The Farewell Symphony by Edmund White Read Free Book Online Page B

I could authenticate my gay readers if not myself. Of course I had no such readers. I was an unpublished writer.
    Now my strategy was being directed against Sean. He didn't think he was queer and he hated the idea that he might end up in the arms of a man; I was trving to convince him that human contact is flexible, more a dance partner's quick hoist or slipknot than the Stone Guest's funereal embrace. (Today of course I see that all these youthful fears of how one ends up are wide of the mark since the only end, as the Buddha foresaw, is old age, sickness and death, and on that compost heap strange, unexpected new flowers breed.)
    Nothing in all the world—not even old age, sickness and death—is as painful as one-sided love, which is a foreglimpse of the other three. Love was the great bitter school for me, since it gave me something the minute it took it away. It seemed to give me the man I'd longed for over so many years. Back in boarding school I'd stared through the steam at raucous carefree jocks laughing and snapping towels at each other in the locker room (I was the face on the towel). Hugging my books to my chest I would scutde drUy across the quadrangle and watch them clown and hit and hug each other. In a dorm room one cute litde guy would bounce on his big friend's lap and call out at the top of his lungs for the benefit of the other guys standing around, smiling, "Hey, this feels great, we should get mar-

    ried, how about dropping Sally, Rich, how about it? Drop the bitch and marry me" —a huge laugh, all that warm young flesh with the peach fuzz, the smells of sperm and Clearasil and cheap colog:ie and tuna fish for lunch and fresh sweat in hairless armpits, a tenderly veined and muscled hand, modeled by Michelangelo not in marble this time but terra cotta, red from the eternal cold of a Spartan, unheated school, this big, elegant hand emerging out of a sleeve of white linen and good tweed all those powerful legs and soccer-playing butts in unprcsscd khakis, cufiless because they'd been let out as the boy grew, those perfect white teeth, sun-bleached eyebrows, small ears, baggy but secredy tumescent crotches, high-arched feet in thick white socks pulled halfway out of penny loafers under a scufTed wood desk, the ragged nails, the bobbing Adam's apples, and in the shower the hairless chest and twin oak-brown aureoles, one round as the earth, the other (because the hand is stretched high) elliptical as Saturn, the boy's lips a gash of garnet in a face drained dangerously pale by rugby practice, the knees black with a mud that under the flowing water snakes across the tile floor in the absinthe-green winter sunlight, cast by high windows on shoulders too wide for a torso all ribs and flat muscles, applied by the painter with just a few deft dabs of the palette knife. . . . Now a young man like one of my locker-room gods had been given to me but this one I was free to kneel before and worship. With aU those earlier deities I had had to pretend I didn't see through their disguise, I had been forced to act as though I believed they were human beings like me (I worshipped them alone, in secret, and with just one hand, the other molding the air into the divine form), but now the thick, knobby godhead itself was plunged into my mouth, not just some tasteless wafer of the imagination.
    I never lived on familiar terms with Sean, doubdess the reason I can still refer to him as a god even though I watched him crack up before my very eyes. He wept, producing long gleaming sheets of spit and snot that clung to his face and hands like a placenta or a pupa's chrysalis, except his metamorphosis was not toward something lighter and more beautiful, but heavier, bloated with medicine, stunned with grief He spent six weeks on the psycho ward at St. Vincent's Hospital in New York, then was shipped home, fat and bewildered, to relatives in Minnesota. In my mind he'd been the powerful young man who'd rejected me and I'd wept many