The Farewell Symphony (6 page)

ried, how about dropping Sally, Rich, how about it? Drop the bitch and marry me" —a huge laugh, all that warm young flesh with the peach fuzz, the smells of sperm and Clearasil and cheap colog:ie and tuna fish for lunch and fresh sweat in hairless armpits, a tenderly veined and muscled hand, modeled by Michelangelo not in marble this time but terra cotta, red from the eternal cold of a Spartan, unheated school, this big, elegant hand emerging out of a sleeve of white linen and good tweed all those powerful legs and soccer-playing butts in unprcsscd khakis, cufiless because they'd been let out as the boy grew, those perfect white teeth, sun-bleached eyebrows, small ears, baggy but secredy tumescent crotches, high-arched feet in thick white socks pulled halfway out of penny loafers under a scufTed wood desk, the ragged nails, the bobbing Adam's apples, and in the shower the hairless chest and twin oak-brown aureoles, one round as the earth, the other (because the hand is stretched high) elliptical as Saturn, the boy's lips a gash of garnet in a face drained dangerously pale by rugby practice, the knees black with a mud that under the flowing water snakes across the tile floor in the absinthe-green winter sunlight, cast by high windows on shoulders too wide for a torso all ribs and flat muscles, applied by the painter with just a few deft dabs of the palette knife. . . . Now a young man like one of my locker-room gods had been given to me but this one I was free to kneel before and worship. With aU those earlier deities I had had to pretend I didn't see through their disguise, I had been forced to act as though I believed they were human beings like me (I worshipped them alone, in secret, and with just one hand, the other molding the air into the divine form), but now the thick, knobby godhead itself was plunged into my mouth, not just some tasteless wafer of the imagination.

I never lived on familiar terms with Sean, doubdess the reason I can still refer to him as a god even though I watched him crack up before my very eyes. He wept, producing long gleaming sheets of spit and snot that clung to his face and hands like a placenta or a pupa's chrysalis, except his metamorphosis was not toward something lighter and more beautiful, but heavier, bloated with medicine, stunned with grief He spent six weeks on the psycho ward at St. Vincent's Hospital in New York, then was shipped home, fat and bewildered, to relatives in Minnesota. In my mind he'd been the powerful young man who'd rejected me and I'd wept many times a day over his defection, but to him my love had been just one more intolerable demand, on the same level as the need for good grades or the fear of ending up penniless—or gay.

The Farewell Symphony

If I remember Sean so well it's because he made me suffer so much. I lay on my bed for hours and hours writhing in pain, thinking about him. I'd picture his holding me and kissing me by candlelight before the mirror; rd masturbate; then, as the sperm dried on my hand and the candle-wax in the memory congealed, I'd start to cry. Without the piston of my fist driving it, the whole vast locomotive of my imagination stalled. I cried until I was exhausted, then I'd start to fall asleep. I'd awaken with a start, sitting up, unable to catch my breath. I was stifling. The blood pounded in my ear so loud that I couldn't sleep on my side. I found that the pulse was louder in my left ear than in the right, so I trained myself to sleep on my right. I'd cry so long I'd become exhausted; my esophagus ached; I felt as warm and snotty as a baby—would a psychiatrist say that I cried in order to feel like a baby, that my reaction to Sean's departure was a search for infantile comfort?

Or was that too ingenious? Perhaps I should have just accepted my loadisome dependence on him and recognized that nothing could be done with it. It couldn't be psychologized in some redeeming or even interesting way, nor was it the cornerstone of a philosophy—or even of my own brand of folk wisdom.

I suppose all of my life has been led in the aftermath of this love; I wish he'd burned his initials into my ass, at least I'd have something to show for all that pain. I'd entered into this passion for him half-jokingly, quite aware I was playing a love-sick role. What I hadn't bargained on was that my little self-conscious smile didn't immunize me from the deep infection that was inexorably changing me from inside, molecule by molecule. By the time the smile began to fade my bones and ribs and inner organs had all been thoroughly invaded and reconstructed.

Love—real, violent love—makes other people impatient. Heterosexuals didn't want to learn about the intricate domestic topography of Sodom; they preferred to draw a big A' over the entire land. Anyway, all the world hates a lover. Friends are jealous, adults irritated, children unengaged, readers bored (the few I could round up to listen to my bulky manuscript). I'd trick friends into listening, not to my novel, but once again to my obsessive chatter by claiming I'd just had a starding new insight; only halfway through the same old circular story did their atten-tiveness surrender to frustration as they realized not one detail had been changed. With the long shot of indifference they'd say, "It just takes time, you'll soon be over it and off and running after some new piece of trouser." What they didn't realize was that I felt that if my thoughts of

Sean faded at all I'd be guilty of sacrilege; he was the Israel I'd promised never to forget. Memory and the repetition of our story was a way of defeating their cure-all, time.

When Sean left New York the whole city began to fade. Each skyscraper lost three floors, the taxis slowed down, the disconsolate vagrants stopped panhandling, the Hudson ran backwards, salty with tides of tears. The only thing that increased was the steam issuing from the manholes, since it was an endless exhalation of lonely desire.

My trip to Paris and the bout of hepatitis set a term to the first agony over Sean. He refused to communicate with me; it was as though he'd become a silent Cistercian. Now that I no longer had any contact with him (his grandparents, polite but firm, murmured, "He's not allowed to speak to his New York friends," and hung up), I began to elaborate his life, our life, in my novel. His blood turned into ink, his pale face became my blank page, the first three lines his deep frown. The power of this disease of love to devastate a spirit surprised me, materialist that I was. I who understood how Troy could be lost because Helen's nose was a centimeter longer than other women's, had a hard time comprehending this rotting away of a soul from within just because of something that wasn't there: a lack, a refusal, a departure, silence.

Of course I had lots of explanations, all suitably self-derogatory. I had chosen Sean precisely because he was unavailable. I apparendy was unable to accept homosexuality into my intimate life; if I dreamed of a man every night but awakened every morning alone in my single bed, then I was still somehow indeterminate, neutral, available for a still undecided future.

(Another part of my mind objected, "But I thought he would love me. If I'd known in advance that he wouldn't, then I would never have suffered so much. A miracle, yes, if he'd loved me, but it was a miracle I was counting on.")

Or I said he was like my father, a cold, unfeeling man I longed to seduce. At night when I was thirteen I would sit outside my father's bedroom door in the darkened house, hugging my knees, and imagine entering and taking my stepmother's place beside him, a desire I pictured so clearly that I was afraid I might find myself actually doing it. What if at last I could seduce this sleeping, snoring man, who would wake up to fmd my legs, not his wife's, wrapped around his waist, his hard sex deep in my butt, the sharp dilation of surprise in his eyes quickly clouding over with pure pleasure?

The Farewell Symphony

(But another part of my mind objected that I didn't want Sean to be my father—nor did I long to be his child bride but his mate, two nearly identical pairs of jeans tossed on the floor, the trouser legs intertwined.)

Or I said that as a writer I would find a live-in lover too close for comfort. Didn't writers prefer to suffer alone and conjure up the cruelly absent beloved? Writers needed time out to work up their stories. Certainly I needed room and time to elaborate all the ways in which I was not loved, all the happy days together we'd missed out on due to that time I'd pressured him to say what he really felt, or that time I'd taken his hand on the Staten Island ferry deck, embarrassed him and lost aU the ground I'd gained by my week of calculated indifference. Love and childhood are the writer's two great themes because they are the only seasons during which evei"y object takes on a glow throbbing with meaning. A song can evoke tears; a balding teddy bear, with its curious woody smell (could it be stuffed with pine chips?), recalls soHtary hours with such poignancy that the whole mental stage is plunged into a new, queer light. I was almost thirty but I was marinated in suffering as acrid as that I'd distilled during my lonely, desperate childhood. Sex and love with Sean had seemed a way out of that isolation; when he'd abandoned me I was left holding the dirty bag of my own unworthiness.

But it was all much simpler than that: ever since 1 was a kid I'd wanted someone beautiful to belong to me, a man who had beautiful hair, teeth, hands, skin, loins, bones, a beautiful way of walking pigeon-toed, of lifting a spoon seriously, simply to his lips, of scratching his neck, of pissing a full, hard stream, of plunging off a diving board forthright, without fear, of sleeping, one hand cast back, someone with full, plush lips, who had a fine dusting of gold hairs on his stomach and longer, darker, silkier hairs around his scrotum, whose leg muscles were fiat and suggested even in repose the power to hold, to clasp, whose skin was warm to the touch as a clay pot left out in the sun, someone so beautiful he'd never had anything but romantic se.x, someone who'd never made the first move, whose palms were callused and neck burned from manual labor, someone whose breath was sweet and so warm it fogged up the window on his side of the car, while the other passengers sat beside shamefully clear glass, someone who knew instinctively how to turn up the collar of his blue cashmere coat or to leave his white cotton pajamas unbuttoned to show his scabbard-fiat chest, someone blessed with a driving intellectual curiosity so that he'd never had much interest in his own beauty, whose hair was

as heavy, thick and straight as a cord that separates a masterpiece from the public.

Today when I came back to our apartment (I must learn to say "my" apartment, now that Brice is dead), I had a message on my machine to call James Assady, a former student of mine who lives in Boston. He was high on morphine, he said the CMV had made him blind and now was in his spinal cord and was slowly paralyzing him.

"I've stopped eating or taking Acyclovir," he said. "It's my way of bowing out without committing suicide. I've met a priest. Father Phil, who's going to bury me. 1 was feeling terribly isolated until I met Father Phil, who told me it's my church, I must not forget it belongs to me, too, and that I have a right to be buried beside my family."

He thanked me for making his last two years such a whirlwind, though I felt bad I'd not been able to convince an editor to publish his book. I told him we aO admired him for showing such courage and stoicism and gaiety "Really?" he asked, surprised. "Well, that's what I tried to do."

Then we said good-bye and we assured each other that we loved each other. Just two years ago we'd gotten stoned one afternoon in his apartment and I'd put the make on him but he'd turned me down.

Now he said, "I do love you. I've always felt bad about that time." I told him it wasn't important. Anyway, last spring, when his nose was swollen and black with Kaposi's sarcoma he'd already said to me, "Now I know what it's like to be turned down. I'm so sorry I did that to you." He always had a tough, cool air about him; perhaps because he'd grovra up poor, half-Irish, half-Syrian, he'd learned not to ask anyone for anything. Yet he asked me just now to write something to be read beside his grave.

I met a guy named—well, I'll call him Rod, though I'm tempted to use his real name since he might be dead now and his ghost would appreciate a "mention" (as they say in gossip columns).

Rod lived on Bleecker Street with a girl and a dog. He had been a psychology graduate student at Columbia who'd been pushed out of the program after he said in a group therapy practice session that he was homosexual. They'd all been encouraged to be as frank as possible, but homosexuality was considered a perversion, oral aggressive, possibly sadomasochistic, definitely infantile, that would necessarily occlude the objectivity of a future psychotherapist. He had to go, though the program director never admitted that homosexuality as such had been the disabling cause. No, he was told, it was more a matter of a general lack of seriousness, of professionalism. . . . Now Rod was making light boxes, which he assured me would become the art form of the future, entirely replacing painting. Back then people were always insisting that the novel was dead, the theater outmoded, easel painting washed up, human nature about to be radically revamped. We read William Burroughs' collage novels, eyes dutifully scanning page after page of repetitious, broken sentences. W^e saw group gropes of naked youngsters re-enacting Bacchic rites based on Greek tragedies, though denuded of the exalted language. Language was suspect, protest imperative, the tribe tyrannical, the author