The Farewell Symphony

by Edmund White

  When Kevin and I went up to the West Eighties and Columbus for our interview, we felt a bit like pale mice darting up out of a sewer. I was worried that something awful would come off me, something like a roach or an attack of diarrhea, and that not only would we not get the apartment but I’d be eternally humiliated.

  I might more reasonably have worried that Daniella would want to see our bank statements, which would not have reassured her. Kevin didn’t even have a bank. But she was, fortunately, perversely personal in her method of selection.

  When she opened the door to her apartment we were almost overwhelmed by the cigarette smoke. Everything was dark (no bulb, it appeared, had more than fifteen watts), torn silk shades dangling tassels topped every turquoise-blue Chinese vase. Smoke hung visibly in the air in long strands. In this dimness the entrance hallway, with doors opening up to the right and left, looked almost mythically long. What gave me a thrill of cupidity was the realization that the apartment upstairs, our apartment, was exactly the same size.

  Daniella led us into a small sitting room. The shutters appeared to be nailed tight against the bright summer afternoon although one thin stripe of sunlight cut surgically through the swirling clouds of smoke, the sort of leak that might penetrate into a House of Horrors at the fairground and turn its scariness silly. She seated us in a pair of slipper chairs dangling fringe and price tags and offered us whiskey neat in oily shot glasses. Her grey hair, dry and spun high in a bun, was stabbed through by what looked like chopsticks; the hair itself resembled congealed smoke and suggested a child’s cotton candy found by archeologists beside Vesuvius.

  We had to reassure her we did not now possess a dog nor would we ever buy one in the future. “The minute I hear the pitter-patter of little feet, you’re out of here!” She fixed us with a steady stare as she screwed a fresh cigarette into her grey-lipped mouth, small but efficient. I lit up a Pall Mall, adding my faggot to the bonfire.

  “So you’re friends of Tom and Tom?” Daniella said, mentioning the gay boys who’d tipped us off about the apartment.

  “Great guys!” I exclaimed in a thick burst of smoke, although I couldn’t think what else to say about them, since they were only friends of friends.

  “Tom B. does such wonderful designs—I wonder what he has in store for us this year?”

  In a panic I said, “He sure keeps us guessing, doesn’t he!”

  As it turned out, Tom B. worked up the Christmas windows every year for Harry Winston, the jeweler, sometimes nothing more than a palm tree of emeralds and a forty-carat Star of Bethlehem. Tom L., his “pal,” as Daniella referred to any homosexual lover, was, as we later discovered, a feverishly active homemaker who was singlehandedly keeping alive Victorian household practices, everything from canning fruit in the fall to lining the linen cupboard shelves every month with new scented paper. At Christmas time he would have dark circles under his eyes from cooking so many fruitcakes, gingerbread men and star cookies with silver sprinkles.

  Throughout the interview I experienced the peculiar anguish of making small talk with someone who holds your fate in her hands. Kevin mentioned that his parents were English and his granny Welsh, which sounded classy or at least civilized. When asked his profession, he risked all and said he was an actor; Daniella surprised us by saying she liked actors. I realized that Kevin found our audition amusing but not crucial. He didn’t much care whether we lived together or not. For me it was vital; I sweated and grinned in the dark, swirling atmosphere. I asked her about her own background out of politeness and she told me her father, an Armenian rug dealer, had bought this building for her and she’d grown up in it. I wondered if she saw the missing tiles on the floor of the entryway downstairs and heard the unoiled whining of the closing elevator gate, the tarnished brass guard gate which was shiny only where the old black elevator man, hatted, smiling and half toothless, pushed it shut day after day (at night we had to take the stairs).

  “Well, can you afford to make a month’s deposit?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said brightly.

  “I’m not going to give you a lease because I—” she seemed to be smiling behind her smoked glasses—“I might not like you.”

  I virtually kissed her hand as we left. At that moment I was ready to buff her nails every night and with my own feet pump the iron lung she must sleep in. I convinced myself we had tons in common and would be best friends. A week later I never gave her another thought.

  TOM AND TOM invited us to a cocktail party a week after we moved in. Fifteen men in coats and ties sat around in a sitting room with hunting prints on the chocolate-brown walls and ate hot prunes wrapped in bacon and drank Beefeater martinis while listening to a cast album of Marne. Daniella was the only woman there. She was wearing a silk robe her father had brought back from China in the 1930s and all her white-haired, cap-toothed boys were oohing and aahing over the craftsmanship, the beadwork, the cut! Tom L. drew me aside and said, nodding toward Kevin, “You really robbed the cradle this time. What a beauty! And yet he looks vaguely familiar.” I wondered if Kevin had once come up on call as a hustler and forgotten the two Toms in a drug haze.

  As soon as the party was over Kevin was off on his bicycle to the Village. He didn’t come back till dawn. I felt I’d made a terrible decision to move uptown. I was far from all my haunts—the docks, the trucks, the dozen gay bars I liked downtown. The empty apartment with its fourteen windows and eight rooms was half a city block long. We’d never furnish it or even carpet it. It smelled of old plumbing and mouse shit. Dust squares and rectangles on the wall indicated where the previous tenant’s furniture had been, apparently for decades. “It must be a ghastly mess in there,” Tom L. said. “I suppose you’ll get someone in to redecorate entirely.”

  “Entirely,” I said, knowing I had just two hundred dollars left in my checking account.

  Now I tried to sleep in my lumpy little bed, which looked so forlorn here, as though vagrants were squatting an emptied, once elegant building, something like an abandoned expensive asylum. I glanced out the window and no one was on the street. People in other, lit windows looked old and poor, but not picturesquely poor as in the Village. An old lady was looking at her television, which I couldn’t see, but which kept X-raying her over and over again with its scanning, shifting lights and shadows.

  I rooted around for work and found an educational publisher who wanted to do a thousand-page, two-volume “managed textbook” on U.S. history which would be one of the first college texts to give a prominent place to the accomplishments of women and blacks. I’d receive twenty thousand dollars in three payments (on signing, after turning in the first volume and finally, when the whole manuscript was in). Six “authors,” specialists in their field, would supply me with Xeroxed articles on each topic. The “in-house editor” would prepare a cut-and-paste outline of the best passages from all the rival textbooks.

  I had to meet with the “authors” (I was merely the “writer”) in order to discuss with them their concept of each section. They were flown, all expenses paid, with their wives or husbands from their remote campuses and put up at the Sheraton for three nights. From my old days of regular employment, I had my one remaining suit; I took it to be dry-cleaned so that I could meet them. One of the couples was from Montreal and though their English was perfect the more I drank the more certain I became that my French was adequate, no, fluent. Way after midnight I was burbling along, cigarette in one hand, brandy snifter in the other, when the Canadian woman (expert in America’s nineteenth-century colonial expansion) frowned and said in English, “But you know you’re not making any sense at all.”

  I could see that the other authors had lapsed into silence and were looking at me with that combination of fear and hatred people feel when they think their own profits might be compromised by a drunk. Was I the alcoholic charlatan I appeared to be, someone who’d capsize our brave, academic galleon? Or was I, as the publisher had described me, an experienced journalist and promising young
novelist? During the sociable dinner, amidst references to rival textbooks being launched, I discovered that if our book was widely adopted we could become very rich indeed, despite our laughably small percentage points. As we stood outside at three in the morning, facing Central Park South, two of the authors, themselves reeling by now, continued to harangue me about a new statistical analysis of the Founding Fathers’ wealth, which showed they’d lost money by voting for independence. “They were motivated by principles, not by the profit motive,” one of them shouted. He was wearing a bow tie and his hair was clipped short; an overhead street lamp picked out the shiny bald spots. Across the street single gay men in jeans and ripped T-shirts were darting into the dangerous, appealing park. I was furious that I was trapped here in a coat and tie.

  Christa called me the next day to say she’d heard that one of the biggest women’s magazines in the country was looking for a senior editor. The salary would be between fifty and seventy-five thousand dollars a year. I thought that if I landed the job I could drop the onerous textbook project. I called Mrs. Helier’s secretary for an appointment. She told me I should buy the new issue and prepare a five-page critique of it, have lunch with the man I’d be replacing and “drop in” on the people I’d be working with, finally come in a week from Tuesday at nine a.m. to see Mrs. Helier herself.

  The magazine, which I’d never looked at before, took up the questions of abortion, extramarital dating, premarital sex, a woman’s right to multiple orgasms, new fall colors, how to wrap prunes in bacon and how to lacquer apartment walls a chocolate brown.

  With whorish facility I entered into the project and drew up a list of pros and cons, making sure that the pros far outnumbered the cons, since I knew Mrs. Helier wouldn’t really enjoy being substantially criticized about an issue she’d put together in accord with her time-tested formulas.

  Todd, the outgoing senior editor, though married, was obviously gay. He knew Tom and Tom in my apartment building and had even worked with Tom L. in the distant past. He kept raising one eyebrow and staring at me haggardly whenever I mentioned Mrs. Helier, although everything Todd actually said about her was diplomatic, even approving. After our second martini we were entirely open, even flirtatious, with each other. The next morning I feared he’d regret his candor and might even jinx my chances. Would he want someone floating around in the small world of magazine publishing who had the goods on him? The woman whose boss I’d be took an instant liking to me, even though she was ten years older than I and by all rights should have had the job herself. She knew Christa, she wanted to write fiction, I reminded her of her son. By the end of our meeting she’d told me I was her candidate for the job. Her name was Elena.

  For a gay freelancer in the 1970s, nine a.m. was the equivalent of four a.m. for anyone else; I arrived at Mrs. Helier’s office on the twenty-fifth floor of the Kipniss Building pale and tense, my brain puréed and molded into something resembling a brain. My stomach was growling and my outraged biological clock had stopped in protest. My old suit looked even more dowdy here in the offices of a magazine devoted to the ephemeral verities of fashion.

  I held my critique—superficially brusque, profoundly flattering—in my freshly laundered hand. At nine-ten Mrs. Helier—tiny, wizened, dressed in fur-trimmed embroidery and a barbaric necklace and girdle and resembling nothing more than a Siberian dowager—darted in, squeezed herself in beside me on the loveseat, looked me in the eye and said, “How will your homosexuality affect your performance at Eclipse, which is all about fucking, man-woman fucking?” She winced slightly each time she said “fucking,” which she pronounced with the final g intact as though she’d trained herself to say it fearlessly, deliberately, as a way of staying up to date, despite the squeamishness of a woman of her far more euphemistic generation.

  The blood rushed to my head and finding nothing alive there immediately deserted it. In all my years of office work no boss had ever asked me a personal question, certainly nothing about my sexuality. Suddenly all the rules were changed. I felt at once violated and thrilled, since like all Americans I was excited by the sudden promise of a higher sincerity, one that would cut through all ignoble forms of timidity At the same time I badly needed this job in order to support Kevin and me and to turn our apartment into a real showplace with white carpets and sectional sofas, lacquered brown walls and hunting prints.

  “I suppose my homosexuality, Mrs. Helier, would make me less competitive with you. I mean, a heterosexual man with my qualifications would have trouble taking orders from a woman, wouldn’t he?”

  She was shaking her small head, her antique forged-iron earrings, heavy with topaz, grazing her starved shoulders. This barbaric splendor, so incongruous in a Manhattan office, was yet another proof of the violence of her willpower, that force which had turned her from a namby-pamby single girl, a mere secretary, into a publishing phenomenon, whose lean, exercised body was regularly brought to multiple orgasms by a loving, faithful husband, himself a captain of industry or at least industriousness. If I knew her legend it was because she’d written a best-selling book about her rise to the top, a pinnacle that struck me as curiously unenviable as I smelled her bad breath from continual dieting, looked at her elaborate Kabuki makeup, which she must have begun to apply at six this morning, after her workout, and as I imagined a whole life trapped inside this office, reinventing again and again the same magazine. The man I hoped to replace had told me, “Mrs. Helier is Eclipse. It’s her story. She’ll stay up all night rewriting a perfectly good article, but make it a great one by injecting into it her own fears from twenty years ago, which it’s her genius never to forget. She was a nobody from Indiana, a plain girl with a big tummy, no money and no eyebrows. Now, by God, she’s rich, thin and she can afford the best mink implants or whatever those things are, but she’ll never forget her origins, not for one second.”

  “No,” she said, “I’m sure you’re going to be disgusted. At Eclipse we’re talking about the female body—reproduction, labial hygiene, lubrication, clitoral stimulation, orgasm, breast lifts, tummy tucks—and it’s not for the faint hearted. But what we’re mainly all about is fucking, man-woman fucking.” She turned her huge eyes, outlined with the firm hand of a Chinese calligrapher, and smiled at me sorrowfully—for a second I thought part of her sorrow came from her conviction that I would forever be immune to her charms.

  “But I think you have in mind gay men of an older generation,” I said. “Before gay liberation homosexual men were afraid of women, and probably some of them envied women. They didn’t usually know many women.” And those they did know, I thought guiltily, they called fish, and they were always going on about their smelly effluvia. “But now,” I added brightly, “gay men and straight or gay women see that they share a lot—such as the oppression of patriarchal society.”

  “Nice try.” Mrs. Helier smiled sadly, with just one corner of her small mouth a brush had painted the color of weathered pink brick. The smile was a parenthetical acknowledgment.

  I didn’t get the job. I called Elena and asked her what happened. “We just couldn’t tell her that Todd—” the man I’d be replacing—“is gay and that she loved him and with you she was just inventing a problem. What a pity!”

  I began the U.S. history book at the same time that Watergate was occurring, a chain of events that raised serious Constitutional questions about the roles and rights of the White House and Congress. Joshua came back from Venice at the end of August and he and two of his women friends, both classmates from Harvard, avidly pursued every twist and turn of the drama over the next year and a half. They phoned each other up every time a new story broke and took time off from work to follow on television the unfolding of the tale. At dinner their conversation was nothing but speculations about Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, Judge Byrne and Ellsberg, Judge John Sirica and James McCord, John Dean and the Ervin Committee, John Mitchell, Archibald Cox, Ehrlichman and Haldeman—and of course the vengeful, petty, ignorant, incompetent, imm
oral Nixon himself.

  I never bothered with a second of it. To me it was their history in the making, not mine, just as it was their rights being violated, since mine had never existed. When Joshua, Rebecca and Ludmilla would express shock and dismay over the government’s ethics, I considered the crimes that excited these responses laughably minor and inevitable. Just by going to Harvard and meeting professors who had advised presidents, Joshua imagined that what he thought counted. He was slow about deciding how Judge Sirica should proceed; to Ludmilla and Rebecca, the judge instantly became a hero. They needed someone to admire, they said. Admiration of men in public office was not a possibility for me, never, not under any circumstances. I knew that, like Nixon, I would have said or done anything to succeed and stay on top; fortunately for the sake of my morals and public ethics, my life presented me with no opportunities for serious wrongdoing.

  Kevin and I went shopping at Secondhand Rose in the Village, a used furniture store with a trendy image, and there we bought 1940s wicker garden furniture. Kevin wanted bare floors, pure white walls, the frailest chairs and sofas suggesting the least substantial season, paintings leaning against the chair rail rather than raised and suspended at eye level. He wept when I bought an ugly dining room table and six heavy chairs, all of oak, at the Salvation Army. “Oh, it’s so depressing,” he said.