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pretended his father was a retired naval officer. "He calls him the Commodore,'' someone named Furlong hissed, "but there is no rank of Commodore in the Navy And look at him now, the litde slut." Jamie—my Jamie, the timid prep-schooler who'd wept in the Sainte Chapelle—was carrying Gerry upstairs in his arms. "Did they just meet?" I asked Furlong.
    "What? Just meet? But of course not, my good man, Jamie's been

    The Farewell Symphony
    cornholing that little slut the past five years. They're what pederasts call lovers, vile term."
    I SCRATCH AWAY at these memoirs at midnight as my basset hound sighs and turns on the couch beside me.
    Brice always liked the idea we'd both be cremated and our ashes mingled and put into a jar and stored in the dovecote at Pere Lachaise. I worry about the practical details. Will his family mind the mingling? If I die several years later in America, will it be a big bore for someone to bring my ashes back on a plane? Will I feel far from home if I'm buried in Paris?
    But where's home? A French woman friend spoke the other day about the pain of selling her senile grandmother's house and letting this part of the "patrimony" slip out of the family's hands. But I cast a wintry look on her attachment to mere property. I've lived in furnished sublets for the last ten years and have given my books away with each move, though I've also felt a clandestine urge to own land and a house but dismissed the longing as old-fashioned materialism designed to create the illusion of permanence just when we must be getting in training for transience, then extinction.
    For me the sublet has been a spiritual exercise. Until a year before Brice died, when we finally rented in our own names a big five-room apartment next to the Tour St.-Jacques, as though we needed to step firmly on a block of melting ice just as we were approaching the rapids. I kept feeling he was trying to fix up a place for me to live in after he'd be gone, and I received each naO he drove into a wall as a gift he was making me with his frail body. At least our new neighborhood has all the trappings of earthly permanence. It's the oldest extant part of Paris and its narrow medieval streets were filled even back then with whores and writers (public scribes were given space to work under the arches of the Eglise St.-Martin). But if it seems permanent, it's also a place of evanescence, even dematerial-ization. The Tour St.-Jacques is all that's left of the leveled church, which in turn was buUt by the rich alchemist Nicolas Flamel, who one day invited his maid to precede him down the steps into his underground labo-ratoiy On the way down she heard a loud whoosh, like the angrv' snapping-shut of a fan. When she turned around, the alchemist was vanishing. A month ago, when I heard that story, I sighed, thinking. Lucky man, to be spared the humiliation of decomposition. Real connoisseurs,

    my lover and I used to talk about what would constitute "une belle mort," "a fine death." More than once, on being told a supposedly tragic tale of a sudden demise (heart attack, car crash), we'd shock our mourning interlocutor by beaming and rubbing our hands together and murmuring, "Quelle belle mort."
    After a morning of bad coffee and compulsive chatter with Jamie, I would spend melancholy lunch hours thumbing through new novels in book stores, trying to figure out why they had been published and my books rejected. In college I'd received several literary prizes and been pubHshed in the campus literary magazine. I'd been considered by my friends the writer most likely to succeed and thousands of cigarettes, drinks and hours had been consumed in discussing my "art." I didn't want to be very famous or even famous; I just wanted to be published. In fact no accolade seemed higher to me than that of "a minor writer," because it exempted its bearer from the obligation to treat the great themes (birth, marriage, adultery, divorce), which in any event were closed to me as