The Farewell Symphony

by Edmund White

  “Well …”

  “Top or bottom?”

  “Top.”

  “Blond or brunet?”

  “Blond.”

  “Short or tall.”

  “Tall.”

  “Okay, we’ve narrowed it down to a tall blond top. Kink?”

  “Huh?”

  “Are you into water sports, CBT or TT or VA?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Cock and Ball Torture, Tit Torture or Verbal Abuse.”

  “Well …”

  “Are we a little bit shy?” A rich laugh that ended in a cigarette cough.

  “No, it’s just that it’s a matter of chemistry, of what the other guy wants.”

  “I see.” I could picture Harold stagily suppressing a yawn with an outstretched hand. “Let’s say we want a Severe Taskmaster—”

  “Who’s tender later.”

  “Do you want Daddy to console his little boy after punishing him?”

  “Yeah, sort of. That’s a possible scenario.”

  “Now, I’ve got three fellows who are available. We’re talking a hundred dollars for a full hour—on an outcall?”

  “Yeah, my place.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “West Village.”

  “How did I guess. You have such a young voice—how old are you, doll?”

  “Thirty-two.”

  “You sound nineteen. Now, I have Jason, who’s a six-foot-two blond hockey player, twenty-four years old, a hundred and seventy pounds of firm, naturally athletic manmeat, definitely a top, nine inches and thick, low heavy hangers, smooth chest, hairy butt.”

  “Yeah, sounds great….”

  “Do you want me to try Jason? He should be at home. He’s on call. And he lives near you, in Chelsea, you pay the cab ride.”

  “Okay.”

  While I hung on, Harold called Jason on another line. I could hear a muffled conversation but could not make out the words. Suddenly Harold was breathing smokily into my ear again. “It’s all set, doll. Jason will be over right away. He’s going to phone you now and you can give him directions for getting there. Remember, no checks or credit cards, cash on arrival, have fun, kiddo!”

  Seconds after I hung up Jason rang me. He sounded bored and resentful and his voice was high pitched and nasal—a turn-off. I asked him if he had any poppers. He’d said he’d look for some.

  Despite his voice I became increasingly excited about his arrival as the time approached. Usually I was filled with a hopeless lethargy when I contemplated housework but now I raced about straightening things, putting fresh sheets on the bed, running the garbage down. I showered as rapidly as possible, afraid I wouldn’t hear the buzzer. I dressed in a torn T-shirt and jeans frayed at the crotch. My mind filled with pornographic fantasies that alternated with a romantic scenario. He’d said he’d be over in forty-five minutes. I kept looking at the clock.

  Joshua phoned. From his voice I could tell he was already in bed. “Well, that was fun, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. Lots,” I lied. I couldn’t afford the time needed to be sincere. I didn’t want to tell him how much Eddie’s silence had tortured me simply because I didn’t want to be on the phone still when Jason rang the bell. I knew Joshua would be wounded if he thought I had a trick coming, especially the sort of repeat trick who’d be stopping by for a sex date at midnight; he’d be outraged if he thought I’d hired a hustler.

  We chitchatted about this and that and then Joshua began to giggle, half to himself.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked.

  “Eddie’s too wicked. When I asked him what he thought you looked like, he said: ‘Minou Drouet.’ ”

  “Who’s he?” I asked, suspicious.

  “She. Oh, only Eddie would remember her. She was this ten-year-old French poet in the 1950s who had little round steel glasses like yours and bangs and the French had decided she must be a genius, the new Rimbaud, and her poems were published on the front page of Le Monde des Livres and Cocteau—” Joshua began to laugh again “—Eddie reminded me of this, isn’t his memory extraordinary?—when they asked Cocteau what he thought of her, he said, ‘All children are geniuses except Minou Drouet.’ ”

  “Listen, I’ve got to go, that’s my bell.”

  “Your bell? Really! Minou Drouet, leave it to Eddie….”

  “Most amusing. I have a very hot date. ‘Bye.” I hung up, furious. I recognized that Joshua was so enthralled by Eddie’s least witticism that he could momentarily forget my feelings and become uncharacteristically cruel.

  In fact, I had to wait another twenty minutes for Jason’s arrival. The tension, which might have titillated someone else, to me seemed almost excruciating. “Waiting,” I said out loud, “is the best part,” since in fact it was the worst. I tried to immerse myself in the psychology textbook I was ghostwriting, but I’d drunk so much at Joshua’s that I couldn’t bring into focus the page I was typing. Eddie’s scorn—comparing me to a fake genius, a child, whom only a real writer had had the wit to unmask—had stripped me of my precious second identity, the writer’s.

  Would Jason be surprised by how young and handsome I was? Would he fall in love with me? I’d send him back to school, we’d become lovers. No, he’d be stoned, belligerent, he’d want to hurt me—he left me behind naked, chained and bleeding. He was small and hairless, good enough to eat. No, he was tall and hairy and strapping, a farm boy who wanted to plow me….

  The buzzer rang and I signaled back. I stood in my open door and heard his loud, heavy steps battering their way up the flimsy staircase; everything was suffocatingly erotic, an absence about to be filled. “Jason?” I called out.

  “Yo!” he said. His voice sounded deeper, rawer than on the phone and not at all petulant.

  He had a big head, bristling with light brown hair (some blond, I mentally grumbled, even as I found him exciting). His shoulders were broad, his chest heavy, as a worker’s might be, but his waist was a slender, stylish column, which only emphasized his wide hip bones. He was certainly six foot two or even three, as advertised, but he was twenty-eight, not -four, and I became dubious about those promised nine inches. Suddenly I thought how numerical desire is, all a matter of number of years, inches, dollars, and that lust, which would seem to be the most concrete science, was actually a twin to mathematics, the most abstract, and just as a tailor’s flimsy pattern is all penciled numbers scribbled on paper, numbers that will someday sheathe the body of a walking, talking man crossing the Place von Fürstenberg, in the same way a lightning mental calculator quickly jots down proportions to create a dressmaker’s dummy labeled “Jason”—with this difference, that a big ass (as I could now see he had after he’d turned around) is a quantity that can be redeemed by the appropriate word, “a hockey player’s big firm ass,” although I was sure Jason knew no more about hockey than I did.

  “Hi,” I said in a low voice, standing on tiptoe to kiss his lips, wondering if he was thinking, “Shit, a romantic little kitten, he’ll probably be wearing black lace panties.” I shook his hand as an afterthought, which, because it was nonsexual, came off as more genuinely welcoming and, I hoped, masculine enough to offset the girlish peck I’d just planted on his mouth.

  “Would you like to smoke some grass?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said. He was talking too loudly, given our proximity. Surely his volume was meant to push me away, or rather position me at the right professional distance, just as a private dancer’s refusal to lock glances or to drop a glassy smile reminds the customer of just how stylized this performance really is, no matter how close the performer and client might be.

  “Sit down,” I said, indicating the bed. I sat on the floor and rested an arm on his knee. I liked that I’d bought his time and even his body. He’d be the one to fuck me, possibly even hurt me, but I’d be the one to indicate when we would start—and at any moment I could always say, “You can go now,” or “Let me sit on you.” And if he might not have found me to his taste in a ba
r, now I was the one who could say, “Here’s half the money, but you’re not exactly blond and twenty-four and I do insist on truth in advertising.”

  I’d switched the radio from my usual classical station to a rock program. Now I lowered the lights and lit the joint. As we passed it back and forth I caught something dangerous in his expression and so I said, “You’re great, exactly my type. I’ve been looking for someone regular I could see at least once a week,” because beyond the soothing power of flattery (fatal on a first date with an unpaid equal but reassuring to a skittish whore) my words were meant to plant the idea in Jason’s head that he’d better not rob me or force me to come too quickly since he had a stake in pleasing a potential regular.

  But as I looked at “Jason’s” face, I sensed he was too wild and destructive to be swayed by reason or self-interest. I said, “You know, when I make it with a guy, I love to whisper his name—don’t worry, I’m not noisy in bed—and I’m sure your real name isn’t Jason. Look, I’ll give you an extra twenty bucks if you tell me your real name and kiss me from time to time as though you really meant it.”

  “Yeah, talkin’ about money, where the fuck is it?”

  I passed him back the joint and watched the brightening end illuminate his face, as though all the blood had rushed to his head and lit him up. I gave him the hundred.

  He counted it. “So where’s the extra twenty?”

  “So what’s your real name?”

  He swallowed. I noticed for the first time that his neck was hairless, not just shaved clean but totally smooth, and that his hair in back fell in thick locks directly brushing the naked skin. His head was so large it must have been heavy; I could imagine its weight. He had three moles along his jaw line that I wanted to connect with a pencil to form an isosceles triangle. He had a tuft of baby-fine hair under his lower lip that the razor had missed; now I was willing to revise his age back down to the early twenties after all. What made him look older were the big knobby shoulders and his hard, thin mouth and the smudges under his eyes, as though he’d been eating too much sugar and sleeping too little, the sort of dark circles priests used to ascribe to masturbation.

  “Elmer,” he said. “Gotta beer?”

  I found him one and sat back down on the floor, this time between his legs. I gave him twenty more dollars. As I turned around with the money I looked in his eyes. When he took it I could swear his crotch filled out and what had looked like a broad, loose fold in his trousers suddenly stiffened. Getting paid got him hard. He passed the joint back to me and I felt how big and rough his hand was.

  Now I really was stoned and it was as though the smoke I’d inhaled had lit a bonfire inside me. I felt lust playing on my solar plexus like a drum that the instrumentalist crouches to retune softly before pounding it hard. Lust was also rudely flicking my nipples with the back of a fingernail, then injecting molten silver into my neck veins and forcing it to rise through my head and flow in a thin sheet of hot, shiny fluid behind my eyes. My hands, without receiving any instruction from my brain, were rubbing his calf muscles, which now had passed over some line to become really and truly a hockey player’s. Sitting on the floor I could catch the sour, mildewy smell of his sweat socks and sneakers and after the idea that he wasn’t impeccably clean repulsed me I decided to like it. Behind me, in a V-shaped enclosure I couldn’t see but that I intuited through my transparent skull, his hardening cock was pressed down by his jeans at an uncomfortable angle. I knelt and turned and buried my face in his crotch and suddenly his voice, a low, country voice, was coaxing me, as though a father usually too taciturn to say anything were forced to talk his boy out of a burning window into his waiting arms.

  With medical efficiency he held one of my nostrils and made me inhale poppers through the other. He cupped my face in his hands and looked at it unflinchingly, with a huge, unvarnished power of confrontation. He spit on me, then smoothed the spit over my closed eyes and open mouth with that slow, rough palm. He pressed my face back to his crotch, which smelled of piss, he’d tucked his still wet cock away after urinating and let his piss dry on his jeans day after day—and I could hate it or love it, but when his fingers found my nipples through my T-shirt I knew I loved it.

  He pushed me away from him, back on my heels, fed me another hit of the poppers and as I watched he lit a big, black cigar, rotating it expertly. He reached over and turned off the light. Now all that was visible was the pulsing tip of his cigar and the thick clouds of smoke filling the room, bathing me—and I remembered how much I’d hated my father’s cigars and loved and hated him and now this rich, burning odor broke something in me, as though I were one of those glass vials within which Europeans store liquid medicine. The end just snapped off, easily and cleanly, of this sealed glass vial I was carrying somewhere inside me and I wept the liquid and became all greedy mouth and unstrung, undone body as Elmer, a big dangerous presence behind clouds of cigar smoke, pushed me down, this time to his exposed cock, stewing in its own subterranean liquors. It had a circumference as many inches around as it was long, a cock so hard I couldn’t imagine it had ever been or could ever be soft, for it wasn’t pulsing or still inflating, no it was just as thick and hard as a bit of root a gardener digs up after he’s already cut down and extirpated a tree, a hard white root so old it’s become mineral.

  JOSHUA didn’t phone me for the next twenty-four hours, long enough for me to miss him. If my life was an on-going novel, he was the only one reading the installments. I realized that Eddie was his most precious possession and Joshua imagined he’d honored me by introducing us. If I were now to complain about Eddie’s rudeness Joshua would never understand. Gratitude was the only acceptable response to Eddie in Joshua’s eyes.

  I knew that Joshua’s boat sailed the next day. “Oh. Hel. Lo,” he said over the phone, sounding a bit distant, spacing the syllables as though he couldn’t quite remember who I was.

  “Can I see you before you sail?”

  “Come by for a drink at five, if you like.”

  I did like. He quickly warmed up. I decided never to mention my disappointment with Eddie, since I knew it would reflect on me, not on the great writer; if I bit my tongue I could pretend I was an “Eddie groupie,” as Joshua called himself.

  “Dear heart,” Joshua said, holding my hand, “I am going to miss you.” The shadowy hallway behind him was full of packed bags.

  “But you’re the one off to glamorous Venice. You’re the one who will be swimming in the Cipriani pool—”

  “ ‘Lourdes,’ as Gore calls it.”

  “—and squiring Peggy exclamation point about.”

  “Exclamation point? I think not. More like dot, dot, dot…. I always call her the laziest girl in town.”

  “It still sounds better than New York in August, stale pizza crusts and hot subways filled with piss and psychos. Well, no matter, my novel will be out in the fall and you’ll be back to help me celebrate. I hope you make lots of progress on your book this summer.” Joshua’s book was a study of five contemporary poets, one of them Eddie.

  Things went so well between us that Joshua told me he had a wonderful surprise for me—a ticket for that very evening to the Tiny Troupers. We’d be going with Eddie and from there on to a party at the Central Park West apartment of the dual pianists Smith and Watson, men who’d commissioned Poulenc and Rorem and Stravinsky to write them four-hand compositions. I wondered silently whether Joshua had arranged for the ticket for me a long time ago (tickets were very scarce) but hadn’t told me about it until now because he wasn’t sure I would deserve the treat, or whether Eddie, one of the benefactors of the Troupers, had just made the ticket available.

  Some thirty people were seated in a large living room in the West Sixties just off the park. Everyone seemed to know everyone and there were lots of anticipatory coos and exchanged winks that filled me with hate and made me want to throw a stink bomb. At one end of the room was a puppet stage. The lights dimmed and the curtain went up to reveal a Victo
rian family of puppets at home with a puppet maid in uniform. The family members were all seated in a middle-class drawing room of overstuffed furniture and heavy gilt frames beside the fireplace. The lady of the house had decided she wanted to play Phaedra in an amateur theatrical. Her maid, Lucy Lump, would of course be playing the maid Aricie and the stepson would be playing Hippolytus. The father would double as Theseus and the Chorus. After a brief pause, the curtains opened again on a set of a Greek palace. The hand puppets had an extremely limited repertoire of gestures: the double take (which elicited the most laughter), the conspiratorial glance at the audience, nodding yes, shaking the head no, clapping hands together in glee, thumping the chest in despair and, when singing, a violent trembling all over.

  Eddie had commissioned a ne’er-do-well Alexandrian tourist guide who spoke six languages badly to write a ballad opera, providing old tunes with new words in a macaronic Italian-English-French. The opening number, “Allo, Phaedra,” was of course set to the tune of “Hello, Dolly.” Eddie rushed up to tell us that when the librettist had asked him to summarize the plot of Phaedra, he had offered to give him a copy of Racine but the librettist had said, “Oh, no, I don’t want to get into details, just give me the gist.” Eddie professed to find this impertinence wonderfully droll.

  At the end of the opera the audience went into ecstasies. With my outer face I, too, smiled and cooed but my inner eyes bored holes of hate through them all and my inner teeth were instantly filed to spikes. I ran into Butler, the only other person present who was under forty.

  “Isn’t it all disgusting?” I hissed at him.

  “Oh, groan, I can’t bear the idea that Eddie bankrolls this frivolous rubbish whereas we’re too poor even to Xerox our work to submit it for publication. If I were a patron of the arts I’d set up a free copy shop for writers, for any and all writers, no distinctions made, all welcome.”