To add to a retrospective sense of chagrin, one day I ran into Glen, a dark poet with a scarred face and beautiful hands who had written a thesis on a Byzantine saint. We had a sandwich together and Glen said, "How could you ever break up with that sexy Fox?"
"I didn't know you knew him?"
"Know him? Why, I used to hire him as a master. Wasn't his ad sexy?"
I didn't know he had an ad or worked as a prostitute but I vamped for time. "Yeah, it sure was. ..."
"Fd call him up all the time on his special phone and if you weren't there he'd let me come over and lick his toilet bowl clean. Or he'd stuff my mouth with his dirty socks and put me in the bathtub with a dildo and some poppers and piss on me. Once he even gave me an enema."
"Yeah, he was great at that. How much did he charge?"
"Just fifty bucks. After all, his ad said, 'Cheap: A Bargain Top!' Later, when I found out how literary and funny he was, we became friends. But I still hire him from time to time. I think Fm his only customer now—and of course William, that old man he shits on. Once Fox called me up—I think you were out of town—" here he went into a fit of giggles "—and asked me if Fd shit on William with him. We took acid that must have had a lot of speed in it, we couldn't get it up, but we necked and necked on the bed while William ate out our asses. Later we stood over him—he was in the bathtub and we were standing, our feet balancing on the sides of the tub, and Fox actually produced one, small but creditable etron —"
"What does that mean?"
"It's French for turd. William came, of course, and I thought that now he'd regained his senses he'd be horrified by all this evidence of his twisted mind so I rapidly hosed away the dirty litde clue, but he said to me, in an angry snit, 'That's wy job,' as though Fd greedily deprived him of the best part, as though I were a rival shit eater."
Once I saw Fox and his new lover drinking at Julius's. They didn't see me and from my dark corner I watched Fox haranguing the curator. I couldn't hear them but I could easily imagine what Fox was saying. Although I was
The Farewell Symphony
pleased I was no longer living with the Grand Inquisitor I also felt oddly weighdess. Now no one cared about the exact degree of treachery in my soul, the exact shade of perfidy in my heart.
M Y DOCTOR, who'd gained thirty pounds since he'd stopped smoking, seemed grouchily malevolent. He barked at me, "You have chronic bronchitis and it's never going to get better as long as you're still smoking—how many packs do you smoke?"
"Three. Sometimes four if I'm feeling ambitious."
"Well, you stink from it. Your face is grey, your fingers yeUow. Here's the number for an eight-week behavioral conditioning program. Go to it or you'll be dead from lung cancer in five years."
"Oh well," I joked, "what about this new gay cancer? It will get me first."
"Amoebas!" he shouted. "It's all caused by amoebas." Indeed, my doctor had become obsessed by amoebas. When I showed him what was obviously a syphilitic chancre on the head of my penis he wanted to treat it with Flagyl, a highly toxic amoeba medicine that had the additional disadvantage of making the patient ill if he drank alcohol. Finally I convinced the doctor to test and treat me for syphilis; I spent the night shivering and sweating, the usual reaction of primary syphilis to antibiotics.
I stopped smoking and I, too, gained twenty-five pounds. I now looked like my father; I didn't have his final blue, skeletal mask but the flushed, fleshy face he'd presented throughout my childhood and adolescence. I trimmed my hair and shaved off my mustache, the better to own up to the full horror of this big pudding I'd become.
I fell gendy, domestically in love with Ned. He wasn't jealous as Fox had been. In fact I don't think he even fancied me, though he loved being with me. Nor was he jealous of my new-found success. He had no desire to be a writer He talked vaguely of being an architect or interior designer some day, but in the meanwhile he was happy to let me support him, to go out to the bars every night, usually on his own, to seduce the handsome men the city was filled with. He watched too much television for my taste, dressed too young to look convincing, argued with his family too peevishly, but when he was "lit," that is, drunk, he really did appear to be illuminated with a crazy happiness. He had a great capacity for joy, and it was my pleasure to bring it to him as often as possible.
He was well brought up and had gone to an expensive school for rich dumbbells. There he'd met two girls with whom he'd while away the afternoon eating unbuttered, unsalted popcorn (their diet food) while watching the soaps and discussing relatives or men. Ned would complain about his former employers and the girls would grumble about their dates.
Ned didn't mind that I'd gained so much weight. He apparendy liked men for their money and power and I was beginning to have a bit of both. He'd even read one of my books at university in his "Gay Lit" class (his parents thought he was studying Gaelic). His erotic interest, when it wasn't distracted by power, was almost exclusively invested in black men, but he'd turn red with anger if I'd say that in so many words. "That's so demeaning to put it that way," he'd shout.
"Why? Face it. Everything else being equal, you're more attracted to blacks than whites."
"Nothing ever is equal. It's a question of individuals, not groups. You make me sound like a . . . fetishist." In fact, his "type" eventually stabilized. He was attracted to black preppies, who brought together the twin themes of success and color. He was also heavily invested in the idea of playing the pun aeternus and more black men than white were willing to treat him as Huck, Honey.
From the very beginning Ned and I were more friends than lovers but our friendship was a serious business. We didn't much mind if one or the other of us slept around as long as the object of attraction was constantly changing. We slept in the same bed two or three nights a week and we called each other constandy.
After we'd known each other six months I asked him to move in. I was horrified when I came home and discovered my litde apartment entirely filled with twenty big blue garment bags.
"Ned, what's in all these bags?"
"Clothes."
"Are you wearing all those clothes currendy?"
"What do you mean?" he squeaked in his high voice, driven higher by anxiety and irritation.
"We're going to go through your clothes, one by one. I'm going to hold up each item and you're going to swear to me on a stack of Bibles that you've worn it at least once in the preceding year."
"No, no, I won't work like that," he said, as though I were offering him a job. "You go away and I'll. . . consolidate things."
The Farewell Symphony
"Remember," I said, heading out the door, "everything must fit into that closet."
The novel I'd written about my boyhood was pubHshed in 1982. Ned and I were staying on Martha's Vineyard when the first copy arrived. We'd rented a room and a rickety balcony in a big, underfur-nished house in West Chop, or was it East Egg? Certainly the golden-haired tennis players who lived all around us were worthy of Gatsby Ned had gone to prep school with Jennifer, the young woman who had inherited this fabulous ruin from her parents. They couldn't pay the taxes or upkeep on this twenty-room pile, which had been built by their grandparents, so they handed it over to the kids, who rented out rooms to their friends. Anyway, the parents were divorced and feckless; the father hired out his saUboat and services in the Bahamas, the mother sold popcorn-making machines in Catalonia.
In the double drawing room downstairs only one chair stood like a crippled sentinel, a stack of books replacing a missing leg. A row of coat hooks by the front door reminded us that the house had been run, unsuccessfully, as a girls' school in the 1950s. The grim, ijistitutional kitchen and the giant pots and kettles were other reminders, although the roomers now never ate together. Each had a half or a quarter shelf in the fridge, clearly labeled by name, and not even the most basic things—sugar, flour, salt—were bought in common, and the refrigerator stank from all the half pints of spoiling coffee milk.
Since our fellow lodgers were all New England aristocrats, their parents thought they should work every summer. In Europe kids of this class would have island-hopped in Greece or lounged around the pool at the family bastide near Nimes, but here they mowed lawns for five dollars an hour or worked at the local dress shop and drank themselves into a stupor every night (just as their parents were doing over on Nantucket). At night we'd find them beached halfway up the steps, often in a pool of vomit. They kept a tank of oxygen beside their beds and came to breakfast in dark glasses. They were nice enough to us as a gay couple; alcoholism is a leveler. We'd sit on our rickety balcony, look down at the abandoned Volkswagen on the lawn; a pine tree was sprouting up through it. At dusk we'd watch the cold fog roll in from the ocean. We'd drink our boiler-makers and invite other kids to join us. They were all young, blond, lithe; drink had not yet made their faces pufiy.
The son of" the nouve.au pauvre family of proprietors lived up under the eaves with a Brazilian girlfriend. We'd go up there and smoke opium, lie back on overstuifed cushions and look out the dormer windows at clouds. We'd confide without much urgency thoughts that collected like condensation and formed, slowly, irregularly, into one drop of language after another
Ned and I would go jogging. Neither of us was in very good shape and every two hundred yards or so we'd have to walk for a few minutes before falling back into a trot. We'd run past old summer cottages in need of a paint job that made me think of my father's house on a small, cold, deep Michigan lake. My father's mother, isolated back in Merkle, Texas, had read an article about Christian Science and converted to it, pardy out of snobbism, since like the Scientists she believed there was something in-herendy tacky about evil, as though the best families would be spared its incursions, and pardy out of wishful thinking, since she longed to triumph over her worsening bouts of mental illness through the will alone.
In the first enthusiasm of her new-found faith she convinced my father to drive her to the Mother Church in Boston. Afterwards through a Scientist they gained entrance into an exclusive New England resort for a week-long holiday. No one spoke to them for the first five days, until at last an old Brahmin approached the Texans and said, "I told everyone I wanted to meet you even though you shout while playing tennis."
This was that kind of resort. The grandfather of the nouveau pauvre hosts received us in his drafty house with the threadbare Persian rugs and terra-cotta Tang horses dipped into green and white glazes. He said, "You teach? I taught at Columbia but retired when the school became overrun with—well, you know."
"No. I don't."
"Those small, dark, avid people." When I looked blank he added, "Jews."
As a boy I'd always wanted to win acceptance from these very people, but my mother was a divorcee, my father a hermit and misanthrope. Whereas I'd wanted to attend Groton and Princeton I'd ended up staying in the Midwest among the children of the automobility. Now, here at last I'd penetrated, thanks to Ned, into the inner sanctum of these Brahmin families and I saw their conversation was as poindess and drifting, their prejudices as deep dyed, their values as fundamentally mercantile as those of people anywhere else in America.
Whereas I'd once imagined I'd chosen a world of artists and homosexuals by default, I now saw I didn't want to belong to the mandarinate even
The Farewell Symphony
if I could. We paid a weekly visit to a famous old writer who lived close to the harbor. His eternally youthful wife went off to play tennis or retreated into her office to manage a surprisingly effective watchdog organization designed to protect the rights—and the lives—of endangered writers all over the world, while the great man himself as heavy a drinker as I, slowly became genteely incoherent as the day wore on.
When we returned to New York I stopped drinking forever one day after a night when I'd become so drunk I couldn't climb the ladder to my loft bed. Ned was shocked and angry at my decision. "How dare you make a unilateral decision about something that obviously affects us both! Some of our best times together have been drinking."
"I know, but it's something I just can't moderate. You can live next to six half-empty botdes of booze and offer your guests a choice from your bar, but you saw how nervous it made me to have those botdes brought into the house. Buder is right—I'm a consumer of booze, food, money, men. I live off the fat of the land."
Ned asked me if I was going to join AA and I said only if I couldn't stay sober on my own. My AA friends chided me for not joining up; they said I was on a "dry drunk." But my mother had stopped on her own— or, as she would say, because she'd promised God. Even if I didn't go to AA, I was armed with its principles. I decided to start living one day at at a time.
Ned and I moved to Paris, we thought for just a year; that move only dramatized the slow withdrawal I was undergoing. Since I no longer smoked or drank I never went to bars in France. Because Ned and I shared the same bed, even if chastely, I would never have dreamed of entertaining a boyfriend at our apartment; our sexless love, so sustaining to us, was brittle and easily cracked. Back in the 1970s along with the rest of my generation in New York I had hated couples; Buder and Philip even talked half-jokingly about starting a support group for the promiscuously challenged. The couple was deemed dowdy, mid-American, middle-class, mittel-stupid, and people apologized for their fidelity to a lover as though it were a reprehensible eccentricity. Gay couples, we decided, were shamelessly imitating heterosexual marriage, which itself seemed a primitive institution based on the exchange of cows for cowrie shells and clitoridec-tomies. Buder claimed it was difficult to socialize in the gay world if one was half of a couple.
Now most of the people who'd promulgated such ideas were dead or dying and they'd been replaced by a new gay generation that blamed their threatened health on the randiness of their elders. Gay guys now dated several times before going to bed, and that's just where they went— backrooms and baths had been shut down. Now people took workshops in safe sex, saw pornographic films in which the actors sheathed themselves before penetration and in which no poisoned sperm was swallowed. Couples had themselves tested repeatedly and even so took no risks.