The Farewell Symphony by Edmund White Page A

materialist that I was. I who understood how Troy could be lost because Helen's nose was a centimeter longer than other women's, had a hard time comprehending this rotting away of a soul from within just because of something that wasn't there: a lack, a refusal, a departure, silence.
    Of course I had lots of explanations, all suitably self-derogatory. I had chosen Sean precisely because he was unavailable. I apparendy was unable to accept homosexuality into my intimate life; if I dreamed of a man every night but awakened every morning alone in my single bed, then I was still somehow indeterminate, neutral, available for a still undecided future.
    (Another part of my mind objected, "But I thought he would love me. If I'd known in advance that he wouldn't, then I would never have suffered so much. A miracle, yes, if he'd loved me, but it was a miracle I was counting on.")
    Or I said he was like my father, a cold, unfeeling man I longed to seduce. At night when I was thirteen I would sit outside my father's bedroom door in the darkened house, hugging my knees, and imagine entering and taking my stepmother's place beside him, a desire I pictured so clearly that I was afraid I might find myself actually doing it. What if at last I could seduce this sleeping, snoring man, who would wake up to fmd my legs, not his wife's, wrapped around his waist, his hard sex deep in my butt, the sharp dilation of surprise in his eyes quickly clouding over with pure pleasure?

    The Farewell Symphony
    (But another part of my mind objected that I didn't want Sean to be my father—nor did I long to be his child bride but his mate, two nearly identical pairs of jeans tossed on the floor, the trouser legs intertwined.)
    Or I said that as a writer I would find a live-in lover too close for comfort. Didn't writers prefer to suffer alone and conjure up the cruelly absent beloved? Writers needed time out to work up their stories. Certainly I needed room and time to elaborate all the ways in which I was not loved, all the happy days together we'd missed out on due to that time I'd pressured him to say what he really felt, or that time I'd taken his hand on the Staten Island ferry deck, embarrassed him and lost aU the ground I'd gained by my week of calculated indifference. Love and childhood are the writer's two great themes because they are the only seasons during which evei"y object takes on a glow throbbing with meaning. A song can evoke tears; a balding teddy bear, with its curious woody smell (could it be stuffed with pine chips?), recalls soHtary hours with such poignancy that the whole mental stage is plunged into a new, queer light. I was almost thirty but I was marinated in suffering as acrid as that I'd distilled during my lonely, desperate childhood. Sex and love with Sean had seemed a way out of that isolation; when he'd abandoned me I was left holding the dirty bag of my own unworthiness.
    But it was all much simpler than that: ever since 1 was a kid I'd wanted someone beautiful to belong to me, a man who had beautiful hair, teeth, hands, skin, loins, bones, a beautiful way of walking pigeon-toed, of lifting a spoon seriously, simply to his lips, of scratching his neck, of pissing a full, hard stream, of plunging off a diving board forthright, without fear, of sleeping, one hand cast back, someone with full, plush lips, who had a fine dusting of gold hairs on his stomach and longer, darker, silkier hairs around his scrotum, whose leg muscles were fiat and suggested even in repose the power to hold, to clasp, whose skin was warm to the touch as a clay pot left out in the sun, someone so beautiful he'd never had anything but romantic se.x, someone who'd never made the first move, whose palms were callused and neck burned from manual labor, someone whose breath was sweet and so warm it fogged up the window on his side of the car, while the other passengers sat beside shamefully clear glass, someone who knew instinctively how to turn up the collar