The Farewell Symphony (44 page)

sensual mouth, unn-adablc brow, lots of hair—sitting; on a porch beside a standing Willie, round-lacod, hair up, her hat and traveling suit covered with jet-black embroidery. My mother and her defiant-looking brother in plus-fours and a newspaper boy's cap are squeezed between them. What seems suggestive is that, contrary to a Victorian wedding photo, here the man is seated and the woman standing.

y\s a railroad employee my grandfather had been lodged in a little house beside the tracks, but after he died my grandmother and her two children were ousted. They'd gone to the homestead farm—bliss for my mother, who'd run wild and played with dozens of cousins. And with one teenage uncle. "He used to rub me down there when I was just five or six. I liked it. It felt wonderful. Everyone makes too much of sex with children. After all, children have their sexual needs, too. As long as there's no violence. . . ." Willie, however, had to work terribly hard from dawn to dusk on the farm to earn their keep, although no one would have put it like that. She was just "doing chores."

She'd been released from servitude when she unexpectedly married Mr. Wentworth, a local high school math teacher. He took my mother's education in hand and later, when she was eighteen, made sure she went to university. He went with her, since he was working on an advanced degree that would allow him to teach on the junior college level. Without him my mother would never have had a higher education.

He was a good fifteen years younger than Willie and had always been fussed over by his mother and spinster sisters. He was almost an invalid since when, as a boy, he'd tatded to the schoolmarm on the other boys and they'd rewarded him after class by beating his leg to the bone with a thick stick. It became infected, then gangrenous, and finally had to be sawed off. Now he had a heavy wooden leg that was attached to his body by an elaborate harness. He walked with a rocking gait and had to lift the leg with both hands when he went upstairs. If he was resting he'd slump down in his chair and keep it stretched out in front of him. When Anne and I went to waken him in the morning, his leg would be standing in the corner like a totem garlanded with orthopedic straps.

When I was very young—fourteen?—my grandmother put my mother and sister in one bedroom and my grandfather and me in the other. She slept on the couch. Mr. Wentworth was a randy old thing who'd hug us all to his big soft chest and belly with his surprisingly powerful arms. At such moments he cocked his head to one side and wore a big, fatuous smile as though he were transfLxed by some private joke. My mother said, "Poor

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Mr. Wentworth, I'm sure Willie won't—well, I'm sure he's not getting much tenderness from her. Mother is as good as good gets but she doesn't set much store by—well, I'm sure Mr. Wentworth is starved for affection. But he's always been a terrible hugger and grabber. Maybe it started with his infirmity, but when I was sixteen and he became my stepdad, I can remember how he'd hug and hug me and I didn't like it at all but Willie refused to see anything wrong, she'd just say, 'Stop your fussin', can't you see he's just being sweet?' "

I wasn't his favorite grandchild and I'm sure he preferred little girls to boys, but that night—in the big featherbed which smelled of the yellowing cake of tar soap that Willie kept out in the wash house next to the chicken coop—Mr. Wentworth and I squeezed each other for hours on end. I was interested in his penis but no matter how much I let my hand, seemingly innocendy, trail or flop about, he kept shifting adroitly away to avoid its touch.

He would, however, squeeze me and let me squeeze him, which was like squeezing a huge bolster loosely packed with feathers, but heavy feathers, as though they'd been dipped in mercury.

I could scarcely sleep, but I must have drifted into and out of sleep. My grandfather seemed to be mostly awake as well, since nearly every time I looked at him he was smiling on the pillow beside me. He was dressed in big, baggy white undershorts and a loose white T-shirt. When he'd unstrapped his wooden leg he'd hopped on the other over to bed. I was fascinated by his stump and he was never shy about showing it. But I'd never touched it and now I kept trying to judge from the pressure against me whether there was a bone in it or not.

My erection, pressed by my underpants against my stomach, throbbed, unrequited, and acted as the motor to my dreams. My dreams were at least half literaiy My mother had given me a rhyming dictionary for Christmas that also explained all the traditional meters and forms. All through the holidays I'd been working on a paean to the seasons in Byron's ottava rima. My pleasure in the writing was registered as a light strum of my whole body and as a sizzling behind the temples. Sometimes I felt as though I were in an elevator that had just fallen a foot. For the first time my life was no longer all staccato notes. The idea that I had a big ongoing project had added to the score graceful, interlocking legato marks. The coal-tar smell of the clean sheets, smooth as wilting flower petals from hundreds of washings, the outrage of the cock's strangled cry just on the otlier side of the window, the metronomic pulsing of my penis under

the waistband of my underpants, the pillowy disarray of my grandfather and his shy, half-awake smile, the visceral certainty that I was writing a great poem—that even now, as dawn was painting layer upon thin, silvery layer of lacquer on the blinds, my poem was metastasizing somewhere inside me—these were the elements that as a young Buddhist I tried to separate out, to disentangle and card. I wanted to cut through the knot of self, but as a writer I was incurably self-centered. I mean that I watched my mind at work and tried to catch it in the act of thinking; I was like a fisherman who watches a still pool, looking for a tell-tale ripple, that second when a wave takes on the substance of a fm or tail.

At last I fell asleep. When I awakened, my grandfather was already in harness and dressed and in the adjoining back parlor. Even through the closed door I could hear him saying to my grandmother, my mother and sister, "Ooh-ee! That litde boy is just as sweet as he can be. We hugged and kissed all night long. He wouldn't let me go one single minute. He just hugged and kissed me. I never did see such a sweet litde boy."

"Wall, ain't that just the sweetest thang you ever did hear?" I could just picture my grandmother's faint smile, her clouded eyes and the way her palsy shook her head slighUy left to right, right to left as though she were saying no when all she ever said was yes.

My mother and sister were ominously silent. They, of course, knew ex-acdy what sort of sickness and perversion I'd been up to. I wanted to rush out and shut my grandfather up, but it was too late, he was already saying it again, "Well, he's just as sweet as sugar I never knew he loved his grand-daddy so much. He just hugged and squeezed me all night long. He's as loving as a litde angel boy."

I got out of bed and knelt beside the gas burner. I turned on the gas without lighting it. I inhaled deeply. I wanted to die. Finally I lost my nerve and turned off the gas and got dressed.

A FEW WEEKS AFTER my sistcr's second suicide attempt my mother phoned to tell me that my sister's oldest child, Gabriel, had been put by his father and stepmother into a mental hospital because he was cutting classes and had even run away for a week after having stolen seventy dollars from his father's wallet. "The poor boy, he's become vio-lendy anti-social," my mother said, "he just lives in the basement like an animal, he won't bathe or obey his father. He sleeps by day and won't go to school. Of course it's all your sister's fault for having put him in that

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Free School where the kids do nothing but read Mao's Little Red Book all day and where the students, if you please, voted math out of the curriculum as being too bourgeois and just a capitalist tool. Tm sure the Russians have many fine mathematicians. Now poor Gabriel is just fourteen and he's out at the Lakewood Facility and the doctor is a total tyrant who acts like one of those religious cult leaders, those nuts, and he lives there with them, and the kids study nothing, they just sit around in those morbid group therapy sessions all day and drink coffee and smoke cigarettes." My mother burst into tears. Wlien she recovered herself, she said, "Willie wasn't far wrong. Remember how she'd say, 'Don't smoke or drink'?"

' ''Drank' " I said. "She said, 'Don't smoke or drank.' '"

"Don't make fun of her. She was a simple country woman but a lot more on the ball than—"

"Fm not making fun of her. I loved her And poor Gabriel. Have you seen him?"

"When I think I have a daughter and a grandson in the asylum at the same time! Honey, what is the world coming to? We need Willie's good old-fashioned values. My, she was down-to-earth. Do you know that the day she died she laid out her dress and shoes and even chose her brooch, the things she wanted to be buried in?"

When I hung up I thought there was no choice between family life with its squabbles and sordid melodramas and single life with its melancholy pleasure seeking. I knew young mothers who dreamed of a few minutes in which to write a poem; I had vast acres of free time and not much heart to fill them. I could mope around the house for hours, berating myself, wilting onto a sofa or strumming through an insipid book, lighting up for a long, juicy phone call, then sinking into a hot bath in the middle of the afternoon with a pack of cigarettes and a pot of tea on the floor beside me, my eyes unhappy with the wall paint that had been slopped over the tiles although I would never have spent the ten minutes necessary to scrape them clean.

Outside, in the great world of Manhattan, a few lesbians and gay men were fighting for our rights. I was sure that for them the conviction of working for a community spared them both the squalor of family life and the stale narcissism of artistic isolation.

Of course I filled my free time with New York friendships—exigent, hysterical, invasive. I had many friends I saw once every week or two and long parts of my day were devoted to lunches, dinners and phone calls. The calls could be rapid-fire reports ("Howard's really done it this time. I

think it's all over. I'm oH" for an emergency session with the shrink. I'll (all later") or in themselves, long therapeutic sessions ("Okay, now let's get this straight. You were talking intimately with your father—and your mother dared to pick up on an extension?"). Joshua would call up to read me the John Ashbery poem he was working on ("Don't you see the tide, 'Soonest Mended,' comes from the saying, 'Least said, soonest mended'? Except here nothing's mended and the voice is endlessly self-renewing. All those loose, sloppy connections, John's 'Meanwhile, back at the ranch' sort of construction. Last night at John Myers' cocktail party, there was a kid who asked John Ashbery what was his own favorite poem and all three of us—John, Harry Mathews and I—we all said, 'Soonest Mended,' in the same breath. Isn't that somehow . . . marvelous? Not to mention reassuring, given how . . . nutty }o\m\ work is?").

Through Joshua I met Lillian Hellman and, a week later, her archenemy Mary McCarthy, over for a visit from Paris. Through Max I met Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock's widow. Of course none of them would have remembered me half an hour later. Joshua took me to a party at George Plimpton's where I saw Norman Mailer, small and thuggish, grey hair curling on his neck. But most of my contacts with the celebrated were at one remove. An art critic I had worked with was one of Warhol's best friends. They'd talk on the phone to each other late at night while each, at home, was watching the same television program.

We had cool, distant artistic gods—the poet Elizabeth Bishop, the nearly silent Samuel Beckett, the painter Jasper Johns and, in France, remote, dandified thinkers such as Roland Barthes (whom I had belatedly espoused)—but as New Yorkers we also needed art that wasn't eternal, that was hot and ephemeral. We ran off to all of Warhol's movies, even now that he himself no longer made them. We saw Sondheim's musical Follies; Joshua and I, after yet another romantic disappointment, would sing "I'm still here!" We bought expensive, whacky, certainly tacky clothes. We grumbled about the propagation of Black English in the schools, which we feared would deny black students access to ordinary jobs. We visited an art gallery where Vito Acconci was lying under a raised boardwalk, masturbating while imagining the people walking above him; he collected the sperm and sold it under the name "Seedbed." Robert Wilson and Philip Glass had taken over the Metropolitan Opera to present Einstein on the Beach; Kevin and I attended, so high on acid that soon we were weeping from the flood of revelations rushing over us, and I wrote a review for Christopher Street, the new gay magazine, comparing

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the event to the premiere of Parsifal. We spurred each other on to exaggerate so that we could feel at home in our own era and could convince ourselves that New York was truly the center of the world. If so much was going on around us, then we, too, must be about to do something brilliant.

I WENT to Venice in June to visit Joshua. He told me that if I could pay my way over he'd pick up all my other expenses while I was there.

I took a boat in from the airport. It threaded its way past abandoned islands and pylons bound together like asparagus held upright in a steamer so that the stems cook faster than the tender heads. I thought that if I were a painter Fd paint this vast pale blue dome—streaked with pale cirrus clouds and gently quaking with unreleased light—which fitted over and joined the dark blue scumbled sea below, and on the low horizon line I'd place all the interest, just the finest band of minuscule towers and flashing windows and thread-bright flags.

In the big water taxi I was seated staring up at a teenage boy who was a crew member: he wore the regulation dark blue trousers and T-shirt. The T-shirt was beating violently in the wind. He ran along the gunwale and then hung out over the waves, his back to the sea, holding onto nothing but a guy wire. His skinny tan arms were as long and improbable as a colt's legs. His nose was shiny, his chin slightly red and sprouting stubble, his hair tea brown with apricot highlights. His stare was as intense and puzzled as a deaf man's.