enemy, whom he never talked about, was the leading New York dance critic. This ass, who had the common failing of making up for his ignorance by the vigor of his opinions, attacked Jimmy week after week. “Yes, the boy is brilliant, the best technician on stage we have,” he wrote on a typical day, “but his effeminacy sickens as does his shameless mugging. If he’s obliged to touch a real woman, he treats the ballerina with the disdain usually reserved for an ordure.” Then shifting into a tone designed to cater to the Yanks, he added, “Come on, Jimmy, give us plain folk in the audience a break; we can’t help thinking you are the one who’d like to be the girl! And doesn’t the company recognize you’re just too small to be a jeune premier?”

  Jimmy dreamed of changing his sex, not because he rejected his … well, boyhood, but because he thought that if he were a woman he’d be the strongest ballerina in the world with the most startling elevation and he’d never have to totter and struggle to lift another big girl off the ground.

  I moved to Rome and lost touch with him but I heard that he’d quit the company in a pique. His talent was so particular and his reputation so bad that no one else would hire him. For a while he danced at Radio City Music Hall. Audiences went into raptures over his long, floating adagios, whiplash turns and hummingbird entrechats, but Easter came along and the Rockettes had to break out of painted eggs wearing nun costumes, tap dancing to “Climb Every Mountain,” and Jimmy was again out of work. He went to every casting call but he was too small to be a Broadway chorus boy. He produced his own one-man recital but the attendance was disappointing and he lost all his money. He swallowed his pride and tried to rejoin his old ballet company, but no one wanted him back. Life had been so much calmer without him.

  Six years ago a famous American painter came to dinner at my house in Paris. Since his girlfriend was a choreographer with her own company, I asked him if he’d ever heard of Jimmy. “Of course,” he said, “but surely you know?”

  “Know what?”

  “He was a répétiteur for Nancy’s dancers but even though he was in his late thirties he wanted to perform just one more time himself. Nancy promised to create a new solo for him and she even scheduled it for last fall. But then she got so busy with Switch Hitter, her big new dance to a Stan Getz score, that she never got around to Jimmy’s solo. Poor Jimmy, he’d invited all his friends to see his farewell performance. He couldn’t bear the shame and killed himself.”

  I HAD SEX with so many different men, usually a new one every night, that once a month I came down with a case of gonorrhea, usually rectal, sometimes penile, once in the throat (so sore I could scarcely swallow, my only symptom). I was covered by the company’s health policy and the doctor invented ever more fanciful but innocuous diagnoses to enter into the insurance forms. I’d sit in the waiting room, which played the best classical FM station, and as I waited my turn I’d read through back numbers of Architectural Digest or a stylish magazine called After Dark, in which the glossy black-and-white photos were all of new dancers, young athletes and up-and-coming male models. All the other patients were men, and since we were there for the same reason we’d smile sheepishly if we caught a friend’s eye. One of us would mime exasperation, hands on hips, while the other wagged a mock-reproachful finger. We’d cruise strangers fitfully, attracted by the other man’s imagined excesses, put off by his current illness, so like our own.

  Once in the examining room, the usual decorum of concealing screens for disrobing and paper gowns for sheathing nudity was dispensed with. I’d dated my doctor, he’d even fisted me once on an afternoon on Fire Island when we were both stoned and bathed in a sea of grease, and he was so rich and manly that I longed to go out with him again; with a shameless alacrity I cast my clothes aside and mounted the examining table, “as naked as a jaybird,” as my mother would have said, convinced that this new glimpse at my occasionally hidden charms would tempt him to invite me out to dinner again. A second later I’d pressed my chest to the table and stuck my rump in the air. With a similar efficiency he’d already entered me with a long hollow chrome bar, a surgical flashlight that permitted him to say at a glance, “Yep, that’s it, but I’ll take a swab just to be sure.” A long, cotton-tipped wand was inserted into the speculum and a smear swabbed onto a slide, which the doctor looked at, and into a petri dish, where the bacteria would be cultivated and challenged by various antibiotics in order to verify which treatment would work best. “Okay, you can get dressed,” he said with disappointing indifference.

  In his adjoining private office (silk Turkish rug of the tree of life on the floor), the doctor perched briefly on a corner of his desk and said, while writing a prescription, “I’ve given you two massive shots of Penicillin. Drink plenty of water and take two Bactrim three times a day for a week. If you have a resistant strain that should show up in the culture, I’ll let you know. And of course I’ve drawn blood to check for syphilis.”

  No shame attached to these frequent medical visits; they were Aphrodite’s spoils. The only fear we felt was that one day a strain of syphilis or gonorrhea would evolve that would be resistant to all available drugs. Already the original doses had been boosted dramatically. Yet we felt we were enlightened both in science and in the arts of the flesh. We thought we had a right to express ourselves sexually wherever, whenever and with whomever we chose. A venereal disease, far from being a price to pay, was a frequent medical accident, easily remedied, which bore no moral weight. A residual and unrecognized sense of guilt might make us depressed for an hour, but a visit to the handsome doctor absolved us, especially since he had a sort of Mr. Fixit approach to our mishaps. One day he said to me, “Since you get the clap so often, maybe we should put you on a daily diet of Bactrim as a prophylactic. The only problem is that it might mask the symptoms without killing the bacteria. And you’d have to add a f
ew things to your diet to replenish the intestinal flora and fauna it might kill off. I suppose you’d never be willing to try condoms?”

  “Are you kidding?” I said. “Let’s try the Bactrim. Isn’t there a danger that if I take it too long it won’t work anymore?”

  “No. You don’t become resistant to it, but it—the whole population of bacteria—can mutate and become resistant to the antibiotic, but if that happens everyone will just boost the dose again.”

  My only regret was that if the new regime was effective I’d be seeing my doctor less often. Armed with Bactrim, I hesitated not at all in my endless couplings and found this new license enviable, certainly an admirable freedom, an essential article in the code of our personal liberation. Just as the Pill freed women to do with their bodies what they wished, so antibiotics made us invulnerable to the puritanical menace of disease.

  One day my doctor was on vacation and his weird older partner filled in for him. Despite the Bactrim I’d contracted gonorrhea in my penis. After the doctor gave me two horse shots of Penicillin, which he stuck me with as painfully as possible, he said, “Wanna fuck me now?”

  “But I’ve got the clap!” I protested.

  “I’ll give myself a shot as soon as we’re finished.” He dropped his pants but did not remove his white doctor’s smock or stethoscope. The strange setting and kinky situation excited me and I climbed onto the examining table behind his bare, lean ass. I caught a glimpse of his legendarily big penis, which had never been seen erect. It dangled, as did his stethoscope, on the table.

  As I was leaving the examining room I saw him shooting up and quickly buckling his trousers. I still had to pay the full fee.

  ALTOGETHER twenty-four editors or their assistants had rejected my novel. Two years later I met several of these editors, two of them gay; one of them told me he’d liked my book but had seen no way he could have defended it in a meeting without “destroying his reputation.” Soon after that, I learned that he’d been fired for spending hours each day in the toilet and for being cripplingly disorganized; he hurled himself under a subway. The other said he’d found parts of the book “amazingly sophisticated” and other passages “shockingly naïve.” “I mean,” he asked, indignantly, “how could the protagonist not know what a garlic press is, for Christ’s sake?” Another admired the first chapter (before the narrator meets “Sean”), but found the rest “obsessive” and “tiresome.”

  I didn’t know how to respond to the criticism that my very life was “tiresome.” If everything I’d experienced and valued and suffered over was just a big bore, then from what vantage point of scintillating cleverness could I revise my very existence? I’d read once that a philosopher had said that to discuss language with words was like trying to build a boat that was already under sail; for a bore to inject interest into his tedious book (or life) was surely every bit as impossible a task.

  I suspected that the homosexual subject matter of my book was the principal problem in getting it accepted. Jamie objected that there were plenty of “weird” books being published—those by William Burroughs, Jean Genet, Hubert Selby. But I argued that they were all about hustlers or robots or thieves or transvestites and that, whereas low life and drag were actually reassuring to straight readers, my middle-class gays with their jobs and friends and bank loans were far too close for comfort.

  But now I had an idea for a new book, which I resolved would be my last one. Like most other writers I saw the composition of a novel as a terrible expense of spirit, a reckless and dangerous overdraft drawn on alarmingly meager funds of energy. Or I imagined the book was a precious vase I had to carry during a rough-and-tumble obstacle course, but a vase that I was somehow molding as I ran along. I believed that I’d have a pleasant, easy-going life if I could only get the art monkey off my back. I’d seen so many of my friends accept spirit-deforming poverty and miserable living conditions in roach traps in exchange for humiliation and overwork as actors, painters or poets. I refused to be a “martyr to art.” Statistically it appeared to me that the chance of being published at all was infinitesimal, and if one was published the chance of being reviewed and permitted to publish a second time was even more remote. Yet such worries were way beyond my means. I longed for the authentication of a single acceptance. Nor did I dream of being famous; I just wanted someone occasionally to whisper when I entered a room, “That one? He’s a novelist. What? One book, I think, I don’t remember the title.” I didn’t know any published writers and in my seven years in New York I’d never even seen one.

  The Newspaper Guild had won us five weeks of vacation; I had accumulated three weeks from the preceding year, which gave me two months of freedom. I spent them on Fire Island in a beautiful Chinese-style house with sliding glass doors looking out on the Bay, and there I wrote most of the new novel.

  On Friday evening pale, tired-looking young businessmen, my roommates, arrived in their suits and ties smelling of cigarette smoke and the beer they’d drunk on the train. I’d come down to the dock to greet their ferry. I’d load their suitcases in my red wagon. I’d be soft-spoken and tan, barefoot, in shorts with no shirt, eager to talk to them after my week of solitude though I was on an entirely different timetable. They jostled for control of the bathroom with the same nerviness they showed in pushing onto a subway car before the door shut. By midnight they’d applied their facial masks and peeled them off. They’d ironed and donned their painter’s pants (the thin white cotton trousers were attached to a bib and shoulder straps, the whole supplied with several long, narrow pockets for paintbrushes). They’d gelled their hair, reshaved and applied some bronzer. Drops had whitened their eyes and a cream had erased the dark circles under them. And they’d taken such powerful drugs that they talked incessantly, fell down laughing, forgot the food burning on the stove and at midnight, when it was served, had no interest in touching its charred, gummy remains. By one in the morning we were all off in a loud wolf pack bound for the disco, where we’d dance till dawn. Everyone was frantic to cram in as much fun as possible during the forty-eight hours of freedom allotted them each weekend. The rents were so high that some of the guys could afford only a half share, which entitled them to come out only every other weekend.

  By Saturday night everyone in the house had settled down a bit and dinner was more decorous, the conversation earnest and thoughtful, the food well prepared and eaten with appreciation. My roommates had strolled up and down the beach all day, checking out the new faces and bodies, running into friends and exchanging gossip and invitations. Now they were tanner, more rested, carefree adolescents rather than the careworn men they’d been the night before. Fourteen of us sat down at ten in the evening and we saw our reflections suspended in the plate-glass window, as though we were a corporation of burghers painted by Rembrandt, until someone turned on the porch light and canceled us out. Caught between the exigencies of work during the week and the laborious pleasures of disco dancing, seduction and sex that were to follow, we had just this long, quiet moment to joke, to confide, even to talk.

  For me the weekends were like the splashy, passionate acts and the weeks like the nearly silent, certainly solitary intervals. So often in the city I was impatient with the smoke and drink, the coming and going, above all the defiling talk with which we so pointlessly filled every moment. But here, on the island, I rose with one perfect dawn after another, made my coffee and in the Baccarat-clear, ringing silence I sat down to write a novel nearly as mysterious to me as it would eventually be to a small cult of readers.

  I had found an exhilarating if suicidal liberation in my rejection slips. Everyone said my writing was cold; now I’d become glacial, although the ice would contain a flame, the same secret passion that only those men who’d made love to me knew about. Editors had said my subject matter was too “special” to interest other people. Now I would imagine for myself an undistractible reader whose mind was limpid and composed, ready to follow me no matter where I might lead. I wanted to show the
anguish of being a frightened, crafty being in a hostile world full of sensual delights.

  In the book, the narrator remarks that he is playing an organ sounding in another room somewhere. He can’t hear what he’s playing, nor does he know how to play, but when he runs down the hall the rapt listeners assure him he’s inspired and hasn’t made the slightest mistake. I hoped that my novel, which I knew how to drive but had never seen on the road, would perform just as dazzlingly. When I wrote it I sometimes felt as though I were wearing a lab coat, so precise and objective were my manipulations of every elusive element. At the same time I kept repeating to myself with a smile, “I just work here,” as though to excuse my incomprehension of my own book.

  The hero was no longer meant to be a simulacrum of myself. No, he was a “character” to whom I attributed a fussy, pedantic voice, a logic-chopping niceness, a systematic, endlessly metastasizing paranoia; he shared my desire to please and a sexuality based on gratitude though all too sensitive to violence. He was far more snobbish than I although like me he was by turns shy and a show-off. That he was no longer a stand-in for me relieved me. I was tired of being dogged by this too-precise double who converted my soft clouds into palpable rain.

  My life that summer on Fire Island was one of solitude and discipline during the day, debauchery by night. During the day I filled the big, sun-struck house with Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, ate diet food, did a hundred sit-ups on the sliver of private beach down beside the Bay. I took an hour of sun, carefully basting myself in oil and stretching and pulling my muscles through yoga exercises. If I made a sortie at all it was only to the market. Otherwise I indulged in long unnumbered hours of entranced writing. I knew that my whole being generated a distinctive hum if I found the right tone for my novel, a register unlike any I’d ever sounded before. Sometimes I felt I was traveling at the bottom of a sunless sea in a submarine and the only thing that kept me on course was that thin, sonic signal. I had no other principle of literary construction.