The Farewell Symphony (22 page)

"Ma hai detto che hai sentito la mia mancanza."

"So what? In English that means nothing special. 'I miss my mother, I missed my train, last night I missed my enema.' It means absolutely nothing at all."

She was in her slip, sitting up on the mattress, her hair pushed forward on one side. She looked miserable. "In Italian it means 'I love you.' "

The next day she took a train for New Haven, where she knew a tall, skinny American graduate student who'd spent a year in Rome studying Italian social structure. Two weeks later they were married.

I HAD BECOME almost entirely a Villager and I seldom ventured above EDurteenth Street, not even to see the ballet, and if I put on a coat and tie for a Midtown lunch with Jamie I felt as strange as a cowboy must feel in Paris. My "dress up" clothes were out of date, the trousers pegged and cuffed rather than bellbottoms, the jacket lapels straight and narrow rather than wide and notched, and my ties weren't as

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broad and floral as fashion dictated. Jamie, of course, wouldn't have noticed since he was still wearing garters and white breast-pocket handkerchiefs to go with his Brooks Brothers "sack" suits. I was a bit embarrassed to see any of my former colleagues, almost as though Td lost the knack of playing straight, talking loud, thumping backs, and had clearly come down in the world.

Sometimes I read my work to Butler, who was also working on a novel. He had left his wife for a shaggy-browed Jewish architect who owned an immense Hoboken loft into which he'd inserted Mackintosh ladder-backed chairs and gesso panels inlaid with gems. Butler was free to stay home, perform his sit-ups while listening to a recording of Shakespeare's sonnets, which he was trying to get by heart. He kept a blank notebook from Venice constantly at his side in which he could jot down a line, a thought or even just a word that might end up some day in a story. He was at once exquisite and heavy-handed, the perfect student with very little sense of humor. At least he had none of Maria's ability to catch herself and quake with laughter at her own pomposity or absurdity.

Buder kept carbons of all his letters, which were obviously written with one eye on posterity, full of nature descriptions, lengthy impressions of historic monuments he'd visited and reflections on current social problems, all adorned with appropriate tags from Horace or Boileau. He hadn't yet published a book but he was already lamenting that his future works would probably not be printed on acid-free paper. "Microfilm! That is the only solution. We must be sure our books—" (mine were included as a courtesy)—"are microfilmed or else they'll end up as britde, yellowing scraps scattered on the library floor." This archival quandary kept him awake at night. He returned to the problem often. His letters and manuscripts, I noticed, were confided to paper that would oudast the centuries.

Like many American intellectuals raised in small towns in modest circumstances, he'd not grown up listening to classical music, though he'd played the tuba part in his high school band's version of Sibelius's Fin-landia; now as an adult and cultured New Yorker, he listened dutifully to records, studied scores and read program notes. There was no indication he ever closed his eyes, swept away by melancholy, longing or a sense of excruciating beauty. Right away he'd learned to sneer at Tchaikovsky, Dvorvak and, incidentally, Sibelius, and to esteem Bach (especially the unaccompanied cello sonatas), the Beethoven of the late quartets, Mozart's operas, all Monteverdi; he even sang motets in an a capeOa

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group and when we were driving from Rome to Paris after he rescued me he offered to teach me medieval part songs so we could sing together while drixing and not "waste time." When I nixed that plan, he translated, whenever I was driving, from a fat guidebook in Italian published by the AutomobOe Touring Club, a scholarly tome of a thousand pages printed on bible paper that told me much more than I wanted to know about the history of Volterra and the iconographic eccentricities to be found in Rosso Fiorentino's strangely Manneristic Deposition from the Cross. I once teased Buder by saying he was like a Victorian miss who'd been required to pick up all the accomplishments (sewing, music making, canning, painting on china) since she didn't have a dowry.

The same guilt-provoking complaints (that no doubt made Buder a lover whom one could never take for granted because one could never please him) rendered him annoying as a friend. Somehow I was always "disappointing" him because I'd forgotten to phone, to wonder how his cold was progressing, to ask after his current novella. If he was severely disappointed, his dismay could send him into a terrible pout.

He told me I was basically a consumer—of words, money, men. He said he thought I had to be fueled with a high-octane version of all the world had to offer His observation blended astonishment with distaste. Certainly he was an epicurean who could pick quizzically over a single fresh sardine during a long evening in which I would knock back two dozen oysters, an entire roast chicken, potatoes with a whole head of garlic and a half gallon of California red. He kept up with me only in his alcohol consumption, although unlike me he modulated tastefully from blond Lillet on the rocks with a twist of orange peel to a white wine with the sardine, a light Beaujolais with the four kinds of goat cheese (chalky, white and nearly tasteless—the ultimate upper-class food), an Armagnac in a giant globe snifter to toy with beside the fire, as though he'd accepted it only for its light-refracting properties.

When he was elaborately sauced he'd become genial. His accent would revert to Southern, suddenly one understood why he had laugh lines around his eyes, and he sketched an elegandy scaled-down allusion to . . . yes, it must be, to a slap on the knee. He passed around thin, experdy rolled joints. When he crossed the room he appeared to have an extra folding place above his kneecaps. In sandals his feet looked immense, as though so much willowiness above needed a big taproot below. When he danced he seemed to be treading grapes in place. In fact, closer study revealed that he never moved his size-12 shoes at all, although his feet gen-

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eratcd waves of motion sent up through his long legs and into his lean flanks and supple torso, down through shoulders which shone as though they'd been chamoised with an expensive, furniture-makers' beeswax. No doubt he'd practiced his movements as he perfected everything else, but he gave the illusion at least of forgetting himself entirely when he danced.

Late at night his true kindness and vulnerability would come out. Then he'd tell me in fits and starts the story of his childhood. His real mother, a sweet Southern woman, had died when he was five. His father had married two years later a woman who was good to Buder until he was nine when she started having children of her own. She went on to have three children altogether and with each birth she turned fractionally further away from Buder. He'd gone from being the center of a family and his father's cherished link to his lost wife to an unwelcome outsider, someone who ate too much, breathed too much air, occupied a bed needed by one of the legitimate children.

It was then that Butler, until that time a lazy, moody boy, decided to become irreproachable. He read with a pencil in hand, he excelled in all subjects, he even achieved as much popularity as a boy could in a Southern town if he wasn't athletic. The church replaced the playing field. He taught Sunday School, he visited sick parishioners and he memorized all the Psalms, the Song of Songs and large parts of the Gospels. His constant bedtime prayer was, "Oh, Lord, make me a preacher when I grow up."

But his high school English teacher had other ideas for him. A patrician from Nashville, she pushed him to write poetry of the obviously beguiling Sara Teasdale variety, the sort she herself wrote in the privacy of her room. He and she discussed the books she suggested, including some racy ones banned in their Georgia town such as Catcher in the Rye and From Here to Eternity.

Thanks to her encouragement he won a French contest and the poetry contest (prize fifty dollars) held at the Public Library in memory of Mrs. Wentworth Bean IIL He scored in the high 700s in the CoDege Aptitude Tests, the best mark in the state, and was admitted a year early to the University of Georgia. From there on in he always pulled in every available honor and scholarship, did his doctorate on Mallarme at Columbia and began his succession of comfortable if not luxurious marriages (only the first one to a woman). For someone who'd emerged from such a dismal childhood he had unexpectedly few material ambitions; all he longed for was the novelist's laurel and a place on Mount Parnassus. As a

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consequence he was judicious to the extreme in his praise of other writers; once when I asked him to name his top ten, he couldn't get beyond five ("Stendhal wrote too rapidly although with admirable verve," he said with typical reserve, "even if he tells us more than he shows").

The strange thing was that I too had what we called in our campy way a "bluestocking side." I, too, had been an unhappy sissy boy who'd found consolation in books. Like Buder I'd confounded the arts with European refinement, which in turn I assumed must guarantee a smiling moral tolerance. I'd hated myself when I wallowed away for an evening watching TV and only Maria's early influence had made me appreciate pop music, though I felt more reassured when I listened to The Magic Flute or a Bartok string quartet. In the 1970s, even when I was so drunk I had to hold one eye shut in order to read, what I would read was Spinoza or the Minima Moralia. During those years I vigorously underlined passages in dozens of the most austere books of philosophy, yet when I page through them now I neither recognize the words nor can discover any system behind my highlighting. I had everything in common with Butler; perhaps what I despised in him was precisely what we shared. By laughing at him I could pretend I wasn't a Midwestern exquisite, a homegrown dandy, and by criticizing his fmickiness I could suggest I was made of tougher stuff.

Certainly many people teased me for being an intellectual and an aesthete, although around Butler I could think of my prose as coarse, my manners democratic and my tastes promiscuous. Perhaps I liked him because beside him I felt crude and careless—an attractive contrast that excused my failure to learn foreign languages, remember opera plots or capture the devotion of a handsome man.

During the nine years I'd lived in New York I'd never met a published writer, although we were always on the alert to the possible passage of such a rare bird. I blamed my sexual interest in younger men for my paucity of interesting acquaintances, but the explanation remained theoretical since I continued to resist the approach of anyone over forty. To me it was impossible to see an older man as gifted; I was convinced that age's modey (bald spot, second chin, sagging belly) could be worn only by fools.

Butler met a famous poet and man of letters named Max Richards at a gay bar. We'd heard that Richards went to one bar, the Stud, and through frequenting it almost nighdy, Butler finally met him. With extreme generosity Buder spoke to Richards mosdy of my work and especially of my Japanese-Fire Island novel. Richards was ubiquitous as a

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judge of literary contests, poetry editor of little magazines, friend to the famous and patron to the young and talented.

One morning the phone rang about eleven while I was still sitting tragically over my first cup of coffee and could barely articulate. Before I picked up I sang the scales to chase the sleep out of my voice. "Hello."

"Oh, I see I awakened you. This is Max Richards—I presume that name means something to you?"

"Hi, of course, Buder—"

"I see it does." There was a little burst of laughter, not Richards's, and I realized he must be playing to an admirer. "It appears you have something to show me?"

"Well, I have some stories, a novel, and now I've started a new novel—"

"I want to see it all. But let's start with the finished novel, not with the (Euvres completes. Do you have a typescript at your house?"

"Yes, Mr. Richards, I'd be delighted to stop by—"

"No need for that. I'U be heading uptown today at one to have lunch with Lee Krasner? Jackson Pollock's widow? And then to see my shrink. Do you think you could be standing at the corner of Horatio and Eighth Avenue, on the southwest corner, at precisely twelve-fifty, with the manuscript in hand?"

"Of course, Mr. Richards, I'll be there."

"I realize it's only an hour and fifty minutes away. Will that give you time to do your toilette and, as the young say, 'get your day on the road'?" Again, the appreciative chuckle in the background.

"Sure, plenty of time," I said, now more relaxed.

"Very good. Then I'll count on you."

Suddenly I was holding a buzzing receiver in my hand.

If I'd had a dog I would have waltzed it around the room, so exultant was I. I instandy called Buder "Am I disturbing you?"

"Well, if I sound funny it's because I'm doing a full facial wrap. You take these plantain leaves—"

"Max Richards just called me. I'm going to hand him my manuscript on the corner in two hours."

"Sounds very Goldfinger He probably wants to see what you look like before he commits himself to a full evening."

"Precisely. What should I wear?"

"Angora sweater and Dacron pedal-pushers?"

"I thought pasties and micro-skirt, perhaps the lame? Oh, Buder, I am thrilled. Maybe my luck is about to turn and all thanks to you."

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I put on sneakers and no socks, my tightest blue-jean shorts and an unironed grey T-shirt. I was reeHng in a Breughel peasant dance of signi-fiers. At thirty was I too old to be dressed so trashily? Would I look a Village vagrant, part of the great lost tribe of actor-singer-dancer-waiters, baker by night, novelist by day? Or would I come off as a pathetic husder, pushing the body because the work was feeble, one of the superannuated downtown sex symbols? Certainly Fd never have worn the same clothes if my manuscript drop had involved a straight man. Nor a gay man my own age. But I knew that Max Richards was a decade older than me and I, who'd had so little experience seducing older men, made the coarsest assumptions about them. And yet, as Maria had once said, "It's terrible how your most cold-hearted, cynical predictions usually turn out to be true."