The Farewell Symphony (38 page)

"You're stoned." I was angry and started shoving the furniture I hadn't even paid for yet back into the apartment.

Kevin snapped, "Hav-e it your way, doll," and left on his bike for the Village. At dawn, when he came back, his hair smelling of beer and cigarette smoke, I told him I was sorry.

"No, you were probably right," he said wearily. After that I felt he lost interest in the apartment and decided to live in it as he would have lived in a hotel.

Like me, Kevin drank a lot and was often drunk and stoned, but for him it never appeared to be habitual. When I got stoned I was so consumed by my desire for him that I assumed he must share it. Every cell in my body was magnetized by him. It was a religious frenzy that forced me to my knees before him. "You sick cow," he'd say, laughing, "stop looking at me like that."

Can it be called lust if it's a longing to be owned by someone, to write his initials on every chromosome of your body? I was haggard with lust, if that's what it was, idiotic with desire, certainly cretinous and repentant and humorless with longing. We'd be standing in the hallway, stoned, grinning, talking about something, and I'd suddenly sink to my knees, a vassal to love, as though I were a boyar (shaved, wigged and perfumed in the newest European lashion) who still wanted to kiss his tsar's foot.

"What are you doing?" Kevin would complain. "Girl, get a grip."

Perhaps as a husder he'd known all too many men who'd longed for a bigger, cruder fantasy looming right behind him, someone Kevin was standing in for but couldn't entirely embody. What he wanted from me was something more affectionate and offhand and palsy; I should have played his Sister Eileen, and every time the subway detonated under our

apartment I should have rushed into his arms for a chorus of" "Why-Oh Why-Oh Why-Oh, Why did we ever leave Ohio?"

Instead he had to live with my heavy penitent's tread up and down the house and my absurd genuflections, as though he were one of the Stations of the Cross.

One night he surprised me by staging a sex scene with me of course! Why hadn't I guessed that he could be stimulated only by sex-as-performance? He turned of! all the lights, blindfolded me, left me naked with my hands handcuffed behind me in his bedroom. He fed me a joint, speaking quietly to me all the while. He led me, gently, like Antigone leading the blind Oedipus, down the hallway. There I had to kneel again. I knew that recently he'd been seeing a guy who practiced "sex magick," who, apparently, treated an orgasm as just one incidental part of a long propitiatory rite complete with chanting, incense and a record of Steve Reich's Drumming. When Kevin released my eyes and hands, there he was, naked, erect, lit from within like a thick altar candle in which the wick and flame have burrowed deep into the flesh of the beeswax. He ordered me to suck him as one might take Communion. Only now do I realize that the performance, far from exciting him, was designed as an offering to me.

I was social in a robust style, he in a glancing way. He'd drop in on one of my dinner parties and as Ludmilla who, for complicated reasons, had an English accent, spoke of one of her passions (NLxon, child psychology, Balanchine, documentaries), or as Joshua railed against Max or Butler, laughing at their foibles, fulminating against their effrontery, Kevin would just perch on the edge of a chair, curious, smiling, but too stoned to follow the charged vocabulary, the complex syntax, the livid reactions so at odds with his own cool detachment to everything. "Nixon?" he'd say, blinking, "the President?" asking it in a tone of disbelief, dumbfounded that anyone would bother with someone so remote. Rebecca would say, "No, not the President, the man," because she found a subtle distinction lurking behind Kevin's question, unable for a moment to imagine he was really so dopey or doped.

My novel was at last published. It struck me as strange that publication, which to me was as momentous as the canonization of a saint, took place so simply, even humbly. I suppose even the cardinals must trudge into their chilly chambers on a November morning to vote

The Farewell Symphony

for or against that Chilean martyr who'd whipped herself in her parents' garden so many centuries ago; in the same way this book, which I'd composed on Fire Island six years earlier and which existed in my mind as a chord that took two hundred pages to get resolved, now existed in the world as a quire of flexible paper bound in harder paper.

I'd been presented with a cover design that I'd rejected (hadn't my contract said I had "cover approval"?), but it was used anyway: a seasheU dripping a blue tear Max wrote a "blurb" for the back cover that mentioned Freud and Darwin and pronounced on the saving powers of forgetting. I was thrilled and told him it reminded me of when at fourteen I'd written a few bars of music which a professional composer had played on a grand with crashing chords and rolling arpeggios: I hardly recognized my broken little tune. Max was generous if he could be proprietary, although unlike most great men he did not require that his disciples resemble him ardsti-cally He had a grasp, a very wide grasp. Perhaps his moral study of the history of art and artists made him avoid the usual pitfalls of genius; he resented Goethe's failure to sponsor Kleist and blamed him for the young man's suicide. "Goethe liked only his imitators, the feebler the better," Max said, "not like the Master—" by whom he invariably meant Henry James "—who recognized the genius in everyone from Flaubert to H.G. Wells, the ingrate!, and if he missed Whitman the first time around at least eventually he made up handsomely for his regrettable original misprision." Max had no respect for the minor virtues (he could be shockingly rude) but he honored the one he took as major, even sublime: generosity.

The New York Times Book Review published a well meaning but confused review of my book on page 3; the reviewer, a novelist I'd never heard of, treated the story as a mystery and years later I'd still find the book in remote public libraries under "crime fiction" or "tales of the supernatural" or just "mystery." There were few other reviews except one I recall from a local New Jersey paper with Catholic tendencies: "Every year New York flushes its intellectual sewers and down floats another load of crap like this pretentious doozy. C'mon, guys, can't you put together a good, old-fashioned plot for once? How about an honest day's work?"

I never saw the book for sale anywhere, I never saw anyone reading it on a park bench or in the subway, and within a year the publishing house had informed me it had sold just five hundred copies of the two thousand they'd printed. They were pulping the rest. Five hundred sounded like a lot to me. I was delighted when I imagined a room full of five hundred

people who'd read my book and allowed their niiiids lo be tattooed by my needles.

Because my afiair with Kevin was going so badly—in fact Kevin referred to me as his roommate—I had all my c\cnings free for Joshua, as many as he might want. Occasionally he looked at me with big eyes, with the very same anticipation I directed toward Kevin, but most of the time Joshua held himself in check. That first winter after I stamped my foot he was sometimes harsh and chiding with me, but only by flashes.

We went to spend a weekend with Eddie in his New England village. Eddie read to us a poem he'd written to his goddaughter, the plump one-year-old child we could hear laughing and talking to herself in her playpen on the landing below, as siie batted at the fish mobile dangling above her pillow. Fifteen years ago her father had been a handsome evzone in a white skirt, with a narrow waist and strong, hairy legs. He and Eddie had met in Athens and every stage of their love had been celebrated in poems with titles reminiscent of Cavafy or Rilke, a blend of heart-piercing nostalgia and a throbbing angelus of narrative and allegory. Now the Greek was a portly, balding family man of thirty-five and he and his wife and daughter lived downstairs. He was the janitor and caretaker and he also worked in a nearby pizzeria Eddie had bought for him. Once a month he came upstairs, tool in hand, to give Eddie a tune-up. His wife probably didn't suspect a thing. She stayed inside, grew broader, smiled shyly, knitted baby things against the winter cold, made Eddie the lemon-rice chicken soup he loved.

Joshua and I read the new poem for Cassiopeia, worked our way through its elaborate astrological conceits and consulted with each other. Finally Joshua, despite an admiration that bordered on awe, dared to say to Eddie, "Isn't it... a bit.. . cold?" Eddie slapped his forehead and said, "Of course! I forgot to put the feeling in!" He rushed upstairs to the cupola that served him as a study and fiddled with the verses for an hour before he descended with lines that made us weep, so tender were they, so melting and exalted. That night, when we were alone, Joshua whispered, "A rather chilling vision of the creative process, Fd say. We must never tell anyone about this, since how many people would understand and forgive the heartless, manipulative craftsmanship of great art?"

The village, for Eddie, was a repository of good stories. For him the walls of the houses were transparent and inside he could picture the drunken wife beater, heir to an automobile fortune, or see the spinster sis-

The Farewell Symphony

ter pulling aside an inch of curtain to peek outside, or overhear the tireless wrangling of the celebrated mother and daughter, novelists both, one a Romanian baroness by marriage. Greek Revival houses were the settings for Gothic passions. In such a small world, over-obsei^ved by fine minds all keeping detailed diaries, every ton mot was treasured. When Eddie came back from Italy with an antique clock for Gloria, the ancient novelist who talked like Mae West, she said, "I don't want a clock. I like things from Gucci. When Mary came back from Rome she brought me a lovely handbag from Gucci." Eddie murmured in mock exasperation, "Oh, Gloria, sometimes I have the feeling that for you Italy is nothing but the shores of Gimmegucci."

With me Eddie was kind in a deliberate way, as though he'd written himself a reminder. Perhaps he'd realized how wounded I'd been the night he'd said nothing after I'd read him the first chapter of my book. Eddie was a bit like a royal prince who's naturally shy, even slightly cruel, who's been trained to recall that his slightest remark or smallest gesture can crush one of his subjects. He sat with me one afternoon for a quarter of an hour in the living room while Joshua considerately went out for a walk. He told me he'd read my novel and liked it, then asked me about my plans. He suggested I apply for a grant from his foundation. "Of course I'm not the only member of the jury—there are four others—but I'll be plugging for you."

It struck me that Eddie had resolved brilliandy the problem of being an artist with inherited wealth. He worked hard, revised constantly, won all the prizes and in no way bought his celebrity. Since his other friends were all poor poets, he had set up his foundation to help them out with small sums; they couldn't ask him direcdy for handouts, nor need they feel beholden to him for grants given by five jury members. Money was never allowed to poison his relationships with other artists. Since Americans admire wealth and have no ideological hostility to it, Eddie's legendary family fortune only added to his splendor Everyone always assumed that he'd endowed his foundation. What no one knew was that every year he was bankrolling it out of his own pocket and that he was quite literally sharing his wealth with his friends. Perhaps because my father had been prosperous if not rich, money held no mystery for me. Nor did I think of myself as poor. Certainly it never occurred to me to resent someone rich.

Ha\ing read every line of Eddie's considerable ceuvre out loud with Joshua, in long, drunken evenings of appreciation, I now found myself, for a few days, living with the great man, drinking his tea, returning his

smiles, listening to his quips, which only one time out of ten became airborne. I came to realize that meeting a writer, knowing him up close, in the hope of better understanding his work, was a useless, even destructive exercise. In his poetry Eddie was quicksilver, not only funny and irreverent but also compassionate and wise, and he tilted from one mood to another word by word with an unprecedented fluidity. But if he was all at once Dante (the law-giving man) and the Marschallin (the sad, civilized woman in Der Rosenkavalier bidding fareweU to love), an Ariel of wit and a Caliban of sensuality, nevertheless this composite self, this kaleidoscope of roles, gained nothing by being experienced at first hand.

When I told Eddie that I knew a young poet who wanted to meet him as well as Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, and Robert Lowell, Eddie laughed and said, "But he'd only be meeting empty shells propped up around a table." He was exaggerating. Eddie's living, breathing body was not extinct. But he was right that to the degree a writer has metamorphosed his blood into ink his is an abandoned body. Or if the writer still has a personality, it is full of sharps and flats at odds with the tuned melody emitted by his writing.

In Eddie the man I detected a perversity and snobbishness that he radiated in spite of himself, qualities he'd entirely transformed in his writing into impishness and humor. In life he had an age, a pear-shaped body, a maddening drawl; on the page he was eternally youthful, a charged field of particles, a polyphony of voices. Whilst nothing that showed up on the page was unintended and everything was a pure product of the will, Eddie, like everyone else, sagged after lunch, generated a body heat, created an impression (of nervousness and effeminacy, in his case) that he himself was unaware of and that might not have been interpreted that way by someone who avoided appearing nervous and effeminate less strenuously than I. Or by someone less impressed than I by his mere mannerisms. Joshua, for instance, who'd gone to Harvard in an era of eccentrics and who'd also known Marianne Moore and Ezra Pound, did not take any notice of such superficial characteristics, mere caste marks, that might have made Eddie into a figure of fun in a movie meant for the masses but that signified nothing special within his clan of mid-Adantic artists and that wouldn't even have been mentioned in the memoirs written by any one of his friends.