The Farewell Symphony

by Edmund White

  Now that Kevin was acting he was kind if vague with Gabe, as though he were a poor relation whom he wished well but scarcely knew. Sometimes he was so lost in thought that he glanced at Gabe in surprise, as though he’d forgotten who he was. Gabe and I lived our dull, routine lives beside this man who rose at noon, steamed his vegetables, did two hours of aerobics and napped before cycling down to the theater. He wouldn’t be home before two or three, since he was too wired after his performance to do anything except drink and pick at a salad. Sometimes he let himself be asked out by Tulsa and his band. Gabe and I felt we were the grey, self-effacing child and governess living in the house of a grande cocotte whose métier was her body and who sold it at night.

  Three or four nights a week Kevin spent his evening after the play with Dennis, that strange Boston Irishman he’d met at my improvised orgy. They were always playing the young lovers and Kevin, after Dennis would phone, would hang up and let his hand pound against his chest to mime his fluttering heart. I’d hear the endless litany of their romantic talk through the wall. I felt as though I belonged to the workaday world of parents and breadwinners, whereas they were youngsters who, no matter how many hours they worked, could still take the most intense pleasure in each other. I’d never had that sort of affair, or at least not for longer than a few days, but I could imagine what it must be like to melt without a transition out of an embrace into sex and then, after the second or third climax, continue whispering about all the things one loved about the other’s body (“You have the smallest, cleanest ears and I cream whenever I see your birthmark or notice the difference in color between one eye and the other and then that dramatic black hair, so straight, and that pale Heathcliff skin”), praise that would be silenced by still more kisses. I could imagine awakening near dawn with that black hair fanned across my chest and weeping hot, hot tears of pleasure, knowing how tender and still and intimate the night was, so unlike the horror of waking up beside a snoring pick-up, this disgusting foreign body, not even clean perhaps, smelling of stale beer…. No, Dennis was the romantic lead in Kevin’s domestic drama and they’d often appear at the door hand in hand or Kevin, who was so much smaller, would sit on Dennis’s lap and they’d joke until Dennis would whisper something dirty or sweet in Kevin’s ear and carry him off to the bedroom.

  The only problem was that Dennis not only looked like Heathcliff but also acted like him. He’d suddenly descend into a dark, angry mood. His beautiful jaw muscles would work. He wouldn’t talk at all for an hour or a week and would just keep pounding a cushion or pacing back and forth. A fleck of blood would float across his eye—or, maybe it had always been there, but it looked like a symptom of the storm raging in his head.

  With me Kevin was eager to discuss his interpretation of the role late into the night. Over the years I’d dated so many actors (but never one as intelligent as Kevin) that I’d learned to talk about “actions” and “motivations,” never about appearances or meanings. I knew it was useless to say, “The boy should seem pathetic here.” Rather, one had to say, “As he crosses a room he must lean his weight on one table after another because he’s afraid he’ll pass out otherwise.” At last I could see how I might be important to Kevin. I was his confidant, his big brother, possibly his big sister, certainly his artistic adviser. I saw the play so many times that I’d memorized his lines and had to keep from mouthing them.

  Gabe’s father refused to release his school records so that they could be transferred to the Rockford Academy, and the academy legally couldn’t admit him before it received these documents. I spent night after night seething over this problem. Finally, when I called his father in a rage, his second wife got on the line: “Do you realize what you’re doing?” she asked. “You’re tampering with the mind of a kid who’s been diagnosed as schizophrenic.”

  “Those labels don’t frighten me,” I said. “When I was a boy a psychiatrist told my parents to lock me up and throw the key away.”

  “Well …”

  “Don’t be rude. I happen to have a dictionary right here. I can read you the three definitions it gives of schizophrenia and you can tell me which one applies to Gabriel.”

  “I didn’t realize you were such an expert.”

  “Look, I’m not asking you to help support Gabriel. I want to send him to an expensive tutoring school and I’ll pay for it. I just don’t want you to be obstructionists. Just release the documents.”

  “How do we know this school is the right thing for him? We think he should be in a hospital receiving treatment.”

  “Treatment? Smoking cigarettes and watching TV? Struggling to catch an egomaniacal shrink’s eye? Well, if that’s the right treatment he’ll have a lifetime to devote to it later. Just give us a chance now.”

  Reluctantly, Gabe’s father released the documents.

  BUT GABE had developed a new obsession. He thought all the time about Ana, the Mexican-American girl he’d met in the mental hospital. Now she’d escaped and was hitchhiking to New York with Christie, her girlfriend. She’d said she was going to come directly to New York but soon she was calling from road stops in Virginia or Mississippi, high and giggling on drugs, and when Gabe called her back at first she’d tell him how scared she was and a moment later she’d be describing how much money all these great truck drivers were giving her. She worried that Christie was kind of in love with her, she had some definite dyke potential. But when Gabe asked her if they’d actually made love, Ana was elusive. As a Mexican-American, she could always pretend she didn’t understand the question. Anyway, Gabe knew she could always hang up on him if he bugged her. “You and your questions, you’re like a shrink,” she’d say, taunting him.

  Gabe lived for the phone to ring. He wouldn’t leave the apartment, not even for a second. If I lingered on the phone talking to Josh he’d scowl at me with tragic eyes. He’d bound up from his bed in the maid’s room and rush in on the first ring to the wall phone in the kitchen. “Yes, operator, I’ll accept the call,” he’d shout. “Ana! Where are you? You said you were coming to New York last night. South Carolina? What are you doing there. Yeah…. Sure…. Bill. You sleeping with him? Okay, okay, calm down. How’s Christie? Ana, you sound sort of weird. What are you on? I’m not talking like a shrink…. My uncle? Yeah, he’s kind of cute. He’s got a mustache and he goes to the gym and he wears black T-shirts and jeans. Long. No, just touching the shoulders. Brown. His hair’s brown, too—but he’s gay, I told you that. No, he does not ever get it on with chicks, so stop talking about that. No, he’s not a sissy. Okay, well, maybe you’re right, maybe his voice does sound sort of high and, yeah, like a girl’s….” When he hung up, he told me gloomily that Ana thought that he, Gabe, was also starting to sound sort of faggy.

  One day Ana called at dawn from Fort Worth saying she was frightened. She was staying with a trucker who was fucked up on pills and she didn’t know how to get away from him and he’d already hit her twice and busted her lip last night. I told her to leave the house tomorrow at dawn and hitchhike to the center of Fort Worth. She should ask for the main courthouse and stay there, directly in front of it. At noon Gabe would be there to bring her back to New York on a plane.

  I thought, I can’t go fetch her myself, I can’t leave my job and wouldn’t I be breaking the Mann Law? Even if Gabe does go, am I not creating a situation that will cause a judge someday soon to scratch his head and look down at me from the bench and say, “Exactly how many kinds of deviance are you striving to perfect?”

  I decided that Ana couldn’t pass a single night under my roof for legal reasons, although now I realize that where she slept scarcely mitigated my guilt, if guilt there was. Just across the avenue were rooms to let and I had my nephew rent one in his own name.

  We dashed off to a travel agent and bought a round-trip ticket to Fort Worth for the next day in his name and a one-way Fort Worth-New York ticket in hers. Purchasing the ticket I wondered whether I shouldn’t be wearing a beret and hornrims as a disguise. I spe
nt two hundred of the four hundred dollars I had in my account.

  Gabriel could never sleep at night. I’d hear him padding about the apartment, coughing occasionally. His old metal lighter would snap shut with a soft ching and a minute later the acrid smoke, manly and somehow Asian, would creep under my door. I felt we were on an ocean liner and that anxiety, Gabe’s and mine, was the throbbing propeller. Somewhere belowdecks shirtless men were stoking the engines with coal. Kevin kept away from us, as a cat picks its way fastidiously through the debris after a party, its nose flinching and eyes narrowing in the smoke from a still smoldering ashtray. Kevin had The Play to worry about; otherwise he kept everything simple.

  Gabe, I think, was astonished that I was going along with his desire to live with Ana. I could see no reason he and she shouldn’t be allowed to live as they wanted to; illogical, autocratic denial and the deprivation of all pleasure did not strike me as beneficial child-rearing methods. I could remember vividly all the nights as a teenager when I’d lain alone on my bed, longing for sex and tenderness and, mainly, escape. I was terrified that my nephew would scorn me, that he would think I was unenlightened, antipathetic; my compulsion to be his best friend was both my strength and weakness as a parent.

  When Ana arrived with Gabe I liked her right away. She had skinny flanks and big breasts, like Helen Paper, the girl I’d loved in high school, but whereas Helen (like Christa) was a remote beauty, tuned to some extraterrestrial signal more powerful than the world’s static, Ana kept scanning us all. She was afraid. Her ten days on the road had made her jittery. She’d learned she needed to orient herself instantaneously to every eventuality. She sat on a kitchen chair, tapping her foot and staring at us through her hair.

  Lou’s old nickname for me had been “Bunny,” which Kevin sometimes called me, half-affectionately, half-teasingly. Ana decided to call me “Sunny.” She was always hidden behind her hair, tapping her foot as though listening to a private jam session, and the noise and the hair concealed her within a protective swarm, but just as a single bee will sometimes lift off from the hive and fly away alone, armed to sting, in the same way she’d suddenly dart a glance at me and say, “Hey, Sunny …” She’d smile with all her beautiful little white teeth, perfect as the cubes in a doll’s ice-cube tray.

  She and I spent hours together on the weekends. In a parody of Josh’s and my old game of playing Italian housewives (“Carissima …”), Ana and I would dust and run the sweeper and change the sheets and towels and mop the kitchen. I thought I had to build on what she already knew and respected. My nephew might aspire to a university and a profession, but Ana must be pious and feminine, a homemaker and a beauty. I sent her to a Catholic secretarial school. Maria understood my reasoning, since she’d worked with lots of kids from the ghetto and could see no signs of unusual ambition in Ana, but my other feminist friends were appalled. “You, a liberationist, and you want to put her in a parochial school!”

  “Look, first of all a parochial school isn’t very expensive.”

  “What about a public school? People like you who withdraw your children are exactly—”

  “She’s not my child, she’s not a privileged white kid, she’s a Mexican drug addict, child of same, and the only thing in the whole world she respects are nuns.”

  “Why do you put your nephew in a college-track school, whereas Ana, a mere girl—”

  “If she ever finishes secretarial school and actually becomes a secretary it will be a triumph, a reversal of all sociological studies, psychological predictions, tea-leaf readings and actuarial tables….”

  The wife of an Irish poet I knew was a voluptuous beauty about thirty from Costa Rica. I kept inviting Mick and Pilar to dinner and I begged Pilar to take Ana under her wing. Again I thought that pretty clothes, makeup and feminine wiles, especially if suggested by Miss Rich Coast of 1973, would reconcile Ana to the middle class.

  If my nephew had jeopardized his future so dramatically it was because he was certain he could always stage a comeback, a nice recovery, whereas I’d always made sure my life looked conventional on the outside because I’d been afraid of falling off the edge of the world. I’d always had good grades, I’d belonged to a fraternity. I’d worked for a blue chip company for eight years, whereas my nephew had already been put in a mental hospital. Even now I could observe him playing with his sanity or his destiny with the self-assurance of someone who believes he can always pull it out of the fire. Yet my reading of Proust had taught me that one can lose status far faster than one can ever make a social recovery. Was Gabe so confident because he was heterosexual and on some level sure things would fall in his lap? Had I always been so fearful because I’d grown up feeling I belonged to a despised tribe of one?

  Or was I wrong? My sister had been intimidated by Gabe when he was still just a baby (which was crazy) and I, too, just as crazily saw him as a prince who’d put on rags simply in order to have a few extra adventures, but maybe he really was as irremediably tortured as his stepmother maintained and he insisted.

  Although I was half in love with him I was protective of his privacy. I didn’t offer a penny or a pound for his thoughts. I never saw him nude. He was free to come and go as he liked and I gave him a good allowance, but perhaps I was so openhanded because I knew he was too fearful to stray far. When some gay friends of mine were sitting around my living room one day teasing Gabe, telling him that soon he’d be swishing about like his uncle, I scolded everyone: “You can say and do anything you like among yourselves about yourselves in front of Gabe, but I forbid you to make insinuations about him.” Everyone tittered (“Get her!”), but at least I thought I’d shown Gabe I was going to protect his … integrity? privacy? manhood?

  I suppose I saw myself in him, not as I was now but as I’d been as a teenager in boarding school. Then I’d daydreamed constantly about an older man—my gym teacher, one of the painters at the affiliated art academy—who’d take care of me, divine my thoughts, anticipate my needs (for I would never have voiced them and he, if he loved me, would be able to read my mind). I was the person who, through elaborate readings with the astrolabe of psychological second-guessing, could chart all of Gabe’s fears and longings.

  I reconciled myself to my desire to secure for Gabe and Ana a respectability I myself was fleeing as fast as possible. I thought of all my old Beat friends from college who were now leading their kids off to Sunday School and dance class. I told myself that they—we!—were giving our kids a choice. If later they wanted to reject a middle-class status they could, but ninety-five percent of the world longed for the security and comfort we affected to scorn. And membership in the bourgeoisie was easy to lose but very hard to come by. I thought of all those classes for slum kids in which they were taught to give a firm handshake after a job interview and never lose eye contact during it. They learned to joke easily, combine casualness with respect, call a potential boss by his first name but show deference in surrendering to him the conversational lead, speak clearly and act sincerely—oh, these were all the skills we’d spent a lifetime acquiring unconsciously and now wanted to shed.

  I found an apartment in the Village for Gabe and Ana. It belonged to a photographer I knew who was going on a year-long trip to South America. Just two rooms in an old tenement building, the apartment was next to that of a hustler I’d once met, a kid from Houston named Beau. Gabe and Ana would listen through the wall whenever Beau was entertaining a client. “Does it hurt to take it up the ass, Beau?” Ana asked quite seriously. “Gabe wants to do it to me but his is too big.”

  They were just fifteen and thirteen and I’d had the bizarre idea they should live on their own. I was afraid the police would arrest me for molesting Ana and I instructed Gabe to say if ever he was interrogated that she was living there with him unbeknown to me. And I convinced Pilar to register Ana at the parochial school as her cousin whose school records had been lost in one of their revolutions. A lawyer I consulted said he thought we might just slip through the wid
e-mesh nets of society; only a brush with the law would create a snag (I pictured Gabe and myself silver and wriggling under the flashlight).

  Despite my corporate job I was desperate for money I asked Max for an appointment and went to his study to beg him for a loan, but he shook his head, avoided my eyes and kept sipping air with his tsk-tsks. “Tu exagères, mon cher” he said to me. “You’ve simply taken on more than you can manage.” Recently Max had suffered a series of terrible fainting spells, for all the world like epileptic seizures, except his electroencephalogram was normal and not one of the six specialists he consulted could find anything wrong with him. I was sure it was because he was almost literally being suffocated by the sometimes month-long depressions of his lover, Keith. That’s why he won’t help me, I told myself. He’s afraid of becoming an invalid. Or he wants to break away from his millionaire lover and fears he won’t be able to maintain the same train de vie without him.

  Then I called on Tom, my droll friend who was the poetry editor of a famous magazine. He was warm and sympathetic and gave me no lessons, though he did say, “I’m going to write the story of my friends and call it Messy Lives.” He’d been so pleased by my review of his collected poems that I thought his gratitude could be translated into a check, but he, too, turned me down. Instantly I let him off the hook and lit a cigarette and sat on his windowsill, puffing into the cold night air. Tom told me he’d met a wonderful young lover—well, twenty years younger than Tom at least—at a poetry reading. “He’s the love of my life. There will never be another. Preposterous as it sounds.” I felt that I’d lost favor in his eyes by asking him for money—which had suddenly abrogated the sacred disinterestedness of friendship—but that I’d inch back into his esteem by listening to his long story of how he’d met Daniel, who was bringing groceries over in a few minutes to cook something for Tom. When Daniel came in, he was wearing a belted trench coat and, even in this least flattering of garments, managed to look slim-hipped. His face was attractively drained under his thatch of gleaming, coppery hair. I thought how lucky Tom was to have money, have Daniel.