The Farewell Symphony (25 page)

Lou's motives struck me as irreproachable, since his zaps allowed him to meet handsome, fearless younger gay men, to feel as young and rebellious as he looked (despite the fact he was over forty, married and the vice president of an advertising company) and to exercise his extraordinary gift for demagoguery. Of course I remembered when, ten years ago, we'd laughed at the idea of homosexual rights and said one might as well demand respect for safecrackers.

Max, despite his arrogance, which came in fitful gusts that alternated with a touching insecurity, didn't believe that he alone could keep me entertained. He invariably arranged for us to drop in on someone after dinner, old people who'd known Arshile or Maxim Gorky, younger ones who'd studied vwth Hannah Arendt or worked for Djuna Barnes. He introduced me to a charming man with Parkinson's disease who assembled from their own writings collage-autobiographies of classic French authors. I met through Max a millionaire from Nebraska who edited a litde magazine.

The Farewell Symphony

And one night we dropped in on Tom, the poetry editor of a famous magazine, which represented the wedding of New York ghtz and sophistication to soHd investigative journalism. Tom was allergic to cigarettes; since I was a chain smoker I'd have to sit on his windowsill, with the window pulled down to my knees like a transparent skirt, and smoke and talk outside (Tom had a hard time hearing me through the glass though he could see me smiling, fuming, gesticulating). In a litde magazine I reviewed Tom's collected poems, which, paradoxically were seldom discussed because Tom wielded so much influence that poets were afraid to appear to be currying his favor. He was delighted by my praise, just as I was pleased to be published.

One evening Tom read me a verse play he'd written a decade before. On another he introduced me to an amateur boxer with a lisp who'd been a paid fuck-buddy for years; the boxer's only passion was opera and he made annual pilgrimages to Bayreuth and Salzburg. He and Tom camped it up and laughed the bored, knowing laugh of the cultural consumer. But Tom wasn't happy with him. They'd become too comfortable in their joking remarks on the leading sopranos of the day to engage any longer at night in fierce sexual combat; there was no way that sex and friendship could be made compatible—Max's theory of the incest taboo. I can remember one night the boxer said, "I don't like Beverly Sills. Her name reminds me of Beverly Hills."

Tom replied without a pause, "Funny, you never had that objection to Victoria de los Angeles."

Tom longed for true love with an intellectual inferior and physical superior, preferably with someone who spoke no English (and would thereby be immune to Tom's only charm). Tom had been in Freudian analysis for twenty years and made sophisticated jokes about his treatment as about everything else (his parents, his lack-love life, his failing health). He was a famous wit, as dry as his own martinis, and I knew a joke was on its way when his eyebrows would rise above the solid black rims of his round glasses and his small body, swaddled in a tighdy buttoned tan summer suit made by "the Brothers" (Brooks) and sporting a pastel rep tie, would begin to rock all over Since his humor never overturned his preconceptions it didn't take him or his listeners by surprise; no, it was a local affair, just a snarl in his mental trafiic, not an accident.

One day Tom said to me, "I'm terribly embarrassed but I don't kirow any of your books. Could you tell me some of your tides?"

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"I could," I said, "but that wouldn't get you very far since all my books are still unpublished."

"That must be very painful for you," he said, and though I was ready to be miffed by any remark that came close to condescension, I could tell right away that he knew exactly the humiliation and frustration I was experiencing and I fell relieved, acknowledged. I was the youngest man at most of the parties I was attending now and at age thirty I was still able and eager to play the attractive student, but at the same time I was sure I'd soon lose my looks, my only entree into this society, even if I'd written a perfect novel, as I judged it, a book at once intimate and impersonal, a closely woven web of signifiers that could be mapped onto our everyday life, though only imperfecdy—"God's aUegory," as Dante scholars called it, referring to those Biblical passages that can be interpreted only partially, that have only a Hmited correspondence to reahty, passages that refuse to be completely teased out and that strenuously guard the mystery of the concrete.

My secret pride, I felt, however, was vexed and sore to the extent it was based on something shadowy, an unpublished novel, which is like a song no one has sung yet, or a set of plans for a house that has yet to be built. I'd quit my job on a wager that I'd succeed as a novelist. I'd deformed my personality just as a ballerina bloodies her feet or as a nun shaves her skull—always on the wager that one is going to become a star, a saint, an artist. My deformations were less dramatic than the dancer's or holy sister's, perhaps, but they were pursued just as fatally. Someone proposed I write for a television soap opera at a fee of a hundred thousand dollars a year, but I would have had to live on the head writer's estate on Cape Cod and turn out two hours of dialogue a week. I convinced myself that I was too pure (too artistic, idealistic) to accept, but in fact I was too addicted to sexual adventure of the sort only New York could provide.

Among all the people Max introduced me to, only one, Joshua, became a close friend. In fact he became the great friend of my life, although at first I scarcely noticed him. His charm was oblique, his humor understated, his looks appealing only to the initiate.

He wore contact lenses, but his eyes were so bad that he saw litde enough by day and nothing by night, and when I'd send him off in a taxi at midnight after a drunken dinner and a nightcap or two, I had the impression I was pushing a wind-up soldier toward a precipice, for if the New York of Max, Tom and Joshua was a pinnacle of civilization,

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inhabited by these eclectic geniuses who knew everything and read books in every language in their calm, spacious apartments, the city outside was also as noisy as an Arab bazaar and as dangerous as a bear pit: the streets were piled high with uncollected garbage and pulsing with revolving police lights; on the fire escape beyond an open window lurked a house robber—or the shadow of laundry on a line; even the ground was just the thinnest layer of macadam poured over ten stories of hidden wires, sewers, subways, all ratding and steaming like pots on a stove. Only the lofty, raggedy roof gardens beside the forest of aerials and the slat-sheathed water tanks suggested another, tribal landscape—those roof villages or the dim inner courtyards flooded with pooling rain that pasted down layer upon layer of gingko leaves into a thickening vegetal collage of what looked like parchment, wax paper and butcher paper

Joshua had a mind I couldn't fathom quickly. Early on I'd learned (perhaps because when I was a child we changed cities every year and I was faced each September with a new classroom of potential enemies) to characterize and seduce the people around me, but I could never figure Joshua out. Since the intellectuals I was meeting wanted to explain their work and to read it out loud, I was happy to listen (after all, most of them were at least part-time professors and used to a captive audience). My questions and welcoming silence could precipitate them into hours of glittering talk or recitation. Joshua, however, was quiet and curious. If someone like Max was always fearful that the tone might be lowered and spoke only on what he considered to be the highest plane, Joshua was delighted to gossip about friends, to speculate about the sex lives of the dancers at the New York City Ballet, to alert me to a good new restaurant reviewed in the SoHo IVeekly Mws. He was deeply suspicious of ideas and liked to quote William Carlos Williams's injunction, "No ideas but in things." Whereas I was convinced by almost any idea I could grasp and passed quickly from Structuralism to semiotics by way of a Gramsci-inspired Marxist cultural analysis, Joshua smiled at my enthusiasms and yawned at my lectures. He wanted to know how to prepare pasta alia puUanesca. He hoped to meet the ballerina assoluta Suzanne Farrell. He wondered what Lola was up to in the soap opera The Guiding Light. We had a very campy way of talking together that we deleted the minute Max or anyone serious was around. We gave all of our friends, men and women alike, female names and referred to them all in the feminine gender

Joshua had been first in his class at Harvard as an undergraduate and had written an acclaimed doctoral thesis on the migration of the Petrar-

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chan sonnet from Italy via France to England. He was considered one of the leading experts alive on Sir Philip Sidney, but the Renaissance bored him, although he quickly scanned articles every week or two in learned journals just to keep up with what everyone in his field was doing.

No, what interested him were the poets whom he was meeting and whom he was beginning to write about. His own life had been changed by Eddie—a poet, millionaire and gay man—who'd transformed Joshua by convincing him to buy contact lenses to replace his extremely thick glasses, and silk shirts and pale, pleated slacks to wear instead of the heavy, old-fashioned wool suits his father, a small-town tailor, had outfitted him with. Joshua and Eddie visited a tailor in Venice, a certain Signor Cicogna, every summer, and Joshua would come back with sports jackets in a fabric that in English is called houndstooth but in French (and Italian) "hen's foot." Or a black wool suit lined in red silk, which would cause Joshua, as he flipped his jacket open, to say in Italian with a sly little smile, "Priest outside, cardinal inside." His new look lifted him out of the category of the dowdy academic into that of the smart man-about-town.

At first Joshua—so wry, so unemphatic, smiling quizzically because he wasn't sure he was seeing the right expression on the other person's face— seemed like a charming extra in my new life, but soon I came to love him for the intimacy that sprang up between us as well as for all of his virtues, which were precisely the ones I lacked.

I had a way of shamelessly courting and flattering people such as Max or Buder because I felt I was acting in a play, whereas Joshua took them seriously, he was at home in this New York intellectual milieu, this was his one and only life, and he wasn't about to concede an inch to someone as high-handed as Max or as slippery and self-righteous as Buder. Joshua had started out as a bookworm. He'd excelled in studies that had obliged him to learn Greek, Latin and Renaissance Italian and French. If he looked fifty when he was only twenty-five (I was shocked by his old photos) and back then had been both loveless and envious, at least he'd had the satisfaction of mastering his field and even writing an essay on Shakespeare's sonnets that everyone still quoted two decades later. Anything judged remarkable that touched on Shakespeare, no matter how peripherally, repositioned the very cornerstone of our civilization—or should I say their civilization, since I could speak about it so pompously only because I didn't feel part of it; I bowed my head before Shakespeare as one might stand or kneel in an unfamiliar church. I'd majored in Chinese, I'd been a Buddhist, my favorite college courses had been Buddhist Art and

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the Music of Bartok, I knew The Tale of Genji better than Hamlet, Vd never studied Marlowe, Sidney or Spenser (Joshua kept telling me there was no greater pleasure than reading The Faerie Queene but I remained unconvinced), Fd read all of Ibsen (even Emperor and Galilean), revered Knut Hamsun, and Colette and Nabokov were the writers I read whenever the world appeared colorless, but if I wept when I read Keats my eyes were dry when I perused Dante—dry or slowly drooping into deep sleep.

If I was a public-libraiy intellectual, someone who read without a plan and followed only his whims, Joshua was the real thing. I went with him one day to the university where he taught. Whereas Max bullied his students and hoped above all they'd consider him intelligent, Joshua was the good shepherd who gently prodded his flock toward the paddock. Max was exhilarating because he poured so much energy into every encounter and had a vaudeville extravagance about him. But he was also absurd with his swooping intonations, dictionary words, Inverness cape and deerstalker, and no one would have wanted to be like him—or if, bizarrely, the desire to emulate him had been awakened in some undergraduate breast, no one would have known how to go about copying such a preposterous style, so angular precisely because it joined a European erudition to a Midwestern bumptiousness (he avoided these two psychic and geographical extremes in favor of New York, where no one could judge him because no one could quite place him, and where energy, a quality he brisded with, was prized more than polish).

But Joshua, during all the years and in all the different countries and contexts I knew him, was always more admirable than intimidating and esteemed more for what he was than for what he said or did. Any guy in his classroom was fitter, more agile, better looking than he and abler at seeing the world around him, but his very frailry only pointed up the strength and suppleness of his mind and the high finish of his manner. Anyone could tell right off that Max was a tyrant; he could make it disadvantageous, even perilous, to disagree with him. But his friends and students didn't fear Joshua. No, they longed to please him. Joshua's hands gendy molded the air when he spoke. He sat on the edge of his desk closest to his students, which suggested without demonstrating casualness, since his performance was so highly organized that nothing about it went unpremeditated. He cocked his head to one side and listened to his students, whom he sometimes deliberately pretended were saying things more intelligent than they intended. Everything he said was designed to

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lead his audience to a more focused vision of Shakespeare's world, an almost pictorial apprehension; as Joshua spoke one could see golden clouds banked in Tintoretto-blue skies above Cleopatra's sun-baked walls.