The Farewell Symphony Read Online Free PDF

the past. My fantasies are memories as accurate as I can make them of past lovers and what they did to me. These days I find myself fucking the dead most of the time. Once when I asked the ninety-year-old Boris Kochno, Diaghilev's last secretary, if I could interview him, he said, "You must

    The Farewell Symphony
    understand I don't want to meet new people. I prefer the company of my dead." And although I'm not quite there yet, I know what he means. When I was young I lived a far from satisfactory life thinking it was only a dry run for a better future, but those rehearsals turned out to be the only performances I would know and now I embrace the memories, which I'm afraid of touching up as I write them down, although I long for sleep and dreams. If in a dream I feel a melting tenderness toward one of my dead that I never experienced while he was alive and if I awaken bathed in grateful tears, it doesn't matter. I have no control over my dreams and I can't be held responsible for the improvements they make.
    After our trip to Paris, Jamie became still friendlier to me. Our office door would be closed, which permitted us to talk for hours on end without being observed or disturbed. We had so little work to do—just a few picture captions to turn out every week for our glossy national magazine—that we'd invariably panic on Friday morning and work feverishly all day in hushed concentration, trying to make up for a week we'd wasted on long lunches, coffee breaks, phone conversations with friends and social calls on other offices down the hall. Otherwise we were free to talk even if we were chained to our desks.
    As a Midwesterner I was used to wide-eyed candor, but Jamie was tricky, reserved, both shy and disdainful. For the longest time I hadn't known if he was gay or straight. In Paris he'd introduced me to all those gay men but still looked blank when I'd mentioned their homosexuality. He had a metallic, upper-class New York voice and, snob that I was, I imitated his Tory pronunciations ("ennuhway" for anyway, ''thee-\i\i-Xu\\' for what I had pronounced as "thee-rqr-terr"); I learned to say "Beth is very social" rather than "Beth is a member of high society," as we had put it, cap in hand, back in Michigan. If I'd bear down on him with what he labeled a "personal question" (in the Midwest, all questions had been personal), he'd shake his head as though pulling himself out of a bad dream, call me by my last name with a thumping, head-prefect's gruffness and tell me, half-seriously, half-affectionately, that I was "impossible."
    Today he'd be called a young fogey, but in the sLxties nothing could have been less likely than a young journalist who wore garters to hold up his black lisle stockings and whose one concession to jauntiness was a polka-dot bow tie. He wasn't reviving the fifties, as people do now; he'd never abandoned the style of his adolescence. At twenty-nine he already

    had silver hairs scattered becomingly among the black. His eyes were grey-blue and one wasn't quite aligned with the other, especially when he was tired. Jamie played racquetball and always had funny stories to tell about antediluvian members of the Athletic Club, but the stories worked both ways, as a dismissal of outworn standards and as a reminder that those standards were still in full force.
    He bit his nails. He lovingly inventoried the mementos on his desk. He slid down the corridors with tense shoulders hunched up around his ears. He flinched if someone called out his name. When the editor just above us summoned him, Jamie would go pale. I couldn't help but picture the lonely, self-suflicient twelve-year-old first-former at a strict prep school famous for its cold showers and rough sports. He had that precocious old-mannishness of the underloved preppie whose mother is nothing but a scented letter that arrives once a month, who ducks whenever addressed because he expects a blow or an insult, who goes through his stamp collection with the