He came back to the balcony drenched with sweat, his polo shirt sticking to his chest. On his face was an expression of radiant exhilaration; that expression that led people to think Malone took speed, when he didn't. It was his joy that there were men who loved other men. "How is the party, darling?" he said to Sutherland, catching his gloved arm as he swept by in a swirl of taffeta. Sutherland held his cigarette holder in the air and said: "On a scale of one to zero? Beyond credence, dearest," he said, embracing Malone. "Absolutely everyone showed up. Except Pam Tow, thank God... Don't mess my hair," he said, drawing back. "Mummy's so pleased. The pigs-in-the-blanket were delicious, the music is to die, and everyone seems to be on the same drug, which is so important. The bathrooms, of course, are filled with people sucking cock, I can't even get to the drawer with my world-famous collection of rare and antique Valiums. Are you happy, dear?" "Yes," Malone said, embracing him again. "Even John is having a good time, and Frankie is the star of the summer." "I never said you hadn't taste," said Sutherland in a sinuous voice. "He's bought a house in Freehold, New Jersey," said Malone, as they sat down for a moment and Sutherland slipped off his satin pumps. "Do tell," said Sutherland, massaging his foot. "Yes, he's making twenty thousand a year now, and he'll have a pension, too. Never say America isn't a worker's paradise!" "Grandfather always said that," sighed Sutherland. "And we haven't got the price of a bus ticket to Denver. Oh, well, we lived for other things," he smiled. Malone put his arms around him and held him close. "At least," he murmured in his ear, "we learned to dance. You have to grant us that. We are good dancers," he said. "And what," said Sutherland, "is more important in this life than that? Nothing!" They grew melancholy in each other's arms as they sat quietly there, suddenly tired for a moment, or was it years, and the party seemed to drift away; and Malone, who had become an insomniac, so anxious was he over his life, began to feel sleepy—the index of happiness—until Sutherland, looking over Malone's shoulder in a daze, noticed a tall, gaunt, bearded man standing in the hallway looking glumly at them. "But who is that?" said Sutherland. And Malone, looking around, replied in his ear: "Roger Denton. The size queen who moved to San Francisco because he had had everyone in New York. She's back, dear, and looking for new meat."
"Oh la," sighed Sutherland, his arms still around Malone's neck, "send her to that village in the Philippines filled with young men who are all that way. Don't worry," he smiled back at Malone as he slipped out of his arms and stood up to greet this guest. "I have our tickets already. Darling! How are you? Was San Francisco what they say, a weekend city?" And he embraced a giant praying mantis who had just arrived behind Roger Denton.
The crowd suddenly roared as the lights went out, and the room was bathed in a low red feverish glow, and John Schaeffer appeared at the same instant at the top of the stairs, white-faced, terrified. "I waited for you," he said to Malone, his eyes anguished. Malone took his hand and led him to the balcony and put his arm around him as the violins of "Love's Theme" began their ascent, and they leaned on the balustrade to look down at the scene.
An hour later Malone pushed John Schaeffer down the stairs in front of him, for at that moment "Law of the Land" had begun. It was one of those parties that people were not going to leave: Everything was as they wanted it. The people, the music, the drugs, the place. Around four Malone and John Schaeffer, exhausted, sweating, came out onto the terrace where I was cleaning up glasses. John Schaeffer walked back inside to get wine, and Malone walked down the deck to the bay. His face was calm, and innocent, and fresh in the way some faces are after a night of dancing. "Well," he said, as he stripped off his soaked green polo shirt and shoes and waded into the bay, "at least I learned to dance." He saw me there and called: "Tell Sutherland it was a wonderful, wonderful party, tell him I'm going out west, tell him I'll write." He waded deeper as I stood there. "I'll only be happy working in some little town in Idaho, and living a decent life. First I'll build a cabin and then I'm going to dental school," he said, waist-deep now in the still, dark bay, turning one time to wave good-bye, his slim white figure and grave eyes visible in the lights from the throbbing house, and then, with a single splash, suddenly vanished in the darkness. I stood at the water's edge and wondered if I should go after him: especially after listening to his reflections on the young man who had killed himself in Manhattan that afternoon. Someone was always dying at one of these parties, trying to sniff a popper at the bottom of a swimming pool, or jumping off a balcony on Angel Dust, but as I listened I could hear no cries for help. And the warm, dark night descended on me as I stood there with an armful of glasses, napkins, and discarded scarves and ribbons. "Malone!" I yelled. But there was no answer.
Even as Malone was swimming across the bay, Sutherland searched for tranquility in his own way. He was still at the party when word got back that twelve men had died in the fire at the Everard Baths, and the rumor went around (via one of the boys on the dock that evening who had heard Malone agree to fly back after the party) that Malone had gone up in smoke, too. Did Sutherland think Malone had gone back to the Baths? And assuming the worst, did he go upstairs and take a pill? Or did he go to his room even before Malone had waded out of his life, simply because the party had exhausted him? Whichever is true, sometime before dawn he awoke (as who would not in that deafening house) and reached for another Quaalude. He had taken so many drugs that evening, mixing them in his bloodstream with the equanimity of a chemist in a research lab, and not even remembering what he had taken, half-asleep, he reached reflexively for another pill. He pulled the pillow closer and shortly afterward, while the distant strains of "Love's Theme" crept up the staircase and down the hall, his heart stopped beating. The host of the Pink-and-Green Party was not discovered, much less thanked, till Tuesday afternoon when a writer who had taken a midweek share to finish a book on gay consciousness and who planned in fact to interview Sutherland entered the room. The writer found a note on the table beside Sutherland, which he had left to deter any guests who might stray up to his bedroom, and which made no mention of suicide—for Sutherland had little use for suicide, and less for suicide notes: "Don't awaken me. It was kind of you to come. I'll call you in the city. Kisses to you." A forest of X's followed, which looked like crosses, but were really kisses.
In the letter Sutherland had once composed on the funeral of his dreams, he was to be laid out on the high altar of the cathedral of Cologne, while an orchestra played "Pavane for a Dead Princess"; but instead he was sent off at Frank E. Campbell's on Madison Avenue. The wake was exactly the sort Sutherland would have loved, attended by everyone he considered beyond the pale of simple good manners, but who could have danced him into the other world: the crowd Sutherland called "the hard-core tit-shakers," with whom he had danced for nearly twenty years. The dealers and the astrologers and the psychics came. Even in a week that saw many gay funerals, half of Seventh Avenue was there, and people whose names appear monotonously in the columns: a man from Hatston's read the eulogy, and one of the two Egyptian heiresses read a few lines from Schopenhauer, and Sutherland was cremated. The coffin was closed, which prompted a hairdresser at Cinandre to ask: "But how do you know he's really dead?" Others came up to an old friend of Sutherland (a retired queen who had been to Sutherland what Sutherland was to Malone) and claimed the dead man owed them money. Others—the old guard of New York psychics who still practiced such things, and felt it a favor to offer their services like this—inquired if they might put us in touch with Sutherland now that he had passed over. A professor from Rutgers pointed out that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had died on the same day, not four hours apart, on the Fourth of July; and the departure of Malone and Sutherland on the same night was just as curious, and even more symmetrical, to some queens.
The whole ragtag crowd who came, all the people Sutherland had supplied with drugs all those years, were buzzing with it: the models, illustrators, pimps and hustlers, the boys like Lavalava and Spanish Lily who lived only to dance, the yoga gurus and brahmacha
ryis, the antique dealers and screenwriters, the jewelry designers and doctors, the psychiatrists and weight lifters, the waiters and the copywriter Nearly everyone assumed Sutherland had killed himself. They talked of karma, and dying the way one had lived, and getting back what you had given out. After all there had been Angel Dust at the party and no one was himself in the hands of that particular drug. And so they went on gossiping that evening, and others that followed. No one bothered to correct anyone's interpretation of the event; it made no difference now, certainly not to the deceased, whose ghostly laughter we could hear whenever we looked at the people in the room: these émigrés of the South Bronx who had become far richer and more successful than Sutherland in careers inconceivable to someone of Sutherland's unbringing; for Sutherland, while he would have been a pimp, would never have been a copywriter.
The tape played at the wake was a tape Sutherland and Malone had once declared the greatest work of art since the Sistine Chapel, made five summers ago, when they had been happiest dancing on Fire Island, by the discaire who was now in Paris recording for a homosexual count. Afterward the mourners went out to the opening of a new discotheque in Soho. There were too many discotheques now, and the songs one heard in them had become what we considered music to roller skate by. But these people would never stop dancing. The only member of Sutherland's family who came north was a bald, well-mannered brother we didn't know he had; but then one couldn't imagine Sutherland as having a family at all, composed of the usual figures in the usual house on the usual corner, with a driveway in which the children played with the hose on hot summer Saturdays. His mother was ill in Richmond and could not stand the journey. It was just as well, somehow; for most of us forgot that anyone had a family, living among queens in New York City. Families belonged to that inscrutable past west of the Hudson, and when a queen walked out a window, and you heard the family had come east to claim the body, it was like hearing that some shroud had come out of the darkness to pick up the dead and return whence the Three Fates sequestered, in the hills of Ohio or Virginia. There was no family to mourn Sutherland. John Schaeffer was at the moment off the coast of Nova Scotia, reading Proust in a skein of silver sunlight that stretched inviolate for miles around him. The only figure who was missed, and missed by everyone who had seen the two of them together for years, thinking they were lovers, was Malone. It was Malone whose absence was the chief topic of conversation; because by then the rumor had become generally accepted that he had died himself, in the flames of the Everard Baths, and the fact that he was not at the wake was considered" proof positive. Malone had gone up in flames with the sleazy mattresses, the queens waking up in drugged confusion in a stranger's arms to find the walls in flame around them, the hundred and thirty beds on which he had adored so many dark-eyed angels like a man drinking at a holy spring.
Whether or not he did, it was that image which I recalled now: of a night in winter, when the Everard had been the place we all went to, especially after a night of blissful dancing at the Twelfth Floor, when the only thing that could cap the music was a lover's embraces. I came upon Malone in the dark hallway of the third floor, beside the little window from which people jumped the morning of the fire, broke their bones and died, like roaches falling from a hot oven. It was cold and snowing that night, and the hallway filled with bodies was even more voluptuous because of it. Malone stood at the window, looking out at the falling snow through the web of ice crystals that had formed on the windowpane, watching the snow fall "on Twenty-eighth Street, on the tops of garbage cans, the silver throats of the streetlights; while against him brushed the bodies of the muscular men who wished to catch his eye, thinking that once Malone saw them, they would have him. But Malone continued standing there, within the house of flesh, the Temple of Priapus, staring out at that sparkling snowfall. That was it That was Malone—standing in the crush of voluptuous limbs, enthralled by the cold, lonely, deserted street.
It was autumn now, however, in the street outside the funeral home, where I stood watching the mourners stream out to go dancing at the opening of Flamingo, and the night was crisp and thrilling. Autumn always gave our lives an inexpressible undercurrent of hope, for winter meant, if not the promise of new love affairs, at the very least a change of clothes. How strange, how perfect, that one did in the end grow tired of summer, and long to leave the beach and see faces in the drama of early darkness once again. I stood there for a moment, the sound of taxi doors closing crisp, the trees fluttering in the frigid wind that had floated down from Canada, along with the geese that even now were flying south down the deserted beach that this crowd had lately quit. Everything—the doors closing, the faces disappearing, to dinner parties, assignations, love affairs, bodies, smiles—was, like Malone, elusive and thrilling. Out of the darkness a voice that resembled Sutherland's addressed us, that low, breathless voice that always gave the impression the speaker had been somewhere marvelous and was going somewhere even more exotic in a moment (the promise, in the end, of New York City). "My dear," said the queen of an earlier generation who had taught Sutherland much of his style, "do you think the girls are right when they tell us only our lovers are our friends? Or even worse, that each of us has only one friend in Gotham? If he had only awakened from that sleep, Sutherland could be dancing with us tonight. Let us pray, darlings, that he has found an angel like himself and that for those of us still left on earth, the music at this dump will not be too dreadful." And with a wave, he disappeared into the darkness that had fallen early, it seemed, for the first time that evening.
Midnight
The Lower East Side
Darling,
By the way—Spanish Lily OD'd on some strange new drug that even the Angel Dust aficionados won't touch, so we won't be seeing her on the dance floor anymore. John Schaeffer went off to Europe to either hike the German Alps or attend the London School of Economics, or both; with twenty-six million it hardly matters—we'll never see her again. Frankie has become a perfect circuit queen—he left that Cuban crowd, and is now being kept by some guy whose family owns Sydney, Australia. Half those people who used to go to Sutherland's to shoot up have moved to San Francisco, and I heard Rafael opened up a plant store in Queens. For the truth is, darling, what happens to most of these people anyway? They have their fling and then they vanish. They have to take jobs eventually as telephone operators, bartenders, partners in a lamp shop in some little town in the San Fernando mountains... and others take their places... but mostly they just vanish, and you forget about them unless you hear, one day, a certain song.
Well, no one will forget about Malone; I saw a man one evening this winter coming out of 399 Park Avenue in a Chesterfield, his hair very blond, one of those young associates with Shearman & Sterling, I suppose, and my heart stood still. In the depths of all that grayness, in the late-winter afternoon light, that big man as handsome as a prince, as a Nordic warrior: which is what it's all about. All societies, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., said, are founded on the blood of young men; and if they don't get it through a war they get it some other way just as definite...
Everyone is the same here—suicide notes on Monday, found a lover on Tuesday, divorced on Thursday—the only things that change up here, darling, are apartments, haircuts, and winter coats; and good faggots still go to San Francisco when they die. (All the more reason to, now that the Everard is gone; there is just no place to go and everyone's in a funk over it. Do you know they have fifteen major baths in San Francisco?) Write soon. I await your reaction to the novel.
Rima, the Bird Girl
The Deep South
Stinking Hot
Raison d'Etre,
The novel is more vivid than I had expected, and frankly brought back things that are a little too close to me still. I had to leave New York, you know, not for any practical reason but for a purely emotional one: I simply couldn't stand to have it cease to be enchanted to me. How could it? Our hearts can't change, and yet those riots of the soul that carried us on, se
quined swimmers in that aquacade of sex, simply failed us one day and we looked up, as if the refrigerator had stopped humming and the current in our apartments had failed. Those streets, those corners, everyone of which I loved, were just streets, just corners. Malone was possibly more committed to it than any of us—whatever "it" was—for to be perfectly honest, I cannot name the disease, the delirium of the last ten years; even now, having thought and thought about it, I have no idea why I was living that way unless, if you'll excuse me (now that our hair is down, earrings off and shoes too), it was for the same reason a man as reasonable as Malone goes out into the street at night: because he is handsome, infertile, and lonely.
As to where he went—if he ever finished that swim across the bay—I've heard a half-dozen different things. Lots of people in New York are convinced he died at the Everard Baths, where he was headed the night he came back from Fire Island. But I don't think so: The fire broke out at seven in the morning, and Malone seldom stayed long at the Baths. When he first came to New York he used to stay for days, and wanted to live there; the Baths were a kind of paradise. But as the years went on, he would go and stay no more than forty-five minutes, since he either knew everyone there, had gone to bed with them, or worse, could no longer deal with people in that way—the way that used to thrill him (the beauty of the body, the communion of flesh) and which now, as he was growing older, repelled him slightly and could not warm his heart. No, if he went to the Everard that night, I think he stayed an hour at most and then went on his way, a last farewell to places of his youth. He also was seen at the Eagle's Nest that night, you know. (Remember the first night we saw him there. I shall never forget that!) I admit that, to you, the novelist, it would have been perfectly appropriate to have him burn up in that fire—because when those baths went up in flames that morning, so did those ten years Malone presided over like an angel, our youth, our dreams, our crazy hearts. But life so seldom imitates art; if only it did, I wouldn't have retired to a farm and be sitting now in the shade of this dreary live oak.
Dancer From the Dance: A Novel Page 21
