The Farewell Symphony (66 page)

I LEARNED that Scau had died. His lover wrote me to say he'd lived long enough to read what I'd written about him in my Stonewall novel. I'd always thought that I'd get back to Sean, as though he were a letter, an important letter, I'd failed to answer. Now my correspondent was dead, someone who, because I hadn't watched him age, remained eternally young in my mind. Once, in the 1990s, when I'd given a reading in New York, I saw someone who resembled an old fuck-buddy from the sixties. I rushed up to this guy in his twenties, relieved to see he was alive—but of course it wasn't the same person, how could thirty years have gone by, leaving him untouched? In the same way, if I'd seen Sean at fifty—or seventy, since AIDS would have added twenty more years—I could never have recognized him. When I wrote back to his lover, asking for more details, he didn't respond. As a result, Sean remains for me a booming voice, wincing blue eyes, a long, smooth swimmer's body, courdy manners, a love of literature in every language, a cock that twisted to one side when erect, a Midwesterner's guileless confidence in authority, a desire to laugh and have fun not matched by any genuine merriment. . . .

I'd once told him that I thought in a masterpiece the whole network of impulses could be isolated in any paragraph throughout the book, a monad containing all the important features in miniature; Sean developed this notion into a dissertation. Ironically, for me he was the monad, the person whom I'd loved the most intensely and who awakened in me if not the widest, then the deepest feelings. I told him that in a medieval shield when the whole coat of arms was repeated in a miniature inset, this device was said to be placed there en abime; Sean was the abyss into which all of me had fallen.

The Farewell Symphony

Now I understood why Eddie had invented his dress-up party version of the afterlife with its amusing social introductions across the centuries and its continuing re\-elations. It was a normal way of keeping the dead alive. I remember that a graduate student researching a thesis inter\iewed Eddie about Auden and finally asked, rather peevishly, "Did Mr. Auden say that before or after he died?" But e\en for Eddie the Ouija board became a drawing room game that turned sour. Before his own death from AIDS just last year, a depressed, emaciated Eddie told me that he'd followed the board's instructions to go to a certain cafe in Athens where he'd be sure to meet the fat Indian girl who was Joshua's reincarnation, but the child didn't come. Eddie waited until t\vo in the morning, when the cafe closed, but the child never showed up.

Nevertheless, a death without rituals is intolerable. Most people would do weU to stick with church ceremonies, which are noble and fuU-throated in the right well tested places and even dull and distracting elsewhere in just the desiied degree, but Eddie had a solemn, awed, fluent way of celebrating the great, hard moments. He swirled Joshua's ashes from a gondola into the Grand Canal while reciting a poem he'd written for the occasion.

I went back to the palazzo where Joshua had lived. The principessa had asked me to stop by. She led me up to the attic, which looked like the reversed hull of a war ship, all ancient, rough-hewia beams. There, in that maritime desolation, stood a litde pile of Joshua's things—dirty white trousers, sunscreen, the typewriter his computer had replaced, an old copy of a Beaux-Arts magazine, an extra fan. The principessa behaved as though it was, well, even legally necessary that I do something with these pathetic possessions, Joshua's half-hearted pledge that he'd come back if not the next summer then the one after

I shrugged, even laughed a bit rudely, took the things away (did she think they were infected with the "Ides" virus?), and dumped them in the trash just outside the door Joshua's spirit was no more in these things than was our \irus; his spirit was lodged in Eddie's pages, in his ow-n, even, I hoped, in mine.

A Note About the Author

Edmund White was born in Cincinnati in 1940. He has

taught liteiattirc and creative writing at Yale,Johns

Hopkins, New York University; and Columbia, was a full

professor of English at Brown, and ser\ed as executive

director of the New York Itistitute for the Humanities.

In 1983 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and tlie

award in literature from the American Academy and

Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1993 he was made a

Chevalier de I'Ordre des Arts et Lettres. For his book

Genet: A Biography (1994), he was awarded the National

Book Critics Circle Award and the Lambda Literary