The Farewell Symphony (55 page)

In New York and San Francisco there were now so many gay men living openly that not only the genus but even aberrant species thrived. One could socialize, if one chose, only with other opera-loving sadists or only with cat-owning bibliophiles into urine. Straight members of the public saw the enormous gay parades of dykes in work boots and drag queens and the grinning, bespectacled parents of gays, but they never caught a glimpse of all those homosexuals who didn't want to participate: the doughy clarinetist scutding from a lesson to lunch with a lesbian musicologist or the doctor who, since he was busted for prescribing Quaaludes too often, never emerged from his apartment, or the Asian teenage woman holding hands with her Puerto Rican girlfriend in the park late at night.

Even if New York gay life was a ghetto made up of minorities, all con-tradictoi"y and severally exclusive, nevertheless Fox was surely representa-

live of that moment. He was aware that we were making history of some sort. He saw the Hnks with an older generation (Ned Rorem's, Frank O'Hara's) and even Homer's much older generation, but he could also glimpse how the present was preparing a new youth of wild, loud, totally freaky anarchic kids. Fox worshipped high culture, especially when it was wrapped like a shawl around the shoulders of men and women he knew personally (Homer's ancient friends, whom he had met on a trip to Paris that he'd taken with the old man, were as real to him as the New York boys he murmured to over the phone every night).

He and I assumed there was going to be a future and that it would get more and more extravagant. We saw gay men as a vanguard that society would inevitably follow. I thought that the couple would disappear and be replaced by new, polyvalent molecules of affection or Whitmanesque adhesiveness. I was having sex with a sleepy-eyed Native American I'd met through Kevin. He and I would make love to a blond steward from Norway—and sometimes with a hairless translator from the French who affected a crewcut and policeman's shiny shoes. At other times we were joined by a Kennedy-like gay political leader who'd rush in wearing a white shirt and rep tie and would have to keep checking his messages.

We were friends and lovers, more friends than lovers, and our long evenings of pasta, Puccini and sex felt as mellow as vintage Bordeaux held up to a flame and as exhilarating as a hit play in previews. In the warm weather we'd leave the huge windows open at my new place and listen to the sound of laughter and cudery on plates welling up from the garden restaurant just below. We were inside, naked beside a candelabrum blazing with twelve candles, the long silver marijuana pipe from Morocco passing from one sun-tanned hand to another. The Indian was completely crazy; he had a paranoid fantasy about a cult of Hollywood actors who wanted to sacrifice him to the devil. But in our stupor, each guy's head resting on the next man's stomach, we'd sometimes start quaking with laughter in spite of ourselves when the Indian's plot became too impossibly convoluted.

When we were all shaking, the Indian, Tad, would catch himself: "Okay, fellows, believe it or not, laugh all you want, but I swear —" and at that point we all lost it and writhed with the pain of our laughter until Tad began to blow out the candles one by one and then, when the room was dark and the needle had lifted from the last record, he'd kiss the steward, then the translator, then the Kennedy, then me with his big warm mouth, juicy as a pear so ripe it's already turning brown, and he'd begin

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to murmur incoherent, fatherly reassurances in his baritone voice. He'd wrap us in his arms, the arms of a vvxestler who's taken on a winter weight he's about to shed though the bulk can't hide the strength that hes just under the skin. His skin had the not-unpleasant smell of Cubans who live on black beans and saffron rice (maybe that's what he ate) and his big un-circumcised penis lolled so lazily, so majestically on his balls, like a river god on mossy rocks, that we four gathered around him with the vulnerability and clustering affection of smooth-limbed daughters. If in the dim light bouncing up from the paper lanterns strung through the trees below my window I saw Tad's dark hand on the white of my ass, I felt he was growing a beard, I breasts and, after the mad excesses of his Hollywood Satan story, he re-established his dignity through the simple authenticity of his body. We were still boys, even I at nearly fort); but Tad at thirt\- was so fully a man that only he among us need not fear aging. Our laughter melted into moans as we eased back into making love again.

I HAD TO HIDE my uights of Whitmanesque camaraderie from Fox because the more he loved me the more jealous he became. At first I found his jealousy reassuring, even exciting, after my years of hopeless love. Fox stared at me with his hyperthyroid eyes, which bulged out of his head in order to see more of me, even my slightest, most inadxertent and peripheral gesture.

.\fter that first night when we'd met at the Slot and Fd fucked him, he never stopped fucking me. Fd lie on my back with him between my legs and he'd stare and stare at me as he'd fuck. If Fd groan with pleasure or pain (I could never distinguish between them) he'd redouble his efforts. He acted as though, if he shoved a litde harder, inched in a bit deeper, he'd fmally own me, take care of me. He was staring so hard at me not because he was melting with tenderness or because he wanted to transmit a thought but because, like an eagle carrying off a lamb, he wanted to see if there was still some life in me, something that might kindle in me a will of my own and inspire me to run off, head for safeU'.

I'd leave Fox's apartment to walk home and the phone would be ringing when I came in. "What took you so long?" Fox would ask. "Don't try-to fool me—you usually make the trip in fifteen minutes. Today it took twenty-eight—nearly thirt}'\"

"I was window-shopping."

"Yeah, for dick. Huh? See some nice dick? Did you stop in to that dirty movie theater on Second and—"

"Don't even tell me the address! I don't want to know. You're the one who knows all those—"

"Oh, sure," Fox said scornfully. "You're pure as the driven snow. Don't forget where I met you, sugar; that wasn't any convent."

When I'd come in the door he'd pull me into a tight embrace. If I didn't respond ardendy, he'd push me away and say, "What's wrong? Have you ad-ready come twice today? Plum wore out?" He'd push a hand down the back of my jeans. "No undies? Wanna be ready for action? You Village Boys are like that, aren't you? Notorious for—And what's this? Your asshole feels loose and juicy. Didn't you even have time to clean it up before coming to see your hubby?"

The worst of it was that I'd grow self-conscious and giggly. I could feel myself blushing and becoming more and more awkward. He'd start nuzzling my neck and since he was shorter than me he'd have to stand on tiptoe to do so, but his ass and legs were so strong that I felt like a big, willowy girl beside this powerful litde bully who would soon lift and guide me through a long floating dance.

Over dinner with friends he concealed his jealousy entirely. He was thoroughly up to date and always ready with a scandalous story, but if during the course of the meal I forgot myself and told a sex anecdote of my own about someone I'd known even years ago I'd see Fox cock an ear, sit up, take note. Later, when we were alone, his jaw muscles would flex and his nose would seem to dilate. He'd say, "Oh, so he played with your nipples, did he? Like this, sugar?"

He'd fuck me, fall asleep and in the middle of the night start fucking me again. He'd play with my nipples so much they'd bleed and scab over and they'd ache under my starched shirt and I'd think of him all day, half with revulsion.

I developed a case of prostatitis that no treatment seemed able to cure. It made ejaculation painful, sometimes impossible. Only when I was seeing a doctor in Seattle, where I was interviewing people for a new book, did I learn that the whole condition was imaginary. "I'm afraid there's nothing wrong with you beyond a bit of hysteria," the doctor said with a smile. The next day I was cured.

Fox was so jealous that even when I was guildess I'd notice with horror if a buddy touched my shoulder or stroked my neck, in all innocence; I

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could feel Fox watching. I'd tense up, move away, but it was only a matter of time before he'd say, "We're awfully buddy-buddy, aren't we?"

"WTio? Who and who?"

"You told me you and Stuart were just friends."

"We are."

"Look, I wasn't born yesterday."

If I'd come over to his apartment with groceries to prepare supper, he'd feel the milk and say, "It's not even cold. And this butter is melting. What happened? Did you get waylaid?"

If my hair was wet with sweat, he'd say, "Oh, ho! So you took a shower after your litde romp—you're becoming more and more brazen, I see, you don't even pretend you re faithful anymore. . . .'"

"I am faithful!" I lied, "but I detest this whole vocabulary, innocent, faithful, guilty, brazen, sluttish. You know I don't believe in monogamy. Neither do you. It's a dreadful trap. We're not straight—although mayheyou are. Axe you sure you're not a breeder?"

The next night, just to spite Fox, I stood him up and had dinner with Sean and his new lover, a big bear of a man who was a lumberjack. They met me at a restaurant in the West Fifties. Their clothes made them seem completely out of place in New York. Just as an object shifts from right to left as you shut first one eye, then the other, in the same way Sean seemed healthy and vigorous with his new reddish-blond beard and his checked shirt and jeans as he talked about their dude ranch in Arizona, but then, seen from another point of view, he appeared dowdy, provincial—in those days, as a convinced New Yorker, I invariably saw out-of-towners as drab and marginal. What confirmed that impression was Sean's insistence that he and his lover were accepted by their neighbors as "regular guys" and that no one suspected there might be something "illicit" in their relationship (and here Sean's eyes lit up crazily, as though we both shared the same vice, one he could mention only once every ten years, and then only to a fellow debauchee).

The stolid, willed normality of their love made my affair with Fox seem all the more neurotic. Fox would bite me hard to leave love marks on my neck, especially above the collar, so that "my other lover" (an obsessive figment he'd created) would see I belonged to him. Fox didn't say that in so many words, but I knew what he was doing and what I'd originally thought arose from an excess of passion I now realized was the fruit of careful scheming—and I started resenting his amorous violence.

Sometimes he thought he'd hook me for good by initiating me into ever

more bizarre vices. One night he kept passing the joint my way and feeding me brandy stingers until I was incapable of putting up a resistance or even walking. Then with remarkable efficiency he undressed me, kissing me with those kisses of his that always ended with a lingering little bite. His hands were all over me (how I long for them now that I'm alone) and I couldn't decide whether they were irritating or overwhelmingly delicious—and then, suddenly, he was pushing me back onto the bed. I toppled there in a naked heap. He left the room and I could hear water running and running. The cats came to inspect me contemptuously, as though they knew how dangerous so much spinelessness could be. They looked at me, breathed lightly on me, and hopped away—or was what I took for their breath really Fox's hand, passing lighdy over me, banking the fires of my nearly extinct aura? My eyes, unfocused, myopic (I'd taken out my lenses an hour earlier), saw that Fox was hooking something up to a tall pole he'd wheeled beside the bed.

"Whassat?" I asked drunkenly.

"An enema bag."

"I don't want that . . . that would make me ashamed . . . the smell . . . loss of control. . . ."

Fox fed me a hit of poppers and said, "There, my litde boy's a good boy, he's going to let me do whatever I want," and before I could reply he had a greasy finger up my ass and then the nozzle of the enema bag.

I couldn't feel the water going in at first but when I looked up I saw that Fox was pinching the tube, then releasing it, and slowly the orange rubber sack deflated. After two bags full of warm water had gone in, a wave of cramps swept through me and I panicked. I was afraid I'd burst, that Fox didn't know what he was doing, that he himself was too stoned to stop. He massaged my taut belly soothingly and told me the "discomfort" would soon pass. I remembered that there are no pain receptors, only cramp receptors, in the digestive tract; I could be ruptured, bleeding, and I wouldn't even know it.

The cramps went away, only to return when he filled me up wdth the third bag. Again he massaged my belly. I alternated between resenting his interference even with my vital processes and inner organs and surrendering to him as though he were a doctor—or a parent, since my stepmother had been the one to give me enemas when I was a boy, an operation that even then was half-erotic, at least for me.

It all ended with my sitting on the toilet (I who jumped sky-high if someone walked in on me) while Fox crouched beside me, pushing more

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and more of the spurting water out of me while I wept from shame and gratitude as the horrible smell of something fundamental within me rose all around us, something that Fox, too, was breathing, sharing.

I was a fundamentalist, if that meant I believed that every attribute was an intrinsic aspect of our essence. I was willing to submit manfully to the powerful spices in Indian food only because I believed that these dishes were necessarily hot; the day I discovered that this cuisine could be ordered milder I lost my faith in it—or rather, felt my faith severely shaken. In the same way when I learned that the color of Coke was added later, that brown sugar was just white sugar with molasses sprayed on it to give it a "natural" unprocessed look—oh, all of these discoveries troubled my primitive fundamentalism. In the same way I believed that shit was not just food passing through the body but something that had always lived within it. Fox had somehow sensed this funny faith of mine and gone right to it. He'd tapped the corruption residing in my heart, not just the waste passing through m\- tripes.

One evening we were eating an ordered-in pizza with friends, other young writers who belonged to a literary club we'd started where we'd take turns reading out loud to each other. Fd just read something and been praised for it (which was no surprise, since our organization was named "The All-Praise Club"). Fox's face darkened with jealousy—but suddenly I saw it was emy And if the two words were often confused that was because folk wisdom recognized that the mad, possessive husband wants to be —no, the analysis was less well suited to the dynamics of het-erosexuality: the fox wants to be the chicken.

I can't imagine Brice in that druggy promiscuity of love and friendship, jealousy and en\y When I first seduced him I'd get him stoned on .American joints and I tried out some kinky sex on him tliat he'd ne\er experienced before, but one year into our affair, after he became ill, we stopped making love, although we continued to sleep tangled up together, held hands at the movies and were in every way a couple. Perhaps with all my earlier lovers I'd felt claustrophobic, whereas with Brice I knew that we were both positive and he was seriously ill and that this closeness, this love, was not going to go on forever, that soon enough we'd be sleeping alone in our graves. I was no longer afraid of intimacy, since I knew that I'd fi-naUv arrived at the end of all feeling, all experience, and that the moments that remained to him and to me might as well be as intense as possible.

And as exclusive. I felt that Brice and I were wearing a caste mark, and

that we were the caste's only two members. Others had lots of time to play around with, as though they were in a Gorky comedy about an endless summer house party, whereas we were in a terse Greek tragedy, compressed and efficient, plunging towards its denouement. After all my years of defending promiscuity, I'd become a fierce champion of the couple.

While writing a travel article, I went to Cincinnati, where my father still lived. He and I hadn't spoken in nearly five years nor seen each other in seven. I checked into the Netherland Plaza, a 1920s hotel skyscraper where as a boy just after the war I'd gone to eat lunch with my mother (chicken potpie and chocolate sundaes) and watched an ice show in the middle of the afternoon (big, heavy-breathing women in sequins and feathers spraying snow onto us as they suddenly braked with their blades, their painted eyes and lips round with the faked excitement that seemed so hard to relate to the placid, doughy, sexless housewives I called women).

But no sooner had I checked in to the hotel room than I called my father. My stepmother answered. She whispered: "Your father's had a very bad heart attack. Now he just sits around all day with a stopwatch measuring his heartbeat. Try not to excite him. Here, I'll call him."

"Well, why are you staying there, young fellow?" my father asked when I explained where I was. "I'll be right down to get you."

He was much, much thinner than I'd ever seen him. His ears stood away from his head and the skin hung in folds under his neck like an elephant's. In the past he'd traded in his Cadillac every other year (and his wife's on alternating years), but now the car struck me (an ignorant New Yorker who'd never owned any kind of vehicle) as at least ten years old, though it was spodessly clean inside and recently Simonized outside. He was wearing sports clothes that seemed equally old; the trousers hung off him, flapping oddly, the waist cinched by a badly scarred black leather belt and a small, square silver buckle that was tarnished on one corner. His three initials, the same as mine, were inscribed onto the silver in a script so stylized as to be nearly illegible.

He was pale, almost blue, and his hair much thinner and very white. There were liver marks on his hands. He trembled slighdy as he shook my hand. I was expecting him to make a crack about my long hair and mustache (he thought only little guys who wore platform shoes and needed to show off ever sported a mustache), but he said nothing, which made me

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realize Fd moved out of the category of family retainer into that of potential customer, the only two human species he recognized. If one could fart and belch in front of a retainer or read die paper while he or she sat there during dinner, with a customer one had to make jokes, lay on a spread, ask seemingly interested questions.

He was chewing so much gum, which made his cheek bulge and impeded his speech, that I asked him about it.

"Ever since I went on this salt-free, fat-free diet and lost so much weight I've had all this flab to worry about, so I've worked out my own system— I chew twenty pieces of gum half an hour twice a day."

"That's a very good idea," I said. "I'll have to try that. My face is beginning to sag some, too."

He offered to carry my bag but I wouldn't let him. As we walked to the parking lot I fell behind him for a moment and saw how britde his walk had become, if that's the opposite of supple. He walked as though he were a badly oiled machine. I thought his physical decline must depress him, he who'd always been so competitive in sports. My nephew had told me that when he was about twelve he'd raced against his grandfather on a bike. He'd been appalled that the old man, already in feeble health, had won, but only through a shocking expense of pedaling energy.

All my life he'd frightened me—his expansive, glowing flesh, his dozens of dark, tailored suits, his resolute silences meant to convey disapproval. He'd been someone who could sit for hours at a stretch behind his blond mahogany desk, making his calculating machine, drawn up beside him on its portable shelf and wheels, jump slighdy each time he touched its keys. He'd been someone who when he wasn't working changed into old clothes (not old sports clothes but old tailor-made trousers and a frayed mono-grammed shirt and sun-bleached wingtip shoes) in order to do yard work, not because he loved living things or found gardening restful or creative. No, for him the yard counted as just another job, another punishing dut)'. If like me, he'd been afraid of heights I never would have known it, since he could never have admitted a weakness. His cigar was sometimes only a wet black butt in the corner of his mouth. Everything in his house and car was steeped in cigar smoke since he kept both permanendy sealed and circulated through them either heated or cooled air. "I'm down to just ten cigars a day," he said, as though reading my mind. "My heart, you know."

I'd never seen his new house, which was in a better neighborhood than the previous ones even diough it was considerably smaller. "This is your

father's room," my stepmother said. "He shouldn't climb the steps so I've fixed him up here." If he looked blue and balding and fragile, she was flourishing, more like his daughter, her hair dyed a brighter copper red, her nails freshly painted, her suit sober and burdened with only a single, exquisite branch of diamonds.

When my father was out of the room for a moment she whispered, "Don't worry, your father thinks you're still just a journalist. I've torn all the ads and reviews reierring to your fiction out of his papers—you know, Tin always up early and censor the papers for him. So you can rest easy. He doesn't know anything about, what's the word?, that gay writing of yours. It seems a shame you've gone and spoiled a perfectly good word."

"Only you ever used gay in the old sense," I said. "Most Americans say merry or happy. Isn't it more an English word, gay?"

When my father came back in he had his stopwatch in hand. "I measure my heartbeat twice a day," he said neutrally, as though he were referring to nothing more personal than the barometer.

"That's a good idea," I said stupidly, but he didn't notice what I'd said. Anyway, even when I'd lived in the Midwest I'd never been able to predict what would rub my father and his wife the wrong way. Being fatuous and condescending or humorless and clumsy, in any event, were not faults they were tuned to pick up.

What surprised me was that he wanted to know in detail everything about my mother, my sister and my nephew, especially everything about their health. It irritated me that my sister had forbidden me to tell him she'd become a lesbian. He knew everything about me and bitterly disliked it, whereas she, despite her divorce and suicide attempts (which he read as moral flaws) nevertheless remained in the realm of the rectifiable. My father, had he known about my sister's lesbianism, would have been mainly troubled by what our homosexuality suggested about his genes, for he un-questioningly espoused the belief (in the 1970s considered retrograde but at the end of the century again taken up as progressive) that sexual preference and most other psychological characteristics are inherited.

In the past when he'd quiz me about my mother I'd thought he'd been looking for signs that she was about to remarry (or die an early death), either of which would have removed her from what he referred to as "the payroll." Now, however, he seemed more genuinely concerned about her welfare (he said, "She's a fme, intelligent woman," the highest accolade he'd ever given her to my knowledge). There was a touch of that old-person's cu-

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riosity about which of his coevals is going to live the longest—in particular, outlive him.

When I'd been growing up my father had been interested in things, not people, in engineering problems or financial operations rather than in psychological speculation or gossip. Now he had changed completely—so much so that I wondered if he'd always quizzed his wife about her friends, but in deepest privacy, lest my overly impressionable nature be encouraged still further in the wTong direction. For when I was a kid he'd thought that if I was a sexual pervert that couldn't, surely, be something fundamental (he too was a fundamentalist and he couldn't think of a single deviant on either side of the family) but rather something my mother had unintentionally bred into me by over-stimulating me. He'd written my mother that I was excessively nenous, bobbed my head rhythmically, bit my nails, had opinions on adults, couldn't pitch or bat a ball, avoided yard work and knew how to mix (and sip) cocktails (that was true: after a part)' my sister and I ran around collecting dirty glasses, which meant "drinking the stems," as we said, for our mother sometimes used champagne glasses with hollow stems). He'd offered paternal gruel to replace maternal curries, mowing and raking instead of cocktail chatter (and mixing). Essentially, he saw me as a thoroughbred (like himself—he often referred to his "racehorse legs") who'd been ridden badly and too hard and now had to be put out to pasture for a whole season before being broken in and trained all over again.

Now all that was in the past. I was nearly forty and no longer at a formative age. I'm sure he was glad we were eating at home—he wouldn't have wanted any of his acquaintances to see him with the long-haired weirdo that I was. In his eyes even my cigarettes and wristwatch counted as effeminate (as opposed to cigars and a manly pocket watch), and the fact I lived in New York and worked as a journalist suggested a character disorder, perhaps even Communist leanings.

But age had mellowed him. He enjoyed telling me about the neighbors, about his sister (the old maid who'd married late, her husband full of useless get-rich-quick schemes) and his brother: "Poor guy, he became bald as an egg. Everything he attempted failed, you remember that barbecue joint in Dallas?"

"Great barbecue," I said.

"Sure as hell was, but he couldn't run it worth a damn. Then he was selling crap door-to-door, poor old Hank, had loads of charm, folks liked him, but always thinking too big, soon as he made a few bucks he'd hire a