The Farewell Symphony (11 page)
No shame attached to these frequent medical visits; they were Aphrodite's spoils. The only fear we felt was that one day a strain of syphilis or gonorrhea would evolve that would be resistant to all available drugs. Already the original doses had been boosted dramatically. Yet we felt we were enlightened both in science and in the arts of the flesh. We thought we had a right to express ourselves sexually wherever, whenever and with whomever we chose. A venereal disease, far from being a price to pay, was a frequent medical accident, easily remedied, which bore no moral
weight. A residual and unrecognized sense of guilt might make us depressed for an hour, but a visit to the handsome doctor absolved us, especially since he had a sort of Mr. Fixit approach to our mishaps. One day he said to me, "Since you get the clap so often, maybe we should put you on a daily diet of Bactrim as a prophylactic. The only problem is that it might mask the symptoms without killing the bacteria. And you'd have to add a few things to your diet to replenish the intestinal flora and fauna it might kill off. I suppose you'd never be willing to try condoms?"
"Are you kidding?" I said. "Let's try the Bactrim. Isn't there a danger that if I take it too long it won't work anymore?"
"No. Tou don't become resistant to it, but it —the whole population of bacteria—can mutate and become resistant to the antibiotic, but if that happens everyone will just boost the dose again."
My only regret was that if the new regime was effective I'd be seeing my doctor less often. Armed with Bactrim, I iiesitated not at all in my endless couplings and found this new license enviable, certainly an admirable freedom, an essential article in the code of our personal liberation. Just as the Pill freed women to do with their bodies what they wished, so antibiotics made us invulnerable to the puritanical menace of disease.
One day my doctor was on vacation and his weird older partner filled in for him. Despite the Bactrim I'd contracted gonorrhea in my penis. After the doctor gave me two horse shots of Penicillin, which he stuck me with as painfully as possible, he said, "Wanna fuck me now?"
"But I've got the clap!" I protested.
"I'll give myself a shot as soon as we're finished." He dropped his pants but did not remove his white doctor's smock or stethoscope. The strange setting and kinky situation excited me and I climbed onto the examining table behind his bare, lean ass. I caught a glimpse of his legendarily big penis, which had never been seen erect. It dangled, as did his stethoscope, on the table.
As I was leaving the examining room I saw him shooting up and quickly buckling his trousers. I still had to pay the full fee.
Altogether twenty-four editors or their assistants had rejected my novel. Two years later I met several of these editors, two of them gay; one of them told me he'd liked my book but had seen no way
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he could have defended it in a meeting without "destroying his reputation." Soon after that, I learned that he'd been fired for spending hours each day in the toilet and for being cripplingly disorganized; he hurled himself under a subway. The other said he'd found parts of the book "amazingly sophisticated" and other passages "shockingly naive." "I mean," he asked, indignandy, "how could the protagonist not know what a garlic press is, for Christ's sake?" Another admired the first chapter (before the narrator meets "Sean"), but found the rest "obsessive" and "tiresome."
I didn't know how to respond to the criticism that my very life was "tiresome." If eveiything I'd experienced and valued and suflered over was just a big bore, then from what vantage point of scintillating cleverness could I revise my very existence? I'd read once that a philosopher had said that to discuss language with words was like trying to build a boat that was already under sail; for a bore to inject interest into his tedious book (or life) was surely every bit as impossible a task.
I suspected that the homosexual subject matter of my book was the principal problem in getting it accepted. Jamie objected that there were plenty of "weird" books being published—those by William Burroughs, Jean Genet, Hubert Selby. But I argued that they were all about hustlers or robots or thieves or transvestites and that, whereas low life and drag were actually reassuring to straight readers, my middle-class gays with their jobs and friends and bank loans were far too close for comfort.
But now I had an idea for a new book, which I resolved would be my last one. Like most other writers I saw the composition of a novel as a terrible expense of spirit, a reckless and dangerous overdraft drawn on alarmingly meager funds of energy. Or I imagined the book was a precious vase I had to carry during a rough-and-tumble obstacle course, but a vase that I was somehow molding as I ran along. I believed that I'd have a pleasant, easy-going life if I could only get the art monkey off my back. I'd seen so many of my friends accept spirit-deforming poverty and miserable living conditions in roach traps in exchange for humiliation and overwork as actors, painters or poets. I refused to be a "martyr to art." Statistically it appeared to me that the chance of being published at all was infinitesimal, and if one was published the chance of being reviewed and permitted to publish a second time was even more remote. Yet such worries were way beyond my means. I longed for the authentication of a single acceptance. Nor did I dream of being famous; I just wanted some-
one occasionally to whisper when I entered a room, "That one? He's a novelist. What? One book, I think, I don't remember the title." I didn't know any published writers and in my seven years in New York I'd never even seen one.
The Newspaper Guild had won us five weeks of vacation; I had accumulated three weeks from the preceding year, which gave me two months of freedom. I spent them on Fire Island in a beautiful Chinese-style house with sliding glass doors looking out on the Bay, and there I wrote most of the new novel.
On Friday evening pale, tired-looking young businessmen, my roommates, arrived in their suits and ties smelling of cigarette smoke and the beer they'd drunk on the train. I'd come down to the dock to greet their ferry. I'd load their suitcases in my red wagon. I'd be soft-spoken and tan, barefoot, in shorts with no shirt, eager to talk to them after my week of solitude though I was on an entirely different timetable. They josded for control of the bathroom with the same nerviness they showed in pushing onto a subway car before the door shut. By midnight they'd applied their facial masks and peeled them off. They'd ironed and donned their painter's pants (the thin white cotton trousers were attached to a bib and shoulder straps, the whole supplied with several long, narrow pockets for paintbrushes). They'd gelled their hair, reshaved and applied some bronzer. Drops had whitened their eyes and a cream had erased the dark circles under them. And they'd taken such powerful drugs that they talked incessandy, fell down laughing, forgot the food burning on the stove and at midnight, when it was served, had no interest in touching its charred, gummy remains. By one in the morning we were all off in a loud wolf pack bound for the disco, where we'd dance till dawn. Everyone was frantic to cram in as much fun as possible during the forty-eight hours of freedom allotted them each weekend. The rents were so high that some of the guys could afford only a half share, which entided them to come out only every other weekend.
By Saturday night everyone in the house had setded down a bit and dinner was more decorous, the conversation earnest and thoughtful, the food well prepared and eaten with appreciation. My roommates had strolled up and down the beach all day, checking out the new faces and bodies, running into friends and exchanging gossip and invitations. Now they were tanner, more rested, carefree adolescents rather than the careworn men they'd been the night before. Fourteen of us sat dowm at ten in
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the evening and we saw our reflections suspended in the plate-glass window, as though we were a corporation of burghers painted by Rembrandt, until someone turned on the porch light and canceled us out. Caught between the exigencies of work during the week and the laborious pleasures of disco dancing, seduction and sex that were to follow, we had just this long, quiet moment to joke, to confide, even to talk.
For me the weekends were like the splashy, passionate acts and the weeks like the nearly silent, certainly solitary intervals. So often in the city I was impatient with the smoke and drink, the coming and going, above all the defiling talk with which we so poindessly filled every moment. But here, on the island, I rose with one perfect dawn after another, made my cofTee and in the Baccarat-clear, ringing silence I sat down to write a novel nearly as mysterious to me as it would eventually be to a small cult of readers.
I had found an exhilarating if suicidal liberation in my rejection slips. Everyone said my writing was cold; now I'd become glacial, although the ice would contain a flame, the same secret passion that only those men who'd made love to me knew about. Editors had said my subject matter was too "special" to interest other people. Now I would imagine for myself an undistractible reader whose mind was limpid and composed, ready to follow me no matter where I might lead. I wanted to show the anguish of being a frightened, crafty being in a hostile world full of sensual delights.
In the book, the narrator remarks that he is playing an organ sounding in another room somewhere. He can't hear what he's playing, nor does he know how to play, but when he runs down the hall the rapt listeners assure him he's inspired and hasn't made the slightest mistake. I hoped that my novel, which I knew how to drive but had never seen on the road, would perform just as dazzlingly. When I wrote it I sometimes felt as though I were wearing a lab coat, so precise and objective were my manipulations of every elusive element. At the same time I kept repeating to myself with a smile, "I just work here," as though to excuse my incomprehension of my own book.
The hero was no longer meant to be a simulacrum of myself No, he was a "character" to whom I attributed a fussy, pedantic voice, a logic-chopping niceness, a systematic, endlessly metastasizing paranoia; he shared my desire to please and a sexuality based on gratitude though all too sensitive to violence. He was far more snobbish than I although like me he was by turns shy and a show-off. That he was no longer a stand-in
for me relieved me. I was tired of being dogged by this too-precise double who converted my soft clouds into palpable rain.
My life that summer on Fire Island was one of solitude and discipline during the day, debauchery by night. During the day I filled the big, sun-struck house with Mozart's Clarinet Concerto, ate diet food, did a hundred sit-ups on the sliver of private beach down beside the Bay. I took an hour of sun, carefully basting myself in oil and stretching and pulling my muscles through yoga exercises. If I made a sortie at all it was only to the market. Otherwise I indulged in long unnumbered hours of entranced writing. I knew that my whole being generated a distinctive hum if I found the right tone for my novel, a register unlike any I'd ever sounded before. Sometimes I felt I was traveling at the bottom of a sunless sea in a submarine and the only thing that kept me on course was that thin, sonic signal. I had no other principle of literary construction.
I'd read The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, an eleventh-century Japanese court diary full of anecdotes, lists and jottings about daily events. The writer, like my hero, was an unapologetic snob wlio included in her list of "hateful things" a curious item: the sight of beautiful snow on the houses of poor people. At the court, women seldom married but were free to choose lovers, even on a rapidly rotating basis. The men never actually saw the women until the (still obscure or at least dim) moment of erotic encounter, a moment oddly violent and brutish, although preceded by courtship poems and followed by poems of regret and longing the next day.
But in fact every moment of the day required the production of such "spontaneous poems." I remember once running up to Jamie at the office and saying brightly, "Have you ever thought what it would have been like to live at the Heian court at the time of The Tale of Genjt?"
Haggard, he stared at me and said, "A nightmare."
Suddenly I saw Fire Island as an exact analogue to medieval Japan— an idle and gossipy court society, profoundly hierarchical if superficially egalitarian (didn't the islanders all dress alike, wear the same sawed-ofT jeans and ripped T-shirts, though back on the mainland one was a bank president and the next an ailing and penniless hustler?). Just as the courtiers had replaced ethics with aesthetics and worried more about matching the colors of superimposed layers of sleeves than about the fate of last year's favorite, in the same way the islanders were capable of watching a fire destroy a house in which people were dying and judge it a pity the flames weren't bluer. Even the contrast between decorous social
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life and brutal sensuality seemed to be a common denominator, as did the disposable sex partners and the unchanging terms used in speaking of them. Every night I'd bring someone different back to the house, find another hand prying open my ass, another mouth engulfing my penis, and no matter how eccentric his pillow talk or behavior, the next day I'd call to tell a friend, "He was a hunky number, well-hung, very hot to trot."
And yet, I thought, what Heian Japan hadn't known was that Fire Island specialty—the endless Saturday made up of hours and hours of walking up and down the beach cruising (even here our hedonism had its practical side, since kicking through the surf was intended to build up our calves and the burning reflection of sun on sand to hurry up and even out our tans). Stripped of clothes and yet dressed in our expensive haircuts and Speedos and gym-bought muscles, our feet pumiced smooth by trudging through miles and miles of sand, we felt the freedom of breasting water and wind, of slipping a hand around an ocean-clammy waist, of kissing a shoulder tasting of brine if smelling of coconut oil, of exchanging glances and, if the glance lingered, of detouring behind the dunes where a moment later we'd be ambling up a path redolent of sun-hot pine needles, an erection poking its sticky red head above a loosened drawstring. If we were each by chance on the same cycle of the same drug, our blue lips and twitches and paranoia at last surpassed and evened out toward universal love, we would touch each other with childish awe, we'd lie naked in the sand for hours, white loins burning pink, and we'd hold two penises in one hand, dumbstruck by this new member's heft and heat, or we'd lick the closed eyelid, fluttering like a moth caught in a hand, or lick inside each nostril, tasting its concentrated, snail-like saltiness, or explore the earlobe, surprised at its marsupial thinness and its delicate, ramifying veins transporting blood even to the most farflung periphery'. . . .
