The Farewell Symphony (65 page)

The project seemed hopeless. Gay men of my generation, especially those who'd shared my experiences, were dead or dying. The younger ones, with their shaved skulls, pierced noses, tattoos and combat boots, appeared to belong to another race, militant, even military, too brusque and strident to be receptive to my elegies. Whereas pioneer gay novels— Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar, James Baldwin's Another Country, John Rechy's City of Night —had attracted curious heterosexual readers, now gay fiction was a commodity assigned its two shelves in a few stores, and no heterosexual would venture to browse there, just as no man would leaf through a book shelved under "Feminism." The heterosexual browser or the curious male might have even felt he was trespassing. The category of

The Farewell Symphony

general literary fiction was vanishing, and its disappearance showed that the new multiculturalism was less a general conversation than rival monologues.

In an .\merican leather magazine I read a personal ad written by someone looking for "a slave, looks indifferent, attitude everything." I felt I answered that description and mailed a groveling response. A month later I received a letter The recto side of the letter gave me cruel orders in the same growling, half-literate prose of the original ad. The verso side said, "Surprise! And now for the good news. I'm the very screenwriter who phoned you in June and whom you were unable to see, due to your pressing engagements. Isn't it exciting to think we've found each other 'in the rag-and-bone shop of the human heart'? (\eats) I know we're going to be a great team, in bed and out! There are so many ways you could help my career—and perhaps I could help yours, too, who knows?

"I'm enclosing all my numbers, but please be cautious since I do live with a lover and, though he's a slave, no reason to hurt him unnecessarily.

"Actually, we met years ago at a staged reading of a very camp little musical I wrote the book for, an adaptation of Gone with the Wind for an all-male cast, whites played by blacks and vice versa. Do you remember it? We could never get the rights, sadly."

Absurd as the letter was, I started telephoning this guy, Ward, all the time. I'd be in Leeds on a book tour or in Berlin with Hajo, unable to sleep, and I'd phone Ward. Once I might have picked up men who attended my readings, but now most of them trembled when they came up to get their books signed (so venerable had I become in just a few . . . well, it seemed like a few minutes, but it must have been several years). I'd also given dozens of interviews about my HIV status and people, even those who belie\'ed in safe sex, were turned off by someone they knew was positive. In the past I'd received fan letters asking me for sex; now the letters asked me for advice on how to find a young lover. If I mentioned to a seemingly sympathetic straight friend or younger gay friend how sexually frustrated I was, I could see a look of disgust crossing his or her features, as though to say, "Haven't you created enough havoc with your beasdy desires? Couldn't you just . . . tuck it away for the duration? Retire?"

Ward told me he was going to be writing a screenplay and working with a producer in San Francisco. I said I was going to New York to say good-bye to Joshua and would hop on a plane out to the West Coast to meet him at last and spend a few days with him.

He said, "I've got to tell you I don't really look as . . . fit as I did in that

])hoto I sent you. That was during my physical high point as a runner—that jiicture was taken four years ago,^w!—during the New Yorii Marathon."

"Oh, well, 'looks indiflerent, attitude everything,' as the ad says. You know, I should have suspected you were an educated person right there, inserting that fancy phrase into your four-letter obscenities. Anyway, I have a confession, too, although it's probably old news. I've already alluded to it in interviews and you probably know all about it. I'm positive, which I discovered just a year ago when the test became available, but I've probably been positive since the late seventies, or whenever it ail started. You know, they're unfreezing the blood samples of people who participated in a hepatitis study in the late seventies and they're finding that many of them were already positive back then." But I could hear an unexpected, prim silence accumulating on the other end of the line. "That doesn't make any difference to you, does it, my being positive?"

"Of course not."

"Are you positive?"

"No. My lover and I are both negative."

"Yeah, I guess S&M is mainly a head trip, no need for genital contact. Luckily." I laughed feebly.

"Actually," Ward said with an unforgivable degree of self-righteousness, "my lover and I have been relatively faithful and we work too hard to waste much time on sex."

But still I didn't get it. After all. Ward had become famous for an AIDS movie of extraordinary sophistication and compassion and, leaving that aside, he was a middle-aged gay man who'd lived in New York all his life. We arranged that I'd come direcdy to his San Francisco hotel room when my plane arrived at midnight and slip in beside him if he was already asleep. I was in such a fever of sexual anticipation that I couldn't imagine his being asleep; Ward's dirty, perverse, precise fantasy, as stated in his ad, was the only combination of fifty words that had made me masturbate with hot-faced excitement hundreds of times.

When I rang the bell to Joshua's apartment, Philip—lustrously bearded, boisterously gloomy—let me in. "Well, I'm afraid you waited too long," he called out, heardess and gende, "there's not much left. If you talk to him you might get a smile, that's about all there's left of cortical response, God knows what it means, probably just a reflex—typical of Josh that his last automatic response should be a smile."

In the front bedroom Joshua lay on his back in the blue and white pajamas I'd sent from Lanvin in Paris. His face was so white, covered with

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still whiter patches on the temples, that he seemed caned out of a mushroom, a big pale shelf of mushroom growing out of the roots of a tree in wet ground. .\nd yet, when I touched his hand, it was diy, each fmger dry as a new, cool stick of blackboard chalk. Even with his lenses in he'd always had trouble seeing, but now, lensless, he could have perceived nothing but light and shadow and mo\ement. Except his eyes looked ftxed, glazed o\er. His nose had grown an inch longer. He was terribly thin ("At last!" I could imagine him exclaiming with a laugh) and looked as though, like Kafka's hunger artist, he could be mistaken for a bit of dust or straw and quickly swept up into a dustpan by an energetic hand.

I said, 'Josh?"' He smiled, faintly, lifted his eyebrows, blinked encouragingly. His lips pursed slightly, as they always had, as though he wanted to meet the world half\vay, not just hear its messages but also sip them, taste them.

I thought. The Egyptians had the right idea, de\oting their whole lives to building tombs as big and luxurious as their palaces, mammoth launching pads for eternity, whereas e\en our richest men and women, who li\e in twenty rooms, or a hundred, are willing to be slid into a tomb no longer or wider than their lowest senant's cot—which onlv shows no one really believes in a life after death.

I wanted to build a monument of words for Joshua, big and solid, something that would last a centun; although I doubted I had the abilirv:

I wanted other people to know about his intelligence, which was sympathetic, even diagnostic, but never analytic: he could learn a poet's language in just a few tries, as though he were one of those ethnolinguists who can entirely map out an unknown tongue in just twenty days in the Bush. He could also tell \\hat were that poet's preconceptions, preoccupations, points of unresolved discord, governing metaphors and link all that to his (usually her) most intimate experience without gossiping about the details of her or his life. He loved Shakespeare's comedies for the same reason he loved Balanchine's ballets (there on Joshua's wall was a get-well card from Suzanne Farrell, the prima ballerina who was assoluta in his heart): both Shakespeare and Balanchine dexised new combinations of men and women, of courtship and union, of assertion and accommodation, but transposed into a higher, purer key.

I flew out to San Francisco to see Ward, but he was asleep when I ar-ri\-ed and never touched me once while I was there. He barely looked at me. He was a short, pudgy man with a denture and bad breath. He had meetings with his producer during the day; the hotel he'd chosen was

across the street from Golden Gate Park and I went jos^^ng in it for long hours, weeping and running, weeping and running, sitting in the Japanese Tea Garden (with its pagoda, bridges, stream, carp and refreshment pavilion) and drinking hot tea and composing a long poem to Josh, ihc first I'd written since I'd been a student. I remembered how Josh would say something someone had done (usually Butler, whom he'd nicknamed "Missy") was "grotesque" or "past belief" Now my life seemed to be both.

When Joshua died, Eddie called me to tell me he'd communicated with him already via the Ouija board and that he was fine, on his first day he'd been given a lovely tea party by Wystan Auden and Chopin, and he sent me his love. Josh was very excited since he was scheduled to be reborn soon as a little brown baby girl in Calcutta.

I laughed and hurried to get off the line, so offended was I. Soon afterwards I looked through all the letters I'd ever received from Joshua and I realized I'd been unworthy of him then, that he'd been sending them through time to me as I would become years later.

B RI c E DIED almost ten years after Joshua, and it was only then that I understood this need to believe the dead go on living, somewhere, at least for a while. In medieval churches the lord and his lady are represented by tomb sculptures that show them as they were at age thirty, no matter how old they were when they died. Thirty was considered the ideal age and the resurrection was supposed to find their bodies perfect. Brice was only thirty-three when he died, but a very, very old thirty-three—three times older: ninety-nine.

He died on March 21st, 1994. On August nth I wrote: "My day began with tears because I picked up a tarnished silver ball that Brice once gave me (it had rolled behind the radio). I used to walk around with it in my pocket; some delicate inner mechanism makes it chime when you shake it. I suppose by awakening with TinkerbeU I thought Brice could hear it if I rang it. And yet I find something tawdry, seedy, about all this Blavatsky-like cant about communicating with the dead. No, the dead are dead, which is our tragedy and their grandeur."

Those words sound colder, more decided, than what I felt then or even now, two years later, as I approach the end of this book. For a year I went to church every day and lit a candle for Brice; I lit them also in the cloisters beside the cathedral in Barcelona, in the Baroque Swiss church in

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Einsiedeln, in a church in Lucca, in Montreal and Sydney, wherever I traveled, almost as though I thought that on his distant star he'd like to see these faint pinpricks of Ught pulsing all over the globe in his honor.

It was also a way of serving him without thinking of him, for now that he was dead he seemed dark, even black, and bigger, certainly crueler. He frightened me and I didn't want to think too much about him, nor about our life together, it had taken too much out of me, cost too much.

Perhaps the price I'd paid was in what I'd lost. Brice had been the first man I'd loved at the same time he loved me. After our first six months together I learned he was, or soon would be, seriously ill. Maybe because I knew he was dying I could love him, for I'd always been more afraid of being overwhelmed by what I possessed than of being abandoned by someone who'd never belonged to me.

He died in Morocco. The day before he died we were in an oasis town. We'd been driving through mile after mile of baked mud and straw cities, humble citadels that bordered a river in the desert that .sometimes became nothing more than a brook or e\en a damp line through the sand. The structures were tall, squared off often polished, crazy congeries of balconies and turrets and tiny, lopsided doorways. Date palms flourished beside the river; we saw a woman collecting dates in what looked like a bath towel. Little boys were selling dates in small cages made of palm fronds; bees were hovering around the rich, oozing fruit.

Brice had stretched out in the backseat, although sometimes he'd sit up and say, looking at the mud houses, "Cm/ superbe . . . superbe . . ." He spoke only in a whisper now. His face was covered with a week's growth of beard. He was so skinny that it hurt him to wear jeans (the seams cut into his flesh-less nerves and bones); he'd put on a long, flowing blue robe. With his darkened skin, his beard, his cadaverous face, his skeletal hands, his feeble walk (I had to hold him up whenever he left the car), he looked Biblical, like an ancient prophet about to die before we entered the Promised Land.

I was in a panic, determined to drive as fast as possible with the fewest possible stops back to Marrakesh, where I'd arranged for a private plane to fly us back to Paris and a good hospital and Brice's own doctor, a celebrated specialist. But now, in this oasis town, he'd lost control of his body, he was covered with shit. I tried to mop him up as best I could and put him in clean clothes, long enough to get him into the luxury hotel where I'd found us an air-conditioned room. We'd rest up, we'd order food from room service, I'd place calls to Paris, lining up his doctor for an appointment—but as I was helping Brice towards the hotel entrance he fainted

and fell on the hotel lawn. A passing Frenchman said, "Good God, let's call an ambulance," and 1 couldn't object, though I knew perfectly well that an ambulance would take him only to an Arab hospital where there would be no food, dirty beds, no medicine, lots of flies, doctors who'd never seen a case of AIDS before. . . .

I can't go on. I can't tell this story, neither its happy beginning nor its tragic end, the all-night ride through the snowy Atlas mountains in a freezing ambulance, Brice's angry hateful words to me, the look of his face, dead, when I awakened at dawn, his mouth open, his eyes starded, as though he'd seen something dreadful and I'd not been there, conscious, to share it with him—