The Farewell Symphony (21 page)

arm of a chair and say, "Here I am, nearly forty, and I'm still hurling myself about like a teenager. I thought I'd have acquired a certain ^rawtej by now." She leafed through magazines and poked at her potted plants in the back yard. "My aunt Carlotta visited me," she confessed, "and of course she's used to big Nebraska houses with four bedrooms upstairs and two acres of gardens. She looked around my apartment and said, 'You mean you live in these two tiny rooms?' I said the garden was the best part but when we went outside she said, 'Docs this dirty litde alley actually lead to a garden?' and I said, 'This dirty little alley is the garden.' " Maria shook all over with laughter.

For her as for me the real if vigorously rejected world was one of Midwestern suburbs in which kids with silky blond hair walked down sidewalks under old elms, where the ice-cream wagon played its chimes on the street corner in order to summon forth inhabitants from shadowy, cream-colored, stucco-covered houses, where basements were filled with hundreds of neady stacked cans of food, where the living-room furniture was dressed each spring in flower-sprigged slipcovers and where winter woolens were stored in cedar chests—a whole world of irreproachable ennui, styleless comfort, solid, dozing bank accounts.

The only difference between us was that I thought my New York existence was a temporary form of camping out whereas Maria said, "I visited my brother and his family and I can see it's a perfectly nice life crowded with tennis lessons, church socials and Sunday brunches, but if I had to live like that I'd just as soon put a bullet through my brain." I could never bring myself to buy any furniture other than Salvation Army junk, since whatever I'd be able to afford would appear pathetic beside my father's gleaming piles of blond mahogany and pale velvet. Maria was happy to piece together her own bohemian nest, her Manhattan take on Iowa, just as a florist, tilting her head from side to side, composes a bouquet out of plants never found together in nature—a bird of paradise, two hollyhocks and a clump of buffalo grass.

Now down to my last six hundred dollars, I'd lie awake on my little cot at Maria's and calculate how long I could make it last. An old Fire Island friend offered me a job working as a stock boy in his Madison Avenue shop where he sold objects in lucite. I told him I'd get back to him in a month, if he could wait that long. He couldn't; reluctandy I let the offer slip through my hands. I auditioned to be a bartender but flubbed in making a sidecar, even though I'd stayed up all night reading a book of recipes.

The Farewell Symphony

I found a dirty litde one-room apartment in a tenement at the foot of Horatio Street which cost only a hundred dollars a month. The fall was setting in and I could glide through the cool, blowy nights like a sailboat, the sail now drawn tight against the propelling wind, now flapping as I drifted. In Rome I'd been intimidated into dressing up before I went out, even to carry my dirty shirts to the laundress (garments I transported in a suitcase), but now I lived with a freedom I'd never known before, since I didn't need to keep any particular hours or show up at an office.

I signed up to ghostwrite a thousand-page psychology textbook for college freshmen at four hundred dollars a chapter, payable upon delivery. Publishers had discovered that academics were incapable of delivering a manuscript on time and in comprehensible prose so they paid a professor for the use of his name and outline. The in-house editors prepared a package for the ghostwriter of a cut-and-paste collage of the best passages on any given topic (perception, memory) from rival textbooks and a thick set of Xeroxes of the best and latest relevant articles ("Primacy and Recency in Rat Memory: A Review of the Literature"). I'd rise at noon, drink instant coffee, shower and shave, go to the gym, eat a late lunch of thick bread and minestrone at the Front Porch, browse at a used bookstore, then amble home, pausing to stare back at any idle man who might cruise me. I'd sit at my kitchen table and pound out two or three pages on size constancy or proprioception, proud of my powers of assimilation and synthesis. Then the phone would start ringing as friends would call shopping around for dinner dates; I kept a litde appointment book in my back pocket, the only accoutrement recalling my old office days and its schedules.

I tried to write a new novel, now that the salt and sewer breezes of New York had blown the Roman cobwebs out of my head, but I felt it too was doomed never to be published and an aching feeling of hopelessness paralyzed my hand whenever I took up my pen. My heroine, Alyx, was based on Christa. I wrote from her point of view and tried to imagine her as an American heiress, resolutely heterosexual, who becomes best friends with a gay man (me) and a lesbian (Maria). Alyx was compounded of Christa and Henry James's Isabel Archer as well as a fox-hunting girl I'd known at coOege; she realizes when she turns thirty (my age then) that she's followed a false scent in copying the personal style of a gay man and woman who exalt independence because they're artists and a cult of friendship because marriage will never give a continuity to their lives. Alyx, in a panic, decides she must marry but chooses unwisely—the handsome.

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cruel, gold-digging Osmond. In Portrait of a Lady, James calls giving up one's friends for one's beloved "the tragic part of happiness" and for a while I toyed with the idea of calling my book The Tragic Part.

If my Fire Island novel was considered obscure, Baroque, overly ingenious, this book would be limpid, its effects at once melodramatic and refined. Because its inspiration was medieval and Japanese, my Fire Island novel, I decided, had failed to connect with anything American editors could recognize—it seemed almost too original, for if critics and publishers say they esteem originality, what they really mean is a small variation on a known theme, not an innovation ex nihilo. In Woman Reading Pascal, as I decided to call my work-in-progress, I would deal with homosexuality but only as observed by a sometimes uncomprehending heterosexual woman never exposed to the gross physicality and obsessive sexual cov-etousness of her friend "Dan," as I named myself; no, Alyx would compare herself unfavorably to Maria and Dan, ironically unaware that in most people's eyes she was a golden being and we disgusting misfits. If my Fire Island novel was mosdy invented, this new book would, I hoped, seem entirely mimetic.

One night in a bar I was cruising two young men who were obviously hoping to put together a three-way I kept flickering past them in a vain attempt to attract their attention. At last I gave up and went into the backroom, so dark that very little was visible. Two other men were kissing deeply, their hands ecstatically touching each other's faces while their bodies were turned away, as in a dance in which only the shoulders may touch; each man was being gone over by a whole retinue of gnomes, much as a race car is feverishly serviced at a pit stop. One gnome was licking a flank, another was sucking a cock, a third was burrowing into buttocks. The royal couple, two Oberons, kissed while their invisible cloaks were unfurled around them by attendant fairies. What was wonderful was that I, too, could touch them, kneel beside them, lick, suck—or kiss a hand as a vassal might. Dancers, cars, fairies, lords—a whole kaleidoscope of successive images was refracted around these two lovers.

The usual mating ritual, with its feints and hesitations, its coquetry and crowing, was abridged in the backroom into a nearly silent passage from desire to act. I moved easily from one man to the next, my hand sifting through long hair, my lips grazing a soft mustache, my cock engulfed by a

The Farewell Symphony

hot mouth that like a glass-blower's would make grow and glow through its motion a shape and an urgency.

Someone pushed my blower aside and was about to go down on me when I caught a whiff of his distinctive perfume and heard him clear his high, unchanged voice—my Romanian! "A/a come mat!" I whispered, amazed.

He rose then and fell into my arms, we withdrew into the light, the focus of friendship replacing the blur of generalized lust, and he told me in his halting Italian of his disappointment as an au pair boy in the industrial wasteland of New Jersey, the terrible slavery the butcher and his family had imposed on him, his official complaint registered before the Romanian immigration board in Newark, his new placement as a "house boy" to a distinguished elderly Korean diplomat on Gramercy Park. . . . While he spoke the attractive young couple in search of a third partner cruised closer and closer to us. At last, when my Romanian went off to the toilet for a second, one of the handsome strangers came up and asked me, speaking slowly, eyebrows raised, "Do . . . you . . . speak . . . English?"

"Uh leede beet," I ratded off fluendy

I went home with them, lined them up side by side, face-down, and fucked one for two strokes, then the other, then back to the first, all the while muttering things in the gruffest Italian {"Pana madomia" or "Che cidoP' were two of my standbys).

Near my apartment were the docks where late at night fellows from New Jersey ("the bridge and tunnel crowd") would stand in a line between parked semis, undo their trouser buttons and let the guys crouched under the trucks suck them off. After a warm autumn day the night was cool and airy. Manhattan without a wind is like a becabned ship festering in a Sargasso Sea of sewage and despair, but as soon as the first fresh breeze stirs, then the ship comes to life and its maritime men move smartiy, shimmying down from their perches to pace the decks.

In the 1960s the homosexual population was small and I'd known most of it, at least by sight. On some November nights there had been just a few skinny queens in wheat jeans and red windbreakers darting through the rain. Now there seemed to be more and more visible gay men, thousands of them, all similarly slender and mustachioed, many of them with tire same loud voices and crude way of talking ("Hey, Howie, wanna cwoffee?") as the guys who used to beat us up.

I went out for a few weeks with Joey, a gaunt six-foot-three, hundred-and-fifty-pound kid from Long Island ("Lawn Guyland," as he said it, and

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I imagined a million guys set up like bowling pins on a clipped green). He drove his parents' ten-year-old Chevy and showed me snapshots of his high-school graduation (last spring). To my taste he was too romantic and not sexual enough, a spindly girafie wanting to be consoled in my arms for everything he'd ever felt, which had suddenly coalesced around mc. He drank too much and sat weeping in his car in front of the door to my building. Eventually he moved in with an Italian-American cop in Say-ville, someone also named Joey, who presided over a large white house filled with all his relations.

I became thinner and thinner as I lived on a diet of cigarettes, espresso and vodka, as I dashed up and down my stairs on the way to the gym, the bar, the trucks. Sometimes to write my psychology textbook I'd swallow amphetamines, work all night and still be wide-eyed and e.xcited at dawn. I'd race down to the trucks in dirty jeans—without underwear—ripped strategically at the knees, over the buttocks, and beside the crotch. The last pervert would already have left and a garbage truck would be slowly edging along from house to house, its maw open and swallowing. Desperate, I'd press myself against the wall and stare holes through the garbage collectors. Dawn would be twitching brighter and brighter, as though God's rheostat were too old and cheap to function imperceptibly. The first office workers, pale and yawning, their hair still wet from the shower, would be automatically hurrying down the four steps of their stoops, off to the subway entrance five blocks away. I stared at them, too, tliinking I might lure one up to my eyrie for a quickie.

I was keeping up a desultory correspondence with Tina. I worked out how to say, "I miss you" {Sento la tua mancanzd), and after receiving my letter with that expression in it she hopped on the next plane to New York. She seemed momentarily taken aback by the squalor of my apartment, but she must have been pleased that we would be lying side by side in a small bed every night, even with the two mattresses of the single bed separated and thrown on the floor I had found so litde echo in New York of what I had now expanded into a whole "year" in Rome that I was happy to have her here, with her wonderful, heady laugh, her face devoid of makeup except for the mascara tracing her huge eyes in black, her skinny flanks, clean but unpainted nails, her eternal MS cigarettes, her curiosity about everything.

Like aO European Communists, she wanted to see Harlem first thing. She tried to walk the streets alone but after she discovered that wasn't such a great idea she insisted that I fmd a friend with a car; we drove up and

The Farewell Symphony

down the streets and she seemed ahnost disappointed by what she considered the look of relative prosperity, though we told her the apartments were dangerous, overcrowded and rat-infested. She didn't believe us when we said the principal victims of black crime were other blacks. In Litde Italy she was shocked to discover in a shop an ashtray bearing the portrait of Benito Mussolini. "And it looks like the past! This is Italy after the war."

"Ah, yes," I said, "America is Italy's attic where everything outmoded— including outmoded ideas—is stored in mothballs."

"Cosa?" she asked, puzzled. I never knew whether she went blank around me because she was studying me sorrowfully or whether she was overcome with desire and not really listening or whether I was speaking too fast in English or incorrecdy in Italian. I'd never had anyone look at me so searchingly and it flattered me and made me feel guilty.

One night she wept because I never cooked her any spaghetti and she felt she couldn't get through another day without "them." I took pains to make a rich, delicious Bolognese sauce on my little stove poised on top of the waist-high fridge; as soon as the stove heated up, roaches came scut-ding out of it.

When she threw herself over me again that night I exploded. I sat up, switched on the light, lit a cigarette and held it in a trembling hand. "Tina, this can't go on. I'm a homosexual. I don't want to sleep with you. We're friends."