The Farewell Symphony by Edmund White Page A

walked side by side, block after block, heading down toward Ri\erside as an old Chevy with a broken exhaust pipe and good radio putt-putted past, swirling us in richest Motown, a falling gospel wail sustained by a sudden updraft of doo-dahing. In the darkened canyons of buildings only one window on the twentieth floor released a sulfurous yellow glow, and for some reason I thought of the words "half-life," something I imagined that rotting carbon emits. The Hudson, beyond the strip of park and the West Side Highway, exhaled a colder, damper breath into the hot night, like a trace of sweat perceived as the black stain through a blue shirt. Neither of us spoke, as though afraid to cut the sexual tension with mindless chitchat. He looked straight ahead but must have been aware I was side-swiping him at every step with another glance, calculating the flab at his waist, the heft of his hands, the girth of his calves. Was he clean? Was he a cold man who could express tenderness only in bed, or would there be no bed, just him backed up against a wall, cock jutting out of his jeans in the darkened hall, eyes squeezed shut, his mouth clamped shut when I would tiy to kiss him?
    His apartment was in a 1920s building on Riverside overlooking the park. The rooms were all one step up and two down. There was a sitting room in a round tower lined with small beveled glass panes. The furniture was heavy and dark, heat-cracked leather club chairs, a roll-top oak desk, a frayed Oriental rug, a brass reading lamp with a green glass shade and, as soon as he'd poured us a whiskey each in a crystal tumbler, there was a contralto voice over all the hidden speakers in the six or seven rooms, a voice as ambiguous as a countertenor's but its opposite, for if a countertenor vN-as neutered she was as fully gendered as an angel, consolation and authority' joined in one voice.
    At frrst I thought he must be a guest in the apartment of a much older professor, this place with its thousands of serious shelved books, the volume of Aristode on the work table open to the Mcomachean Ethics, the voice on the sound system singing Handel with a pathos that seemed more noble because not quite human. I pictured the pained open mouths and tearful closed eyes of angels in a Bellini entombment as small hands lower into the ground the cadaver with its old, dark wounds in the hands and skinny side.
    But then he started to tell me everything about his life. He'd been the last child in a poor family of nine. He'd grovvTi up in western Pennsylvania, where his father worked in a filling station repairing cars. "I was in-

    telligent," he said, "but I couldn't think because I didn't know any words. Middle-class people like you have no idea, but with a minuscule vocabulary it's as though you're trying to pick up blobs of mercury with tweezers." That he knew I was middle class seemed cither dismissive or clinical; that one had a class identity at all seemed to me, an American, novel and threatening, for though I was a Socialist my principles could be applied only to other people. I myself was a pulsing, energized vacuum, I was an Artist, all potential, a capability entirely negative, a field of dangerously unattached and whirling neutrons.
    He'd moved to New York, lived in the streets, turned tricks and one day husded a guy who turned out to be a Columbia professor. "He seemed to recognize I was bright. Anyway he moved me in and started to teach me everything he knew at a breakneck pace—German, history, Hegel, Freud, Marx. Into two years I was able to compress ten years' worth of study."
    He said that those two years had been the most exalted of his life. He'd been the wolf child, his teacher the Enlightenment philosopher, and I pictured the bedroom light gleaming on the student's fangs, the professor's well kept hands tangled in the facial fur as he whispered wisdom into one cocked ear.
    Throughout those two years, recordings of this contralto singer had played night and day. "I