The Farewell Symphony (30 page)

After that night I never phoned to fmd out if he'd marry me or not. I never saw him alone again and only spent one more evening with him, and that years later. I was afraid to know the truth, no doubt. But also the slightest chance he might accept my proposal spread a salve over the inflamed wound where the arrow had pierced me.

Perhaps I suspected that I'd no longer be content with—well, I won't say the love he had to offer, since I knew nothing about his love, nothing concrete about him as a functioning person, whether he winced with fear or awakened with a smile, worried about his diet or panicked about money. No, what I no longer wanted was the dream of love he represented—or rather I could no longer wear his grey habit and vow myself to a life of perpetual adoration.

When I thought of Sean I'd remember when I'd first met him. We'd walked for hours at night in what was then called the "Warehouse District," an area of Civil War buildings that presendy, in the early 1970s, was becoming fashionable SoHo. Back then the Village had been quieter, simpler, poorer, although even then, ten years earlier, on a summer Saturday night, the streets could become so thronged that only the roof was lacking

The Farewell Symphony

that would have permitted us to call the whole thing a party. I tagged along behind him. I avoided mirrors, which would have proved to me I wasn't his litde brother. He'd cooked me lentil loaf, talked about the Latin language, read to me his overly serious translation of "Lesbia's Sparrow," made love to me by candlelight before a mirror I looked into, with fear and shy delight, as one might look into a dream renamed reality. Then we showered together in a tall, narrow, sentinel box of a shower stall, as narrow as Forrest Greene's lifeguard tower. The shower was in the kitchen and Sean had lit the burners to warm up the room. The blue flames glowed through the translucent shower curtain. All my memories of him can be reduced to a paragraph and I feel unsure of each element in it, especially the lentils. Did he really cook lentil loaf or was that some other guy? I never kept journals and for years I drank too much. Even unaided, time itself (thirty-five years of it) wears away at memories, like pollution eating away the detail of the Carpeaux sculptures in front of the Paris Opera House, the blackened Bacchus with his raised tambourine sinking into a soot-stained circle of dusky, high-breasted revelers. And yet if a few scratches on a wax cylinder are enough to keep alive Caruso's voice, let these words, these few, famt memories, constitute Sean.

The next morning I spoke to my mother longdistance for half an hour, a luxury I could scarcely afford, but I was so relieved to find her convalescing at home. "Honey, thank you for flying out here. I needed that. And your sister has been an angel. If I can be grateful for one thing it's that my operation made Aime and me get back together. You see, it was a blessing in disguise. I'll be back at work next week." She chattered on in her bubbly way What amazed me was that she could be so self-absorbed and yet so sweet. She never asked me anything about myself and yet she seemed to care about me. My mother was in a fever of self-promotion but curiously she took in every detail about me and my sister.

As soon as I hung up Max called me to tell me that my novel had been sold to one of the best known publishing houses in New York. "At last," I thought. While I covered him with thanks in a warm babble, some determined, frantic litde person in my head kept repeating, "At last. At last." I was afraid of crowing like the cock of the walk; I affected casualness. A muscle that had been holding on for so long I'd stopped noticing its existence relaxed. I sat deeper in my chair, my lungs breathed in and out.

fully, smoothly. Enfranchised. Legitimate. Never once did I wonder if I'd become famous, nor did I daydream about what I should do to promote my product. I was simply relieved that I'd passed over from that vast army of those with dog-eared manuscripts to the small elite of those with printed pages between boards. I felt that after waving my arm for hours, the teacher had finally called on me.

Max and I went out that evening to celebrate. I was too poor, especially after my ruinous trip to Chicago, to invite him to a restaurant, but he took me to an "Inn" on a quiet street in the Village we liked because of its shabby gentility—its deep booths, pewter chandeliers and its clientele of old women eating hot biscuits and gravy-covered meat loaf, this battered parody of respectable, rural New England in the heart of the kicked-out, bohemian West Village.

From there we went on and on, deeper and deeper into the night, reeling from bar to bar, stopping only at eleven to look at books and at twelve to buy a few records before heading back to the gay bars to drink till four in the morning, closing time. In those days on Eighth Street there was a bookshop many stories high where one could browse for hours, ascending from the new hardcover fiction on the ground floor to the poetry mezzanine and on up to the paperbacks about sociology and political science and philosophy. Friends ran into each other there—or across the street at a record store that prided itself on stocking the oldest or most obscure recordings of early Italian oratorios or never-performed Bohemian operas or on novelties such as the only extant recording of the last genuine castrato, at the beginning of the century, who at the time had already been a very old member of the Vatican Choir.

In these stores Max was imperious. He'd recently affected a monocle, which he screwed into his eye when he wanted to size up some young man or upbraid a clerk. Tonight Max asked a college student shy to the point of surliness if they'd received the new edition of Aksakov's childhood memoirs and the kid, perched on a high stool on the dais behind the cash register and reading a book, just shrugged and waved a hand vaguely toward the gleaming stacks of books all around us. Max nudged me and lifted his monocle to his eye, as though he needed its aid to quiz such a noisome insect. "Do you realize who I am?"

"Yeah, everyone's warned me about you. Guess you're one of the most infamous cranks who haunt this store."

Max was charmed by the boy's soft, breathy voice, such an inadequate medium for his scorn, and by the deep red color that was infusing his face

The Farewell Symphony

and neck. "Tiens'' he said loudly, "a rude homosexual, now there's a new one for the books." Like so many of Max's insults it was flirtatious.

''.New? I thought you'd cornered the market on that one," the boy replied.

"Our respective positions are rather different."

"Yeah," the kid interjected. "Mine is higher" And he was miming the literal truth of his statement when Clive, the middle-aged, pipe-smoking manager, intei^vened. "Good evening, Mr. Richards, can I help you fmd something?"

"A civil clerk, for instance?"

"Did I hear you mention Aksakov? Right this way."

Max explained to me, "This bookstore is as famous as a Chinese restaurant for its rude help, and their abrasiveness constitutes a considerable local sideshow that the cognoscenti like to visit in an always undisap-pointed anticipation of genuine unpleasantness." Clive, overhearing the remark, removed his pipe as though to defend the shop but then thought better of it and put his pipe back in place with a smile. I felt a strong conflict between my normal meekness in dealing with clerks and my secret relish of the scene, just as at my age I half-identified with the arrogant youth and half with the offended adult.

As we went through the bookshop Max, his talk enlivened by vodka, hailed various titles as though they were charming eccentrics or delicious grandes cocottes he'd known all his life. "Here's Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters. You don't know it? Now I am shocked. It's the Japanese Buddenhrooks, but touched by the delicate perversity of its author—not always so delicate since he takes as horrible a pleasure in describing physical pain as does Tolstoy. The description of sawing off a leg in Tanizaki rivals the same scene in Tolstoy's war reportage. Here's a strange trifle by Monique Lange, Kissing Fish, a story of a woman's obsessional love for a homosexual. Lange's husband is Juan Goytisolo, the great Spanish avant-garde novelist {and homosexual, one might add). Now here's an .'Vlexandrian love ston', written just after the birth of Christ, in which a gay couple is played off against a straight couple, they're separated and, just as in Can-dide, undergo many travails before they're reunited in a double wedding— you don't know it? How can that be? Here, let me buy it for you."

At four in the morning Max and I found ourselves seated on a stoop on Charles Street. It was a strangely balmy night. The sky was still bright with rolling clouds and reflected light. A breeze, warm and briny, was blowing although we were in the first week of December; I swore I could

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hear gulls calling in the wind. Just down on the corner of Seventh Avenue the changing traffic signal released heat after heat of racing cars, but here, just fifty feet away, we were in a side paddock of parked automobiles.

"Oh, it's so wonderful being here, Max," I exclaimed affectionately. "I missed you so much when I was in Chicago."

"You did?" he asked, in an uncharacteristically small voice.

"Oh, yes!" I assured him, resting a hand on his shoulder "When I'm with you I'm always so excited. You're such a stimulating man." Every time I moved my head it continued to describe a motion way out into space; I felt a lunar freedom from gravity.

Dimly I became aware of a small, vigorous activity beside me, as though Max were scrubbing diamonds and rubbing them dry. At last he said, "I'm crying because I'm so moved. Of course I longed for you, too. I dreamed, I dared not hope—oh, my darling!" He took my face between his hands, pressed his lips to mine and filled my mouth with his thin, muscular tongue—I had the impression that I'd bit into an overripe, nearly flowing persimmon and a lizard had darted out of it into my mouth. I suddenly remembered that Max had told me he was always the active partner in sexual "congress" and I wondered what being fucked by him would be like.

With a start I realized that somehow in my drunkenness I'd given poor Max a misleading signal and suggested I was in love with him.

Now I was too polite to clear up the mess I'd made. Besides, he was so delighted, so gallant, so touched that I couldn't bear to cool his ardor. And, after all, he'd been the one to sell my book.

I hoped he'd forget our drunken love vows, but the next day he called me and spoke with a new diffidence. "My darling, did you sleep well?"

"Very weO. I was so drunk."

"And how's your work going?"

"I never work, Max. That's one thing you must understand. I can't. I must talk to ten friends a day on the phone—"

"Oh, I hope I'm not intruding."

"But I want to talk to them. I call them if they don't call me. It's as though I'm cold when I awaken, spiritually cold, and I must talk to everyone under the sun to convince myself I exist, even to refill my word banks. What does Madame de Stael say of the French—that, unlike the Germans, they're addicted to conversation, which may be an art of civilization but also a disease, one that keeps the French frivolous, since they can never bear the solitude necessary for serious intellectual work."

The Farewell Symphony

"Very witty. Quite brilliant!" Max exclaimed. "You're quite right to bring us all back to Madame de Stael whom we've been neglecting^r too long. 'Stakl,' dear, is how it's pronounced, in spite of that distracting useless umlaut. Remember that her husband was Swedish."

He invited me for a weekend on a farm in New Jersey tliat belonged to his friend the publisher who'd printed my review of Tom's poems. WTien we arrived I realized that Max and I had been assigned the guest cottage on the other side of a pond from the main house. The three other guests were all in their forties or fifties.

During the weekend we went to a neighboring farm to visit a famous old gay couple in their late seventies. One of them had been a brilliant writer of late-Jamesian prose in the 1920s and "30s and had lived in Paris. Although his sexually neutral if erotically charged writing had been much admired back then, it had been largely forgotten since; now the writer, Ridgefield, had become all caught up in the workings of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. There was the question of whether a higher and a lower house should continue to exist or, more democratically, whether they should be "conflated" into just one body. And then there were the committees—Ridgefield headed the Citations Committee—and the luncheons, not to mention the star-studded spring awards day, open to an invited public.

Now that I luiew my novel was going to be published I no longer feared being introduced to other writers, but I still felt 1 was an outsider—a status I clung to.

We were sitting in Ridgefield's old stone farmhouse at the edge of a wood. His brother had married well; Ridgefield's house was on a vast estate dominated by the brother's mansion with its eighteen-column facade.

A fue was crackling on the hearth. Despite Ridgefield's twenty years in Paris, there was no trace of anything French in the room. Everything was rigorously Colonial or English, from the fox-hunting prints to the rag rug on the wide-board wood floor to the gleaming drop-leaf table and Duncan Phyfe chairs. Piles of books and literary reviews in several languages were neady centered and graduated, largest book on the bottom, smallest on top. Tangerines from some warmer part of the world filled a blue and white Chinese bowl.

Max had shown me pictures of Ridgefield taken in the 1920s by his aristocratic Russian lover of the time, a famous fashion photographer in Paris. It was hard to acknowledge that this twittery old man in a tweed jacket with the big, red, Scotch-nourished nose and fluty voice had once

been the scrubbed ephebc with the prematurely deep widow's pcaic and the skin that looked as though he'd swallowed a light bulb, an inseam of light rising from each corner of his mouth toward the narrow shadow cast by the sundial of his long, straight nose. In his dark suit he'd looked like a boy going to his First Communion, inconceivably young and fragile (he'd been just twenty-two), incapable of holding a pen in his hand or a plot in his head, much less of writing a book about rural life in his native Ohio (the fictionalized memoirs that had won him his small bit of celebrity). Nor in his mid-Adantic tones could one detect any trace of his Midwestern past.