The Farewell Symphony

by Edmund White

  Except I had Gabe. I might love Ana in a simple, admiring way even if I worried that all the odds were against her. With Gabe I was the one placing the bets and the croupier. I was determined to make him into a winner. More than ever before I had a clear vision of what had to be done, at least in his case, and though my friends might debate what effect all this—New York, a gay milieu, a kindly if guilt-inducing uncle—might have on him, in fact I stayed awake not worrying about what to do but how to do it. I needed money, lots of money. I felt like Nora in The Doll’s House who doesn’t mind devoting herself to her husband selflessly because she’s certain that he’ll come through the one time she must call on his aid.

  Just as she was bitterly disappointed by him, so all my ardor for Max and Tom ran cold when they refused me. For them, perhaps, friendship had to be disinterested (that’s what Simone Weil, the French philosopher, thought); for me it was a mutual-protection society. Not that I sized up a new friend by asking myself if he’d sustain me if and whenever I’d need him. But once he’d let me down I could no longer love him, not as an intimate, a brother.

  Josh asked Eddie to give me some money through his foundation and within a month I received a check for seven thousand dollars. My only regret was that the money wasn’t buying me time to write a novel. No, it was Gabe’s tuition, rent, food, face medicine.

  Gabe did office work for one of my friends, a stockbroker. He sent out large mailings between six and nine every evening and earned five dollars an hour. One whole summer I had done mailings for my father, and I remembered how tedious it was. I paid Ana the same amount for cleaning my house, but often as not she and I became completely silly, putting chairs upside down on our heads as visors—we were knights jousting one another and sounding trumpet blasts with our mouths. We charged up and down the apartment until Daniella downstairs complained.

  I felt that my wards must understand we were all in this together. They’d delved into trouble because they’d defied their parents and other authorities. But they couldn’t rebel against me. We didn’t even live together. I said to them, “You can go to school or not, exactly as you please, but if you’re not going to go let me know so I won’t waste any more money on tuition. You can sleep all day, get drunk, do whatever you like. I’ll give you a weekly allowance, half of what I earn.” I showed them my checkbook. “You must both work to flesh out your allowances. You can eat ‘hambies’—” (Gabe’s childhood word for hamburgers)—“and canned corn every meal for all I care. I’m not going to set any rules for you or be angry with you or hurt or disappointed. I refuse to play that game. You’re invited to my house once a week for dinner.” I wanted them to look forward to seeing me and to consider me amusing, a treat.

  Perhaps because I’d gone to a progressive grade school that didn’t hand out marks and that encouraged personal study, I assumed everyone would benefit from maximum autonomy and a minimum of discipline. Certainly my nephew, who’d appeared devoid of all sense of guilt before, now became as anguished as I—never sure he was working hard enough, always fearful of drawing public attention to his faults. He suffered wretchedly from insomnia; Ana told me that he drank himself to sleep every night on Gallo wine and then set three alarm clocks every morning, afraid he’d be late to the Rockford Academy.

  I thought that most teenagers were cranky because they weren’t allowed to have sex regularly. Gabe and Ana, at least, were never deprived of that.

  They worked and they studied. They kept house and prepared their own meals. Gabe doctored his face. I bought Ana sports clothes and a few dresses—she became head-turningly beautiful with her full, pouty mouth, dazzling teeth, her slender waist, full breasts, long legs and small, tight buttocks, with the black luster of her hair, now cropped and waved, her long neck and small chin, her way of tossing her head angrily if someone stared at her and then slowly raising her long lashes and smiling. Her beauty, like great screen acting, was all a matter of timing, the coltish impatience when she lowered her head and then the dark burnt sugar of her gaze followed by the reprieve of her smile. When she lowered her head and shook it you thought you’d angered her or hurt her. When she looked at you she no longer seemed so young or defenseless, but she still appeared indignant. But when her smile chimed in, then you were pardoned, blessed.

  I realized she didn’t understand English as well as she pretended, although she became petulant if I hinted at my doubts. My solution was to ask her to give me Spanish lessons. Soon we were making long lists of Spanish words and their English equivalents, presumably for my benefit.

  But then things began to unravel. My friend was forced to let Gabe go from his afternoon job; he was caught making long-distance phone calls to Chicago. My nephew’s only response was to dismiss his boss as a fool and a liar—I could hear him using the same vocabulary I applied to Jane, my boss. Ana told me that she and Gabe now had screaming fights.

  She was bored. My nephew told me that when he tried to study at night she would get drunk and show him her pussy, hoping to distract him. After school, when he was still going to his office job, she would dally with a neighbor, who wanted her to put him in handcuffs and suck him. In return he’d give her grass and money. Ana had abandoned her secretarial course. Pilar thought she might find her some work as a model. They both read the latest issues of Vanidades obsessively.

  I refused to lay down the law, since I knew these kids were skilled at defying it. Ana still came up to my house a few evenings a week to clean, although mostly we made our English-Spanish lists of words and acted silly. She was just turning fourteen. She said that in Mexico girls had wonderful dances given for them when they had their sixteenth birthdays. They danced with their fathers—would I dance with her?

  My nephew had worked so well at the Rockford Academy that he’d caught up with his age group. I put him in a more conventional private school, one that cost less. It was just a block from my apartment. One evening, when I went to a parent-teacher meeting, a number of predatory divorcees chatted me up. I realized that they perceived me as a divorced or widowed père de famille. Everyone was extremely deferential to me, in a way people had never been before. I thought, Heterosexual men must be treated this way all the time. People strew rose petals in their path. My shrink told me that the biggest problem straight men had when they came out was the loss of status.

  Tulsa had a huge party for Kevin. Forty guys were invited. Three waiters in blue hotpants, orange socks and work boots served cocktails, then dinner. It was the Bicentennial and Tulsa had rented the whole dining room of a motel on the Hudson. The tall ships sailed past. I brought Gabe, Ana and my mother, who happened to be in town. She became horribly drunk and flirted with Tulsa. “You’re my kind of guy,” she told him. She passed out before the dessert was served, a cake iced to look like the national flag.

  When he was completely soused on champagne, Tulsa, who’d probably just spent ten thousand dollars on dinner, drew me aside. “You know, I love that Kevin with a love bordering on piety. He’s my religion. I’d give a hundred thousand dollars just to sleep beside his naked body.”

  I couldn’t resist telling him the truth: “Tulsa, you already had sex with him once.”

  “That’s a lie—a blasphemy.”

  “No, seriously. You hired him three years ago through a hustling service, Bob Plum’s Boys.” Tulsa’s eyes widened. I went on. “He came to your house. You knelt on the floor beside the bed and sucked him off. You never looked him in the eye. He said it was as though you were scrubbing the laundry on a washboard. When it was over you couldn’t wait to get him out of there. It cost you forty dollars.”

  The rest of the evening Tulsa looked smaller and older.

  I WAS ABLE to give up my ghastly office job. I’d been asked to write a gay sex manual that would pay very well. The big advance I received even allowed me to buy off my U.S. history textbook editors. I’d completed one volume; they’d found someone else to write the second.

  I told Jane, my boss at the chemical comp
any, that I was quitting because I’d just received a big book contract, but I didn’t give any details. I suggested the project was top secret. She cried and asked, “Who’s going to help me with the annual report?” I didn’t feel sorry for her, since she’d done everything to divert blame onto me since I’d arrived. Anyway, she’d already hired an outside agency to create the annual report. American corporations were so arthritic they could no longer do their own work; everything was farmed out to freelancers. That’s why Tulsa was such a success. In his consultant’s capacity he’d invite warring vice presidents to his house, individually and then in pairs, for a whole day’s fireside chat. He’d attempt in his sly, cornpone way to ease their differences, although sometimes I suspected he was really only sowing more discord in order to insure his own role as pacifier.

  I’d auditioned for the sex manual along with nine other writers. We’d each been asked to prepare a sample entry on such topics as “kissing,” “fisting” and “aging.” We were all told that we were going to be teamed up with a psychologist, who’d already been chosen but whose name wasn’t mentioned. When I was selected I found out that the shrink was my own, Abe. He said I could be his collaborator or his patient but not both. I chose collaborator, since I’d already had three years of therapy and needed the sex manual money.

  I worried about what effect the sex manual would have on my reputation. At the ballet I ran into the woman who’d edited my Japanese-Fire Island novel (and refused my long novel about Christa). When I told her about the sex book, she laughed cruelly with her silent, almost unsmiling laugh, the laugh that made her whole chest shake while her old eyes peered out at me as though through the big, singed holes a shotgun bullet burns through a paper target. “Perfect,” she said, still quaking, “that’s perfect for you.”

  The woman who was writing the companion manual for lesbians was equally worried; after all, she’d published three literary novels already. When we told the sex book publisher we might use pseudonyms, he shrugged and said, “It makes absolutely no difference. Your names are unknown to ninety-nine percent of our potential readers.”

  But then I thought it was absurd to hide behind a pseudonym in writing a book urging gay men and lesbians to come out of the closet. Even tactically, I thought anonymity would be an error. I’d sold five hundred copies of my only published book and I couldn’t get the subsequent novel into print. If my name was associated with a commercial blockbuster, that success would count more, especially in money-mad America, than any loss in a prestige that had, in any event, passed unnoticed. Moreover, as I knew, to sign my name to a gay sex manual in 1977, the first of its kind and one that would be sold over the counter across the country, was itself a political act.

  My lesbian friend wanted the sex book money to send her daughter to an expensive university. We decided that if we were ever asked on television why we wrote gay sex manuals we’d say, “For the sake of our children.”

  Fortunately I was paired with my shrink. He’d come out late and didn’t know much about bars, baths, cruising or exotic erotica, whereas I knew all that but had a much darker, tougher view of relationships. He counseled gentleness and tenderness and from his patients knew about the shame of impotence and delayed or premature ejaculation; I was the seasoned sex machine who’d traumatized them. He knew that beginners had to be coaxed to relax before they could be penetrated, I was the guy at the baths on Quaaludes who positioned his ass on a pillow under a spotlight and lost count how many times he was getting fucked. He suggested to our readers that role playing was passé. When I was stoned I shouted, “Fuck that beef pussy” or dressed a skinny, naked twenty-year-old in my black leather jacket and whispered in his ear, “I’m your cock-slave, sir.” If my shrink thought that sex was a matter of cuddling and intimacy, I thought it was a cold, calculated rite promising transcendence but certainly not affection.

  What neither of us questioned was that as much sex as possible with as many men as one could find was a good thing. Except Abe was less hostile than I to couples. For the strange, unaccountable thing was that I, who longed to marry Kevin, just as I’d once ached to wed Sean, responded in any abstract discussion to the concept of the couple with implacable hostility. I suppose my impossible loves, soaked in tears and mimicking the religiosity of a saint, were acceptable to me because they were medieval and only marginally sane, whereas domestic love—with its adulterous melodramas, cozy compromises, sexless cuddling, petty spats—offended me precisely because it stank of the possible, of what could be done, of what everyone did.

  Of course I was also lonely and wanted to settle down. Since Kevin had become a star he seemed ever more remote to me. I took up with a man who worked in a dirty book store and I saw him at his place for dates. I needed to keep a separation between my life with Kevin—which still seemed as cold and silvery as those erotic, sexless nights when we’d first slept together chastely, back in the era of the Society of St. Agnes—and anything as mundane as good, adult lovemaking after a steak dinner, a bottle of Valpolicella and an evening of shared confidences. Kevin encouraged me in these affairs, but I was ashamed that my lovers weren’t as handsome as his—or as he.

  Even so, I was happy to be my own boss again. Whereas I could be a benign ruler, I was inevitably a devious, undermining little subject. I was so convinced of my superiority that I could not contain my hatred of all authority—worse than hatred, dirtier: my sneering contempt for anyone placed above me.

  My father had done everything to please his boss, the owner of a chemical factory, and when someone else had been preferred over him my father, irreparably wounded, had quit and started his own business. That had been in 1940, the year I was born. I was like him, I saw, in this way, too, and the resemblance sickened me. During the war and for years afterwards my father had made lots of money, but in the 1960s chemical manufacturers had no longer needed representatives to find them new industrial customers—and to skim off a twenty-five percent commission. All the potential customers had already been located. My father, who’d been the world’s leading broker of chemical equipment, saw his far-flung offices (in Akron, Cleveland, Charleston, West Virginia, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati) cut back and lose money. One of the manufacturers that dropped him had a new president who was Jewish; this convergence of factors inspired a nearly apoplectic anti-Semitism in my father. I thought back to the time when he had lost sleep over my homosexuality and had nearly died of a broken heart. Now he was filled with heart-bursting rage over what these filthy kikes were doing to him.

  Cleverly he’d been building through profit-sharing a large fund for his top employees in each city (all chemical engineers). He now handed this money over to them in a lump sum and suggested they buy Industrial Sales from him. Two of the five men took the money and ran but the other three paid my father the remaining two million dollars for the company’s name, reputation and client list. A bad investment, as it turned out.

  My father, unfortunately, did not take well to retirement. He mounted his tractor and mowed the lawn so frequently that the grass turned brown. He ate so much that he gained a twenty pounds he could ill afford. Traveling interested him not at all, but investment did, tragically—he lost half his money in a year. The rest he invested in an industrial toilet supply firm, a sort of janitorial service for factories. He loaded up paper towels and liquid soap in the trunk of his Cadillac and wore a grey uniform with his own logo, “Cleanzessence,” over his left breast pocket.

  Cleanzessence went broke in a year. Now, with whatever money he had left he was living in his new, smaller house and watching record-breaking amounts of television. His wife’s social life, which in his heyday he’d dismissed as an annoying time-waster, now became his main source of amusement. Although he was too lofty to beg to know all “the dirt” the minute she came back from a Queen City luncheon, nevertheless he maintained an unnatural, hopeful silence until she finally, coquettishly served up the day’s dish—scraps from the table of female activity that he was able to reh
eat several times for his homey little solitary meals. American businessmen of his class and age had no hobbies beyond yard work, which never even ascended to the dignity of gardening.

  My sister was well, out of the hospital and in her last year of graduate school (her grades were so good she was now receiving free tuition and financial aid). She’d met a girlfriend and was living with her.

  After a year and a half in New York, my nephew was ready to enter his last year of high school. His grades were excellent, his appearance greatly improved. He was now afraid of failing and desperate to succeed; I’d inoculated him with middle-class anxiety and considered the minor infection as preventive. But Ana was tired of being on her own, of cooking for herself and, now that she’d dropped out of school, filling her idle hours. Thanks to Pilar, Ana was looking so beautiful I worried about her. I felt like a parent. I worried that her expertly painted lips and eyes, her pink nails and expensively coiffed hair, the silk dresses under which her full breasts and snaky hips glided like a rumor through a crowd would attract the evil eye.

  Ana decided to move back to Chicago to live with her parents. She said, “Sunny, I want to be a little girl. I want my mother to take care of me.” I didn’t have the heart to remind her that her mother had never babied her. I thought, I am your mother, Ana, and your father, the one who will waltz with you on your sixteenth birthday.

  My nephew decided that if Ana left he’d go with her. He and I were drinking coffee together in a Village coffee house, a rare break in our lives of drudgery. “Hey, Unk,” he said, in a parody of our real relationship, a parody that expressed nothing except his awkwardness in discussing something that wasn’t urbane, trivial, “delicious”—the qualities he imagined I esteemed, whereas my only reason for playing them up around him was to keep him entertained. Maybe I sensed that he thought gay men were “fun,” even “cool,” only so long as they appeared to be dandies aristocratically above the common struggle. I wanted him to like me. “Hey, Unk, I’m going to lam it out of this burg and head back to the Windy City.”