The Farewell Symphony by Edmund White

Author:Edmund White
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Literary, Gay men, Fiction
ISBN: 9780307764478
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1998-09-02T04:00:00+00:00

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

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