The Farewell Symphony Read Free Page A

was longing lor the thousand and first blight whom at last I would marry and with whom I'd live ever after in the strictest fidelity. If marriage was my conscious but still deferred goal, I was less ready to admit I was always on the lookout for adventure.
    Yet when I'd been healthy there had been nothing more exciting than to go to the gym after work on the nights I didn't stay late at the office. At

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    the gym I'd perform movements in machines designed to stretch and swell muscles someone's hands would later smooth and relax. I'd shower, then hurry home to change into a pair of beltless tight black jeans, the fly half unbuttoned, a loose grey T-shirt and an old leather bomber jacket. Around ten I'd head out into the winter night. I could feel something young and vital pulsing in me, an unfocused exhilaration, as I walked through the slanting snow, my bare hands shoved into my pockets, for if the leather jacket was a concession to the cold, I was ready at a moment's notice to shed it to reveal my summer body- -my ridged stomach beating a slow tam-tam against the T-shirt. If at an intersection I'd see someone similarly dressed and mustachioed accelerating his pace as he came down a side street, I'd stare at him in the most impenitent way. Whether I might want him was a secondary question. For the moment all I needed to do was to attract him. That was what mattered.
    Sometimes I'd heard people refer to the pleasures of the chase; they eluded me. The idea of playing hard to get struck me as inexplicably perverse in a world where gestures misfired, voices gave out and everyone was shy. Heterosexuals, who revolved in a closed circle of friends under the brilliant scrutiny of their parents, who turned like the gleaming horses in an indoors training stable, could be sure their slightest signal would be observed. They could afford the luxury of elusiveness. They were accompanied by a reputation—for money, charm, intelligence, achievement, heritage or for poverty, boorishness, idiocy, idleness and obscurity (even the obscurity, paradoxically, was sure to be registered, even pedigreed). But all of my anonymous males—easily spooked, at once pursuer and pursued, stripped of their histories and reduced to the cruel materialism of a face and body and the harsh verity of a first impression—could not risk feigning rejection. Everyone had to be unambiguous, as glowing as a peacock's tail and as towering as a stag's anders, secondary sexual characteristics evolved on the principle that more is more, even if the lyrebird's seductive tail so encumbers him he can no longer escape a predator.
    Our immense bodies, nourished at such expense and pumped up so laboriously, were difficult to clothe and awkward to maneuver. In coat and tie we looked either fat or menacing, like Bar Mitzvah boys or nightclub bouncers rather than promising young executives. I became so muscle-bound I could no longer scratch my back or peel off a T-shirt. Gay boys who just ten years earlier had hissed together over cocktails, skinny in black pegged pants and cologne-soaked pale blue angora sweaters, and had disputed Callas vs. Tebaldi now lumbered like innocent

    The Farewell Symphony
    kindergartners in snowsuits of rosy, inflated flesh from a solitaiy workout to a lonely hour of feeding before toddling off to an athlete's chaste sleep in a narrow bed.
    One guy at our gym had become so huge from downing quarts of milk and dozens of rotisserie chickens that he had to be handed up the stairs by his brother, who would lift one leg after another for him as he came back up for yet another four-hour workout. The brother was as self-effacing and solicitous as the boy who leads the blind Samson into the temple. We all raised eyebrows and whispered that Samson had gone too far this time, while inquiring later in private about the exact detaUs of his routine.
    For we all knew that discipline and effort paid off, that after a week of strict training we could park a huge