Dancer From the Dance: A Novel

by Andrew Holleran

  "He's so lonely," Sutherland would say to Malone when they sat on the stoop discussing him, "and such a gentleman. The old-fashioned kind, who would gladly fight a duel over you. He'll buy you a townhouse here, darling, and just fly up every month or so for some medical conference, take you to the best parties, and then fuck you to oblivion in the den afterward. Every girl's dream..."

  "Hah," Malone shrugged. "But he's a block of ice. So exact, so competent, so macho. Why is he interested in me?"

  "You resemble a boy he was once in love with, the great love of his life, when he was young—oh, when he was young," Sutherland sighed, "you should see the photograph I saw, he looked like a Greek god."

  "He is very well built."

  "Well built? You could do your nylons on his stomach."

  "My nylons?"

  "He has a washboard belly," said Sutherland. "You know, all those bumps and ridges."

  Malone said nothing.

  "Girls have committed suicide over the man," said Sutherland breathlessly. "And he is from a major B.A. family."

  But Malone just smoked his cigarette, and looked at the beautiful Puerto Rican boy passing, and said nothing; he was still in love himself with those dark eyes, those slender angels, who were on the street day and night in our neighborhood. Malone still had a wistful memory of that romantic dream, of a kind and beautiful Latin youth, lying in his arms in some room somewhere, a dream in which the things the world cared about were irrelevant... he was even now still hoping to see a boy he had seen one night that winter, while walking up Second Avenue from the Baths, a night so cold the people selling Christmas trees on the sidewalk had filled empty oil barrels with trash and set it on fire to keep warm. He had looked up at a little family group, and on the edge of it, a young man looking at Malone behind the flames of the trash barrel, his eyes dark and glowing... eyes he would never forget, or the flames at three a.m. on a cold winter night on the Lower East Side. He could not forget that face even now and went down to the fruit stands of that block from time to time, hoping to see him again.

  He did not find him, but one evening he met another boy, as dark-eyed and grave and beautiful: a bank teller who lived in an apartment on Third Street beside St. Jude's Cemetery. It was a quiet street, and the boy led a quiet life. He was studying to be a Rolfer. When Malone went to see him one evening, he found him seated in his bathtub, reading a book on anatomy in the light of a dozen candles set about the tiles on little saucers. He came home each day from the bank and got into the tub and memorized the names of muscles in order to pass the state licensing examination for a masseur. He spoke very little. Malone knelt beside his bathtub and kissed him above the faintly fragrant greenish water in the tub, as a tiny trickle from the tap splashed in the silence. His white penis floated on the surface of the water like a lily pad. Malone felt as if he were in church, at those banks of candles in red glass cups his mother had taken him to as a child to pray for some aunt or cousin in America. He felt a curious peace flood his limbs: the warmth of the candles, their flames all around him, the slightly humid air, the moist high space, the trickling water, and the beauty of this young man submerged in the tub reading a book filled with the precise drawings of human musculature. Through the half-opaque window the silhouettes of trees made a pattern. They made love much later on a mattress in the living room, as the cries of children playing in the street echoed around them, and when Malone left, he had fallen in love; not with the young man, but the thought of him in the bathtub with his candles redding books of anatomy; and when Malone went to see him the next time, he simply sat with him in the bathroom and did not even ask to make love. The next time he merely paused on Third Street one evening while walking past the cemetery and looked through the trees and gravestones at his milk-white window and watched the blurred form moving about the room, setting candles on the tiles. It was six o'clock. He had come home from work, Malone surmised, and was sitting down in the tub to read his book. The breeze rustled the trees. The street was still, the cemetery dark. There in the darkness of the silhouetted trees and empty summer street Malone felt a great peace descending on him. This was all he needed now: the blurred grace of the bank teller bending down to light a candle—in the unconscious beauty of a figure on a temple frieze. He wondered if he should ring the bell; but what would be the. point? He loved him as he stood there in the street, remembering his penis floating on the water like a lily pad. He loved these boys, as did I, to be among them was enough; he was in thrall to them, he was in the thrall of Puerto Ricans.

  He watched them now even as Sutherland continued talking about the advantages of an alliance with a rich and prominent family in Buenos Aires, walking down the street in their sneakers and jeans and cheap leather jackets, until a cab pulled up and a screenwriter who had once been very successful in Hollywood got out. And while Malone talked to him on the sidewalk, he saw, walking behind him, an adolescent Puerto Rican who had nothing at all to do with wealth, success, or glamour: a boy named Juan Rafael, who worked as an orderly on the night shift at Beth Israel, and who came to our little park afterward in a denim jacket and sneakers, and allowed himself to be blown in the flowerbed by some man while he stood there looking at his watch and saying, "Hurry up, man, huh? I gotta go."

  His dark, cloudy eyes, eyes that cloud in cold weather, were what still made Malone glance wistfully over the screenwriter's cashmere shoulder. He preferred Juan Rafael. He loved the bank teller who came home from his day and got in the tub after setting lighted candles over the tiles in little saucers. He liked his homely and modest life. If Malone danced with the decorators, designers, and discotheque owners who bought Maseratis one year and Mercedes the next, and then traded them in for Rollses, he considered them realistic in a way he didn't want to be. But I'm so tired, he thought as he stood there on the crowded sidewalk, I must get out of New York. And so the three of them, Malone, Sutherland, and the screenwriter, went off for dinner at the townhouse of a wealthy textile manufacturer on Beekman Place.

  Of all these candidates for Malone's hand, however, the richest by far was the youngest and least sophisticated, and the one most painfully in love: John Schaeffer. At the age of eighteen, he had inherited twenty-six million dollars, and at the age of thirty, he was to inherit twenty-six million more. His family had raised him in so subtly normal a way—had essentially quarantined him from contamination by the unnatural fact of this great fortune—that he was indistinguishable from any well-brought-up, idealistic, unassuming young man. He seemed in fact unwordly—his pale face, the watchfulness in his eyes as he sat listening to whoever was speaking. Even so, six men were assigned to his trust at Morgan Guaranty, despite the democratic intentions of his parents. Sutherland started to check the stock market in the morning now, to see how Union Carbide was doing, and loved to refer to its enormous tower on Park Avenue as John's little townhouse. A moral man is essentially dumbfounded when confronted by a man who is amoral—everything the latter does is met with a certain disbelief. And since no one could decide whether Sutherland was actually amoral or so moral that he had given up on any relationship with other men in the first place, we all wondered if he actually planned to sell Malone. We had heard of boys who had been given property, of course; kept boys, lovers, who were ultimately given a legal share in some huge estate, or an apartment building on Third Avenue, or a house at Fire Island; but it seemed improbable to us that anyone, especially an American, could be so cold-blooded about the fleecing of an amiable young man. But then we were average people, and Sutherland was not. He began to tattoo, for instance, the closing price of Union Carbide stock on the inside of his wrist each morning, where he could glance at it throughout the day as he continued to solidify his position with John wherever they went.

  No one knew better than Sutherland the pathology of love; and he was not hesitant to strengthen Malone's hold on John with a little suffering. And not such a little. John Schaeffer was in a weak condition, anyway; a month ago, he had graduated from college
, and with this event, said good-bye to a long, long phase of youth, along with the friends, the green courtyards, long evenings of talk of poetry and life, carefree adolescence which ends officially at twenty-one in this country. A homosexual will never have such a close relationship with his heterosexual peers again, unless he enters the army, a relationship that sublimated sexuality makes even more moving. John Schaeffer was an affectionate, idealistic fellow, and these friendships' end had left him as with a limb cut off. He was twenty-one, shot through with Shakespeare's sonnets and the novels of Henry James; he was young, and to many people the very image of the handsome American, the gilded youth; yet all he wanted himself was affection, a true friend, a companion to assuage the loss of what he sentimentally saw as his lost youth (he hardly could know how we extend our youths at the end of each succeeding decade, like a man postponing payment on a loan), and in this state—of melancholy despair, poignant sensitivity to the sensual, romantic aspects of life: green courtyards, bluffs above the sea, faces, friendships, long lunches, iced tea in summer, in short, all that Princeton and his happy summers had meant to him—complicated by the fact that he was now expected to do certain things (marry, begin a career, repay the world what it had given him), he met that figure whose kindness, whose beauty seemed a magic bridge between his youth and the next phase of his existence. He fell in love with Malone while the two of them left the stoop and went down the street that first afternoon to buy peaches on First Avenue; that was all it took. The sunlight glowing on the golden hair of Malone's forearm, the veins in his hand, the peach it held, the dusty trees, transfixed him. He found the city hideous, but in it was Malone. He wished to take him out of it, to stand with him some summer morning on a mountaintop at dawn and watch the fog roll back from the farms spread out below. He wanted to go with Malone to Greece. He had just begun to interpret the world in terms of love, and as is the case with converts, now nothing else mattered. The universe had shrunk to one manifestation of nature: Malone. He watched Malone standing there in the sunlight surveying the cartons of fruit to see what they would take with them, and he felt as if the cherries, peaches, raspberries, and tangerines had not existed until Malone caressed them in his hand. He wanted to buy Malone every peach on Second Avenue. He did not know if the whores were laughing at him, with his arms loaded with peaches when he walked back with Malone, but it did not matter: He felt safe beside Malone.

  And when John Schaeffer was not with Malone (which, by Sutherland's machinations, was most of the time), he thought about Malone. His heart was heavy, his throat thick, with the thought of him. He played over and over again in his mind what they had said to one another, how Malone had looked, the moment at which he had walked into the room, Malone's relationship with whoever else was there, Malone's parting words. Malone was so confident, so at ease. He sometimes did not answer his own telephone for days—an indifference to the invitations of life that not only astonished but struck John as extremely erotic: the thought of Malone sitting in his chair, bathed in sweat, while the phone went on ringing and ringing through the hot afternoon with importunate lovers unable to break through the thorns of his perfect indifference. Malone's parting words to him were subject to the most painful, exhaustive interpretation: What had Malone meant when he said, "Keep in touch"? Or, worse, "Good-bye"? Or, still worse, not even noticed his departure? Malone did not return his calls. John stayed in his uncle's apartment on East End Avenue all day on the chance that he might call. Malone was always out with other people, but when Malone was with him, their moments were so mysteriously moving to John that he lay for hours in the study feasting on the memory of them. The phone did not ring. Sutherland ignored him. He seemed to either shower John with invitations or leave him utterly alone. Finally he started going down to the Lower East Side, on the pretext of buying secondhand books or seeing a movie, in the hope that he might run into Malone on the street returning to his apartment from the newsstand. This • is the most humiliating and painful stage of love. One warm spring night when Malone had left town for a dinner party in Bucks County, John came wandering down to St. Mark's Place after getting drunk himself for the first time in his life at a dinner party at his uncle's and, still in black tie, showed up at the little park on Fifteenth Street.

  He paused like a little boy entering a cathedral at the gate of the dark park, as if wondering whether or not to dip his hand in the font of holy water, and then began walking slowly up and down with a pale, frightened face. He knew Malone sometimes came here to smoke a cigarette. He did not wish to appear as if he were looking for Malone—he did not want Malone to realize how he was suffering—but at the same time he hoped desperately his Malone would be here. But the dark figures he peered at as he walked down the benches, half of whom assumed he was cruising and " asked him to sit down, were not Malone. Then he came to us, and he sat down and blurted, "I'm looking for Malone!" We said he was out of town. "Out of town! For how long? When will he be back? Where did he go?" he gasped. And we told him he would be back that night. He was drunk, and excited, and the tension of his search, the warm darkness, made him confess with the gentlest of questions how he felt about our mutual friend.

  "He's all the boys I've ever loved in all my life," he said as the black man in the trench coat snored on the bench beside us, and the glowing butts of cigarettes floated about in the darkness like votive candles beneath a shrine, "the boy I fell in love with at Le Rosey, the boy who was mowing the lawn of Hampshire House the day we drove by to my grandfather's funeral, my cousin Paul, the Irish medical student I met in Africa that night in the hut above Ngorongoro, all of them I'll never forget! On my deathbed I will remember their faces! But Malone, Malone is all of them, all of those boys, those summers, the smell of grass when it's cut in August, the heat of a summer day, talcum powder, empty rooms, tiles gleaming, the Swiss lakes, the fir forests around Heidelberg, Malone is all of them!" he said. And with that, he lurched to his feet and rushed out of the park and hailed a cab.

  That was the last we saw of them for a while—John went off to Maine, to sail up and down its coast with his family, all in white, and Dr. Valeriani-Winston returned to Argentina. Sutherland remained uptown. Malone went out on calls. It got very hot very soon that summer—tremendous heat that made the East Village almost sensual for a spell: shadows, and breezes, and the sun beating down till dusk, when it broke up and rose in shimmering waves from the pavements toward the clear blue sky. The fire hydrants were open, gushing day and night. Peaches were ripe in the fruit stalls on Second Avenue, the streets south of Astor Place were empty at dusk, and every figure you came upon walking south shimmered for a moment in the distance, then materialized into a group of boys playing ball in a lot littered with broken glass. Even Sutherland, when you ran into him on Fifth Avenue after the office workers had rushed home for a game of tennis in the country before the light had failed, was ecstatic as he stopped to talk, after an afternoon in the men's room at Grand Central, picking pubic hair out of his teeth: "Oh, my dear, there is no other time, no other time at all, but now, when the city is overripe, like a fruit about to drop in your lap, and all the young stockbrokers' underwear is damp! My dear!"

  In the worst of the heat, we sat in our park till four in the morning because the apartment was an oven.

  The park was the only place to go to get cool in that neighborhood, and as the nights got hotter, it got very crowded. The park was used by two classes of people, who came there at different hours. The first group came early to walk their dogs before going to sleep in the air-conditioned bedrooms of their town-houses, which lined the northern side of the park; they were usually gone by midnight, and then, like ghosts, like gremlins, the derelicts, faggots, drunks, and freaks moved in. It was where the slimiest creatures of the Lower East Side swam to the surface for a moment, in the dark, when the middle class had left the beach, only to go back to the bottom before dawn. At dawn, they vanished. Dawn, that most insulting moment for the homosexual, when the sky goes white above h
im, and the birds begin to chatter, and still on his knees he looks up from the cock he's been sucking to see the light, like a man making love in a dark bedroom when the door has been flung open. Until that moment, however, it was the perfect place to rub the itchy sore of lust—the perfect cave in which to lick your wounds—for half the lamps did not work, and in the shadows of those trees, it was very, very dark.

  We were sitting on our usual bench one hot August night watching the characters come and go. We hadn't seen Malone or Sutherland for weeks and assumed they had gone to Fire Island for good. There wasn't any wind at all, and the dregs of life were busy in the bushes. Around one o'clock a man came in and sat on a bench nearby and began to croon, with the careful modulation of the would-be nightclub singer, songs by Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart. "I've got you... under my skin," he sang, loud, as if trying to project to the balconies, the farthest tables at El Morocco, "I've got you... deep in the heart of me." And after a few songs, the black men trying to play craps farther down the benches yelled, "Shut up!" and he went right on with his extensive repertoire. He sang of a New York City many blocks and many years away from where we sat now—making our own kind of music when he finally left, the beautiful music of regret, rising to a roar like cicadas in high grass in summer:

  "But what is life for?" a man who ran a bookstore on St. Mark's Place said unhappily. "You must admit there is no real reason for us to do anything. We have as much purpose in existing as these trees."

  "But you'll never find an intellectual reason for living," said the next. "It has to come from the heart. There is no reason per se to live. People do things from the heart, not from reason. There is no reason to live."

  "Exactly," said another. "But isn't the idea of using our reason the most irrational thing of all?"