The Farewell Symphony (20 page)

After Brice died I discovered that all my clothes were rumpled and stained with food. I threw out some of them and took the rest off to the dry-cleaner's. I'd neglected my appearance completely during the last two years of Brice's illness.

Just a month after Brice's death I went to Easter mass at St. Eustache and—while contemplating the gold and white altar under the pale clarity of the spring light pulsing in through the unstained-glass windows and transecting the incense—I listened to the intimate words of the Resurrection, all the more striking because filtered through the unfamiliar suavities of the French language. Distanced in this way, the words reached right inside me, words that said. Do not mourn me. I have come back, I am here beside you, I live. I live.

I called my friend Brad and told him I was terribly lonely but couldn't bear to be with friends, not all the time, because then all we'd do was discuss Brice. Maybe I didn't like my familiar self looked at by old friends. I wanted to discover someone new and be someone new to him. I wanted Brad to find me a nice husder, someone who'd come in the afternoon or at midnight or whenever I needed him, someone who'd hold me in his arms and watch old movies with me or tell me the stor)' of his life.

He found me Olivier, a disillusioned sweetheart, a thirty-something guy as disabused as a man my age but someone who just five years earlier had still probably had lots of hopes. I told him about Brice and he said he understood, he'd lost his mother, she looked so young everyone had assumed she was his sister, they went out to dance in the clubs together, and then she'd died—and suddenly he was Brice, my Brice who'd lived

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through his twenties and until his death at thirty-two in the shadow of his mother's death. Olivier was the sort of boy who shrugs a lot, whose handsome full lips are always turned down, who expects nothing more out of life, the sort who'd be hopeless as a lover since he'd have no enthusiasm to offer, but who, as a rent boy, can kiss you sadly, professionally, and make you feel good because that's his job.

For so long I'd lived a life disciplined by Brice's crises; like a mother who awakens when her baby cries, I'd fly to his side whenever he'd need me in the middle of the night. I was like one of those mothers whose milk spurts out of her breast when her baby cries in another room. Now I had vast, emptv' hectares of time to fill. Olivier was ideal because I could summon him whenever I needed him and send him off with a polite, "Gee, I'm awfully tired." I liked the sinfulness of drawing the curtains in the middle of the day and getting stoned.

As the days lengthened the sun became brighter and more invasive. From the sidewalk I'd look down long passageways at inner courtyards, usually so gloomy and glaucous, suddenly gaily sparkling with light dancing on the basin of the rusting water pump or with light projected across the flagstones and reflected off the warped panes of the concierge's loge. I felt that that light, like the sunlight that once a year follows a brass line traced into the floor of the cathedral at Bologna, was exploring a secret vein in my soul that had never been touched before. Aren't there all sorts of temples, Mayan or Egyptian, in which the holy of holies is illuminated only on the single day sacred to the local deity, eagle or alligator?

When I flew back from Europe in 1970 after my sLx months in Rome, a friend met me at the airport in New York, popped some speed laced with a hallucinogen into my mouth, and led me on a tour of the new gay discos that had sprung up like magic mushrooms since my departure. I was shocked by how much the cit\^ had changed. Where before there had been a few gay boys hanging out on a stoop along Christopher Street, now there were armies of men marching in every direction off Sheridan Square. Not just A-Trainers—the blacks and Puerto Ricans who would come down from Harlem on the express subway, men who were already bold and streetwise—but even the previously timid white boys of lower Manhattan were now out in sawed-off shorts a:id guinea T-shirts, shouting and waving and surging into the traffic. "Is this a holiday or what?" I asked my Virgil.

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"Not at all," he said to his wide-eyed Dante, "it's an ordinary evening in New Haven or should we say Greenwich Village."

At the foot of Christopher Street, near the docks, there was a new bar called Christopher's End where a single stripper, a bit pudgy and smiling drunkenly, danced on a dais while he wriggled out of his Jockey shorts. He threw them at a famous painter I recognized, who then got up on the stage and tried to fuck the guy right there. A bouncer snatched the painter by the collar and lifted him off the dais. When I introduced the painter to my friend and said, "Do you two know each other?" he said, "Know each other? We were crumb-girls together at the Last Supper." I then remembered that the painter collected and preserved these odd camp expressions of the past, verbal memorabilia, the verbal equivalent of drag ball tiaras or boas from the twenties.

Afterwards I went into a dark backroom and looked down a narrow chute—just a foot wide, too narrow to walk through—at two naked men who were taking turns sucking each other It was too dark and I'd drunk too much to understand what was going on. Were the men performers or just other customers? Was it permitted to take one's clothes off in this room? What about the police? We were looking at the couple, I imagine, through the slowly rotating blades of a fan, but the effect was of an amateur porno film unwinding so slowly that the black bands separating each frame were visible and hovering queasily in the middle of the screen.

I was led to a huge disco in a warehouse in the meat-packing district. There hundreds of guys were dancing under black light, which turned their city-pale torsos tan, their white T-shirts radioactive blue, a false tooth black, a trail of eye drops snaking down a cheek light green, a shock of peroxided hair a weird white. At the old Stonewall (now a wood bowl and sheepskin rug store) the music had been pumped out of a jukebox with intervals of silence between each selection, but at the Zoo a discaire, important as a broadcasting engineer in a glassed-in booth, blended the music seamlessly from one turntable to a second, the transition almost unnoticeable. Back then no single song was long enough to sustain our drug-induced frenzy so the disc-jockey often went from one record to an identical cut in another copy of the same record, thereby doubling our pleasure. The disc-jockeys themselves were becoming prominent members of the gay community—known for their ability to build a mood and take it even higher.

On a dais a go-go boy in a white towel was dancing. The towel glowed

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in the black light as he draped it with ingenuity and provocativeness. He was a small blond who showed us his ass but never his cock, which grew larger the longer it remained imisible. I watched him for hours, entranced. He handed out his phone number and name, which he'd neady printed out in advance, to several of us gathered around him. If guys got too grabby he pushed them back down the steps with his long legs.

During his break he said, "Wait till I'm off and I'll go home with you." I suppose I thought that meant at four in the morning, the hour when bars used to close in New York, but in fact last call was at six. All the men he encouraged, I noticed, had hair as long as mine and thick. Viva Zapata mustaches. For him we were bandits and he our bandit queen.

When he and his roommate, the obese bouncer, were at last ready to go, it was seven in the morning. Once we emerged into the daylight I saw that my dancer was a trashy bleached blond with horrible pizza-face acne and rotten teeth, but I was too polite to back out of our date. The bouncer had an old car and drove us to their apartment in a remote section of Brooklyn. My ardor turned to stone as my speed wore off and I recognized how hard it would be ever to get back home. And I picked up that the bouncer was in love with the dancer and was brooding ominously over my presence.

The apartment smelled of roach spray and bacon. Dirty dishes teetered in piles all over the kitchen. The couch opened out into a bed. The candy-striped sheets were stilT with come. Beside the bed was a life-size plaster statue of a Moor in a turban and culottes, his chest and legs bare, his eyes large and white and his lips painted a ruby red. With one arm he held up a floor lamp, its shade as big as a busde and dripping glass bangles.

The dancer, a bronzed faunJet who'd pushed all tliose broad-shouldered men away from his dais last night like Marilyn Monroe toppling a line of adoring chorus boys, was now desperately whining and tiying to pull me back into his lumpy couch bed with the hinged bar of metal that cut across the back. Minutes after I'd come I was so repelled that I went staggering out into the sunny empty Sunday morning streets.

I told Maria that I was impressed by how seriously New Yorkers took themselves now, how sure they were that all the world was hanging on their latest cry; of course eternal Rome, by contrast, was so unchanging and its past so indisputably central that today's Romans could afford to be trivial, shepherds in rags grazing their sheep beside toppled imperial columns. I was probably just irritated that no one in New York wanted to

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hear about my Roman holiday and that by the time I'd sorted out my mental slides for a thorough presentation my audience had melted away.

For eight years in New York I'd worked for a world-famous firm that employed primarily bluebloods from the best schools, and even if I'd arrived disastrously late for work every morning and sipped at two-hour-long, wet luncheons and spent the rest of the time on the phone or roaming the corridors looking for conversations, nevertheless I had the security and prestige of my job—and a good salary. I'd proved my father wrong, he who'd predicted I was too unstable and mediocre to succeed in New York.

He'd paid a lot of money to a psychiatrist hoping I'd recover from my homosexuality, marry and setde down to the humdrum, workaday world. He'd always said I coveted too much attention, that I imagined I was special, that I expected an existence of all frills, that I was incapable of creating a normal, average life for myself To reassure him I'd patched together a simulacrum of an average life, first at the university, where I joined his fraternity and studied something useful, Chinese, later in New York, where I worked for the conservative weekly magazine he himself read. I hadn't dyed my hair or tattooed my arm and if I was unmarried at thirty that omission could still be dismissed as a minor eccentricity or an excess of choosiness soon to be rectified. Since my father had no friends he couldn't even worry about what the neighbors would think. No, his sense of propriety was purely abstract, a Karma accountable only to the gods.

But now I was falling ofi" the edge of the world. In six months of sipping white wine in Rome I'd spent the seven thousand dollars in profit-sharing I'd accumulated over eight years. I was back in New York without a job or an apartment. When an older guy I'd tricked with a few times before my Roman holiday saw me at the gym, he said, "But you've lost your looks. What have you been doing? You're skinny and puffy, not such a great combination." My father was right—I was unsavory.

I was living with Maria, but I felt out of place. She was fasddious, calm, unambitious, whereas I was sloppy and driven by my twin appetites for sex and success, both of which struck me in her presence as hairy and unwashed. She spoke to her cats in German and gave them fragrant cooked chicken livers to eat but let them slip through the bars on her windows and roam free through the wild New York night, noisy with sirens and rusding with a life more exciting than one's own because of its speed. Those overexposed photographs that eliminate the substance of vehicles

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and render traffic as just the scrawled calligraphy of headlights seemed the surest transcription of the urban blur. Strafing lights, the rumbling of the subway, the smell and spoor of sex, the tides of pedestrians channeled by the massive seawalls of skyscrapers—these were the never-stilled dynamics of the city pulsing just outside Maria's windows.

I too wanted to slip through the bars but I also needed to prove to her and to myself that I was still capable of sitting home and "schmoozing" (our newly acquired New York Jewish word), far from the world's michigas and kvetching and tsuris. Maria promised cozy evenings imbued with Gemutlichkeit (a German word from her German youth in Iowa). Just as Yiddish was considered to be a warmer, friendlier version of German, so her spodess apartment with its violets on the windowsills, its many litde lamps, the black leather and rosewood armchair, the framed family photos and the folding screen she'd painted with a scene of a moonlit balustrade and a diaphanous curtain blowing in the wind—so this New York home, half bohemian and half bourgeois, was an ideal version of Midwestern propriety.

I remember we fought over ideas as we'd done when 1 was a teenager and we'd first met. Back then we'd quarreled about art and politics; now we disagreed about whether women or gay men were the more oppressed.

"How can you say women are a minority when they constitute fifty-one percent of the population?" I asked.

"In South .Africa blacks are ninety-five percent of the population and they're slaves."

"Yeah," I said, "but women at least don't feel guilty about just existing. Femininity isn't classified as a disease or a crime or a sin, but homosexuality is."

"Essentially all this fancy new gay liberation just involves a tiny part of a privileged male population and is a fairly trivial matter. I'm talking about half the world's population, about hundreds of millions of women who are beat and starved and overworked and underpaid if they're paid at all. Even in .America most poor households are headed by single women."

Maria's political views would make her blood pressure mount dangerously; I'd convince myself I could see her veins ticking just behind the transparent skin stretched over her temples. To calm herself she'd make a German salad of sliced cucumbers marinated in white vinegar, sugar and dill. She'd gulp down a glass of white wine. She'd throw a leg over the