The Farewell Symphony

by Edmund White

  Among all the people Max introduced me to, only one, Joshua, became a close friend. In fact he became the great friend of my life, although at first I scarcely noticed him. His charm was oblique, his humor understated, his looks appealing only to the initiate.

  He wore contact lenses, but his eyes were so bad that he saw little enough by day and nothing by night, and when I’d send him off in a taxi at midnight after a drunken dinner and a nightcap or two, I had the impression I was pushing a wind-up soldier toward a precipice, for if the New York of Max, Tom and Joshua was a pinnacle of civilization, inhabited by these eclectic geniuses who knew everything and read books in every language in their calm, spacious apartments, the city outside was also as noisy as an Arab bazaar and as dangerous as a bear pit: the streets were piled high with uncollected garbage and pulsing with revolving police lights; on the fire escape beyond an open window lurked a house robber—or the shadow of laundry on a line; even the ground was just the thinnest layer of macadam poured over ten stories of hidden wires, sewers, subways, all rattling and steaming like pots on a stove. Only the lofty, raggedy roof gardens beside the forest of aerials and the slat-sheathed water tanks suggested another, tribal landscape—those roof villages or the dim inner courtyards flooded with pooling rain that pasted down layer upon layer of gingko leaves into a thickening vegetal collage of what looked like parchment, wax paper and butcher paper.

  Joshua had a mind I couldn’t fathom quickly. Early on I’d learned (perhaps because when I was a child we changed cities every year and I was faced each September with a new classroom of potential enemies) to characterize and seduce the people around me, but I could never figure Joshua out. Since the intellectuals I was meeting wanted to explain their work and to read it out loud, I was happy to listen (after all, most of them were at least part-time professors and used to a captive audience). My questions and welcoming silence could precipitate them into hours of glittering talk or recitation. Joshua, however, was quiet and curious. If someone like Max was always fearful that the tone might be lowered and spoke only on what he considered to be the highest plane, Joshua was delighted to gossip about friends, to speculate about the sex lives of the dancers at the New York City Ballet, to alert me to a good new restaurant reviewed in the SoHo Weekly News. He was deeply suspicious of ideas and liked to quote William Carlos Williams’s injunction, “No ideas but in things.” Whereas I was convinced by almost any idea I could grasp and passed quickly from Structuralism to semiotics by way of a Gramsci-inspired Marxist cultural analysis, Joshua smiled at my enthusiasms and yawned at my lectures. He wanted to know how to prepare pasta alla puttanesca. He hoped to meet the ballerina assoluta Suzanne Farrell. He wondered what Lola was up to in the soap opera The Guiding Light. We had a very campy way of talking together that we deleted the minute Max or anyone serious was around. We gave all of our friends, men and women alike, female names and referred to them all in the feminine gender.

  Joshua had been first in his class at Harvard as an undergraduate and had written an acclaimed doctoral thesis on the migration of the Petrarchan sonnet from Italy via France to England. He was considered one of the leading experts alive on Sir Philip Sidney, but the Renaissance bored him, although he quickly scanned articles every week or two in learned journals just to keep up with what everyone in his field was doing.

  No, what interested him were the poets whom he was meeting and whom he was beginning to write about. His own life had been changed by Eddie—a poet, millionaire and gay man—who’d transformed Joshua by convincing him to buy contact lenses to replace his extremely thick glasses, and silk shirts and pale, pleated slacks to wear instead of the heavy, old-fashioned wool suits his father, a small-town tailor, had outfitted him with. Joshua and Eddie visited a tailor in Venice, a certain Signor Cicogna, every summer, and Joshua would come back with sports jackets in a fabric that in English is called houndstooth but in French (and Italian) “hen’s foot.” Or a black wool suit lined in red silk, which would cause Joshua, as he flipped his jacket open, to say in Italian with a sly little smile, “Priest outside, cardinal inside.” His new look lifted him out of the category of the dowdy academic into that of the smart man-about-town.

  At first Joshua—so wry, so unemphatic, smiling quizzically because he wasn’t sure he was seeing the right expression on the other person’s face—seemed like a charming extra in my new life, but soon I came to love him for the intimacy that sprang up between us as well as for all of his virtues, which were precisely the ones I lacked.

  I had a way of shamelessly courting and flattering people such as Max or Butler because I felt I was acting in a play, whereas Joshua took them seriously, he was at home in this New York intellectual milieu, this was his one and only life, and he wasn’t about to concede an inch to someone as high-handed as Max or as slippery and self-righteous as Butler. Joshua had started out as a bookworm. He’d excelled in studies that had obliged him to learn Greek, Latin and Renaissance Italian and French. If he looked fifty when he was only twenty-five (I was shocked by his old photos) and back then had been both loveless and envious, at least he’d had the satisfaction of mastering his field and even writing an essay on Shakespeare’s sonnets that everyone still quoted two decades later. Anything judged remarkable that touched on Shakespeare, no matter how peripherally, repositioned the very cornerstone of our civilization—or should I say their civilization, since I could speak about it so pompously only because I didn’t feel part of it; I bowed my head before Shakespeare as one might stand or kneel in an unfamiliar church. I’d majored in Chinese, I’d been a Buddhist, my favorite college courses had been Buddhist Art and the Music of Bartók, I knew The Tale of Genji better than Hamlet, I’d never studied Marlowe, Sidney or Spenser (Joshua kept telling me there was no greater pleasure than reading The Faerie Queene but I remained unconvinced), I’d read all of Ibsen (even Emperor and Galilean), revered Knut Hamsun, and Colette and Nabokov were the writers I read whenever the world appeared colorless, but if I wept when I read Keats my eyes were dry when I perused Dante—dry or slowly drooping into deep sleep.

  If I was a public-library intellectual, someone who read without a plan and followed only his whims, Joshua was the real thing. I went with him one day to the university where he taught. Whereas Max bullied his students and hoped above all they’d consider him intelligent, Joshua was the good shepherd who gently prodded his flock toward the paddock. Max was exhilarating because he poured so much energy into every encounter and had a vaudeville extravagance about him. But he was also absurd with his swooping intonations, dictionary words, Inverness cape and deerstalker, and no one would have wanted to be like him—or if, bizarrely, the desire to emulate him had been awakened in some undergraduate breast, no one would have known how to go about copying such a preposterous style, so angular precisely because it joined a European erudition to a Midwestern bumptiousness (he avoided these two psychic and geographical extremes in favor of New York, where no one could judge him because no one could quite place him, and where energy, a quality he bristled with, was prized more than polish).

  But Joshua, during all the years and in all the different countries and contexts I knew him, was always more admirable than intimidating and esteemed more for what he was than for what he said or did. Any guy in his classroom was fitter, more agile, better looking than he and abler at seeing the world around him, but his very frailty only pointed up the strength and suppleness of his mind and the high finish of his manner. Anyone could tell right off that Max was a tyrant; he could make it disadvantageous, even perilous, to disagree with him. But his friends and students didn’t fear Joshua. No, they longed to please him. Joshua’s hands gently molded the air when he spoke. He sat on the edge of his desk closest to his students, which suggested without demonstrating casualness, since his performance was so highly organized that nothing about it went unpremeditated. He cocked his head to one side and listened to his students, whom he sometimes deliberately pretended were saying things more intellige
nt than they intended. Everything he said was designed to lead his audience to a more focused vision of Shakespeare’s world, an almost pictorial apprehension; as Joshua spoke one could see golden clouds banked in Tintoretto-blue skies above Cleopatra’s sun-baked walls.

  For Joshua the woods in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or As You Like It were a charmed precinct in which young lovers would try out new (even androgynous) roles before returning, wiser and more humanly gendered, to the city or court. Perhaps that’s why Joshua loved the New York City Ballet, since it, too, showed us a Utopian society in which a man and a woman wordlessly moved through the enchaînements of other couples under the charged regard of spectators, symbolized by the lateral lights raking them from out of the wings. Joshua admired the ballet criticism of Edwin Denby, who had a Shakespearean vision of dance as both urban and Utopian.

  And Joshua adored “cruising” the main lobby of the newly opened State Theater, although his prowling and looking were more social than sexual and even under the bright lights he could scarcely make out who anyone was. As I squired him about the lobby from the bar onto the vast outdoor balcony he’d make funny remarks about all the celebrities we were passing; he’d give me their pedigrees, tell me how they were related to each other—and then realize he’d conjured up the wrong person. Perhaps his blindness stimulated his imagination and permitted him to construct better plots, nobler lineages, more amusing social conjunctions.

  Like so many people I’d been taught from the very beginning that society was entirely negative: a hypocritical, gossipy artifice from which sincerity was necessarily banished and intimacy absent. But Joshua taught me (though only because I wanted to imitate his example, not because he ever tried to convert me to his beliefs)—Joshua taught me that society provides the necessary amplification of our private thoughts and acts. We gay guys had gotten things exactly the wrong way—we made love in public (in trucks and baths and backrooms) but shared our thoughts only in the confessional of the tête-à-tête, preferably over the phone in which the spirit was entirely disembodied and all that remained of communication was a crackling silence or a tinny, transmitted voice. Of course even so we were better attuned to urban possibilities than heterosexuals, since at least we were always cruising the streets.

  Joshua’s Utopian expectations of society never occluded his awareness of its more usual grotesqueries. “It’s simply past belief,” he’d tell me during our morning phone call, recounting some new outrage that on my own I would have accepted as normal behavior. “He’s gone too far this time,” he’d say, and then the suppressed laughter in Joshua’s voice would bubble over or he’d start munching his rye crisp or he’d tell me what was going on in the street below—usually pure invention, since Joshua saw only what he imagined.

  My mother called me to tell me that she was going to be operated on for breast cancer. “Honey,” she said, “I’m afraid this may be it.”

  “Really?” I asked. “But millions of women have survived a mastectomy.”

  “It’s spread. It’s in my lymph nodes all up and down my left arm. It’s the left breast.”

  “Have you had a second opinion?”

  “What for?” she asked, offended. “I can read X-rays and medical reports for myself. After all, I’m a professional woman.” She had a job as a psychologist in a medical clinic for mentally retarded children and she never corrected anyone who called her “Doctor.” If truth be told, she had spent so many years studying the then-new field of mental retardation that her judgment and diagnoses were usually sounder than those of any medical doctor.

  My question about the “second opinion” was the only canned response I had to this emergency and I knew for sure now that I’d never have been able to write for daytime television.

  My mother would have been equally ineffectual; she’d been schooled by radio soaps and didn’t have the jaunty, self-deprecatory manner of television characters. She was portentous, not “cute,” in talking about her worries. I could almost hear the sustained organ chord underlining her tragic utterances. I admired her style, although I found it unbearable.

  “Son,” she said, “I need you.”

  “Maybe it would be better if I came out while you’re recuperating. During the operation you’ll have all your friends around. Later, when you’re feeling better—”

  “No,” she said, with a force teetering on the edge of anger, “there may not be a recovery period. I need my kids near me now. I’m not being melodramatic. I could recover and have many more productive years” (Mother always spoke of productivity not happiness), “but stastically, statistiscally” (like Dad she always stumbled on this word and this word alone), “the statistics also suggest my life could be much shorter. And a mastectomy is not minor surgery.”

  “Okay,” I said. We discussed what plane I should take. I’d arrive on Friday, the night before her operation, see her Saturday and Sunday in recovery. “Then if I’m out of the woods you can fly home. You can stay in my apartment while you’re here. The doorman, George, will give you my keys. Your sister wants you to have dinner with her when you arrive.” She went into all the details; I noticed how she’d planned to the last moment how long we’d visit her and when, as though she knew she couldn’t otherwise be assured of our doing things properly.

  On the plane to Chicago I felt a powerful anger against my mother filling me. I wrestled with her in my mind as though she were sitting beside me. “I won’t let you drag me into the grave,” I whispered soundlessly as New York tilted and shrank below me. I was shocked to see how almost unidentifiably small was the part of Manhattan I cared about; Greenwich Village was just a pimple on the backside of the five boroughs and the sprawl beyond—and then I came back to this inexplicable anger, so unfair. Already here on the plane the crafty faces and sinewy dark little bodies of New York had been replaced with Midwestern prize pigs—fat, pink, guileless. Years ago I’d said good-bye to the possibility of a steady job, early nights, mashed potatoes, porcine love, knee-slapping jokes.

  But who was I kidding? It wasn’t the Midwest I’d escaped but my mother; I’d fought free of her gravitational pull but now, like a dark lodestone, she was drawing me back to her. If I was cold and incapable of love it was because I’d given all my love to her so long ago. When I was fourteen I’d said, “If you die I’ll throw myself in the grave with you—I couldn’t go on living.”

  In Rome and New York I’d fashioned a new personality for myself. All the things I did in the holds of parked trucks and all the books I read and all the masterful men and books I discussed with Joshua, Tom, Max or Butler—these were all the ways I had of convincing myself that I had nothing more to do with that woman, who was almost illiterate and who always said the predictable thing except when her idiocy surpassed even my predictions.

  When I was a child she’d seldom held me though she’d sung to me in the dark before I went to sleep, sung “I’ll be with you in apple-blossom time” in her frail voice, a plaintive war-ballad addressed by a soldier to his girl. Together we’d listen to FDR’s “Fireside Chats” and the teenage Frank Sinatra singing on the radio during the war years. At our rambling Michigan summer house I remember the smell of my mother’s wool swimsuit when it was wet; I’d run to her and bury my face in it. Her features, thrown into relief by the sculptural white swimming cap, frightened me with their boldness, free of mascara and makeup. I remember the wasps that haunted the artesian well and that would sting the backs of our necks until my father bagged and burned them. I remember the smell of trapped heat and dust in the empty servants’ quarters over the garage, a smell that to my mind seemed to emanate from the clear glass tear-shaped sphere of red liquid (fire-extinguishing fluid) resting in a rusting metal hoop projecting from the pine board wall.

  When my mother and father divorced I’d become my mother’s best friend, her confidant and, somehow, her older brother. She’d say, “You’re so much more mature than your father,” or, “If I could find a man like you I’d marry him right a
way,” or, “You were already wise when you were born. There’s something almost … Christ-like about you.” This sacred, consoling spirit that inhabited me when my mother was drunk or lonely had nothing to do with the whining, sniveling brat who wouldn’t get up in the morning, on one of those winter mornings when it was still night outside and the world had died and gone mortuary cold under a sheet of snow. Nor did this Christ-like spirit have anything to do with the ugly, embarrassing nerd my sister despised; I had believed her when she told me I smelled. Nor did this holy spirit cohabit my body with the queer I was in danger of becoming, head ready to be shaved for some eventual lobotomy, skin potentially white and veins putatively blue because when I grew up I would never go outside or if so only by night, a monster whimpering for compassion but incapable of keeping his big, clammy hands off boys’ cool thighs, so like girls’ thighs except the knees were knobbier, the pores microscopically larger, the skin pierced by the first dusting of sperm-smelling fuzz.

  No, what my mother loved in me was the wise child in the temple, consternating the rabbis, the compassionate listener who seemed all-knowing only because I parroted back the advice she’d already offered to herself just the day before during an inebriated monologue. She loved me when I said to her, “You’re a wonderful intelligent woman who possesses a very deep, wise soul; you’re pre-eminent in your field, you’re surrounded by friends who idolize you, and if most men are frightened off because you’re such a fine person then that is their loss. You must hold to your own high principles and never cheapen yourself.” No matter that if her friends “idolized” her it was only because they were the sort of people so pitiful that they had no other friends. No matter that she made me spend my eighth, ninth and tenth birthdays in a nightclub with her while she cruised men at the bar; her principles lurched ever lower with every highball and she wondered if she had cheapened herself only on subsequent nights when her phone refused to ring. Cheapness became a vice only after it had proved to be a bad amatory move; as good Americans our morality was almost entirely pragmatic.