The Farewell Symphony

by Edmund White

  Then I left and three weeks later Fox was dead. I resented my passivity: why hadn’t I insisted his visitors leave us alone for a moment? Why hadn’t I wrung a bit of truth, even pain, out of the situation? Oh, I never knew what to do or how to behave. Part of me said I should let the dying man set the tone. If he wanted diversion and reassurance, he should have them. If he wanted honesty (but he never did), then he could have that too. Though usually tempted to let things dribble away in inconsequence, this time I felt cheated.

  I talked to Ned almost daily on the phone. He told me that one night, at midnight, he’d received a phone call from Fox who was back home from the hospital. “He wanted me to get him some cocaine. I didn’t know what I should do since he was so sick, but then I thought that as a friend it wasn’t up to me to question him now. I called a dealer, scored quickly and was over there within an hour. The apartment was a mess, the cat was screeching, everything stank. I fed the cat and changed its box while Fox, who could scarcely hold himself upright, was shoveling the coke up his nose.”

  Ned paused. “The next morning he was dead.”

  “Don’t feel bad,” I said. “You weren’t going to reform him. He was going to die anyway.”

  Fox had made all the arrangements for his own memorial ceremony with his usual efficiency. He had chosen the place, made up the guest list, named the speakers and established the order in which they’d address the public. His secretary from his publishing firm had only to follow his detailed instructions. After the eulogies he’d prepared a slide show of the key moments in his life; he’d included the photo of himself as a baton twirler and even a picture of us. The whole event concluded with a recording of The Nylons singing “Up on the Roof” a cappella (“And all my cares drift into space …”).

  This ceremony was his final coup de théâtre since Fox, who’d always been so secretive, had at last brought all his friends together—his two movie stars, his straight writers, the actors he’d directed in avant-garde video pieces, the slaves who’d paid him, his long-haired hippy, ex-con father, his respectable grandparents, one of the Washington pages he’d worked with, people from the New York art world he’d met through his curator, his boss…. Oddly enough, we all hung around at the Ethical Culture Center after the event because we were so curious about one another and even more fascinated by all the facets of Fox’s complex personality that this heterogeneous crowd represented.

  Josh, too, was failing. And when Ned couldn’t be with him, Butler and Philip were there. Butler was becoming increasingly religious. He brought a pious air to the sickroom, which only annoyed Josh; and Josh worried that Butler would write a story about him. Butler had a full supply of beautiful literary citations with which to mark each stage of Josh’s decline. He pillaged his “commonplace book,” in which he’d stored up all these apt and quaint quotations, in order to feed his journal, in which he scrupulously recorded the memento mori meditations that Joshua’s dying had prompted. In a fit of funereal social climbing he wrote many solemn letters (soaked in grief as women used to dab their letters in perfume) to Eddie, who was only enraged by them.

  But Butler’s lover Philip was efficient, confidence-inspiring. Beneath his tough-talking exterior he deployed an inexhaustible energy focused on Joshua’s real needs. Whereas we all felt inept and shy in dealing with doctors, lawyers and heterosexual family members, Philip summoned Josh’s brother to New York and reviewed the will, making sure everyone agreed on (or at least accepted) its terms. And Philip had found a clever graduate student to piece together Joshua’s last book, to pluck it like a divination out of the entrails of the abandoned computer.

  I stopped calling Joshua, nor did he phone me any more. The last time I’d spoken to him he’d seemed so confused, if gentle and kind, that I thought he must be close to the end.

  He wasn’t. Butler and Philip were disgusted with Lionel, who they insisted neglected Joshua entirely when he was left in charge over the weekend. “When Butler and I drop in on Monday morning it’s obvious that Lionel hasn’t been feeding Joshua. Of course Josh is just blissed out, always smiling, but you can see he’s dehydrated, Lionel hasn’t changed his diaper, and he’s left Joshua alone for long periods during which he’s gone out clubbing. It’s criminal behavior—and disgusting that he’s going to inherit fifty thousand dollars in cash, which he already knows about. He’d probably like to see Joshua die as soon as possible.”

  “Surely you’re exaggerating?”

  “Oh, well,” Philip said, lowering his voice for a moment, “he liked Joshua well enough as long as he could meet famous people and go on exciting trips, but now that we’re in for the long haul he’s lost interest. I’m not saying he’s satanic, unless a self-absorbed ninny is Satan. He insists on his right to look after Joshua over the weekend and has become annoyingly pettish with me, but now I’ve engaged a very sweet black nurse named Ernie who is wonderfully competent. Joshua obviously likes Ernie and if I let two or three days go by with Joshua in Ernie’s care—and the care of a night nurse—then he looks clean and well fed, his hair brushed, freesias in the silver vase, just as he always liked them.”

  I was silently horrified that things had gone so far and that, in the few weeks since I’d stopped phoning, Joshua had become blissed out and demented, bedridden and diapered, and that his preference for freesias was now referred to in the past tense. I kept thinking of Haydn’s The Farewell Symphony. In the last movement more and more of the musicians get up to leave the stage, blowing out their candles as they go. In the end just one violinist is still playing.

  I WAS WRITING a short novel, as punchy as I could make it, about the 1960s, ending with the Stonewall Uprising in 1969 and the beginning of gay liberation. I thought that never had a group been placed on such a rapid cycle—oppressed in the fifties, freed in the sixties, exalted in the seventies and wiped out in the eighties. Although I didn’t mention AIDS, which would have been anachronistic, I hoped the book would remind gay readers of the need to fight lest we fall back into the self-hating, gay-bashing past. The Christian Right—my very relatives in Texas!—were now attacking gays, since the gradual collapse of the Evil Empire of Communism left nothing to unite the rich few and the numerous poor on the right into the semblance of unity except a factitious agitation over “family values.”

  In the past I’d written for an imaginary European heterosexual woman who knew English but didn’t live in America, because she functioned for me as a filter, a corrective. I was afraid of preaching to the converted, of establishing character through brand names, of nudging ribs exactly like my own to provoke predictable laughter, of playfully alluding to shared moments of recent history and of ruing attitudes I could count on other gay men to condemn just as readily as I did.

  Now, the sadness and isolation I felt—as an expatriate, as the survivor of a dead generation, as someone middle-aged in a gay youth culture—made me turn to other gay men, young and old, as my readers. I wanted to belong to a movement that I scarcely understood, for Larry Kramer had called for anger and activism, but I had nothing to offer but grief and helplessness. More exactly, I wanted to see if the old ambition of fiction, to say the most private, uncoded, previously unformulated things, might still work, might once again collar a stranger, look him in the eye, might demand sympathy from this unknown person but also give him sympathy in return. These secret meetings—unpredictable, subversive—of reader and writer were all I lived for.

  The project seemed hopeless. Gay men of my generation, especially those who’d shared my experiences, were dead or dying. The younger ones, with their shaved skulls, pierced noses, tattoos and combat boots, appeared to belong to another race, militant, even military, too brusque and strident to be receptive to my elegies. Whereas pioneer gay novels—Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar, James Baldwin’s Another Country, John Rechy’s City of Night—had attracted curious heterosexual readers, now gay fiction was a commodity assigned its two shelves in a few stores, and no heterosexual would venture to
browse there, just as no man would leaf through a book shelved under “Feminism.” The heterosexual browser or the curious male might have even felt he was trespassing. The category of general literary fiction was vanishing, and its disappearance showed that the new multiculturalism was less a general conversation than rival monologues.

  In an American leather magazine I read a personal ad written by someone looking for “a slave, looks indifferent, attitude everything.” I felt I answered that description and mailed a groveling response. A month later I received a letter. The recto side of the letter gave me cruel orders in the same growling, half-literate prose of the original ad. The verso side said, “Surprise! And now for the good news. I’m the very screenwriter who phoned you in June and whom you were unable to see, due to your pressing engagements. Isn’t it exciting to think we’ve found each other ‘in the rag-and-bone shop of the human heart’? (Yeats) I know we’re going to be a great team, in bed and out! There are so many ways you could help my career—and perhaps I could help yours, too, who knows?

  “I’m enclosing all my numbers, but please be cautious since I do live with a lover and, though he’s a slave, no reason to hurt him unnecessarily.

  “Actually, we met years ago at a staged reading of a very camp little musical I wrote the book for, an adaptation of Gone with the Wind for an all-male cast, whites played by blacks and vice versa. Do you remember it? We could never get the rights, sadly.”

  Absurd as the letter was, I started telephoning this guy, Ward, all the time. I’d be in Leeds on a book tour or in Berlin with Hajo, unable to sleep, and I’d phone Ward. Once I might have picked up men who attended my readings, but now most of them trembled when they came up to get their books signed (so venerable had I become in just a few … well, it seemed like a few minutes, but it must have been several years). I’d also given dozens of interviews about my HIV status and people, even those who believed in safe sex, were turned off by someone they knew was positive. In the past I’d received fan letters asking me for sex; now the letters asked me for advice on how to find a young lover. If I mentioned to a seemingly sympathetic straight friend or younger gay friend how sexually frustrated I was, I could see a look of disgust crossing his or her features, as though to say, “Haven’t you created enough havoc with your beastly desires? Couldn’t you just … tuck it away for the duration? Retire?”

  Ward told me he was going to be writing a screenplay and working with a producer in San Francisco. I said I was going to New York to say good-bye to Joshua and would hop on a plane out to the West Coast to meet him at last and spend a few days with him.

  He said, “I’ve got to tell you I don’t really look as … fit as I did in that photo I sent you. That was during my physical high point as a runner—that picture was taken four years ago, five!—during the New York Marathon.”

  “Oh, well, ‘looks indifferent, attitude everything,’ as the ad says. You know, I should have suspected you were an educated person right there, inserting that fancy phrase into your four-letter obscenities. Anyway, I have a confession, too, although it’s probably old news. I’ve already alluded to it in interviews and you probably know all about it. I’m positive, which I discovered just a year ago when the test became available, but I’ve probably been positive since the late seventies, or whenever it all started. You know, they’re unfreezing the blood samples of people who participated in a hepatitis study in the late seventies and they’re finding that many of them were already positive back then.” But I could hear an unexpected, prim silence accumulating on the other end of the line. “That doesn’t make any difference to you, does it, my being positive?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Are you positive?”

  “No. My lover and I are both negative.”

  “Yeah, I guess S&M is mainly a head trip, no need for genital contact. Luckily.” I laughed feebly.

  “Actually,” Ward said with an unforgivable degree of self-righteousness, “my lover and I have been relatively faithful and we work too hard to waste much time on sex.”

  But still I didn’t get it. After all, Ward had become famous for an AIDS movie of extraordinary sophistication and compassion and, leaving that aside, he was a middle-aged gay man who’d lived in New York all his life. We arranged that I’d come directly to his San Francisco hotel room when my plane arrived at midnight and slip in beside him if he was already asleep. I was in such a fever of sexual anticipation that I couldn’t imagine his being asleep; Ward’s dirty, perverse, precise fantasy, as stated in his ad, was the only combination of fifty words that had made me masturbate with hot-faced excitement hundreds of times.

  When I rang the bell to Joshua’s apartment, Philip—lustrously bearded, boisterously gloomy—let me in. “Well, I’m afraid you waited too long,” he called out, heartless and gentle, “there’s not much left. If you talk to him you might get a smile, that’s about all there’s left of cortical response, God knows what it means, probably just a reflex—typical of Josh that his last automatic response should be a smile.”

  In the front bedroom Joshua lay on his back in the blue and white pajamas I’d sent from Lanvin in Paris. His face was so white, covered with still whiter patches on the temples, that he seemed carved out of a mushroom, a big pale shelf of mushroom growing out of the roots of a tree in wet ground. And yet, when I touched his hand, it was dry, each finger dry as a new, cool stick of blackboard chalk. Even with his lenses in he’d always had trouble seeing, but now, lensless, he could have perceived nothing but light and shadow and movement. Except his eyes looked fixed, glazed over. His nose had grown an inch longer. He was terribly thin (“At last!” I could imagine him exclaiming with a laugh) and looked as though, like Kafka’s hunger artist, he could be mistaken for a bit of dust or straw and quickly swept up into a dustpan by an energetic hand.

  I said, “Josh?” He smiled, faintly, lifted his eyebrows, blinked encouragingly. His lips pursed slightly, as they always had, as though he wanted to meet the world halfway, not just hear its messages but also sip them, taste them.

  I thought, The Egyptians had the right idea, devoting their whole lives to building tombs as big and luxurious as their palaces, mammoth launching pads for eternity, whereas even our richest men and women, who live in twenty rooms, or a hundred, are willing to be slid into a tomb no longer or wider than their lowest servant’s cot—which only shows no one really believes in a life after death.

  I wanted to build a monument of words for Joshua, big and solid, something that would last a century, although I doubted I had the ability.

  I wanted other people to know about his intelligence, which was sympathetic, even diagnostic, but never analytic: he could learn a poet’s language in just a few tries, as though he were one of those ethnolinguists who can entirely map out an unknown tongue in just twenty days in the Bush. He could also tell what were that poet’s preconceptions, preoccupations, points of unresolved discord, governing metaphors and link all that to his (usually her) most intimate experience without gossiping about the details of her or his life. He loved Shakespeare’s comedies for the same reason he loved Balanchine’s ballets (there on Joshua’s wall was a get-well card from Suzanne Farrell, the prima ballerina who was assoluta in his heart): both Shakespeare and Balanchine devised new combinations of men and women, of courtship and union, of assertion and accommodation, but transposed into a higher, purer key.

  I flew out to San Francisco to see Ward, but he was asleep when I arrived and never touched me once while I was there. He barely looked at me. He was a short, pudgy man with a denture and bad breath. He had meetings with his producer during the day; the hotel he’d chosen was across the street from Golden Gate Park and I went jogging in it for long hours, weeping and running, weeping and running, sitting in the Japanese Tea Garden (with its pagoda, bridges, stream, carp and refreshment pavilion) and drinking hot tea and composing a long poem to Josh, the first I’d written since I’d been a student. I remembered how Josh would say something som
eone had done (usually Butler, whom he’d nicknamed “Missy”) was “grotesque” or “past belief.” Now my life seemed to be both.

  When Joshua died, Eddie called me to tell me he’d communicated with him already via the Ouija board and that he was fine, on his first day he’d been given a lovely tea party by Wystan Auden and Chopin, and he sent me his love. Josh was very excited since he was scheduled to be reborn soon as a little brown baby girl in Calcutta.

  I laughed and hurried to get off the line, so offended was I. Soon afterwards I looked through all the letters I’d ever received from Joshua and I realized I’d been unworthy of him then, that he’d been sending them through time to me as I would become years later.

  BRICE DIED almost ten years after Joshua, and it was only then that I understood this need to believe the dead go on living, somewhere, at least for a while. In medieval churches the lord and his lady are represented by tomb sculptures that show them as they were at age thirty, no matter how old they were when they died. Thirty was considered the ideal age and the resurrection was supposed to find their bodies perfect. Brice was only thirty-three when he died, but a very, very old thirty-three—three times older: ninety-nine.

  He died on March 21st, 1994. On August nth I wrote: “My day began with tears because I picked up a tarnished silver ball that Brice once gave me (it had rolled behind the radio). I used to walk around with it in my pocket; some delicate inner mechanism makes it chime when you shake it. I suppose by awakening with Tinkerbell I thought Brice could hear it if I rang it. And yet I find something tawdry, seedy, about all this Blavatsky-like cant about communicating with the dead. No, the dead are dead, which is our tragedy and their grandeur.”

  Those words sound colder, more decided, than what I felt then or even now, two years later, as I approach the end of this book. For a year I went to church every day and lit a candle for Brice; I lit them also in the cloisters beside the cathedral in Barcelona, in the Baroque Swiss church in Einsiedeln, in a church in Lucca, in Montreal and Sydney, wherever I traveled, almost as though I thought that on his distant star he’d like to see these faint pinpricks of light pulsing all over the globe in his honor.