The Farewell Symphony (40 page)

Of course the sermons I preached against love and jealousy were all the more absurd because I was so besotted by Kevin. I wanted to be his wife in the most straidaced of marriages. I wanted to cook his breakfast and bear his babies. I wanted him to be my boy-husband, my baby-masten I suppose when I say I'm an atheist and always have been I'm not being quite honest, since I've worshipped two gods in my life, Sean and Kevin.

The Farewell Symphony

Kevin was suddenly off every night working as a waiter in the Village and on a good night he could pull in a hundred dollars; during the days he went to gym class or dance class or an audition. I seldom went out and felt all the more becalmed in the wake of his excited entrances and exits. Once in a whUe when he was out I'd sneak into his room and turn the wheels of his bicycle, which was hoisted high on the wall and held there by protruding industrial clamps. I just wanted to hear the ratcheting of his gears, the sound of that month when we belonged to the Society of St. Agnes and had slept in each other's chaste, feverish arms.

The man at the orgy who'd stayed apart and looked as inconsolable as Job became Kevin's lover His name was Dennis. He was a Catholic boy from Boston with one blue eye and one green and a faint birthmark on his forehead, as though the forceps had caused a hemorrhage when he was born, a bruise just beneath the skin, and the mark had never healed. He was tall and pale skinned, with teeth that were small, flat and tinged with blue like the teeth of Victorian dolls. One tooth was broken and he hid it with his hand when he smiled. His beard grew in a moment after he'd shaved. His biceps looked like veined gooseberries packed in snow. He was so handsome we scarcely noticed he had no conversation beyond a way of shaking his narrow head in mild amazement and exclaiming, "Jeez . . ." under his breath, eyelids lowered. At a time when most gay men were lifting weights he was doing very precise and demanding stretching exercises of his own devising. Other young gay men wore their new shoulders as though they were store-bought football padding, but he was as familiar as an animal with his own muscles. A line of black hair crept up his pale, ridged stomach like a trail of ants across tablets of white chocolate. His hands were big but refined and the knuckles were dusted with glossy hair You pictured them playing the piano, reaching for octaves, so pale they made the ivory keys look dingy. He didn't pay much attention to what other people were telling him. Strangely, he seemed indifferent even to what he was saying. He'djust ratde on, coming up with whatever he thought would please his listeners or merely filling in the blanks as dictated by convention. Meanwhile, his thoughts, all unnoticed, would spin out of control. He'd go off in a secret, sick direction and end up hot-wiring a stolen car or shooting heroin, almost without even noticing it. Or he'd smack his fist through a window pane a moment after calling his sick grandmother to cheer her up or mailing a thank-you note to a hostess. Kevin teased him constandy, usually about sex, and though Den-

nis was too blue-white to blush, he lowered his eyes and complained happily in his Boston-Irish accent and laughed behind his hand.

Kevin seemed to be madly in love with Dennis. After Dennis would leave, Kevin would drum his own heart with his open hand and say, "God, that man, he's so wild. Those eyelashes grazing his cheeks like black wings. He's a solo version of the second act of Swan Lake all by himself Those buns? Slurp, slurp."

Dennis lived with Al, a forty-year-old window designer who devised chic, scary scenes of nibber fetishism to advertise the new Magnavox or who came up with the public hanging of a skinny mannequin in a Givenchy frock for Bonwit's. Al was very possessive and Dennis was not only his lover but also his employee. From the way Dennis referred to him, Al sounded like a fat, sweaty old man; imagine our astonishment when Kevin and I dropped in at their atelier one afternoon and discovered a bald little he-man who'd been a champion figure skater and had the butt to prove it.

A straight man doesn't want to sleep with his rival, just kill him, but a rejected gay lover hopes to seduce his successor in order to spite his ex-partner, perhaps, but also out of curiosity, even desire. I couldn't hate Dennis, especially when I saw how headstrong he was in his self-destruction, any more than Al could hate Kevin.

I liked Dennis and when I thought of him I saw him as I'd first encountered him at the orgy—big eyes struck with horror, chin resting on his fist, body folded into itself And yet when Kevin and Dennis would sit on the couch and smooch while I counted stitches—no, I didn't really knit, but I felt like a maiden aunt in a black dress, skinny loins on fire and a cobweb in her pussy, nervously raiding the spoon in her teacup.

I'd put an empty water glass to the wall between my room and Kevin's and listen to Dennis's sighs and Kevin's groans. I asked Kevin who "shtupped" whom and Kevin said they took turns though their favorite thing was sixty-nining for blissful, suckling hours. For some reason I thought of Melville's description of baby whales in the warm Caribbean nursing underwater, their blue eyes looking up through the water toward the sky and off to one side, as though they'd sighted an angel.

If we hadn't lived together I would have stopped seeing Kevin for a few weeks and I might have regained some dignity or at least independence. Living with him meant I became more and more abject. Joshua would go along with my plotting and scheming, probably because he'd been in on my obsession from the start. He heard every detail in our twice-daily

The Farewell Symphony

phone calls. Also because Joshua was a true friend, someone who takes you at your own evaluation, who buys your version, the opposite of a shrink.

I began to see a psychotherapist, but a gay one this tinie, which made all the difference. Abe was a fat, bearded guy who walked around his big West Side apartment in stocking feet and was in love with a skinny, sexy dandy who had pursed, purple lips and, the one tinie I chatted with him, seemed to know everything about everything—hieroglyphics, Rasputin, Mao's Cultural Revolution—but was also in possession of the inner, esoteric meaning of every system, person or event he mentioned. He was spooky in an amusing, original way, which made me admire Abe's taste and feel that my habit of falling in love with picture-perfect athletic blonds proved how banal my character must be.

Soon Joshua and Kevin were also going to Abe. I didn't worry that they were crowding me out; on the contrary, so much Beta conformity made me feel all the more an Alpha leader.

The American Psychological Association had taken homosexuality off its list of character disorders and neuroses and reclassified it as falling somewhere within the normal range of sexual behavior. Although I suspect most psychotherapists, especially the Freudians, kept their reservations about homosexuality in pello, we were gratified that officially we were off the books.

With my other shrinks, paradoxically, I'd never had to talk about my real problems because for them the unique problem had been homosexuality. With Abe, because he was gay (if such a butch, bluff, overweight man could be considered gay), I had to trace out the exact topography of my unhappiness. Where did it hurt? What did I want to change? Whereas before the therapist had felt like a priest I was hoping to placate, Abe made it clear he worked for me, was providing a service and I could use him as I saw fit. There was a certain wary respect and affection between us and no love lost and no "transference," if that meant exaggerated, unearned feelings of hate and desire.

One day he made me look in the mirror and list all the things I liked and disliked about myself Surprisingly the likes outnumbered the dislikes, even though the dislikes were deeper. Another day he focused a camera on me and later he played back ten minutes' worth of film. I said, "God, I sound like such a sissy," and he said, "All American men say that, straight and gay. It's because the real men in the movies—cowboys, criminals—make no gestures and speak in a low monotone. Any expressivity comes across as effeminate by that standard."

I came in with a dream about being trapped in a mummiform coffin with my father's face painted on it, which was positioned down a long processional row of statues of Anubis. Abe said that from everything I'd told him he thought that I was afraid of dying inside while going on living outside—as my father had obviously done. I no longer thought about my father nor did I have any contact with him. I hadn't exchanged a letter or phone call with him in two years. When I was a boy I'd wanted to be his lover; he'd never come through and now I hated him with a cold, denying hatred. I imagined him wondering why I never phoned and feeling too aggrieved to mention it even to his wife, despite the fact she fed his resentments whenever she could.

My mother still received her small alimony from him every month, enough to tie her to him, and my sister drove down to Cincinnati to see him occasionally, but when she asked him for money after her divorce to go to graduate school so that she could eventually earn a living, he refused. She cried at yet another proof of his indifference. He lived in his fourteen-room house with the two new Cadillacs under the car port and the chain-smoking, hillbilly maid and looked down through acres of landscaped grounds at the Ohio River, but he couldn't afford three thousand dollars a year to send her back to school (she wanted to earn a master's degree in social work so that she could be a psychotherapist). I earned only twelve thousand dollars a year, but I ended up paying for her education. Daddy had always seen Anne and me, no doubt, as nothing but a potential financial burden whom he'd contracted in the divorce agreement to help until we reached age twenty-one or graduation from college, whichever came first. When Anne had married he'd presented her with an itemized life bill, a fiendishly detailed document of every expense, no matter how minor, he'd ever incurred on her behalf; the object was not to demand reimbursement but to warn Anne of the forbidding cost of raising a child, lest she begin breeding heedlessly. Once I'd left university to come to New York, he'd never advanced me another nickel. I'd done everything myself, but my survival, rather than making me proud, caused me to feel lonely.

I wanted to define myself as my father's opposite. Where he was tight-fisted, I'd be generous. Where he was cunning, I'd be guileless. Where he was cautious, I'd be reckless. Where he was intent on preserving his reputation as an upstanding citizen and moral paragon among people to whom he was entirely indifferent, I would lay myself bare in full public view through my exhibitionistic writing.

The Farewell Symphony

And yet I could feel his expressionless, self-centered face hardening over mine like a plaster death mask. The humiliations I was suffering almost daily over Kevin had sapped my confidence, unmanned me. I was like a troublesome tooth that a dentist desensitizes by killing the nerve. The tooth continues to sit tranquilly in the mouth, resembling the adjacent teeth, but it is dead. Perhaps Fd suffered so much Fd died.

Abe said that everyone was always going on about cruel heterosexual fathers who reject their gay sons, but he asserted that more frequendy the gay son, who wants a kind of gende, hall-romantic love that his bewildered heterosexual father isn't programmed to provide, ends up by rejecting old ineffectual Dad. I didn't know when or exacdy why Fd rejected my father, but I hated him now with the cold, abiding resentment of the jilted lover

Even though Kevin was small and boyish and looked no more than sixteen, even though I was the one who paid the rent and ran the household, with him I was once again hoping, as Fd always hoped with my father, to squeeze a bit of love out of a distant man.

At least that was the sort of thing we discussed in therapy, Abe and I, although now it all sounds both pat and unconvincing. I could just as easily have said, I now see, that I was impersonating my father and Kevin me, but with a new twist: now it was the son who was denying his father love, not the contrary. Or I could have said that no one was playing anyone and that the drama between Kevin and me wasn't a restaging of roles but rather a re-enactment of certain tensions created by crossing the themes of money and love when I was a child.

Or I could have said that I loved Kevin, as who would not, and he didn't love me, which was reasonable. The story was just that simple and any effort to extenuate that unacceptable fact was pathetic.

While writing my history textbook, Fd been polishing my novel about Christa. Fd spent five years writing it, most of that time occurring before the long-delayed publication of my Japanese-Fire Island novel. Now, having put the finishing touches to it, I submitted it to the same woman who'd published the earlier novel. She wasn't too sure about the new book. She asked for extensive revisions; by the time Fd done them she'd changed her mind and rejected the manuscript. "You tried the most difficult thing of all," she said, "to make a passive woman your heroine. Good tiy, but you didn't pull it off."

Kevin was so stoic in facing his own almost daily defeats during auditions that he set me a heroic example. I didn't complain, although I registered in m\' marrow every one of the twenty-three rejections the book

subsequently garnered. Kevin and I smoked so much dope and dropped so many pills that we were in a constant confusion of creativity. He disliked my solid, bill-paying side, even though he depended on it, but he warmed to me whenever I'd tell him about a new book I was planning or whenever I'd listen as he told me about his plan to memorize backwards the whole first-act balcony scene in Noel Coward's Private Lives.

An older poet whom I'd met through Joshua told me he'd been to see an ancient Jungian famous for curing blocked writers. "What did she tell you?" I asked eagerly. "She asked me to give her the schedule of my typical day and I said, 'Well, I wake up and get up,' and she interrupted me right away and said, 'But you must never get up. You must pee, make coffee, then go back to bed right away before you've spoken to anyone and contaminated your mind with chatter and then write for just half an hour a day. That way you're close to the unconscious and the universal language of dreams, and your defenses are still low.' "