The Farewell Symphony

by Edmund White

  “Where are the puppeteers?” I asked.

  “See those two old eunuchs over there surrounded by admiring dowagers? This room just stinks of money—our tax money, I might add, since the Tiny Troupers are a tax-deductible charity and therefore what should be public money goes to support them.”

  “If they were avant-garde,” I grumbled, “they might be tolerable—didn’t the Princesse Polignac commission Colette and Ravel to write L’Enfant et les Sortilèges for her salon?”

  “Yes, that was Singer Sewing Machine money.” Butler shook his head sagely. “It’s pathetic how the times have changed. Now we just have recycled showtunes and absurd lyrics that do nothing but make a mockery of two of the greatest works of literature, Hippolytus and Phaedra.”

  “Eddie’s own poetry is superb,” I said, “but his influence as a patron is sort of questionable. So frivolous, as though he just wants to ridicule all the great art that has come before.” I suppose we were both wondering how to apply to his foundation.

  At this moment Joshua brought up the puppeteers themselves to meet us. That we’d not been led over to them was, of course, an unusual honor—so unusual it must have stemmed from the sudden desire of the camp old puppeteers themselves to meet the youngest men in the room.

  “What an utter delight!” I exclaimed in a fruity mid-Atlantic accent I didn’t recognize. “Do you do all the voices?”

  “Yes,” one of the men replied, who incongruously seemed to have just outgrown his clothes, as though he were a senile adolescent; his trouser cuffs fell at mid-calf and his sleeves ended three inches above his wrists. “I’m afraid I wasn’t in very good voice tonight—the arias Phaedra sings are just too difficult, especially the ‘I love you, a scepter and a crown.’ ”

  “That’s to ‘A bushel and a peck,’ isn’t it?” Butler asked with his warmest, most sparkly and soft-focus smile, as though he were an old-fashioned starlet shot through gauze. “It was all deliciously amusing.”

  “Well, we’re retiring after this season,” the other puppeteer said. “We have a farm in New Jersey that a writer friend has found for us.”

  “Oh? What discriminating Maecenas still exists in this philistine age?” I asked, beaming, burning with avidity.

  “Perhaps you know him: Max Richards.”

  “My dearest friend,” I hastened to throw in.

  “Yes, yes,” Butler exclaimed.

  As we all streamed over to the party at the duo-pianists, Butler and I avoided looking at each other.

  Only outsiders are satirical about a party; the other guests are having too much fun, even if it’s a tepid, ordinary sort of fun, to notice what’s going on or to work up much bile. I was intimidated by the wealth and culture of the older guests. My father and his acquaintances were rich boors, boors I could easily dismiss, but here was a famous white-haired choreographer, talking about his secret passion, cooking, to one of the duo-pianists, whose shortness and gold watch made him look like a prosperous businessman—except he instantly began to talk about an Italian Futurist cookbook which calls for waiters to spray the bald heads of diners with warmed liquid and which condemns pasta as the chief cause of Italy’s stagnation. The son of a Spanish marquis and an American heiress showed up with a kilo of Beluga caviar (“I found it at the Caviarteria, where my father used to buy his!” he announced with that fatuous respect for the habits and practices of his own family one often remarks among the rich, as though their wealth lent an Olympian importance to even their smallest actions). In a wheelchair sat a slender woman in her fifties who’d once been a famous ballerina; she’d been one of the last people to contract polio before the Salk vaccine was developed.

  Soon we were all seated at six tables of six people. Butler mumbled to me afterwards, “It’s Eddie, of course, who’s paying the caterers, although he’s pretending to be so grateful to Smith and Watson—a bit like Ronald Firbank, who slipped some money under the table so that his guardsman could pay the bill, which prompted Firbank to clap his hands and exclaim, ‘How thrilling to be invited!’ ” The Tiny Troupers were fussing over each other’s health. “I told you not to eat strawberries,” I overheard one telling the other. “You know they only cause you to have mouth ulcers.”

  Joshua invited me back to his place for a nightcap. We ended up drinking several brandies and talking Troupers and Eddie and poetry. Joshua surprised me by fishing a tape recorder out from under the couch. “I just bought this. It’s voice activated,” he explained, mentioning a feature that at that time was brand new. “I thought I might keep it beside my bed in Venice in case I get a good thought during the night about my book.”

  He replayed our conversation. What I’d imagined had been warm, intelligent, witty chat between two cultivated men turned out to be slurred, drunken nonsense. Our voices rose and fell in shrieks and mumbles. Laughter rang out tinnily, fakely, and our voices sounded as fruity as old dowagers’.

  At the door Joshua grabbed me and filled my mouth with his tongue. Overwhelmed by anger, I stamped my foot. I said, “No! Why must every evening … Oh, nothing. Good night. Bon voyage.”

  Max and Joshua and even Butler had gone away for the summer and I felt that the city had been handed back to us, the kids. It was hotter, more violent, smellier than in the spring, but at least it was all ours.

  I seldom went north of Fourteenth Street, but when I did nothing seemed as muffled and elegant as the rich neighborhoods I’d seen during my week in Paris or my six months in Rome. Here in New York everyone was a “character” and a white-uniformed black maid walking her mistress’s poodle was wearing green basketball shoes, whereas her white counterpart in the Bois de Boulogne or on the Via Giulia would have scuttled along hoping to be inconspicuous. Here in Manhattan chauffeurs in waiting limousines reamed their nostrils with a dirty index finger, wealthy women shoppers spoke so loudly they endangered the sales clerk’s eardrums, a chic young couple outraced an old lady for a cab, a vagrant sprawled across a subway grating on Lexington Avenue was drinking and bawling out “I want a gal just like the gal who married dear old Dad.” No one whispered as they would in a Paris restaurant nor did they cover their eccentricities as Romans cover their mouths when they pick their teeth.

  It’s wrong to say that North Americans don’t have a Latin sense of theater about street life. Our theater, however, is a farce full of crazies, not a well-made boulevard comedy.

  Kevin told me that he was fed up with sex and that he was entering a chastity phase. Everything with him was a passing trend, a New Year’s resolution broken at the beginning of each month, since as an out-of-work actor he had to turn his life into an experience or at least an experiment. I was happy to join him in his vow of chastity, since as long as we observed it I could convince myself he wouldn’t fall in love with someone else—and he’d let me sleep beside him. We were the founding members of the Society of St. Agnes, in honor of that virginal girl who considered God to be her betrothed. As a lapsed Catholic Kevin enjoyed this sort of Papal Camp more than I did, even though he railed against “failed” Catholics. “There’s always a horrid moment,” he said, “when all the Catholic fags in the room start swapping Sadistic Nun stories and stories about closeted Father Dan the basketball coach. I really can’t bear all that obsessive wallowing.” Of course even his objections only perpetuated what he was criticizing, much like complaints about the class system—an unhealthy commentary that only further immerses the critic into the system he’s attacking, since snobbism and Catholicism are superstitions that can thrive on anything but neglect.

  At first that June wasn’t hot—not the suffocating humid heat of the usual New York summer. Or maybe it was simply that I was so happy with Kevin. I mean to say that just as I’d awaken to a room full of light consecrating this boy beside me, in the same way a cool breeze was always blowing through the big blocs of heat bearing down on the city, the breeze like an occult joy redeeming something stale and quotidian. No day was the same as my other days. Every day with Kevin was
like a day in a novel—animated by observations, economical, eventful, intended—and not like the slow ether drip of ordinary existence.

  We lay beside each other like brothers and children. Kevin didn’t mind if I touched him, so long as it was innocent. Of course nothing I did was innocent; not even my sleep was innocent, it was shallow and Argus eyed, ever alert to Kevin’s slightest movement, especially a shift toward me in bed. As he’d fall asleep his hands and legs would pass through five minutes of jerks and twitches and I’d prop myself up on one elbow to observe this fitful pianism of the body. How I longed to be the instrument he played and once I even placed his small hot hand on my chest so that he could drum his nervous tattoo on me.

  We slept naked under just one sheet in Kevin’s apartment (Hal was in Chicago in a musical). One night a cold salt atmosphere advanced up the Hudson and we clung to each other in the chill. There was nothing feminine about him—he was far more assertive, independent, athletic than I—but what I felt toward him must have been something like what an ugly man feels toward a beautiful woman. First came the realization that despite such perfect skin, despite the strength and elegance shaping every step, despite the panoply of personality rustling open like a peacock’s eyed glory, nevertheless at rest, naked, in bed, this bewitching person was just a small body, almost a boy, merely an upward tilt of nose and chin, two baby-pale nipples, a taut stomach, just a grip on an udder of hot, streaming air. Then there was the ugly man’s longing, my longing to be married to this enviable creature, a desire born from a strange confidence in the binding irreversibility of marriage, a union imagined to be entirely transubstantial, for if the bride changes her name, the groom changes his nature and becomes her equal, superior to his previous, single, unbeautiful self.

  My head was full of these magical words, more like lights gently exploding than pronounced words. I dozed beside Kevin in the still night as though we were two loaves the baker had forgotten and left in an oven he’d switched off. Through the open windows we could hear the hard, determined footsteps of someone pacing out the dimensions of the night or we could hear a throbbing air conditioner in some rich person’s window. But otherwise everything was quiet, dark, still, and in the articulated emptiness of a big summer city we were more alone than we would have been in a boat at sea or on a deserted mountain top. The digital clock nervously counted illuminated hours and minutes without any of the old-fashioned clock face’s suggestion of eternal return. No, here each green digit seemed anxiously conceded, another chip placed on a losing number. Two guys harangued each other drunkenly, then a bottle was smashed and the voices, suddenly calmer, trailed away. My thoughts kept sliding obsession-ally before me, those same phosphorescent numbers twitching on toward a dawn that wouldn’t materialize. I’d never gone so long without sex. I didn’t even masturbate, though I slept with an erection tucked between Kevin’s buttocks. Everything became erotic, the timbre of his voice, the feel of gymnastics calluses on his fingers, especially the ratcheting of his expensive bicycle gears unwinding, unseen, behind me, as though the solution to the skeptic’s familiar objections about the weight of an angel’s body to the size of practicable wings was a previously unsuspected and elaborate system of gears catching and slowing down through a dozen little downshifts, a sound like the patter of diamond chips on glass.

  Now I suppose I wouldn’t even start to fall in love with someone who hadn’t indicated he’d welcome my affection, but back then I loved only someone who was unavailable—or, rather, not yet available. Kevin didn’t despise me completely, any more than had Sean; in fact, both men admired me. The French divide love into esteem (the sort Corneille promoted) and passion (the tragic vice of Racine), and what I felt for Kevin and hoped to educe from him was Racinian, although I fooled myself into imagining that l’estime could serve as a transition down into that darkness and despair.

  There’s something much simpler that needs to be said as well: I had no confidence in my looks, in my body, in my sexuality, and I longed for a demi-god to confer desirability on me. Most people who are timid or unsure of themselves probably set their sights low, but bizarrely I courted men far above me. Just as I hoped the publication of a novel would redeem all that I’d suffered and worked for and in one stroke elevate me out of ignominy, in the same way I believed that a great love, magically reciprocated against all odds, would prove to other people, even to me, that I was worthy of such distinction. The milieu I lived in of actors and writers, who were used to miraculous changes in status, only encouraged my fantastic ambitions in love and art.

  JOSHUA sent me a letter:

  Dear Heart,

  I was so wounded and, worse, angered the night you Stamped Your Foot, that honestly I never wanted to see you again. So that’s where all the subtle exchanges and only half-transfigured longings have led us: the Young Tyrant has Stamped His Foot. If I wanted all year to be your lover it was chiefly, I thought, because we already were lovers in every way but carnally—the only way, alas, that counts in the eyes of the world, that place where, finally, all marriages must be consummated.

  Did it ever occur to you that I also wanted you to fulfill yourself—and not just as an artist (that you’ll probably do in one way or another, you’re that driven) but as a man, I mean someone not living at one remove? I know how much you worry about being inauthentic; that’s not the fear I’m playing on. No, I mean that despite all your years of therapy you can’t seem to connect with anyone (maybe that’s why you drink so much). Kevin’s adorable, of course, but he doesn’t love you. You’re afraid of me, no doubt, because I’m older, more settled—“bourgeois,” to use your word, one which erases distinctions rather than making one. How many years will you go on sucking off strangers between trucks?

  You’re lonely, driven, poor, and I’d like to share everything with you, make you happy, help you along in the world, release you from the drudgery, the need to do so much soul-killing hackwork. But more importantly I’d like to discover the body through you (you know what an innocent I am) while through me you discover … the deep-dish apple pie comfort of being loved, really and truly loved by someone alert enough to know what you’re feeling and bright enough to fire your imagination.

  Anyway, you Stamped Your Foot, the veil trembled and fell. I was white-hot with fury on the Queen Elizabeth but on the third day out Eddie said to me, “Look, Joshua, that nutty boy loves you; even if it’s only half a loaf it is the bread of love. There’s not that much love in the world. Who are you to refuse what he’s offering?”

  The rest of the letter contained gossip about the English vicar, Peggy Guggenheim and her hunt for a retired gondolier who might man her boat at below-union wages, the party at the Duc Decazes’, the arrival of Grace with Gore, plans to receive Lillian and so on. But all that was there to deflect the sweet blow of his renewed love and its declaration. What a joke: here he wants to learn about the body through me, I thought, whereas I’m tuned to Kevin like a bird dog to a pheasant.

  Kevin and I decided to live together. He told me that Hal’s tour was over and he wasn’t really welcome at Hal’s place anymore, Hal had met a great kid, a fun little slave named Tony. “He’s hysterical,” Kevin said with a voice that sounded almost hoarse, an “exciting” register he’d found to lend a new urgency to tired expressions. “I was talking to Tony the other day and he said Hal was such a monster. He’d heated up a soup spoon and burned Tony on the ass. Tony said, ‘I just flew across that room in pain. But you wanna hear the weirdest thing? Next thing you know I found myself backing up to get the other cheek burned, you know, symeh-, semi- —uh, symmetrically.’ ”

  “But what’s that got to do … ?” I was so excited by the prospect of living with Kevin that all these details irritated me.

  “Well, Tony is a typically pushy masochist and now that he’s wormed his way into the apartment he’s getting me kicked out. No, I shouldn’t complain. Tony’s great for Hal. At last a little stability.”

  “Stability!” I exclaimed.
“What lives we lead,” I said in Joshua’s tone of voice. Now I was impersonating Joshua, although all I wanted to talk about was our house, Kevin’s and mine, our stability. “I think I’m on to a fabulous place on the Upper West Side, eight rooms for just four hundred dollars,” I said.

  “Just!”

  “Well, I’ll pay for it. But—” and here I thought I was adding something appealing to take the curse off the neighborhood and the pricy rent—“the landlady only likes fags, she lives in the building, it’s a fairy palace, and we have to audition for her, I mean, she has to like us before she’ll give us the apartment. The building is full of all these middle-class queens swooning over her, she’s called Daniella but she’s actually Armenian, everything in her apartment has a price tag on it, if you admire something—ashtray, coffee cup, rug—she’ll turn it over and read the tag through bifocals and say, ‘You can have it for just fifty dollars.’ I’m serious. The point is that these queens are all competing to do Daniella’s hair or nails—”

  “Or walk her apricot poodle?”

  “Wrong! That’s the Catch-22. She’ll rent only to fags, but fags-without-dogs, and that’s a contradiction in terms.”

  “We don’t have a dog.”

  “Our sole virtue, and how good are we at being fags? We can’t bake, we don’t do interior decoration, we can’t burn hair. Anyway, put on your best clothes and smarmiest manner.”

  Kevin of course liked the challenge. He would have been too shy to meet an unknown sixty-year-old landlady as himself, but as an Upper West Side Priss who spends all day looking at fabric swatches, shopping at Zabar’s for some mythically lean and odorless Russian sturgeon or eating Godiva chocolates with a chin strap on, stabbing out cigarettes in a pot of cold cream while listening to Helen Morgan seventy-eights, that was a role he could play with utter confidence.

  In the early 1970s apartments were available because everyone had given up on New York. The city itself had gone bankrupt. Crime was on the rise. The streets seemed dangerous and deserted except in Midtown, where dark-suited executives and high-heeled secretaries were piped in underground from New Jersey and extruded up into sealed skyscrapers. By six o’clock they were all sucked back home and the district was empty. Property values were plummeting uptown and down. The Lower East Side (which only white urban pioneers called, optimistically, the East Village) had lost its bloom after a hippie had been stabbed in a soured drug deal; now the old Poles and Jews and Ukrainians who’d always lived there were creeping back onto stoops and the smell of dill and cooking kielbasa had once again replaced the sweet scent of burning marijuana. The West Village was sad, even creepy; a twenty-nine-year-old gay man had been stabbed in his apartment in the Village. Two more young guys were also stabbed to death in their Varick Street apartment. And the bodies of two others were found floating in the Hudson.