The Farewell Symphony by Edmund White Page B

came to think of her as my guardian angel, this singer, entering me with that penetrating voice. There is something sorrowful about that voice, not the Virgin Mary's lachrymose compassion but the tragic realism of . . ." He smiled. "Of Briinnhilde. Doesn't she sound like a warrior?" He told me he became obsessed by her "I read a litde book of tributes by various conductors and soloists and friends that had been put together after her early death—she'd died of throat cancer." He found out that she had a twin sister whom she'd always lived with. "They were inseparable and she was serene all her life, almost saindy, except for one brief period of six months when she was married. Then she was a bitch. She cried all the time, seemed always to be on the rag. Finally she left her husband and went back to her sister and resumed a sort of unearthly gendeness, even during her horrible last illness, a gendeness so unassailable that as I lay here night after night smoking joints I started to dream up certain things about her. I realized that she and her sister must have been lovers."
    "How do you figure that?" I asked.
    His powerful hand and thick legs were under the warm light shed by the lamp beside him but his face was eerie in the green halo cast by the

    The Farewell Symphony
    glass shade. I felt a delicate unspoken decision was being taken: the more he told me abovit his life the less likely it was I was going to get fucked. We might end up cuddling like brothers but the mystery that goaded his sexual nastiness was being dissipated word by every word. "Figure? Well, I figure," he said, swiveling the floor lamp away from him so that now his entire body was subaqueous, "I figure that the only way somebody can be so saintlv is if she has no needs, no emotional needs, no needs for anyone outside the closed circuit she and her twin, her identical twin, make up. Just think: if you loved and were loved by someone you'd known all your life, from whom you had no secrets, could have none, someone who had the same mole on the same place on the left hip, who laughed before you finished the joke, became ill with you after the same meal, whom even your parents couldn't tell apart after they'd not seen you for a few months— hell," he said, sitting forward, dangling one hand into the pink light under the green lamp, and I saw that hand (which he pulled back until it became vernal again) as my last vanished bid for se.x that night, "I learned that her twin was living down in Philadelphia and I began to correspond with her, I even took the train dowai for tea, she was this nice old English ladv who put a tea cozy in the shape of a Beatrix Potter rabbit over the pot. We talked about tessitura and the Danish broadcast during the war and she had me pegged for just another opera queen but I had to know if they'd been lovers so I invited her to New York last year, remember that's when Bergman's film about the lesbian sisters was playing, so I took her to that, she didn't know what to expect, and I could feel her tensing up beside me in the theater and when we got outside I pushed her up against the wall and I said, 'That's the way it was between your sister and you, wasn't it?' and she said, 'Yes, yes,' but of course I already knew I was right and I left her sobbing there in Times Square, boy, was I pleased with myself" It never occurred to him (or to me) to feel any solidarity with this woman as a fellow homosexual. No, she was an "old dyke" whom he'd gleefully tricked into revealing her secrets.
    That night back home I went to sleep alone curled up beside an imaginary Sean. In my dream he couldn't stop fucking me, he bent me into dozens of difierent shapes but he had to stay inside me, otherwise he wasn't happy, he apologized if he was hurting me, but I understood, didn't I, and I did. In my sleep my asshole felt sore, it ached way inside and burned near the lips but when I woke up there was nothing wrong with it.

    At work I was assif^ncd a new