Dancer From the Dance: A Novel

by Andrew Holleran

  It was the most beautiful illusion of homosexuals and romantics alike: if only I'd loved that one...

  What had that twenty-three-year-old young man, whose blond beauty had caused even Malone to believe in the springs of his wasted youth again the day he saw him at the gym, done by dying? His face took on a sad cast as he spoke of the news that had put the whole island into shock, as shocked as it could be, and which, as he spoke of it now, made Malone's limbs begin to tremble under his cotton shirt. That twenty-three-year-old beauty who had his whole life before him; that boy from Idaho—who had slashed his wrists, and then his throat, and then hurled himself nine floors from the top of his apartment building to the steaming pavement below on this hottest of all hot afternoons just four hours ago in the city? What had he accomplished by that? Malone knew the dead boy's lover, he had been Malone's own ideal once, and their love had been for him one of the reassuring things of this neurotic life; and now the boy, with his fine bones, his gazellelike grace, his long thighs, and high buttocks, had slashed his veins, hurled himself down to that soiled, grimy sidewalk Malone himself had walked nearly every day, lined with a dozen cheap grocerias and bodegas in front of which men sat drinking whiskey and making bets. This blond youth from Idaho had smashed himself against the hot, hard sidewalk before the eyes of those drunken cardplayers, hating his youth, his beauty, his lover. Of all the people Malone had listened to, had tried to help, he now felt responsible somehow for this one's suicide; for he had spent many afternoons at the YMCA with him doing gymnastics. "Why didn't I sleep with him?" he said. "When we're all so terribly alone. The least we can do in this life is love one another... just a hug and a kiss..."

  He was right, of course; but how could you love everyone? If only enough of us loved enough—perhaps by some arithmetical progression, everyone would be given this gift. But that was useless speculation for those of us left behind, who were not going to hurl ourselves off a building in the pressure of a summer beat wave, a lover's quarrel, a drug, I thought as we sat there now. There was no such end for the rest of us, or glorious legacy of love: Fate in America was quite different, as Malone knew staring at the waters at his feet—one went back to work, bought a house, accepted. As a child Malone had consecrated his life to Christ; as an adult, to some adventurous ideal of homosexual love—well, both had left him flat. We sat there in silence for a while as the throngs who had come down to the bay with drinks to see the sunset went back to their boats, and parties, and restaurants. "Well, darling," Malone said, standing up with that necessary ability, acquired over the years, to eschew the serious and return to the blithe, to move, literally, from funeral to party, "I'm off to set my hair and choose the right nail polish." He looked down at me and smiled. "This is my engagement party, after all." And we walked off the dock, even as a seaplane at our backs touched down with John Schaeffer, two elderly designers holding Lhasa Aposos in their laps, and the discaire who would play at Sutherland's party, a seventeen-year-old Moroccan from Brooklyn they had discovered on one of their forays to the boroughs.

  By the time the pontoons touched the water, darkness had descended, and John Schaeffer came ashore into a crowd of people streaming home from Tea Dance, brushing their bare chests, bronze arms, listening to their warm voices spilling laughter and gossip on the evening air. The lights in the harbor came on, their reflections trembled in the water, a breeze fluttered the awnings, and the millionaire and the discaire—who had never been here before—searched up and down the boardwalks till they found Sutherland standing in a nightgown and wig atop a house blazing in floodlights and a mist of sea salt. Sutherland had awakened to eat supper. The three of them shared fried chicken, as Sutherland, still groggy with sleep, tried to dispose of John Schaeffer's excited questions. "These men I flew out with," John Schaeffer said, "one was taking a German friend here for the first time, and I overheard him tell the German, 'You must remember that the boys who come out here are all in love with themselves.'" He put down the fried chicken. "Do you think that's all it is?" said John Schaeffer. "They're in love with themselves?"

  Sutherland dangled a wing and looked at him, speechless, for a moment. "Well, surely you know we homosexuals are just a form of ingrown toenails..."

  "But—" said John Schaeffer. "But I'm in love with Malone, not with myself."

  "Of course," said Sutherland. "Oh, don't worry," he sighed, nibbling at the wing, "you have a cock thick as a sausage, love will most certainly come your way in one form or another. By the way," he said to the discaire, "what are you doing tonight? I think it very important for the hostess and the discaire to be on the same drug. Do you think I should have put it on the invitation? I suspect that most girls will be doing THC, don't you?" And they began to discuss, Sutherland and the discaire, the various drugs that had risen and fallen in popularity that summer, and if any Angel Dust had arrived recently from the Coast. John Schaeffer took this opportunity to move to the sink and begin washing dishes as he listened to this outlandish conversation.

  "Oh," Sutherland yawned, "I'm too old for this. Centuries ago these affairs used to leave me a quivering lump of jelly, but now, I want them all to go home, and they haven't even come. Oh good evening, darling," he smiled as the first huge headdress swayed through the door.

  There are parties and there are parties on Fire Island, and Sutherland, who had devoted himself to nothing very purposefully the past fifteen years of his life, had learned along the way to give a party: He had been to so many, he knew exactly why the great ones were great. It was a public event. People had come by train and boat for this one, from the Hamptons, and Montauk; from Paris and San Francisco by plane. People from the past he had not seen in five years reappeared and were lined up on the boardwalk outside, feathers rustling in the breeze. People had spent a week's salary on their costumes, had made sure Women's Wear would be there, and Interview; someone from cable TV was interviewing the guests on the boardwalk for Anton Parrish; but so strange were most of the faces to Sutherland that he was grateful to be suddenly embraced by the Swamp Lady—an ancient queen who had been coming to the Pines since it was a collection of shacks occupied by poets, and who had seen it become a Malibu mobbed each summer by hordes of youths. She came. Theatrical agents and actresses, models and a new designer's entourage; the Warhol stars of ages past; men who flew in from Topeka and Dallas, eye surgeons from Omaha and Phoenix; boys who had been living in Rome for ten years: All of them came. To Sutherland's dismay. "My dear," he breathed as another crowd of strange queens went by, "who are these people?". And they began lamenting their old age.

  By three the discaire was playing sambas for this crowd of unknown creatures, and the platform built over the pool had begun to bounce visibly to the beat of the dancers, when a stockbroker from Kuhn, Loeb cleared the floor to whirl around in a passionate dance in swirls of pale green organdy. Sutherland tried to place a scene vaguely similar in his mind: Had he cleared the floor at the Leo Party in 1969 too? In the same dress? But the memory failed him, and he sighed and said to Malone: "Each tab of acid, they tell me, destroys a hundred neurons."

  So Sutherland and Malone gawked at a quintet of handsome Latin youths who were dancing with their arms on each other's shoulders under the holly tree. "Young girls who come into the canyon," Malone decided.

  At four there was a commotion in the room and they were delighted to recognize Lavalava and Spanish Lily at the door arguing with a guard. "She threw garbage in my face!" the guard said. "She doesn't have an invitation and I told her to go home!" Lavalava flicked a pink boa at the guard and began expelling a rapid stream of Spanish. "Oh, she may stay!" Sutherland said, loyal to his nights at the Twelfth Floor and remembering that Lavalava had murdered a friend of his years ago by voodoo. "We don't want her going home and making little dolls of us," he murmured to Malone. The furious guard left. Lavalava beckoned to a companion to come forward, a tall, dark, handsome man in pink tights and green suspenders over his bare chest. There was something prepossessing about him
as he stood for a moment surveying the crowd, something still, motionless, and sinister even before Sutherland gasped: "Frankie!"

  Was it Frankie? Or someone who looked like Frankie, for there are a dozen Frankies every season on the circuit in New York: dark, saturnine boys with grave eyes and faces that one instantly imagines on a pillow in a shadowy room. There were several Frankies at this party alone, and when Malone arrived from his dinner party in Water Island and Sutherland told him his fears, Malone said, "Oh, I know, he was on the boat coming over. Don't worry. It's over at last. He's staying with this rich old Cuban feather queen, he loves the Island, he has as much interest in me as a used popper." They watched the real Frankie from the balcony, standing on the floor beneath them in a circle of people who were putting poppers to his nose, and dancing around him, and when Frankie stripped off his shirt, Malone smiled. For it had come full circle. It was the final proof, the final piece of data that confirmed Malone's view of the whole world: watching Frankie dance without his shirt, adored by all the people near him, conscious of his beauty. And he wasn't the only one. Malone stood with Sutherland on the balcony marveling over the number of them. So many of the people at this party they did not even know—especially the young ones, come into the canyon for the first time, quiet as deer, some of them, coming to your hand for salt: their dark eyes wide and gleaming with the wonder and fear we had all felt at seeing for the first time life as our dreams had always imagined it... at seeing so many others like themselves, at seeing so many people with whom they could fall in love. The old enchantment composed of lights, music, people was transfixing them for the first time, and it made their faces even more touching.

  Friends came up to embrace Malone, people he had known for years—how many years, they did not want to think. They were all looking at the new faces with an odd sensation of death, for they had all been new faces once. Each summer on Fire Island has a star: the boy who moves through the little society with the youth and beauty he-has just begun to squander (and what else can be done with them?). The old friends embracing Malone and Sutherland had each had his summer, had once caused hearts to lurch when they walked into a party like this, quiet and nervous as fawns. And now they were wondering—as men had wondered about them—if they could get any of these stars into their beds, or were they older than they thought they were? Were they as old as X, that man who had stared at them their first summer with that terrible despair in his face, and whom they had refused even to meet? None of this bothered Malone. In his mind he was seeing this for the last time. He could enjoy it as he hadn't since he first arrived on the Island how many summers ago.

  "Look at that one!" Malone would cry as he grabbed the person he was standing with, in a voice charged with that delight which everyone loved in him, and which they flocked to after their own capacity for wonder had vanished. "To die! To die over! And what about the green T-shirt! Oh my Christ! Get me a transfusion! I am dead on arrival! He's flawless!" And he would turn and say to John Schaeffer, who stood beside him wanting to ask Malone to dance but having no idea how to, "You must admit this place is incredible—we, who've grown used to it—" "Just a bit," breathed Sutherland, flicking an ash onto the crowd below. "Forget the sheer style, and beauty," resumed Malone, "in this room. It's all we'll ever see of the Beatific Vision!" "I'm glad you like it," said John Schaeffer with a smile. "Oh, I loathe it," said Malone. "Loathe it? Why?" gasped John, staring at Malone. "Because... because... oh, I guess because I'm thirty-eight," said Malone, "I'm afraid that's all it comes down to. You have all this before you, and I have all this behind me," he said to John Schaeffer. "I'm in mid-passage, darling," he said, beginning to talk like a queen so as to demystify himself, so as to destroy the very qualities John Schaeffer had fallen in love with, "I'm menopausal, change of life, hot flashes, you know. Wondering how much longer I can go without hair transplants and whether Germaine Monteil really works on the crow's feet. I've had it, I've been through the mill, I'm a jaded queen. But you, dear, you have that gift whose loss the rest of life is just a funeral for—why else do you suppose those gray-haired gentlemen," he said, nodding at his friends on the floor, "make money, buy houses, take trips around the world? Why else do they dwindle into a little circle of close friends, a farm upstate, and become in the end mere businessmen, shop-owners, decorators who like their homes filled with flowers and their friends flying in on Air France and someone pretty like you at the dinner table? It is all, my dear, because they are no longer young. Because they no longer live in that magic world that is yours for ten more years. Adolescence in America ends at thirty." And John Schaeffer stood there, dumbfounded, not wanting to hear any of this, because he loved Malone. "You have ten years of adolescence stretching before you," said Malone in an acid tone, stubbing out a cigarette in a plate of aspic, "and / am a professional faggot. What is gay life," he said, looking down at the dancers, "but those bumper cars at an amusement park, that crash and bounce off each other? Like some Demolition Derby." He put his hand on John Schaeffer's shoulder and said in a kind voice: "You must remember one thing, if I can leave you with anything, if my years out here can benefit you at all, then let it be with this. Never forget that all these people are primarily a visual people. They are designers, window dressers, models, photographers, graphic artists. They design the windows at Saks. Do you understand? They are a visual people, and they value the eye, and their sins, as St. Augustine said, are the sins of the eye. And being people who live on the surface of the eye, they cannot be expected to have minds or hearts. It sounds absurd, but it's that simple. Everything is beautiful here, and that is all it is: beautiful. Do not expect anything else, do not expect nourishment for anything but your eye—and you will handle it all beautifully. You will know exactly what you are dealing with," said Malone, his arm around John Schaeffer as they faced the crowd of beautiful dancers.

  "But I don't want to deal with it," said John Schaeffer now, turning to Malone. "I want to go around the world with you. Go anyplace you like. I love you," he said now.

  "Oh, God!" Malone said with a laugh and simultaneous shudder that passed through his upper torso. "Those words. Expunge them from your vocabulary, it will save you a lot of trouble. You don't love me. I am a professional faggot. Now what other lessons can I pass on to you?" he said, moving on to put that moment behind them. "Indifference is the greatest aphrodisiac," he began carefully, trying to sum up in three minutes the experience of ten years on the circuit, and distill it properly for this fellow to whom he was passing the torch, "never underestimate the value of indifference, it is, finally, the great freedom. Try not to be self-conscious," he said, "or so critical. Don't mope around looking for someone else to make you happy, and remember that the vast majority of homosexuals are looking for a superman to love and find it very difficult to love anyone merely human, which we unfortunately happen to be. Oh, God, let's dance!" he said, for they had started to play Zulema.

  The discaire was mixing old songs with the new, unlike the mediocre ones in town (who must play new music, music the crowd loves; or worse, music the crowd has never heard), and the old songs brought back the magic of whole summers to the people there. He danced with John Schaeffer in a corner, allowing him finally to be overcome by the music, and showing him without a word a step he could be comfortable with. They danced together as if they were falling in love, but John Schaeffer's love only produced in Malone a gloomy helpless guilt. They faced each other at opposite ends of an illusion. And then those first unmistakable beats of the bass guitar, those first few notes of that song that had made everyone at the Twelfth Floor holler in a communal shout of ecstasy began, those first, repetitive, low notes that had caused Sutherland to say with great hilarity one night: "Each E-flat is like the thrust of a penis," that curious song that had the power—even though it was just a song played at discotheques one year, was never the most popular there, or surfaced in public—to change the whole tenor of the place. Malone drew John Schaeffer nearer to him, closed his eyes, a
nd began shaping the words that Patty Jo sang: "Make me believe in you, show me that love can be true," his eyes wild when he finally opened them.