The Farewell Symphony (19 page)

The Farewell Symphony

aesthetic and had suffered at Groton, nevertheless he'd been forced to defend himself in boarding school, to play rugby and dominate the younger boys and swagger with the other prefects—he'd been espaliered by his whole world into an oppressor, and that was the side of him I longed to submit to now.

In a three-way with old friends the fust chuckle, the least hint at an intention to enter into discussion, can evaporate the preliminary translucent drops of desire. I smiled at them but as though through a dream, as though I recognized them but through a glass darkly. What I wanted to communicate was not the surprise I felt but quickly reined in, nor my awareness of the comic possibilities, all too rich and unwelcome. Intellectuals are the best sex because to be intelligent means to skip steps and to prize the unprecedented, to know how to tune out static and beam in pure melody, how to fmd the depth and originalitv' in even the humblest coupling (or tripling). But if an intellectual is proud and keen to prove he's alert to irony, then his snickers, his raised eyebrows, his running commen-tar\- undermine the theatricality of passion and make erections melt. I wasn't an intellectual but I was smart enough not to blow this scene. Two men were crossing over from the safet)' of friendship into the danger of sex and pushing their cocks toward me as gifts, as rods divining the well of loneliness hidden within me. I was going to make this transition as easy for them as possible.

What I discovered was that if most gay men you pick up want to get fucked because that's somehow easier on a first date or a fifth, and if to be fucked is to become the object of desire and the subject of fantasy, nevertheless after the years have passed and both men feel secure within the confines of their affair, at that point they both want to be active in bed. The simple joy of penetrating and the complex satisfaction of dominating supersede the even more sophisticated pleasure of being dominated. These tribes of two chiefs look for a solitary Indian to rule, as I was about to discover

But if I was able to gi\e them my hunger and an oneiiic compliance, I wasn't the one to say exactly how things were supposed to go. After all, it was nvo against one. They'd undoubtedly done this before and had probably sketched out in advance a scenario for tonight. Nor need I have worried that something so minor as a snicker could put them off; they approached sex with the New Yorker's usual determination to have, to enjoy—English verbs which in New York alone need not take an object but can be conjugated in the hortatory ecstatic intransidve (as in the com-

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mand, ''Enjoy.'"). Living in Rome had slowed me down to the point where I wondered how I'd ever walked the Manhattan high wire. I was in danger of" falling off it now through an excess of self-consciousness; Jamie and Gerry were still speedy from New York and rushed across the wire and jumped onto the trapeze. My long afternoons of drinking wine in the sun, of taking two naps and roaring nonsense over dinner had sapped my courage to act, whereas their crowded, programmed days—eight a.m. piano lessons followed by jogging in Central Park, habitual emergencies at the office, the split-second timing of psychiatric and haircut appointments, cocktails with X and dinner with Y—had left them lean, honed, impatient.

Jamie fucked me doggie-style while I sucked Gerry, still quizzical and bird-like as he looked down into his lap to see what I was doing with his long clean cock rising up out of a blond's light cloud of brown pubic hair dusting an unusually red scrotum. Gerry, who had an exquisite, long-limbed body as assertive as his ski-jump nose, was ashamed of a deep hole in his chest just where the breast bones met or failed to meet. He unveiled this "imperfection" with a timidity I found attendrissant and exciting. Then I was instructed to squat down on Geriy's dick while Jamie kneeled between Gerry's legs and tried to fuck me at the same time, but a minute later Jamie had given up on that and had come around to face me; he was standing on the mattress and stuffing my mouth.

The trick, of course, was to remember that this was Jamie's cock long enough to lavish on it the keening years of pent-up desire and to depersonalize both men sufiiciendy to turn them into an ownerless congeries of arms and legs to lick, to hug, to kiss. If they remained Jamie and Gerry too concretely, each brisding with an aura of individuality, then I'd never be able to overcome the social dilemma, the etiquette problem (Am I paying too much attention to Jamie? Would Gerry like two cocks in his face? Should I absent myself to the toilet for a moment so that they can recon-noiter and re-establish their solidarity?) long enough to set myself adrift in a sea of pure, moaning pleasure. The id, in order to flourish, needs to put aside the ego's quibbling negotiations with reality. I succeeded in serving them by forgetting them until I was merely a spark ignited between something rough (Jamie) and something smooth (Gerry).

The main impression I came away with from the trip to Capri was of Gerry's ingenuous pleasure in opening up every minor mystery that experience presented him with, even if it was only my body, and of the brimming, husbandly pleasure Jamie took in Gerry. Jamie loved Gerry

The Farewell Symphony

with a mixture of curatorial, sponsoring pride (the desire to show him off to someone else) and of continuing astonishment at his good luck in knowing this guy, so much more lively and expressive than he, even if occasionally garrulous. I hoped that someday someone would love me as much as Jamie loved Geny

Back in Rome, through Lucrezia I met a famous American movie star, a matinee idol of my adolescence, a man whose first name my sister and I would moan, pretending to swoon, parodying the real lust his long pale face and glossy lashes and bruise-dark lips would excite in us. He wasn't a Hell's Angel or a sweet boy-next-door t\pe pawing the ground shyly but rather a grown man in a white ch-ess shirt, with long legs and a formal dark suit he wore casually. He was good in scenes in which he pulled his long lithe body, tie fluttering like a loose tongue, onto a moving train, or when he reached gloomily for a drink and exhaled smoke from his long, straight nose. He'd had a promising career in the 19505 and then the rumors he was gay caught up with him and even seeped through to the public. My sister and I'd somehow heard, for instance, that he was likely to wear green on Thursday, considered a sure sign of pei^version. He'd suddenly had no more roles. What we hadn't known then was that he'd worked briefly and brilliandy in Italy until he'd started drinking too much. I'd seen him once on the stage in New York in a Chekhov play.

Now, apparendy, he had a new lover and he was sober and he'd come back to Italy to relaunch his career. I decided I should write him a "vehicle," a screenplay tailor-made to his age, accent and abilities. Of course I was too shy to tell him about the project and too inexperienced to line up a contract from a producer. My scenario was about the affair I might have had with Tina: an American painter falls in love wdth an Italian woman in Rome. They can't communicate but they end up having lots of violent sex. He goes back to America on a brief trip but dies in a car crash. She has almost recovered from his death when a three-month mail strike in Italy finally ends. Every day she receives another passionate love letter from him and she fmally decides to make the trip to the States in order to learn what kind of man he was. There she discovers that her lost love— and by extension most educated Americans—are not just chameleons but also masters of deceit; with a sense of relief she returns to the innocence of the Old Worid.

Susie, who was still unemployed after being sacked as a real-estate agent, worked for me every afternoon as my secretary. I would scribble bits of dialogue on paper, then dictate them to her and she'd type them, slowly, with lots of muttered commentary. The weather was hot, I was a bit fuzzy after midday lunch and wine consumed in a sunny cafe and her presence inhibited me from thinking. But I knew I'd become too lazy to work on my own. I needed the waiting taxi, meter ticking, to force me to travel mentally. Anyway, she needed the job.

And besides I liked her stories about her sexual adventures. Her lover Enzio lived with his mother and, like every single Italian man, twenty or forty, straight or gay, he had to be back home in his bed by the breakl'ast hour. He could slip into his room at six in the morning and his mother could hear his late arrival and nothing would be said, just so long as he was there for roll call. In return he could shower and change shirts three times a day and Mother, his laundress, his cook, would think nothing of it.

He'd pick Susie up in a car he'd especially rigged out with a passenger's seat that at the flick of a lever would flip back so that the passenger would suddenly be flat on her back, legs in the air, as though prepared for an obstetrician. His dandyism, his randiness, his easily wounded pride seemed funny to her, since she was used to British coldness and self-deprecation. I didn't dare tell her that I preferred a stiff cock to a stiff upper lip, and that Italian strutting delighted me more than English reserve. Perhaps she would have agreed with me.

When at last she'd typed up the script on stencils and mimeographed it, I sent it off to three producers Lucrezia had done translations for. Two didn't respond and the third contacted me only because he was so angry at my portrait of Italian men, for if I'd branded Americans as dissemblers, I'd shown Italians as macho brutes. In one of the most dramatic moments in the film the heroine, after learning of her American lover's death, goes stumbling out into the night. She's sobbing but around her swirl boys in cars honking and heckling and shouting obscenities and making grotesque sucking noises with their mouths. One even moons her. Because of Maria and Christa I'd thought about feminism more than any other man I knew, although as a writer I was less attracted to the substantial issue of economic equality than to the flashier question of sexual harassment.

The Italian producer, a bald tycoon in his sixties always in search of vehicles for his wife, a famous actress, spluttered with indignation that Italian men loved women and paid them court as knights had done for

The Farewell Symphony

centuries, throwing them verbal bouquets. I remembered that Christa, a six-foot BrunnhiJde, at least professed to enjoy the excitement she created in the streets, but I also knew that Tina had bought a car because she cotildn't even walk to the corner without being hassled. I knew that Swedish women, bored with their polite but tepid compatriots, reportedly came to Italy for "the phallic cure." but Fd also heard from Susie that two of her English friends who'd married Italian men had left them after a year of alternate brutality and neglect.

What complicated my response still more was that I wanted to be treated brutally. Thomas hadn't resorted to violence only because I'd been so compliant as w'e'd wallowed for three days in our st\; but the posed threat had only intensified my excitement. Before I ejaculated I was capable of relishing mental images of profound abjection, pictures that repulsed me as soon as the sperm was drying. I liked the idea of being captured by a gang and raped by its members, one after another, all night long, but a minute after I'd finished masturbating I was cross if Thomas so much as asked me to walk Anzio when it wasn't my turn.

I made an effort to understand that what for me was an idle if persistent fantasy constituted a real danger for women—but the effort failed, since the minute I contemplated, soberly, disapprovingly, the idea (or the image) of rape, I immediately became aroused.

Of course I mouthed my sympathy to women, as I would for years to come, since the years of the New Left in the sixties, just ending, had so corrupted me that I did not measure my political opinions against my actual beliefs but rather against what I thought I should feel. As a writer I had nothing but feelings to count on, but a conviction, I thought, shouldn't be simply an amplified sensation; no, it brought together, didn't it, experience, judgment and a code of morality one had presumably picked over and, somehow, verified.

Because I wanted to get my scenario read I pushed Jamie and Gerry to introduce me to an Italian film director who'd pursued Gerry for years. I phoned the director and he was eager to see me, believing no doubt that Gerry had sent him another willowy All-American blond. VVTien he met me he was visibly let down. I wasn't his t\pe—a category of taste I always forgot about and was stardcd, each time, to rediscover, I who didn't have a t\pe, any more than I had a set way to take my coffee. I suppose an enemy would have said anyone as sexually driven as I could not afford to have a tspe: obsession precludes choice. But I prided myself on my whore's ingenuirs; If I found myself sucking a fat, bearded man with an

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inch-long cock, I convinced myself he was the pasha, I the new girl in the harem and this was my one chance to persuade him of my talent. I never stopped to wonder why I had to please everyone.

I managed to get a few "important" people to read my scenario, but no one was interested in it. I was a failure in the world but at least I had it all before me. It was withholding its acceptance, which infused me with crimson indignation, nor was I at all certain that approval would ever be granted. I couldn't even claim I'd prepared myself diligendy or worked with great application (in The Paris Review I kept reading interviews with successful writers who maintained banker's hours, and I would imagine them typing rapidly on an old Remington, gradually building up a mountain of foolscap as they tried a scene first one way, then another, fiddling with point of view, tense and the proportion of reported to quoted dialogue). I needed a full day to summon up the courage to write a paragraph; it would never have occurred to me to strike it out. Words came to me slowly; even slower to materialize was the courage to commit them to paper.

My father had predicted my failure, and although I'd succeeded in working as a journalist for eight years, I'd failed until now to publish even a single page of fiction. When I quit my job, my boss had predicted I'd fail as a freelance writer, and now it appeared he was right. Just at the moment when New York was entering an era of gay liberation, I was off in repressed, provincial Rome. Buder, my friend from New York, wrote that my letters indicated I was not profiting from a study of "the central city of Western culture," but rather treating it as "a slighdy kickier version of Scranton" (a reference to a particularly blighted and duU town in upstate New York).

Tina and I took the train to Naples. We had dinner there in a restaurant where solemn men toasted one another. "They're using strange nicknames for each other," Tina said. ''Bear and Wolf—I think they're in the Camorra." When we wandered the streets we saw kids everywhere jumping on the backs of trolleys or swarming around us, demanding a coin with irresistible rafiishness. "It's like Rome just after the war," she said. "I'm amazed this is still going on." I could see she relished the direct contact with people, the feudal dignity of those toasts, the independence of the kids, the theatricality and danger of Spacca Napoli.

We took a boat to Procida, an island where we stayed in a Swiss pension on top of a hill. Huge lemons grew on a tree just outside our window. Down by the water, arches of bare light bulbs crossed over the street, and

The Farewell Symphony

a band from Naples played while people danced in the square. At night Tina lay beside me, an explosive waiting to be detonated. Her passion thrilled me, I who had no lover, but I didn't want it. She was willing to damp her fires in order not to scare me off, but I knew all along she was after just one thing.

Butler arrived alone in Rome, without Lynne. He was cool, genial, perfect. He took the sun just the right amount of time on our balcony amid the pots of azaleas. The oil he applied to his chest and stomach turned his skin to a lustrous mahogany brown. His shirts were impeccably white and collarless, his forest-green trousers pleated but never creased, a silver chain slid discreedy over his dark chest. His feet looked immense but exquisitely formed in his expensive leather sandals from Greece.

He had an itinerary in Rome, things he needed to visit because he hadn't seen them the last time: the Michelangelo statue of Moses; the Borromini Church of St. Ivo with its corkscrew tower; the Raphael frescoes in the Farnesina on the other side of the Tiber. He thought Rome might serve as the backdrop for a short story in which every tenth word would rhyme with the name of a place here ("heavy" for "Trevi," "hollow semen" for "Colosseum"). He took one long look at my life in Rome, and a mercifully quick one at my body (I was at once skinnier and flabbier) and drew me aside and said, "I'm getting you out of here."

"That's a good idea," I said. "I think I could be ready in a week or ten days."

"A week! No, we'U be leaving tomorrow. I've rented a car. We can drive to Paris slowly, stopping in all the important hill towns. I have a very good guidebook. First we'll go to Assisi, the only city in Italy that does seem holy. No, frankly, you've gone to seed, I hope you don't mind my telling you so diiecdy. Of course that happens to most Americans in Rome, just look at all these losers you've surrounded yourself with. I guess we could say la dolce vita has defmitely turned amara. Isn't it funny, you've come halfway around the world to create an inferior version of what you left behind: Tina is a less talented, less refined version of Maria, just as Thomas is an uncooked copy of your old lover in coUege, what's his name? Lou? _ the sex without the brains. And after you wrote that exquisite Fire Island novel you've cranked out this \ailgar litde screenplay, so lisdess in its language, so obvious in its ironies. You know, it's really a

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form of arrogance on your part, this mauvaisefrequmtation you seek out, as though you were trying to prove your talent and intelligence are so durable they can resist even the lowering effect of idiots and drunkards. But you know you're pressing your luck."

I saw a sharply etched, despairing trutli in his words where I'd intuited only vague cloud shapes of disappointment. "It's true enough, I've gone to seed," I said, not rejecting the floral imagery, "but I wouldn't say I was escaping New York or my friends, just my job." And yet I saw myself as a dandelion gone white, held up to his pursed lips. Trained by so many years in therapy to smile foolishly whenever someone else presumed to know my feelings better than I, I snickered in agreement.

The last night I was in Rome my English-speaking friends gave me a party. We sat very late at table outside in the Piazza Navona. In distant streets the last saraceni, those linked metal gates that protect storefronts, were thundering shut. Two aggressive gypsy girls were pushing roses at us; a shy, lean Senegalese in a dashiki passed by, selling electric yo-yos that glowed briefly when set in motion.

We wandered about all night and at dawn ended up on the Capitoline Hill. The armed forces were rehearsing a huge patriotic parade. From our perch we looked down on the wide boulevard that led from the Colosseum to the Piazza di Spagna. Tanks rolled by, rank after rank of soldiers filed past, fighter planes swooped low. We were the only spectators. We were drunk. Susie's pale pink gauze skirt was tangled up in her belt, as though she were a can-can dancer clutching at her hem to reveal her legs. An English guy had tears in his eyes, although perhaps the glare of the rising sun was just making his eyes water. He told me he was sad to be going home. As an American I was used to the idea that "home" was superior to everywhere else (richer, more powerful, trend-setting), and it was with a jolt I realized that for this man Rome might be preferable to London.

Suddenly I saw that for an American travel abroad is always a form of slumming, and the city, under Buder's microscope, became distasteful to my eyes. For him, as for all New Yorkers, human action was only useful in so far as it produced results. I had to return to New York, and make my mark as a writer, but I was terrified I'd fail. Or rather, that I'd go on failing.

I've always said I was a Buddhist, but now I know I'm no longer one. Perhaps I've never been one. Immediately after Brice's death I wanted to die, yet not out of a philosophical indifference to this illusory world. I went to church every day, the Catholic church of St.-Merri just across the street from where I live in Paris. I lit candles in front of a saccharine painting of the Virgin and Child. I imagined that the Virgin was Brice's mother, who'd committed suicide ten years earlier, and the wise, dry-eyed baby was Brice himself I liked the way disembodied angels' heads, propelled by wings, hovered around the holy couple. I lit my candles before a modern polychrome statue of an adult Jesus pointing with unsurprised fatuity at his own heart.

I cried a lot. I said, "Why did you leave me?" I sang, over and over, the first line of an old pop song, the only line I knew, "WTiere are you? You went away without me, I thought you cared about me."

Brice, I was so focused on you for our five years together that when you died I felt an enormous silence descend all around me. At the time I said, "It's as though I've been in a totally absorbing play for years and then once, by chance, I wandered out to the edge of the stage, the apron, and then the asbestos fire curtain came ringing down, thud, and there I was, alone, in an immense, echoing theater, separated from everything I cared about." I suppose it was just my fancy way of saying something that a

book review I was reading the other day said was the "greatest banaHty: we want to share our mourning with the dead."

My Catholicism has no Pope and no God and only a few, rather helpless saints (I pray to St. Anthony of Padua when I lo.se something and in Prague I said a prayer to St. Vitus against the shakes and excessive weeping). My Catholicism centers on the Virgin and Child, who don't do anything for anyone except themselves; their love is a wonderful example, a closed circuit, a thing of beauty to contemplate: Brice and his mother My Catholicism is a home-made cult given over to lighting candles and making the sign of the cross and genuflecting with embarrassment, a child's animism quarried out of the grown-up Church and its ruins, a primitive superstition inferior to the solitary splendor of monotheism. There's no morality in my Catholicism and no hell except the one we're living in, this fiery posthumous existence I'm inventing.