The Farewell Symphony

by Edmund White

  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 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! “Ma come mai!” 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 leetle beet,” I rattled off fluently.

  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 (“Porca madonna” or “Che culo!” 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 becalmed 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 smartly, 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 the 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 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 giraffe wanting to be consoled in my arms for everything he’d ever felt, which had suddenly coalesced around me. 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 Sayville, 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 excited 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, thinking 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 mancanza), 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 little 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 all 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 find a friend with a car; we drove up and down the streets and she seemed almost 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 Little 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 incorrectly 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 scuttling 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.”

  “Ma hai detto che hai sentito la mia mancanza.”

  “So what? In English that means nothing special. ‘I miss my mother, I missed my train, last night I missed my enema.’ It means absolutely nothing at all.”

  She was in her slip, sitting up on the mattress, her hair pushed forward on one side. She looked miserable. “In Italian it means ‘I love you.’ ”

  The next day she took a train for New Haven, where she knew a tall, skinny American graduate student who’d spent a year in Rome studying Italian social structure. Two weeks later they were married.

  I HAD BECOME almost entirely a Villager and I seldom ventured above Fourteenth Street, not even to see the ballet, and if I put on a coat and tie for a Midtown lunch with Jamie I felt as strange as a cowboy must feel in Paris. My “dress up” clothes were out of date, the trousers pegged and cuffed rather than bellbottoms, the jacket lapels straight and narrow rather than wide and notched, and my ties weren’t as broad and floral as fashion dictated. Jamie, of course, wouldn’t have noticed since he was still wearing garters and white breast-pocket handkerchiefs to go with his Brooks Brothers “sack” suits. I was a bit embarrassed to see any of my former colleagues, almost as though I’d lost the knack of playing straight, talking loud, thumping backs, and had clearly come down in the world.

  Sometimes I read my work to Butler, who was also working on a novel. He had left his wife for a shaggy-browed Jewish architect who
owned an immense Hoboken loft into which he’d inserted Mackintosh ladder-backed chairs and gesso panels inlaid with gems. Butler was free to stay home, perform his sit-ups while listening to a recording of Shakespeare’s sonnets, which he was trying to get by heart. He kept a blank notebook from Venice constantly at his side in which he could jot down a line, a thought or even just a word that might end up some day in a story. He was at once exquisite and heavy-handed, the perfect student with very little sense of humor. At least he had none of Maria’s ability to catch herself and quake with laughter at her own pomposity or absurdity.

  Butler kept carbons of all his letters, which were obviously written with one eye on posterity, full of nature descriptions, lengthy impressions of historic monuments he’d visited and reflections on current social problems, all adorned with appropriate tags from Horace or Boileau. He hadn’t yet published a book but he was already lamenting that his future works would probably not be printed on acid-free paper. “Microfilm! That is the only solution. We must be sure our books—” (mine were included as a courtesy)—“are microfilmed or else they’ll end up as brittle, yellowing scraps scattered on the library floor.” This archival quandary kept him awake at night. He returned to the problem often. His letters and manuscripts, I noticed, were confided to paper that would outlast the centuries.

  Like many American intellectuals raised in small towns in modest circumstances, he’d not grown up listening to classical music, though he’d played the tuba part in his high school band’s version of Sibelius’ Finlandia; now as an adult and cultured New Yorker, he listened dutifully to records, studied scores and read program notes. There was no indication he ever closed his eyes, swept away by melancholy, longing or a sense of excruciating beauty. Right away he’d learned to sneer at Tchaikovsky, Dvorvák and, incidentally, Sibelius, and to esteem Bach (especially the unaccompanied cello sonatas), the Beethoven of the late quartets, Mozart’s operas, all Monteverdi; he even sang motets in an a capella group and when we were driving from Rome to Paris after he rescued me he offered to teach me medieval part songs so we could sing together while driving and not “waste time.” When I nixed that plan, he translated, whenever I was driving, from a fat guidebook in Italian published by the Automobile Touring Club, a scholarly tome of a thousand pages printed on bible paper that told me much more than I wanted to know about the history of Volterra and the iconographic eccentricities to be found in Rosso Fiorentino’s strangely Manneristic Deposition from the Cross. I once teased Butler by saying he was like a Victorian miss who’d been required to pick up all the accomplishments (sewing, music making, canning, painting on china) since she didn’t have a dowry.

  The same guilt-provoking complaints (that no doubt made Butler a lover whom one could never take for granted because one could never please him) rendered him annoying as a friend. Somehow I was always “disappointing” him because I’d forgotten to phone, to wonder how his cold was progressing, to ask after his current novella. If he was severely disappointed, his dismay could send him into a terrible pout.

  He told me I was basically a consumer—of words, money, men. He said he thought I had to be fueled with a high-octane version of all the world had to offer. His observation blended astonishment with distaste. Certainly he was an epicurean who could pick quizzically over a single fresh sardine during a long evening in which I would knock back two dozen oysters, an entire roast chicken, potatoes with a whole head of garlic and a half gallon of California red. He kept up with me only in his alcohol consumption, although unlike me he modulated tastefully from blond Lillet on the rocks with a twist of orange peel to a white wine with the sardine, a light Beaujolais with the four kinds of goat cheese (chalky, white and nearly tasteless—the ultimate upper-class food), an Armagnac in a giant globe snifter to toy with beside the fire, as though he’d accepted it only for its light-refracting properties.

  When he was elaborately sauced he’d become genial. His accent would revert to Southern, suddenly one understood why he had laugh lines around his eyes, and he sketched an elegantly scaled-down allusion to … yes, it must be, to a slap on the knee. He passed around thin, expertly rolled joints. When he crossed the room he appeared to have an extra folding place above his kneecaps. In sandals his feet looked immense, as though so much willowiness above needed a big taproot below. When he danced he seemed to be treading grapes in place. In fact, closer study revealed that he never moved his size-twelve shoes at all, although his feet generated waves of motion sent up through his long legs and into his lean flanks and supple torso, down through shoulders which shone as though they’d been chamoised with an expensive, furniture-makers’ beeswax. No doubt he’d practiced his movements as he perfected everything else, but he gave the illusion at least of forgetting himself entirely when he danced.

  Late at night his true kindness and vulnerability would come out. Then he’d tell me in fits and starts the story of his childhood. His real mother, a sweet Southern woman, had died when he was five. His father had married two years later a woman who was good to Butler until he was nine when she started having children of her own. She went on to have three children altogether and with each birth she turned fractionally further away from Butler. He’d gone from being the center of a family and his father’s cherished link to his lost wife to an unwelcome outsider, someone who ate too much, breathed too much air, occupied a bed needed by one of the legitimate children.

  It was then that Butler, until that time a lazy, moody boy, decided to become irreproachable. He read with a pencil in hand, he excelled in all subjects, he even achieved as much popularity as a boy could in a Southern town if he wasn’t athletic. The church replaced the playing field. He taught Sunday School, he visited sick parishioners and he memorized all the Psalms, the Song of Songs and large parts of the Gospels. His constant bedtime prayer was, “Oh, Lord, make me a preacher when I grow up.”

  But his high school English teacher had other ideas for him. A patrician from Nashville, she pushed him to write poetry of the obviously beguiling Sara Teasdale variety, the sort she herself wrote in the privacy of her room. He and she discussed the books she suggested, including some racy ones banned in their Georgia town such as Catcher in the Rye and From Here to Eternity.

  Thanks to her encouragement he won a French contest and the poetry contest (prize fifty dollars) held at the public library in memory of Mrs. Wentworth Bean III. He scored in the high 700s in the College Aptitude Tests, the best mark in the state, and was admitted a year early to the University of Georgia. From there on in he always pulled in every available honor and scholarship, did his doctorate on Mallarmé at Columbia and began his succession of comfortable if not luxurious marriages (only the first one to a woman). For someone who’d emerged from such a dismal childhood he had unexpectedly few material ambitions; all he longed for was the novelist’s laurel and a place on Mount Parnassus. As a consequence he was judicious to the extreme in his praise of other writers; once when I asked him to name his top ten, he couldn’t get beyond five (“Stendhal wrote too rapidly although with admirable verve,” he said with typical reserve, “even if he tells us more than he shows”).

  The strange thing was that I too had what we called in our campy way a “bluestocking side.” I, too, had been an unhappy sissy boy who’d found consolation in books. Like Butler I’d confounded the arts with European refinement, which in turn I assumed must guarantee a smiling moral tolerance. I’d hated myself when I wallowed away for an evening watching TV and only Maria’s early influence had made me appreciate pop music, though I felt more reassured when I listened to The Magic Flute or a Bartók string quartet. In the 1970s, even when I was so drunk I had to hold one eye shut in order to read, what I would read was Spinoza or the Minima Moralia. During those years I vigorously underlined passages in dozens of the most austere books of philosophy, yet when I page through them now I neither recognize the words nor can discover any system behind my highlighting. I had everything in common with Butler; perhaps what I despised
in him was precisely what we shared. By laughing at him I could pretend I wasn’t a Midwestern exquisite, a homegrown dandy, and by criticizing his finickiness I could suggest I was made of tougher stuff.

  Certainly many people teased me for being an intellectual and an aesthete, although around Butler I could think of my prose as coarse, my manners democratic and my tastes promiscuous. Perhaps I liked him because beside him I felt crude and careless—an attractive contrast that excused my failure to learn foreign languages, remember opera plots or capture the devotion of a handsome man.

  During the nine years I’d lived in New York I’d never met a published writer, although we were always on the alert to the possible passage of such a rare bird. I blamed my sexual interest in younger men for my paucity of interesting acquaintances, but the explanation remained theoretical since I continued to resist the approach of anyone over forty. To me it was impossible to see an older man as gifted; I was convinced that age’s motley (bald spot, second chin, sagging belly) could be worn only by fools.

  Butler met a famous poet and man of letters named Max Richards at a gay bar. We’d heard that Richards went to one bar, the Stud, and through frequenting it almost nightly, Butler finally met him. With extreme generosity Butler spoke to Richards mostly of my work and especially of my Japanese-Fire Island novel. Richards was ubiquitous as a judge of literary contests, poetry editor of little magazines, friend to the famous and patron to the young and talented.

  One morning the phone rang about eleven while I was still sitting tragically over my first cup of coffee and could barely articulate. Before I picked up I sang the scales to chase the sleep out of my voice. “Hello.”