The Farewell Symphony

by Edmund White

  I who’d heard nothing but my mother’s endlessly repeated rosy version of her life as a “professional woman” was at first shocked by what he was saying, although an instant later I realized she was self-aggrandizing, fearful of failure, in need of burnt offerings which, however, failed to nourish her spirit and left her ever hungrier for praise. She knew she preened too much to encourage her collaborators. And she had such a weak grasp on reality that she couldn’t head off insurrection until it was too late.

  Now, with my sister I contented myself with saying, “You know, those lines about Bowman’s Department Store aren’t in the play, they must have been added to the movie script.” I wanted to remind Anne that as a New Yorker and a writer I’d acquired a coolness, a certain sophistication; I wasn’t the same old nerdy Brulley whom she’d grown up with.

  “Charge, charge, charge,” my sister sang on a falling tone, hoping, I suppose, to elicit from me a silly laugh, silly because it fed on repetition and was dependent on a squalid, feeble mockery.

  The next morning my sister phoned me at eight (disastrously early for me, who arose only at noon). She picked me up in her battered old station wagon, full of the kids’ toys, clothes, books, the ashtray overflowing with lipsticked butts. We drove to the hospital.

  We were told by a nurse that our mother would be wheeled back to her room at nine-thirty. “Were there complications?” my sister asked. The nurse called the recovery room and reported to us that everything was normal and the patient was doing nicely.

  In the corridor we saw the elevator doors open and two orderlies emerge with our mother on a gurney. She was greyish-white. Her mouth was sunk in on one side where she’d removed her dentures. A traveling intravenous feed was bandaged to her right arm (not the arm that had been filleted); the flabby skin was bruised a bright sulfurous yellow. Her face appeared even whiter than when she would cold-cream it down before bedtime. In fact she looked less a patient than someone who’d just emerged from a refrigerated morgue. Any pity I might have felt was held back by horror—by awe, I thought. Awful.

  Anne wasn’t affected by my brand of squeamishness. She was magnetized to our mother’s side. She swooped down and kissed her forehead, then tucked a strand of hair back into a plastic cap they’d put on her. With my quick irony and brittle mockery I was disarmed by the moment, one that required my mother’s kind of solemn heroism.

  That afternoon she looked just as lifeless as she lay in her hospital bed in a room she shared with another old woman. The roommate, apparently, was deaf and her two daughters, themselves middle-aged, had to shout in her ear. My sister and I sat bleakly silent while this cheerful, alien din clattered away just on the other side of the half-drawn curtain. All I could think about was smoking a cigarette.

  When we were back in Anne’s car she said, “Brulley, we’ve got to talk about what we’d do in case of …” Her voice trailed off.

  “In case of what?” In this part of Chicago the stores were all of brick and just one story high; half of the shopfronts were boarded shut.

  “In case she … turns into a vegetable.”

  “Do you want to pull the plug?”

  “We must tell them not to use any extraordinary measures to keep her alive.”

  “Okay.”

  But that night our mother was awake and the next morning she was woozily talking and smiling. Anne and I never discussed our agreement, but we knew we’d been sinfully quick to bury our mother. Was it because we hated her? Wasn’t it, rather, that we wanted some leverage over this massive stone that had so long blocked the path leading to the treasure, which for us was an undetermined, indescribable future, one that surpassed our imagination because all our thoughts had always concentrated on the past and on our mother?

  Or were we tired of her, just as we were tired of ourselves?

  I FLEW back Sunday afternoon but only after I’d spent an hour beside my mother. She was wearing her makeup and had arranged her hair very carefully. Her bedside table was covered with flowers and cards. “My friends just won’t stop calling me,” she gaily complained. “Can’t they see they’re exhausting me? You’d think people would be more considerate. But then everyone depends on me. It makes them so anxious when they see me vulnerable. Honey,” she added, “I’m tired. Why don’t you read to me?”

  I’d always been impressed by Italian operas or nineteenth-century English novels in which it was assumed that no love was more precious than that of a mother for a son. “You only have one mother,” my aunt had said to me. “Treat her well, because she’s all you’ve got and when she’s gone …” But for me that love was as troubled and eternal as my own consciousness.

  When I was a kid of nine or ten I’d read to my mother while she drove, a book by Will and Ariel Durant about Greek philosophy or a Romantic biography of Beethoven or a study of the child’s mind by Bruno Bettelheim (whom my mother had once met and called by his last name as though he were an instrument, a “Steinway” or “Stradivarius.” She’d even say, “When a Bettelheim takes a look at autism—that’s childhood schizophrenia—there are no more mysteries”).

  We’d ride for hours on the open highway down to Texas or up to Michigan and as she drove I’d read. She’d say, “Isn’t that beautiful?” or “What wisdom! What wisdom!” when struck by a passage. She’d even drum the steering wheel with her gloved hand, smile exultantly and bounce up and down with a little-girl glee that looked slightly mad.

  Now I read to her from Mary Baker Eddy, whom she admired without believing, or believed without following, though such distinctions were inappropriate to Mom, since she could approve of even contradictory ideas so long as they sounded familiar, and if I asked her if she espoused the doctrine of free will or determinism, she’d say, “A little bit of both, dear.”

  Mary Baker Eddy’s ideas about health she entirely ignored but her philosophy she endorsed, especially her belief that evil doesn’t exist except as a form of ignorance. “How true,” Mother whispered, and she said to me as though I’d written the passage instead of just read it, “I’ve always felt I was on such a high spiritual plane with you, darling.” Now I was too conscious of the hard-of-hearing woman and her shouting daughters on the other side of the curtain to let myself go—and too worried about my mother to be able to bathe in the warm restorative waters of her praise. But I could remember when we’d driven hour after hour over the green, rolling countryside and I’d been so happy to provoke my mother’s spiritual pleasure that I was convinced I shared it.

  When I got back to Kennedy Airport, I was so spooked by my weekend with my mother and sister that I rushed into the subway system and down to the Village like a rat scurrying down its hole. It was night and cold but within a few minutes I’d changed into my dirtiest jeans and my leather bomber jacket with no shirt, not even a T-shirt, underneath. I headed for the trucks but it was too early, just nine o’clock, so I went to Julius’s bar and ate a hamburger and drank some white wine.

  Suddenly I remembered it was Sunday. That must be why the bar was so deserted. Tomorrow would be a work day for everyone else. I worried I wouldn’t find my fix tonight.

  I ran into someone I’d tricked with ten years before (I couldn’t remember his name but for some reason recalled his initials, E.G.G., which he’d had monogrammed on his dress shirts). We encapsulated our last decade for each other in a few brief sentences, two upbeats to one downbeat, which gave me that bravura rush of somehow being in control of my destiny and knowing exactly where I was heading, until he said, “How’s the writing going?”

  “The pits,” I said. “I’ve just added another unpublished novel to my invisible œuvre.” From New York stand-up comics I’d learned to make a brassy joke of my plight, the opposite to Midwestern ways, which for my parents’ generation dictated hiding failure and for mine providing a full, unhappy confession.

  “Oh, well,” he said, “keep up the good fight.” His bromide was so formulaic that it constituted a dismissal; I looked into the mirror behind th
e bar to see that he’d caught the eye of a guy the age I’d been when he’d seduced me. The few words we’d exchanged, however painful, had repatriated me to New York. On a good day I could walk down Christopher Street and know every twentieth guy, know to nod at him, even know a scrap of personal gossip about him, but tonight I’d been desperate to exist if only for a few seconds in someone’s familiar eyes, no matter whose.

  I walked down Christopher to the docks, passing a few roving packs of noisy men in leathers and denims. Before, in the sixties, gay men had dressed with care in pressed trousers and pastel-colored cashmere sweaters under Burberry raincoats or, more usually, tan windbreakers cut short enough to reveal the basket and buns. Guys had street-cruised at any hour back then and sought to “turn a trick” (as both gays and prostitutes put it)—an hour or a whole night at home that began with a drink and a bit of conversation and ended between sheets. Now, since the innovation of the back room, all sex took place only very late and while still partially clothed and in public or semi-public places where no talk was required. In fact the least word broke the spell.

  This vow of silence had eliminated the last link with the old, established world of man and woman, the one in which sexuality was used as a bright bait, as reward or recompense, in a game that otherwise concerned suitable pairings, the suitability determined by money, age, religion, race. Gay couples might still observe the familiar conventions, but for that very reason gay men looked down on marriage itself as retrograde. Perhaps that’s why gay couples were usually relegated to Brooklyn Heights (if they were dully domestic) or the Upper East Side (if they were stylish) or West (if bookish)—anywhere out of sight of these bold, laughing Villagers with their mustaches, ringing voices, their clothes contrived as erotic advertisement, their warm, seasoned faces, just a bit lined and vulpine from so many nights on the hunt, their scent-free bodies molded, more and more, by black leather since the sadistic was the only look that went well with extreme pallor.

  At four in the morning I discovered beside a warehouse dock, wedged between two trucks, a man-mountain being ascended by five alpinists. Here was a huge, barrel-chested man, strong all over, devoid of the sculpted definition of a gym-built body; no, he was like a turn-of-the-century wrestler, hair brilliantined and parted in the middle, mouth engulfed by a handlebar mustache flowing directly into shaggy sideburns, the shoulders like boulders in cream, the oiled chest broad and the calves encased in knee-high black stockings held up by garters. I couldn’t see him very clearly but I could see my Gulliver accepting the feverish attention of these five Lilliputians.

  I was taller and stronger than his admirers but Gulliver submitted to us all with the egalitarianism of passivity—anyone could get a grab of him. I tried to push the others aside but they came clawing and chewing back, like a litter of newborn pups fighting for their mother’s teats.

  After a cop car glided slowly past and frightened us, I said, “Why don’t you guys come just around the corner to my place?” Once Gulliver agreed the others fell in behind him. They didn’t trust me not to exclude them at the last moment so stuck as close to their leader as Fafner to the Rheingold.

  In my tiny, dirty, neglected apartment, my studio with the barred windows and the sour smell of mildewed bathroom tiles and the sharp, chemical odor of roach spray (odor of burning rust), I pushed aside my still unpacked bag and pulled my two mattresses onto the floor. Within seconds the elves had undressed their giant, and one after another they sat on his long, thick penis. I whispered into his ear, “When they leave, stay with me and sleep over.” As the dawn light entered my dark room like a Michelangelo releasing a figure from stone, it chiseled more and more detail into the David’s back and buttocks, which were pounding with powerful strokes into the fourth of the five tiny guests, pile-driving this guy, too, into a moaning, swooning climax until his fist foamed over with spurts of sperm.

  At last they were all smiling and sipping cups of instant coffee they had to share (I had only two cups). They were dancing on one foot and staggering as they stepped into fancy bikini underwear, the sort a Spanish mother might buy in packs of five in a Newark shopping mall. They wriggled into jeans and finger-combed raven-black hair as they took turns looking at themselves in a broken shard of mirror they passed around. At last they were gone. Now the sun had sculpted my big captive much too long and left him flawed, passing directly from the ideal lineaments of a Greek deity to the deformities of a late Roman statuette of a comic character. Even his skin no longer looked like sugar dissolving in a spoon but had taken on the grainy, tobacco-stained hue of old piano keys.

  I assumed his exertions had exhausted him, but no, he mounted me, too, not with a cocksman’s challenge to himself to plug every hole but rather with a rhythm that struck me as machine powered, intentionless and unstoppable. When it was over he turned into a sad, heavy man.

  “When I was growing up,” he said, after we’d talked a while, “everyone made fun of me. They called me the Dooms.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “What do you mean, what’s that? Don’t you know what a doofus is? It’s an idiot, a moron, a retard. You see, everyone in my family—my mother and father and my brother, they’re all slow, they’re retarded, and they can’t work. I’m the only person in the family who can do things like read and write and add and drive a car and cash checks. I’m no genius. I never graduated high school. But I can look after the others. I work for the Automobile Association of America. I work nights. I dispatch repair trucks to accidents and breakdowns. I can’t read real books—and the news on television? That’s too hard for me.”

  “It’s hard for everyone,” I said suavely.

  “Not for you, not for most people. But I’m just a doofus, I guess.”

  I kissed his oily forehead. We were still lying on a bare mattress although the sun had become as bright as it was going to get today. The doofus had put on a pair of boxer shorts covered with brown diamonds. I suppose modesty was suitable to someone who had so much to hide and whose attributes were so in demand. I wanted to write, to call my mother, to eat, to check in with my friends, but here I had beside me this sexual prodigy who’d turned into a sad, struggling human being, and if I put it to myself that way I did so because, earlier, sexual desire had blinded me to his suffering humanity.

  His back was covered with boils and his teeth were etched in scum; these afflictions seemed like those of a punished Job or a half-human Caliban. Or maybe he seemed more like an erotic golem about to revert to mud and straw, having served his master by servicing him. Even these comparisons were the idle, systemic chatter of an over-educated, undisciplined mind, one that couldn’t come to terms with the Doofus and what he represented.

  “Did you ever date girls?” I asked.

  “Nah, what goil—” he had a Brooklyn accent—“what goil is gonna wanna be seen wit’ me, a guy like me? Huh? I ask you…. Nah, I stick with the fellas. All these little guys are real nice to me—”

  “Well, sure they are,” I said, “considering you’re a sexual maestro!”

  “A what?”

  “Well, you’re great sex.”

  “Thanks. I dunno. Anyway, there’s no future with guys. They all like me till they come, then they wanna get rid of me. You prob’ly wanna get rid of me, right? You know, you remind me of this other guy I met, this poet guy, I think he said he was a poet, anyway a hell of a nice fella, who lives in a house with a red door on, what is that, East Eleventh Street?”

  “Tenth,” I said. “Is he called Tom? Is he the poetry editor of a magazine?”

  “Dunno—”

  “Thick black glasses, bald, bow tie, looks like Mr. Magoo in the comics?”

  “Yeah, that’s the guy.”

  “Yeah, that’s Tom.”

  Suddenly I was delighted by this coincidence in Tom’s and my taste. Just when I thought I’d surrendered to my most exaggerated predilection for a man covered with boils, an Atlas who held a world of sorrows on his shoulders, I reali
zed I wasn’t alone in appreciating his monstrous gift. His appetite hadn’t won him any girls, it excited most men but didn’t hold them, and yet Tom and I had singled him out, just as he’d found us or at least in my case allowed himself to end up on my sweat-soaked mattress after a troupe of perverse amoretti had tiptoed away, flambeaux held high, leaving behind the satyr and his willing nymph.

  So many comparisons, classical or Biblical, did not prevent me from wondering if I could live with the Doofus. I knew that I was capable of jerking off for years to come thinking about him; now that the years have come and gone I can swear to the accuracy of my prediction. But if he was all I desired, or what I desired most, could I surrender everything else to him, even my long, tormented dream of Sean?

  I called Sean and found out that his Nuyorican poet had dropped him. I invited him into the city and we had dinner, just in a cheap little joint, something I could afford, a coffee shop near where I lived, although it had a small glassed-in terrace giving on Hudson Street and its light foot traffic.

  I didn’t ask him about the end of his affair with Angel because I didn’t want to become his confidant. I wanted in his eyes to remain a potential lover, in the hope that absence had regilded my aureole—although I’m sure now (and suspected even then) that things don’t work that way: once friendship has demagnetized someone, he never again becomes attractive (in French the word for “magnet,” aimant, is just one letter longer than the word for “lover”).

  As the silences collected around us once again, Sean punctuated them by singing in his booming baritone voice little snatches of melody, including the opening four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth (is it called the “Fate theme”?). The seeming aimlessness of the evening and our assumed casualness kept being underscored by this alarming motif, the knocker hammering at the door.

  He talked of school, of classes he was taking, but I felt the presence of a new decorousness in his grave turns of phrase. If I used even the slightest bit of slang he’d wince. He narrated every stage of the evening, appreciating for us our food, our conversation, our friendship. This new man I sensed inhabiting him might have been an older lover, a professor perhaps, or maybe simply a teacher he admired, possibly an author he was reading—whoever it was, the gentleman had a highly developed appreciation of ceremony.