"What?" said a bearded poet, who had been unable, after all, to leave this round of discos, bars, and baths he had denounced on many occasions.
"That it is the same color as one's pubic hair," said the model. He removed the cigarette holder from his lips and hollowed his cheeks in a comical expression of hauteur. "How many times I've gone to bed with dreamy people, only to discover their pubic hair was a dull, uninteresting gray. Of course my beard would be blond."
"And what if he doesn't look at you then?" said the poet.
"Then I'll try a moustache," the model shrugged. "There must be some look he's crazy for. It's all just a matter of packaging. Perhaps," he frowned, "he doesn't like blonds!"
"Oh, come see," said a boy sitting by the window. "The sunset is very beautiful."
"Then pull the shade," said Sutherland, wiping out an ashtray with his apron. "I never look at the sunset across these rooftops. It is too depressing. The more beautiful the sky, the more hopeless the neighborhood."
"You must track him down, learn his habits," said the poet, once again intrigued by the problem of seduction at hand.
"The way you moved to Montauk to be with the surfers," said the model.
"Yes," he said. "If you are in love with giraffes, you should live on the Serengeti, if you are in love with surfer boy, you must go to Montauk. And that is what I did."
"But, Rafael!" said Sutherland. "You never slept with any of them!"
"So what?" he shrugged. "One smile from them was ten times more thrilling than the most expert blow-job by some queen at the Baths. I did not have sex with them, but I surfed with them, drank with them, baked clams together, fell asleep side by side in motel rooms—who wants a blow-job?"
"Millions of American boys, thank heaven," said Sutherland in his breathless, throaty murmur. "Oh, God," he said, staring at himself in the mirror, "I been bitten by the love bug!"
Several people shrieked and stood up and said they were on their way to dinner; they filed by Malone's bed and all spoke to him—and what was striking, for those people, they sounded sincere. As they left, however, the open door admitted a new flood of visitors. We watched in astonishment as those mysterious faces we had been so in love with came into the room. Janos Zatursky came, a Hungarian physicist who rarely smiled or said a word (and everyone was in love with him), and Andrew Litton, a beautiful boy who had once been his lover, and Stanley Escher, a struggling architect, and Robert Truscott, the heir to a California forest, and then a host of nameless cocoa-colored boys (me sees all around Manhattan, delivering messages, playing handball in empty lots—those Hispanic angels, a blend of Cuba, Africa, and Puerto Rico, whose dark eyes and bone structures no plastic surgeon could create: All of them stopped by to kiss Malone or share their dope with the other people in the room. Raoul Lecluse came, of the Lecluse Gallery years ago, and Felipe Donovan, the owner of the Twelfth Floor, and a man who had pierced his nipples years before it was a fad and shaved his head before that, and John Eckstein, a dancer with the American Ballet Theater, and Prentiss Nohant, the boy famous for appearing in public in costumes made entirely of gas masks.
The circuit queens came: Luis Sanchez (who played the music at the Twelfth Floor on Saturday) and John di Bellas (a gymnast we had loved till learning he was arrogant); Ed Cort and his lover, Bill Walker (an anal masochist who went to work with a seven-pound ball bearing up his ass); Edwin Giglio (who was so disliked that at his birthday party on Fire Island the guests brought in a candlelit cake and then threw it in his face—while he was tripping); George Riley (a melancholy architect who had never recovered from his affair at Stanford with a professor of mathematics); two airline stewards whose names we didn't know; Eddie Rien, Paul Orozco, and Bob Everett (all hustlers who were no more than five feet four, or twenty years of age); Bill Morgan (who looked like a portrait by Titian, always had gonorrhea, and worked at the airport fueling jets); Huntley Fish (the famous tits), Edwin Farrah from Australia; and Bob Chalmers, a millionaire who went to the Baths every night and lived at the Hotel Pierre watching old Tarzan movies till night fell.
Lynn Feight, a handsome man from Philadelphia being kept by an Episcopalian bishop; and Bob Giorgione (the photographer), who had attempted suicide too many times to recall; and Tom Villaverde (who had a penis so large no one would go to bed with him); and Randy Renfrew (whose penis was so small no one would go to bed with him); and Alonzo Moore, who roller-skated through town in a chiffon ball gown waving a wand to passersby, all came by to see Malone.
And, at the very end, Bruno Welling, a famous drug dealer from the Upper East Side, and Leonard Hauter, a short, dark, enigmatic boy who never said a word but went everywhere with Bruno Welling and served, people said, as a human guinea pig for the newest drugs, which Bruno could not sell till he learned their effect on people. They came by and left Sutherland with a lid of Angel Dust and his favorite drug of all: speed. Everyone in New York was waiting for Sutherland to disintegrate before their very eyes—he shot up incessantly—but by some perverse fate, he went on blooming like a cherub, the very seraph of good health.
They were talking to Archer Prentiss, the chinless, ugly boy who was such a good dancer and who lived in our neighborhood, when we arrived. He lived in a fifth-floor walk-up above a Polish funeral home and spent all his time reading newspapers in his room; he went out only to buy cottage cheese, and newspapers, and to dance.
"But I have never seen you, in the faubourg!" said Sutherland in a voice whose passionate excitement gave you the impression he had just been someplace marvelous and was going to be someplace marvelous again.
"I'm a recluse," said Archer in his warped monotone.
"Ah," said Sutherland, tilting the cigarette holder by his lips. "Ah," he breathed.
"A real recluse," said Archer.
"Tell me," said Sutherland. There was a pause, and Archer leaned forward. "What does one wear?"
Archer stared at him until Sutherland said, with a wave of his hand, "No, no, surely there are more intelligent questions than that, it is not your fault I am concerned," he said, "with surfaces."
"With surfaces?"
"Yes, with hats, with gloves, you understand," he said. "I was a recluse myself once, due to a... grocery store," he said, waving his hand. He spoke with the most fluid languor, and never above a breathless rush, and as you looked at him, reclining on some pillows that had been thrown onto an old sofa in the corner beside Malone's bed, he produced an impression of almost soporific languidness until your eyes traveled down the figure and saw his one foot, tapping the air with the regularity of a metronome.
"But the whole affair blew away," he murmured throatily, "and I shop at D'Agostino now. Why did you become a recluse?" he asked Archer.
"Because I was burned out," droned Archer, "because I was a doomed queen, because I got tired of the same faces, and the same places, because I had been standing in the Eagle's Nest for ten years."
"My dear," breathed Sutherland as he expelled a stream of smoke. "At least you weren't in the men's room at Grand Central."
"I know just how you feel," said Malone all of a sudden. "I want to become a recluse, too."
"The Schaeffers have a place in the Berkshires," said Sutherland, turning to Malone. "Will that do? Is a thousand acres enough for you to be alone with the wild-flower and the loon? Will a thousand acres suffice, darling?" he said.
"I think so," said Malone, looking at him with a smile.
"Don't you think he looks just like a wounded airman of the First World War recuperating at Sandringham?" said Sutherland, getting up to hover around Malone like Betty Furness displaying a refrigerator. "If you walked in and saw him, could you resist? Could you?" he said. "I wonder," he said, standing back like a designer appraising a gown, "if we should hang dog tags around his neck. Or sprinkle talcum powder all over everything? Talcum powder and cheap after-shave cologne?" he said, asking us all to survey Malone.
"You see," he said, turning to us, "this is what our client will see whe
n he walks through the door tomorrow. We mustn't make a mistake!" He put a hand to his lips. "We could always ask Harry Kaplan to come down. He's done brilliant things with the windows at Bendel's."
But evidently this was not required, for the next afternoon when we came up with his groceries and his mail, Malone looked as we had left him. And the handsome young man with horn-rimmed glasses whom I had last seen sitting beside Sutherland on the sofa at the Twelfth Floor was now sitting on a pillow in the corner. "You really can't think of five things in life you've always wanted to do," Sutherland said to him when we walked in.
"Well," he said, "I've always wanted to spend a year on the Serengeti, and go up the Amazon, and visit the Galapagos, but do you mean things like that? I imagine everyone wants to do those."
"Well, not everyone," breathed Sutherland. "Some of us prefer, like Thoreau, to journey in the mind. I was thinking, nevertheless, of fantasies deep within you. Secret wishes of the heart, so to speak."
"Well," said the boy, whose calm had given Sutherland no entree till now, "I suppose what we all want is to—not be lonely," he said, his voice growing small. "What I really want is someone to love."
"Ah," said Sutherland.
"But you see," he said, "I don't think two men can love each other... in that way. It will always be a sterile union, it will always be associated with guilt. Sometimes I think that God was sitting up above the world one day, after He had created it," the boy sighed, "and someone said, 'Now what could we throw in to spoil it? You've created such a perfect existence, how could it go amuck?' And someone said, 'Confuse the sexes. Have the men desire men instead of women, and the women desire women. That would do it!' And that's what they did," he said. "You see, life would be marvelous if we weren't homosexual. To grow up, to fall in love, to have children, grow old and die. It's rather nice. But then God threw in that monkey wrench. As if out of sheer mischief!" he said.
"Does your family know you're gay?" said Malone, from his bed.
"Oh, no," said the fertilizer heir. "Oh never. I can't imagine. I simply can't imagine it." He stared at the floor and he said, "They were talking about it one night in Maine, and my uncle said, 'If I were queer, I'd put a rifle in my mouth and pull the trigger.'" He looked up. "That's what they think of it."
"They wouldn't cut you out of the will, would they?" said Sutherland in a breathless voice.
"I don't think so," he said.
Sutherland quickly fanned himself before the boy looked up at him.
"But then they'll never know," he said.
"It's just as well," said Sutherland. "But I must disagree with you totally about the impossibility of love! There are hundreds of beautiful young men who want just what you do," he said, "but they are afraid! Cynical! Pessimistic! Self-loathing! Love bids them follow, and they say, 'No! I'd rather spend my evenings in the men's room at Grand Central!' But you, you are too intelligent, too sensitive, for that. You need, in the words of the Jefferson Airplane, someone to love. And before the summer is through, you'll have him."
"I will?" said the boy with a smile that dissolved in the irony of his little shrug. "Ah, then show me, please, I am anxious for this person."
"Wonderful," said Sutherland. "I have someone in mind at this very moment."
"Who?" he said.
"Ah, that is not the issue just yet," said Sutherland. "As Ortega y Gasset says, 'Love is an experience few people are capable of,' and I must first find out if you yourself are one of those happy few. Let's go. I'm taking you to a cocktail party on Bank Street"
"Oh," said the boy as he got to his feet. There was an expression of disappointment on his face. He had been happy sitting there in the shaft of sunlight by the fire escape telling Sutherland the answers to his questions while Malone lay there listening.
"All the boys you saw at the Twelfth Floor last night will be there," said Sutherland.
"Oh," said the boy.
"At least you love beauty," said Sutherland.
The boy walked over to the bed and shyly shook Malone's free hand, and then, after bidding us good-bye, went out the door. "He is deeply in love with you," said Sutherland to Malone the moment the door had closed.
"What do you mean?" Malone said. "He hates being gay and said that he doesn't believe in love between men."
"My dear, that was all for your benefit!" said Sutherland. "He wasn't talking to me, he was talking to you! He was pouring out his innermost doubts, and fears and despair! He was putting forward all the reasons he couldn't believe in love, while he was already dreaming of your damp kisses! He wasn't talking to me, he was talking to you!" he said, gathering up his cigarettes and dark glasses and beret. "He was saying, 'Love is difficult, love is impossible, help me make it through the night!' You'll be in the will by Labor Day. Good-bye, darlings, I'm taking him to the overdecorated home of a burned-out queen whose beautiful and alcoholic guests will only make him long for you, Malone, recuperating in this slum! I'll call you tonight!"
He gave Malone a cocktail kiss and turned at the door. "He is young, he is innocent, he still thrills to Patty Jo when she sings 'Make me believe in you, show me that love can be true,' and not only that, he believes the lyrics! Have you never been sitting beneath a tree beside a lake, when a young girl comes on her bicycle, and thinking she is alone, walks down to the water and wades out to swim? Have you never seen a nine-year-old boy on a Georgia road playing by himself in the noonday sun? Have you never seen innocence? Well, this afternoon, you have!" And he was out the door.
"He believes the lyrics?" said Archer with a grin.
Malone waved his hand, and smiled. "So do I," he said, as he leaned forward to breathe the scent of a single rose that John Schaeffer had brought that afternoon.
"But the one who just left—is nuts!"
"Oh, he believes the lyrics, too," said Malone. "At the same time, I have no idea what he wants from life, or where he thinks he is heading, or what really matters to him. But then"—he shrugged, smiling at the absurdity of a statement so unlike everything in which he had been taught to believe—"he says no man can know anything for certain in this life, except how to be well-dressed."
Sutherland loathed money—partly because he belonged to an old Virginia family that considered it vulgar, and partly because Sutherland, while not serious, was a man to whom wit and beauty were the true source of happiness. He loved to tell the story of his paternal grandfather, who spent hours in the bathroom reading novels, and who was doing so the afternoon a remote cousin came by from Atlanta with a block of stock in a new company that he wished Sutherland's grandfather to buy; but his grandfather refused to come down, engrossed as he was in a novel by Jane Austen. "Tell him I'm taking a very long shit," the old man said to his sister at the bathroom door; and the young man went away, and with him, a fortune in Coca-Cola stock. The family remained poor.
And so we sat on the stoop those spring evenings and watched the bidders for Malone come and go. Sutherland was hardly interested in the sympathy of circuit queens who could do nothing but shake a tambourine and look pretty. He was suddenly all business. The fact that he was joining rich men and a beautiful friend did not bother him at all—he loved to do it, rather—but the fact that he was doing something for money bothered him a great deal. The right hand knew not what the left was doing. As he waited on the sidewalk beneath us for a client to arrive, a beggar approached Sutherland and held out his hand and said: "I'm hungry." And Sutherland said to him, with that suppressed hysteria that lurked behind his breathless voice: "I am hungry, too, for love, self-esteem, religious certainty. You are merely hungry for food." And he gave the man a Valium. And standing there in the twilight waiting for some enormously wealthy art dealer to arrive—an art dealer who had seen Malone at dinner parties with Sutherland and always ached to know him—he nervously tapped his foot against the pavement, hating, even now, the fact that he was doing one thing for gold. "But I have all the things money can't buy," he wailed to the waiting moon, the whores clustering
at the soda counter, "charm, taste, a curious mind. Why run after gelt? Because," he reminded himself as he stood there, "plane tickets cost money. God! Not to mention houses in Greece."
Since coming to New York Malone had received numerous offers from wealthy men amounting to very little effort on his part. People wanted Malone the way they wanted vases from China, étagères, Coromandel screens. And so, while spring arrived on the Lower East Side, and we sat out on our stoop in the evenings, we watched them come and go: the fertilizer heir, the Argentinian architect, rich screenwriters, decorators, owners of textile firms—Sutherland had them all filing through that apartment, like the people uptown at Parke-Bernet viewing the works of art before they go up on the block.
Meanwhile the Poles in their dark suits and hats watched it all go by, their hats pushed back on their heads, as if a funeral were about to begin in the church down the street. The street had come down to that, the Poles and Puerto Ricans, the two races of man, northern and southern, inundated in the garish chaos of hustling for a buck.
One evening we came downstairs and saw an ambulance pulled up in front of the building—and five minutes later a body covered up on a stretcher came out. It was one of the tenants, the Coughing Lady, who had lived alone on the fourth floor for thirty-five years in the same apartment and who had died nearly a week ago without anyone knowing.
Dancer From the Dance: A Novel Page 15
