The Farewell Symphony Read Free

dangling like a flapper's to a point below the knees. The face was undeniably worldly (after all, the stretched-out ears revealed that the saintly Gautama had once been Siddhartha, a prince who'd worn heavily jeweled earrings), but it was sacred, if to be sacred meant to be Nothing at all. Of course the sculpture wasn't there or was in storage and I wandered, jaundiced, through acres of bad blue and white Ching pottery.
    When I flew back to New York, I was the color of old teeth and so thin and indifferent that everyone at the airport spoke to me in French. My doctor in New York hospitalized me. After eleven days he released me and I went home. He prescribed two months of bed rest, six months of sexual abstinence, a year without drink.
    At that time I was living alone in the West Village in a ground-floor apartment. Before my illness I'd regarded it as just a pit stop where I'd shower, eat and change before rushing out again into the night to one of the nearby bars. If I came home at two or three in the morning without a trick my heart would pound. I was that afraid of being alone.
    But now hepatitis restored me to my adolescence. My gym-built body dwindled back into boyish slimness, my ears stood out from my head. Forbidden sex and drink, I spent whole days and nights alone. I shuffled from the Pullman kitchen to the kidney-shaped couch, took several naps a day, received friends who arrived with groceries or laundry, let a book fall from my hands, contemplated walking to the corner store, listened to the radio. The couch and two armchairs my mother had given me from our old apartment; the bed I'd bought for fifty dollars from the warehouse. Until

    The Farewell Symphony
    now I'd never felt at home here. The floor had seemed raked to tip the action up at an angle so as to be readily visible to the audience. As the subway rattled I felt the walls might tumble, leaving me naked in a spotlit shower or asleep in the shadowy arms of yet another lover. I read everything, surrounded by the mildly bleak coziness of my couch, comforter, tea and toast. The walls began to thicken, the place to seem authentic. Until now the volumes of Proust had always been like an invitation to a party I was about to attend, but now that I'd gone to Paris and suffered social disgrace, I read Reinembrance of Things Past as a history of past lives rather than as a map leading to my future.
    I was depressed, no doubt mainly because my liver was functioning badly but also partially because my curtailed and disastrous holiday and the long stay at home had broken my usual pace. As my face slowly whitened and my feces slowly darkened, I stood back and evaluated what I'd accomplished in almost thirty years of life.
    I'd written five novels, but no one wanted to publish them, and four full-length plays, but no one wanted to perform them. I kept on vwiting almost every night in my office. Fd leave with the other employees at the end of the work day, eat a solitary dinner, then come back to the deserted thirty-second floor and write while looking out on the glittering city of empty skyscrapers. (Now that I make my living as a writer I'm glad those novels were never published.)
    I'd been to two psychiatrists for several years each but I'd neither gone straight, as I'd hoped, nor accepted my homosexuality, as I'd feared. My job I despised. I had dozens of friends whom I cultivated with tireless assiduity as though they were temperamental home appliances, essential for a civilized existence but always in danger of going on the blink. I listened for hours to their problems, which I begged them to confide, but never mentioned my own, an omission they seldom recognized. I kept thinking I was storing up credit to draw on later.
    I'd had sex with my first thousand men but that was a statistic that might sound like an achievement more to someone else than to me. Sex is an appetite that must be fed every day; even a thousand past banquets cannot nourish the body tomorrow. I