The Farewell Symphony

by Edmund White

  “I was window-shopping.”

  “Yeah, for dick. Huh? See some nice dick? Did you stop into that dirty movie theater on Second and—”

  “Don’t even tell me the address! I don’t want to know You’re the one who knows all those—”

  “Oh, sure,” Fox said scornfully. “You’re pure as the driven snow. Don’t forget where I met you, sugar; that wasn’t any convent.”

  When I’d come in the door he’d pull me into a tight embrace. If I didn’t respond ardently, he’d push me away and say, “What’s wrong? Have you already come twice today? Plum wore out?” He’d push a hand down the back of my jeans. “No undies? Wanna be ready for action? You Village Boys are like that, aren’t you? Notorious for—And what’s this? Your asshole feels loose and juicy. Didn’t you even have time to clean it up before coming to see your hubby?”

  The worst of it was that I’d grow self-conscious and giggly. I could feel myself blushing and becoming more and more awkward. He’d start nuzzling my neck and since he was shorter than me he’d have to stand on tiptoe to do so, but his ass and legs were so strong that I felt like a big, willowy girl beside this powerful little bully who would soon lift and guide me through a long floating dance.

  Over dinner with friends he concealed his jealousy entirely. He was thoroughly up to date and always ready with a scandalous story, but if during the course of the meal I forgot myself and told a sex anecdote of my own about someone I’d known even years ago I’d see Fox cock an ear, sit up, take note. Later, when we were alone, his jaw muscles would flex and his nose would seem to dilate. He’d say, “Oh, so he played with your nipples, did he? Like this, sugar?”

  He’d fuck me, fall asleep and in the middle of the night start fucking me again. He’d play with my nipples so much they’d bleed and scab over and they’d ache under my starched shirt and I’d think of him all day, half with revulsion.

  I developed a case of prostatitis that no treatment seemed able to cure. It made ejaculation painful, sometimes impossible. Only when I was seeing a doctor in Seattle, where I was interviewing people for a new book, did I learn that the whole condition was imaginary. “I’m afraid there’s nothing wrong with you beyond a bit of hysteria,” the doctor said with a smile. The next day I was cured.

  Fox was so jealous that even when I was guiltless I’d notice with horror if a buddy touched my shoulder or stroked my neck, in all innocence; I could feel Fox watching. I’d tense up, move away, but it was only a matter of time before he’d say, “We’re awfully buddy-buddy, aren’t we?”

  “Who? Who and who?”

  “You told me you and Stuart were just friends.”

  “We are.”

  “Look, I wasn’t born yesterday.”

  If I’d come over to his apartment with groceries to prepare supper, he’d feel the milk and say, “It’s not even cold. And this butter is melting. What happened? Did you get waylaid?”

  If my hair was wet with sweat, he’d say, “Oh, ho! So you took a shower after your little romp—you’re becoming more and more brazen, I see, you don’t even pretend you’re faithful anymore….”

  “I am faithful!” I lied, “but I detest this whole vocabulary, innocent, faithful, guilty, brazen, sluttish. You know I don’t believe in monogamy. Neither do you. It’s a dreadful trap. We’re not straight—although maybe you are. Are you sure you’re not a breeder?”

  The next night, just to spite Fox, I stood him up and had dinner with Sean and his new lover, a big bear of a man who was a lumberjack. They met me at a restaurant in the West Fifties. Their clothes made them seem completely out of place in New York. Just as an object shifts from right to left as you shut first one eye, then the other, in the same way Sean seemed healthy and vigorous with his new reddish-blond beard and his checked shirt and jeans as he talked about their dude ranch in Arizona, but then, seen from another point of view, he appeared dowdy, provincial—in those days, as a convinced New Yorker, I invariably saw out-of-towners as drab and marginal. What confirmed that impression was Sean’s insistence that he and his lover were accepted by their neighbors as “regular guys” and that no one suspected there might be something “illicit” in their relationship (and here Sean’s eyes lit up crazily, as though we both shared the same vice, one he could mention only once every ten years, and then only to a fellow debauchee).

  The stolid, willed normality of their love made my affair with Fox seem all the more neurotic. Fox would bite me hard to leave love marks on my neck, especially above the collar, so that “my other lover” (an obsessive figment he’d created) would see I belonged to him. Fox didn’t say that in so many words, but I knew what he was doing and what I’d originally thought arose from an excess of passion I now realized was the fruit of careful scheming—and I started resenting his amorous violence.

  Sometimes he thought he’d hook me for good by initiating me into ever more bizarre vices. One night he kept passing the joint my way and feeding me brandy stingers until I was incapable of putting up a resistance or even walking. Then with remarkable efficiency he undressed me, kissing me with those kisses of his that always ended with a lingering little bite. His hands were all over me (how I long for them now that I’m alone) and I couldn’t decide whether they were irritating or overwhelmingly delicious—and then, suddenly, he was pushing me back onto the bed. I toppled there in a naked heap. He left the room and I could hear water running and running. The cats came to inspect me contemptuously, as though they knew how dangerous so much spinelessness could be. They looked at me, breathed lightly on me, and hopped away—or was what I took for their breath really Fox’s hand, passing lightly over me, banking the fires of my nearly extinct aura? My eyes, unfocused, myopic (I’d taken out my lenses an hour earlier), saw that Fox was hooking something up to a tall pole he’d wheeled beside the bed.

  “Whassat?” I asked drunkenly.

  “An enema bag.”

  “I don’t want that … that would make me ashamed … the smell … loss of control….”

  Fox fed me a hit of poppers and said, “There, my little boy’s a good boy, he’s going to let me do whatever I want,” and before I could reply he had a greasy finger up my ass and then the nozzle of the enema bag.

  I couldn’t feel the water going in at first but when I looked up I saw that Fox was pinching the tube, then releasing it, and slowly the orange rubber sack deflated. After two bags full of warm water had gone in, a wave of cramps swept through me and I panicked. I was afraid I’d burst, that Fox didn’t know what he was doing, that he himself was too stoned to stop. He massaged my taut belly soothingly and told me the “discomfort” would soon pass. I remembered that there are no pain receptors, only cramp receptors, in the digestive tract; I could be ruptured, bleeding, and I wouldn’t even know it.

  The cramps went away, only to return when he filled me up with the third bag. Again he massaged my belly. I alternated between resenting his interference even with my vital processes and inner organs and surrendering to him as though he were a doctor—or a parent, since my stepmother had been the one to give me enemas when I was a boy, an operation that even then was half-erotic, at least for me.

  It all ended with my sitting on the toilet (I who jumped sky-high if someone walked in on me) while Fox crouched beside me, pushing more and more of the spurting water out of me while I wept from shame and gratitude as the horrible smell of something fundamental within me rose all around us, something that Fox, too, was breathing, sharing.

  I was a fundamentalist, if that meant I believed that every attribute was an intrinsic aspect of our essence. I was willing to submit manfully to the powerful spices in Indian food only because I believed that these dishes were necessarily hot; the day I discovered that this cuisine could be ordered milder I lost my faith in it—or rather, felt my faith severely shaken. In the same way when I learned that the color of Coke was added later, that brown sugar was just white sugar with molasses sprayed on it to give it a “natural” unprocessed look—oh, al
l of these discoveries troubled my primitive fundamentalism. In the same way I believed that shit was not just food passing through the body but something that had always lived within it. Fox had somehow sensed this funny faith of mine and gone right to it. He’d tapped the corruption residing in my heart, not just the waste passing through my tripes.

  One evening we were eating an ordered-in pizza with friends, other young writers who belonged to a literary club we’d started where we’d take turns reading out loud to each other. I’d just read something and been praised for it (which was no surprise, since our organization was named “The All-Praise Club”). Fox’s face darkened with jealousy—but suddenly I saw it was envy. And if the two words were often confused that was because folk wisdom recognized that the mad, possessive husband wants to be—no, the analysis was less well suited to the dynamics of heterosexuality: the fox wants to be the chicken.

  I can’t imagine Brice in that druggy promiscuity of love and friendship, jealousy and envy. When I first seduced him I’d get him stoned on American joints and I tried out some kinky sex on him that he’d never experienced before, but one year into our affair, after he became ill, we stopped making love, although we continued to sleep tangled up together, held hands at the movies and were in every way a couple. Perhaps with all my earlier lovers I’d felt claustrophobic, whereas with Brice I knew that we were both positive and he was seriously ill and that this closeness, this love, was not going to go on forever, that soon enough we’d be sleeping alone in our graves. I was no longer afraid of intimacy, since I knew that I’d finally arrived at the end of all feeling, all experience, and that the moments that remained to him and to me might as well be as intense as possible.

  And as exclusive. I felt that Brice and I were wearing a caste mark, and that we were the caste’s only two members. Others had lots of time to play around with, as though they were in a Gorky comedy about an endless summer house party, whereas we were in a terse Greek tragedy, compressed and efficient, plunging towards its dénouement. After all my years of defending promiscuity, I’d become a fierce champion of the couple.

  WHILE WRITING a travel article, I went to Cincinnati, where my father still lived. He and I hadn’t spoken in nearly five years nor seen each other in seven. I checked into the Netherland Plaza, a 1920s hotel skyscraper where as a boy just after the war I’d gone to eat lunch with my mother (chicken potpie and chocolate sundaes) and watched an ice show in the middle of the afternoon (big, heavy-breathing women in sequins and feathers spraying snow onto us as they suddenly braked with their blades, their painted eyes and lips round with the faked excitement that seemed so hard to relate to the placid, doughy, sexless housewives I called women).

  But no sooner had I checked in to the hotel room than I called my father. My stepmother answered. She whispered: “Your father’s had a very bad heart attack. Now he just sits around all day with a stopwatch measuring his heartbeat. Try not to excite him. Here, I’ll call him.”

  “Well, why are you staying there, young fellow?” my father asked when I explained where I was. “I’ll be right down to get you.”

  He was much, much thinner than I’d ever seen him. His ears stood away from his head and the skin hung in folds under his neck like an elephant’s. In the past he’d traded in his Cadillac every other year (and his wife’s on alternating years), but now the car struck me (an ignorant New Yorker who’d never owned any kind of vehicle) as at least ten years old, though it was spotlessly clean inside and recently Simonized outside. He was wearing sports clothes that seemed equally old; the trousers hung off him, flapping oddly, the waist cinched by a badly scarred black leather belt and a small, square silver buckle that was tarnished on one corner. His three initials, the same as mine, were inscribed onto the silver in a script so stylized as to be nearly illegible.

  He was pale, almost blue, and his hair much thinner and very white. There were liver marks on his hands. He trembled slightly as he shook my hand. I was expecting him to make a crack about my long hair and mustache (he thought only little guys who wore platform shoes and needed to show off ever sported a mustache), but he said nothing, which made me realize I’d moved out of the category of family retainer into that of potential customer, the only two human species he recognized. If one could fart and belch in front of a retainer or read the paper while he or she sat there during dinner, with a customer one had to make jokes, lay on a spread, ask seemingly interested questions.

  He was chewing so much gum, which made his cheek bulge and impeded his speech, that I asked him about it.

  “Ever since I went on this salt-free, fat-free diet and lost so much weight I’ve had all this flab to worry about, so I’ve worked out my own system—I chew twenty pieces of gum half an hour twice a day.”

  “That’s a very good idea,” I said. “I’ll have to try that. My face is beginning to sag some, too.”

  He offered to carry my bag but I wouldn’t let him. As we walked to the parking lot I fell behind him for a moment and saw how brittle his walk had become, if that’s the opposite of supple. He walked as though he were a badly oiled machine. I thought his physical decline must depress him, he who’d always been so competitive in sports. My nephew had told me that when he was about twelve he’d raced against his grandfather on a bike. He’d been appalled that the old man, already in feeble health, had won, but only through a shocking expense of pedaling energy.

  All my life he’d frightened me—his expansive, glowing flesh, his dozens of dark, tailored suits, his resolute silences meant to convey disapproval. He’d been someone who could sit for hours at a stretch behind his blond mahogany desk, making his calculating machine, drawn up beside him on its portable shelf and wheels, jump slightly each time he touched its keys. He’d been someone who when he wasn’t working changed into old clothes (not old sports clothes but old tailor-made trousers and a frayed monogrammed shirt and sun-bleached wingtip shoes) in order to do yard work, not because he loved living things or found gardening restful or creative. No, for him the yard counted as just another job, another punishing duty. If, like me, he’d been afraid of heights I never would have known it, since he could never have admitted a weakness. His cigar was sometimes only a wet black butt in the corner of his mouth. Everything in his house and car was steeped in cigar smoke since he kept both permanently sealed and circulated through them either heated or cooled air. “I’m down to just ten cigars a day,” he said, as though reading my mind. “My heart, you know.”

  I’d never seen his new house, which was in a better neighborhood than the previous ones even though it was considerably smaller. “This is your father’s room,” my stepmother said. “He shouldn’t climb the steps so I’ve fixed him up here.” If he looked blue and balding and fragile, she was flourishing, more like his daughter, her hair dyed a brighter copper red, her nails freshly painted, her suit sober and burdened with only a single, exquisite branch of diamonds.

  When my father was out of the room for a moment she whispered, “Don’t worry, your father thinks you’re still just a journalist. I’ve torn all the ads and reviews referring to your fiction out of his papers—you know, I’m always up early and censor the papers for him. So you can rest easy. He doesn’t know anything about, what’s the word?, that gay writing of yours. It seems a shame you’ve gone and spoiled a perfectly good word.”

  “Only you ever used gay in the old sense,” I said. “Most Americans say merry or happy. Isn’t it more an English word, gay?”

  When my father came back in he had his stopwatch in hand. “I measure my heartbeat twice a day,” he said neutrally, as though he were referring to nothing more personal than the barometer.

  “That’s a good idea,” I said stupidly, but he didn’t notice what I’d said. Anyway, even when I’d lived in the Midwest I’d never been able to predict what would rub my father and his wife the wrong way. Being fatuous and condescending or humorless and clumsy, in any event, were not faults they were tuned to pick up.

  What su
rprised me was that he wanted to know in detail everything about my mother, my sister and my nephew, especially everything about their health. It irritated me that my sister had forbidden me to tell him she’d become a lesbian. He knew everything about me and bitterly disliked it, whereas she, despite her divorce and suicide attempts (which he read as moral flaws) nevertheless remained in the realm of the rectifiable. My father, had he known about my sister’s lesbianism, would have been mainly troubled by what our homosexuality suggested about his genes, for he unquestioningly espoused the belief (in the 1970s considered retrograde but at the end of the century again taken up as progressive) that sexual preference and most other psychological characteristics are inherited.

  In the past when he’d quiz me about my mother I’d thought he’d been looking for signs that she was about to remarry (or die an early death), either of which would have removed her from what he referred to as “the payroll.” Now, however, he seemed more genuinely concerned about her welfare (he said, “She’s a fine, intelligent woman,” the highest accolade he’d ever given her to my knowledge). There was a touch of that old-person’s curiosity about which of his coevals is going to live the longest—in particular, outlive him.

  When I’d been growing up my father had been interested in things, not people, in engineering problems or financial operations rather than in psychological speculation or gossip. Now he had changed completely—so much so that I wondered if he’d always quizzed his wife about her friends, but in deepest privacy, lest my overly impressionable nature be encouraged still further in the wrong direction. For when I was a kid he’d thought that if I was a sexual pervert that couldn’t, surely, be something fundamental (he too was a fundamentalist and he couldn’t think of a single deviant on either side of the family) but rather something my mother had unintentionally bred into me by over-stimulating me. He’d written my mother that I was excessively nervous, bobbed my head rhythmically, bit my nails, had opinions on adults, couldn’t pitch or bat a ball, avoided yard work and knew how to mix (and sip) cocktails (that was true: after a party my sister and I ran around collecting dirty glasses, which meant “drinking the stems,” as we said, for our mother sometimes used champagne glasses with hollow stems). He’d offered paternal gruel to replace maternal curries, mowing and raking instead of cocktail chatter (and mixing). Essentially, he saw me as a thoroughbred (like himself—he often referred to his “racehorse legs”) who’d been ridden badly and too hard and now had to be put out to pasture for a whole season before being broken in and trained all over again.