The Farewell Symphony (7 page)

dying. Warhol had made the transition from canvas to screen. We watched hours and hours of his home movies, certain that the boredom was functioning to break down our conscious resistance, considered a bad thing. Of course the real fun was the audiences, the bits of mirror and velvet, the leg-of-mutton sleeves and bellbottoms, the flowing hair and curling cannabis smoke, for we were only slowly becoming aware that we constituted a new generation unlike any other before us in history.

After I had sex with Rod on the fold-out couch bed, his dog came bounding in and licked our milky stomachs clean. Today even a drop of sperm is rich with death, a mortal culture, but then porno magazines referred to it as a "soothing cream" and we liked to taste it, swallow it, smell it, rub it over our cheeks and murmur with a smile, "The fountain of youth." If someone had a big cock we called it "The Dick of Death," an expression no one would dare use today.

Adult men—all those aggressive, out-of-shape, heavy-breathing heterosexuals—might carry syphilis or at least gonorrhea in their bodies, we thought, contracted through their drunken, half-hard thrusting, the toil of making money, war, babies. But we were big, bucolic gay boys, and our brief transactions were redolent of summer camp, irresponsible as a groan heard in a shadowy forest or as transfiguring as the mystery of light glowing on a lake glimpsed through a rood-screen of leaves. We were engaged in a game of touch-tag far removed from the possibility of giving— or taking—a life.

Rod had a party at the end of every month, to which he invited the tricks he'd turned during the preceding thirty days. He threw all their numbers in a fishbowl and plucked them out and rang them up every fourth Saturday. Often they didn't remember him or he them. It was his benevolent idea of society, which, as so often happens in America, was mLxed up with an inclination toward charity. All thirty guys would stand around his small apartment and scowl at each other, appalled to observe the range of Rod's erotic taste: black and white, short and tall, smooth-skinned and hairy, young and not quite so young, butch and twinky.

People kept entering. The front door led direcdy into the kitchen with its ratty Hnoleum floor and the tub in the center of the room covered for the moment with a board that served as a table to hold all the bottles of rot-gut wine the guests had brought. I'd offered a straw-covered quart of Chianti; my year of post-hepatitis sobriety had recendy come to a reeling, jubilatory end.

Just beyond was the small living room, nearly filled by the bed when it

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was opened out though now it had contracted back into itself, a couch on which were seated a handsome young man and woman murmuring to each other in French. He had a red scarf tied around his left biceps, a romantic touch at odds with his glinting granny glasses. She wore nylons sparkling with silver chips. She was Black: her features small as an Ethiopian's.

The only other woman present was Penelope, Rod's roommate, a dainty little thing tottering by on very high heels and swaddled in a tight miniskirt. Her top had trailing lace sleeves. She w^as consoling Rod for some slight he'd suffered. Her tone was tinged with irony but the words were sympathetic, the compromise of a woman embarrassed to baby her lover in front of strangers and who tries to suggest this humiliating necessity may be just a game.

I swayed, bemused and a bit drunk, before the French couple. "Excuse me, do you speak English?"

"Of course," the young man said, "we're .\mericans. We just speak French to each other because that's what we're studying." He had a thin, Errol Flynn mustache, not the botde brush popular then, and a long, rangy body, intelligent eyes, a languid manner and a studied smile. Everything about him was studied, the work of someone who'd been friendless and unloved as a child and who now, with the zeal of a good student, has set about mastering all the social skills. I recognized the game; I was playing it, though I suspected Fd started my lessons at an earlier age.

"Are you a Southerner?" I asked.

"A Southerner?" he repeated, as though examining something dubious at the end of a fork.

His wife was nodding \'igorously and saving in a barely audible aside, "He certainly seems to have diagnosed the case. . . ."

We introduced ourselves. He was Buder, she Lynne. The word "brilliant" kept igniting the light box of my head—her brilliant smile, his brilliant glasses, her brilliant stockings, their intellectual brilliance. L\iine had the long neck and strong calves of a dancer, and the slighdy obscene turnout; Buder folded back like the couch into himself, calm, poised, even elegant. His manner was lordly but intended to be accessible, like that of an Oriental despot vacationing at Saint-Tropez with just one wife. But if he appeared as though he were about to extend his beautiful large hand to be kissed, his facial expressions alternated complacence with a nervous critique of everything going on around him.

He seemed to have acquired his expectations and standards from nineteenth-century novels; he was repeatedly shocked by the impertinence or unseemliness of the Village gay guys milling around us, who'd had a few drinks and were now talking loudly, at once members of rival gangs and potential lovers. They weren't writers or even readers—they were just guys hoping to get laid on a Saturday night. Two fellows were even groping each other in the doorway and a small freckled hand had lifted a T-shirt to stroke a well turned brown waist. Was Buder really shocked by this tipsy, amorous rough-housing, or was he anticipating Lynne's reaction in order to defuse it? Why had he brought his wife to a gay party?

Our dainty hostess kept casting bemused glances our way as an adorably sulky Rod stretched out on the floor and buried his unkempt head in her lap. He'd drunk too much wine and was apparently wounded that two of the days, or dates, in last month's very rich calendar were merging in the bedroom, which Rod pretended was a violation of house rules, although the only rule it broke was his heart—or vanity. The dog was pulling on his shoe laces. Penelope crooned and whispered reassuring things to him—and soon enough was free to slip out from under the burden of his sleeping, smiling head.

She made her way over to us. "You're certainly the most fascinating group here," she said with a smile that projected good will and conveyed curiosity. Her articulation was perfect, like that of a school librarian, but I had the impression she wouldn't have blurred her speech even if she'd known it was grating since everything about her—her cool, ironic regard, her high heels and hair, her somewhat Victorian fashion sense crossed with the reigning look of the bug-eyed, bedraggled moppet—everything seemed born out of a complex fantasy of her own devising rather than out of a desire to please or follow fads. Her self-presentation was as entranced and impregnable as someone else's erotic scenario.

We were all bookish, as it turned out, and we talked about Proust, Isherwood, Stendhal, with the zest of true readers, excited into appreciation not analysis, endlessly eager to evoke favorite scenes and to judge characters as though they were real people. "Oh, God, remember when they realize they're in love just because the word love is pronounced—"

"Is she his aunt or his mother? I forget."

Lynne kept mentioning James Baldwin, and I wondered if it was because they were both Black. If we'd been Europeans, snobbism might

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have slipped into our talk, but since reading bore no cachet at all in America we were reduced to a pleasure as inconsequential as that of the stamp collector or armchair traveler.

What I liked most of all was that all three of my new acquaintances were not only bookish but also beautiful.

"Do you wTite?" I asked Penelope.

"Yes," she said, "though I shouldn't talk about it since I've never published anything."

"Join the crowd," I said. "What are you working on?"

She smiled a dodgy little smile, as though I might be mocking or stalking her, but she overcame her fear— and her vanity—to say with great firmness, "No one, not even Rod, has ever read anything I've written, though you'll all be encouraged to buy my first novel as soon as it comes out."

"Come on, tell," I said.

She straightened her skirt around her knees and said, "That would be against my principles. But surely you've introduced the subject because you're dying to tell us about your own belletristic efforts."

Buder, Lynne and I all froze, looked at each other, drew a breath and rocked with laughter. Penelope laughed too, delighted by the effect she'd produced. I speculated that she was one of those people who prefer being admired for their eccentricities than liked for their common fund of humanity, if they ha\'e such a fund. Soon we were eagerly talking about our belletristic efforts. Buder was a short story writer who favored the "avant-garde" and who had translated several of Raymond Roussel's obscure "te.xts" into a stiff-jointed English. Lynne was writing a thesis on Max Jacob and his influence on Picasso. I said, "My novel is purely autobiographical. Exerything in it is exacdy as it happened, moment by moment—sometimes even written dov^Ti moments after the event. The main character bears my name. I'm writing it in order to persuade the love of my life to come back to me; I'm afraid it's going to be a very long book. That's the avant-garde technique I've invented: it's called realism."

Penelope asked, "Isn't that what most people call a diary?"

The truth was, I'd long since finished and typed my four-hundred-page novel and it was slowly making the rounds of all the New York publishers. It had already been rejected by a dozen. My agent sent me the editors' comments, if there were any. What shocked me most were how personal and arbitrary they were. Whereas I saw publication as a medal conferred

on merit, the notes suggested how haphazard and capricious acceptance must be.

Butler said, "But everything written is a version of reality, even a betrayal of it— tant mieux, since a betrayal is already a choice, which is a conscious, imaginative act."

I protested that since "reality," at least the psychic reality that is the subject of books, takes place in our heads and nowhere else, a fictional account of reality is in no way a translation or "betrayal" of that material into another medium. Lynne murmured, "Tradurre, tradire" exactly as I knew she would.

Butler's eyebrows shot up to indicate his alarm at my heresy, whereas his beautiful hands lazily calmed the waters I'd riled. For if he was both a benevolent despot and a shockable miss, it was his hands that were benevolent and the eyes that were permanently alarmed. He pointed out that language is a closed system in no way connected to reality and that books can only be about other books; I pictured shelves in a dim library where all the books were gabbling contentedly amongst themselves like old people in bed.

"And yet realism is the great challenge," I said, "not the School of Realism with its sordid kitchens and tough streets, much less Social Realism, but rather the burning desire to render the exact shade of sadness, the sadness you feel when you finally get what you want." I spoke facilely, my commas eliminated by drink, and now I was looking into Lynne's merry eyes that were astonished by my recklessness. Suddenly I realized I was talking too much, a temptation I surrendered to only when the subject turned to books, and I dutifully returned to interviewing my new friends. My father had taught me that I need never feel ill at ease socially since all people love to talk about themselves at the slightest provocation—a lesson he, the world's most boring conversationalist, never observed except during business dinners.

While the gay boys around us were slow dancing, a romantic excuse for bumps and grinds and bodily examinations of a nearly mediczJ thoroughness, I was trying to ingratiate myself v\dth Lynne and Buder. I took them more seriously than the boys because they were a heterosexual couple or at least ambiguous sexually.

Couples fascinated me. All my life I'd been dancing attendance on them. I worked harder than they did to keep them together and often failed to see that their spats were just the fleeting coquetry of sex

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antagonism, the natural play in a joust that was more exciting because it was half-hostile. When I was with my couples I was never happy. In fact I was constantly anxious, afraid they'd separate, fearful I might unwittingly be the cause of their separation. Yet I could imagine becoming happy soon if only some movable part (I never figured out which) would tumble into place. I would resolve every morning not to become too involved with my couple of the moment, but by midafternoon I'd already been on the phone with each partner half a dozen times and had invited them to a peace-conference dinner that very evening. I would do everything to bring a smile to their lips, as though my sur\ival depended upon their caprices. I invariably took the side of the man and counseled the woman to give in, concede everything, since to my mind it was clear that it was a buyer's market and she was selling. I had no doubt that he, no matter how unappealing, would find another woman right away, whereas I thought it was only a polite fiction that she was a full and equal partner in any marriage with a man. After all, I'd grown up with a woman—a frustrated, heavy-drinking, headstrong woman—who writhed with loneliness and impatience beside the silent phone. A woman took on importance only if a man desired her, but male desire itself was illusoi-y or at best brief, and women desirable only by convention, not conviction.

Suddenly everyone was whispering, "Brandy," and the next thing I knew I was being introduced to a tall, slender drag queen in a sequined baU gown. She was young but had a mature, expertly painted face designed to appear—I won't say "natural," since nature had nothing to do with it—but plausible only if seen at a distance, on the stage, say She took my big mitt in her tiny, slighdy feverish hand. "I'm so upset," she said in a thrillingly low voice. 'Jorge has just taken off with all my jewels. He threatened to kill me if I called the cops." Her eyes were tragic but a ghost of a smile alighted with a delicate "ping!" on her glossy scarlet lips outlined in black. Penelope said, "You poor girl," and pressed a whiskey into her hands. I tried to imagine Brandy's penis.