The Farewell Symphony Read Online Free PDF Page B

meticulousness of a miser, who panics if the school schedule varies by an hour, and is ashamed to admit he has nowhere to go over Thanksgiving break. By the time he's a sixth-former he's picked up a loud, irritating voice, a stock of snappy come-backs and a silver medal in the hundred-yard dash. Secredy he writes sonnets and reads Tennyson, whose In Memoriam is for him the perfect blend of technical polish and ho-moerotic Victorian pathos. And, despite his heartiness, there's a flaw in his regard.
    Even Jamie's way of fmally coming out to me was indirect. One evening, a year after our trip to Paris, there was a company party. We both got drunk on vodka and tonic and suddenly at seven we found ourselves only half-fed on pretzels and avocado dip. I myself had downed vast quantities of plump shrimp, loudly declaring that all my years of psychoanalysis had taught me just one thing, to eat my fill of expensive hors d'oeuvres without apologizing—a declaration that was itself an apology, of course. But we were still hungry. "I know an amusing place," Jamie said with a wink exacdy as his grandfather might have done, with the same hint at naughtiness. We sped downtovm in a taxi and there we entered the oldest gay bar in the Village, the ceiling picturesquely hung with cobwebs, sporting pictures in dark wood frames on the walls, brass fixtures on the bar and sawdust on the floor—all providing the right virile alibi. Jamie exaggerated his drunkenness, as though to explain how he'd confusedly ended up in such a louche place, it's all a lark, I'll never remember it tomorrow.

    The Farewell Symphony
    After that, at the ofiice, I'd catch him looking at me with a combination of desire and complicity. He'd slouch down in his revolving chair, facing me, until I could see the outline of his crotch, and then he'd slowly wag his legs together. A lock of his hair fell over his brow, his voice deepened and his left eye became lazier than usual. Yet when I got up my nerve to tell him I found him attractive, he looked starded and laughed cruelly. Sharing an office is like being in a Beckett play, however, and after everything has been said you still must go on talking.
    Jamie told me about a young man from an old Huguenot family whom he was obsessively in love with. With reverent discretion, Jamie was careful not to mention his name. His obsession was so pure, so abstract, that it made him speak constantly and colorlessly about the beloved, who was not a person with quirks but a paragon with neutral virtues, although I recognized the xdrtues were listed to justify a passion that had preceded them.
    In those days I used to dance late every night at the Stonewall, where I'd developed a crush on an occasional customer, a high school principal. He was trapped in a loveless marriage with an unhappy Shakespearean actor who was completing his third year as the villainous tycoon in an execrable but well paying daytime soap opera. The principal, the one I liked, was Yugoslav, six foot four inches, and he laughed maniacally over anything. He had just three hairs on his chest, which was as hard and articulated as a cuirass. I'd toss back the vodka and tonic, which glowed blue when the black light was snapped on, and wait for the principal to arrive. He liked me, he took me home twice out of friendliness, but he was himself bewitched by Puerto Ricans, as who was not. Most of his inner-ciry students were Puerto Rican; when he tricked with stand-ins, in his fantasies they were the ones to administer the discipline to Teach. There was nothing profoundly democratic about New York, no one was ready to surrender an inch (of penthouse terrace surface, of office window exposure, of limo length) but having certainly looked feasible to the have-nots during those years when Puerto Rican pizza delivery boys got sucked off" by lonely miUionaiies ordering in for the third time in an afternoon, hoping to get lucky, or when the white store manager of a supermarket elbowed