The Farewell Symphony

by Edmund White

  “Hear, hear!”

  “Even if he’d presented his …” and here Ridgefield paused, searching for a euphemism, “his uranism in an attractive light, I would have objected. After all, a writer writes for everyone, for the man, woman and child in the street and, mad as it may seem: They. Don’t. Care what Monsieur Genet daydreams about in his cell. And then (and here I’m being merely frivolous) I think it spoils everything if our …” (again the problem of the euphemism, causing Ridgefield to wrinkle his nose) “… our Athenian pleasures are described to the barbarians. I think our world is amusing only so long as it remains a mystery to them.”

  Everyone chuckled warmly and repeated his words in cozy asides.

  “But why, my dear?” Max cried, smiling hugely, playing the straight man. “Isn’t the duty of literature precisely the depiction of even the most exotic and depraved corners of human experience?”

  “Well, it’s true that Dante presents Brunetto Latini,” Ridgefield replied, letting his little smile alight once more on the swaying perch of his lips, “but only to identify his punishment in Hell, which would be exactly my way of dealing with, uh, the love that dare not speak its name—”

  “And that won’t shut up these days,” Max concluded gleefully. Everyone chortled.

  Max seemed so happy to be in the presence of a writer of such consequence that he didn’t pause to wonder if he agreed with him or not. Max’s joy was partially exemplary: he wanted to indicate to me how to chat gracefully and clubbily with the great. The urgency of his enthusiasm was also proprietary, since if Max knelt before Ridgefield he did so only after having crowned him. Whereas Max would have responded waspishly to Mailer or Miller—acknowledged and, fatally, middle-brow authors (not to mention aggressively heterosexual)—his respect for Ridgefield, this obscure exquisite, was inspired by curatorial, king-making pride.

  I felt my temples throbbing and my mouth going dry as I began to speak, “But Genet is no sociologist. He’s a poet and his vision is lyrical—”

  “A poet!” Ridgefield exclaimed, indignant. “There, my dear chap, you go too far. Unless an unbridled slut is your idea of a poet.”

  I blushed deeply and smiled faintly.

  “Really, darling,” Max echoed, a single line creasing the gleaming smooth expanse of his brow.

  That night I drank a lot knowing what lay in store for me. I wanted to perform successfully, although when we were at last alone in our cottage and Max mounted me, I was impotent, which he didn’t seem to notice. I couldn’t tell if he was too polite to mention my flagging attention or whether he was indifferent to it. The next day he was just as polite and attentive as ever but he’d marginally withdrawn. He no longer called me “my darling,” and I saw that I was going to be let off lightly. I’d not wanted to wound his vanity; I’d wanted to be open to his ardor; but my body had failed me and him and he was enough of a realist to understand its verdict and enough of a gentleman to forgive me.

  When I returned the next evening to Manhattan I headed to a leather bar. I knew that many of these leather men were artists or intellectuals, but their manner, unlike that of Ridgefield’s generation, was gruff and menacing. Or rather, they maintained an on-stage silence even if in the backstage corridors (over dinner or on the phone with friends) they chirped away gaily about holidays and movies. I found a young guy with a big belly and a yellow hankie in his back pocket who took me and twelve cans of beer into an abandoned warehouse. We each swallowed a half hit of acid, smoked joints and recycled the beer back and forth into each other’s mouths. We laughed and hugged each other and smeared our spit, sperm and urine over each other’s bodies. The beer, filtered so rapidly through our kidneys, had almost no taste though it was warm and foaming. “I like a good session, don’t you?” my partner whispered; what I liked was that gay life had become so specialized, so shamelessly fetishized. I supposed Ridgefield would assign us both to Brunetto Latini’s ring in hell, but I thought eternal damnation seemed an excessive punishment for a game babies in a playpen would have found wonderfully sociable. At last I staggered home at dawn, drenched, trembling and stinking.

  IKEEP THINKING of a couple of Americans we met during the year before Brice died. One of them, Neil, was a heavy, stoop-shouldered man like me and like me he had a barrel chest that descended directly into a barrel waist. Unlike me he still wore a mustache, which was grey and so thick it covered his upper lip. His hair he treated like an accessory he despised and he batted at it with his hand or slapped it impatiently away from his brow.

  His lover, Giles Satsumi, was a Japanese-American lawyer in his thirties who no longer practiced. He’d been brought up in San Francisco and had met two of my friends who’d migrated there from New York in the early eighties and died in the first three years of the plague. Giles was always smiling and knew all the lyrics to Nöel Coward’s and Cole Porter’s songs. He kept nodding other people into agreement. He never spoke about himself and seemed more intent on understanding whatever was light and amusing about his guests than in confiding his darker secrets or eliciting theirs.

  Neil was from an old New England family that had made a small but necessary item. He apparently had a large enough fortune to finance a life of decorous leisure. But since they were Americans Neil and Giles felt the need to improve themselves even if in rather disjointed and ultimately useless ways. They studied cooking at the Cordon Bleu in Paris. They’d toured gardens as far apart as Vancouver, Sissinghurst, Nara and Florence. Giles had also spent months in Japan learning the tea ceremony and buying fabulously expensive cracked and mended pots and exquisitely crude Korean cups. They’d purchased a little house in the eighth arrondissement that for them was just a bagatelle, since they rarely lived there.

  “It’s so funny,” Giles said in his choppy, rat-a-tat way that made everyone laugh but that didn’t coerce laughter, “we’re so naive, Neil and I, at least about certain things, that when we bought this house we couldn’t fathom why any residence would have eight bedrooms, each with a bidet, and no kitchen, until our French friends, stifling their éclats de rire, explained to us we’d just bought a bordello!” That one French expression, with its double r, so tricky for American uvulas, was so perfectly produced that I remembered they’d also studied French diction with a private instructor.

  In honor of this bonbonnière from the turn of the century with its fake Greek statues of laughing girls in shorty peplums and slipping togas, its slender Ionic columns in the tiny salon that appeared to be made of lightly licked spun sugar and its courtyard fountain of a verdigrised Pan leering over his pipes while a drunken naiad embraced his hooves, Neil and Giles had covered their windows with crackling yellow satin curtains and their Louis XVI bergères with a faded lemony and beige tapestry. Everything looked as though it had just been pulled out of a dress-shop band box and flung with prodigal abandon over a bed. I could imagine a cocotte in an ice-blue peignoir trimmed in coffee lace smoking a cigarette in the salon and listening to a wind-up Victrola playing a recording of Mistinguett. The bathroom upstairs was royal, intended more for the piquant display of pink female flesh to special customers than for routine hygiene.

  We ate a “gourmet” dinner and I remembered to keep up a constant stream of oohs and aahs and compliments, which sounded so exaggerated to Brice that he raised an eyebrow and suspected me of mockery until I explained to him later, when we were alone, that Americans don’t mock each other, at least not with such subtle cruelty, and that praise any less dithyrambic would have struck our American hosts as poorly concealed disappointment.

  After dinner, Giles asked if we’d like to participate in a tea ceremony. Brice had just recovered from a bout of wasting brought on by a bacterium in the blood related to tuberculosis and though his cure had been miraculous he was still thin and weak.

  “How long does it last?” I asked.

  “About an hour.”

  “And we’re seated cross-legged on tatami mats the whole time?”

  “On tatami, but mos
t Westerners lounge about or even lie down.”

  “But I want to do it,” Brice said. “I’m sure it’s very spiritual and beautiful.” The problem with dying for an atheist is that there are no normal spiritual occasions; exotic ones—or improvised moments—are made to bear a heavy weight.

  Giles nodded and left the room. Neil sniffed at us a bit like a faithful family dog. He was companionable and heart-breakingly kind but he seemed a bit lost without his brilliant companion, so decisive, so magnetic, so full of amusing ideas.

  After ten minutes Neil led us into the courtyard, where we were supposed to remain silent, drink sips of water from the fountain (this absurd fountain of a lean, leering Pan and a lubricious maiden). Neil said, “We’re purifying ourselves of the dust from the outside world. Our thoughts must settle.” I worried that Brice, so fragile and bony, might catch cold, despite his many layers of shirts, sweaters and vests, but I could see he was concentrating and participating in everything with great seriousness.

  Brice had become purer over the last few years, since the onset of his illness. When I’d first met him he’d been a swaggering playboy, always sporting a well-cut jacket and a silk foulard (which looks prissy to Americans, rakish to the French). He’d been unduly fascinated by the rich and the titled—especially the tided, although that taste for old names can be read not just as snobbism but also as a form of poetry; in his case he never found any advantage in his collection of aristocrats beyond a simple pleasure in associating himself with a Golden Book of history.

  Recently he’d put all that behind him. After all, he’d been only twenty-seven when I’d met him. Now, five years later, he’d aged by several millennia. He’d had to accept that he wasn’t going to live, that he wasn’t going to have the brilliant career as an architect that everyone had foreseen, that his promise wasn’t going to be fulfilled. He had every reason to complain—of the pain that racked his body, of his bitterness at all his losses—but he maintained a stoic silence. At first, before he’d become ill, he’d been the usual French hypochondriac. But now that he was nothing but a skeleton, he made no protests, certainly he said nothing general or cosmic about the unfairness of life. He had prepared his little cache of pills with which to commit suicide, but just a few days before the tea ceremony he’d admitted that he no longer had the strength (either moral or physical) to take his life. Now he was prepared to drift ever closer to death. It would have been irrelevant, certainly impertinent, to urge him to fight back. His only fight was to draw another breath, ascend another staircase, hold down another cup of soup, especially since he’d arrived at the point where the lightest sustenance (what anyone else would have considered to be “diet food”) repelled him. Every morsel was too heavy, too fatty—one would say, too substantial.

  Neil led us into a narrow but high room (one of the many chambres d’assignation?) that was carpeted with tatami on platforms around a recessed heating element and a bubbling cauldron of hot water. Giles was outfitted in elaborate robes of many layers, the outermost of black silk. His shoulders were motionless somewhere under stiff peaks. He was wearing a glossy round black hat and a sort of brocaded apron. He seemed a cross between a Shinto priest and a Masonic Grand Master. He was easygoing and quick to explain things and laugh at passing awkward-nesses, but nevertheless the room, the costume and the singing of the kettle made him seem more subdued.

  Brice was panting slightly, no doubt from the pain of sitting on his un-cushioned bones, the hip bones, which looked as huge as an old nag’s when he was naked, and the bulb at the base of his spine where the coccyx had worn through, red and inflamed. But his eyes were sparkling with excitement.

  Neil, in stocking feet and trousers, big belly hanging over his belt, scooted about on his knees, the grave, mustachioed acolyte serving the priest and presenting us, the communicants, first with small, beautiful and nearly tasteless rice cakes and, after the elaborate brewing and whisking, the foamy, bitter green tea. Giles explained everything he was doing. He showed us all the ancient elements of the tea service. He explained the painting on the wall. He demonstrated the method for receiving the cup and turning it a hundred and eighty degrees away in order modestly to drink from the inferior side and to present the superior side, with a bow, to the next drinker. We examined the black lacquered caddy and the bright green dry tea piled high to resemble Mount Fuji. After two rounds of tea the bowls were rinsed and dried with a smart swipe of a folded towel. “Now you’re allowed to handle the bowls and look at them from every angle, since often a visitor might see a particular bowl only once in his lifetime.” I could see that Brice was sweating from the effort to stay seated this way but that he was charmed by such a fussy ritual combining spirituality and connoisseurship. And he was certain that this was the one time he would be seeing these bowls.

  Nine months later, on New Year’s, just three months before Brice was to die, we were invited back, this time with Brice’s brother Laurent, a big, strapping weightlifter from Nice who, despite his bulging muscles, was every bit as much an aesthete as Brice himself. Since he was shy and in any event spoke no English, Laurent was very quiet, but he, too, marveled at the refinement of the ceremony, conducted so improbably in this Belle Epoque maison de passe. The elements of the tea service were all decorated with silver and gold this time, since these precious metals were considered to bring good luck, appropriate to a New Year’s Tea. Giles was extremely attentive to Brice, who was now ectoplasmically thin; his cheekbones looked as though they’d burst through the translucent yellow parchment of his skin. And yet Giles seemed driven to complete this dolorous if inspiring ritual in the most exacting manner.

  Brice died and I received a condolence note from Giles and Neil. Six months later, Neil sent me a black-bordered printed bristol announcing Giles’ death. I called our only mutual friend, who told me that Giles had been secretly ill for years, but able to travel, cook, garden, make tea. When his health suddenly took a turn for the worse at the end of the summer he’d refused all medication and faded in two weeks. Neil, his passionately devoted lover, had vanished, inconsolable. It seemed strange to me that Giles had never spoken of his own status and that of the five participants in the New Year’s Day Tea, two were already dead.

  The spring came and on the hot, sunny street in front of my apartment building I met Kevin. He was riding a bicycle, the kind racers use, all sparkling, wire-strutted wheels and a gentle, expensive ratcheting sound of well-oiled gears winding down. After I met him I’d be walking along the street and suddenly I’d hear a sound, perhaps it was the sound an ant would hear if it was pursued by a dragonfly, and I’d look up uneasily to see his iridescent wings descending on me.

  I fell in love with blonds but liked to have sex with dark-haired men. Kevin was as pure as the youngest, most odorless blond and as sexy as a rancid brunet. Like a dragonfly he could hover so long in one place that he would seem stationary and his whirring wings would become invisible but suddenly he’d swerve off at a dramatic angle, sunlight mica-bright on his body. Which is just Kevin’s metaphorical due, words to suggest his way of sampling me, as a rap composer might sample three bars from a standard.

  I don’t remember our first words. All I recall is that he was a bit of an orphan or a Cinderella. He was living across the street from me and two doors up, not in a tenement like mine but in a proper Federal house with a brick façade, a grand stoop, a red door with a glowing brass knocker and mail slot, except the door was marred by extra locks and the door jamb with four buzzers, one for each floor-through apartment. Kevin lived on the top floor with Hal, a musical comedy star who’d always played the young leading man (Puerto Rican rocker or Manhattan bachelor suffering from a bad case of anomie and exceptionally nosy friends). Hal had picked Kevin up when he was just eighteen on his first trip from Ohio to New York, almost seven years earlier. Little Kevin had been thunderstruck by the attention and had fallen in love with all the force of first love, that complete union of the physical and the spiritual that we seek
to duplicate the rest of our lives. A kiss is a meltdown, a fuck is the first perfect Christmas morning, a three-a.m. embrace is tantamount to a delicately engineered rendezvous of ships in darkest space.

  That quickly came to an end, that bliss. Hal was a famous cocksman, easily distracted, quick to follow any kid down an alleyway. Soon he was using Kevin as bright bait to lure other boys home.

  “That must have hurt,” I said when Kevin told me the story. We were sitting on his stoop.

  “Not at all.” Kevin had a dirty laugh, low and throaty, and it came welling up now. “I was a simp, mooning over an alleycat like Hal. I learned my lesson. There was never anyone less romantic than Hal.” He sat up with that perfect poise of a dancer, someone who never makes an unpremeditated move unless frightened. Now he was becoming centered in his body as though reminded of that past mastery over his aching, heart-sore spirits. In any event, he was always suddenly stretching—dropping his head forward or raising one arm, then the other like a jerked marionette, or clasping his hands and turning them palm out while he pushed them slowly away from his chest—and I learned not to read any special meaning into these abrupt exercises. They meant nothing. No more than a thoroughbred’s caracoling.

  Now Hal let him live rent-free in his apartment as a houseboy, chair-warmer, package-receiver. If Hal was lonely Kevin would climb onto his vast slab of a bed, although normally Kevin slept in a corner on a little cot. “Of course, if he’s brought home a trick I’ll find the door locked and I have to wander the streets till dawn. He’s even capable of waking me and saying, ‘Okay, babe, it’s over and out,’ and I’m supposed to get dressed and clear out in no more than ten seconds—unless, of course, the trick wants a three-way, but usually Hal’s sort of boy isn’t looking for another twinkie.”