The Farewell Symphony

by Edmund White

  As for the new disease, I thought that it would never attain epidemic proportions. By 1983, two years into its history, there were still fewer than two thousand cases. And no one knew what caused it. Some people said that “viral overload” must be the cause, yet I knew that since the mid-1960s (almost twenty years) I’d gone to the doctor with hundreds of cases of gonorrhea—mostly rectal, occasionally penile, once in the throat—one case of syphilis, dozens of cases of amoebas, one case of hepatitis, and yet I was flourishing.

  Other people said the disease was caused by poppers, those sudden blasts of amyl nitrate we inhaled on the dance floor or during sex, but again I’d been sniffing them for twenty years with no apparent damage done (I’d first been given poppers in 1964 by a black heterosexual woman friend who sniffed them just before orgasm), nor could I imagine that a chemical inhalant which caused the blood to rush to the heart would also spread a fatal disease. And what about all those people who used poppers to stimulate their hearts—had they contracted cancer?

  Could the disease be contained in sperm itself? If so, then we were all lost, since we were bathed, daily, in a sea of sperm.

  My own conviction was that it wouldn’t touch me or the people I loved. I certainly was opposed to the idea of limiting my sexual encounters or knowing my partners’ names—what good would that do? True, when people came down with a venereal disease they were supposed to call up their partners, but I was from an older generation devoid of community spirit and once a month I threw out my trick chits (on which I’d marked names and phone numbers). Anyway, we were all big boys used to dosing ourselves and mopping up our own problems.

  Of course we’d never played for such high stakes before—death.

  Dr. Friedman-Kien thought we should all stop having sex for a while, until the exact nature of the disease and its transmission became clear, but everyone laughed at him. Obviously the good doctor knew nothing about gay life. We’d fought hard for sexual freedom, which was virtually the beginning and end of our idea of freedom itself. Hadn’t gay liberation begun with the defense of a gay bar? A cruising spot? And hadn’t our progress been measured by the number of bars and bathhouses and sex clubs that had sprung up in the last decade? We felt that straights hated us because we were getting so much, because among gays sex was easy to come by and seldom used just as a reward for work, fidelity, responsibility. Should two thousand cases of gay cancer convince us to exchange our freedom for chastity? Straight doctors, straight politicians, straight cops were all too ready to order us to give up our pleasures, that sticky semen-glue that bound us together, but we weren’t going to be dispersed by scare tactics.

  When a German news magazine called me and asked me to comment on the disease, I said, “It’s caused by mustaches. If every gay man shaved, it would be cured tomorrow.”

  After I hung up, my new lover, Ned, said, “Don’t make a fool of yourself. You have no business making pronouncements, especially not frivolous ones, when people are dying.”

  I’d met Ned through one of Max’s acolytes, Angus, a Boston poet who wrote about his childhood and his friends in Max’s characteristic syllabic verse and with his riddling, punning insolence. Angus was good looking, well educated, rich, but he was consumed by indecision—whether to work or not, whether to settle down with a lover or play the field, whether to move to New York or remain in Boston. In the meanwhile he wrote his poems.

  Angus had called me up at Christmas time in 1981 and said, “Have I got a boy for you!” He’d already told me twice about this guy, who’d moved from Boston to New York to study design, who was “pretty as an angel” and from the “ultimate High WASP family,” though his parents had rejected him and thrown him out of the house.

  Now he was working as a houseboy for a rich older man who had a duplex in Chelsea. We went over there, Angus and I, for a drink before heading off to see Torch Song Trilogy. Ned’s boss was on a Caribbean cruise, as it turned out, and Ned was cooking dinner for two friends who were about to arrive. I suppose it was appropriate that the first time I saw Ned he was preparing dinner for friends.

  He asked me if I knew how long a leg of lamb should cook and I said something confused—I was dazzled by this young man beside me. He had a very high-pitched voice, not a girl’s voice but a boy’s, a choir boy’s, as though this startling characteristic should be taken as a pledge that he would never age, a statement instantly contradicted by his hair, which was already white, although he could not have been more than twenty-six or twenty-seven years old at the time. Since his hair was both blond and white, not at all receding, densely planted and standing up here and there in spiky cowlicks, I kept doing a double take to make sure that what I took to be white wasn’t actually platinum.

  He wasn’t sensual; in fact, he was tall and gangly, but his air of innocence called for defilement, which after all is a form of sensuality (even if rather specialized).

  But that came later, if at all, my thoughts about sex with him. For now, all I could think about was marriage, linking my name to his, this angelic boy with the refined accent, the choir boy’s voice, the slightly goofy look, as though he were a comic-book character who’d just had a flower pot drop on his head and was now seeing stars, lurching around and humming a slowed-down love waltz before collapsing in pottery shards—to be instantly mended in the very next frame.

  When we left the cozy apartment with the lit fire and odorless hothouse flowers in every vase, Angus said, “So?”

  “So what?” I said, almost irritated. “So I like him, so what’s the big deal, since he’s much too good for me?”

  “I’ll call him. We’ll see,” Angus said with his air of the sly boots who’s just licked up all the cream. “I think he liked you. But remember, a boy like that will cost you about fifteen thousand dollars a year.”

  “That doesn’t sound like very much,” I laughed. “He should raise his rates.”

  I had broken up with Fox six months earlier at the Riviera Café. I’d carefully explained why it was best for him, for our friendship, for our development as writers—and suddenly he’d drenched me with a glass of water and stormed off, leaving me in a puddle, dripping. The smiling waiter brought me a hand towel and I, too, smiled, glad that it was all over, the petty squabbling and endless jealous interrogations.

  Except I hadn’t much liked the grand silence that had followed. Now there was no one to grill me, watch me, call me, attempt to trip me up. There was no one to collate my present remarks with some long ago but carefully preserved comment I’d once made on the same subject. Now if I came home early or late, slept alone or with two other men, there was no Fox to trot around the barnyard by the light of the moon.

  Worse, he’d found another lover right away, a young curator of a fashionable new museum, and everyone spoke of them as a smart couple about town. Fox began to rise in the world. He worked for a couple of years as an assistant to my new editor and then moved on to a paperback house where he edited his own line of new fiction.

  To add to a retrospective sense of chagrin, one day I ran into Glen, a dark poet with a scarred face and beautiful hands who had written a thesis on a Byzantine saint. We had a sandwich together and Glen said, “How could you ever break up with that sexy Fox?”

  “I didn’t know you knew him?”

  “Know him? Why, I used to hire him as a master. Wasn’t his ad sexy?”

  I didn’t know he had an ad or worked as a prostitute but I vamped for time. “Yeah, it sure was….”

  “I’d call him up all the time on his special phone and if you weren’t there he’d let me come over and lick his toilet bowl clean. Or he’d stuff my mouth with his dirty socks and put me in the bathtub with a dildo and some poppers and piss on me. Once he even gave me an enema.”

  “Yeah, he was great at that. How much did he charge?”

  “Just fifty bucks. After all, his ad said, ‘Cheap: A Bargain Top!’ Later, when I found out how literary and funny he was, we became friends. But I still hire him from
time to time. I think I’m his only customer now—and of course William, that old man he shits on. Once Fox called me up—I think you were out of town—” here he went into a fit of giggles “—and asked me if I’d shit on William with him. We took acid that must have had a lot of speed in it, we couldn’t get it up, but we necked and necked on the bed while William ate out our asses. Later we stood over him—he was in the bathtub and we were standing, our feet balancing on the sides of the tub, and Fox actually produced one, small but creditable étron—”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s French for turd. William came, of course, and I thought that now he’d regained his senses he’d be horrified by all this evidence of his twisted mind so I rapidly hosed away the dirty little clue, but he said to me, in an angry snit, ‘That’s my job,’ as though I’d greedily deprived him of the best part, as though I were a rival shit eater.”

  Once I saw Fox and his new lover drinking at Julius’s. They didn’t see me and from my dark corner I watched Fox haranguing the curator. I couldn’t hear them but I could easily imagine what Fox was saying. Although I was pleased I was no longer living with the Grand Inquisitor I also felt oddly weightless. Now no one cared about the exact degree of treachery in my soul, the exact shade of perfidy in my heart.

  MY DOCTOR, who’d gained thirty pounds since he’d stopped smoking, seemed grouchily malevolent. He barked at me, “You have chronic bronchitis and it’s never going to get better as long as you’re still smoking—how many packs do you smoke?”

  “Three. Sometimes four if I’m feeling ambitious.”

  “Well, you stink from it. Your face is grey, your fingers yellow. Here’s the number for an eight-week behavioral conditioning program. Go to it or you’ll be dead from lung cancer in five years.”

  “Oh well,” I joked, “what about this new gay cancer? It will get me first.”

  “Amoebas!” he shouted. “It’s all caused by amoebas.” Indeed, my doctor had become obsessed by amoebas. When I showed him what was obviously a syphilitic chancre on the head of my penis he wanted to treat it with Flagyl, a highly toxic amoeba medicine that had the additional disadvantage of making the patient ill if he drank alcohol. Finally I convinced the doctor to test and treat me for syphilis; I spent the night shivering and sweating, the usual reaction of primary syphilis to antibiotics.

  I stopped smoking and I, too, gained twenty-five pounds. I now looked like my father; I didn’t have his final blue, skeletal mask but the flushed, fleshy face he’d presented throughout my childhood and adolescence. I trimmed my hair and shaved off my mustache, the better to own up to the full horror of this big pudding I’d become.

  I fell gently, domestically in love with Ned. He wasn’t jealous as Fox had been. In fact I don’t think he even fancied me, though he loved being with me. Nor was he jealous of my new-found success. He had no desire to be a writer. He talked vaguely of being an architect or interior designer some day, but in the meanwhile he was happy to let me support him, to go out to the bars every night, usually on his own, to seduce the handsome men the city was filled with. He watched too much television for my taste, dressed too young to look convincing, argued with his family too peevishly, but when he was “lit,” that is, drunk, he really did appear to be illuminated with a crazy happiness. He had a great capacity for joy, and it was my pleasure to bring it to him as often as possible.

  He was well brought up and had gone to an expensive school for rich dumbbells. There he’d met two girls with whom he’d while away the afternoon eating unbuttered, unsalted popcorn (their diet food) while watching the soaps and discussing relatives or men. Ned would complain about his former employers and the girls would grumble about their dates.

  Ned didn’t mind that I’d gained so much weight. He apparently liked men for their money and power and I was beginning to have a bit of both. He’d even read one of my books at university in his “Gay Lit” class (his parents thought he was studying Gaelic). His erotic interest, when it wasn’t distracted by power, was almost exclusively invested in black men, but he’d turn red with anger if I’d say that in so many words. “That’s so demeaning to put it that way,” he’d shout.

  “Why? Face it. Everything else being equal, you’re more attracted to blacks than whites.”

  “Nothing ever is equal. It’s a question of individuals, not groups. You make me sound like a … fetishist.” In fact, his “type” eventually stabilized. He was attracted to black preppies, who brought together the twin themes of success and color. He was also heavily invested in the idea of playing the puer aeternus and more black men than white were willing to treat him as Huck, Honey.

  From the very beginning Ned and I were more friends than lovers but our friendship was a serious business. We didn’t much mind if one or the other of us slept around as long as the object of attraction was constantly changing. We slept in the same bed two or three nights a week and we called each other constantly.

  After we’d known each other six months I asked him to move in. I was horrified when I came home and discovered my little apartment entirely filled with twenty big blue garment bags.

  “Ned, what’s in all these bags?”

  “Clothes.”

  “Are you wearing all those clothes currently?”

  “What do you mean?” he squeaked in his high voice, driven higher by anxiety and irritation.

  “We’re going to go through your clothes, one by one. I’m going to hold up each item and you’re going to swear to me on a stack of Bibles that you’ve worn it at least once in the preceding year.”

  “No, no, I won’t work like that,” he said, as though I were offering him a job. “You go away and I’ll … consolidate things.”

  “Remember,” I said, heading out the door, “everything must fit into that closet.”

  THE NOVEL I’d written about my boyhood was published in 1982. Ned and I were staying on Martha’s Vineyard when the first copy arrived. We’d rented a room and a rickety balcony in a big, underfurnished house in West Chop, or was it East Egg? Certainly the golden-haired tennis players who lived all around us were worthy of Gatsby. Ned had gone to prep school with Jennifer, the young woman who had inherited this fabulous ruin from her parents. They couldn’t pay the taxes or upkeep on this twenty-room pile, which had been built by their grandparents, so they handed it over to the kids, who rented out rooms to their friends. Anyway, the parents were divorced and feckless; the father hired out his sailboat and services in the Bahamas, the mother sold popcorn-making machines in Catalonia.

  In the double drawing room downstairs only one chair stood like a crippled sentinel, a stack of books replacing a missing leg. A row of coat hooks by the front door reminded us that the house had been run, unsuccessfully, as a girls’ school in the 1950s. The grim, institutional kitchen and the giant pots and kettles were other reminders, although the roomers now never ate together. Each had a half or a quarter shelf in the fridge, clearly labeled by name, and not even the most basic things—sugar, flour, salt—were bought in common, and the refrigerator stank from all the half pints of spoiling coffee milk.

  Since our fellow lodgers were all New England aristocrats, their parents thought they should work every summer. In Europe kids of this class would have island-hopped in Greece or lounged around the pool at the family bastide near Nîmes, but here they mowed lawns for five dollars an hour or worked at the local dress shop and drank themselves into a stupor every night (just as their parents were doing over on Nantucket). At night we’d find them beached halfway up the steps, often in a pool of vomit. They kept a tank of oxygen beside their beds and came to breakfast in dark glasses. They were nice enough to us as a gay couple; alcoholism is a leveler. We’d sit on our rickety balcony, look down at the abandoned Volkswagen on the lawn; a pine tree was sprouting up through it. At dusk we’d watch the cold fog roll in from the ocean. We’d drink our boiler-makers and invite other kids to join us. They were all young, blond, lithe; drink had not yet made their f
aces puffy.

  The son of the nouveau pauvre family of proprietors lived up under the eaves with a Brazilian girlfriend. We’d go up there and smoke opium, lie back on overstuffed cushions and look out the dormer windows at clouds. We’d confide without much urgency thoughts that collected like condensation and formed, slowly, irregularly, into one drop of language after another.

  Ned and I would go jogging. Neither of us was in very good shape and every two hundred yards or so we’d have to walk for a few minutes before falling back into a trot. We’d run past old summer cottages in need of a paint job that made me think of my father’s house on a small, cold, deep Michigan lake. My father’s mother, isolated back in Merkle, Texas, had read an article about Christian Science and converted to it, partly out of snobbism, since like the Scientists she believed there was something inherently tacky about evil, as though the best families would be spared its incursions, and partly out of wishful thinking, since she longed to triumph over her worsening bouts of mental illness through the will alone.

  In the first enthusiasm of her new-found faith she convinced my father to drive her to the Mother Church in Boston. Afterwards through a Scientist they gained entrance into an exclusive New England resort for a week-long holiday. No one spoke to them for the first five days, until at last an old Brahmin approached the Texans and said, “I told everyone I wanted to meet you even though you shout while playing tennis.”

  This was that kind of resort. The grandfather of the nouveau pauvre hosts received us in his drafty house with the threadbare Persian rugs and terra-cotta Tang horses dipped into green and white glazes. He said, “You teach? I taught at Columbia but retired when the school became overrun with—well, you know.”