Read Online The Farewell Symphony by Edmund White - Free Book Online
Authors: Edmund White
Ads: Link
came bounding in and licked our milky stomachs clean. Today even a drop of sperm is rich with death, a mortal culture, but then porno magazines referred to it as a "soothing cream" and we liked to taste it, swallow it, smell it, rub it over our cheeks and murmur with a smile, "The fountain of youth." If someone had a big cock we called it "The Dick of Death," an expression no one would dare use today.
Adult men—all those aggressive, out-of-shape, heavy-breathing heterosexuals—might carry syphilis or at least gonorrhea in their bodies, we thought, contracted through their drunken, half-hard thrusting, the toil of making money, war, babies. But we were big, bucolic gay boys, and our brief transactions were redolent of summer camp, irresponsible as a groan heard in a shadowy forest or as transfiguring as the mystery of light glowing on a lake glimpsed through a rood-screen of leaves. We were engaged in a game of touch-tag far removed from the possibility of giving— or taking—a life.
Rod had a party at the end of every month, to which he invited the tricks he'd turned during the preceding thirty days. He threw all their numbers in a fishbowl and plucked them out and rang them up every fourth Saturday. Often they didn't remember him or he them. It was his benevolent idea of society, which, as so often happens in America, was mLxed up with an inclination toward charity. All thirty guys would stand around his small apartment and scowl at each other, appalled to observe the range of Rod's erotic taste: black and white, short and tall, smooth-skinned and hairy, young and not quite so young, butch and twinky.
People kept entering. The front door led direcdy into the kitchen with its ratty Hnoleum floor and the tub in the center of the room covered for the moment with a board that served as a table to hold all the bottles of rot-gut wine the guests had brought. I'd offered a straw-covered quart of Chianti; my year of post-hepatitis sobriety had recendy come to a reeling, jubilatory end.
Just beyond was the small living room, nearly filled by the bed when it
The Farewell Symphony
was opened out though now it had contracted back into itself, a couch on which were seated a handsome young man and woman murmuring to each other in French. He had a red scarf tied around his left biceps, a romantic touch at odds with his glinting granny glasses. She wore nylons sparkling with silver chips. She was Black: her features small as an Ethiopian's.
The only other woman present was Penelope, Rod's roommate, a dainty little thing tottering by on very high heels and swaddled in a tight miniskirt. Her top had trailing lace sleeves. She w^as consoling Rod for some slight he'd suffered. Her tone was tinged with irony but the words were sympathetic, the compromise of a woman embarrassed to baby her lover in front of strangers and who tries to suggest this humiliating necessity may be just a game.
I swayed, bemused and a bit drunk, before the French couple. "Excuse me, do you speak English?"
"Of course," the young man said, "we're .\mericans. We just speak French to each other because that's what we're studying." He had a thin, Errol Flynn mustache, not the botde brush popular then, and a long, rangy body, intelligent eyes, a languid manner and a studied smile. Everything about him was studied, the work of someone who'd been friendless and unloved as a child and who now, with the zeal of a good student, has set about mastering all the social skills. I recognized the game; I was playing it, though I suspected Fd started my lessons at an earlier age.
"Are you a Southerner?" I asked.
"A Southerner?" he repeated, as though examining something dubious at the end of a fork.
His wife was nodding \'igorously and saving in a barely audible aside, "He certainly seems to have diagnosed the case. . . ."
We introduced ourselves. He was Buder, she Lynne. The word "brilliant" kept igniting the light box of my head—her brilliant smile, his brilliant
Adult men—all those aggressive, out-of-shape, heavy-breathing heterosexuals—might carry syphilis or at least gonorrhea in their bodies, we thought, contracted through their drunken, half-hard thrusting, the toil of making money, war, babies. But we were big, bucolic gay boys, and our brief transactions were redolent of summer camp, irresponsible as a groan heard in a shadowy forest or as transfiguring as the mystery of light glowing on a lake glimpsed through a rood-screen of leaves. We were engaged in a game of touch-tag far removed from the possibility of giving— or taking—a life.
Rod had a party at the end of every month, to which he invited the tricks he'd turned during the preceding thirty days. He threw all their numbers in a fishbowl and plucked them out and rang them up every fourth Saturday. Often they didn't remember him or he them. It was his benevolent idea of society, which, as so often happens in America, was mLxed up with an inclination toward charity. All thirty guys would stand around his small apartment and scowl at each other, appalled to observe the range of Rod's erotic taste: black and white, short and tall, smooth-skinned and hairy, young and not quite so young, butch and twinky.
People kept entering. The front door led direcdy into the kitchen with its ratty Hnoleum floor and the tub in the center of the room covered for the moment with a board that served as a table to hold all the bottles of rot-gut wine the guests had brought. I'd offered a straw-covered quart of Chianti; my year of post-hepatitis sobriety had recendy come to a reeling, jubilatory end.
Just beyond was the small living room, nearly filled by the bed when it
The Farewell Symphony
was opened out though now it had contracted back into itself, a couch on which were seated a handsome young man and woman murmuring to each other in French. He had a red scarf tied around his left biceps, a romantic touch at odds with his glinting granny glasses. She wore nylons sparkling with silver chips. She was Black: her features small as an Ethiopian's.
The only other woman present was Penelope, Rod's roommate, a dainty little thing tottering by on very high heels and swaddled in a tight miniskirt. Her top had trailing lace sleeves. She w^as consoling Rod for some slight he'd suffered. Her tone was tinged with irony but the words were sympathetic, the compromise of a woman embarrassed to baby her lover in front of strangers and who tries to suggest this humiliating necessity may be just a game.
I swayed, bemused and a bit drunk, before the French couple. "Excuse me, do you speak English?"
"Of course," the young man said, "we're .\mericans. We just speak French to each other because that's what we're studying." He had a thin, Errol Flynn mustache, not the botde brush popular then, and a long, rangy body, intelligent eyes, a languid manner and a studied smile. Everything about him was studied, the work of someone who'd been friendless and unloved as a child and who now, with the zeal of a good student, has set about mastering all the social skills. I recognized the game; I was playing it, though I suspected Fd started my lessons at an earlier age.
"Are you a Southerner?" I asked.
"A Southerner?" he repeated, as though examining something dubious at the end of a fork.
His wife was nodding \'igorously and saving in a barely audible aside, "He certainly seems to have diagnosed the case. . . ."
We introduced ourselves. He was Buder, she Lynne. The word "brilliant" kept igniting the light box of my head—her brilliant smile, his brilliant
Similar Books
