The Farewell Symphony (41 page)

I don't think the poet ever foOowed her system, but I did. I had such a crushing schedule to follow with my U.S. history textbook that I felt the only way I'd ever write fiction again was by doing a half hour in bed every morning. I hadn't reread my Fire Island novel since I'd written it five years earlier, but a few people had praised it for its "Baroque" quality so that now, in my new book, I began to write in that complex, ornate style; for me, at least, a Baroque style is one that sets every element in motion, that confuses religious sentiment with sensuality and that makes litde distinction between ornament and substance. Despite the fact that those early readers of mine had been wrong and my Fire Island-Japanese book may have been surrealistic in its vision but quite chaste in its style, I was now in the process of imitating their mistaken impression of my earlier work.

But my new book wasn't altogether healthy; I confused my fantasies with reality, replaced the simple past with the past-subjunctive of wish fulfillment. I turned my boring father into a satanic playboy, my hysterical mother into an operatic madwoman. My narrator was Kevin twenty years older, who regretted that he'd rejected his patient, wise lover (an amalgam of Frank O'Hara, God and me). I feared I was beginning to lose my mind. One morning I knelt in the hallway outside my bedroom door and prayed to God, but when I opened my eyes He was standing there dressed in full saturnine leathers.

At noon my secretary would arrive. Through a friend at the gym I'd found William, a smiling, deferential, painfully thin man in his mid-twenties. He was an aspiring actor who, I gathered, lived with a lover (in

The Farewell Symphony

those days people would admit almost apologetically that they had a lover, as though it were a bad habit or the survivor of an earlier, less enlightened age). He would sit patiently while I shuffled through piles of Xeroxed historical articles and the cut-and-paste oudine. Then, suddenly inspired, I'd begin to dictate pages of my textbook. I feared that if I didn't have someone sitting there whom I paid by the hour I'd never get around to writing Changing Eras.

Of course we ended up talking a lot about our lives. William even invited me to catch his performance at the Upstairs at the Downstairs. I went one evening and was surprised to see him in chains, alternating tap dancing and a humorous monologue in which he spoke about his childhood in New Hampshire, his desire to be dominated and his struggle with diabetes. Part of me was shocked by such candor; I still believed in Virginia Woolf's distinction between art and self-expression. But another part of me recognized that every dare William made against propriety generated a spark, and that energy I was almost certain could be called aesthetic. To me, a work of art is a performance of a certain length that generates interest. Hovering just over the divide between invention and reportage struck me as inherently interesting, especially when what was being reported was a whole new world of experience.

Kevin and I were both passionate admirers of Ross Stubbins, the avant-garde theater director, but he seemed to us as unapproachable as all other celebrated people. We were certain that he held no brief with the New York commercial theater, nor did we, although Kevin kept auditioning for it and I kept writing for it; during the preceding ten years I'd written five full-length plays, which were meant to be attractive to a Broadway producer, since they required only a single set and no more than six actors and were intended to be funny and topical, but I never had the energy or confidence in my theatrical skills to push them. Nor had I ever admired a play I'd seen on Broadway.

Stubbins didn't seem to have financial restrictions. He would put on a three-day play with a cast of two hundred at a festival in Casablanca or Aix, and in New York he had his own foundation, his own school of acting and an association with a Fifty-Seventh Street gallery, where he sold his costume sketches at high, conceptual-art prices. He had a fascination with The Beauty and the Beast, which he'd adapted and staged in dozens of different versions, variously mixed and crosshatched with Spanish religious processions, textbook explanations of ballet or a largely effaced script of Ibsen's Little Eyolf.

I'd met a man who claimed to have been his roommate in an Oklahoma madliouse twenty years ago, when they'd both been of college age.

The Farewell Symphony

This man had even written an article in a learned journal about Stubbins' obsessive arranging of the furniture in their cell. Since Stubbins' staging was all based upon the elements of the set being juxtaposed to one another according to the most minute calculations and those proportions reflected in the actors' movements, the article about furniture arrangement provided a key to Stubbins' mysterious but apparendy rigorous "operas without words."

Kevin and I went night after night to see Stubbins' current play. Usually we smoked some marijuana, occasionaUy sprayed with a hallucinogen or a horse tranquilizer—we scarcely knew which—and once we ran into Brewster, one of the WTiite Russians, with his wife co\ered in brilliants. Kevin and I, in our T-shirts and leather jackets and dirty, ripped jeans, clung to each odier like two litde kids lost in the adult world. We giggled at everything Brewster said and I was incapable of responding conventionally to Brewster's hard-edged, insincere show of seeming "interested." I laughed and laughed, certain that Brewster himself was in on the joke and playing a role just to amuse me. I could imagine what Brewster and Mufiy must have thought, for even though Fd fucked Brewster years ago, before his marriage, now I'd gone from what he would have called "decadent" (i.e., stylishly, mysteriously bisexual) to "raunchy" (poor, obvious and no longer redeemable).

Stubbins was able to attract Village gays as well as Italian art dealers in their dark glasses, baggy, expensive suits and grey-striped coUarless linen shirts. There was even a sprinkling of uptown millionaire collectors in search of new thrills. Ten years later in New York le beau monde would reject all other groups and would become as narrowly exclusive as their parents had been, but in the aftermath of the 1960s they'd momentarily lost their confidence and thought the way to be chic was to be promiscuously social and arty.

Kevin was thrilled one night when he picked up a dark, muscular, nappy-haired guy who danced in Stubbins' plays (he simply walked, in place, or backwards and forwards, for hours on end). At last Kevin had met someone who was intimate with the great Stubbins— how intimate Kevin learned only during the long, druggy, talky night when Maurice confided he lived with Stubbins and had been his lover for years.

Kevin gave Maurice his phone number on a scrap of paper and half-hoped he'd hear from him. Aiier two weeks without a call, Kevin, disappointed, said, "Gee, I thought the sex was great and we sure had a lot in common, but mv mistake was that I made him dork me. Have you ever

noticed you only get a call-back when you've done the dorking? No, I'm serious, it's absolutely a rule." (Call-hack was the show-biz word for a second audition.) Kevin also worried that Maurice might have looked down on him for being the type of actor who was still going to "cattle calls" (open auditions) for Broadway plays. On the other hand, Maurice had told Kevin that Stubbins didn't despise the commercial theater but had just found that everything on stage happened too fast. "Everyone was speeding around in such a brisk, artificial way, making entrances and exits like birds in an overwound cuckoo clock, and Stubbins thought any five minutes would be good if it was slowed down to five hours." In a Stubbins play a woman could take an hour to peel and slice an onion.

The morning after their one night together, Kevin had told Maurice over our noon breakfast things I hadn't known. We were seated around a litde brown metal table painted to look like knotty pine. The double sink was from the thirties and the huge stove and the fridge, wdth its rounded edges and big chrome handle, from the fifties. We'd scrubbed them to a gleaming white, and just painted the walls a shiny white all over. One night on speed we'd washed the windows with vinegar and newspapers, but the bright sunlight showed the unreachable smudge where the upper and lower sash panes overlapped. Kevin was saying, "I lived in London for two years. I told everyone later that I was studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, but actually I just clapped on a cowboy hat and hustled. The English are so weird. In England a typical John is a married bank clerk who arrives wdth a briefcase in which he has a wooden cucumber he's whitded and painted green for a month every evening in his basement shop and now he wants one to insert it into his not altogether clean posterior—they know nothing about douching."

"I think I'd like that," Maurice said, unsmiling, coolly exhaling smoke. "I'm into shit— not to eat, mind you, but. . . otherwise."

I wondered if Kevin's coldness, his degrading comebacks and snappy putdowns, might not be a remnant of his days on the street in Piccadilly. It was one thing to turn a paying trick from time to time in New York and another to hustle for a living in another country, to be exposed, day after day, to the resentment and stinginess of rogue customers.

We began to receive dirty phone calls from someone who identified himself only as "Jimmy." I would have hung up on him out of unreflecting prissiness but Kevin grabbed the receiver and shooed me out of the room, miming that I was to close the door behind me. (His miming, unlike everyone else's, was completely understandable.) Ten minutes later he

The Farewell Symphony

strolled into my study, where I was dictating the crossing of the Delaware to my masochistic, tap-dancing secretary. "Excuse me for interrupting," he said, "but that guy on the phone had a very sick and admirable imagination. He threatened me with the most refined tortures and ended up chaining me to a tree in the Rambles and strangling me with my own knickers. Verbally, of course."

William smiled with that Mona Lisa smile variously attributed to the joys of pregnancy, the desire to conceal bad teeth or fatuous self-regard (was the Mona Lisa Leonardo's self-portrait?). In William's case (was it Mona Lisa's?), he was smiling with that mixture of slyness and shame with which a masochist recognizes a fellow sufferer Even among otherwise sophisticated homosexuals a committed masochist must conceal his penchant. No one truly understands him, although friends are vulgarly curious or tell stupid jokes ("Beat me," said the masochist. "No," said the sadist)—jokes that reveal no understanding at all of the subde reciprocity between master and slave.

Something about William's smile—the guilty, dawning, What-Woman-Wouldn't smile of complicity—excited me. Kevin left, I dictated a bit more and stood uncomfortably close behind William. He looked up at me with harassed, humorous eyes.

"Wanna go in die bedroom?" I said.

After that, every afternoon we'd continue our dictation in the bedroom for half an hour William's body was thin, his skin flaky, his hair long, fme and dry, but he was also supple and seraphically obliging. His face was pointy as stifily beaten egg whites—a point for a nose, a pointy chin, darting, funny eyes with long, stiff eyelashes. They bubbled with sparkling wit and a knowledge as sophisticated as it was per\'erse. I felt a complete control over him that I didn't think about \eiy much and certainly didn't question. After Fd come in his ass (William didn't usually even touch himself or get hard), he'd smile the rueful, indulgent smile of the older woman humoring her vigorous young lover

William had a lover he'd been widi for years and I knew from a mutual friend that if with me he was awed and mosdy tongue-ded, with his own crowd he was a chatterbox and hysterically funny. The thought that he had a whole life apart from me only reassured me. I didn't have to take any responsibility for him. He admitted to me that he drank too much, given that he was diabetic, and twice in the last year he'd passed out. He could rarely get it up and explained, blushing, that as a diabetic he was in-termittendy impotent.

Judging from our sessions, he was always impotent, although it occurred to me that he wanted to please me but didn't desire me and this lack of desire was the real reason he couldn't get an erection. I didn't mind. I even took a secret pleasure in the thought that the only stiff dick in the room was mine. I'd throw his legs back and hook them over my shoulders and fuck him with less performance anxiety and more genuine enjoyment than I'd ever known before. So litde was at stake emotionally for me that I could relax enough to feel the sensations flowing through me. Sometimes after I'd come, while I was still in him, he'd jerk off modestly, hygienically, with a half-hard penis. If I had made the least grunt signaling impatience, I'm sure he would have waived his climax as an unnecessary luxury.

I felt a nice, simple affection for him, the sort of feeling a married man must have for an ugly mistress, one he keeps assuring is "the best pal a fellow ever had." Our mutual friend told me that William was in love with me, but 1 didn't want to hear too much about that. Usually I was the ironic, wounded, quick-to-forgive party (observant, mocking, grateful), a Merry Andrew of thoughts and half-thoughts, but with William I was the bluff, nice guy who just wants a hug and a squirt and who taps his partner woodenly on the back at parting and says, "See you sometime"—the very words my father would murmur, cigar clenched in his teeth, when he'd rush us at the last possible second to Union Station and put my sister and me on the train to go home to our mother.