The Farewell Symphony (48 page)

I took my nephew with me to San Juan. We stayed in a cheap hotel two blocks off Condado Beach I'd heard about, more an apartment than a

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hotel room since there was a kitchen where we could cook. I had only three hundred dollars but I thought the sun might be good for Gabriel's skin.

We'd lie on the sand and he'd talk shyly about which girls he liked. If I talked too crudely about big tits or the outline of a vagina seen through a swimsuit, Gabe would say, "Gross," and look at me pityingly. He had vei-y romantic ideas about Spanish-speaking women. He told me that back in the psycho ward he'd fallen for a thirteen-year-old girl called Ana, a Mexican-American who was beautiful and royally fucked up. Her father was a drunk and violent and her mother had a heroin habit.

I was a bit in love with Gabriel. I could see through his swimsuit that he had a large penis, much bigger than mine. With him I wanted to be a buddy, another teen, even a straight one, and soon enough I was looking at girls, too.

In a way my relationship with Gabriel was a continuation of the love I'd felt for Giovanni. At night, our faces burning from the day's sun, we'd walk through Old San Juan down blue cobblestones that Spanish galleons had brought over to the new world as ballast—Spanish stone to trade for Peruvian gold. Gabriel encouraged me to go off on my own to a gay bar, but I enjoyedhc'ing with him. I never thought of Kevin, or even Sean. Gabe knew how little money I had. He was grateful that I was sharing what I had with him. He said, "You don't really seem like a grown up. You look so young and you know all the latest dances and pop songs, more than I do, I'm not really into pop, more folk, and you just live from hand to mouth but always seem to be ha\ing fun, drinking, getting high, getting laid, but you get your work done, too." I thought that maybe I'd taken the curse off growing up for Gabriel, but I couldn't be sure he wasn't just saying what he thought I'd like to hear He was a bit of a con artist, the result of therapy and his Maoist school and his overly analyzed mother.

She seemed jealous when we called her from San Juan. She said, "I don't think Gabriel needs or deserves expensive vacations in the tropics. He needs to be thinking about the serious business of getting back on the straight and narrow. Life isn't all laughs."

But I thought it should be. In the weeks following our trip Gabriel picked up what he called my "aristocratic" code of never pontificating, never seeming to struggle, never complaining or speaking fearfully of the future. Now that his face was clearing up he began to dress fastidiously. I said, "Oh, God, I'm sick of always having my nails look so dirty and urchin-Yikt. I've broken down and bought a manicuring set and a brush,

though it makes me feel like my father, the cold, old narcissist endlessly buffing his nails." Instantly Gabe began to take care of his nails, as I'd planned. He barely knew my father, but he'd concocted a myth about him. He decided that in his nocturnal, misanthropic splendor Daddy was "cool." Perhaps I couldn't serve him as a model since I was gay; my father at least had the virtue of being heterosexual.

Of course I disliked my father even if I remained hypersensitive t(j the faintest signals he emitted. He told my sister that he thought it was admirable the way I was looking after my nephew. He'd even said he admired me for paying Anne's tuition. I found such "admiration" shocking. Why should I have to worry myself sick, digging into a very shallow pocket, when he was so well off? Of course I was also gratified that he recognized what I was doing. I suppose my gratitude betrayed my slave mentality.

In influencing Gabe so indirectly, I wasn't trying to manipulate him; the truth was that I wanted him to love me. To please him I introduced a chapter into my Baroque novel, one set in Spain. I even invented a character named Ana in order to titillate him. He was delighted by my literary compliment.

Every morning I'd lie in bed and write, waiting for the day to come rushing down on me—Gabriel's needs, especially his need for company, the phone calls from Josh and Max and Buder and Maria and Lou, the secretary's arrival and the necessity to shop and cook and clean. While I lay in bed, I could feel the day, just outside my door, coiling to pounce. My novel became my "little" novel, a secret journal, and if the language was overworked that was because I needed to prove to myself I could still write. And not so secret either, since I read it to Gabriel every morning.

At first Kevin kept his distance from Gabriel except if he ran into him slumped over coffee and a cigarette in the kitchen. Then Kevin would exclaim, "Yogurt! Steamed vegetables! Lots of fruit!—this is Miss Jean Brodie warning you!" Gabe would just smile feebly, sleep sand in his eyes. He didn't catch the reference but he was willing to be amused and stared at Kevin as a Siberian prisoner might stare at a Balinese dancer. Kevin looked much younger than Gabe, though he was ten years older. Gabe slept, smoked, strummed his guitar and masturbated (I could see the shadow of his thwacking hand through the crack of the bathroom door), whereas Kevin was almost never home and was usually off somewhere on his bicycle or at classes or auditions. Some nights he worked for a gay caterer who did large parties.

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But one day Kevin, triumphant and a bit shaken, announced that he'd just been cast in a big Broadway play, a psychological thriller, and that he'd be playing the juvenile lead, a crazed teenager. Suddenly I noticed that Kevin was drinking my nephew in with narrowed eyes, noting his strangely mechanical walk, his mirthless laugh, his rigid neck, his way of folding up into himself when he was seated and alone. The performance that six months later earned Kevin a Tony Award was based on Gabe. Never for a moment did Gabe resent the exploitation of his pain. It certainly wasn't doing him any good. Besides, Gabe himself was by then writing a novel and studying both of us.

Kevin changed overnight from a bored profligate with a cutting tongue into a serious, home-loving professional. The play was a monster hit and he quickly became entirely subservient to it. The director was a vile Englishman who called women "slits" and who thought that an actor's ego had to be broken down before it could be reconstructed in the proper way. Worse, the star, one of the most famous men in the world, was recovering from a seven-year binge and couldn't remember his lines. He'd be moving easily along in one of his fust-act monologues, thrilling everyone with his plangent voice, the only voice I'd ever heard that spoke in the minor key— when suddenly he'd be off and running in a second-act speech (one key word, used in both monologues, must have served as the hyperspace button). It was Kevin's job to herd old Wet Brain slowly and seamlessly back into the proper first-act lines.

The action called for Kevin to be fully nude at the end of Act One. Nine tenths of the audience was seated in the normal fashion but a symbolic few, usually students, were placed in a half-circle on the stage, perhaps to suggest that this "serious" drama appealed to earnest young minds and not just to the usual well-heeled crowd of bored expense-account executives— the "carriage trade," as it was still quaindy called.

Here and there, scattered among the couples, were a few gay men who'd come for the nudity—as well as for the hot and cold splashes of hysteria and wisdom, an invigorating bath that Tennessee Williams had first dravvTi for them. These older men, their conseivative tailoring so at odds with hair colors never seen before in nature, would pull out opera glasses at the crucial moment when Kevin would go berserk and rip off his clothes. Then they'd be able to see if Kevin had the smallest pimple on his ass. The kids on stage, used to looking at television actors who couldn't hear their remarks, would comment audibly on a blackhead—or, just once, a love bite on his neck ("No wonder he's so neurotic if he's getting mauled

by a vampire"). The director, vulvar and hatclul as he was, had never asked to see any of the actors auditioning lor Kevin's role nude, hi fact he saw Kevin's body only during the first preview. Kevin was vexed that the tension of being on stage made his large cock shrink; "Why don't you come backstage and fluff it for me, doll," he said to one of his boyfriends. The size of Kevin's penis was the unspoken point of the first-act curtain.

There was one man in his sixties who attended the play three or four times a week, often with an attractive group of younger guys. He'd half-doze but at the moment of truth he'd sit up and focus his high-power binoculars, even though he was only in the fifth row and could sec per-fecdy well.

His name was Tulsa and after twenty performances he started sending mountainous bouquets, fruit baskets and kilos of Belgian chocolates to Kevin's dressing room. At last he came by after a matinee and shyly introduced himself I happened to be there and he instantly latched onto me, whom he correctly diagnosed as the high priest of the cuh and much more approachable than the god himself.

I needed a job. I wanted to send Gabriel to a private school, the Rock-ford Academy, in which "problem" students were taught all day long, one-on-one, by tutors. Kids who'd been ill or living abroad or in a madhouse or prison or who'd just been goofing off could catch up with their age group through accelerated courses. Gabe was eager to attend. In fact he'd become almost alarmingly motivated to re-enter the middle class. The only hitch was that the school cost each semester half of what I earned in a year, even if I did bits and pieces of journalism on the side. Kevin paid all the rent now out of his Broadway salary, but I was still far from coming up with the tuition.

Tulsa offered a solution. He was a consultant for several corporations and found me a job in the publicity department of a big chemical manufacturer that had its headquarters on Madison Avenue. My salary was generous, although after deductions my paycheck looked pretty measly; I felt I could supplement it if I labored every night on the history book.

I was back at work in an office after a five-year hiatus of getting stoned, sleeping late and working long days in little snatches. Jane, my boss, the token woman on the board of directors, made it clear that I was expected to be at my desk twelve hours a day, from eight to eight.

I had to buy two new suits, which I saw as an investment in my corporate future. The job itself, like every other position in this old-fashioned company, was devoted entirely to passing the buck. If I sent round a

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memo asking for "input" on the corporate report, the memo would pass from ofTice to office, always being referred on to someone else whose "expertise" coincided with just such a question. The vice presidents were twenty well fed men in their fifties who were fiercely protected by their female retainers. Everyone was white.

I had a variety of assignments. I was asked to make a twenty-page condensation of The Coming of the Post-Industrial Age for the chairman of the board; I received high praise from the chairman himself, which threw Jane into a panic of insecurity and resentment. The company had major investments in South Alrica; I was asked to explain how such investments were in no way abetting apartheid.

It was all too clear to me that having a child cost dear—in hours, money, compromises. I recalled one of my buddies from the sixties, who'd published three novels in his twenties, had never written another word after marndng at age thirty' and becoming a father. With my day job and my night job there was no chance I'd ever get back to my "little" novel, which I abandoned. Our apartment had gone from a place of casual sex, irregular hours and constant creativity to one where we kept normal hours, ate ordinary meals, remained more or less chaste, never wrote fiction or painted, drank little, did our homework.

I figured out that when Kevin had not been acting he'd needed to stage daily erotic adventures in which he'd perform for an audience of one. He'd invented new personalities for himself and tried out new sexual techniques. Most important, he'd dazzled man after man. As "Pete" the hick or "Ivan" the Latvian gymnast or "Clarence" the English runaway Etonian, he'd tried on the new roles. As a hustler he'd intuited his clients' fantasies and starred in their private dramas. He told me, "One day I was on a call and I walked into a hotel room and there was Tennessee Williams. I had a choice. Either I could gush and say, 'Oh, Mr. Williams, how you've enriched my life!' or I could march over to him and say, 'Lick my boots, dog.' I chose the latter and I could sense he was deeply grateful."

Now that Kevin was acting he was kind if vague with Gabe, as though he were a poor relation whom he wished well but scarcely knew. Sometimes he was so lost in thought that he glanced at Gabe in surprise, as though he'd forgotten who he was. Gabe and I lived our dull, routine lives beside this man who rose at noon, steamed his vegetables, did two hours of aerobics and napped before cycling down to the theater He wouldn't be home before two or three, since he was too wired after his performance

to do anything except drink and pick at a salad. Sometimes he let himself be asked out by Tulsa and his band, (iabe and I felt we were the grey, self-effacing child and governess living in the house of a grande cocolte whose metier was her body and who sold it at night.

Three or four nights a week Kevin spent his evening after the play with Dennis, that strange Boston Irishman he'd met at my improvised orgy. They were always playing the young lovers and Kevin, after Dennis would phone, would hang up and let his hand pound against his chest to mime his fluttering heart. I'd hear the endless litany of their romantic talk through the wall. I felt as though I belonged to the workaday world of parents and breadwinners, whereas they were youngsters who, no matter how many hours they worked, could still take the most intense pleasure in each other. I'd never had that sort of affair, or at least not for longer than a few days, but I could imagine what it must be like to melt without a transition out of an embrace into sex and then, after the second or third climax, continue whispering about all the things one loved about the other's body ("You have the smallest, cleanest ears and I cream whenever I see your birthmark or notice the difference in color between one eye and the other and then that dramatic black hair, so straight, and that pale Heath-cliff skin"), praise that would be silenced by still more kisses. I could imagine awakening near dawn with that black hair fanned across my chest and weeping hot, hot tears of pleasure, knowing how tender and still and intimate the night was, so unlike the horror of waking up beside a snoring pick-up, this disgusting foreign body, not even clean perhaps, smelling of stale beer. . . .No, Dennis was the romantic lead in Kevin's domestic drama and they'd often appear at the door hand in hand or Kevin, who was so much smaller, would sit on Dennis's lap and they'd joke until Dennis would whisper something dirty or sweet in Kevin's ear and carry him off to the bedroom.