The Farewell Symphony (33 page)

"Hjigienkr the performer squealed indignandy. "You're totally weird."

"Now you are becoming insulted," the handsome gymnast muttered, clenching his jaw, grimly donning his previously neatly folded clothes. When the performer was introduced to a wickedly smiling, hundred-percent American Kevin a year later he was furious, then amazed, finally amused.

Kevin's favorite character was Pete, a painfully naive Ohio hick just arrived in New York, a boy of nineteen incapable of sustaining a thought, a sweet kid who would unexpectedly become stubborn just when he was wrong. Pete would say at the moment when someone was going down on him, "You sure this is okay to do? My pa warned me that in the Big City guys would—wow! That feels great! Don't stop, don't stop."

One day Kevin told me that he husded through a service and made a hundred and fifty dollars for each trick he turned. "But I have to get stoned to go through with it and then the money I just throw away with both hands, it's dirty money. The worst of it is that it's almost impossible for an actor known to be gay to work—"

"Why?"

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"No one wants to see the fag kiss the girl on stage."

"And if the play is gay?"

"Everyone prefers to see a genuine male breeder kiss the boy, sure-fire Academy Award or Tony, what talent, what courage."

"I'm sure you're right. . . ."

"It's one thing to suspect me of being a fag, but if they know for sure I'm a whore—"

"No one would know who hadn't hired you."

"All the more reason to despise me. Johns resent having to pay. Even if the idea of paying (and controlling) someone excites them in advance, after they come they feel insulted. That's why we make them pay in advance—" (his use of we congealed my blood)—"not just because they might try to welch out on us but also to spare their feelings."

"You must get some weird characters," I said, wondering if he'd let me hire him.

"I scarcely remember them, it all goes past in a drugged haze."

"Do you play Pete with them?"

"No. I tried. But Pete's too \ulnerable. One guy even beat him up— me up."

I could see perfectly clearly that by confiding in me Kevin was tiying to turn me into a big sister rather than a lover. Love thrives on mystery and if Kexin told me about his hemorrhoid ("I don't see what all the fuss is about, I just poke it back in with a finger and then get fucked with nothing but really big dicks, it's the little red jabbers that can do a woman in"), he was so open in order to repel me. What he didn't realize was that this usually sound technique only endeared him to me all the more because it strengthened the guise that had become so touching to me: beautiful boy with a sweet face whom New York had destroyed. Once I'd held his sinewy, slender waist in my hands, my hands could not forget the feel of steel sliding under silk. If I looked at him too longingly his wildcat laugh—dirty, deprecating and spontaneous—would come geysering up. "Oh, dear, look at the lovesick cow," he'd say, pointing at me. I'd have to laugh, too, that bitter, grudging laugh at one's own expense that the French caU "a yellow laugh" (itn rirejaime).

I suppose my love tapped the same sources that feed the public worship of movie stars: I was privy to (and could sympathize with) the small setbacks and passing crises of a demigod I should by all rights have envied and feared from the foot of the throne or ev-en the back of the audience hall.

Kevin would nudge me when we passed a guy he fancied: a guy \\ ith

grease on his forearm and barring his T-shirt with a bend sinister, caste marks he'd piciced up by working under his car; a sweaty black teenager, all knobby knees like a yearling, who was dribbling a basketball across the open court on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Third Street, suddenly shouting to a buddy so that the veins stood out on his long neck, Adam's apple jutting out like a sharp elbow poking through black velvet; a beefy boy tongue-kissing his girl on a bench, his crotch swelling with a half erection ("a Hollywood loaf," as Kevin termed it, for some reason). Kevin's New York was full of starded black eyes, taut tummies seen in a flash when a hand brushed a T-shirt aside, a postal worker ruffling the hair of a blushing trainee, the full-lipped open mouth of a baker asleep on the subway at four in the morning as he headed for work and we headed home to bed—a whole democratic gang of lovers, all of them unaware of how Kevin was mentally snapping and cropping them.

We had our pilgrimages to make, including one to a foul pizza joint on Bleecker Its only attraction was the guy who fed the oven with dough, whose uniform was unbuttoned enough to show he had a "perfect eagle" of black hair covering his chest. Kevin, from the waist up, was entirely hairless, his upper body marked by nothing more serious than a scattering of freckles on his shoulders. But precisely his own blond smoothness made him feel a child's vaguely longing curiosity about hairy men; his weak-kneed desire and envy he controlled by stylizing. He'd say, "I'm going to swoon. Did you get a gander of that chest hair? Oh, God, I could sleep till dav^Ti on that fur pillow. And did you see the buns? He makes my panties wet."

I was a true believer whose faith is only confirmed when his messiah declares his apostasy, when the world doesn't end as predicted, when the priest himself defiles the temple. The more Kevin drooled over other guys the more I coveted him. The more he pointed out his own faults—his "washed-out coloring," his "pigmy size," his "seventeen cowlicks"—the more my imagination turned them into virtues. The more he violated his own dignity, calling his anus his "twat," his cock his "clit," his bleeding hemorrhoid his "period," the more he pretended we were just two Ohio housewives on a Manhattan spree, the more I saw him as my furry-flanked satyr, my archaic Arcadian, my sylvan prince.

At the end of June Joshua was planning to sail to Europe with Eddie. I was jealous like Janus—jealous of Eddie for spiriting

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Joshua away, jealous of Joshua for his intimacy with this famous poet. For Eddie had in the last year, with the publication of his epic, become the most respected American poet of the day, although he'd long been the most notorious, since he was a millionaire whose childhood had been illuminated by the glare of grotesque publicity—a suicide, a suspected murder and especially the twinned themes of custody and alimony, love and money. Joshua and Eddie had been friends since they'd first met ten years earlier on a train. At that time Eddie had yet to win his first national book award and Joshua was just an assistant professor at Haivard, teaching in a celebrated program, "Humanities 6." Joshua had managed to invite Eddie to give a reading at Harvard and though Eddie was too much an old-fashioned aesthete and dandy to be grateful for anything so public and transitory as an appearance in no matter how august an institution, the favor was registered if not mentioned and it lent the right tone to a friendship that quickly flourished for an altogether different reason: Joshua had a sense of fun.

He'd make the pilgrimage on a weekend once a month to Eddie's house in a New England village, a house that would have been perfecdy ordinaiy e.xcept that every object in it had figured in an unforgettable poem. There Joshua and Eddie would cook pasta recipes Joshua had brought back from Italy, reread Elizabeth Bowen's To the North or Eleanor Ross Taylor's collection of poems, Welcome, Eumenides!, listen to a recording of "the boys" (the duo-pianists Smith and Watson) playing Faure's Dolly Suite. The alternately jaunty and melancholy passages of this7^"^-naiVe music for a sophisticated child scored the light-fingered dynamism underlying the apparent indolence of their long mornings established by the Hu Kwa tea steeping in the blue and white pot, the rustling of their silk dressing gowns, the blue smoke rising from Eddie's single Gauloise of tlie morning, the scattered pages of the TLS and by the combined smells of the cigarette, the smoky tea and the pot-pourri in the entrance hall that Eddie kept refreshing by soaking the dried flowers with drops of orange essence.

In the winter they'd go out for long walks down to the harbor, then cninch their way back home through the snow that the evening was already turning blue. They'd beat their hands to stay warm and smell the smoke from log fires, so sad because it suggested family life. They'd quote lines from Elizabeth Bishop in an antiphony made \isible by the misty breath trailing from tlieir mouths, look up to see tlie ruby lamp hanging above Eddie's upstairs dining room table. In the summer diey'd take the sun on

the highest terrace and peer down into a garden where a famously hermetic novelist could be seen pacing back and forth alone behind his agent's house ("We've seen him!" they whispered to the others, triumphant, that evening over cocktails. "That is, we've sighted his limp. He has a limp. I've seen him, you haven't. What? A black turdeneck").

If Joshua had been the usual American academic—pedantic, incurious, obsessed with departmental politics—he could never have become intimate with Ariel-Eddie. But Joshua never lectured, loved gossip, always won at charades, knew how to tease the local ladies, several of whom had already made reluctant star turns in the magic theater of Eddie's verse. Joshua had found just the right way to cite Shakespeare or Sidney, with unsounded depths of veneration that didn't paralyze one's own playfulness (in a charade Joshua acted out, none too convincingly, the line, "111 met by moonlight. . .").

Eddie, who was almost a decade older than Joshua, liked to fuss over Joshua's fragile health ("Sit over there in the high-backed chair, there's a bit of a draft hitting the loveseat, though why I'll never know, must be the churning of angels' wings"). Eddie also upbraided him for his laziness ("At least I have some laurels to rest on," Eddie said, "whereas your mere two tides are rather scant foliage, though dense enough, admittedly, to seat you comfily for life in the Harriet Smith Silverstein Cushy Chair of Renaissance Studies").

"Some of us have to work for a living," Joshua stoutly called out, even if he was terribly hurt by Eddie's harping on his slender output and the name of his absurd professorship. "Ah, yes, whereas I merely live to work," Eddie replied.

He always had the last word. Of a new Japanese painting he said, "It's the usual swirls before pines." When he came back from a trip to Asia and his first taste of opium, one of the ladies asked him if it caused impotence and he replied, "Poppycock." The occasionally soggy puns in his conversation and his sometimes tedious adherence to all forms of parlor games were five-finger exercises for the flashy word play and formal trickiness of his long poems, in which virtuosity was always transposed up a note into wisdom. No wonder he liked French piano music, which at its best kept the same proportions of parody, parlor fun and stabbing beauty.

"How can he be so cruel?" Joshua asked me. "Teasing me about my output, when he knows I suffer terribly from writer's block. And of course I could point out that teaching is grueling work, not that he's ever had to think about work. The other day when I told him I'd received a raise and

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was now earning fifty thousand dollars a year, I might as well have been discussing shekels or drachmas. He blinked and said, 'Is that considered a lot?' "

Although I'd read litde contemporary poetry since university days, Joshua was immersing me in it again. Most of the time I found it tedious and obscure and I thought it kept its prestige pardy because of its ceremonial past and pardy because it took so litde time to read and to write—a perfect medium for dilettante writers and theory-spinning critics. Each page of a novel could be just as well written word by word as a poem—a novel was six hundred sonnets. For a poem's formal ingenuity, the novel could substitute a far more gripping plot.

But Eddie was a genius who corralled into the sacred paddock of poetry' his irreverent social tone and his sense not only for how things look and taste and smell but also for how they wriggle and crawl and soar. On the page his puns and acrostics and palindromes, even his calculated wxitten-out stuttering, were so freighted with feeling that I didn't know whether to smile in acknowledgment of his skill or cry because he'd passed an electrode over the neurons in which my strongest emotions were stored. For if Max was concerned primarily with dazzling readers, even if that meant chilling them, Eddie wanted to play them, striking all their notes, the virtuosity his, perhaps, but the resonance entirely theirs.

As a young poet he'd written bejeweled verse fuU of poetic props (swans, lutes), and his favorite poet of the recent past had been Amy Lowell. But to this overwritten, turn-of-the-century formula, which made the poet weep but left the reader dry eyed, Eddie brought a sudden new intensity generated by touching together the two least likely wires—autobiography and allegory. Everyone else of his generation, following Robert Lowell's example, was beginning to write confessionally, with a new straightforwardness that felt as exciting as sin after years of the monastic discipline of impersonality imposed on poets by Eliot and the New Critics. They were the theorists who'd believed that a poem was "objective" and could be read—or written!—in exactly the same fashion in Oshkosh or Johannesburg, in 1800 or 1950. Eddie's early poems had conformed to this austere ideal, but now he was slowly inserting his life into his work— with this difference, that he couldn't resist allegorizing even his own parents' divorce, which instandy became a quarrel between Mother Earth and Father Time, a marriage on the rocks.

Joshua was uniquely qualified to understand this kind of autobiography. If he would have been titillated but left speechless by shocking personal

revelations, Eddie's approach, whicli harked back to Dante's l/i VitaMuova, reconciled the Renaissance with the second half of tlic twentieth century. Dante had alternated exalted but abstract sonnets with short, straightforward prose paragraphs narrating his various meetings with the historic Beatrice in the streets of Florence. Eddie melded the poetic and the prosaic, the symbolic and the literal, the religious and the frivolous into verses that glowed as though the glassblower had just pulled them out of the furnace, puffed and twisted contrasting colors into shapes, then pinched them ofi" and .set them aside to cool.