The Farewell Symphony

by Edmund White

  Suddenly I was proud of my knack for rounding them up, a social magnetism I could exert at those rare times when I wasn’t feeling unsure of myself, an excitement that worked a charm in gay bars, where everyone was paralyzed with fear. The best way to cruise, for me at least, was to come to a bar with two noisy friends, talk and laugh with them in the center of the room, then at the crucial moment disengage myself from them and tackle someone who’d been watching our group with a faint smile that echoed our laughter. I didn’t have the sort of brooding looks that silence and mystery could enhance; I looked my best when I was the liveliest.

  Now I passed joints, Quaaludes and wine around rather nervously to my five guys, worried that in the bright lights of Kevin’s studio their erections would melt and they’d remember they had to get up in the morning for work. Kevin was explaining to one guy how he wrote backwards for hours and hours and, at a certain moment of inspiration, continued producing his reverse calligraphy with colored inks on expensive drawing paper. The guy, round eyed, was standing with his hands clasped at crotch level as though he were a cowboy holding his hat and respectfully listening to the rancher’s wife.

  “Let’s go in the other room, guys,” Herb said, for he and I were sending inaudible bat cries back and forth across the room about the necessity to act quickly. “Come and join us, Kevin,” I said with an offhandedness that sounded convincing, at least to my ears.

  I could describe the way Herb undressed the slender blond whom we mistakenly had thought would be shy. I stood behind the blond and breathed on his nape, his ears and down his spine between his shoulder blades while reaching around and tuning in Venus by turning his nipples. Within seconds he was a lion holding Herb down with a tawny paw and jabbing his mouth full of a long, straight but flexible penis. I could say how every man in that room looked to me like a package to be opened with just one soft tug at the big bow. Now that I’m in my fifties I see most men as social beings who have a pedigree and a past, a nature open or closed, someone fun or boring to talk to, remote from me or no more than six or seven acquaintances removed through snob golf, but back then, in that bedroom illuminated by a single candle on the sill, they were just wide cocks or thin, balls light and tender as seedless grapes or big and veined like walnuts, insensitive and straining in their leathery sac; they were a short-sleeved coat of black hair as closely woven as a knight’s mail singlet—or just a tuft at the neck, as though the filaments were the exuberant waste siphoned off from the column of breath. A man was the surprising assertiveness triggered in the little guy with the pinched breastbone and a lowered sight line as he realized he was being given permission for once to dominate another man and accordingly he widened his stance and squared his shoulders. Or a man was this thick-thighed mesomorph who, through a trick of the will, became light, reversed the metamorphosis from tree trunk to nymph and was lifted in Herb’s strong arms, lifted and screwed. The guy threw his head back dramatically and extended the line of his long neck with a flung-back arm, an Adam’s apple and an elbow becoming the only knobs in such long, smooth, weeping branches. The Quaaludes relaxed our muscles, turned us into slow-motion divers plunging into one another’s bodies.

  Herb talked dirty, verbal kindling until we all caught fire, then he went silent and let us listen to the slap and sigh of the general slow conflagration. In the flickering candlelight and in the transitory Roman-candle highs induced by the passed poppers, our bodies may have resembled those of Laocoön and his sons but our desire writhed around us like the snakes.

  Kevin came in, already naked as a child, and in the melee I was able to lick the instep of his foot and inhale the crushed-dandelion smell of the sweat under his arms, to feel the cool heft of his buttocks, at once firm and yielding, and to see the leonine blond’s cock emerge taffy-apple shiny from Kevin’s mouth. Hadn’t I staged this whole orgy just so I could touch him in the anonymous confusion?

  One man would never join in. He crouched in a corner, naked, chin in hand, despairing as Blake’s Job, looking at us with huge eyes. We tried to encourage him to enter our fold, but he disapproved of us, it seemed.

  When they’d all gone and the daylight was developing and printing Kevin’s body, he knelt above me, his knees burning into my pinioned biceps, and with infinite peacefulness he watered my mouth and face and chest with his bitter, hot urine.

  Sex was a shadow we cast wherever we went, which traveled at our speed, like the calm shadow of its wings that an airplane inevitably projects onto the fields and forests below, that assumes the shape of the changing landscape and yet remains constant. None of our friends would have said we were “obsessed.” That was a word heterosexuals used, or older, envious homosexuals. We thought having sex was a positive good, the more the better. A straight guy I’d known when I was an office worker and whom I kept up with, said to me, “You fags are so fuckin’ lucky, always getting laid. You know what a fuckin’ pain in the ass it is for us? We gotta wine and dine the chicks and dish out all this sweet talk and they still don’t always fuckin’ put out, whereas you fuckin’ horny bastards just grope each other in the public crapper or at the back of the fuckin’ movie thee-yay-terr without so much as a ‘thank you ma’am.’ Not that I could fuck some hairy guy’s hairy asshole, for Chrissake, I like that sweet honeypot pussy.” He pronounced it “puss-say.”

  We believed that women held out in order to force guys into the servitude of marriage, that pussy was scarce so men would have to work for it, and that religion conspired to make men believe they were doing the right thing when they put on the iron collar and manacles. We thought that if women were as horny—as disinterestedly horny—as men, then everyone, straight or gay, would be having sex on every street corner.

  We were free. We didn’t fall for any morality bullshit—anyway, the Christians had already assigned us to hell just for looking at men: the thought was as bad as the deed and the offending eye had to be plucked out. Before we plucked it out, we wanted to wink with it. If we picked up a case of clap the cure was just one shot away. Courtship was a con, again part of female culture. If we loved one another it wasn’t something we confused with glandular deprivation. Even “love” was a suspect word, smelling of the bidet. Guys just sort of fell in with each other, buddies rubbing shoulders. We wanted sexual friends, loving comrades, multiple husbands in a whole polyandry of desire. Exclusivity was a form of death—worse, old hat.

  If love was suspect, jealousy was foul. We were intent on dismantling all the old marital values and the worst thing we could be accused of by one of our own was aping the heterosexual model.

  I went to bed with a straight man, a young hippy writer who thought he should try sex with another guy and chose me because he liked my work. He treated me as he’d obviously been trained to treat women, with little fluttering kisses along my brow, a tender tracing of my erect nipple, jokes whispered in my ear. We smoked some grass laced with PCP and when he found himself fucking me brutally and slapping my ass, he was so horrified by his violence and my pleasure that he hurried into his clothes and still half-undressed, half-erect, ran away, never to be seen again.

  We equated sexual freedom with freedom itself. Hadn’t the Stonewall Uprising itself been the defense of a cruising place? The newer generation might speak of “gay culture,” but those of us thirty or older knew the only right we wanted to protect was the right to suck as many cocks as possible. “Promiscuity” (a word we objected to, since it suggested libertinage, and that we wanted to replace with the neutral word “adventuring”) was something outsiders might imagine would wear thin soon enough. We didn’t agree. The fire was in our blood. The more we scratched the more we itched—except we would never have considered our desire a form of moral eczema. For us there was nothing more natural than wandering into a park, a parked truck or a backroom and plundering body after body.

  There had been no radical break with the past (we’d all heard about the orgies in the navy during World War II), but at least since I’d first come on the
scene in the 1950s three things had changed: in New York City the cops weren’t closing down our bars any more or harassing us if we held hands on the street; we now had a slogan that said “Gay is Good,” and we’d stopped seeing shrinks in order to go straight; and there were more and more, millions more, gay men with leather jackets and gym-built bodies and low voices and good jobs. We used to think we were rare birds; now the statistics said that one out of every four men in Manhattan was homosexual. When we marched up Fifth Avenue every June there were hundreds of thousands of gay women and men, many of them freaks, but the bulk of them the regular kind of people we liked. These were the kinds of guys I had sex with several times every week. If I had sex, say, with an average of three different partners a week from 1962 to 1982 in New York, then that means I fooled around with 3,120 men during my twenty years there. The funny thing is that I always felt deprived, as though all the other fellows must be getting laid more often. A gay shrink once told me that that was the single most common complaint he heard from his patients, even from the real satyrs: they weren’t getting as much tail as the next guy. I was so incapable of fitting my behavior into any general pattern that I would exclaim, aghast, “You know Liz has been married five times!” If my marriages had been legal, they would have been legion.

  Nor did all this sex preclude intimacy. For those who never lived through that period (and most of those who did are dead), the phrase “anonymous sex” might suggest unfeeling sex, devoid of emotion. And yet, as I can attest, to hole up in a room at the baths with a body after having opened it up and wrung it dry, to lie, head propped on a guy’s stomach just where the tan line bisects it, smoke a cigarette and talk to him late into the night and early into the morning about your childhood, his unhappiness in love, your money worries, his plans for the future—well, nothing is more personal, more emotional. The best thing of all were the random, floating thoughts we shared. Just the other day a black opera singer, who’s famous now, sent me one of his recordings and a note that said, “In memory of that night at the baths twenty-five years ago.” The most romantic night of my life I spent with an older man on the dunes on Fire Island, kissing him until my face burned from his beard stubble, treasuring the beauty of his skin and skin warmth and every flaw as though it were an adornment. When he walked me home through the salt mist floating in off the sea and the sudden coldness of dawn, we strolled arm in arm as though we’d been lovers before the war, say, any war, and were reunited only now.

  OF COURSE the sermons I preached against love and jealousy were all the more absurd because I was so besotted by Kevin. I wanted to be his wife in the most straitlaced of marriages. I wanted to cook his breakfast and bear his babies. I wanted him to be my boy-husband, my baby-master. I suppose when I say I’m an atheist and always have been I’m not being quite honest, since I’ve worshipped two gods in my life, Sean and Kevin.

  Kevin was suddenly off every night working as a waiter in the Village and on a good night he could pull in a hundred dollars; during the days he went to gym class or dance class or an audition. I seldom went out and felt all the more becalmed in the wake of his excited entrances and exits. Once in a while when he was out I’d sneak into his room and turn the wheels of his bicycle, which was hoisted high on the wall and held there by protruding industrial clamps. I just wanted to hear the ratcheting of his gears, the sound of that month when we belonged to the Society of St. Agnes and had slept in each other’s chaste, feverish arms.

  The man at the orgy who’d stayed apart and looked as inconsolable as Job became Kevin’s lover. His name was Dennis. He was a Catholic boy from Boston with one blue eye and one green and a faint birthmark on his forehead, as though the forceps had caused a hemorrhage when he was born, a bruise just beneath the skin, and the mark had never healed. He was tall and pale skinned, with teeth that were small, flat and tinged with blue like the teeth of Victorian dolls. One tooth was broken and he hid it with his hand when he smiled. His beard grew in a moment after he’d shaved. His biceps looked like veined gooseberries packed in snow. He was so handsome we scarcely noticed he had no conversation beyond a way of shaking his narrow head in mild amazement and exclaiming, “Jeez …” under his breath, eyelids lowered. At a time when most gay men were lifting weights he was doing very precise and demanding stretching exercises of his own devising. Other young gay men wore their new shoulders as though they were store-bought football padding, but he was as familiar as an animal with his own muscles. A line of black hair crept up his pale, ridged stomach like a trail of ants across tablets of white chocolate. His hands were big but refined and the knuckles were dusted with glossy hair. You pictured them playing the piano, reaching for octaves, so pale they made the ivory keys look dingy. He didn’t pay much attention to what other people were telling him. Strangely, he seemed indifferent even to what he was saying. He’d just rattle on, coming up with whatever he thought would please his listeners or merely filling in the blanks as dictated by convention. Meanwhile, his thoughts, all unnoticed, would spin out of control. He’d go off in a secret, sick direction and end up hot-wiring a stolen car or shooting heroin, almost without even noticing it. Or he’d smack his fist through a window pane a moment after calling his sick grandmother to cheer her up or mailing a thank-you note to a hostess. Kevin teased him constantly, usually about sex, and though Dennis was too blue-white to blush, he lowered his eyes and complained happily in his Boston-Irish accent and laughed behind his hand.

  Kevin seemed to be madly in love with Dennis. After Dennis would leave, Kevin would drum his own heart with his open hand and say, “God, that man, he’s so wild. Those eyelashes grazing his cheeks like black wings. He’s a solo version of the second act of Swan Lake all by himself. Those buns? Slurp, slurp.”

  Dennis lived with Al, a forty-year-old window designer who devised chic, scary scenes of rubber fetishism to advertise the new Magnavox or who came up with the public hanging of a skinny mannequin in a Givenchy frock for Bonwit’s. Al was very possessive and Dennis was not only his lover but also his employee. From the way Dennis referred to him, Al sounded like a fat, sweaty old man; imagine our astonishment when Kevin and I dropped in at their atelier one afternoon and discovered a bald little he-man who’d been a champion figure skater and had the butt to prove it.

  A straight man doesn’t want to sleep with his rival, just kill him, but a rejected gay lover hopes to seduce his successor in order to spite his ex-partner, perhaps, but also out of curiosity, even desire. I couldn’t hate Dennis, especially when I saw how headstrong he was in his self-destruction, any more than Al could hate Kevin.

  I liked Dennis and when I thought of him I saw him as I’d first encountered him at the orgy—big eyes struck with horror, chin resting on his fist, body folded into itself. And yet when Kevin and Dennis would sit on the couch and smooch while I counted stitches—no, I didn’t really knit, but I felt like a maiden aunt in a black dress, skinny loins on fire and a cobweb in her pussy, nervously rattling the spoon in her teacup.

  I’d put an empty water glass to the wall between my room and Kevin’s and listen to Dennis’s sighs and Kevin’s groans. I asked Kevin who “shtupped” whom and Kevin said they took turns though their favorite thing was sixty-nining for blissful, suckling hours. For some reason I thought of Melville’s description of baby whales in the warm Caribbean nursing underwater, their blue eyes looking up through the water toward the sky and off to one side, as though they’d sighted an angel.

  If we hadn’t lived together I would have stopped seeing Kevin for a few weeks and I might have regained some dignity or at least independence. Living with him meant I became more and more abject. Joshua would go along with my plotting and scheming, probably because he’d been in on my obsession from the start. He heard every detail in our twice-daily phone calls. Also because Joshua was a true friend, someone who takes you at your own evaluation, who buys your version, the opposite of a shrink.

  I began to see a psychotherapist, but a gay one this time, wh
ich made all the difference. Abe was a fat, bearded guy who walked around his big West Side apartment in stocking feet and was in love with a skinny, sexy dandy who had pursed, purple lips and, the one time I chatted with him, seemed to know everything about everything—hieroglyphics, Rasputin, Mao’s Cultural Revolution—but was also in possession of the inner, esoteric meaning of every system, person or event he mentioned. He was spooky in an amusing, original way, which made me admire Abe’s taste and feel that my habit of falling in love with picture-perfect athletic blonds proved how banal my character must be.

  Soon Joshua and Kevin were also going to Abe. I didn’t worry that they were crowding me out; on the contrary, so much Beta conformity made me feel all the more an Alpha leader.

  The American Psychological Association had taken homosexuality off its list of character disorders and neuroses and reclassified it as falling somewhere within the normal range of sexual behavior. Although I suspect most psychotherapists, especially the Freudians, kept their reservations about homosexuality in petto, we were gratified that officially we were off the books.

  With my other shrinks, paradoxically, I’d never had to talk about my real problems because for them the unique problem had been homosexuality. With Abe, because he was gay (if such a butch, bluff, overweight man could be considered gay), I had to trace out the exact topography of my unhappiness. Where did it hurt? What did I want to change? Whereas before the therapist had felt like a priest I was hoping to placate, Abe made it clear he worked for me, was providing a service and I could use him as I saw fit. There was a certain wary respect and affection between us and no love lost and no “transference,” if that meant exaggerated, unearned feelings of hate and desire.