The Farewell Symphony

by Edmund White

  When we woke up in the morning, I was just about to smile ruefully in my middle-class way, apologize for my “zoo breath” and start bustling about setting the house in order, but Thomas reached for the half-empty quart of gin, poured more of the transparent liquid down my throat and his, and soon he was humping me again. He never touched my erection—of course not, since he considered himself heterosexual.

  We drank, fucked and slept, drank, fucked and slept in a cycle that blent day into night and his body into mine. The bottle was the magic source of pleasure, its genie our delight. My mental eye widened as it glimpsed the possibility of limitless gratification. No need to wash, shave and dress the body, to go out, to work, read, discuss things. No need for the party ever to end. Anzio whined to be walked and finally, in desperation, relieved herself on the terrace. She lay above us on the couch, her paws dangling over the edge, each ear cocking successively as she watched our couplings. At one point (it was night), I awoke to see Thomas draining some cooked spaghetti, his face emerging out of a cloud of steam. He came back to the mattress and fed me with a fork that kept clanking against the metal bowl. My mouth was still warm with penne and butter when he started stuffing it with his cock again. He put the bowl on the floor for Anzio, who greedily gobbled down the rest; the bowl slid over the tiles like a teacup across a Ouija board. The muscles inside my thighs ached, as though I’d been riding a horse too long.

  When we awakened the next time the gin was gone. We didn’t speak to each other and separately we took long showers that washed us clean. While I was in the bathroom shaving, Thomas must have put his mattress back in place, straightened the furniture and left with Anzio. I stood on the terrace and looked down at the buses and cars turning around the Largo Argentina and its small, ugly Etruscan temple. When I saw him next he was hostile, as though I’d tricked him into our sex binge.

  EVERY WEEK I walked to the American Express office to cash one of my dwindling number of traveler’s checks, to buy the local American newspaper and to eat my hamburger at Babington’s. One day I found at American Express a rejection letter from the publisher who’d been holding onto my Japanese-Fire Island novel for the last six months. He wrote, “I like high-class junk and junky junk, but your book doesn’t fall into either category. It’s pure ‘quality lit’ and just a bit too highbrow for poor me.”

  The jaunty, falsely self-deprecating tone made the letter writer seem all the more inaccessible to me, drunk as he must be on his own attitudinizing: he couldn’t see how cruel he was being.

  I started to cry with hurt and frustration. What kind of world was it that prized “junk”? I asked myself. Had I been too much of a snob in never reading mysteries, detective novels, whodunnits or comic strips, advice books, recipes? Already cut off from the mainstream of human experience by homosexuality, I’d only compounded my isolation through snobbism.

  I walked down from the Spanish Steps, past the fashionable men’s and women’s shops, toward the Corso. In the Piazza Colonna I imagined the triumphal column—erected by an emperor and adorned with a relief of hundreds of the vanquished—as a monument to all the defeated writers throughout the centuries, an absurdity that made me smile. But this feeble irony hatched by my brain was only a fitful distraction. Once I’d pushed through the Piazza di Spagna and its snarling Vespas and Cinquecentos and started walking past the Fori Antichi toward the Colosseum I abandoned myself to my grief.

  “I … can’t … speak,” I said through my sobs, sibylline words I instantly started to interpret. Yes, I thought, they won’t let me have my say. I don’t want to write trash, high class or low, since it wouldn’t say what only I could express. But why should the world be interested in my self-expression? I asked. Hadn’t my shrink said my gay friends and I were “self-admiring and nonrelating”? Were such people suitable to literature either as subjects or narrators? Even in my new novel, from which I’d banished homosexuality as a theme, my perversion still seeped through, like a blood stain through cotton. If only I could be published I’d never ask for more or complain about anything. I knew my book was good. If it was rejected, that must mean my judgment was faulty or the world’s values abominable or both; in either case I was lost.

  I decided to kill myself. I’d bet everything on one number and lost. I’d quit my job thinking that such a rash act would conjure fortune and get me published. I’d bet that by becoming a writer (the spring sunlight was warm on my shoulders and all these Italians were rushing to destinations I’d never know) I’d be able to transform myself from being an exception to becoming an example. My voice would speak to readers over the barrier of years, gender and even (through translation) of language. (Down there, in the pale green spring grass, was the miliarium, that stone, wishbone white, from which the Romans measured all distances.) If suicide seemed philosophically inevitable, the nearly redundant plugging of a silenced mouth, nevertheless the mechanics of stopping this big, busy machine, my body, required a skill I hadn’t yet worked out. Later in my life I was drawn toward suicide and that pull was literally a vertigo sucking me out toward the fifteenth-floor balcony, despair accompanying but not causing the self-destructive surrender to gravity or the vividly imagined collision of flesh and stone—a sensation utterly different from the frustration and anger I felt that day in Rome. And of course the desire to punish that editor, to lay a terrible burden of guilt on his shoulders.

  I made a vulgar little deal with God that if he’d send me an angel I’d go on living. I sat down on a bench overlooking a broken, worn-down pair of Roman columns. Just as my mother had always said flashy, provocative things in elevators, hoping to appear intriguing to perfect strangers, just as she had an uncanny knack for hearing our conversation with their ears and could simultaneously respect the naturalness of our situation while imparting through hints and omissions a much more glamorous version of things to these auditors, in the same way, even in the midst of an intensely personal, isolating crisis in my life, I couldn’t help but “turn out,” as actors say, toward a nonexistent but potential audience, in order to make a touching effect. To God or to a stranger. To be fair, I needed to be saved.

  The angel arrived. I was saved. A Danish tourist, a tall gay man in his thirties peering out through smudged glasses, came over to me, sat on the bench, watched me cry, put his arm around my shoulders, led me home, made gentle, smiling, dabbing love to me. His foreskin was so tight it couldn’t roll back. He asked me if I liked his “virgin cock.” I believed I’d been saved but I didn’t believe in God. Nor could I decide what I’d been saved to do. My mother was always saying we’d been put on earth to “make a contribution” to others. I didn’t think like that, but if I tried to, I knew what my contribution was meant to be—the problem was that no one wanted it.

  ———

  THE SPRING TURNED into summer. My money was running out faster than I’d expected. A young jeweler from Spoleto who lived next door would pull me into his arms and kiss me deeply while his pregnant wife was in the other room making coffee on an electric burner. I paid their rent because I loved his muzzy, handsome face, his full, pink upper lip that had been cut and was lopsided (perhaps it was a badly repaired harelip), his way of lazily shrugging as though he understood nothing and had gotten in much too deep. (He was the long-suffering, put-upon man.) I loved the reedy timbre of his voice as he whispered in my ear. His wife smiled but treated me almost formally, as though I were a client who’d come to see her husband’s jewels (family jewels, to be precise, though I never saw them).

  I liked the finch they kept in a cage and the records scattered on the floor and the wet-brick smell of watered geraniums competing with the black wealth of coffee thundering up the vesuvio. I liked her slender legs, high instep and the nylons drying on a line stretched across the window. I liked that I could go to their apartment and take a nap on a cot by myself and no one, not even Thomas, would know where I was. I was a visitor, of course, but I was paying their rent. The jeweler would push me away, gently, as thou
gh to do so were one more weary obligation, and he’d indicate with a jerk of his adorable tousled head the adjoining room, where his wife was fussing over the bird, a bit stagily, perhaps, to kill time till I left. They seemed somewhat unhappy, very much in love, a little sleepy and confused. Of course I gave them money. Wouldn’t you? Since I had so few savings left I felt compelled to spend my last dollars as quickly and disastrously as possible.

  Jamie, my old office mate, came to Rome with his lover, the tall, blond Gerry. The three of us went to Capri where the season was about to begin. The island was deserted except for workmen making last-minute repairs; as we walked along pathways consecrated to the memory of Augustus or the Krupps, we could hear hammers rhythmically tapping in the distance. We smoked a joint. The whole island, apparently deserted if secretly inhabited, knocked and knocked like a woods—glossy, hot, breathless—inhabited by woodpeckers. The sea glittered straight below us. Jamie sang the Nöel Coward song about life coming to Mrs. Wentworth-Brewster when two Italian sailors goosed her at the bar on the Piccola Marina. We walked past a house spilling bougainvillea from every balcony like Persian carpets being beat and aired.

  Jamie, such a timid, somehow battered guy with his falsely booming voice and one slow eye, seemed so happy with Gerry, just as a reserved husband is both proud of his glittery wife and relieved she can do the talking for him. Certainly Gerry talked all the time. After six months in Rome, I found these two New Yorkers to be loud, purposeful, meticulously organized. Gerry made a huge salary in public relations and Jamie received a comfortable enough paycheck, though what they didn’t have was time—just two weeks of vacation a year in Gerry’s case, five in Jamie’s. So they needed every moment to count. They wanted to go from thrill to thrill and an unprogrammed delay while waiting for a ferryboat or a bill tortured them both. They each had three guidebooks, knew what ruins to look for and what special dishes to order; they’d been forewarned to avoid the Blue Grotto and to insist on taking a detour to see Malaparte’s house cantilevered out over the coastline. They regarded guides as cheats and hotels as rip-offs. They’d planned their wardrobes for each moment of the day and night and Jamie had brought along a portable iron and an electrical converter to give a last-moment touch-up to his linen trousers, though Gerry invariably exclaimed, “We didn’t schlepp all the way to Europe to press pants, for Chrissake!” But that was half a joke, as was everything else they said, and if they were to have seen a comic film based on their trip to Italy they would have been the first to laugh.

  They were eager to learn, quick to bicker, sullen as owls and chipper as sparrows, their faces mobile, expressive—-funny. They were polite and asked me questions, swooned over the dullest details of my Roman adventures; I felt buffeted back into life by so much animation. Whereas for the Italians I was dull because an outsider or at best an imperfect copy of a Roman, for Jamie and Gerry I was one of them but newly exotic because I’d dared to be an explorer.

  That night I heard a knock at my door in the hotel. It was Jamie and Gerry, wearing grins and towels wrapped around their waists and nothing else. I smiled and pulled them in by the hand. As soon as the door had closed I kissed Gerry full on the mouth and reached out behind me blindly to pull Jamie toward me, against my back. After all those hundreds of hours of staring at Jamie’s crotch in our office I had an overpowering urge to open that package at last and to be fucked by him. He was too subtle and too gentlemanly ever to talk about what he did in bed with Gerry, but when he used to speculate about Richard Smith and describe his body in obsessive detail, I noticed that he lingered longer on his perfect buns than on any other feature except his intelligent, flickering smile and mocking, social eyes. And even if Jamie was reserved and aesthetic and had suffered at Groton, nevertheless he’d been forced to defend himself in boarding school, to play rugby and dominate the younger boys and swagger with the other prefects—he’d been espaliered by his whole world into an oppressor, and that was the side of him I longed to submit to now.

  In a three-way with old friends the first chuckle, the least hint at an intention to enter into discussion, can evaporate the preliminary translucent drops of desire. I smiled at them but as though through a dream, as though I recognized them but through a glass darkly. What I wanted to communicate was not the surprise I felt but quickly reined in, nor my awareness of the comic possibilities, all too rich and unwelcome. Intellectuals are the best sex because to be intelligent means to skip steps and to prize the unprecedented, to know how to tune out static and beam in pure melody, how to find the depth and originality in even the humblest coupling (or tripling). But if an intellectual is proud and keen to prove he’s alert to irony, then his snickers, his raised eyebrows, his running commentary undermine the theatricality of passion and make erections melt. I wasn’t an intellectual but I was smart enough not to blow this scene. Two men were crossing over from the safety of friendship into the danger of sex and pushing their cocks toward me as gifts, as rods divining the well of loneliness hidden within me. I was going to make this transition as easy for them as possible.

  What I discovered was that if most gay men you pick up want to get fucked because that’s somehow easier on a first date or a fifth, and if to be fucked is to become the object of desire and the subject of fantasy, nevertheless after the years have passed and both men feel secure within the confines of their affair, at that point they both want to be active in bed. The simple joy of penetrating and the complex satisfaction of dominating supersede the even more sophisticated pleasure of being dominated. These tribes of two chiefs look for a solitary Indian to rule, as I was about to discover.

  But if I was able to give them my hunger and an oneiric compliance, I wasn’t the one to say exactly how things were supposed to go. After all, it was two against one. They’d undoubtedly done this before and had probably sketched out in advance a scenario for tonight. Nor need I have worried that something so minor as a snicker could put them off; they approached sex with the New Yorker’s usual determination to have, to enjoy—English verbs which in New York alone need not take an object but can be conjugated in the hortatory ecstatic intransitive (as in the command, “Enjoy!”). Living in Rome had slowed me down to the point where I wondered how I’d ever walked the Manhattan high wire. I was in danger of falling off it now through an excess of self-consciousness; Jamie and Gerry were still speedy from New York and rushed across the wire and jumped onto the trapeze. My long afternoons of drinking wine in the sun, of taking two naps and roaring nonsense over dinner had sapped my courage to act, whereas their crowded, programmed days—eight a.m. piano lessons followed by jogging in Central Park, habitual emergencies at the office, the split-second timing of psychiatric and haircut appointments, cocktails with X and dinner with Y—had left them lean, honed, impatient.

  Jamie fucked me doggie-style while I sucked Gerry, still quizzical and bird-like as he looked down into his lap to see what I was doing with his long clean cock rising up out of a blond’s light cloud of brown pubic hair dusting an unusually red scrotum. Gerry, who had an exquisite, long-limbed body as assertive as his ski-jump nose, was ashamed of a deep hole in his chest just where the breast bones met or failed to meet. He unveiled this “imperfection” with a timidity I found attendrissant and exciting. Then I was instructed to squat down on Gerry’s dick while Jamie kneeled between Gerry’s legs and tried to fuck me at the same time, but a minute later Jamie had given up on that and had come around to face me; he was standing on the mattress and stuffing my mouth.

  The trick, of course, was to remember that this was Jamie’s cock long enough to lavish on it the keening years of pent-up desire and to depersonalize both men sufficiently to turn them into an ownerless congeries of arms and legs to lick, to hug, to kiss. If they remained Jamie and Gerry too concretely, each bristling with an aura of individuality, then I’d never be able to overcome the social dilemma, the etiquette problem (Am I paying too much attention to Jamie? Would Gerry like two cocks in his face? Should I absent mysel
f to the toilet for a moment so that they can reconnoiter and re-establish their solidarity?) long enough to set myself adrift in a sea of pure, moaning pleasure. The id, in order to flourish, needs to put aside the ego’s quibbling negotiations with reality. I succeeded in serving them by forgetting them until I was merely a spark ignited between something rough (Jamie) and something smooth (Gerry).

  The main impression I came away with from the trip to Capri was of Gerry’s ingenuous pleasure in opening up every minor mystery that experience presented him with, even if it was only my body, and of the brimming, husbandly pleasure Jamie took in Gerry. Jamie loved Gerry with a mixture of curatorial, sponsoring pride (the desire to show him off to someone else) and of continuing astonishment at his good luck in knowing this guy, so much more lively and expressive than he, even if occasionally garrulous. I hoped that someday someone would love me as much as Jamie loved Gerry.

  BACK IN ROME, through Lucrezia I met a famous American movie star, a matinée idol of my adolescence, a man whose first name my sister and I would moan, pretending to swoon, parodying the real lust his long pale face and glossy lashes and bruise-dark lips would excite in us. He wasn’t a Hell’s Angel or a sweet boy-next-door type pawing the ground shyly but rather a grown man in a white dress shirt, with long legs and a formal dark suit he wore casually. He was good in scenes in which he pulled his long lithe body, tie fluttering like a loose tongue, onto a moving train, or when he reached gloomily for a drink and exhaled smoke from his long, straight nose. He’d had a promising career in the 1950s and then the rumors he was gay caught up with him and even seeped through to the public. My sister and I’d somehow heard, for instance, that he was likely to wear green on Thursdays, considered a sure sign of perversion. He’d suddenly had no more roles. What we hadn’t known then was that he’d worked briefly and brilliantly in Italy until he’d started drinking too much. I’d seen him once on the stage in New York in a Chekhov play.