Dancer From the Dance: A Novel

by Andrew Holleran

  "A woman of no importance," said Sutherland, expelling a stream of cigarette smoke. "A vengeful queen. For that great blond beast, that Nazi storm trooper, has a cock that if it were any smaller would be a vagina, and if people, for whatever reason, go to bed with him, they inevitably leave in the middle of it, saying 'I'm tired,' or 'I've already had sex today,' or one of those classic excuses. The boy became so bitter about his fate that when he developed a case of syphilis he went to the Baths and infected everyone he could who sported an enormous organ. Well, darling, I guess it's better than assassinating a president." He expelled a long stream of smoke. "For don't you see, even after the dinge are taken care of and the amputees and Eurasians and the fags, even after all of them are provided for, who will ease the pains of that last minority, that minority within a minority, I mean those lepers of New York, the queens with small cocks? Truly Christ blessed the lepers and the whores, but there is no comfort in the Bible for boys with small winks, and they are the most shunned of all. People go to bed with me once, and I never hear from them again!" he said with the bright eyes of a koala bear, confessing what others in his situation spent a lifetime concealing. "What will the government do for them? Ah well, no matter," he sighed, "it's certainly not your problem." He squeezed his hand and smiled. "There are three lies in life," Sutherland said to his young companion, whose first night this was in the realm of homosexuality and whose introduction to it Sutherland had taken upon himself to supervise. "One, the check is in the mail. Two, I will not come in your mouth. And three, all Puerto Ricans have big cocks," he said. And with that he leaned forward and cupped the young man's hand in his long black gloves and said to him in that low, breathless voice: "You are beginning a journey, far more bizarre than any excursion up the Nile. You have set foot tonight on a vast, uncharted continent. Do let me take you as far as I can. I shall hold your hand as far as we can go together, and point out to you the more interesting flora and fauna. I will help you avoid the quicksand in which you can drown, or at least waste a great deal of time, the thorn-thickets, the false vistas—ah," he sighed. "We have many of those, we have much trompe l'oeil in this very room!" he said ecstatically, cocking his cigarette holder at a sprightly angle. "So let us go upriver together as far as we may," he resumed, once more cupping his charge's white, slim hand, "and remember to ask questions, and notice everything, the orchids and the fruit flies, the children rummaging for food in piles of shit, and the ibis that flies across the moon at dusk. Let us go at least as far as the falls. What a journey! If only I can help you avoid the detours, culs-de-sac, fevers, and false raptures that I have suffered." He squeezed the fellow's hand and said, echoing the signal phrase of a Bar Mitzvah he had once attended in the guise of a Jewish matron from Flatbush: "For tonight, my dear, you are a homosexual!"

  And with that he returned his attention to the men coming through the doorway, of whom they had the only unobstructed view from that sofa by the coat check. In the midst of this late-arriving throng (for the desire of everyone to arrive after everyone else had created a ripple effect so that no one could go out anymore before two A.M. at the earliest), in a kind of rest between the arrivals of two of the larger "families," a young man appeared in the doorway by himself; and the fertilizer heir said, 'Oh, who is that? Find a flaw, I can't find a flaw."

  "That is Malone," said Sutherland in his lowest, most dramatic voice, "and his only flaw is that he is still searching for love, when it should be perfectly clear to us all by now that there is no Mister Right, or Mister Wrong, for that matter. We are all alone. He used to be a White House fellow, darling, and now he talks of suicide, if a certain Puerto Rican maniac doesn't kill him first."

  I watched as this individual walked into the room and was immediately greeted by several of the handsomest boys there, the ones so handsome they never looked at anybody, but went to the darkness of back rooms merely to piss on perfect strangers and have their asses licked. They were the first to go over to Malone. He put an arm around their shoulders or shook their hands, with his almost old-fashioned manners. He put his head close to theirs when they spoke to him, as if he didn't want to miss a word, and when he replied he spoke almost against their ear: a charming gesture ostensibly to defeat the noise of the room, but one that made you feel you were being winnowed out, selected, for some confidential revelation. The courtesy with which he moved on through that crowd of zombies who stepped on one another with the oblivious brusqueness of a crowd in a subway, and stopped to talk to whoever tugged at him, was reflected in his smile. He had a face you liked with the certainty that, though you had no idea who he was, he was a good man. He introduced his admirers to one another and then left them new friends and vanished in the crowd. I had no idea who he was, he was just a face I saw in a discotheque one winter; but he was for me the central symbol on which all of it rested.

  "He had the misfortune to fall in love with a thug," said Sutherland when the fertilizer heir asked him again about this man, "who has threatened to kill Malone simply because Malone no longer loves him and was foolish enough to say so. Another rule,caro, which may help you—if blacks are the only ones who wear hats anymore," he breathed, raising his cigarette holder to his lips, "then Latins, my dear, are the only ones who take love seriously. Malone is now being chased around Manhattan by knives and bullets. He never has sex."

  The two Egyptian women came up to Sutherland, leaned down, and spoke rapidly in French to him for a few moments; they shrieked with laughter and went on their way. When the fertilizer heir asked what that was all about, Sutherland replied: "They want to know if they should paint their cunts. What do you think?"

  "Me?" said the boy, his face alarmed.

  "Does the thought of cooze make you vomit?" said Sutherland, blowing out a stream of smoke. "Well, to be dead-honest, I find it, the very thought of it, loathsome beyond words! However, I love my girls! They are being driven mad by the presence of so many handsome young men—so many handsome young men who have absolutely no interest whatsoever in dining between their legs this evening. But,croyez-moi, my friend, there is steam rising from those pussies!"

  The boy sat back, white as a sheet, and Sutherland proceeded to greet a group of five who had come up to talk to him, among them the blond man being pursued by the Puerto Rican maniac, the Egyptian heiresses, and the model who had come over from Paris. For a second, in glancing over, I found myself looking straight at Malone. Our eyes met. His were blue-gray and calm. It was, I noted much later that morning in my journal, like that melodramatic moment in historical novels: when the protagonist, in a crowded marketplace, on a dusty road, on Golgotha, suddenly meets the eyes of Christ, and he is forever changed. Well, I was not changed, but I was singled out—enough to write about it for a while later that day, to record that moment when I looked at Malone and thought: His eyes are like Jesus Christ's.

  But at that moment Sutherland turned to the fertilizer heir and said: "Darling, come, we're going uptown! A small crucifixion at Park and Seventy-fifth, nothing heavy." The boy, pale and stricken, got up and followed the Egyptian women, the French model, and a couple of Halston assistants out of the dim room with Sutherland in his black Norell and turban, leading the pack. With them went Malone, and with him went the magic of the room, which consisted, I realized then, not of the music, the lights, the dancers, the faces, but of those eyes, still, and grave and candid, looking at you with the promise of love.

  IN the years before Malone arrived in New York City he had done all those things a young man was supposed to do—a young man from a good family, that is, a family that had always had in every generation since it transplanted itself in Ohio from a rural town in Germany, a doctor or two, a judge, and a professor. This Germanic family of his father's worked hard, prospered, and gradually scattered all over the globe, even though they retained a certain love for the small town in Ohio in which they had grown up. As a child Malone had been allowed to read the round robin family letter they circulated among themselves: The news was u
sually about the vegetables they had planted, the weather, the seasons, and those events another family might have considered primary were mentioned almost as an afterthought—Sally was going to Korea to serve in the medical corps, Andrew was going round the world on the ship "Hope," Martha had discovered she had TB while examining her own sputum in the lab one afternoon, Joe was drinking. Pete had been promoted to treasurer of Sears International, Harry had died. "We had a good year for squash, though the rutabagas didn't come up nearly so fast as we expected. You know how Lawrence loves his squash. It looks like the corn may be a bit late, too..." and on and on and on. Malone loved to read these letters as a child; they seemed so friendly and so calm to him, how peaceful to care only about the weather and the fruit. And as he grew older he came to see how modest they were, too, finding the fate of their vegetables of more interest than the fate of those human plants who were growing, in the background, to even greater glory than the squash—for the family letter, if it sounded like a garden club newsletter, also resembled to Malone's mind those glossy annual reports that corporations his father held stock in sent him every spring: listing debts and assets, profits, and future plans of investment. That was the family on his father's side: dispassionate, sensible, hardworking, and generous with one another.

  His father had married a city girl, however—from a big, witty Irish family in the suburbs of Chicago—and she had found these Germans sometimes too dispassionate for her tastes. She left Chicago with her new husband, left her friends, her skating parties, rides down Michigan Boulevard, and resorts in Wisconsin, and moved to a small town in southern Indiana; and it was there Malone spent the first few years of his life, chasing rabbits, hunting in the woods, spoiled by his paternal grandmother until his parents went abroad to work for an international engineering firm. It was the golden age of the American corporation, it was the flush of victory following World War II, and the family participated in this, too.

  The family taught Malone to be a polite fellow, self-reliant, hardworking, and to believe in God. He took piano lessons on Saturday morning and he scrubbed the patio each morning before he went to school. Above the sideboard in the dining room of their bungalow hung a painting of a woman knitting in a grove of fruit trees while her children played about her skirts. "That is how my family should be," his father said one day. After lunch his father took a nap—a custom of the tropics—and Malone sat by the telephone on the porch, reading his ancient history and guarding his father's sleep. His father rose and returned to his air-conditioned office at one o'clock, and when he returned at five o'clock in the blue, windy twilight, Malone rushed to embrace him on the porch, and pressed his face against the crisp, white shirt that bore, somehow, the odor of air conditioning. His mother, who had often just arisen, having read murder mysteries through the night, had a drink with his father on the porch while Malone sat out back with the maids, who adored him for his curly golden hair.

  The events of his childhood were perfectly ordinary, if there is ever such a thing: He wept when his dog got lost, and wept when it was found. On Sunday mornings his mother wore short gloves to church and he held her hand walking up the aisle. He collected coral in his bedroom. A variety of varicolored maids came and went, and he attached his heart to them, in the washhouse behind their bungalow as they plaited their hair and he sat reading his books beside the washtubs fragrant with the blue astringency of bleach^ He loved the odor of bleach and the breeze that blew down the hot, empty, baking street and carried the fragrance of the whole island, its thorn trees and cactus; he loved the warm cement, the empty, sunny sky, the maids' laughter. And he gradually over the years forgot those houses that had not only attics, dry and magical, but damp and vivid basements stored with preserves and tools and old toys; he forgot the snows and turning seasons, and became a habitu6 of the Equator, whose soul loves light and the pleasures of the senses.

  For there is no more sensual place on earth. On Saturdays he went to the blazing white movie house in whose dark womb he watched Errol Flynn jumping onto burning decks to rescue Olivia de Havilland, and when he came outside into the dazzling sunlight, there were the cocoa palms, the lapis lazuli waters of the film itself. At night the trade winds moaned in the louvers as he lay in bed; a dog barked far away under the huge moon, the almond trees creaked in the breeze; and Malone dreamed the usual dreams of a boy his age—of cowboys, and Superman, and pirates—but with this difference: that outside, under the date palms, by the lagoons, was the setting for those dreams, as real as the shoes lying beside his bed on the floor. When he was twelve he gave up the dream of being a pirate, and replaced it with being a saint. He began coming home after school in the afternoons, and the catechism class that followed it, not to play ball, but to sequester himself in his room, kneeling, to pray to a statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and hope Christ would manifest Himself. His family said nothing as he said a Grace over his soup which lasted so long that by the time he lifted the first spoonful of cold liquid to his lips, they were eating dessert.

  His beautiful mother went to parties at night in perfume and necklaces; took Malone to mass in the village and made him light candles for his aunts and uncles in America; drank some evenings, and insisted he sit with her in the cavernous lighted living room of their bungalow as she talked about the snow and Christmases in Chicago. Then she would rise and dance to the Victrola—dance about the room, with or without him, as the moths beat against the screens. "Whatever you do," she said, "never lose your sense of humor. And dance! I hope for God's sake you can dance!" And Malone got up and danced for her. Afterward he dreamed of sleighs and snowy nights, of his mother always loving him, of his being the best dancer, of mittens and blankets, and falling snow. On the hottest nights, as the trade winds blew through the bungalow, he dreamed of snow; on the endless afternoons, of being a saint; but he was always dreaming.

  Malone had one of those sweet, receptive natures that take impressions like hot wax: years later, when he had been sent away, he would remember the oil-black shadows the date palms cast on the patio floor in the moonlight; or his mother dancing in that lighted room; the distressed moan of the wind against the shut louvers; the sunburned faces of the Dutch sailors who came out after showering to sit on the veranda of their hotel next to the church he attended with his mother; the cologne she wore to church and the tendrils of her hair curled behind her ears, damp from the shower; the sunlight slanting across tiles; the shine of granite rocks baking in the sun; the wind in the sea grape trees. But the impressions he took from that lighted bungalow, like the hot days and dreams of northern snow, were contradictory. His mother bequeathed him a loving heart, his father a certain German coldness that surprised him later in life in the midst of his most emotional episodes, like a cadaver suddenly sitting up in its coffin, when he suddenly saw he was cold, too. This duality of his cerebral father and tempestuous mother—of northern snows and tropic nights, of the sailors serenading the girls walking down the street in the hot sunlight and Christ dying on the cross within the darkness of the church—was like some gigantic fault that lies dormant in the earth until that single day when years of pressure cause it to slip. His being homosexual was only one aspect of this. He did not think his childhood any different from others he heard of which produced heterosexuals out of the same, if not worse, tensions—and he finally concluded, years later after the most earnest search for the cause of this inconvenience, that a witch had passed a wand over him as he lay sleeping one evening in Ceylon.

  The Bible says, a man divided is unstable in all ways. The child did not know this. The child was dutiful and well brought up, and resolved things by bringing home the first Friday of each month (like the mass devoted to the Sacred Heart of Jesus) a report card that pleased both mother and father. These different people both wanted him to do well in school. This he did. His geography teacher, the Portuguese gardener, his classmates: Everyone loved him for excelling. "Get a degree in law and finance," his father told him one day, "and you'll always be
in demand." At the age of fifteen he was shipped off to America like an island pineapple of special quality to be enrolled in a boarding school in Vermont; and thus, with everything unresolved, confused, inchoate, in a young man who thought life's greatest challenge would be in passing a trigonometry examination, he waved goodbye to the man and woman whose own lives, he would later feel, held the key to his. As their figures grew smaller on the dock in Surabanda between the palms and whitewashed houses, the maid weeping beside them, he moved even farther from a mystery that growing up only obscured, by adding further layers of politeness to a relationship already formal. "Get a degree in law and finance," was all he could think of as his father's white shirt was lost in the specks of color that made up that paradisical island.

  In New England he found snow—but it was the snow of loneliness, for now he missed his family and felt the first shock that occurs when a heart is sundered from its objects of affection. He studied diligently and postponed happiness: a habit he would not abandon for years. Though he was never as great a baseball player as his father had been in his youth, apparently, he was elected captain of the soccer team. He loved the vivid falls—the wildness in the air that singes the soul—and made a few good friends. He was what is so important to Americans: popular. He graduated in a shower of gold. He was ambitious and went to Yale, and from Yale he entered law school, and from law school he enrolled at the University of Stockholm for graduate work in shipping and banking law. He joined a large firm in New York on his return and was immediately assigned a crumb of that enormous banquet that would feed lawyers for decades to come: the Penn Central case. He was considered for a post as White House fellow. He was then a handsome young man in a dark suit with a vest and tie from J. Press in New Haven, wearing glasses to read, and you might have seen him on the shuttle to Washington, reading a novel of Henry James, or on a summer dusk in Georgetown, lingering outside a bookshop to examine the volume on French cathedrals in the window, before going off to the train station to get the Metroliner back to New York. There are various ways to keep the world at arm's length, and success is one of them: Malone was irreproachable, and something of a snob.