The Farewell Symphony (63 page)

Joshua hody denied what Sergio had said: "He's just a peasant, cara, and gets everything mixed up. I'm afraid he found himself less welcome here than he used to be and he simply lashed out with a paranoid mishmash of all these horror stories on television. I'm mortified that he subjected you to these stories; naturally you're upset. But please don't believe a word of it—you know how these boys from the Veneto can't put two thoughts together and always get everything wrong." The princess was from Turin and had nothing but contempt for the locals, which Joshua was shrewdly counting on.

The confrontation rattled Joshua. Because he was so brilliant he'd never felt discriminated against, neither as a Jew nor as a gay man. Once, in the early 1970s, when we were thorouglily drunk, I'd asked him if, because he was Jewish, he felt superior to me and he'd admitted he did—a remark that had so shocked me that it revealed to me that I myself nursed a faint sense of racial superiority invisible until then even to me. Twenty-five years ago he'd moved from Harvard, where he'd come out uneventfully, to New Jersey, where he taught in a department headed by another gay man, a doting classmate from Harvard, and on to New York. Most of his life had been divided between the downtown New York world of curators, professors, agents, critics and fawning students and a Venice of expatriates and aristocrats; in New York his Jewishness and homosexuality

were assumed, in Venice never perceived or if detected not mentioned. Aristocrats, at least on the Continent, liked artists and intellectuals if" they wore decent clothes and had good manners and acted crazy enough to be "amusing." The constant aristocratic need for amusement could take on the proportions of bulimia. Other people's bloodlines or morals would have been questioned only if they'd attempted to marry into the family -and even then money outweighed birth and birth was more important than morals.

The principessa's panic over a mysterious question of hygiene, however, revealed that her ten years' friendship for Joshua had all along been extended only provisionally. After all, he'd never been an intimate, neither a relative nor a childhood friend, the only two categories to whom one owed lasting loyalty.

Venice was both stone and water, permanence and transience, the fluid element shaping but never wholly dissolving the solid, and this very ambiguity had always vouchsafed that no matter how much Joshua submitted to time's corrosives he would endure. One of his favorite books—and one of the crucial texts for his poets—was Ovid's Metamorphoses, and from it he'd learned to see life as both mutable and miraculous, but now every change that was happening to his body was frightening, monstrous. Now he rethought everything and realized that when Daphne had turned into a laurel tree, her fingers ramifying, her thighs becoming cortical, the transformation couldn't have been altogether comfortable.

As the summer came to a stormy, suddenly chilly end, Joshua began to hand over most of his possessions to the two maids, mother and daughter, who cleaned the acres of marble floors twice a week and who spoke in their gentle, caressing tones to each other. He gave one of his two fans to the maids as an offering to the cruel god of realism, then stored some summer clothes in order to propitiate the smiling, infant god of hope, for hope is the youngest of the deities, the one who has all his life before him.

We never took speedboats, which could easily cost a hundred doDars a ride, but at the end of every summer Joshua indulged himself, and the same sunburned, middle-aged man, dressed in a short-sleeved white shirt with dark blue epaulettes and pleated white trousers, backed his speedboat-taxi into the litde rio beside the palace. Given the narrowness of the rio and the backwash from the passing vaporetti, the maneuver was tricky, but the captain never looked the least ruffled. He was just another Venetian, these calm, incurious, handsome people who spoke to one another in their unintelligible dialect, who criticized their compatriots for the smallest

The Farewell Symphony

eccentricity but simply shrugged at the shenanigans of foreigners. The Venetians never read a book (never had) but they knew they inhabited the most beautiful city in the world. They crammed their small apartments with the latest furniture from Milan, made of smoked glass and chrome, of molded Plexiglas and aubergine-colored leather, but outside evei-ything looked and smelled as it had for centuries and nothing could be changed or improved; even the wood bridge built across the Grand Canal for the Feast of the Redeemer had to be entirely dismanded every year after the holiday. We were these foreign impostors who came from our new countries, spent all our money in order to inhabit their palaces for a summer or two, then we vanished, never to return, whereas they, the Venetians, complained of their rheumatism, tiie incursions of acqua alta, the influx of non-paying German backpackers, but they remained, the prosaic machinery rumbling under and animating these poetic illusions.

This year we loaded Josh's things into the taxi and checked our air tickets once more. Joshua talked bravely about next summer He said he wanted to go to Istanbul for two weeks in August on the boat the Orient Express operated out of Venice. But obviously he was looking around for the last time at these many-storied palaces with their green and burgundy rosettes and their stone balconies. "Oh, look, the Due de Gaze must be in residence," Joshua declared bravely, "since there's a book on the stone lectern, look, there, on the piano nohile, that's how you know— that's the palace where Mr. Tissot lived, that dear man who designed avant-garde glass, the one who told Henry Mcllhenny he should go ahead and rent Gount Volpe's place for a thousand dollars a day since, as Mr. Tissot put it, "There are no pockets in the shroud.' Now they're both dead. Henry had to sell a Gezanne to pay the rent, but he never got to live there."

As Joshua's words come echoing across the water and down the years to me, I can't help thinking that his life was not just his finest thoughts about poetry and friendship, expressed in a style that rejected forcefulness in favor of sympathy, but it was also comprised of his long mornings in his dressing gown with the telephone, newspapers, the Hu Kwa smoked tea and the litde sterling-silver strainer that sat in its drip cup when it wasn't straddled across a cup catching leaves. His life was made up of his pleasure in the morning glories as well as his hilarit\- when he learned that one could be friends with the Franchin or the Franchetti family, not both, and his relief when he realized the choice was easily made since Ghristina Franchetti was the most interesting woman in Venice, she who read ever>'-

thing from Hume to Hedda Gahler to Calvino till dawn, slept late into the afternoon, ate lunch at five at Harry's before rushing over to the Cipriani, iioping to catch a glimpse of a few friends still dozing or chatting by the pool. She sent her laundry to London every week. She talked late into the night about her childhood in Cuba and her girlhood in Spain. She spoke French, Spanish, English and Italian with equal headlong rapidity and if, after a long Italian dinner, one begged her to switch back to more restful English, she'd look starded and ask in her low, gravelly voice, "But aren't we speaking English? Oh ..."

I RETURNED to Paris, Joshua to New York. As the autumn came on and every newspaper was crowded with news about Rock Hudson's celebrity AIDS, Joshua told me over the phone he was sickened by the subject, disgusted by the media blaze lighting up Hudson's sickbed, then his panicky flight from America to Paris in a private plane in search of a miracle treatment. Joshua was just as tired of seeing the before and after photos of the once handsome movie star.

I seldom went out. I lived at home on the He St.-Louis in my small apartment looking out on the stone volutes that supported the church roof as giant snails pry up the earth. It seemed to be raining every day and I darted out only long enough to buy food and mail letters.

I spent hours and hours on the gay party line, a number I'd dial (it was usually busy) until I'd be connected with seven or eight other men, all shouting out their home numbers or their dimensions or sexual tastes or just listening, breathing heavily. I called out my own number; everyone on the line laughed at my American accent. One man phoned me and talked me through to an orgasm.

After that he'd phone me every night at midnight and he became my demon lover, my secret sharer, a heartbeat in my ear, the drying liquid in my fist. He'd tell me how much he loved me, and I told him the same: it was the purest affair of my life, nothing but love, desire and fantasy. No face was there to mock, no body to find too gross, no demands to resent, no sex to make sure was safe. I never knew his number, but he called me every night at twelve. If, as happened only once or twice, someone else was there, I simply raised an eyebrow, let it ring and sighed, proudly, com-plainingly, "Men . . ." But usually I was in bed, reading French and looking up words and listening to the radio, dreading the moment when the Catholic music station—remote, classical, consoling—would come to an

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end and be replaced by the ghasdy Protestant program with its guitar music, its pious folk songs and peppy homilies.

"Chen,faipense a toi toute lajournee. .. ." He was there, a reedy, throbbing voice, unashamedly romantic in the Gallic manner, urging me to do something, anything, to put his desire at ease, which now was standing rigidly at attention. "Sit on it. . . put it in your mouth ... it needs you, it can't live alone like this, it's a fish out of water."

After a month of calls during which he told me all about his life, a recital that always shaded into phone sex with its incantatory repetitions and its vigorous, slapping silences, my lover decided we should meet. With Jamesian modesty I told him that I would only disappoint him. "My voice may be young," I said, "but I am not. I'm overweight, my hair is grey, even the hair on my chest is grey, I wear glasses, if you saw me you'd say I was a professor nearing retirement age, not the kid you want to hurt and cherish and live with forever."

"No, no!" he cried. "I love you, my love has gone beyond details like looks."

When I thought of the diplomatic negotiations a real, working, live-in love affair requires I felt tired and hopeless—would he like my friends? I his? Who would cook? Was he a vegetarian? Did he have a steady job? No, no, I thought.

He suggested that we meet at a tawdry hotel (the tawdriness was an essential ingredient). He'd already be there when I arrived, undressed and in bed, the lights off He'd leave the door open. I could enter in the darkness if I was afraid to reveal my looks to him, undress and join him. If I liked, he'd cover his body and face with a sheet and just leave his sex exposed, which I'd be sure to like, he said, it was big, the skin much darker than on his body.

I never agreed to go and we passed over from that moment when a fantasy is still exciting because it might be realized to that later eternity when it dies from lack of nourishment.

A few years back I'd picked up two very young husders at the Gare du Nord and invited them to a hotel room. They didn't know each other but I paid them to make love to each other while I watched.

The smaller one, who was just five foot five, was a blond with the improbably English name of Stanley. Whenever he needed some money over the years he'd phone me and drop by He spoke almost entirely in French slang and if I failed to understand something, he'd grumble, "In-

stead of learning to sound like a book you should spend some time with real people."

He was like a little guy right out of a Genet novel. I was his pal, his pole, and he'd tell me about his problems with his girlfriend before he'd take me to bed. He affected the swagger of a pimp but he was gifted with the hairless, rounded limbs and blond body of a child. He liked to wear pink rayon shirts open almost to his taut belly, but more often than not he'd be much more scrappy looking. He had a stomach that looked like a rounded spoonful of cream, nipples the color of a newborn's nose, so pink as to be nearly transparent, or say they were the color of a drop of blood when it tinctures a basin full of water. He seemed a compact little man out of the past, a refugee from the Montmartre of the thirties, and I half-expected him to show up wearing a golfer's plaid cap and plus-fours, the off-hours uniform of porters and taxi drivers back then. He said his mother was English and that he spoke English, but this linguistic competence was virtual, not actual, more a snazzy boast than a real skill.

One night he dropped by and asked me if I could buy him a gun. "I need to kill somebody," he said. His girlfriend—or rather, the girl he was in love with—ran a stand at the Montreuil flea market (the poorest one) and she'd had a baby by the man to whom the stand belonged, a gypsy who threatened to kill her if she and litde Marie-Louise, the baby, ever tried to leave him. The girl, Garance, wanted to live with Stanley, but she was terrified of Nicu, who'd already broken bones in her hand. So of course Stanley had to kill Nicu so he could live happily ever after with Garance and Marie-Louise. Would I be a real pal and buy him the gun?

I said I'd ask around, and he seemed satisfied with my answer. I then committed the worst crime of my life, just as bad as Stanley's intentions. We got very stoned on some grass from the States that someone had mailed. And I fucked—no, raped—Stanley without a rubber and came in his ass, the surest way of communicating the virus. I don't know what happened to him in the succeeding years, because five years later I moved and lost track of him. At the time I wasn't even aware I was raping him. It was just that I was taking a heart-stopping, breath-racing, mind-orchestrating pleasure in fucking him, with his little tough-kid's ass, his cool, firm thighs pressed against my chest, and as I was doing it I thought. This is the last time I'll ever fuck someone, and it was. Corrupted by a life of pleasure-seeking, coarsened by an anarchic indifference to other people's welfare, I'd been unable to restrain myself.

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When I saw him again a month later he was very drunk. He was no longer asking about the gun. We talked about movies, the new clubs and his plans. He didn't mention Garance or little Marie-Louise; I wondered whether Garance had made it clear to Stanley that she loved Nicu, after all. When I tried to lead him to bed he said, "No, hell, man, you raped me the last time, you know I don't take it up the ass, that's for faggots," and as I replayed my blurred memories of that night I realized he was right, I must have raped him, domestic rape must be like that, a man isn't aware of his force and drink or drugs deafen him to his partner's objections. . . . Is Stanley alive today? Or did I murder him? I sometimes think I'll see a vagrant hanging out near the Gare du Nord covered with lesions, his face an old man's.