And ghostly I was—weak, without a will, or vision of another life—for years. I came to New York for love, too, like Malone, and I had been here so long by the time I first saw his incredible eyes, I could not remember. The first day of my life in that building I went to see an old woman who lived in an apartment on the first floor, two rooms in the back filled with the bottle-blue, milky light that gathered like glue at the base of the air shafts of these buildings. How horrified I was by that light! Exactly how long I had lived there I learned only when, going downstairs one day many years after this visit, I ran into the old woman at the mailbox, and she turned to me and said brightly as she turned the key: "Oh, hello! Are you still here?"
Yes, I was still here: trapped, like a fly in amber, in love with the sordid streets, the rooftops, the Puerto Rican boys, the little park at midnight where I could always find boys hungry as I was, their faces gloomy with lust, as they stood beneath the trees waiting to be picked up. I had come to town—when I no longer remembered—and stayed, and time ceased even to be measured, nothing was measured except the cyclical progress of love.
In the city nothing changes: It becomes cold part of the year, and hot another, but no trees lose their leaves, no crops ripen, there are only the streets, the fire escapes, the sky; the telephone, the echoing gymnasium, the angelic face of the Italian boy selling Christmas trees whom you see walking home from the Baths one cold winter night, glowing in the flames he has started in an old oil can to keep warm as he stands there on Second Avenue. Each winter you dance, and each summer you go to the beach. Each year you love someone new: Orientals in 1967, Italians in 1968, blacks in 1969, and bearded blonds in 1970; and always the Puerto Ricans, the angels, who take the form of messenger boys, waiting to cross the street across the pavement from you in their jeans and sneakers, their old leather jackets, on a cold winter day. You remember the eyes, as beautiful as bare trees against a sky: naked, cold, as they glance at you for a moment and then look away. Years pass loving such eyes. And the only way you know you're older is that you (once loved by older men) now find yourself loving boys younger than you...
How did time pass in this way? How was it possible for five years to seem like five weeks? I stalked people with the oblivious slowness of a man to whom time does not apply. If it took five or six years to finally speak to a man like Malone, no matter. Watching them so long made possession itself almost secondary. Love is a career with its own stages, rewards, and failures... a vocation as concrete as a calling in the Church, worth giving a lifetime to. So I do not know how long I had been on the circuit when I first saw Malone; but this sense of paralysis, of life without movement, had surely begun to affect him, too, by that time.
For that is the curious quality of the discotheque after you have gone there a long time: In the midst of all the lights, and music, the bodies, the dancing, the drugs, you are stiller than still within, and though you go through the motions of dancing you are thinking a thousand disparate things. You find yourself listening to the lyrics, and you wonder what these people around you are doing. They seemed crazed to you. You stand there on the floor moving your hips, wondering if there is such a thing as love, and conscious for the very first time that it is three twenty-five and the night only half over. You put the popper to your nostril, you put a hand out to lightly touch the sweaty, rigid stomach of the man dancing next to you, your own chest is streaming with sweat in that hot room, and you are thinking, as grave as a judge: What will I do with my life? What can any man do with his life? And you finally don't know where to rest your eyes. You don't know where to look, as you dance. You have been expelled from the communion of saints.
And so we come to the night John Schaeffer, up from Princeton for the weekend, was taken to the Twelfth Floor and saw Malone come in the door and greet his friends. Friends who were nothing more than people he went to parties with, and who had long since lost their capacity to enchant. He stood talking to him and listening to the music with an oddly detached, critical ear. He was waiting for a song, the right song, a face, the magic face, to kindle in him again the old ecstasies—and when he found himself on the floor again, putting back his head when Patty Jo began to sing, "Make Me Believe in You," and touching Bruce West's voluptuous chest streaming with sweat, and wondering who the next boy would be, he was, like everyone else, just a prisoner of habit.
But he hadn't been there in a long time, living as he was with Rafael on the other side of town, and it was for some a thrill to see him again. For if Malone was, in the end, only a face I saw in a discotheque one winter, he was somehow the figure on which everything rested. The central beautiful symbol. As long as he was enmeshed, as long as that room could draw him back (as it now had), so was I. As long as it compelled that face it compelled me. You form relationships like that in a city, and especially in a society as romantic as homosexual society, with faces you never even come near but which stand for a great deal. Why did I never try to know these people whom I adored? I do not know. But though I'd never spoken to Malone, I loved him, and though I'd never tried to meet him, / he was the only person in that huge city whose life, whose fate, I found absorbing; and the moment he appeared in that doorway once again, the moment he came back to the Twelfth Floor, I felt a great joy, as if the illusion of love were once more possible.
Nor have I even said what this man looked like, in a story that is really about physical beauty more than anything else—Malone was one of the few blonds I ever found handsome. In New York one is in love with Italians and Jews, and Puerto Ricans and Hungarians, with Sicilians and Venezuelans—the dark-eyed, dark-haired beauties in whom you wish to extinguish yourself, to drown, to disappear in, like a dark night—and blonds were as bland as the bankers and attorneys striding Park Avenue: the blank minions of a vast workhouse, who understood nothing of the secrets of the blood. Then there was Malone. He was the other kind of blond. He resembled those stylized warriors drawn with black lines on the umbrian hue of Greek amphorae, whose thighs were sheaths of muscle so clearly defined they might be plates of armor on the leg. He had the grace of a gazelle grazing on some golden plain in the heat of an African noon. His deep-set, extraordinary eyes were never superficial, empty, glazed over with that dead absence of feeling with which New Yorkers screen out the countless phenomena they must screen out each day in a city whose life assaults rather than comforts. They were filled with emotion; Malone's great strength was the fact that he could hide nothing. He had the perfect manners of a man of his upbringing; but even this restraint and formality could not extinguish the glow. On our deathbeds we will remember faces—not what we accomplished or failed to accomplish, what we worried over anxiously, but the face in the subway, the grace of two black boys who washed each other's shaven heads with shampoo one afternoon in an army camp in Georgia, the sight of Malone when his eyes met yours.
Nothing, however, could have been more startling than to notice Malone and Sutherland in our neighborhood. We had no idea one of them had moved there, but we now saw them every day, late in the afternoon, which is when they got up. Even on that street of crazies Sutherland stood out. There was something wild and breathless about his face, as if he had just seen the Blessed Virgin Mary appear above a subway entrance, or had just stepped out of one of those wind tunnels in which they test the wings of airplanes. Malone drew your attention for different reasons. He looked completely out of place. His eyes were so grave, and kind, and hopeful that meeting their gaze when you passed him on the street, you suddenly forgot where you were going and stopped to recollect
Malone sensed some of this. By now those eyes had become a burden to him. He no longer believed in love himself, yet he saw people falling in love with him every day. Malone's eyes strayed—because he still was astonished by beauty—and he often found himself locked in an embrace with some nameless stranger on a street. He solved this dilemma by simply not looking at anyone anywhere he went; and if he had to meet them, he adopted from the first a breezy, impersonal form o
f friendliness that fairly declared itself a form of asexual courtesy and nothing more; which explains his peculiar ease and fluent charm when John Schaeffer saw him at the Twelfth Floor.
We saw this the afternoon they came into our store, and Sutherland went straight for the old, formal, floor-length dresses being sold secondhand. "They never have my size," he said breathlessly, "and I refuse to tell them it's for a friend."
Malone smiled and stuck his hands in his pockets and struck up a conversation with us while Sutherland inspected gowns: "By the way," he said in that breezy way, "I just moved to this neighborhood and maybe you can help me. Is there anyplace I can go at night to get a bit of air? A nearby park?"
We stared: The words made it sound as if we were living in a little village on the Rhine. Finally we told him of the three within walking distance: Washington Square, which was usually filled with people tossing Frisbees, selling dope, or playing bongo drums, and which wasn't very relaxing; Tompkins Square, which was dangerous; and our own watering hole, those two symmetrical parks on Second Avenue between Fifteenth and Seventeenth streets, where we went in the evening to sit and smoke a cigarette and watch men have sex under the trees, and which we warned him now was patronized by homosexuals.
At this point Sutherland arrived and draped a long, dark gray gown over the counter with marquisette appliqué and padded shoulders, and said in his breathless, vibrant voice, "Thank God I found this before Babe Paley did. Not to mention Marie-Hélène de Rothschild. Do you accept Master Charge, darling?" He suddenly yawned, and then said, "Excuse me," as he blinked back the moisture that had come into his eyes. "Frankie called at five in the morning," he said, turning to Malone as we began boxing the dress and writing the sales slip. "Quite gaga. Not only am I getting no sleep—and sleep is everything, darling—but I am beginning to be frightened, seriously frightened." And he yawned uncontrollably again.
"Why are you frightened?" said Malone.
"He reminds me of the Ruiz Correas," said Sutherland as he raised a cigarette to his lips.
"Who are they?" said Malone.
"The family who own the grocery store across the street," he said, "from my apartment. I reported them two winters ago to the Board of Health. I lived in complete seclusion for weeks afterward. I did not set foot on Madison Avenue."
"But why?"
"I was afraid of reprisals," he said. "I was obsessed at the time by the death of the Duchesse de Cleves. She was executed during the Revolution, of course, poor baby, and afterward the soldier who had guarded her in prison went around wearing a little moustache composed of her pubic hair."
And with that they left the shop.
For a while after that we didn't see them at all. We began to see their pictures in Interview, and the Post, instead, that autumn: for Sutherland had begun to party on a grander scale, and Malone, having nothing else to do, went along on this latest excursion of his friend. Sutherland and Malone went to nearly every opening, premiere, gala, and charity ball given at which an element of gay society (fashion, the theater, the arts) made a momentary alliance with the society whose names monotonously sprinkle the columns (the Paleys, Guests, Guinnesses). In that interface they thrived: smiling in black tie beside Lee Radziwill or Françoise de la Renta as the photographer immured Malone, not in any pyramid, but in a column of Eugenia Sheppard. He was simply identified in the caption as Anthony Malone. But he was only a party-goer manqué.Anything that was not a possible prelude ' to falling in love left Malone cold. He accompanied Sutherland because he did not know what other avenue he had not tried; he even, for a while, set out with him in the afternoons with their pockets filled with dried apricots, cashew nuts, and raisins, for a long night in the subway johns, meeting one another every three or four hours on the shuttle between Grand Central and Times Square to compare adventures. He forsook the subways after a month of that, but he was no longer chaste. That having isolated him more, he began to sleep with everyone. He went from the Venice Ball to the latest backroom bar and stumbled out of a truck on the waterfront at seven in the morning, his tuxedo stained with piss, his face gentle and bemused. One night they came down to the St. Marks Theater in black tie, with the Egyptian heiresses and a famous v decorator, having left a dinner party to see a particularly atrocious double bill. The bill was Once Is Not Enough and Mahogany, and the theater was jammed with gay people, blacks, and Puerto Ricans talking back to the screen. Halfway through the first film a black man stepped on a Puerto Rican's foot as he was leaving his seat for a drink of water; he did not apologize, and the Puerto Rican, a short man in a fake fur coat and peaked maroon hat, jumped up and ran after the black man, saying, "Man, I've got a gun, I'm going to blow your head off! You step on me, you say you're sorry!" The black man vanished, and the Puerto Rican continued stalking the aisles repeating his threat. At first no one paid any attention, and someone even yelled: "Go stick it up your ass and pull the trigger," and some queen yelled, "Now that would be a fuck!" But then the Puerto Rican yelled, "I count to five, I blow your head off!" and people started listening to him. "Everybody shut up! Or I blow this guy's head off!" he yelled, as he stood in the darkness down the aisle beside someone we could not see.
Then—while the ingénue sat on a rock in Central Park having a personal crisis beneath the windows of the Hotel Pierre—the almost clipped, confident voice of Malone said: "Go right ahead, I really don't care if you do."
And Sutherland chimed in breathlessly: "Shoot me, darling, I'm on so much speed that the only thing that could possibly bring me down now is to have you blow my head off. That is the source of all the trouble anyway, isn't it? We think too much! Blow my head off, darling, and leave me just a highly sensitized anus!"
And here Sutherland began telling Malone in his blithe and breathless voice about a course he had taken with a gay psychologist in San Francisco about getting in touch with one's anus as a source of sexual pleasure.
"Shut up!" the man yelled. "I blow your head off!"
"Go right ahead, darling!" Sutherland gasped. "Pull the trigger and let me come down." And he resumed his conversation with Malone, as the crowd hooted, "Thas right, thas right, you tell him!" and the Puerto Rican whirled around to point his gun at the people who had shouted that. Just then Mahogany came onscreen, and the man wandered down to the front row and sat down to watch Diana Ross sing her theme song.
They came out after the movie in black tie, with faces shining, and stood lighting cigarettes as Malone stepped into the street to hail a cab. Sutherland saw the Puerto Rican in the big fur coat and peaked hat standing on the sidewalk with a sullen, dazed expression on his face, as if he were only waiting for another pretext to threaten someone with his pistol. There was a certain ragged edge of human nerves in that part of town—a fine line between human life and violence. You were always missing a murder by ten minutes in that street. You came down to buy a paper and found the sidewalk roped off, as if they had just laid fresh cement, and a sign dangling from the rope: CRIME SEARCH AREA. "You see how dangerous bad art can be to the public," Sutherland said as he offered a cigarette to the Puerto Rican man, who stared at him with a wild, crazy look. "It spreads disorder, as Plato predicted. But I wasn't the one you should have shot," he said as the others called to him from their cab, "it was Jacqueline Susann, darling."
And here he stepped into the cab and blew a kiss, as the man began screaming at him in Spanish.
And once more the city swallowed them up, and they led that strenuous life that existed for us in the newspapers, if there. More parties are given in New York City every night of the week than any other city in the world, surely. Malone and Sutherland went to three a night, and more, for weeks on end. Early in the morning, on our way home from the park, we ran into Malone standing in his tuxedo with a newspaper and carton of milk under his arm, talking to a bum in the clouds of steam that rose from the heating grates, a ghostly sight. "Any luck?" Malone would ask cheerfully when he saw us. He reached into his pocket for a cigarette and pulled ou
t a studded leather cock ring instead. "Are those boys looking for love, too? And finding it?" For he was convinced, even as he went through the paces, that this was an arid way to spend a life. One evening when they had left a new discotheque that had just opened on East Nineteenth Street and strolled down Second Avenue to smoke cigarettes, they wandered into the park where we sat on a bench in the chilly darkness watching the silhouettes float around like sharks in that dark seacave of erotic love.
"He's that gorgeous boy who used to go with John Terry," Sutherland was saying as they sat down on a bench behind us, "the boy who's being kept by a businessman from Singapore, a tea tycoon, the one who masturbates with a lubricated boxing glove and who used to go with George de Rue, the man who is going to redo my apartment next month as a meat locker—"
"Stop!" said Malone all of a sudden. "I don't want to hear another word."
There was a moment of silence and then Sutherland breathed, "But, darling! Gossip is the food of the gods."
"I don't care anymore," said Malone, "whether fatigues are out, or Lacostes the kiss of death, and whether Eddie Chin has let his body go to pot, and will he be anally oriented again this winter, too! And who Terence Hutchinson's lovers used to be, and whether or not Jackie O is going to Halston's party Friday! I don't want to hear another word. I just don't care. I'd like to be serious," he said. "For a while." There was another moment of silence.
Dancer From the Dance: A Novel Page 12
