The Farewell Symphony (32 page)

'95

Nine months later, on New Year's, just three months before Brice was to die, we were invited back, this time with Brice's brother Laurent, a big, strapping weightlifter from Nice who, despite his bulging muscles, was every bit as much an aesthete as Brice himself. Since he was shy and in any event spoke no English, Laurent was veiy quiet, but he, too, marveled at the refinement of the ceremony, conducted so improbably in this Belle Epoque maison de passe. The elements of the tea service were all decorated with silver and gold this time, since these precious metals were considered to bring good luck, appropriate to a New Year's Tea. Giles was extremely attentive to Brice, who was now ectoplasmically thin; his cheekbones looked as though they'd burst through the translucent yellow parchment of his skin. And yet Giles seemed driven to complete this dolorous if inspiring ritual in the most exacting manner.

Brice died and I received a condolence note from Giles and Neil. Six months later, Neil sent me a black-bordered printed bristol announcing Giles' death. I called our only mutual friend, who told me that Giles had been secredy ill for years, but able to travel, cook, garden, make tea. When his health suddenly took a turn for the worse at the end of the summer he'd refused all medication and faded in two weeks. Neil, his passionately devoted lover, had vanished, inconsolable. It seemed strange to me that Giles had never spoken of his own status and that of the five participants in the New Year's Day Tea, two were already dead.

The spring came and on the hot, sunny street in front of my apartment building I met Kevin. He was riding a bicycle, the kind racers use, all sparkling, S I V wire-strutted wheels and a gentie, expensive ratchet-

ing sound of well oiled gears winding down. After I met him I'd be walking along the street and sud-- denly Fd hear a sound, perhaps it was the sound an ant would hear if it was pursued by a dragonfly, and I'd look up uneasily to see his iridescent wings descending on me.

I fell in love with blonds but liked to have sex with dark-haired men. Kevin was as pure as the youngest, most odorless blond and as sexy as a rancid brunet. Like a dragonfly he could hover so long in one place that he would seem stationary and his whirring wings would become invisible but suddenly he'd swerve off at a dramatic angle, sunlight mica-bright on his body. Which is just Kevin's metaphorical due, words to suggest his way of sampling me, as a rap composer might sample three bars from a standard.

I don't remember our first words. All I recall is that he was a bit of an orphan or a Cinderella. He was living across the street from me and two doors up, not in a tenement like mine but in a proper Federal house with a brick facade, a grand stoop, a red door with a glowing brass knocker and mail slot, except the door was marred by extra locks and the door jamb

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with four buzzers, one for each floor-through apartment. Kevin lived on the top floor with Hal, a musical comedy star who'd always played the young leading man (Puerto Rican rocker or Manhattan bachelor suffering from a bad case of anomie and exceptionally nosy friends). Hal had picked Kevin up when he was just eighteen on his first trip from Ohio to New York, almost seven years earlier. Litde Kevin had been thunderstruck by the attention and had fallen in love with all the force of first love, that complete union of the physical and the spiritual that we seek to duplicate the rest of our lives. A kiss is a meltdown, a fuck is the first perfect Christmas morning, a three-a.m. embrace is tantamount to a delicately engineered rendezvous of ships in darkest space.

That quickly came to an end, that bliss. Hal was a famous cocksman, easily distracted, quick to follow any kid down an alleyway. Soon he was using Kevin as bright bait to lure other boys home.

"That must have hurt," I said when Kevin told me the story. We were sitting on his stoop.

"Not at all." Kevin had a dirty laugh, low and throaty, and it came welling up now. "I was a simp, mooning over an alleycat like Hal. I learned my lesson. There was never anyone less romantic than Hal." He sat up with that perfect poise of a dancer, someone who never makes an unpremeditated move unless frightened. Now he was becoming centered in his body as though reminded of that past mastery over his aching, heart-sore spirits. In any event, he was always suddenly stretching—dropping his head forward or raising one arm, then the other like a jerked marionette, or clasping his hands and turning them palm out while he pushed them slowly away from his chest—and I learned not to read any special meaning into these abrupt exercises. They meant nothing. No more than a thoroughbred's caracoling.

Now Hal let him live rent-free in his apartment as a houseboy, chair-warmer, package-receiver. If Hal was lonely Kevin would climb onto his vast slab of a bed, although normally Kevin slept in a corner on a little cot. "Of course, if he's brought home a trick I'll find the door locked and I have to wander the streets till dawn. He's even capable of waking me and saying, 'Okay, babe, it's over and out,' and I'm supposed to get dressed and clear out in no more than ten seconds—unless, of course, the trick wants a three-way, but usually Hal's sort of boy isn't looking for another twinkle."

"Oh, Kevin, how awful."

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"Let's face it, Hal's a real pig but he's a sweetie in his grotesque way."

When I'd arrived in New York ten years earlier and was young even if shapeless, the famous Hal had fucked me a few times with his small, hard cock. It had been an efficient business. Oddly enough, his natural curiosity about other people asserted itself after sex. Whereas lust makes most men convince themselves they want to share secrets with the person they hope to bed, Hal was very efficient about undressing and penetrating his victims—his lean, taut body, broad smile and avid sexuality made him irresistible to most guys. That he paid no attention to what I was saying and seemed more interested in how my anus rather than my mind worked only flattered me. Aftenvard, however, he asked me aU kinds of questions about myself not with the bell-jar concentration of the hovering lover but rather with the gum-chewing affability of a buddy staring at the ceiling.

I told Kevin that Hal had "decked" me a few times years ago.

"Of course," Kevin said, as though nothing could be more natural, although he looked at me with a new respect, as if I'd just been promoted a notch. I was a "number" suddenly and no longer a cipher. A few days later he came back and said that Hal remembered me as "hot sex" and "a real interesting guy."

That spring was hot and sunny although a breeze was always flowing, as though Manhattan were a rowboat about to tug free from its cleats and drift out to sea. The city seemed deserted; maybe on our street people were either away for the weekend or at the office during the week. Kevin crept up on me—I mean my love for him did. Like an idiot I thought he was a poor little kid because Hal treated him so badly. I wanted to take care of him—conveniendy forgetting that every other man in New York would feel the same way, not a particularly noble sentiment given how handsome and young he was.

Young but not fresh. Any mention of sex would automatically release that low, sophisticated gurgle of a laugh in him. If I ascribed altruism to someone or doubted the sexual link between any two people, Kevin would say, "Oh, puh-lease, give me a break."

A love that was once very dangerous, even if it's in the distant past, one continues to handle with asbestos gloves; I find my love for Kevin easier to analyze than to experience anew, especially since I spent so much time talking myself out of it with a shrink. Kevin came at me from so many angles all at once, like one of those karate demons on a kiddies' TV show, at once motorized monster and ubiquitous, half-hallucinated spirit. He was a waif but his bodv was so well trained that he was swift and strong. He

drank too much and liked to be degraded at night, but the next morning he devoted himself to aerobics and vitamins. He observed everyone with the professional eye of the actor on the lookout for novel intonations and tics, but he could also discuss books with Joshua and be as urbane as any man of the world.

He'd been wounded long ago and needed love, but only laughed at my attempts to give it to him. He rejected my body but prized my "art," as evanescent as his own. When I'd make sheep's eyes at iiim, he'd laugh cruelly, but a moment later he'd be beside me, small warm hand in mine, telling me that he admired me, that he knew I could be a great writer, that he was certain we could be one of those legendary artistic couples, like Stieglitz and O'Keefe, like Britten and Pears, like Esenin and Isadora. (If he chose those examples perhaps he did so because they all spent so much time apart and came together only occasionally in incendiary, spiritual encounters.)

Kevin was right about one thing—living with him was the high point of my artistic life and with him I wrote a book that some readers consider my best. No matter if that book is not as original and charged as its defenders claim or as sentimental and obscurantist as its critics allege, what was crucial for me was the experience of living with a restless young man who would sometimes, just when I'd given up hope, make love to me and who flickered into and out of the fantasy of sharing the rest of his life with me.

He kept me in a constant state of desire—desire for his boyish body and manly dick, desire for a permanent love with a committed gypsy, a desire (as MaUarme puts it in a poem) "to introduce myself as a hero into your story."

So many of the gay men I knew, even those who went to the gym now, were such klutzes and had never really been athletic, but Kevin swam for miles with egg-beater efibrdessness. Or he taped his wrists, put on shorts and dusted his palms and performed acrobatics on the rings or the sawhorse, always with a look of open-mouthed concentration, as though such grace and power were only a question of forcing thought down through a narrow hose into his muscles. Shorts revealed his strong, unexpectedly hairy legs, so at odds with his smooth, nearly luminous torso. His prowess, as well as his air of being a disabused waif, made him irresistible to me.

Kevin came into my bed easily enough the first time but he must not have liked my body or quite simply perhaps I wasn't virile or mysterious

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enough to excite him. We never discussed it but he must have thought he'd given it a good try but sorry, Doll, being blown by a worshipful egghead ain't my idea of a hot Saturday night date.

After that Kevin began to stutter all the time. It was the strangest thing. He couldn't get out two words in a row without a struggle. Since I knew he was an actor and performed regularly, his stutter seemed an odd Uabil-ity, but in any event I'd observed him speaking perfectly normally with other people and even with me when we'd first met. Now we would sit for hours on his stoop or wander down to the docks just a few blocks away through crowds of young gay men. Huge silences would hover over us as Kevin gulped and tried to spit it out.

Was he blocked because he liked and didn't want to lose me and yet he didn't want to give in to my oppressive love? My old lover Lou had once said to me, "You show your best side to your friends and your worst to your lovers. You're funny and lively and contentious and charming and easygoing with your friends whereas your poor lovers are treated to nothing but your appalling mooning." I tried now to stay varied and lively with Kevin but every instant mattered too much: love, in fact, can be defined as precisely that state in which every moment matters.

On a rainy day we'd sit inside my small room and listen to Satie's piano music with its strange blend of Spartan simplicity and brasserie roguish-ness. Some of the pieces sounded like the hangover improvisations of a jazz pianist goofing off down at the empty clubhouse. Of someone playing on the other side of the lake on a rainy October afternoon. I say "rainy" because the slow, angular notes were struck with the same irregular rhythm with which the rain flowed down from the sill of the upper sash window and smeared across the lower pane.

Kevin had thick, straight, reddish-blond hair, a domed, slightly bulging forehead, dark eyebrows that grew together in a pale blond union above his straight, small-nostriled nose, and this fuzz seemed related to the down dusting his cheekbones. He had a face too strong and ironic to go with the waifish role he liked to play in his old, deformed sneakers, as eloquent as Van Gogh's peasant's shoes. His white painter's trousers were baggy and his faded T-shirts had nearly effaced letters and symbols advertising the most ordinary household products or even spark plugs (the sort of chic my mother would have pitied as a sure sign of poverty—nor would she have been far wrong).

He was very bright and twenty years later he would become a talented writer, but back then I suspect he subscribed to the notion that an intelli-

gent actor is a bad actor. He read but often the same book over and over again and I made him laugh when I referred to his "Htlle book" because I constantly used diminutives out of affection although he thought out of condescension.

His life—his encounters with other people, his meals, his exercise, the movies he saw, the concerts he attended— everything he considered part of his preparation for the stage. For a while he toted around a copy of Stanislavsky's An Actor Prepares and although I never read it I suspect it, too, took a global view of professional training. If Kevin looked at an old woman on the bus he'd study the movements that betrayed her age—the stiffness in her back, her difficulty in taking a step up, her way of turning her whole bust rather than rotating her arthritic neck—and a moment later he'd be able to reproduce the entire ensemble of movements.

Sexual adventures were just another theatrical experience for him. With one man (a well known performance artist he recognized without revealing he knew who he was) Kevin pretended to be a Swedish gymnast in town for an Olympics training session. He had the falling cadence down perfecdy, the unsmiling Nordic brow-furrowing, the outrage at American social injustice, even the Swede's indignation about personal questions: "I do not have the need, no, to be revealing my life to you just because we have shared this hygienic moment together."