The Farewell Symphony (51 page)

What neither of us questioned was that as much sex as possible with as many men as one could find was a good thing. Except Abe was less hostile than I to couples. For the strange, unaccountable thing was that I, who longed to marry Kevin, just as I'd once ached to wed Sean, responded in any abstract discussion to the concept of the couple with implacable hostility. I suppose my impossible loves, soaked in tears and mimicking the religiosity of a saint, were acceptable to me because they were medieval and only marginally sane, whereas domestic love—with its adulterous melodramas, cozy compromises, sexless cuddling, petty spats—offended me precisely because it stank of the possible, of what could be done, of what everyone did.

Of course I was also lonely and wanted to settle down. Since Kevin had become a star he seemed ever more remote to me. I took up with a man who worked in a dirty book store and I saw him at his place for dates. I needed to keep a separation between my life with Kevin—which still seemed as cold and silvery as those erotic, sexless nights when we'd first slept together chastely, back in the era of the Society of St. Agnes—and anything as mundane as good, adult lovemaking after a steak dinner, a bottle of ValpoliceUa and an evening of shared confidences. Kevin encouraged me in these affairs, but I was ashamed that my lovers weren't as handsome as his—or as he.

Even so, I was happy to be my own boss again. Whereas I could be a benign ruler, I was inevitably a devious, undermining litde subject. I was so convinced of my superiority that I could not contain my hatred of all authority—worse than hatred, dirtier: my sneering contempt for anyone placed above me.

My father had done everything to please his boss, the owner of a chemical factory, and when someone else had been preferred over him my father, irreparably wounded, had quit and started his own business. That

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had been in 1940, the year I was born. I was like him, I saw, in this way, too, and the resemblance sickened me. During the war and for years afterwards my father had made lots of money, but in the 1960s chemical manufacturers had no longer needed representatives to find them new industrial customers—and to skim off a twenty-five percent commission. All the potential customers had already been located. My father, who'd been the world's leading broker of chemical equipment, saw his far-flung offices (in Akron, Cleveland, Charleston, West Virginia, Pittsburgh and Cincinnad) cut back and lose money. One of the manufacturers that dropped him had a new president who was Jewish; this convergence of factors inspired a nearly apoplectic anti-Semitism in my father. I thought back to the time when he had lost sleep over my homosexuality and had nearly died of a broken heart. Now he was filled with heart-bursting rage over what these filthy kikes were doing to him.

Cleverly he'd been building through profit-sharing a large fund for his top employees in each city (all chemical engineers). He now handed this money over to them in a lump sum and suggested they buy Industrial Sales from him. Two of the five men took the money and ran but the other three paid my father the remaining two million dollars for the company's name, reputation and client Hst. A bad investment, as it turned out.

My father, unfortunately, did not take well to retirement. He mounted his tractor and mowed the lawn so frequently that the grass turned brown. He ate so much that he gained a twenty pounds he could ill afford. Traveling interested him not at all, but investment did, tragically—he lost half his money in a year. The rest he invested in an industrial toilet supply firm, a sort of janitorial service for factories. He loaded up paper towels and liquid soap in the trunk of his Cadillac and wore a grey uniform with his own logo, "Cleanzessence," over his left breast pocket.

Cleanzessence went broke in a year. Now, with whatever money he had left he was living in his new, smaller house and watching record-breaking amounts of television. His wife's social life, which in his heyday he'd dismissed as an annoying time-waster, now became his main source of amusement, .\lthough he was too lofty to beg to know aU "the dirt" the minute she came back from a Queen City luncheon, nevertheless he maintained an unnatural, hopeful silence until she finally, coquettishly served up the day's dish—scraps from the table of female activity that he was able to reheat several times for his homey little solitaiy meals. American businessmen of his class and age had no hobbies beyond yard work, which never even ascended to the dignity of gardening.

My sister was well, out of the hospital and in her last year of graduate school (her grades were so good she was now receiving free tuition and financial aid). Siie'd met a girlfriend and was living with hen

After a year and a half in New York, my nephew was ready to enter his last year of high school. His grades were excellent, his appearance gready improved. He was now afraid of failing and desperate to succeed; I'd inoculated him with middle-class anxiety and considered the minor infection as preventive. But Ana was tired of being on her own, of cooking for herself and, now that she'd dropped out of school, filling her idle hours. Thanks to Pilar, Ana was looking so beautiful I worried about her. I felt like a parent. I worried that her experdy painted lips and eyes, her pink nails and expensively coiffed hair, the silk dresses under which her full breasts and snaky hips glided like a rumor through a crowd would attract the evil eye.

Ana decided to move back to Chicago to live with her parents. She said, "Sunny, I want to be a little girl. I want my mother to take care of me." I didn't have the heart to remind her that her mother had never babied her. I thought, / am your mother, Ana, and your father, the one who will waltz with you on your sixteenth birthday.

My nephew decided that if Ana left he'd go with her He and I were drinking coffee together in a Village coffee house, a rare break in our lives of drudgery. "Hey, Unk," he said, in a parody of our real relationship, a parody that expressed nothing except his awkwardness in discussing something that wasn't urbane, trivial, "delicious"—the qualities he imagined I esteemed, whereas my only reason for playing them up around him was to keep him entertained. Maybe I sensed that he thought gay men were "fun," even "cool," only so long as they appeared to be dandies aristocratically above the common struggle. I wanted him to like me. "Hey, Unk, I'm going to lam it out of this burg and head back to the Windy City."

"But why?" I asked, not joking at all. My seriousness sprang him out of his joshing.

"Because I can't live vsdthout a girlfriend."

"You'O find another."

"No, I won't. You have so many tricks—gay life is so promiscuous—"

"I do not. It is not."

"—that you don't realize how hard it is for a straight guy, especially one who's not so great looking—"

"You are good looking," I said, trying to make my paternal praise sound

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more plausible by adding as a joke, "at least good enough for straight life. Women have such bizarre values."

But it was too late. I could see he was panicked by the prospect of living alone. He left New York with Ana. In Chicago they split up. She was married two years later to a Cuban boy who'd dyed his close-cropped hair a greenish-blond. "You'll love him, Sunny," she wrote me. "He has a beautiful body and can wear all my clothes." They divorced three years later when Ana went back on drugs. Only fifteen years later did she join AA and go back to school and remarry.

For the entire time Gabriel had lived with me I'd felt I was hauling water in a leaking bucket up a hill to fight a brush-fire that was quickly spreading. Every day had brought a new crisis—he'd lost his afternoon job or he'd slept through a crucial exam or he'd put his new suit in the washing machine—and I had automatically thrown myself into going back down for more water.

Now he was gone and I didn't think about him. I found I had too much free time at first, but the phone started ringing, there was a new disco to visit, a new crop of gay novels to read, new people to meet, for New York does not encourage a quiet, deepening appreciation of a small circle. I couldn't understand this sudden shift in my interest. Perhaps when Gabe was living with me I'd labored under some feudal sense of responsibility for a dependant, a primitive code of patronage or hospitality that absence dissolved.

Gabe went back to live with his mother and her new girlfriend and attended public high school for his senior year. Two weeks before he was to be graduated my sister discovered some beer cans in his closet and threw him out of the house because he was a threat to her sobriety. He moved into a big, noisy communal apartment where he stayed up all night and didn't study He didn't get his diploma. I was angry with my sister as though she'd carelessly knocked out of my hands the brimming pail I'd been carrying for so long.

But there was nothing I could do. It wasn't that I'd washed my hands of him. No, I'd just rinsed them Hghdy in the waters of Lethe.

Kevin went on a national tour with his play and I'd go see him in cities that weren't too far away We had a romantic weekend in Baltimore, but now that he wasn't under my roof I was gradually able to let him go. The entire time I'd been in therapy with Abe I'd wanted to free

myself of my obsession with Kevin and find someone who loved me. But I couldn't end it on my own, this obsession, not so long as he was living with me. Because I wanted him and he didn't want me, I hated myself I felt my heart turning to stone a bit more every day, as though Kevin were the gallant young Perseus holding aloft a gorgon's head of my own twisted, ugly passion, something he didn't look at but that petrified me.

In Baltimore we lay on twin beds at dusk and watched the thousands of starlings haunting the old stone batdements of the hotel wheeling through the sky like ashes blown off a fire in high wind. Our fire was dead, the log cold, the starlings the last scattering of my love. We lay there, very peaceful, and Kevin was exquisitely sweet with me. Maybe he felt that I needed a reward for having made the trip. Maybe he could tell I was slipping away from him and he wanted me back, not as a lover but as a brother or a friend—a landmark, really, in the shifting uncertainties of his life. Or, just possibly, when he didn't have my hangdog devotion served up to him every morning over breakfast he could remember he loved me, at least sometimes, at least a little bit.

But after his year and a half on the road he headed to Hollywood to make his fortune. He was gone and I resolved I'd never shed another tear over a man. For years afterwards I felt a bitterness towards him. Sean had been too crazy for me to blame for not loving me, but Kevin had withheld love perversely, I decided. When I'd write about him (and he kept showing up in my fiction, sometimes even as a woman), I couldn't resist picturing him as a cold careerist whose flinty heart kept him from succeeding as an artist. Or I imagined that someday he would come to regret the way he'd spurned me.

Proust's law is that you always get what you want when you no longer want it. Just the other day I had lunch with Kevin in New York, one of those Village coffee shops where you sit in deep, comfortable armchairs before a thrift-shop table originally designed to support a sewing machine. He'd asked his fine-boned, forest-creature Israeli boyfriend not to come along since he, Kevin, wanted to be alone with me. He was now deep into his forties, slender and well-built but no longer intimidatingly beautiful. He said that for fifteen years he'd had sex with the hottest numbers in New York but that now his luck had run out, except occasionally he could still score; I told him that even the real dogs went howling in the other direction when they saw me coming.

We laughed. He let me talk for an hour about Brice. "I have the worst amnesia about him, about our years together, which I suppose is a normal

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analgesic," I said, "although for a novelist it's scary, especially an autobiographical novelist like me. I'm supposed to remember eventhing." Kevin assured me that all my memories would come back when I started wridng about Brice but that for the moment they were held on ice (the cryogenics of the unconscious).

I had my doubts, but I appreciated his gentleness, his sweetness. He, too, had begun to write about his past, about his coming out that first summer in New York when he was an acting student from Ohio and had met the famous Hal, star of a big Broadway musical (everything in the story was accurate, e\'en Kevin's sniffing contempt for the musical).

Suddenly all the bitterness I'd ever felt against him vanished. I was glad I'd lived long enough to forgive him—not through any deliberate act of generosity but through the involuntary wisdom conferred on all of us by time, as though with age we all become morally as well as literally far-sighted.

I REMEMBERED that back in the 1970s Ross Stubbins had kept calling our number, even though Kevin had left New York; I was now the one to talk dirty to him. Did he even notice the change of personnel? He started coming over to the apartment and having sex with me, although he drank so much he was usually impotent and just talked and talked and talked. Once we called Ke\in in Los .\ngeles and had a telephonic three-way with him.

One night I ran into Kevin's beautiful lover Dennis at the Candle and invited him home with me. I was surprised he accepted, since I felt he must be two or three erotic classes above me, as indeed he surely was. We smoked a joint and made love by candlelight on Kevin's large foam cube of a bed. After sex he showed me how he did aerobic exercises. I felt appallingly guilty and swore Dennis to secrecy and he only told Kevin years later, just before he, Dennis, died from AIDS. Kevin said to me, "Why didn't you ever mention it? I couldn't care less, frankly."

I stUi looked young, my face unlined even if my eyes were ringed with dark shadows and the fingers of my right hand stained yellow with nicotine. For ten years I'd worried about getting older, too old to score easily and frequendy with the hundreds of men I required annually, but age was held off, frozen, in abeyance. Was it because I didn't have to trudge through the rain while it was still dark on my way to an office? Was it because I was never bored? Or at least never used the word boredom? Was it