The Farewell Symphony

by Edmund White

  “Oh, Kevin, how awful.”

  “Let’s face it, Hal’s a real pig but he’s a sweetie in his grotesque way.”

  When I’d arrived in New York ten years earlier and was young even if shapeless, the famous Hal had fucked me a few times with his small, hard cock. It had been an efficient business. Oddly enough, his natural curiosity about other people asserted itself after sex. Whereas lust makes most men convince themselves they want to share secrets with the person they hope to bed, Hal was very efficient about undressing and penetrating his victims—his lean, taut body, broad smile and avid sexuality made him irresistible to most guys. That he paid no attention to what I was saying and seemed more interested in how my anus rather than my mind worked only flattered me. Afterward, however, he asked me all kinds of questions about myself, not with the bell-jar concentration of the hovering lover but rather with the gum-chewing affability of a buddy staring at the ceiling.

  I told Kevin that Hal had “decked” me a few times years ago.

  “Of course,” Kevin said, as though nothing could be more natural, although he looked at me with a new respect, as if I’d just been promoted a notch. I was a “number” suddenly and no longer a cipher. A few days later he came back and said that Hal remembered me as “hot sex” and “a real interesting guy.”

  That spring was hot and sunny although a breeze was always flowing, as though Manhattan were a rowboat about to tug free from its cleats and drift out to sea. The city seemed deserted; maybe on our street people were either away for the weekend or at the office during the week. Kevin crept up on me—I mean my love for him did. Like an idiot I thought he was a poor little kid because Hal treated him so badly. I wanted to take care of him—conveniently forgetting that every other man in New York would feel the same way, not a particularly noble sentiment given how handsome and young he was.

  Young but not fresh. Any mention of sex would automatically release that low, sophisticated gurgle of a laugh in him. If I ascribed altruism to someone or doubted the sexual link between any two people, Kevin would say, “Oh, puh-lease, give me a break.”

  A love that was once very dangerous, even if it’s in the distant past, one continues to handle with asbestos gloves; I find my love for Kevin easier to analyze than to experience anew, especially since I spent so much time talking myself out of it with a shrink. Kevin came at me from so many angles all at once, like one of those karate demons on a kiddies’ TV show, at once motorized monster and ubiquitous, half-hallucinated spirit. He was a waif but his body was so well trained that he was swift and strong. He drank too much and liked to be degraded at night, but the next morning he devoted himself to aerobics and vitamins. He observed everyone with the professional eye of the actor on the lookout for novel intonations and tics, but he could also discuss books with Joshua and be as urbane as any man of the world.

  He’d been wounded long ago and needed love, but only laughed at my attempts to give it to him. He rejected my body but prized my “art,” as evanescent as his own. When I’d make sheep’s eyes at him, he’d laugh cruelly, but a moment later he’d be beside me, small warm hand in mine, telling me that he admired me, that he knew I could be a great writer, that he was certain we could be one of those legendary artistic couples, like Stieglitz and O’Keefe, like Britten and Pears, like Esenin and Isadora. (If he chose those examples perhaps he did so because they all spent so much time apart and came together only occasionally in incendiary, spiritual encounters.)

  Kevin was right about one thing—living with him was the high point of my artistic life and with him I wrote a book that some readers consider my best. No matter if that book is not as original and charged as its defenders claim or as sentimental and obscurantist as its critics allege, what was crucial for me was the experience of living with a restless young man who would sometimes, just when I’d given up hope, make love to me and who flickered into and out of the fantasy of sharing the rest of his life with me.

  He kept me in a constant state of desire—desire for his boyish body and manly dick, desire for a permanent love with a committed gypsy, a desire (as Mallarmé puts it in a poem) “to introduce myself as a hero into your story.”

  So many of the gay men I knew, even those who went to the gym now, were such klutzes and had never really been athletic, but Kevin swam for miles with egg-beater effortlessness. Or he taped his wrists, put on shorts and dusted his palms and performed acrobatics on the rings or the sawhorse, always with a look of open-mouthed concentration, as though such grace and power were only a question of forcing thought down through a narrow hose into his muscles. Shorts revealed his strong, unexpectedly hairy legs, so at odds with his smooth, nearly luminous torso. His prowess, as well as his air of being a disabused waif, made him irresistible to me.

  Kevin came into my bed easily enough the first time but he must not have liked my body or quite simply perhaps I wasn’t virile or mysterious enough to excite him. We never discussed it but he must have thought he’d given it a good try but sorry, Doll, being blown by a worshipful egghead ain’t my idea of a hot Saturday night date.

  After that Kevin began to stutter all the time. It was the strangest thing. He couldn’t get out two words in a row without a struggle. Since I knew he was an actor and performed regularly, his stutter seemed an odd liability, but in any event I’d observed him speaking perfectly normally with other people and even with me when we’d first met. Now we would sit for hours on his stoop or wander down to the docks just a few blocks away through crowds of young gay men. Huge silences would hover over us as Kevin gulped and tried to spit it out.

  Was he blocked because he liked and didn’t want to lose me and yet he didn’t want to give in to my oppressive love? My old lover Lou had once said to me, “You show your best side to your friends and your worst to your lovers. You’re funny and lively and contentious and charming and easygoing with your friends whereas your poor lovers are treated to nothing but your appalling mooning.” I tried now to stay varied and lively with Kevin but every instant mattered too much: love, in fact, can be defined as precisely that state in which every moment matters.

  On a rainy day we’d sit inside my small room and listen to Satie’s piano music with its strange blend of Spartan simplicity and brasserie roguishness. Some of the pieces sounded like the hangover improvisations of a jazz pianist goofing off down at the empty clubhouse. Of someone playing on the other side of the lake on a rainy October afternoon. I say “rainy” because the slow, angular notes were struck with the same irregular rhythm with which the rain flowed down from the sill of the upper sash window and smeared across the lower pane.

  Kevin had thick, straight, reddish-blond hair, a domed, slightly bulging forehead, dark eyebrows that grew together in a pale blond union above his straight, small-nostriled nose, and this fuzz seemed related to the down dusting his cheekbones. He had a face too strong and ironic to go with the waifish role he liked to play in his old, deformed sneakers, as eloquent as Van Gogh’s peasant’s shoes. His white painter’s trousers were baggy and his faded T-shirts had nearly effaced letters and symbols advertising the most ordinary household products or even spark plugs (the sort of chic my mother would have pitied as a sure sign of poverty—nor would she have been far wrong).

  He was very bright and twenty years later he would become a talented writer, but back then I suspect he subscribed to the notion that an intelligent actor is a bad actor. He read but often the same book over and over again and I made him laugh when I referred to his “little book” because I constantly used diminutives out of affection although he thought out of condescension.

  His life—his encounters with other people, his meals, his exercise, the movies he saw, the concerts he attended—everything he considered part of his preparation for the stage. For a while he toted around a copy of Stanislavsky’s An Actor Prepares and although I never read it I suspect it, too, took a global view of professional training. If Kevin looked at an old woman on the bus he’d study the movements t
hat betrayed her age—the stiffness in her back, her difficulty in taking a step up, her way of turning her whole bust rather than rotating her arthritic neck—and a moment later he’d be able to reproduce the entire ensemble of movements.

  Sexual adventures were just another theatrical experience for him. With one man (a well known performance artist he recognized without revealing he knew who he was) Kevin pretended to be a Swedish gymnast in town for an Olympics training session. He had the falling cadence down perfectly, the unsmiling Nordic brow-furrowing, the outrage at American social injustice, even the Swede’s indignation about personal questions: “I do not have the need, no, to be revealing my life to you just because we have shared this hygienic moment together.”

  “Hygienic!” the performer squealed indignantly “You’re totally weird.”

  “Now you are becoming insulted,” the handsome gymnast muttered, clenching his jaw, grimly donning his previously neatly folded clothes. When the performer was introduced to a wickedly smiling, hundred-percent American Kevin a year later he was furious, then amazed, finally amused.

  Kevin’s favorite character was Pete, a painfully naive Ohio hick just arrived in New York, a boy of nineteen incapable of sustaining a thought, a sweet kid who would unexpectedly become stubborn just when he was wrong. Pete would say at the moment when someone was going down on him, “You sure this is okay to do? My pa warned me that in the Big City guys would—wow! That feels great! Don’t stop, don’t stop.”

  One day Kevin told me that he hustled through a service and made a hundred and fifty dollars for each trick he turned. “But I have to get stoned to go through with it and then the money I just throw away with both hands, it’s dirty money. The worst of it is that it’s almost impossible for an actor known to be gay to work—”

  “Why?”

  “No one wants to see the fag kiss the girl on stage.”

  “And if the play is gay?”

  “Everyone prefers to see a genuine male breeder kiss the boy, sure-fire Academy Award or Tony, what talent, what courage.”

  “I’m sure you’re right….”

  “It’s one thing to suspect me of being a fag, but if they know for sure I’m a whore—”

  “No one would know who hadn’t hired you.”

  “All the more reason to despise me. Johns resent having to pay. Even if the idea of paying (and controlling) someone excites them in advance, after they come they feel insulted. That’s why we make them pay in advance—” (his use of we congealed my blood)—“not just because they might try to welch out on us but also to spare their feelings.”

  “You must get some weird characters,” I said, wondering if he’d let me hire him.

  “I scarcely remember them, it all goes past in a drugged haze.”

  “Do you play Pete with them?”

  “No. I tried. But Pete’s too vulnerable. One guy even beat him up—me up.”

  I could see perfectly clearly that by confiding in me Kevin was trying to turn me into a big sister rather than a lover. Love thrives on mystery and if Kevin told me about his hemorrhoid (“I don’t see what all the fuss is about, I just poke it back in with a finger and then get fucked with nothing but really big dicks, it’s the little red jabbers that can do a woman in”), he was so open in order to repel me. What he didn’t realize was that this usually sound technique only endeared him to me all the more because it strengthened the guise that had become so touching to me: beautiful boy with a sweet face whom New York had destroyed. Once I’d held his sinewy, slender waist in my hands, my hands could not forget the feel of steel sliding under silk. If I looked at him too longingly his wildcat laugh—dirty, deprecating and spontaneous—would come geysering up. “Oh, dear, look at the lovesick cow,” he’d say, pointing at me. I’d have to laugh, too, that bitter, grudging laugh at one’s own expense that the French call “a yellow laugh” (un rire jaune).

  I suppose my love tapped the same sources that feed the public worship of movie stars: I was privy to (and could sympathize with) the small setbacks and passing crises of a demigod I should by all rights have envied and feared from the foot of the throne or even the back of the audience hall.

  Kevin would nudge me when we passed a guy he fancied: a guy with grease on his forearm and barring his T-shirt with a bend sinister, caste marks he’d picked up by working under his car; a sweaty black teenager, all knobby knees like a yearling, who was dribbling a basketball across the open court on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Third Street, suddenly shouting to a buddy so that the veins stood out on his long neck, Adam’s apple jutting out like a sharp elbow poking through black velvet; a beefy boy tongue-kissing his girl on a bench, his crotch swelling with a half erection (“a Hollywood loaf,” as Kevin termed it, for some reason). Kevin’s New York was full of startled black eyes, taut tummies seen in a flash when a hand brushed a T-shirt aside, a postal worker ruffling the hair of a blushing trainee, the full-lipped open mouth of a baker asleep on the subway at four in the morning as he headed for work and we headed home to bed—a whole democratic gang of lovers, all of them unaware of how Kevin was mentally snapping and cropping them.

  We had our pilgrimages to make, including one to a foul pizza joint on Bleecker. Its only attraction was the guy who fed the oven with dough, whose uniform was unbuttoned enough to show he had a “perfect eagle” of black hair covering his chest. Kevin, from the waist up, was entirely hairless, his upper body marked by nothing more serious than a scattering of freckles on his shoulders. But precisely his own blond smoothness made him feel a child’s vaguely longing curiosity about hairy men; his weak-kneed desire and envy he controlled by stylizing. He’d say, “I’m going to swoon. Did you get a gander of that chest hair? Oh, God, I could sleep till dawn on that fur pillow. And did you see the buns? He makes my panties wet.”

  I was a true believer whose faith is only confirmed when his messiah declares his apostasy, when the world doesn’t end as predicted, when the priest himself defiles the temple. The more Kevin drooled over other guys the more I coveted him. The more he pointed out his own faults—his “washed-out coloring,” his “pigmy size,” his “seventeen cowlicks”—the more my imagination turned them into virtues. The more he violated his own dignity, calling his anus his “twat,” his cock his “clit,” his bleeding hemorrhoid his “period,” the more he pretended we were just two Ohio housewives on a Manhattan spree, the more I saw him as my furry-flanked satyr, my archaic Arcadian, my sylvan prince.

  AT THE END of June Joshua was planning to sail to Europe with Eddie. I was jealous like Janus—jealous of Eddie for spiriting Joshua away, jealous of Joshua for his intimacy with this famous poet. For Eddie had in the last year, with the publication of his epic, become the most respected American poet of the day, although he’d long been the most notorious, since he was a millionaire whose childhood had been illuminated by the glare of grotesque publicity—a suicide, a suspected murder and especially the twinned themes of custody and alimony, love and money. Joshua and Eddie had been friends since they’d first met ten years earlier on a train. At that time Eddie had yet to win his first national book award and Joshua was just an assistant professor at Harvard, teaching in a celebrated program, “Humanities 6.” Joshua had managed to invite Eddie to give a reading at Harvard and though Eddie was too much an old-fashioned aesthete and dandy to be grateful for anything so public and transitory as an appearance in no matter how august an institution, the favor was registered if not mentioned and it lent the right tone to a friendship that quickly flourished for an altogether different reason: Joshua had a sense of fun.

  He’d make the pilgrimage on a weekend once a month to Eddie’s house in a New England village, a house that would have been perfectly ordinary except that every object in it had figured in an unforgettable poem. There Joshua and Eddie would cook pasta recipes Joshua had brought back from Italy, reread Elizabeth Bowen’s To the North or Eleanor Ross Taylor’s collection of poems, Welcome, Eumenides!, listen to a recording of “the bo
ys” (the duo-pianists Smith and Watson) playing Fauré’s Dolly Suite. The alternately jaunty and melancholy passages of this faux-naïve music for a sophisticated child scored the light-fingered dynamism underlying the apparent indolence of their long mornings established by the Hu Kwa tea steeping in the blue and white pot, the rustling of their silk dressing gowns, the blue smoke rising from Eddie’s single Gauloise of the morning, the scattered pages of the TLS and by the combined smells of the cigarette, the smoky tea and the pot-pourri in the entrance hall that Eddie kept refreshing by soaking the dried flowers with drops of orange essence.

  In the winter they’d go out for long walks down to the harbor, then crunch their way back home through the snow that the evening was already turning blue. They’d beat their hands to stay warm and smell the smoke from log fires, so sad because it suggested family life. They’d quote lines from Elizabeth Bishop in an antiphony made visible by the misty breath trailing from their mouths, look up to see the ruby lamp hanging above Eddie’s upstairs dining room table. In the summer they’d take the sun on the highest terrace and peer down into a garden where a famously hermetic novelist could be seen pacing back and forth alone behind his agent’s house (“We’ve seen him!” they whispered to the others, triumphant, that evening over cocktails. “That is, we’ve sighted his limp. He has a limp. I’ve seen him, you haven’t. What? A black turtleneck”).

  If Joshua had been the usual American academic—pedantic, incurious, obsessed with departmental politics—he could never have become intimate with Ariel-Eddie. But Joshua never lectured, loved gossip, always won at charades, knew how to tease the local ladies, several of whom had already made reluctant star turns in the magic theater of Eddie’s verse. Joshua had found just the right way to cite Shakespeare or Sidney, with unsounded depths of veneration that didn’t paralyze one’s own playfulness (in a charade Joshua acted out, none too convincingly, the line, “Ill met by moonlight …”).