The Farewell Symphony (56 page)

replacement and start running after the women and drinking. He could knock 'cm back."

"What happened to him?"

"Well, he got a screw loose and couldn't stand loud sounds. His wife and two daughters, lovely women all, well, he drove them out, or rather he got himself a trailer in a trailer park and a rifle, and if the little kids next door started hoUerin', well, old Hank would come out with that gun like he was frxin' to fire it."

"Didn't anyone report him to the cops?"

"You'd think so, but no. But then I could see he was dangerous, out of control, and not even eating properly, and all the time he complained about the terrible pounding in his head, you remember that accident?"

"No."

"You don't? Well, he had run into a tree one night in his old Ford pickup, guess he was tight, that never stopped old Hank." I could see my father took comfort in this simple explanation of his brother's insanity.

But as he went on with the harrowing tale of Hank's hospitalizations, his isolation from his family and eventual suicide ("The pounding in his head just became unbearable"), my father was obviously relishing the story as a narrative. I saw that like me he was a novelist. Or he had become one when every other love (money, sex, power, especially the power to intimidate his family and employees) had given out. The story remained, the story of how Hank's life (and his, yours, mine) turned out or would turn out. He seemed to see his own life as irreproachable, and keeping his record clean, I gathered, he thought was an admirable activity. Just as certain literary critics end up by esteeming poems and novels which one can say nothing against, in the same way he'd applied this standard of unexceptionability, more worthy of a modern monarch than an actual living, breathing human being, to the trajectory of his own experience.

Other people's lives, however, as long as they didn't touch too closely on his, he preferred to be colorful, shameful, even tragic. He steered us away from my nephew because he must have feared any prolonged discussion would end with a plea, no matter how muted, for help, for money.

What struck me was how abstract—and how powerful—this meeting was. I hadn't seen this man in seven years and if, in the interval, I'd thought of him at all it was only as the malign magician of my childhood, the dull but often wonderfully angry source of all power, money, menace.

The Farewell Symphony

I certainly hadn't wondered how he was doing now. He wasn't, in my personal drama, someone who developed, nor did he ever act out of character in my imagination. Now I was faced with this realir\-—reduced, almost pathetic—that had slowly been taking shape in the forgotten alembic of time. He seemed smaller, he was certainly frailer, and he'd developed this late, utterly unexpected taste for gossip, which at the end of a life coincides with a sensitivity to history. Why should I have cared so much for this boring, isolated man in Cincinnad, Ohio, who'd not even heard of my books, much less read them?

And yet, of course, I did care. I never ev'en stopped to wonder if or why I wanted to please him. I wanted to please him so much that tears came to my eyes, as they had done years ago whenever I'd dared to correct him—tears that then had expressed not so much my fear of enraging him as mv sorrow that he wasn't infallible.

In September I rented a house and Fox and I went to Key West for several months. Next door there was someone who played the Hammond organ every afternoon at three. Fox's two cats would hide in the crawl space under the house and he'd go crazy shouting at them to come out. His Southern accent deepened. Across the street there was a Spanish-language Pentecostal church.

We no longer slept together. I'd ended that— Fox's jealousy was too much. Surprisingly, he didn't resist my decision. Perhaps I was releasing him from an obsession he, too, disliked. I ne\'er knew, since like most couples we chatted constandy about every peripheral concern but never breathed a word about what we were living through together, the clauses and riders we were constandy adding to our invisible but tangible contract.

If our sexual life with each other had ended. Fox was no less possessive of me, but now as a writer, as a personage: he was Prince Albert to my Queen Victoria. He insisted we meet all the other v\Titers on the island (there weren't very many in those days) and used Homer as our celebrity bait; he thought such "connections" might someday help my "career."

We both went on the Scarsdale Diet and in two weeks I was thin, tan, clear headed (since the diet included no alcoholic drinks) and Fox's ears stuck out like a kid's—or my father's—and his eyes grew enormous in a face as long, thin and triangular as his white cat's.

I lay in a big double bed in the back room, bathing in the tepid slipstream coming dirough die window fan. I wrote and I read all die books I liked at

the Key West Public Library. Eddie was down for the winter and lent me his library card. Here he was quieter, more relaxed, sweeter than I'd ever seen him before, as though in Florida we were all backstage and what we said didn't matter Eddie and I would bicycle through the sudden cloudbursts, visit the cemetery with its eccentric epitaphs ("I told you I was sick"), cruise the "Dick Dock," as we called the wide pier jutting out into the algae-thick, shallow, warm water near the old bandstand. One day 1 told him how much he'd intimidated me the first time we'd met and he'd said nothing after my reading. "I was drunk" Eddie said. "I used to drink myself into a stupor."

Fox and I put the weight right back on in the following weeks because we drank more and more heavily: margaritas and beers and rum punches. The fall months were off-season and few tourists were around. The sun dazzled off the tin roofs of the old wood houses on White Street. There were gay discos and gay guest houses with their young gay staff members and older gay guests, but perhaps because I was drinking so heavily that competitive world of fit guys didn't much attract me. I preferred going to the Papillon, a gay bar in a 1960s hotel that catered to locals. There Fd drink so many rum punches that Fd be almost too drunk to ride my bicycle home. Fd weave my way through the empty streets, past a cat sleeping in the middle of the cool pavement in the faint light of the moon. I made loopy figure-eights under a banyan that kept casting its roots farther and farther afield and multiplying its trunks. Air conditioners throbbed in windows. Behind mosquito-haunted bushes pulsed the dim lights emitted by old trailers on cinderblocks.

A sudden tropical rain would soak me through but a moment later Fd be dry. When I got home Fox would be shirtless, in shorts, sandals and black, nerdy spectacles, typing furiously in the front room, tearing one sheet after another out of his portable Smith-Corona. Or he'd be crouched beside the house, hissing threats at his deeply indifTerent cats.

Fd shower in the dark outside, slip into boxer shorts, make myself a dark rum on the rocks, stand in front of the open fridge, eat some rock shrimp we'd steamed in beer, the inexpensive litde shrimp with finger-cutting hard shells. They went down like popcorn. Fd lie on clean white sheets, read Chateaubriand or James Merrill. At four in the morning Fd finish one volume, only to pick up another in an exquisite luxury of time-lessness. One of the cats, marked like a sea trout, would pay me a sniffy sort of caO, like a beneficent lady begrudgingly visiting a poor relation, but if she'd stay for a while Fd draw her on a blank page of the notebook in which I was writing a novel about my childhood.

The Farewell Symphony

Sometimes, late at night or even toward dawn, Fox would come into my room, very silly, and do his chicken dance. It was based on a TV commercial, I think, an ad for Campbell's chicken soup in which dancers strutted about dressed as poultry, but I didn't own a television and had never seen the commercial, nor did Fox know the words, but he still liked to fold his hands in his armpits, beat his wings and cluck and feebly sing, with the sweetest smile, "I am a little chicken . . ." The words quickly petered out, he wasn't even sure they were the right ones, but that tentative, erased'ym^e became the anthem of our new love.

If I was no longer the lightning rod for Fox's demonic power, his typewriter now drew his ire. He'd pound at it noisily for hours on end—he'd written the first page of his current short story a hundred times. I was afraid that if I ever stopped to study my writing so microscopically I, too, would become paralyzed.

Wlien Homer came for ten days I gave him the typescript of the first chapter of my new book to read. Since I'd told him it was a "gay nov'el" he was expecting pornography. When he'd read it he said, in his best Mississippi accent, "A lot of wash and not much hang-out."

He'd stay in bed all day, making the most awful noises as he spat and hawked and snored and groaned, but at six sharp he'd emerge, impeccable, in a fresh shirt, bow tie, linen suit creased only to the right fashionable degree, and make us cocktails, usually daiquiris.

He was reading the memoirs of an ancient French grande cocotte who found God late, while gossiping with a society' priest at a dinner party ("Our Lord shall be your last lover"). Despite her natural inclination toward lesbianism, she married a Romanian prince, much younger and shorter, did good works, said her rosary daily and remembered her glory days, all those delicious sins she'd so lingeringly repented of "I nexer knew her—I could have—but I knew her crowd," Homer squeaked, "and here I am, seventy years later, finding out from Ales Cahiers Bleus exacdy who was deceiving whom."

Over the previous summer I'd driven down to Princeton with a Russian friend and met Nina Berberova. I tried to get her to speak about her friendship in Paris in the thirties with Nabokov or of the brilliant noxels she'd written then, but no, she was forward-looking, she was planning a sci-fi novel about the future. My Russian friend had explained to me how she'd emerged out of the rubble of Europe at the end of the war and arrived in New York in her fifties with nothing but a Chanel suit and .\nna Tolstoy's addiess. Within a year she'd learned English, how to dri\e, how

to type—and soon afterwards she was teaching Russian at Princeton. She went on to write her memoirs, The Italics Are Mine.

The mailman arrived with a package from the Soviet Union, bulky, badly wrapped in torn brown paper. When Berberova opened it she said something in Russian and read the letter out loud.

Only when we were alone did I ask my Russian friend, "What was all that about?"

"Well, you just witnessed a minor historic moment. Nina was married to Khodasevich, the poet Nabokov considered to be Russia's greatest of this century. When Mayakovsky committed suicide in the 1930s, Khodasevich irritated everyone by wiiting an article in the French emigre press denouncing Mayakovsky. Suddenly the Whites hated Khodasevich and the Reds hated him—everyone. Unanimous. Anyway, Nina has written all about it in her memoirs and the book has finally made its way to the USSR and Mayakovsky's ancient mistress, Lily Brik, has written Nina saying she found Nina's account fair—and sent her a bottle of Chanel No. 5, which you can find in any drugstore in the States but which must have cost Lily a small fortune, it probably had to be smuggled in from Finland. . . ."

These stories, Nina's and Homer's, gave me a sense of how history is nothing but feuds and fashionable conversations, how it remains in the memory of the last intact brain of the lone survivor, and if it is to be thought about at all afterwards it must become a monument to be deciphered or a legend to be read—not by hordes all at once but singly, occasionally, imperfectly. It occurred to me that what we'd thought and done, the people I knew, might someday be written about. Official history— elections, battles, legal reforms—didn't interest me, I who'd never voted and felt no connection with society. No, I didn't want to be a historian but rather an archeologist of gossip.

One night Fox and Homer and I got drunk at the local disco on Duval Street. We sat outside in the garden to escape for a moment from the heat and smoke and noise, and Homer, deaf and fat and in his nineties, said, "You wouldn't believe it now but when I was in my twenties I was sexy, at least I attracted lots of men who wanted to . .. take me; I think I rather resembled a clean litde piglet, but I must have secreted a special . . . pheromone, is that the word? Anyway, a hormone perfume that drove men wild. I wasn't interested in my beauty, not like Ned Rorem. In fact I wasn't beautiful. I was simply irresistible."

We all three sat back in our bower, all three of us alienated in different ways from the lean, muscled gay men dancing inside like the parts of

The Farewell Symphony

desiring machines in the Anti-Oedipus, the vogue book of the moment. We all three, I suppose, were thinking of the long since vanished power of Homer's rump to attract men—older composers in France, tramway conductors, bankers in Right Bank cafes looking up from a copy of the Figaro —a smooth, silky, hairless rump, always in danger of becoming decidedly plump, as incontrovertible a historical fact as the grande cocoUe's belated conversion or that botde of Chanel No. 5 that LUy Brik had sent Nina Berberova.

I thought of the century plant, a cactus next door to our rented house, in the yard of the lady who played the Hammond organ every day at three. Its strangely mechanical, spiny branches, like a robot's arms covered with grommets, only rarely and then at night proffered at the very end of its prosthesis a delicate white flower; it was like Der Rosenkavalier performed in the age of Anti-Oedipus.

My mother came to spend a week with Fox and me. She was either drunk or so shaky that she couldn't walk without being helped from our house to the car we'd rented just for her. Fox didn't regress into a Southern Yes-Ma'am-No-Ma'am boy but rather called her by her first name and asked her for her opinion on world affairs, something she was always up on since she listened to the news all through the night. She kept her lit-de portable radio under her pillow and woke if Israel invaded Lebanon or Carter lost the election. She was horrified by the way Fox shouted at his cats. She'd become so respectful of other lives that she would harm nothing, not even a fly, but rather shoo it out the window with an envelope. But she appeared extinguished. She was confused, she dozed all the time, she slurred her words and cried easily. Most maddeningly, she became tearftil many times because she'd misunderstood a simple, factual sentence and interpreted it as a sentimental reference.