Dancer From the Dance: A Novel

by Andrew Holleran

  They were the most romantic creatures in the city in that room. If their days were spent in banks and office buildings, no matter: Their true lives began when they walked through this door—and were baptized into a deeper faith, as if brought to life by miraculous immersion. They lived only for the night. The most beautiful Oriental was in fact chaste, as the handmaidens of Dionysius were: He came each night to avoid the eyes of everyone who wanted him (though for different reasons than Malone ignored their gaze), and after dancing for hours in a band of half-naked men, went home alone each night refusing to tinge the exhilaration in his heart with the actuality of carnal kisses. The gossips said he refused to sleep with people because he had a small penis—the leprosy of homosexuals—but this explanation was mundane: He wanted to keep this life in the realm of the perfect,, the ideal. He wanted to be desired, not possessed, for in remaining desired he remained, like the figure on the Grecian urn, forever pursued. He knew quite well that once possessed he would no longer be enchanted—so sex itself became secondary to the spectacle: that single moment of walking in that door. And even as he danced now he was aware of whose heart he was breaking; everyone there was utterly aware of one another.

  For example: I sat on the sofa watching Archer Prentiss dance with two other men in plaid shirts and moustaches, who looked as if they had just come down from the Maine woods—two people I had seen for years and years, yet never said a word to, as was the case with Archer Prentiss. This technical distance did not keep us from knowing a great deal about each other, however. Although I had no idea who the two strangers on my left were, nor had ever been introduced to Archer Prentiss, I knew, to the quarter inch, the length and diameter of each one's penis, and exactly what they liked to do in bed.

  But then so did everyone else in that room.

  If one of the figures in this tapestry of gossip woven at the Twelfth Floor vanished—like the man who fled to Cambodia, or the one who drove west—such a disappearance was, in that crowd, less mysterious than most vanishing acts. If a face in that crowd vanished, it was usually for one of three reasons: (1) he was dead, (2) he had moved to another city whose inhabitants he had not all slept with, or (3) he had found a lover and settled down, spending his Saturday nights at home with his mate, going over the plans of the house they hoped to build in Teaneck, New Jersey.

  The two strangers in plaid shirts who had sat down on the sofa to my left were discussing at that moment such a move. The big, blond fellow (whose face decorated a dozen billboards on the Long Island Expressway, smiling at a Winston cigarette) said to the dark one: "He wants me to move in with him, after he comes back from Portugal."

  "Oh, God, he lives on Beekman Place, doesn't he?"

  "Yes, but Howard lives off Sutton, and he wants me to move in, too. Damn, I don't know what to do."

  "Marry John! Sutton Place is all Jewish dentists."

  And they burst into laughter over their solution to this problem; while at the next instant, the creature who, for a reason I could not put my finger on, fascinated me more than any of the habitu6s of that place came in the door: Sutherland. He swept in trailing a strange coterie of Egyptian cotton heiresses, the most popular male model to come over from Paris in a decade, a Puerto Rican drug dealer, and an Italian prince. Sutherland was dressed in a black Norell, turban, black pumps, rhinestones, and veil. He held a long cigarette holder to his lips and vanished among the crowd. The dark man began to debate idly whether he should go to bed with Archer Prentiss, who was (a) very ugly, but (b) had a big dick.

  In the midst of their deliberations, Zulema's "Giving Up" suddenly burst out of the recapitulations of Deodato, and the two woodsmen got up to dance; at their rising, two other boys in black with tired, beautiful eyes, sat down immediately and began discussing the men who had just left: "I call him the Pancake Man," said one. "He doesn't use makeup!" said the other. "Oh, no," the first replied. "The opposite! Because he's the kind of man you imagine waking up with on Saturday morning, and he makes pancakes for you, and then you take the dog out for a walk in the park. And he always has a moustache, and he always wears plaid shirts!"

  "I agree he's gorgeous," said his friend, "but someone told me he has the smallest wee-wee in New York."

  And with that, as if the boy had snapped his fingers, the big, blond woodsman standing by the dance floor in all his radiant masculinity, crumbled into dust.

  "Oh please," said the one, "I don't need that." He covered his face with his hands. "I'm already on downs, why did you say that?"

  "Because it's true," said the other.

  "Oh, God," the first moaned, in the nasal wail of Brooklyn, "Oh, God, I can't believe that. No, he's my Pancake Man."

  "They all wear plaid shirts, and they all have moustaches," said his friend. "You might as well pick one with a big dick. None of them will look at you, anyway."

  He looked out between his fingers at the woodsman, who was now talking animatedly to Sutherland in his black Norell and turban and long cigarette holder, and said, "Who is that woman he's talking to?" And the other side:"Her name is Andrew Sutherland, and she lives on Madison Avenue. She's a speed freak. She hasn't long to live." At that moment, "Needing You" began, buried still in the diminishing chords of "You've Got Me Waiting for the Rain to Fall," and the two boys on the sofa—with hearing sharper than a coyote's, and without even needing to ask each other—bounded up off the sofa and headed for the dance floor. Instantly their seats were taken by an older, gray-haired man and his friend, an even older fellow who because of his hearing aid, toupee, and back brace was known among the younger queens as Spare Parts. "I find him so beautiful," said the man of the boy who had just left, "like a Kabuki, that long neck, those heavy-lidded eyes. He never looks at me, do you think because he's afraid?" They began to discuss a friend on the dance floor who had recently learned he had cancer of the lungs. "No, no," said Spare Parts, "he has cancer of the colon, I think, his mother has cancer of the lungs." "Yes," said the friend, "he used to scream at his mother for smoking too much, and she used to scream at him for eating too fast. And now look." "He flies out to the clinic tomorrow," said Spare Parts. "Do you suppose he wants to go home with someone?" "You know," said the friend, "I would think the fact that he's dying would give him the courage to walk up to all these boys he's been in love with all these years but never had the nerve to say hello to." "Well, he has a look about him," said Spare Parts. "He looks... ethereal." At that moment two Puerto Rican boys, oblivious to everything but their own heated discussion, stopped to snuff out their cigarettes in the ashtray beside the sofa.

  "And the reason you don't know any English," the one said suddenly in English to his friend, "is because you waste too much time chasing dick!"

  And they hurried off into the crowd, the accused defending himself excitedly in rapid Spanish to his friend.

  The gray-haired man on the sofa rolled his eyes, sighed a long sigh as he snuffed out his own cigarette in the ashtray, and said: "My dear, whole lives have been wasted chasing dick." He sat up suddenly. "Oh!" he said. "There's that song!"

  At that moment, "One Night Affair" was beginning to rise from the ruins of "Needing You," and they both put down their plastic cups of apple juice and started toward the dance floor.

  For a moment the sofa was empty, and two tall black boys wearing wide-brimmed hats eyed it as they moved, like sailing barges, very slowly along the edges of the crowd, but before they could cross the space of carpet to its comfortable cushions, I heard a rustle of silk and a distinctive voice. I turned and saw Sutherland sitting down with a thin, pale young fellow in horn-rimmed glasses who looked as if he had just stumbled out of the stacks of the New York Public Library.

  For an instant Sutherland, as he fit a cigarette into his long black holder, and the pale boy in spectacles eyed the black boys in hats across the rug; and then the blacks, seeing they had lost their harbor, turned and continued moving along the crowd like two galleons perusing the Ivory Coast on a hot, windless day.

&nb
sp; "I find it perfectly expressive of the whole sad state of human affairs at this moment of history, I find it a perfect symbol of the demise of America," said Sutherland in that low, throaty voice that always seemed breathlessly about to confide something undreamed of in your wildest dreams, "that dinge are the only people who take hats seriously!" And he turned to the boy with the cigarette in its rhinestone holder, waiting for a light.

  "Dinge?" said the boy in a cracked, earnest voice as he tried three times to finally get a flame from his lighter.

  "Oh, darling, are you one of these millionaires who go around with ninety-nine-cent lighters?" said Sutherland as he waited for the flame to ignite.

  The boy—who, we later learned, was the heir to a huge farm implement and nitrogen fertilizer fortune—flushed scarlet, for he could not bear references to his money and was terrified that someone would ask him for a loan, or assume that he would pay the bill. Sutherland puffed on his cigarette and removed it from his lips and said through a cloud of smoke, when the boy repeated his request for a definition of dinge: "Blacks, darling. Shvartzers, negroes, whatever you like. Why are they the better dancers? For they are. They get away with things here that no white boy could in a million years. And why do they get to wear white hats? And all the outrageous clothes? When gloves come back," he said, pulling at his own long black ones, "and I'm sorry they ever went away, you can be sure they will be the ones to wear them first!"

  The boy was not looking at Sutherland as he spoke—his eyes had already been caught by something ten feet away from him; his face had that stricken, despairing expression of someone who has seen for the very first time a race of men whose existence he never suspected before, men more handsome than he had ever imagined, and all of them in this tiny room. He looked as if he were about to burst into tears. He leaned closer to Sutherland who was at that moment just finishing with his gloves and who looked about himself now, with a gossamer cloud of stagnant cigarette smoke forming a double veil over his face. "My face seats five," he sighed, "my honeypot's on fire."

  The boy, transfixed and terrified, leaned closer to Sutherland and said, "Who is that?"

  "His name is Alan Solis, he has huge balls and does public relations work for Pan Am." They looked at him together for a moment. "Ask me about anyone, darling, I know them all. I have been living in New York since the Civil War."

  And it was true: Sutherland seemed to have been alive, like the Prime Mover, forever. He had been a candidate for the Episcopalian priesthood, an artist, a socialite, a dealer, a kept boy, a publisher, a film maker, and was now simply—Sutherland. And yet—behind the black veil his face was still as innocent and wonder-struck as it was the day he arrived in New York; his face, though everyone was waiting for it to crumble—from the speed he took—was open, honest, friendly, and looked, even more than that of the boy on his left, as if it were gazing on all of this for the first time.

  "I used to be in love with Alan Solis," he said in his low, breathless voice, "when I came to New York. I was so in love with him, with him," he said (for he stuttered, and repeated phrases, not through any impediment of speech, but for effect), "that when he used the bathroom on the train to Sayville, I used to go in right after him and lock the door, just to smell his farts! To simply breathe the gas of his very bowels! A scent far lovelier to me than Chanel Number Nine, or whatever the ladies are wearing these days."

  "You know," said the boy, bending over as if in pain, his eyes on Alan Solis with all the intensity of a mongoose regarding a snake, "if I can only find a flaw. If I can find a flaw in someone, then it's not so bad, you know? But that boy seems to be perfect!" he said. "Oh, God, it's terrible!" And he put a hand to his forehead, stricken by that deadliest of forces, Beauty.

  "A flaw, a flaw," said Sutherland, dropping his ash into the ashtray on his left, "I understand perfectly."

  "If I can just see a flaw, then it's not so hopeless and depressing," said the boy, his face screwed up in agony, even though Solis, talking to a short, muscular Italian whom he wanted to take home that night, was completely oblivious to this adoring fan whose body was far too thin to interest him.

  "I've got it," said Sutherland, who turned to his companion now. "I remember a flaw. His chest," he said, "his chest is so hairy that one can't really see the deep, chiseled indentation between the breasts. Will that do, darling?"

  The boy gnawed on his lip and considered.

  "I'm afraid it will have to. There isn't a thing else wrong with the man, other than the fact that he knows it."

  "You know," the boy said, "when my family was living in England and I came home from school on vacation, there was a boy who worked at our butcher's in the village. And he was astonishing! He had white, white skin, and rosy cheeks, and the most beautiful golden hair! He was as beautiful as an angel! I'm not exaggerating. And all that winter I used to dream of him, walking over the fields, at home at night. And at Princeton, a boy who used to dive at the pool. I was in love with him, and I used to ache walking home in autumn from the gym and think of him for days! And that's why I'm here, I guess, I'm looking for the English butcher boy, the diver at Princeton," he said as Alan Solis wandered onto the dance floor, "because I'm so tired of dreaming of faces and bodies. I want to touch one this time," he said, his voice suddenly choking.

  "Well, how about that one over there?" said Sutherland, waving his cigarette holder at a tall, square-jawed fellow who taught English to children of the Third World in Harlem. "Greg Butts. I've always found him very Rupert Brooke; however his cock is very small, they tell me, and would hardly sustain a major fantasy on the scale of yours."

  "You know, I hate being gay," said the boy, leaning over toward Sutherland, "I just feel it's ruined my life. It drains me, you know, it's like having a tumor, or a parasite! If I were straight I'd get married and that would be it. But being gay, I waste so much time imagining! I hate the lying to my family, and I know I'll never be any of the things they expect of me," he said, "because it's like having cancer but you can't tell them, that's what a secret vice is like."

  Sutherland was speechless at this declaration; he sat there for a moment, with the cigarette holder to his lips, perfectly still; and then he said, "Perhaps what you need... perhaps what you need," he said, in a speculative tone, "is a good facial." He turned quickly to his friend and said: "Oh, darling, for heaven's sake, don't take it so seriously! Just repeat after me: 'My face seats five, my honeypot's on fire.'"

  "My face seats five, my honeypot's on fire," said the boy with a constipated smile.

  "That's right, that will, get you into the spirit of things! And please don't feel you have an obligation to be secretary of state!" he said, as his two Egyptian heiresses came by. "Their great great great great great great grandfather was a pharaoh, while yours was just a potato farmer in Würzburg!" And he waved at his two Egyptian women, who were wandering around the French model, wreathed in the happiest of smiles. The floor had cleared momentarily to watch a tall, thin girl dance who came dressed each night in the latest work of a famous designer, and who prided herself on sleeping with all the handsomest homosexuals in New York. "Perhaps what you need is this."

  He held out his black-gloved arm, and a little red pill sat in the center of his palm.

  "What's that?" said the boy.

  "Oh don't ask, darling," said Sutherland. "If it's a pill, take it."

  The boy looked askance at the rosy pebble in Sutherland's palm, glowing like a ruby on black velvet in a vault at Bulgari. "I don't..." he said.

  "Don't you trust me?" said Sutherland. "I would never ask you to take anything that does not enhance lucidity."

  "But... speed kills," blurted the boy, looking up at Sutherland over his glasses.

  "And Dial prevents wetness twenty-four hours a day," breathed Sutherland in his lowest tone. "Darling. Don't believe everything you hear. You mustn't for instance read the newspapers, that will destroy your mind far faster than speed. The New York Times has been responsible for more dea
ths in this city than Angel Dust,croyez-moi." He put the red pill on the arm of the sofa and said: "There are many drugs I would not have you take. I am not like these queens whose names I wouldn't mention, but who, if you glance at the dance floor, you can certainly pick out, and who are on hog tranquilizer. My dear," he breathed, nodding toward a certain Michael Zubitski, a blond man wandering past the sofa now with no awareness of where he was: a sleepwalking queen whom Sutherland had not spoken to since he alienated a boy with whom Sutherland had been in love. "I do not pickle myself in formaldehyde or drench my brain pan in a drug used to tranquilize pigs, I have no desire to be turned, like Ulysses's men, into beasts, I am not envious of the profound ease felt by a Nebraska hog about to be castrated and bled to death," he said, straight into the face of Michael Zubitski, who, trying to see who this person was, had stopped and bent down to stare into Sutherland's black veil, five inches from his forehead, and hung there now like a huge sea gull poised above a swimming fish, "for the tables of all-American families in Duluth and Council Bluffs, no, you'll have to forgive me, darling, I am old-fashioned, I believe in General Motors and the clarity of the gods..."

  And here, raising his ponderous blond head, Michael Zubitski withdrew from Sutherland's face and began moving, like a zombie, across the rug till he came to rest against the wall beside a potted plant.

  "Who was that?" said the boy, ogling.