The Farewell Symphony (29 page)

I ran into someone I'd tricked with ten years before (I couldn't remember his name but for some reason recaUed his initials, E.G.G., which he'd had monogrammed on his dress shirts). We encapsulated our last decade for each other in a few brief sentences, two upbeats to one downbeat, which gave me that bravura rush of somehow being in control of my destiny and knowing exacdy where I was heading, until he said, "How's the writing going?"

"The pits," I said. "I've just added another unpublished novel to my invisible osuvre." From New York stand-up comics I'd learned to make a brassy joke of my plight, the opposite to Midwestern ways, which for my

The Farewell Symphony

parents' generation dictated hiding failure and for mine providing a full, unhappy confession.

"Oh, well," he said, "keep up the good fight." His bromide was so formulaic that it constituted a dismissal; I looked into the mirror behind the bar to see that he'd caught the eye of a guy the age I'd been when he'd seduced me. The few words we'd exchanged, however painful, had repatriated me to New York. On a good day I could waUc down Christopher Street and know every twentieth guy, know to nod at him, even know a scrap of personal gossip about him, but tonight I'd been desperate to exist if only for a few seconds in someone's familiar eyes, no matter whose.

I walked down Christopher to the docks, passing a few roving packs of noisy men in leathers and denims. Before, in the sixties, gay men had dressed with care in pressed trousers and pastel-colored cashmere sweaters under Burberry raincoats or, more usually, tan windbreakers cut short enough to reveal the basket and buns. Guys had street-cruised at any hour back then and sought to "turn a trick" (as both gays and prostitutes put it)—an hour or a whole night at home that began with a drink and a bit of conversation and ended between sheets. Now, since the innovation of the back room, aU sex took place only very late and while still partially clothed and in public or semi-public places where no talk was required. In fact the least word broke the spell.

This vow of silence had eliminated the last link with the old, established world of man and woman, the one in which sexuality was used as a bright bait, as reward or recompense, in a game that otherwise concerned suitable pairings, the suitability determined by money, age, religion, race. Gay couples might still observe the familiar conventions, but for that very reason gay men looked down on marriage itself as retrograde. Perhaps that's why gay couples were usually relegated to Brooklyn Heights (if they were dully domestic) or the Upper East Side (if they were stylish) or West (if bookish)—anywhere out of sight of these bold, laughing Villagers with their mustaches, ringing voices, their clothes contrived as erotic advertisement, their warm, seasoned faces, just a bit lined and vulpine from so many nights on the hunt, their scent-free bodies molded, more and more, by black leather since the sadistic was the only look that went well with extreme pallor.

At four in the morning I discovered beside a warehouse dock, wedged between two trucks, a man-mountain being ascended by five alpinists. Here was a huge, barrel-chested man, strong all over, devoid of the sculpted definition of a gym-built body; no, he was like a turn-of-the-

'79

century wrestler, hair brilliantincd and parted in the middle, mouth engulfed by a handlebar mustache flowing directly into shaggy sideburns, the shoulders like boulders in cream, the oiled chest broad and the calves encased in knee-high black stockings held up by garters. I couldn't see him very clearly but I could see my Gulliver accepting the feverish attention of these live Lilliputians.

I was taller and stronger than his admirers but Gulliver submitted to us all with the egalitarianism of passivity—anyone could get a grab of him. I tried to push the others aside but they came clawing and chewing back, like a litter of newborn pups fighting for their mother's teats.

After a cop car glided slowly past and frightened us, I said, "Why don't you guys come just around the corner to my place?" Once Gulliver agreed the others fell in behind him. They didn't trust me not to exclude them at the last moment so stuck as close to their leader as Fafner to the Rheingold.

In my tiny, dirty, neglected apartment, my studio with the barred windows and the sour smell of mildewed bathroom tiles and the sharp, chemical odor of roach spray (odor of burning rust), I pushed aside my still unpacked bag and pulled my two mattresses onto the floor. Within seconds the elves had undressed their giant, and one after another they sat on his long, thick penis. I whispered into his ear, "When they leave, stay with me and sleep over." As the dawn light entered my dark room like a Michelangelo releasing a figure from stone, it chiseled more and more detail into the David's back and buttocks, which were pounding with powerful strokes into the fourth of the five tiny guests, pile-driving this guy, too, into a moaning, swooning climax until his fist foamed over with spurts of sperm.

At last they were all smiling and sipping cups of instant coffee they had to share (I had only two cups). They were dancing on one foot and staggering as they stepped into fancy bikini underwear, the sort a Spanish mother might buy in packs of five in a Newark shopping mall. They wriggled into jeans and finger-combed raven-black hair as they took turns looking at themselves in a broken shard of mirror they passed around. At last they were gone. Now the sun had sculpted my big captive much too long and left him flawed, passing direcdy from the ideal lineaments of a Greek deity to the deformities of a late Roman statuette of a comic character. Even his skin no longer looked like sugar dissolving in a spoon but had taken on the grainy, tobacco-stained hue of old piano keys.

I assumed his exertions had exhausted him, but no, he mounted me.

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too, not with a cocksman's challenge to himself to plug eveiy hole but rather with a rhythm that struck me as machine powered, intentionless and unstoppable. When it was over he turned into a sad, heavy man.

"When I was growing up," he said, after we'd talked a while, "everyone made fun of me. They called me the Doofus."

"What's that?" I asked.

"WTiat do you mean, what's that? Don't you know what a doofus is? It's an idiot, a moron, a retard. You see, everyone in my family—my mother and father and my brother, they're all slow, they're retarded, and they can't work. I'm the only person in the family who can do things like read and write and add and drive a car and cash checks. I'm no genius. I never graduated high school. But I can look after the others. I work for the Automobile Association of America. I work nights. I dispatch repair trucks to accidents and breakdowns. I can't read real books—and the news on television? That's too hard for me."

"It's hard for eveiyone," I said suavely.

"Not for you, not for most people. But I'm just a doofus, I guess."

I kissed his oUy forehead. We were still lying on a bare mattress although the sun had become as bright as it was going to get today. The doofus had put on a pair of boxer shorts covered with brown diamonds. I suppose modesty was suitable to someone who had so much to hide and whose attributes were so in demand. I wanted to write, to call my mother, to eat, to check in with my friends, but here I had beside me this sexual prodigy who'd turned into a sad, struggling human being, and if I put it to myself that way I did so because, earlier, sexual desire had blinded me to his suffering humanity.

His back was covered with boUs and his teeth were etched in scum; these afllictions seemed like those of a punished Job or a half-human Caliban. Or maybe he seemed more like an erotic golem about to revert to mud and straw, having seived his master by servicing him. Even these comparisons were the idle, systemic chatter of an over-educated, undisciplined mind, one that couldn't come to terms with the Doofus and what he represented.

"Did you ever date girls?" I asked.

"Nah, what goil—" he had a Brookl)^ accent—"what goil is gonna wanna be seen wit' me, a guy like me? Huh? I ask you. . . . Nah, I stick with the fellas. AiX these litde guys are real nice to me—"

"Well, sure they are," I said, "considering you're a sexual maestro!"

"A what?"

"Well, you're great sex."

"Thanks. I dunno. Anyway, there's no future with guys. They all like me till they come, then they wanna get rid of me. You prob'ly wanna get rid of me, right? You know, you remind me of this other guy I met, this poet guy, I think he said he was a poet, anyway a hell of a nice fella, who lives in a house with a red door on, what is that, P2ast Eleventh Street?"

"Tenth," I said. "Is he called Tom? Is he the poetry editor of a magazine?"

"Dunno^"

"Thick black glasses, bald, bow tie, looks like Mr. Magoo in the comics?"

"Yeah, that's the guy"

"Yeah, that's Tom."

Suddenly I was delighted by this coincidence in Tom's and my taste. Just when I thought I'd surrendered to my most exaggerated predilection for a man covered with boils, an Adas who held a world of sorrows on his shoulders, I realized I wasn't alone in appreciating his monstrous gift. His appetite hadn't won him any girls, it excited most men but didn't hold them, and yet Tom and I had singled him out, just as he'd found us or at least in my case allowed himself to end up on my sweat-soaked mattress after a troupe of perverse amoretti had tiptoed away, flambeaux held high, leaving behind the satyr and his willing nymph.

So many comparisons, classical or Biblical, did not prevent me from wondering if I could live with the Doofus. I knew that I was capable of jerking off for years to come thinking about him; now that the years have come and gone I can swear to the accuracy of my prediction. But if he was all I desired, or what I desired most, could I surrender everything else to him, even my long, tormented dream of Sean?

I called Sean and found out that his Nuyorican poet had dropped him. I invited him into the city and we had dinner, just in a cheap litde joint, something I could afford, a coffee shop near where I lived, although it had a small glassed-in terrace giving on Hudson Street and its light foot traffic.

I didn't ask him about the end of his affair with Angel because I didn't want to become his confidant. I wanted in his eyes to remain a potential lover, in the hope that absence had regilded my aureole—although I'm sure now (and suspected even then) that things don't work that way: once friendship has demagnetized someone, he never again becomes attractive (in French the word for "magnet," aimant, is just one letter longer than the word for "lover").

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As the silences collected around us once again, Sean punctuated them by singing in his booming baritone voice litde snatches of melody, including the opening four notes of Beethoven's Fifth (is it called the "Fate theme"?). The seeming aimlessness of the evening and our assumed ca-sualness kept being underscored by this alarming motif, the knocker hammering at the door.

He talked of school, of classes he was taking, but I felt the presence of a new decorousness in his grave turns of phrase. If I used even the slightest bit of slang he'd wince. He narrated every stage of the evening, appreciating for us our food, our conversation, our friendship. This new man I sensed inhabiting him might have been an older lover, a professor perhaps, or maybe simply a teacher he admired, possibly an author he was reading—whoever it was, the gendeman had a highly developed appreciation of ceremony.

Suddenly I interrupted myself and said, "Sean, would you marry me? It's been ten years now that I've courted you. We've both been through a lot, you especially, but you'll never fmd anyone as devoted to you as I am. Now that we're entering our thirties, devotion—the longevity of my devotion—should count for something, surely."

He was smiling, charmed by my proposal, which wasn't at all campy; there was no suggestion that I wanted him to be my "husband." He'd heard me often enough rail against the "bourgeois institution of marriage," which in those days we pronounced as though it were a single conglomerate German denunciation. What I was proposing, he must have recognized, was a rite to commemorate a relationship that went beyond (as I hinted) mere passion and that was more permanent than the vagaries of desire. If he was always afraid that I lusted after his body alone, now I was reminding him that no lust could endure a decade. If he was susceptible to the appeal of ceremony, I was invoking one of the oldest. If he was lonely, I was here beside him.

"May I consider your proposal for a while, kind sir, before rephing?" he asked, smiling, bowing his head in polite obeisance. We talked of other things until we parted.

Everything seemed damned and I stumbled through the rest of the evening with only the greatest difficulty. Now I know that this catastrophic feeling of hopelessness falls over me whenever I fear rejection, as though I've already anticipated the worst and suffered from it. But then I did not yet know how to interpret (and discount) my despair I let it wither and kill

my sentiments; the gold that played through my fingers smelled a moment later of ash.

If I remember that one evening out of all the hundreds I've forgotten, it's because that was the night I buried my adolescence—not an easy moment for a writer to say good-bye to. Sean was the great love of my life, not because of what we shared; we shared nothing, not even an idea, never an apartment, only a few times a bed. No, he was the fulcrum where the weight of my loneliness was balanced by the weight of my hopes—or should I say their weightlessness, since neither one existed except as an absence: I was lonely because I had no one and hopeful for a life I'd not yet started living. If I hovered so nervously around him, the trembling empty pans of regret and longing seesawing in the slightest disturbance of the air, I was able to do so because I never understood him. Love is a child who wears a blindfold and shoots an arrow; I was both sightless and the target, and I was certainly childish enough, in the triple sense that I never accepted that the slightest distance should separate us; I refused to study Sean to discover his tastes, habits, limitations; and I was certain that the force of my will alone could render the impossible possible and make him mine in a frozen instant of eternity.