The Farewell Symphony (36 page)

"It still sounds better than New York in August, stale pizza crusts and hot subways filled with piss and psychos. Well, no matter, my novel will be out in the fall and you'll be back to help me celebrate. I hope you make lots of progress onyour book this summer." Joshua's book was a study of five contemporary poets, one of them Eddie.

Things went so well between us that Joshua told me he had a wonderful surprise for me—a ticket for that very evening to the Tiny Troupers. We'd be going with Eddie and from there on to a party at the Central Park West apartment of the dual pianists Smith and Watson, men who'd commissioned Poulenc and Rorem and Stravinsky to write them four-hand compositions. I wondered silenUy whether Joshua had arranged for the ticket for me a long time ago (tickets were very scarce) but hadn't told me about it until now because he wasn't sure I would deserve the treat, or whether Eddie, one of the benefactors of the Troupers, had just made the ticket available.

Some thirty people were seated in a large living room in the West Sixties just off the park. Everyone seemed to know everyone and there were lots of anticipatory coos and exchanged winks that filled me with hate and made me want to throw a stink bomb. At one end of the room was a puppet stage. The lights dimmed and the curtain went up to reveal a Victorian family of puppets at home with a puppet maid in uniform. The family members were all seated in a middle-class drawing room of overstuffed furniture and heavy gilt frames beside the fireplace. The lady of the house had decided she wanted to play Phaedra in an amateur theatrical. Her maid, Lucy Lump, would of course be playing the maid Aricie and the stepson would be playing Hippolytus. The father would double as Theseus and the Chorus. After a brief pause, the curtains opened again on a set of a Greek palace. The hand puppets had an extremely limited repertoire of gestures: the double take (which ehcited the most laughter), the conspiratorial glance at the audience, noddmgyes, shaking the head no, clapping hands together in glee, thumping the chest in despair and, when singing, a violent trembling all over.

Eddie had commissioned a ne'er-do-well Alexandrian tourist guide who spoke six languages badly to write a ballad opera, providing old tunes with new words in a macaronic Italian-English-French. The opening number, "Alio, Phaedra," was of course set to the tune of "Hello, Dolly." Eddie rushed up to tell us that when the librettist had asked him to summarize the plot of Phaedra, he had offered to give him a copy of Racine but the librettist had said, "Oh, no, I don't want to get into details, just

The Farewell Symphony

give me the gist." Eddie professed to find this impertinence wonderfully droU.

At the end of the opera the audience went into ecstasies. With my outer face I, too, smiled and cooed but my inner eyes bored holes of hate through them all and my inner teeth were instantly filed to spikes. I ran into Butler, the only other person present who was under forty-.

"Isn't it all disgusting?" I hissed at him.

"Oh, groan, I can't bear the idea that Eddie bankrolls this frivolous rubbish whereas we're too poor even to Xerox our work to submit it for publication. If I were a patron of the arts I'd set up a free copy shop for writers, for any and all writers, no distinctions made, all welcome."

"WTiere are the puppeteers?" I asked.

"See those two old eunuchs over there surrounded by admiring dowagers? This room just stinks of money— our tax money, I might add, since the Tiny Troupers are a tax-deductible charity and therefore what should be public money goes to support them."

"If thev were avant-garde," I grumbled, "they might be tolerable— didn't the Princesse Polignac commission Colette and Ravel to write LEn-fant et les Sortileges for her salon?"

"Yes, that was Singer Sewing Machine money." Buder shook his head sagely. "It's pathetic how the times have changed. Now we just have recycled showtunes and absurd Krics that do nothing but make a mocken,' of tii'o of the greatest works of literature, Hippolytus and Phaedra."

"Eddie's own poetry is superb," I said, "but his influence as a patron is sort of questionable. So frivolous, as though he just wants to ridicule all the great art that has come before." I suppose we were both wondering how to apply to his foundation.

At this moment Joshua brought up the puppeteers themselves to meet us. That we'd not been led over to them was, of course, an unusual honor— so unusual it must have stemmed from the sudden desire of the camp old puppeteers themselves to meet the youngest men in the room.

"WTiat an utter delight!" I exclaimed in a fruity mid-Adantic accent I didn't recognize. "Do you do all the voices?"

"Yes," one of the men replied, who incongruously seemed to have just outgrown his clothes, as though he were a senile adolescent; his trouser cuffs fell at mid-calf and his sleeves ended three inches above his wrists. "I'm afraid I wasn't in very good voice tonight—the arias Phaedra sings are just too difficult, especially the 'I love you, a scepter and a crovsn.' "

"That's to 'A bushel and a peck,' isn't iti*" Butler asked with his warmest, most sparkly and soft-focus smile, as though he were an old-fashioned starlet shot through gauze. "It was all deliciously amusing."

"Well, we're retiring after this season," the other puppeteer said. "We have a farm in New Jersey that a writer friend has found ff)r us."

"Oh? What discriminating Maecenas still exists in this philistinc age?" I asked, beaming, burning with avidity.

"Perhaps you know him: Max Richards."

"My dearest friend," I hastened to throw in.

"Yes, yes," Butler exclaimed.

As we all streamed over to the party at the duo-pianists, Buder and I avoided looking at each other.

Only outsiders are satirical about a party; the other guests are having too much fun, even if it's a tepid, ordinary sort of fun, to notice what's going on or to work up much bile. I was intimidated by the wealth and culture of the older guests. My father and his acquaintances were rich boors, boors I could easily dismiss, but here was a famous white-haired choreographer, talking about his secret passion, cooking, to one of the duo-pianists, whose shortness and gold watch made him look like a prosperous businessman—except he instantly began to talk about an Italian Futurist cookbook which calls for waiters to spray the bald heads of diners with warmed liquid and which condemns pasta as the chief cause of Italy's stagnation. The son of a Spanish marquis and an American heiress showed up with a kilo of Beluga caviar ("I found it at the Caviarteria, where my father used to buy hisl" he announced with that fatuous respect for the habits and practices of his own family one often remarks among the rich, as though their wealth lent an Olympian importance to even their smallest actions). In a wheelchair sat a slender woman in her fifties who'd once been a famous ballerina; she'd been one of the last people to contract polio before the Salk vaccine was developed.

Soon we were all seated at six tables of six people. Buder mumbled to me afterwards, "It's Eddie, of course, who's paying the caterers, although he's pretending to be so grateful to Smith and Watson—a bit like Ronald Firbank, who slipped some money under the table so that his guardsman could pay the bill, which prompted Firbank to clap his hands and exclaim, 'How thrilling to be invited!' " The Tiny Troupers were fussing over each other's health. "I told you not to eat strawberries," I overheard one telling the other. "You know they only cause you to have mouth ulcers."

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Joshua invited me back to his place for a nightcap. We ended up drinking several brandies and talking Troupers and Eddie and poetry. Joshua surprised me by fishing a tape recorder out from under the couch. "I just bought this. It's voice activated," he explained, mentioning a feature that at that time was brand new. "I thought I might keep it beside my bed in Venice in case I get a good thought during the night about my book."

He replayed our conversation. What I'd imagined had been warm, intelligent, witty chat between two cultivated men turned out to be slurred, drunken nonsense. Our voices rose and fell in shrieks and mumbles. Laughter rang out tinnily, fakely, and our voices sounded as fruity as old dowagers'.

At the door Joshua grabbed me and filled my mouth with his tongue. Overwhelmed by anger, I stamped my foot. I said, "No! Why must every evening . . . Oh, nothing. Good night. Bon voyage."

Max and Joshua and even Buder had gone away for the summer and I felt that the city had been handed back to us, the kids. It was hotter, more violent, smellier than in the spring, but at least it was all ours.

I seldom went north of Fourteenth Street, but when I did nothing seemed as muffled and elegant as the rich neighborhoods I'd seen during my week in Paris or my six months in Rome. Here in New York everyone was a "character" and a white-uniformed black maid walking her mistress's poodle was wearing green basketball shoes, whereas her white counterpart in the Bois de Boulogne or on the Via Giulia would have scutded along hoping to be inconspicuous. Here in Manhattan chauffeurs in waiting limousines reamed their nostrils with a dirty index finger, wealthy women shoppers spoke so loudly they endangered the sales clerk's eardrums, a chic young couple outraced an old lady for a cab, a vagrant sprawled across a subway grating on Lexington Avenue was drinking and bawling out "I want a gal just like the gal who married dear old Dad." No one whispered as they would in a Paris restaurant nor did they cover their eccentricities as Romans cover their mouths when they pick their teeth.

It's wrong to say that North Americans don't have a Latin sense of theater about street life. Our theater, however, is a farce full of crazies, not a well made boulevard comedy.

The Farewell Symphony

Kevin told me that he was fed up with sex and that he was entering a chastity phase. Everything with him was a passing trend, a New Year's resolution broken at the beginning of each month, since as an out-of-work actor he had to turn his life into an experience or at least an experiment. I was happy to join him in his vow of chastity, since as long as we observed it I could convince myself he wouldn't fall in love with someone else—and he'd let me sleep beside him. We were the founding members of the Society of St. Agnes, in honor of that virginal girl who considered God to be her betrothed. As a lapsed Catholic Kevin enjoyed this sort of Papal Camp more than I did, even though he railed against "failed" Catholics. "There's always a horrid moment," he said, "when all the Catholic fags in the room start swapping Sadistic Nun stories and stories about closeted Father Dan the basketball coach. I really can't bear all that obsessive wallowing." Of course even his objections only perpetuated what he was criticizing, much like complaints about the class system—an unhealthy commentary that only further immerses the critic into the system he's attacking, since snobbism and Catholicism are superstitions that can thrive on anything but neglect.

At first that June wasn't hot—not the suffocating humid heat of the usual New York summer Or maybe it was simply that I was so happy with Kevin. I mean to say that just as I'd awaken to a room full of Hght consecrating this boy beside me, in the same way a cool breeze was always blowing through the big blocs of heat bearing down on the city, the breeze like an occult joy redeeming something stale and quotidian. No day was the same as my other days. Every day with Kevin was like a day in a novel—animated by observations, economical, eventful, intended— and not like the slow ether drip of ordinary existence.

We lay beside each other like brothers and children. Kevin didn't mind if I touched him, so long as it was innocent. Of course nothing I did was innocent; not even my sleep was innocent, it was shallow and Argus eyed, ever alert to Kevin's sHghtest movement, especially a shift toward me in bed. As he'd fall asleep his hands and legs would pass through five minutes of jerks and twitches and I'd prop myself up on one elbow to observe this fitful pianism of the body. How I longed to be the instrument he played and once I even placed his small hot hand on my chest so that he could drum his nervous tattoo on me.

We slept naked under just one sheet in Kevin's apartment (Hal was in Chicago in a musical). One night a cold salt atmosphere advanced up the Hudson and we clung to each odier in the chill. There was nothing femi-

nine about him—he was far more assertive, independent, athletic than I— but what I felt toward him must have been something like what an ugly man feels toward a beautiful woman. First came the realization that despite such perfect skin, despite the strength and elegance shaping every step, despite the panoply of personality rustling open like a peacock's eyed glory, nevertheless at rest, naked, in bed, this bewitching person was just a small body, almost a boy, merely an upward tilt of nose and chin, two baby-pale nipples, a taut stomach, just a grip on an udder of hot, streaming air. Then there was the ugly man's longing, my longing to be married to this enviable creature, a desire born from a strange confidence in the binding irreversibility of marriage, a union imagined to be entirely transubstantial, for if the bride changes her name, the groom changes his nature and becomes her equal, superior to his previous, single, unbeautiful self