The Farewell Symphony (31 page)

For some reason the conversation turned to Jean Genet and Ridgefield said, "Oh, I knew him. That was a nasty piece of work."

"Rough trade?" Max asked daringly.

"My dear, a bit of fluff, I would have said, in prison drag. No, seriously," and he passed his hand over his face to wipe away his faint, wicked smile, and his expression, as announced, emerged perfecdy serious, "I met him several times and he was a crafty peasant—/ know the type. After all, Fm a farm boy myself!"

Everyone mumbled well bred chuckles of protest against the farfetched humility of this grand old man of letters who was as proud of his contact with the soil as the Due de Guermantes yet who sported in his lapel the purple and gold braided rosette of the American Academy.

"No, what I object to most," Ridgefield continued, "was not his way of lying systematically or lifting his hostesses' antique silver demitasse spoons ..." Again his hand effaced a tiny smile, as though he were a judge who'd forgotten the dignity of his office and its objectivity. "No, those are mere bagatelles, worthy of gossip and nothing more. What I object to most is his way of wallowing in his perversion."

"Hear, hear!"

"Even if he'd presented his . . ." and here Ridgefield paused, searching for a euphemism, "his uranism in an attractive light, I would have objected. After all, a writer writes for everyone, for the man, woman and child in the street and, mad as it may seem: They. Don't. Care what Monsieur Genet daydreams about in his cell. And then (and here I'm being merely frivolous) I think it spoils everything if our ..." (again the problem of the euphemism, causing Ridgefield to wrinkle his nose) ". . . our Athenian pleasures are described to the barbarians. I think our world is amusing only so long as it remains a mystery to them.'"

Everyone chuckled warmly and repeated his words in cozy asides.

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"But why, my dear?" Max cried, smiling hugely, playing the straight man. "Isn't the duty of literature precisely the depiction of even the most exotic and depraved corners of human experience?"

"Well, it's true that Dante presents Brunetto Latini," Ridgefield replied, letting his little smile alight once more on the swaying perch of his lips, "but only to identify his punishment in Hell, which would be exactly my way of dealing with, uh, the love that dare not speak its name—"

"And that won't shut up these days," Max concluded gleefully. Everyone chortled.

Max seemed so happy to be in the presence of a writer of such consequence that he didn't pause to wonder if he agreed with him or not. Max's joy was partially exemplary: he wanted to indicate to me how to chat gracefully and clubbily with the great. The urgency of his enthusiasm was also proprietary, since if Max knelt before Ridgefield he did so only after having crowned him. Whereas Max would have responded waspishly to Mailer or Miller—acknowledged and, fatally, middle-brow authors (not to mention aggressively heterosexual)—his respect for Ridgefield, this obscure exquisite, was inspired by curatorial, king-making pride.

I felt my temples throbbing and my mouth going dry as I began to speak, "But Genet is no sociologist. He's a poet and his vision is lyrical—"

''A poetl" Ridgefield exclaimed, indignant. "There, my dear chap, you go too far. Unless an unbridled slut is your idea of a poet."

I blushed deeply and smiled faindy.

"Really, darling," Max echoed, a single line creasing the gleaming smooth expanse of his brow.

That night I drank a lot knowing what lay in store for me. I wanted to perform successfully, although when we were at last alone in our cottage and Max mounted me, I was impotent, which he didn't seem to notice. I couldn't tell if he was too polite to mention my flagging attention or whether he was indifferent to it. The next day he was just as polite and attentive as ever but he'd marginally withdrawn. He no longer called me "my darling," and I saw that I was going to be let off lightly. I'd not wanted to wound his vanity; I'd wanted to be open to his ardor; but my body had failed me and him and he was enough of a realist to understand its verdict and enough of a gendeman to forgive me.

When I returned the next evening to Manhattan I headed to a leather bar. I knew that many of these leather men were artists or intellectuals, but their manner, unlike that of Ridgefield's generation, was gruff and menacing. Or rather, they maintained an on-stage silence even if in the

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backstasTc corridors (over dinner or on the phone with friends) they chirped away gaily about holidays and movies. I found a young guy with a big belly and a yellow hankie in his back pocket who took me and twelve cans of beer into an abandoned warehouse. We each swallowed a half hit of acid, smoked joints and recycled the beer back and forth into each other's mouths. We laughed and hugged each other and smeared our spit, sperm and urine over each other's bodies. The beer, filtered so rapidly through our kidneys, had almost no taste though it was warm and foaming. "I like a good session, don't you?" my partner whispered; what I liked was that gay life had become so specialized, so shamelessly fetishized. I supposed Ridgefield would assign us both to Brunetto Latini's ring in hell, but I thought eternal damnation seemed an excessive punishment for a game babies in a playpen would have found wonderfully sociable. At last I staggered home at dawn, drenched, trembling and stinking.

I KEEP THINKING ofa couplc of Americans we met during the year before Brice died. One of them, Neil, was a heavy, stoop-shouldered man like me and like me he had a barrel chest that descended direcdy into a barrel waist. Unlike me he still wore a mustache, which was grey and so thick it covered his upper lip. His hair he treated like an accessory he despised and he batted at it with his hand or slapped it impatiently away from his brow.

His lover, Giles Satsumi, was a Japanese-American lawyer in his thirties who no longer practiced. He'd been brought up in San Francisco and had met two of my friends who'd migrated there from New York in the early eighties and died in the first three years of the plague. Giles was always smiling and knew all the lyrics to Noel Coward's and Cole Porter's songs. He kept nodding other people into agreement. He never spoke about himself and seemed more intent on understanding whatever was light and amusing about his guests than in confiding his darker secrets or eliciting theirs.

Neil was from an old New England family that had made a small but necessary item. He apparendy had a large enough fortune to finance a life of decorous leisure. But since they were Americans Neil and Giles felt the need to improve themselves even if in rather disjointed and ultimately useless ways. They studied cooking at the Cordon Bleu in Paris. They'd toured gardens as far apart as Vancouver, Sissinghurst, Nara and Florence. Giles had also spent months in Japan learning the tea ceremony

The Farewell Symphony

and buying fabulously expensive cracked and mended pots and exquisitely crude Korean cups. They'd purchased a little house in the eighth ar-rondissement that for them was just a bagatelle, since they rarely lived there.

"It's so funny," Giles said in his choppy, rat-a-tat way that made everyone laugh but that didn't coerce laughter, "we're so naive, Neil and I, at least about certain things, that when we bought this house we couldn't fathom why any residence would have eight bedrooms, each with a bidet, and no kitchen, until our French friends, stifling their eclats de rire, explained to us we'd just bought a bordello!" That one French expression, with its double r, so tricky for American uvulas, was so perfectly produced that I remembered they'd also studied French diction with a private instructor

In honor of this bonbonniere from the turn of the century with its fake Greek statues of laughing girls in shorty peplums and slipping togas, its slender Ionic columns in the tiny salon that appeared to be made of lighdy licked spun sugar and its courtyard fountain of a verdigrised Pan leering over his pipes while a drunken naiad embraced his hooves, Neil and Giles had covered their windows with crackling yellow satin curtains and their Louis XVI bergeres with a faded lemony and beige tapestry. Everything looked as though it had just been pulled out of a dress-shop band box and flung with prodigal abandon over a bed. I could imagine a cocottt in an ice-blue peignoir trimmed in coffee lace smoking a cigarette in the salon and listening to a wind-up Victrola playing a recording of Mistinguett. The bathroom upstairs was royal, intended more for the piquant display of pink female flesh to special customers than for routine hygiene.

We ate a "gourmet" dinner and I remembered to keep up a constant stream of ooks and aahs and compliments, which sounded so exaggerated to Brice that he raised an eyebrow and suspected me of mockery until I explained to him later, when we were alone, that Americans don't mock each other, at least not with such subtle cruelty, and that praise any less dithyrambic would have struck our American hosts as poorly concealed disappointment.

After dinner, Giles asked if we'd like to participate in a tea ceremony. Brice had just recovered from a bout of wasting brought on by a bacterium in the blood related to tuberculosis and though his cure had been miraculous he was still thin and weak.

"How long does it last?" I asked.

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"About an hour."

"And we're seated cross-legged on tatami mats the whole time?"

"On tatami, but most Westerners lounge about or even lie down."

"But I want to do it," Brice said. "I'm sure it's very spiritual and beautiful." The problem with dying for an atheist is that there are no normal .spiritual occasions; exotic ones—or improvised moments—are made to bear a heavy weight.

Giles nodded and left the room. Neil sniffed at us a bit like a faithful family dog. He was companionable and heart-breakingly kind but he seemed a bit lost without his brilliant companion, so decisive, so magnetic, so full of amusing ideas.

After ten minutes Neil led us into the courtyard, where we were supposed to remain silent, drink sips of water from the fountain (this absurd fountain of a lean, leering Pan and a lubricious maiden). Neil said, "We're purifying ourselves of the dust from the outside world. Our thoughts must setde." I worried that Brice, so fragile and bony, might catch cold, despite his many layers of shirts, sweaters and vests, but I could see he was concentrating and participating in everything with great seriousness.

Brice had become purer over the last few years, since the onset of his illness. When I'd first met him he'd been a swaggering playboy, always sporting a well-cut jacket and a silk foulard (which looks prissy to Americans, rakish to the French). He'd been unduly fascinated by the rich and the tided—especially the tided, although that taste for old names can be read not just as snobbism but also as a form of poetry; in his case he never found any advantage in his collection of aristocrats beyond a simple pleasure in associating himself with a Golden Book of history.

Recendy he'd put all that behind him. After all, he'd been only twenty-seven when I'd met him. Now, five years later, he'd aged by several millennia. He'd had to accept that he wasn't going to live, that he wasn't going to have the brilliant career as an architect that everyone had foreseen, that his promise wasn't going to be fulfilled. He had every reason to complain—of the pain that racked his body, of his bitterness at all his losses—but he maintained a stoic silence. At first, before he'd become ill, he'd been the usual French hypochondriac. But now that he was nothing but a skeleton, he made no protests, certainly he said nothing general or cosmic about the unfairness of life. He had prepared his litde cache of pills with which to commit suicide, but just a few days before the tea ceremony he'd admitted that he no longer had the strength (either moral or physical) to take his life. Now he was prepared to drift ever closer to death.

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It would have been irrelevant, certainly impertinent, to urge him to fight back. His only fight was to draw another breath, ascend another staircase, hold down another cup of soup, especially since he'd arrived at the point where the lightest sustenance (what anyone else would have considered to be "diet food") repelled him. Every morsel was too heavy, too fatty—one would say, too substantial.

Neil led us into a narrow but high room (one of the many chambres d'assignation?) that was carpeted with tatami on platforms around a recessed heating element and a bubbling cauldron of hot water. Giles was outfitted in elaborate robes of many layers, the outermost of black silk. His shoulders were motionless somewhere under stiff peaks. He was wearing a glossy round black hat and a sort of brocaded apron. He seemed a cross between a Shinto priest and a Masonic Grand Master He was easygoing and quick to explain things and laugh at passing awkwardnesses, but nevertheless the room, the costume and the singing of the kettle made him seem more subdued.

Brice was panting slighdy, no doubt from the pain of sitting on his un-cushioned bones, the hip bones, which looked as huge as an old nag's when he was naked, and the bulb at the base of his spine where the coccyx had worn through, red and inflamed. But his eyes were sparkling with excitement.

Neil, in stocking feet and trousers, big belly hanging over his belt, scooted about on his knees, the grave, mustachioed acol^^e serving the priest and presenting us, the communicants, first with small, beautiful and nearly tasteless rice cakes and, after die elaborate brewing and whisking, the foamy, bitter green tea. Giles explained everything he was doing. He showed us all the ancient elements of the tea sei'vice. He explained the painting on the wall. He demonstrated the method for receiving the cup and turning it a hundred and eighty degrees away in order modesdy to drink from the inferior side and to present the superior side, with a bow, to the next drinker We examined the black lacquered caddy and the bright green diy tea piled high to resemble Mount Fuji. After two rounds of tea the bowls were rinsed and dried with a smart swipe of a folded towel. "Now you're allowed to handle the bowls and look at them from every angle, since often a visitor might see a particular bowl only once in his lifetime." I could see that Brice was sweating from the effort to stay seated this way but that he was charmed by such a fussy ritual combining spirituality and connoisseurship. And he was certain that this was the one time he would be seeing these bowls.