The Farewell Symphony

by Edmund White

  As the days lengthened the sun became brighter and more invasive. From the sidewalk I’d look down long passageways at inner courtyards, usually so gloomy and glaucous, suddenly gaily sparkling with light dancing on the basin of the rusting water pump or with light projected across the flagstones and reflected off the warped panes of the concierge’s loge. I felt that that light, like the sunlight that once a year follows a brass line traced into the floor of the cathedral at Bologna, was exploring a secret vein in my soul that had never been touched before. Aren’t there all sorts of temples, Mayan or Egyptian, in which the holy of holies is illuminated only on the single day sacred to the local deity, eagle or alligator?

  WHEN I FLEW back from Europe in 1970 after my six months in Rome, a friend met me at the airport in New York, popped some speed laced with a hallucinogen into my mouth, and led me on a tour of the new gay discos that had sprung up like magic mushrooms since my departure. I was shocked by how much the city had changed. Where before there had been a few gay boys hanging out on a stoop along Christopher Street, now there were armies of men marching in every direction off Sheridan Square. Not just ?-Trainers—the blacks and Puerto Ricans who would come down from Harlem on the express subway, men who were already bold and streetwise—but even the previously timid white boys of lower Manhattan were now out in sawed-off shorts and guinea T-shirts, shouting and waving and surging into the traffic.

  “Is this a holiday or what?” I asked my Virgil.

  “Not at all,” he said to his wide-eyed Dante, “it’s an ordinary evening in New Haven or should we say Greenwich Village.”

  At the foot of Christopher Street, near the docks, there was a new bar called Christopher’s End where a single stripper, a bit pudgy and smiling drunkenly, danced on a dais while he wriggled out of his Jockey shorts. He threw them at a famous painter I recognized, who then got up on the stage and tried to fuck the guy right there. A bouncer snatched the painter by the collar and lifted him off the dais. When I introduced the painter to my friend and said, “Do you two know each other?” he said, “Know each other? We were crumb-girls together at the Last Supper.” I then remembered that the painter collected and preserved these odd camp expressions of the past, verbal memorabilia, the verbal equivalent of drag ball tiaras or boas from the twenties.

  Afterwards I went into a dark backroom and looked down a narrow chute—just a foot wide, too narrow to walk through—at two naked men who were taking turns sucking each other. It was too dark and I’d drunk too much to understand what was going on. Were the men performers or just other customers? Was it permitted to take one’s clothes off in this room? What about the police? We were looking at the couple, I imagine, through the slowly rotating blades of a fan, but the effect was of an amateur porno film unwinding so slowly that the black bands separating each frame were visible and hovering queasily in the middle of the screen.

  I was led to a huge disco in a warehouse in the meat-packing district. There hundreds of guys were dancing under black light, which turned their city-pale torsos tan, their white T-shirts radioactive blue, a false tooth black, a trail of eye drops snaking down a cheek light green, a shock of peroxided hair a weird white. At the old Stonewall (now a wood bowl and sheepskin rug store) the music had been pumped out of a jukebox with intervals of silence between each selection, but at the Zoo a discaire, important as a broadcasting engineer in a glassed-in booth, blended the music seamlessly from one turntable to a second, the transition almost unnoticeable. Back then no single song was long enough to sustain our drug-induced frenzy so the disc-jockey often went from one record to an identical cut in another copy of the same record, thereby doubling our pleasure. The disc-jockeys themselves were becoming prominent members of the gay community—known for their ability to build a mood and take it even higher.

  On a dais a go-go boy in a white towel was dancing. The towel glowed in the black light as he draped it with ingenuity and provocativeness. He was a small blond who showed us his ass but never his cock, which grew larger the longer it remained invisible. I watched him for hours, entranced. He handed out his phone number and name, which he’d neatly printed out in advance, to several of us gathered around him. If guys got too grabby he pushed them back down the steps with his long legs.

  During his break he said, “Wait till I’m off and I’ll go home with you.” I suppose I thought that meant at four in the morning, the hour when bars used to close in New York, but in fact last call was at six. All the men he encouraged, I noticed, had hair as long as mine and thick, Viva Zapata mustaches. For him we were bandits and he our bandit queen.

  When he and his roommate, the obese bouncer, were at last ready to go, it was seven in the morning. Once we emerged into the daylight I saw that my dancer was a trashy bleached blond with horrible pizza-face acne and rotten teeth, but I was too polite to back out of our date. The bouncer had an old car and drove us to their apartment in a remote section of Brooklyn. My ardor turned to stone as my speed wore off and I recognized how hard it would be ever to get back home. And I picked up that the bouncer was in love with the dancer and was brooding ominously over my presence.

  The apartment smelled of roach spray and bacon. Dirty dishes teetered in piles all over the kitchen. The couch opened out into a bed. The candy-striped sheets were stiff with come. Beside the bed was a life-size plaster statue of a Moor in a turban and culottes, his chest and legs bare, his eyes large and white and his lips painted a ruby red. With one arm he held up a floor lamp, its shade as big as a bustle and dripping glass bangles.

  The dancer, a bronzed faunlet who’d pushed all those broad-shouldered men away from his dais last night like Marilyn Monroe toppling a line of adoring chorus boys, was now desperately whining and trying to pull me back into his lumpy couch bed with the hinged bar of metal that cut across the back. Minutes after I’d come I was so repelled that I went staggering out into the sunny empty Sunday morning streets.

  I told Maria that I was impressed by how seriously New Yorkers took themselves now, how sure they were that all the world was hanging on their latest cry; of course eternal Rome, by contrast, was so unchanging and its past so indisputably central that today’s Romans could afford to be trivial, shepherds in rags grazing their sheep beside toppled imperial columns. I was probably just irritated that no one in New York wanted to hear about my Roman holiday and that by the time I’d sorted out my mental slides for a thorough presentation my audience had melted away.

  For eight years in New York I’d worked for a world-famous firm that employed primarily bluebloods from the best schools, and even if I’d arrived disastrously late for work every morning and sipped at two-hour-long, wet luncheons and spent the rest of the time on the phone or roaming the corridors looking for conversations, nevertheless I had the security and prestige of my job—and a good salary. I’d proved my father wrong, he who’d predicted I was too unstable and mediocre to succeed in New York.

  He’d paid a lot of money to a psychiatrist hoping I’d recover from my homosexuality, marry and settle down to the humdrum, workaday world. He’d always said I coveted too much attention, that I imagined I was special, that I expected an existence of all frills, that I was incapable of creating a normal, average life for myself. To reassure him I’d patched together a simulacrum of an average life, first at the university, where I joined his fraternity and studied something useful, Chinese, later in New York, where I worked for the conservative weekly magazine he himself read. I hadn’t dyed my hair or tattooed my arm and if I was unmarried at thirty that omission could still be dismissed as a minor eccentricity or an excess of choosiness soon to be rectified. Since my father had no friends he couldn’t even worry about what the neighbors would think. No, his sense of propriety was purely abstract, a Karma accountable only to the gods.

  But now I was falling off the edge of the world. In six months of sipping white wine in Rome I’d spent the seven thousand dollars in profit-sharing I’d accumulated over eight years. I was back in New York wit
hout a job or an apartment. When an older guy I’d tricked with a few times before my Roman holiday saw me at the gym, he said, “But you’ve lost your looks. What have you been doing? You’re skinny and puffy, not such a great combination.” My father was right—I was unsavory.

  I was living with Maria, but I felt out of place. She was fastidious, calm, unambitious, whereas I was sloppy and driven by my twin appetites for sex and success, both of which struck me in her presence as hairy and unwashed. She spoke to her cats in German and gave them fragrant cooked chicken livers to eat but let them slip through the bars on her windows and roam free through the wild New York night, noisy with sirens and rustling with a life more exciting than one’s own because of its speed. Those overexposed photographs that eliminate the substance of vehicles and render traffic as just the scrawled calligraphy of headlights seemed the surest transcription of the urban blur. Strafing lights, the rumbling of the subway, the smell and spoor of sex, the tides of pedestrians channeled by the massive seawalls of skyscrapers—these were the never-stilled dynamics of the city pulsing just outside Maria’s windows.

  I too wanted to slip through the bars but I also needed to prove to her and to myself that I was still capable of sitting home and “schmoozing” (our newly acquired New York Jewish word), far from the world’s michigas and kvetching and tsuris. Maria promised cozy evenings imbued with Gemütlichkeit (a German word from her German youth in Iowa). Just as Yiddish was considered to be a warmer, friendlier version of German, so her spotless apartment with its violets on the windowsills, its many little lamps, the black leather and rosewood armchair, the framed family photos and the folding screen she’d painted with a scene of a moonlit balustrade and a diaphanous curtain blowing in the wind—so this New York home, half bohemian and half bourgeois, was an ideal version of Midwestern propriety.

  I remember we fought over ideas as we’d done when I was a teenager and we’d first met. Back then we’d quarreled about art and politics; now we disagreed about whether women or gay men were the more oppressed.

  “How can you say women are a minority when they constitute fifty-one percent of the population?” I asked.

  “In South Africa blacks are ninety-five percent of the population and they’re slaves.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but women at least don’t feel guilty about just existing. Femininity isn’t classified as a disease or a crime or a sin, but homosexuality is.”

  “Essentially all this fancy new gay liberation just involves a tiny part of a privileged male population and is a fairly trivial matter. I’m talking about half the world’s population, about hundreds of millions of women who are beat and starved and overworked and underpaid if they’re paid at all. Even in America most poor households are headed by single women.”

  Maria’s political views would make her blood pressure mount dangerously; I’d convince myself I could see her veins ticking just behind the transparent skin stretched over her temples. To calm herself she’d make a German salad of sliced cucumbers marinated in white vinegar, sugar and dill. She’d gulp down a glass of white wine. She’d throw a leg over the arm of a chair and say, “Here I am, nearly forty, and I’m still hurling myself about like a teenager. I thought I’d have acquired a certain gravitas by now.” She leafed through magazines and poked at her potted plants in the back yard. “My aunt Carlotta visited me,” she confessed, “and of course she’s used to big Nebraska houses with four bedrooms upstairs and two acres of gardens. She looked around my apartment and said, ‘You mean you live in these two tiny rooms?’ I said the garden was the best part but when we went outside she said, ‘Does this dirty little alley actually lead to a garden?’ and I said, ‘This dirty little alley is the garden.’ ” Maria shook all over with laughter.

  For her as for me the real if vigorously rejected world was one of Midwestern suburbs in which kids with silky blond hair walked down sidewalks under old elms, where the ice-cream wagon played its chimes on the street corner in order to summon forth inhabitants from shadowy, cream-colored, stucco-covered houses, where basements were filled with hundreds of neatly stacked cans of food, where the living-room furniture was dressed each spring in flower-sprigged slipcovers and where winter woolens were stored in cedar chests—a whole world of irreproachable ennui, styleless comfort, solid, dozing bank accounts.

  The only difference between us was that I thought my New York existence was a temporary form of camping out whereas Maria said, “I visited my brother and his family and I can see it’s a perfectly nice life crowded with tennis lessons, church socials and Sunday brunches, but if I had to live like that I’d just as soon put a bullet through my brain.” I could never bring myself to buy any furniture other than Salvation Army junk, since whatever I’d be able to afford would appear pathetic beside my father’s gleaming piles of blond mahogany and pale velvet. Maria was happy to piece together her own bohemian nest, her Manhattan take on Iowa, just as a florist, tilting her head from side to side, composes a bouquet out of plants never found together in nature—a bird of paradise, two hollyhocks and a clump of buffalo grass.

  Now down to my last six hundred dollars, I’d lie awake on my little cot at Maria’s and calculate how long I could make it last. An old Fire Island friend offered me a job working as a stock boy in his Madison Avenue shop where he sold objects in lucite. I told him I’d get back to him in a month, if he could wait that long. He couldn’t; reluctantly I let the offer slip through my hands. I auditioned to be a bartender but flubbed in making a sidecar, even though I’d stayed up all night reading a book of recipes.

  I found a dirty little one-room apartment in a tenement at the foot of Horatio Street which cost only a hundred dollars a month. The fall was setting in and I could glide through the cool, blowy nights like a sailboat, the sail now drawn tight against the propelling wind, now flapping as I drifted. In Rome I’d been intimidated into dressing up before I went out, even to carry my dirty shirts to the laundress (garments I transported in a suitcase), but now I lived with a freedom I’d never known before, since I didn’t need to keep any particular hours or show up at an office.

  I signed up to ghostwrite a thousand-page psychology textbook for college freshmen at four hundred dollars a chapter, payable upon delivery. Publishers had discovered that academics were incapable of delivering a manuscript on time and in comprehensible prose so they paid a professor for the use of his name and outline. The in-house editors prepared a package for the ghostwriter of a cut-and-paste collage of the best passages on any given topic (perception, memory) from rival textbooks and a thick set of Xeroxes of the best and latest relevant articles (“Primacy and Recency in Rat Memory: A Review of the Literature”). I’d rise at noon, drink instant coffee, shower and shave, go to the gym, eat a late lunch of thick bread and minestrone at the Front Porch, browse at a used bookstore, then amble home, pausing to stare back at any idle man who might cruise me. I’d sit at my kitchen table and pound out two or three pages on size constancy or proprioception, proud of my powers of assimilation and synthesis. Then the phone would start ringing as friends would call shopping around for dinner dates; I kept a little appointment book in my back pocket, the only accoutrement recalling my old office days and its schedules.

  I tried to write a new novel, now that the salt and sewer breezes of New York had blown the Roman cobwebs out of my head, but I felt it too was doomed never to be published and an aching feeling of hopelessness paralyzed my hand whenever I took up my pen. My heroine, Alyx, was based on Christa. I wrote from her point of view and tried to imagine her as an American heiress, resolutely heterosexual, who becomes best friends with a gay man (me) and a lesbian (Maria). Alyx was compounded of Christa and Henry James’s Isabel Archer as well as a fox-hunting girl I’d known at college; she realizes when she turns thirty (my age then) that she’s followed a false scent in copying the personal style of a gay man and woman who exalt independence because they’re artists and a cult of friendship because marriage will never give a continuity to t
heir lives. Alyx, in a panic, decides she must marry but chooses unwisely—the handsome, cruel, gold-digging Osmond. In Portrait of a Lady, James calls giving up one’s friends for one’s beloved “the tragic part of happiness” and for a while I toyed with the idea of calling my book The Tragic Part.

  If my Fire Island novel was considered obscure, Baroque, overly ingenious, this book would be limpid, its effects at once melodramatic and refined. Because its inspiration was medieval and Japanese, my Fire Island novel, I decided, had failed to connect with anything American editors could recognize—it seemed almost too original, for if critics and publishers say they esteem originality, what they really mean is a small variation on a known theme, not an innovation ex nihilo. In Woman Reading Pascal, as I decided to call my work-in-progress, I would deal with homosexuality but only as observed by a sometimes uncomprehending heterosexual woman never exposed to the gross physicality and obsessive sexual covetousness of her friend “Dan,” as I named myself; no, Alyx would compare herself unfavorably to Maria and Dan, ironically unaware that in most people’s eyes she was a golden being and we disgusting misfits. If my Fire Island novel was mostly invented, this new book would, I hoped, seem entirely mimetic.

  ONE NIGHT in a bar I was cruising two young men who were obviously hoping to put together a three-way. I kept flickering past them in a vain attempt to attract their attention. At last I gave up and went into the backroom, so dark that very little was visible. Two other men were kissing deeply, their hands ecstatically touching each other’s faces while their bodies were turned away, as in a dance in which only the shoulders may touch; each man was being gone over by a whole retinue of gnomes, much as a race car is feverishly serviced at a pit stop. One gnome was licking a flank, another was sucking a cock, a third was burrowing into buttocks. The royal couple, two Oberons, kissed while their invisible cloaks were unfurled around them by attendant fairies. What was wonderful was that I, too, could touch them, kneel beside them, lick, suck—or kiss a hand as a vassal might. Dancers, cars, fairies, lords—a whole kaleidoscope of successive images was refracted around these two lovers.