The Farewell Symphony Read Free Page B

ripped body under a spotlight at a bar and if the shoulders were bigger than car fenders, the forearms tlie girth of horse's withers, the waist as slender as a napkin ring, the butt as imposing as a diva's bosom, then no one would notice a lisp, a biscuit-colored false tooth, a balding head or a di-squieting personality flaw. We could have the pick of the lot at the bar Friends and parents could say we'd gone too far, that we were in danger of becoming grotesque, that all this muscle would someday turn to fat, but for mating purposes the Iwe could never be too large.
    Living alone meant that I could receive anyone or be anyone I liked at any hour of the day. A complex metal grille outside my windows stenciled on my curtain its circles transected by a bass clef, security posing as decoration. As the curtain billowed, the outline of the bass clef moved out of focus. This pale fabric filled like a lung. It breathed or gasped for me or went tragically inert. Wliile I slept it did my dreaming for me. Wlien someone lay in my arms after sex it became a huge spinnaker propelling us across a moon-scrubbed sea. If I joked and gossiped on the phone with a friend it continued to lead a parallel life that was narrowly romantic, sighing and gesturing. Passersby cast their shadows—foreshortened or elongated according to the hour, full face or in profile according to their orientation—on my puppet screen, which democratically eliminated race, age, sometimes even gender and left nothing but moving forms that stUl managed to excite me. At night the blue vapor street light outside found a silk spider web stitched into my curtain.
    One after another men came home with me, usually just once. I suppose most of them are dead now, all those young bodies I touched and undressed and tucked in when they fell asleep, the man with just one ball.

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    the undertaker's son with the pale body who smelled of horse manure when I plowed him, he so brave and strong as he clenched the mattress and took his punishment like a man, the sociology professor who wished I was a bit smaller and dumber so he could cherish me, the blond salesman who lived next door and called me whenever it was raining and he didn't have the courage to go out stalking someone new, the famous kept boy who once pulled me into his apartment for thirty minutes of ofT-the-meter pleasure, the small and big penises, sheathed and circumcised, the hairy Italian and hairless Puerto Rican chests, the ardor, the kisses, the whispered secrets.
    When the first personal ads for hustlers were printed in the East Village Other I ordered up a "former football player" who promised an "oatmeal massage." I persuaded him to skip the oatmeal and move right on to sex. A few days later I was in a local bar, Danny's. My date, the sociology professor, was drinking too much and becoming belligerent. Confident in my twenty-eight-year-old beauty, I said to him, "If you buy one more beer, I'm going to turn to the first person on my right and go home with him if he'll have me." He ordered another beer, I acted on my threat, and when I was out on the street with my prey, I recognized him and said, "But don't you remember me? The oatmeal rub? Last Wednesday?" I explained to him where I lived, what we'd said and done. At last, round-eyed, he said, "But you were old then."
    Old eyes in a young body, with mine I looked at them all, memorized the intricate fittings of their knee bones, felt the burning ears and cold hands, burning scrotum and cold buttocks, kissed their feet and the crease where smooth bum joined hairy leg, dug with my fingers into their intricate ringed anuses too tight, then too loose, and listened there with my touch as one might listen to a pink-lipped shell for the sound of a distant sea, each shell different. The smooth cheeks at night were brisding and rasping at dawn, and button-shiny eyes were lined in the first light with what Cavafy so glamorously called the tell-tale signs of