The Farewell Symphony by Edmund White Page B

of his blue cashmere coat or to leave his white cotton pajamas unbuttoned to show his scabbard-fiat chest, someone blessed with a driving intellectual curiosity so that he'd never had much interest in his own beauty, whose hair was

    as heavy, thick and straight as a cord that separates a masterpiece from the public.
    Today when I came back to our apartment (I must learn to say "my" apartment, now that Brice is dead), I had a message on my machine to call James Assady, a former student of mine who lives in Boston. He was high on morphine, he said the CMV had made him blind and now was in his spinal cord and was slowly paralyzing him.
    "I've stopped eating or taking Acyclovir," he said. "It's my way of bowing out without committing suicide. I've met a priest. Father Phil, who's going to bury me. 1 was feeling terribly isolated until I met Father Phil, who told me it's my church, I must not forget it belongs to me, too, and that I have a right to be buried beside my family."
    He thanked me for making his last two years such a whirlwind, though I felt bad I'd not been able to convince an editor to publish his book. I told him we aO admired him for showing such courage and stoicism and gaiety "Really?" he asked, surprised. "Well, that's what I tried to do."
    Then we said good-bye and we assured each other that we loved each other. Just two years ago we'd gotten stoned one afternoon in his apartment and I'd put the make on him but he'd turned me down.
    Now he said, "I do love you. I've always felt bad about that time." I told him it wasn't important. Anyway, last spring, when his nose was swollen and black with Kaposi's sarcoma he'd already said to me, "Now I know what it's like to be turned down. I'm so sorry I did that to you." He always had a tough, cool air about him; perhaps because he'd grovra up poor, half-Irish, half-Syrian, he'd learned not to ask anyone for anything. Yet he asked me just now to write something to be read beside his grave.

    I met a guy named—well, I'll call him Rod, though I'm tempted to use his real name since he might be dead now and his ghost would appreciate a "mention" (as they say in gossip columns).
    Rod lived on Bleecker Street with a girl and a dog. He had been a psychology graduate student at Columbia who'd been pushed out of the program after he said in a group therapy practice session that he was homosexual. They'd all been encouraged to be as frank as possible, but homosexuality was considered a perversion, oral aggressive, possibly sadomasochistic, definitely infantile, that would necessarily occlude the objectivity of a future psychotherapist. He had to go, though the program director never admitted that homosexuality as such had been the disabling cause. No, he was told, it was more a matter of a general lack of seriousness, of professionalism. . . . Now Rod was making light boxes, which he assured me would become the art form of the future, entirely replacing painting. Back then people were always insisting that the novel was dead, the theater outmoded, easel painting washed up, human nature about to be radically revamped. We read William Burroughs' collage novels, eyes dutifully scanning page after page of repetitious, broken sentences. W^e saw group gropes of naked youngsters re-enacting Bacchic rites based on Greek tragedies, though denuded of the exalted language. Language was suspect, protest imperative, the tribe tyrannical, the author

    dying. Warhol had made the transition from canvas to screen. We watched hours and hours of his home movies, certain that the boredom was functioning to break down our conscious resistance, considered a bad thing. Of course the real fun was the audiences, the bits of mirror and velvet, the leg-of-mutton sleeves and bellbottoms, the flowing hair and curling cannabis smoke, for we were only slowly becoming aware that we constituted a new generation unlike any other before us in history.
    After I had sex with Rod on the fold-out couch bed, his dog