The Farewell Symphony (62 page)

My editor, Marston Higgs, was ten years younger than I. He was from a good Southern family, and had the manners to show for it, but he also had a New Yorker's impatience. He was always swearing under his breath, but his spells of vexation, during which his face would turn dangerously red, were deflated by the sudden pinprick of his laugh. "God, I'm getting to be so Type B, or is it Type A?" he'd say. He had been struck in the left eye when he was a kid, I think; anyway it was white and motionless, which made his cute grin, muscular litde body, charming laugh

all the more appealingly ambiguous, as though he'd once seen something tragic and been half-blinded by it. He was fascinated by his writers and regarded them as nearly mythical beings, whereas at the same time he could take a fully human interest in their declining health, the vagaries of reputation, the misfortunes of love. He was so much the image of the popular swimming star whom most of us geeky writers had lusted after in high school that the realization he liked us, even admired us, seemed—delightfully—like the world upside-down.

Marston would come to Paris and invite me to all the best restaurants on his expense account. He took a year off and traveled around North Africa and up through Italy and France in a luxurious trailer. He tried to write a novel, but abandoned it after fifty pages; this failed effort made him admire his authors all the more. His lover of many years, a handsome older man who worked as a model on ads for life insurance in which he'd pose with his "wife" and high-school age "children," dropped him for a still younger man, an opera singer. Marston, who was naturally secretive, made a deliberate effort to confide his unhappiness to me, almost as though his shrink (if he had a shrink) had told him to open up to his friends. What he didn't tell me was that he was seropositive and that his numbers were rapidly declining, which accounted perhaps for many of the changes in his life—his trip, his writing, his break-up. He'd always had a wild sex life; he burned with a simmering sensuality and I'd catch him sizing up even the most ungainly men and women. He brought a wispy, small-boned blond kid to Paris, but soon he was in love with a famous ballet dancer his age with whom he'd had a brief affair twenty years earlier.

Then suddenly Marston lost his job and was hired elsewhere, but soon afterwards became too ill to work. I hired him freelance to edit a new novel I was working on; he appeared to be surprised that I wasn't able to offer him more money for the job. I gave him the going rate, yet now he found everything disappointing. I visited him in the hospital; it puzzled him that I was still in such obscenely good health.

After he died I remembered I'd told him that I was sure he was going to beat this disease. My reputation as a writer, even my age, now lent my words a weight they hadn't had in the past. I realized that reluctantly, hopefully, Marston had believed me.

He shouldn't have. I was wrong. He did die, as did the writers from my literary club, the guys in advertising I knew, the lawyers, the feUows at the gym, the men I'd shared houses with on Fire Island—they were all dying, even though they'd all been told they wouldn't. I heard stories of a friend

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leavdng his loft to his siuAdxang lover, who was then ousted by the dead man's parents. I heard of a group of friends who decided to help their buddy die. He was blind and incontinent, weighed just seventy pounds and had nothing to look forward to except dementia. But at the last moment one of the angels of mercy cracked, called an ambulance. The dying man was resuscitated, only to die a month later in howling pain. Even so, whenever Dick, the one who'd cracked, saw the others on the street or at a nightclub, he started shouting, "Murderers." Perhaps Dick himself was already succumbing to dementia; in any event he died six months later. I heard of men who spent all their money having their "chakras" tuned by a charlatan with a flute, of those who ate apricot pits in Mexico, cucumbers in China, macrobiotic food in Japan. They all died.

Ned w.\s graduated from his design school and returned to the States to look for a job as a decorator An .\merican could never get work papers in France. Besides, he was determined to plunge back into watching American soap operas on television, listening to the latest American pop music, enjoying .American humor and sex. I put him in my old studio apartment, which I'd been subletting to someone else (the Norwegian steward) all these years.

I developed a strange case of shingles that didn't produce many bumps or cause me much pain; in fact I would scarcely have noticed it if I hadn't become so tired. My doctor gave me a treatment and said shingles wasn't necessarily linked to AIDS, though it could be a "tracer illness." I slept night and day, as I'd slept so many years ago when I'd come down with hepatitis in Paris. A play of mine was being given a staged reading in London; I pulled myself together and flew over to see it, but I realized they'd got hold of the wrong version, an early draft I'd since extensively revised. I sat there stunned, indifferent, hundreds of years old.

The next night I was on a street corner in the West End. trying to find a taxi. A group of drunk young people in evening clothes swirled around, laughing wildly, speaking English, which suddenly sounded so foreign. I hated them because I thought they weren't going to die. They didn't have AIDS and their bodies were smug with health. They weren't sneering at me and I suppose if I'd accosted them one by one at a parts' with my sad story, the women, at least, would have screwed up their eyes and let their mouths open slighdy, serious and unsmiling, and they might even have

risked squeezing my hand before bacicing away, thougintfully; girls like that will take their father figures where they can find them.

But tonight I hated them, I suppose, because I thought they'd won. They would never, under any circumstances, have thought about my kind very much, yet in the 1970s we might just have seemed if not enviable at least plausible, with our dancing, our music, our haircuts, our gym-built bodies, but now we were dismissed with a shrug of a pretty bare shoulder rising up out of a calyx of ivory silk, as though to say, "Oh, no, not now, when we're having such fun. Haven't we done enough for charity?" After gay liberation we'd dared to believe that we might be blazing a new trail; now we saw that our trail had run out, swallowed up by a forest of indifference.

I listened to one record over and over again back in Paris, one of Mahler's Ruckert songs, "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen" ("I have lost track of the world"). When I'd be taking the train somewhere, watching the fields opening up before me and a litde French village gliding past with its squat Romanesque tower and its few dull stone houses, I'd sing this song with its words at once resigned and joyful: "I am dead to the hurly-burly of the world / And repose in a place of quietness!" {"Ich bin gestorben dem Weltgetiimmel, / Und ruh'in einem stillen Gebiet!") For an English speaker who'd been speaking French for so long, that Ich bin gestorben was so much more pungent than Je suis mart and that einem stillen Gebiet so much calmer than the sleek, glib un lieu tranquille. I'd fall asleep, dreaming of a lover who would smell of something burned, of old smoke in heavy green curtains . . .

Joshua asked me to come to Venice for the last two weeks of August. When I arrived he told me he was positive and had fewer than a hundred T cells, but his announcement struck me as utterly implausible. Joshua? He who'd made love to no more than twelve men in his whole life? Who'd always been too blind to cruise, too prematurely elderly ever to bed a fast-lane gay man? Of course I was only exposing my ignorant assumptions. AIDS wasn't cumulative and it didn't just strike the promiscuous scene-makers.

"Have you lost a bit of weight?" I asked.

"Alas," he laughed, "not enough."

He was always dieting and though his skin now was waxy and white and stretched across his cheekbones in that tell-tale way, his lower body was still plump. The changes wrought by AIDS came ten times faster than those imposed by age (five decades' worth of aging could be squeezed into

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five years) but still slowly enough that only someone like me who'd lived apart from Joshua and not seen him for a year could notice how his teeth had become more prominent, as though they'd sUd forward a fraction, and his eyes had become hollower, as though they'd retreated, and the skin on his arms hung looser, as though it had already died.

Joshua had come from New York with a new lover, a tall, slender guy between jobs who, like Josh, had gone to Harvard, and, like us, talked opera, food, friends. .Although he was twenty years younger than I (and I was ten years younger than Josh) Lionel seemed eager to decode our references and know everything about us. I'd hear Joshua and Lionel discussing that evening's dinner, not with the sing-song, almost wean,-dailiness of Sergio, il ksoro, but with an edge of social hysteria. "Do you think we should really mix Pegg%' with Nica? The unreal with merely real estate?" (Nica rented out apartments in the palace her family had owned for six centuries.) Lionel, too, laughed with us about how Pegg); despairing of ever finding a summer gondolier who didn't charge the union minimum, had fmally engaged a retired funeral gondolier If given his head, the gondolier would start rowing for San Michele, the island cemetery, and begin to sing dirges in a big bass voice full of wobble.

Joshua was keeping two different mental sets of books about the disease. He'd say, "This disease is a dreadful thing. I've decided to de\ote the next few years to raising money to fight it," but at the same time I could see he was feverishly working to fmish his "study of poetic friendship." He'd always read to me eveiy word he'd written but now he lingered less over alternative versions and seemed determined to press on, despite his natural reticence, so closely allied to his innate elegance. He'd always been slow to commit an idea to paper, just as in conversation he preferred it if one finished his sentence for him, as if in that way it was one's own fault, not his, if any utterance constituted a slide into vulgarity or error.

Since so much of his work was based on a close reading of his poets (and of their letters—in some cases he'd been the first person allowed to consult them) he was always happy to read them again out loud. His head (and to a much lesser extent his computer) was full of notes, quotations, projects, comparisons, often followed by a question mark. I think he knew perfecdy well that most cases of AIDS involved some dementia, and he must have been terrified that all his knowledge, so painfully acquired after thousands of hours of research in libraries and reading at home, would be lost over the course of a weekend, as though hundreds of pages of metal type, not yet printed, would melt in a big fire. If his favorite novel

was Middlemarch and the two or three women he loved he considered to be as "ardent" as Dorothea, by the same token he'd always feared most that iie'd turn out to be Casaubon, the scholar unable to lead his research to completion. Already, on certain days, his mind, famous for its total recall, felt like nothing more than a blur, waves of heat rising and warping the view.

Joshua had never been able to decide whether Sergio was a lover or a servant and in a greedy way he'd wanted him to be both. He'd wanted Sergio to cook for him and tuck him in, then slide in beside him, but disappear when there was work to be done or a princess to be received. Of course I'd always hoped Joshua would elevate Sergio's status—I believed in fairy-tale endings—but now Lionel had taken that place, accomplishing in six months what "the treasure" had failed to do in six years. I suppose Joshua had wanted to protect his right to go to the ballet, night after night, with one of his Dorotheas, since in his heart the need for friendship was a more powerful appetite than the longing after love, although he complained a lot about the empty-bed syndrome. For years I'd told Joshua that he was "immoral" in the way he was playing with Sergio, "leading him on," filling him with unfounded expectations, but Joshua answered my sermons with lots of dithering and a cultivated vagueness. Besides, he hadn't really led Sergio to expect anything.

Perhaps because he'd lived so long among books and devoted his whole life to literature, all of his friends compared him to characters in classics— to Casaubon, perhaps, but more often to Emma's lovable yet hypochondriacal father, to Proust's aunts, so tentative as to be incoherent, too polite to communicate properly, even to Oblomov (Eddie's devilish contribution, since he constantly teased Joshua for being so lazy).

Now he wasn't lazy. I'd find him late at night, when I returned from a party or cruising the Molo, alone in front of his green, glowing screen. He'd look up and say, "If only there'd been laptops back then. I always found typing so noisy, such a physical effort, so user-hostile, whereas now I can't wait to come back to my green, glowing Rheingold." As though his new haste, even desperation, were just a minor matter of technology.

Because Joshua had never wanted to formalize things with Sergio, he thought nothing of introducing him to Lionel. They even had a three-way and when I saw Sergio next on the beach he said in his high-pitched, slow, almost whiny Venetian accent, "0, come il suo cazzp e grande!" and he held out his hands at river-trout length to indicate the full twenty centimeters, but I could see he was sad and bitter to be superseded by someone who

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could speak to ilprqfessore in his own language, who came from his own social class and was younger and just as well endowed (Joshua and I always came out with the rather sinister "bien pendu" even though we knew the French actually said, "bien tnonte" for "well hung").

Then suddenly everything went bad. Sergio stopped the owner of the palazzo and said to her, "Principessa, the prqfessore is very ill with AIDS" (which the Italians pronounce as though it were the "ides" of March). "You must get the maids to fumigate everything when he leaves. The Ides is highly contagious."

Ordinarily, if the matter had been less serious, the princess might have slipped a note into his mailbox or accosted Joshua at the Cipriani pool, but he'd stopped swimming this summer, which only confirmed her suspicions, and she was too upset to wait for his letter—nor did her stock of polite written formulas include a way of tackling this subject. Her solution was to phone him very early, to assure him in a tiny, shaken voice how much she'd always respected him—and finally to blurt out Sergio's accusation. She ended by sobbing and saying that she had a "historic palace to consider," as though that concern were of any relevance.