The Farewell Symphony Read Online Free PDF Page A

shopping, dutifully tailed by George. In three hours he came back carrying four pairs of shoes widi platform heels and multicolored leather facings, buskins worthy of an ugly-customer rock star on speed or an ancient Greek comic on stage.
    That night, as we lay in each other's arms, he told me of his dream, to buy a big house in Pacific Heights above San Francisco and live there with all his friends of both sexes. They would discuss life, make love, get high— his friends w^ould be both students in Plato's academy and houris in a psychedelic harem.
    We passed a joint back and forth in the dark and I felt my chest and arms light up with jukebox bubbles and my solar plexus swing yet another disc of volatile body music under the waiting needle of my heart, but my words seemed stranded, shunted off on a siding, waiting to be engaged.
    Being high meant being in danger. I who'd never trusted my organs to function or my words and gestures to signif^; I who feared the mechanical world and considered even crossing the street perilous, ob\iously I couldn't "go with the flow," as people were saying then. I knew the perfidious flow was nothing but white water buffeting the boat unerringly toward rocks that would splinter it. I feared being unworthy of this young man beside me—my cock too small, my breath corrupt, my skin clammy with too much experience.
    But the minute he touched it, warm showers of sparks trailed his hand, as though my flesh were the phosphorescing sea in August. Our bodies were immense, geographical, ideal as those elemental gods, dispersed to

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    the flowing elements except where touch quarried out a rich, juicy intricacy of shape and feelings—shame, bliss, sluttishness, awe.
    I discovered that when stoned I skipped transitions and suddenly found myself already doing what I longed to do, as though the film had been badly edited and nothing differentiated the dream sequences from reality. It was enough for me to flash on a mental picture of myself as Craig's slave to discover I was already licking his feet. As soon as I saw his head on the pillow, fine straight hair fanning out to expose his jug ears and the powerful architecture of his jaw and skull, I was already straddling his chest and force-feeding his mouth. Fear of disgusting him surfaced for a moment only to be submerged by my own instantly realized fantasies, so powerful I assumed he must share them. Every action was saying something, at least to me, and saying it indelibly, as a brand sears. The tragedy of sex is that one can never know what this most intimate and moving form of communication has actually said to the other person and whether the message, if received, was welcome.
    Now no one ever touches my body, which I neglect and let bulge, bloat and sag, although I dress it with more and more care, not yet reconciled to the shabbiness of age. No one ever looks at me on the street and my dreams become more and more erotic. Last night I dreamed that an old friend, a writer who's never done more than peck my cheek, caressed me obscenely and tenderly, promised to take me to his house after the theater, but I couldn't find him in the crowd and when I did I was at the wrong entrance and he was angry with me for having disobeyed his instructions.
    Since I've already made physical comebacks several times in my life, I keep regarding my present disarray as a temporary disgrace. Every day I think at last I'll start my diet, go back to the gym, order new contact lenses, dye my grey hair, but every night I've still not begun to initiate these improvements and I go out to another long rich dinner. I'm living in Paris where everyone is slim but me. Superstitiously, I think that it's the extra bulk that's staved off AIDS all these years (I've been seropositive for a decade). Or perhaps being overweight ensures my fidelity to the dead Brice.
    I've always been someone who masturbated while thinking not of ideal, imaginary partners but of actual people I've known in