Dancer From the Dance: A Novel

by Andrew Holleran

  He ran all the way back to Sutherland's apartment, where he found Sutherland in a black Norell standing beside the baby grand piano and singing in a velvet voice: "This time we almost made the pieces fit, didn't we?" He held out his long-gloved arm to Malone and said: "Were you a model of propriety? Did you conduct yourself with dignity?" And then, seeing Malone was distraught, he took off his long gloves, made him a cup of tea, and sat with him on the sofa and listened to his tale of regret and loss until it was time to go to the White Party.

  The next afternoon when they awoke with the empty heads of angels being born, pushed their costumes off their limbs, and walked to the window to see if it was day or night, Malone saw Frankie on the corner opposite. Malone drew back; he was convinced, once again, that Frankie was mad. "To take love so seriously!" said Sutherland in a thrilled voice as he came to the window. "Only Latins take love seriously, and he is so beautiful. We northern Europeans are cold as fish," he smiled, and wrapped his robe around him as he sat down with a bottle of Perrier. But then Malone looked out at him and felt a vague melancholy: He was crazy, but at least he valued love more than anything, and had adored him. And his very seriousness, his very earnest fury, as he stood there on the corner looking across the street at Sutherland's windows, took Malone's breath away. He knew nothing of discotheques and gossip, body-building and baseball caps, bleached fatigues and plaid shirts, the whole milieu of trends on which the city, and the society that revolved around the Twelfth Floor, thrived, even originated. He stood there in his jeans (the wrong kind, cheap knock-offs from a discount house in Jersey City) and wind-breaker (shapeless and green), frowning at Sutherland's window, his dark eyes cloudy as the sky filled that afternoon with an impending thunderstorm, and dark hair blowing about his ears, a creature from a different planet, unfashionable, unself-conscious, unknowing. Yet vain in his own way, Malone reminded himself as he put down the binoculars and turned from the window with a feeling of sadness.

  "I don't know if he's waiting to take me to lunch," Malone said, "or stick a knife in my ribs."

  "I ask myself the same question every time I go over to Ceil Tyson's for dinner," said Sutherland, peering out the window. "Perhaps you should go to Rome until we clear this up."

  "But I can't leave the city," said Malone miserably, "as long as he's in it."

  "Poor baby," said Sutherland, withdrawing from the window. "Then what do you plan to do?"

  It began to rain and Frankie stepped under the portico of the museum as Malone said: "I want to disappear. Can I leave Manhattan without leaving Manhattan? I'd just better vanish in the metropolitan equivalent of one of those holes scientists have discovered in the universe."

  "Well," said Sutherland, putting a finger to his lips judiciously, "you could move to Harlem. One hundred thirtieth Street? But then, northern blacks are so rude. No, I think you should go in the other direction," he said. "I think you should go to the Lower East Side."

  That day friends found for Malone—who had little money now—a small apartment on St Mark's Place in which to hide till Frankie went home himself. "They forget me," said Sutherland enviously, "within five minutes after leaving the apartment. But then I have such a tiny wink," he sighed.

  And so late one night a caravan of taxicabs rolled down Second Avenue south of Fourteenth Street—where Sutherland had once lived as part of Warhol's stable—down the sordid streets of the East Village, bathed in the orange glare of the latest streetlights designed to prevent street crime, and which made each street into a Gaza Strip lacking only barbed wire to prevent the pedestrians on one block from migrating to the one opposite. The whores watched them rumble past; the bums were already sprawled in the doorway of the Ottendorf Library, and the bag ladies were asleep on the sidewalk beside baby carriages heaped with trash. "So much local color!" said Sutherland as the three yellow cabs rolled down the bricks of Second Avenue. "So much raw life. Very Hogarth. Very pretty!" he said, as a man stood shaking his penis against the windshield of a car stopped for a red light, whose driver, a young woman, stared bravely off into the distance, ignoring its presence. "Do you know who used to live along Second Avenue in all these buildings in the twenties?" he said, leaning forward on the seat to look up at the big stone apartment houses in which lighted windows glowed. "Jewish gangsters! Yes!" he said excitedly. "The famous Rosy Segal lived here, and Bugsy Levine and all the boys who used to hang around the Café Metropole. They kept mistresses in these buildings, just like me," he said, for he still got occasional checks from his Brazilian neurosurgeon and his Parisian art dealer. "The biggest Jewish gangsters of the twenties, this was their block," he said, as the pale cornices went by beneath the radiance of a yellow summer moon. "They are huge apartments," said one of the friends who were accompanying them downtown, an urban planner from Boston, "as big as the ones on the Upper West Side."

  "And who lives in them now?" Sutherland said. But before the friend could answer, Sutherland replied himself. "Faggots!" he said. "Faggots where the Jewish gangsters used to keep their mistresses! Ah, this avenue has never been anything but déclassé, it is the perfect place in which to disappear," he said, turning back to Malone. "The perfect place for social oblivion. Not only will nobody know where you are, but when they do find out, they won't visit you after four o'clock in the afternoon!" he said, as they got out of the cab and stepped over the supine body of a man sleeping in the gutter. "Mira!" he said, pointing to a young Puerto Rican man bent at the waist, as he reached for something on the sidewalk at his feet—but as they gazed at him, he remained in that impossible pose, immobilized by a drug he had taken earlier that evening. "I believe," said Sutherland breathlessly, "I believe he is trying to pick up his comb! Welcome," he said, turning to Malone. "Welcome to Forgetfulness!"

  The Lower East Side reminds some people of photographs of Berlin just after the war. And in fact along certain blocks the walls of tenement houses are thin as movie sets, whose windows disclose the rubble of collapsed buildings. I used to have a dream that bombs had leveled the entire neighborhood and grass and trees and flocks of sheep been allowed to flourish there instead. But this will never be. The Lower East Side will go on just as it is, shimmering in waves of heat rising from the asphalt in summer, shrinking in winter in the pale light till it is nothing but a long gray wall hung with fire escapes on whose sidewalks every particle of dirt and trash stands out in the ashen air. Poor people live there. Artists and ghosts—Poles whose neighborhood it used to be and hippies who gathered there in the early sixties. But both of these have had their day, and St. Mark's Place now belongs to hair stylists, pimps, and dealers in secondhand clothing. The building in which Malone took a room is a kind of history lesson of that part of town: It once housed the Electric Circus, a discotheque that began fashionable and white, and eventually became unfashionable and black, and then it was a center for the fifteen-year-old Maharajah Mutu who held prayer meetings there, when I used to see men in dark gray suits running down the sidewalk at five-thirty after work not to be late for meditation—and then a country-and-western discotheque, if that's not a contradiction in terms, that never got off the ground. Finally they closed the place down, and music no longer throbbed out the door on winter nights, and black boys no longer stood around the stairs combing their hair, and no one came in search of spiritual insight And it just sat there, a huge hulk of a building painted shocking blue... a tax write-off for the Mafia. In the very highest part of the big black rounded roof a single window glowed late at night—and that was Malone, trying on T-shirts.

  He found himself by now with a collection of clothes nearly as various as die contents of the closet Sutherland had showed him the night they met. He found himself with fatigues and painter's pants, transparent plastic belts, and plaid shirts, work boots and baseball caps, and T-shirts in every hue manufactured and sold in stores, and then the shades he had created himself by bleaching and fading. He found himself on his empty, lazy afternoons, such as a hooker must spend, trying on clothes and loo
king at himself in the mirror. The mirror was a cracked shard and the clothes were heaped about the room in cardboard boxes and grocery bags, but he didn't care. He was like an actor in his dressing room, always preparing for a performance. He was free. Free to be vain, to be lazy, to dream. To stand in front of the mirror trying on one T-shirt after another, apple-green, soft yellow, olive drab, black, bright red, faded pink, beige, turquoise blue, and to discard T-shirts, pants, belts before he finally chose the clothes in which he went out into the street.

  For whom was he dressing? The love he inevitably met in the street. Malone regressed when he came to live alone on the Lower East Side: He went back to the dreams of adolescence, became the girl on her prom night, dreaming of clothes, of love, of the handsome stranger, of being desired. He'd wanted to live a life like this, of self-indulgence, long days, gossip and love affairs, and in his shabby room on the Lower East Side he was completely free to live this timeless existence.

  For there is no sense of time passing when you live in that part of town. The Polish men stand in front of the stoop in dark suits and hats watching the crowd go by for hour after hour. The Puerto Rican women sit on the stoops down the street feeding their babies soda pop at dusk, and sometimes they dance with each other while a husband plays the guitar. The music on the jukebox in the bar the Polish men sit at every day, their hats pushed down over their noses, is ten years out of date. No one bothers to change the selections. They listen to Dean Martin sing, "I Want to Be Around to Pick Up the Pieces," over and over again, as a pall of incinerator smoke settles over the neighborhood.

  There is no sense of time—the bums come and go; you learn to recognize a few, and then they disappear, on the train to Florida. The whores stand on the corner in their hot pants, shivering under the cold moon, and the sirens of half a dozen police cars rushing to a murder on First Avenue rise up into the sky like a chorus of heavenly voices and then die down. The palm reader dressed like a gypsy has been sitting in her window for years. The funeral home is next to the travel agency, and they look exactly alike. In the window of the travel agency is a poster of five young Polish girls running from a metallic house trailer toward a marshy pond; they have been running for years.

  It is difficult to say how long Malone had been there, but it was long enough for him (who had been horrified at the men begging for money, the boys folding up on the corner from drugs, the bag ladies asleep on their trash, the shrews screaming at the fruit-sellers on First Avenue over pennies of change, the decrepit, strange creatures on platform shoes with attenuated silhouettes) finally to feel he belonged there. He'd finally found a place whose streets he could roam, where time passed and one wasn't conscious of it, no one cared. He was a literal prisoner of love. Lying in his bed late at night, utterly exhausted, he would rise—completely against his will—to run up to the little park on Fifteenth Street because there might be a boy standing under a tree there looking for love. He loved everything while this erotic fever lasted: the empty streets in winter raked by the wind late at night, the bums sleeping in clouds of steam on the heating vents; in summer, the fragrant heat, the flies droning over the fruit stalls, the plash of water from the fire hydrants; the children screaming, the odor of cookies from the Polish bakery, days lived in a T-shirt and tennis sneakers, the acrid smoke of the incinerator smokestacks settling onto the street. He saw sunsets from his roof. In spring he loved the rains that left the subway stations damp and chilly, and he stopped in the men's rooms and made love there. Only the autumn, that crisp, hard, exhilarating season, made him feel ashamed; made him feel trapped in the street, but it passed, and he resumed his life without consciousness of time. And so he lived there for years—and who can say if he stayed in that dismal tenement that so horrified and enthralled him simultaneously, pursuing love, or performing some strange penance for all the advantages he'd had? Love, and humiliation, at once. Malone became one of those boys you see walking home against the crowd at eight in the morning, his face wan, his eyes shadowed after a night with some man in Chelsea: a prisoner of love.

  In fact the entire realm of daytime existence became meaningless to Malone, and he wondered how it was possible for men to do anything but pursue amorous interests; how it was possible for them to found businesses, build buildings, play squash. He found himself coming home on the subways in the morning, with crowds of people on their way to work—and while the man hanging onto the strap beside him was on his way to the headquarters of Citibank, he was coming home from a long night of love with one of its tellers. They swayed beside one another, hanging onto the straps, as the car hurtled through the tunnel: the one the servant of Vulcan, and he the servant of Priapus. When he saw, leaving his room at night, the hookers gathered on Third Avenue in their sequined hot pants and black halter tops, he only blessed them secretly in his heart. Rushing up Park Avenue one night on his way to a tryst, he saw an associate from his old firm leaving the offices of Union Carbide. He waited behind a pillar to avoid being seen.

  He made love in deserted warehouses at three in the afternoon, and in piers along the river, with huge patches of sunlight falling through the ruined roof; he made love at night in curious apartments high above the city. He made love at rush hour in the men's rooms of subway stations; he made love at noon, at midnight, at eight in the morning; and still he found himself alone. He hurried back and forth across the city on the subway, on its sidewalks, rushing only on errands of love. And still he found himself on Sunday evening rushing out to quell the inevitable sadness of that moment. He made love with Puerto Rican anesthetists at Bellevue, psychiatrists and Belgian chefs, poets and airline pilots, anarchists and bankers, corporate attorneys and copywriters, and he discovered that after the most passionate night of lovemaking, in someone's bed or at the Baths, he only wanted more. He went from going to bed with handsome people to going to bed with ordinary people, and finally ugly men; with Jews, Italians, Slavs and Brazilians, Dutchmen, Germans, Greeks and Arabs. He made a vow to sleep with everyone just once. He grew gaunt, even more handsome, his eyes shadowed and turgid with lust: He was a prisoner of love.

  The building in which Malone and I lived, like a big blue mosque in the center of that neighborhood, was filled with prisoners of other things. The lower floors were full of elderly Jewish widows living on Social Security who were kept alive with the sandwich the Puerto Rican boy from the grocery downstairs brought them once a day. There were Polish couples left over from the days when this had been their neighborhood. There was a Japanese family who ran a tempura takeout restaurant on the street. There was a woman who coughed quietly throughout the night and whom no one ever saw. There was a sad young man in a wheelchair whose cousin came down from Queens each day to take him out. There was a courteous, old-fashioned German man who took his dogs out for a walk three times a day and said a courtly greeting to everyone, as if they were strolling on the Ringstrasse in Vienna. There was a hillbilly family who screamed at each other day and night and lived with twenty-nine cats and dogs. There was the teller at Chemical Bank who returned home, changed into an old black Chanel, put a lot of Cole Porter records on his record player, and lay on a chaise longue all evening smoking dope as he leafed through old issues of Vanity Fair. And finally there was the woman who so affected Malone—just the sight of her, on the stairs, a tipsy blond woman with faded blue eyes who paused on each landing to get her breath before climbing to the next, and who smiled and said, "Go ahead," to whoever was behind her. She had once been pretty and she now lived with a husband who yelled at her, as she yelled at him, each evening. She once missed an entire landing coming downstairs, but she was so drunk she just picked herself up off the tiles and went wavering out the door. Her face, in the fluorescent light of that vomit-colored stairwell, had so much sadness and resignation stamped on its Dresden prettiness (long faded, wrinkled now) it sent a chill to Malone's heart and he could not look at her or smell her perfume without a feeling of panic.

  Everybody was a flop there: failed artist
s, artists who'd never made it, disoriented people. Archer had nearly had his doctoral degree at Harvard when he decided that it didn't matter to him what Blake's opinion of applied science was, and he came to New York and lived as a callboy. He spent two hours a day in a local gymnasium, and his tits were now bigger than his mother's. On the weekends he went to different cities along the East Coast just to stand in bars and show them off. The English girl downstairs came from a very good family and was forever being beaten up by her black lovers. She would call up at three in the morning when she was baking her organic bread, and her lover was breaking into apartments in the building, to see if you were home, and if you answered she would ask in her Oxford accent: "Oh, do you have any unbleached soy flour?"

  Why was she, or any of us, still there in that place when anyone of modest sense would have moved out long ago? Rent was cheap. But that is too simple an explanation. The streets were made of quicksand, the air was an odorless gas, time passed and we couldn't rouse ourselves. It was simply easier to stay—and satisfy whatever appetites had brought us here in the first place; appetites that, once satisfied, left us exhausted. We became like the ashen air, the fire escapes, the warren of roofs and laundry lines glistening on a wet April morning. We were ghosts. And that's why I went to the discotheques last winter, and even worked in one: serving punch. It was the perfect form of life for a ghost such as I...