The Farewell Symphony

by Edmund White

  Sergio’s age was something we speculated on endlessly. I thought he couldn’t be more than twenty-two; he might look twenty-seven, but everyone knew Italians went off early. Joshua thought he might be as much as twenty-nine; something suggested he’d known the tail end of the 1950s. When I asked Sergio one day, he said thirty-nine, which made us gasp. He was five years older than I and not that much younger than Josh. Suddenly I felt protective and still warmer toward him because I realized he wasn’t ever going to escape his life as a servant.

  On my way home I flew to Rome to see Tina. She was living in a big, white, nearly empty apartment that looked down on one of the forums. She told me she’d already divorced her tall, skinny American academic. “I married him just to spite you, anyway,” she said. She held my eyes a long time whenever she said something so direct, but otherwise she seemed much more remote. She said she was in love with an Argentinian and hinted that he might be a terrorist.

  Eduardo was away when I called. Tina herself slept in a windowless bedroom at the very heart of the floor-through apartment with its fifteen windows.

  She asked me if I’d seen the gaily painted gypsy wagon on the gravel just outside her building. She said that the strega, the witch who lived in it with four of her children, had knocked at her door one evening with a sick child in her arms. “I must see a doctor,” she’d railed, “or the little one will die.” Gradually, using one ruse after another over a three week period, Drusa inserted herself into Tina’s apartment. She needed to wash her family’s clothes, cook up some white beans, bathe a little boy who’d had diarrhea and was now covered with filth. Drusa elbowed her way into the apartment without even asking, always determined, sometimes desperate. Soon the gypsies were living full time with Tina, breaking dishes, fouling the toilet, handing over to Tina a grocery list that needed filling, strewing bedding over the stone floor, playing the television till all hours at top volume. Drusa advised Tina about love and gave her a talisman designed to bind the terrorist to her forever.

  In the end Tina, sentimental Marxist, was completely under Drusa’s spell. She could see no reason (nor can I, even now) why she shouldn’t share her inherited wealth—enough to keep her idle, drunk and unhappy in those airy, sunlit rooms all by herself—with a family of five, poor and despised gypsies. It was Eduardo, the terrorist, who finally cleared them all out one day, changed the locks, had a metal gate installed downstairs.

  Tina seemed strangely indifferent to me. I knew that since I’d hurt her it was only normal that she’d protect herself. Or perhaps she was so in love with Eduardo that she had little energy left over for me. Her coolness piqued me. It wasn’t my vanity that caused me to feel irritated. I just missed her love, even though it had troubled me so much.

  JUST LAST SPRING I was in Rome again. Tina’s American cousin (the one who’d originally introduced us) had told me her father had recently died. He gave me her phone number, and asked me to call her.

  Her voice sounded even lower except when she cried out my name with a genuine enthusiasm on a high, hoarse note. She wanted to see me instantly.

  Suddenly, there was Tina, still slender, back in her old palazzo, except now I was jowly and she seemed to be missing a few teeth. I told her, just for the pleasure of recollection, everything I could remember about her father, every last detail, and that pleased her, as though such clear and detailed memories proved her father had made an impression after all, even on a foreigner. She wanted me to repeat what I’d said about him to his elegant old girlfriend, who’d become his wife. Tina said her father had abandoned his little book about Time some ten years ago.

  I asked her about Eduardo.

  “He died last year, and I suffered terrible angoscia,” Tina said, sitting forward and nursing her cup of espresso between her hands, even though the day was unusually warm for Palm Sunday, “but now I’m just angry.”

  “Angry?”

  “Yes!” And she let her wild laugh geyser up out of her. “He told me he was an Argentine terrorist living incognito and we drank too much and never went out because we were in hiding from the enemy.” She sliced the air repeatedly with a sideways karate chop, an Italian gesture that, combined with her smile and frown, meant that she was playfully threatening to punish a child—Eduardo, I suppose.

  “Why are you angry?” I still wanted to know.

  “Because when he died his entire family came to the funeral, they were all Romans, he wasn’t Argentine, he was a Roman, for fifteen years we’d been hiding and drinking and he’d been making up stories, even his accent he’d made up.”

  I looked at her, amazed, then burst out laughing, and she burst out laughing, too. I told her my young French lover, Brice, who’d just died of AIDS, had pretended for the five years we were together to be a member of the “minor nobility,” but after his death I’d found his mother had been a hairdresser in Nancy.

  “Cazzo, these men!” she said. She laughed again, her huge eyes searching my face for some explanation. Now that Eduardo was dead she’d stopped drinking and was painting again. She gave me a painting and a sheaf of her poems in Italian. Tina may have been lined from so many years of drinking and hard living, but she was also miraculously vital—hardheaded in her vitality. I thought she wouldn’t have killed herself, not even if all Rome had laughed at her for making an ugly Baroque fountain. She laughed at “these men,” as did I, and suddenly the intervening years melted away. She seemed as vital as that day when she’d come gunning for me in her car, the day I had refused to put out, except that now she said she’d never wanted to kill me, just find me, talk to me, convince me of her love.

  When I returned to New York at the end of that first summer in Venice I couldn’t bring myself to wear socks.

  I hadn’t had sex more than four times in two months but putting it like that suggests that I felt justified in going out to get laid now because I had an exact notion of how much sexual activity I needed and of how much I wanted, whereas in fact I’d never considered sex to be an appetite, certainly nothing needed on a regular basis. I could never—well, perhaps I could, but I wouldn’t have wanted to—answer a questionnaire about my sexual habits. For I was convinced my erotic behavior was no more habitual than anything else I did, whereas in fact the scientists hovering over my cage could no doubt have plotted exactly my activity patterns, the number of times I could press the sex lever without receiving a pellet before becoming discouraged as well as the precise percentages of time I devoted to feeding, working, socializing and mounting.

  I was a dandy, and a dandy is a moral tourist, not a habitué. One night I went to a party with Butler and when we left it, both fed up with the way the young gay lawyers and account executives (guys I knew from Fire Island) had tried to impress us with their new possessions and their costly, lightning visits to big gay weekend bashes in towns scattered across the country, I said, “These circuit queens are satisfied with so little. Say I, with fifty-seven dollars to my name. But can you imagine debating the virtues of a Corvette and an Eldorado convertible for a whole evening? One of them even said, ‘I’m an Eldorado kind of guy’ And even though he had the obligatory way of snickering when he said it, in reality he’d trade his immortal soul for a new model every year.”

  Butler smiled as much at my indignation, I’m sure, as at the circuit queens’ cupidity. “What you forget, hon, is that as a writer you think you’ll be able to use all this years later, that this life in 1974 is just raw material for some future, eternal version of it you’ll be hammering out twenty years from now. But these guys aren’t going to have the last laugh. They won’t have another chance to get it right. They need that fine automobile right now because, well, this is their one and only life.”

  If Butler sounded so aloof it was also because he’d moved on from his last lover, the architect, to another writer, someone much richer, more usefully connected and more conspicuously devoted. This new lover, Philip, had beautiful teeth and wavy hair. Max referred to them as King Carol and Magda
Lupescu.

  When I spent an evening with them I decided that Butler was always so successful in love because he was so quick to reproach and complain. He didn’t let Philip’s slightest burst of bad temper pass unnoticed. Butler, so fastidious—one could say so idealistic if a querulous perfectionism constitutes an ideal—could be content only if their own communication was complete, the decorum of their life unrelentingly grave, their pleasures refined, their superiority widely acknowledged.

  Philip, a Boston Brahmin who alternately cosseted his friends and made them face the usually grating music, caused Butler often to frown with disapproval. Philip had a way of barreling right into even the most highstrung and rarefied existences and bullying everyone with his favors. He and Eddie had become best friends almost overnight. Maybe Eddie was predisposed toward Philip as a fellow poet, but the real attraction surely was Philip’s astounding energy. For a dozen friends he mailed their packages, bought their opera tickets, edited their manuscripts, ferried their pets to the vet, advised on plants for the new herbaceous border and talked turkey to their ineffectual agents or bankers. Eddie was selling his house in Athens and restoring a cottage in Key West, but it was Philip who barked at the brokers or swooped down on the contractor. Philip printed up a private birthday edition of Eddie’s poems for Eddie’s old bridge-playing mother and her friends. Philip went with Eddie to the surgeon when he had a cataract removed. At the same time Philip was writing and publishing his own poems, which sharp tongues said rendered an almost excessive homage to Eddie’s œuvre, and was conducting interviews of elderly bards for a book he’d been commissioned to do. And such industry couldn’t be dismissed as social-climbing, since his family connections were as much Mayfair as Mayflower and Philip had already won all the prizes.

  Butler became more and more languishing in the presence of such solar energy, as though he were a good Christian Southerner fatigued by the lung power of a Yankee huckster. He’d wanted Eddie to be his friend, but by that he meant he’d wanted Eddie to exclaim over him and to promote his career. Famous writers, of course, are not on the lookout for neglected talent. They’re more concerned about how to ship all those Seroukis paintings back from Athens or how to fill the chipped molar, upper left. Philip’s money, competence and generosity far outweighed his boisterous habit of saying unpleasant truths—a habit that, as the mood struck him, he could easily reverse. He once even said to me, “You’re my favorite prose writer,” the sort of lunatic compliment every struggling writer hugs to his chest even though he knows he must set it instantly aside, much as an ugly girl who’s received a love letter looks at the postmark to make sure it wasn’t mailed on April the first.

  Philip liked everyone, or if he didn’t he said so, loudly, whereas Butler was worried about being taken up by unsuitable people whom later he wouldn’t be able to shake. Philip came sauntering out of a new movie shouting, “Pretty ghastly, huh?” whereas Butler was never ready to deliver a snap judgment and needed to submit the experience to what he called “the first freshets of my brooding.”

  Maddening as I found the priestly airs he gave himself, all I had to do was spend a long evening with him and soon he was the sort of Southerner I loved in my mother and grandmother—knee-slapping, country wise, fiercely independent. Suddenly I saw that so much of the strain and pretentiousness he embodied derived from the provincial’s unease in New York, a discomfort I myself felt. My social insecurity was spurred to life when a Swedish acquaintance of mine said, “It’s a shame you can’t live in Europe for a while. It would give you some of the polish you need.” His advice struck me as absurd—wasn’t I considered almost archaically courtly by most of my friends? But the suggestion did haunt me. I thought maybe he meant my off-color remarks and saucy questions, or maybe he meant my sweaty clownishness, my determination to amuse.

  My sister phoned me. “Brother, I’m doing better. I’m living in a sort of halfway house and I think I’ll be able to go back to graduate school next spring and finish up.”

  “Oh, Anne, that’s marvelous. Mother told me you’re still not talking to her.”

  Anne suddenly flared up. “Don’t put any—you can’t imagine—I—” and she lowered her voice and added wearily, “I just can’t hack her.”

  Secretly I envied her the exemption she was enjoying from our mother’s own kind of madness.

  “You do what’s best for you,” I said. “When Mother complains about your rejection I point out that at least you’re alive. I say, ‘Don’t forget that just a few months ago she was suicidal. Wouldn’t you rather have her alive and incommunicado than dying and on the line?’ ”

  Anne laughed: “I’ll bet she wouldn’t, Brulley.”

  I laughed too. I said, “Everyone praises her for being a survivor. At least she praises herself. But I think she’d push us overboard in order to grab the last lifeboat for herself.”

  “Amen. How’s she doing?”

  “Fine. That slimy boyfriend of hers is up at her house every weekend and when they’re not fucking they’re praying or cooking. She loves him for his prayers.” We laughed. I said, “You?”

  “I can’t stay sober, not even with two AA meetings a day.”

  “Try Antabuse. It’s a pill that makes you vomit if you take a drink.”

  “AA doesn’t approve of it.”

  “Fuck them.”

  Over the next few months I kept checking in on my sister. With Antabuse she was able to stop drinking and get a taste of sobriety. She had to report to a pharmacist every morning who made her swallow the Antabuse in his presence. After that she was safe for the day.

  My own drinking worried me. I never kept any liquor in the house but when I went out, which I did every night, I inevitably got drunk. A guy I knew sent me a case of California wine and I looked at it with horror when it was delivered, because I knew I’d drink it all in a week. I’d lie in bed, holding one eye shut, and read German philosophy and reach over to uncork the second bottle of the evening. Drink is supposed to ease pain. With me it broke down all sense of time (is time pain?) and released me into a soft, floating cloud of classical music, a swimming contentment, heady reading. I’d lie in my dark, narrow room, the door open, listening for Kevin to come home. Sometimes I’d hear his voice and the laughter of other men.

  One evening in winter my sister called. “Honey, I can’t bear it that Gabriel is still in the mental hospital.”

  “Is he still there?”

  “Yes, it’s so strange. You know, all three kids have been living with their father and stepmother ever since my last attempt. The younger kids grin and bear it, but Gabriel is so rebellious. You know he always scared me, even when he was a baby. I could never bond with him. I always felt he was this adult, dangerous man, just little. He was always built like a little boxcar. For years he was fine. He was even a Little Leaguer. He and his dad were real pals. But then, after the divorce … Oh, I feel so guilty.” She began to cry.

  I’d been in therapy for so many years that I didn’t rush in to comfort her. I let her “experience her pain,” as we said.

  “Anyway, Gabriel’s just rotting in that hospital. The shrink keeps them all in a lock-up unit. They don’t study, there’s an elaborate token system of merits and demerits. The shrink appears once a day like Louis XIV strolling through the Hall of Mirrors. The kids vie to catch his attention, beg a favor, receive his blessing. What an ego trip for that merde….”

  “What should we do?”

  “Well, Gabriel’s case hasn’t been presented in court because he is his father’s ward and his father has put him there. But if I challenge it—you see, my lawyer says that I can get what’s called a ‘release order’ and if no one arranges for a court hearing within five days he’ll just be released to anyone who’s there—me—willing to take him into custody.”

  “But then what?” I asked.

  “I’ll put him on a plane and send him to you.”

  “Okay. I’ll raise him then?”

  “Yeah.”
/>
  “Okay.”

  “I’ll be there to receive Gabriel. Then I’ll rush him in a cab to the airport. I don’t have a ticket….”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll have a prepaid ticket waiting at the counter as soon as you give me the details.”

  When I told Kevin he just laughed and said, “Great, I’ve always wanted to be a mom.”

  I’D AGREED SO glibly to taking in my nephew because I thought it was stylish and gallant to make split-second decisions, just as I thought farewells should always be cut short, and my idea of elegant haste had offended more than one person. But as I later contemplated the responsibility of supporting Gabriel I panicked. I’d set up my whole life so that I wouldn’t have any responsibilities, but already my passion for Kevin had caused me to give up my hundred-dollar-a-month roach-trap for this four-hundred-dollar floor-through. I often said I wasn’t rich enough to be heterosexual and that children were beyond my means. Now I feared I’d become so burdened with expense that I’d never write again.

  In our family we never met each other at the airport; as our mother said, “We all travel too much to waste our time like that.” The day in early January when Gabriel arrived was no exception. His mother had called to tell me that the release order had worked like a charm since her ex-husband was, as predicted, too passive to challenge it. Anne said Gabriel was in the plane and on his way. He had a twenty-dollar bill to pay for his New York taxi.

  I’d bought a single bed for him and put him up in the maid’s room next to the kitchen; his room had a half-sink and mirror and a little built-in closet. Whereas my own sheets I changed only every two weeks, now that I had a … child, I was determined to do everything properly. I wanted to run a household that was beyond reproach since I was now responsible for the welfare of a young person. I’d laid out a big towel, a little towel and a washcloth for him.