Dancer From the Dance: A Novel (10 page)

The place they found was within view of Frankie's former home on the waterfront in New Jersey, across the flat, silver river on those blistering summer afternoons: They lived above the empty West Side Highway, and were utterly alone. They had a whole floor, which, years ago, had been filled with women in bustles nervously spinning thread for knickers; now Malone and Frankie perched like arboreal creatures high up in the ruins of this city of steel and engineers, naked in the heat, pale forms in a shaft of sunlight swimming with motes of dust between two girders across the dusty floor. High above the deserted streets of that no-man's-land between the financial district and the neighborhoods that eventually become the Village, they lay on a mattress devouring one another till they stopped, merely to wait for the long bout of lovemaking that night.

At the beginning Malone could not even allow Frankie to sit down opposite him without getting up and going over to embrace him. He could not see him standing at the tall window looking out over the harbor without enfolding him from behind in his arms. He could not let him piss without doing this. He sat waiting for him downstairs on the steps at the end of the day, eating an apple or a peach and letting the juice run down his chin and turn to a sticky coating in the breeze. He wore tennis sneakers and blue jeans, and a cross around his neck, like Frankie, a crucifix Frankie had given him on his birthday; and, like all homosexual lovers, they began to look like each other—except for that unmistakable difference, when they lay tangled in each other's limbs by day or night, the pale, golden form, and the swarthy, dark eyed one, the northern and southern race joined at last. Each had his right ear pierced and wore a small gold ring in it. They looked like pirates. And Malone, who marveled at the beauty of Frankie's body (which had been given to him like the beauty of his eyes), began to visit a small gymnasium in the afternoon, to make his body as beautiful as his lover's; and there, under the tutelage of an old Sicilian man, who prescribed for him a diet of avocados and ice cream, Malone ignored what he knew already, that his body was beautiful in a natural way. He wished to do something for his lover and so he worked at making it more muscular, till eventually he became exceptional—one of the famous bodies of homosexual New York—sitting on the stoop in that deserted region of Manhattan, still unknown to that world which valued bodies such as his. Malone lived only for Frankie now. He bought soaps he remembered from his childhood, scented soaps manufactured in New Delhi, and soaped his lover's body and smelled his sweet-smelling skin as they lay together afterward; in the morning, when it was still dark, and cool, Malone got up to bathe and then got back in bed so that Frankie would awaken to a fresh, clean lover and they could kiss in the coolness that comes, if at all, before dawn on a summer day. And eventually Malone's happiness was so full he no longer needed to touch Frankie in that same mad, compulsive way, but only to look at him: shaving, stirring soup, standing at the window, lighting a cigarette...

And Frankie adored Malone: bought him the crucifix on his birthday, kissed him on the eyelids and neck and held him long hours in their window above the harbor, watching ships sail out to sea; promised him they would go to Rio de Janeiro; and when he said one evening, after they had ruined another lasagna. "When we're fifty, we'll probably be good cooks," Malone was deeply touched; for with those words he had said, "I'll love you till I die." He had assumed they would always be together, and Malone could see them years and years from now, old men, for he still loved Frankie and could not imagine feeling differently. He felt a perfect peace as he lay there on Sunday afternoon in the shadows, his face laid on the cool, smooth depression of Frankie's stomach. "I used to hate Sunday evenings," he murmured as dusk started to descend slowly from the sky and the air of the harbor turned blue. "Do Sundays seem—peculiar to you?" he asked. Frankie shrugged and raised his cigarette to his lips and said in that dark, slow voice: "I hate them 'cause I have to go to work the next day." And Malone smiled, and he said no more, realizing he could hardly expect Frankie to feel exactly as he did about the dove-blue holiness of Sunday evenings. "You think too much," Frankie said to Malone, as he caressed the hairs that clustered behind his ear. "I don't think, I just do..." and he bent his face to Malone's and began that thorough investigation of each other's mouth, through which, Malone thought as they kissed, souls actually are sucked out of the body...

There was something extraordinarily soft about Frankie's skin; Malone could not understand it, but only ran his hands over his stomach, his limbs, as if trying to discern what material it was made of, like a buyer in Hong Kong feeling silks. The touch of Frankie's body against his own was so soft, so delicate, when their legs were intertwined after making love and Frankie was drifting off to sleep, that Malone would find himself farther than ever from sleep, and he would raise his head in the dark silence and wish to say to someone: "You be witness. I am perfectly happy. This boy is a miracle. That he loves me is a second miracle." And he would listen in the darkness for a clock, a sound, as if the whole world had vanished and only he and Frankie, by reason of their perfect happiness, still existed. When he lay back again and Frankie's dark, soft hair rested against his shoulder, and the wind, coming across the harbor, began to rattle the window gently, he felt as if they were on some high promontory above the world, as solitary as shepherds on a crag in a canvas of Brueghel—all alone in the blue, windy, gentle world. Malone would lie awake all night in wonderment and peace, like a shepherd who keeps watch over his flock, only this vigil was not dull, this vigil was a joy. When later it began to rain, in great sparkling clouds that drifted down into the empty street below past the orange streetlights, Malone had to extract himself from Frankie's embrace to get up, cross the floor, and close a window. He found when he returned that Frankie had awakened. When he climbed into bed beneath the covers and felt the warmth of Frankie's body, the warmth of his legs and stomach and arms that enfolded him immediately, as if Frankie were one of those plants that attaches itself to stone or wrought iron with tiny pale green tendrils, curling and locking so the vine may follow, Malone felt his happiness choke him. He felt he had been embraced, taken in beneath these warm covers, not by Frankie, but by the world itself, by God, and he lay there, listening to Frankie's heart beat against his ear, afraid to breathe he was so happy; till Frankie kissed him, and he looked up and saw, in the faint light of the streetlight, the tenderness and gratitude that had flooded Frankie's eyes, and made them glisten and sparkle like the rain outside, as he looked down at Malone with the faint smile of a man who awakens in the depths of the night to find not only is he safe, but loved. Frankie merely smiled at him, but for that look, those eyes, Malone would have given the world.

And embracing Frankie those hot afternoons, Malone returned to the core of his existence: the hot afternoons beneath the rustling date palms on a green patio, his mother's perfume, the odor of his father's crisp white shirts and the air conditioning that clung to them, the lapis lazuli lagoons, schooners, palm tree fronds glistening in the light as if water streamed down their tips, the hot blast of a factory whistle at one o'clock, naps in the afternoon, the black women in scarves praying the rosary at church; and the false years of dutiful behavior fell away and Malone felt as peaceful as he had sitting by the washtubs with Irene as she sang songs and straightened "her hair with a hot iron. Love was the key: The popular songs he heard on the radio, Malone realized now, were in the end perfectly accurate. Each time he ran his lips across the concave depression of Frankie's stomach, he banished further the nights of loneliness, the widow's cold cream, the sterile years of his wasted youth, and he burrowed deeper at the thought of it into Frankie's flesh. He looked up at those moments to find, Frankie gazing down at him with an expression of mild curiosity, and wonderment, at Malone's passion.

Frankie wondered about Malone's past: Frankie had left, after all, his wife and child for him. But it made Malone curiously impatient when he detected in Frankie an eagerness to hear about the schools he had attended and the places he had lived, for that aspect of himself he had decided was worthless. Frankie read the papers, asking Malone to pronounce for him the words he had never come across before, and tell him what they meant. Malone no longer read the papers. They meant nothing to him. He was in love. Newspapers only summoned up to him the forlorn Sundays of his past; in the same way Frankie hated tuna fish because he had eaten it so much when he was poor. Frankie was no longer poor, but he still wanted to make more money; he read the want ads, and wrote down the addresses of schools he heard advertised on the radio. He came home with ideas and schemes. "Maybe I should be an electrician," he said, "we could move to Jersey and have a house. Just you and me and all those honkies." He wanted to have a skill, he believed in the unions, he planned for a while to go into the television repair business. He was good with his hands. He was never sick a day at work, even while he discussed his future with Malone, but he wanted to be his own boss. "You need a skill," he said. He blew out a stream of smoke and added: "Even the chicks in the massage parlors have been trained." He said, "Even the hookers." And Malone thought what a fascinating life that would be: the life of a prostitute. For something had happened in him—having renounced the world of work, duty, caution, and practicality, he now wished to live the life of a bohemian. Whores fascinated him, people who lived solely for love, artists, neurotics, and with these the city was filled...

"But you've been to school, man," he would say to Malone, holding his head in both his hands, cupping it beneath the ears so that Malone felt as if his skull could be crushed between Frankie's huge hands like a grapefruit; and Malone thought how miraculous the hands and arms of a lover are. "The world is too much with us," he said, and shut Frankie up with a kiss. But Frankie would not be silent; it obsessed him that Malone was better educated than he. Frankie was proud of his Italian past and did not like being taken for a Puerto Rican. He wanted his son to be a doctor, perhaps, he told Malone shyly. For himself? He wanted to improve his lot; he wanted to learn a skill, fix TVs, and move to New Jersey with Malone to a house in the pine barrens. He was a true American. Malone let these words pass, like a summer rain he knew would end.

The two of them were as alone with one another in that building as two apes in a tree. Nothing intruded in this neighborhood, which hadn't even a name, and seemed to be filled with more parked trucks than human beings, this region of grassy lots, huge, faceless warehouses, and the hulks of switching stations of New York Telephone. They lived in an institutional graveyard. They would have gone on living this placid, rural existence had Malone not gone over to Grand Street to buy watermelon one blistering afternoon—and found there a young man as beautiful, as strangely moving, as Frankie. They hardly said a word to one another before making love in his apartment above a hardware store. It was as if he had fallen from a tree, in fact, for going home to that game preserve in which he lived with Frankie high above the ghostly cables of the telephone company, he encountered more dark-eyed stray young men wandering south from the purlieus of homosexuals. He made love with them in the ensuing afternoons. He did not know what would happen, but he knew he would have to lie. What he was not prepared for was the subtle current of knowledge that passed from his own limbs into Frankie's one evening while making love—no more than a brief pause, the mere skip of a heartbeat, a momentary detachment that Frankie felt instantly, and as Malone lay back with a sigh, caused him to look at Malone with his gorgeous, prepossessing eyes and say in a calm voice :"If you leave me, I will kill you."

It was as if the electricity had failed in the entire city, as if suddenly the current had been shut off, and a tremendous stillness suddenly settled down over the echoing avenues beneath them. Malone shuddered.

The words were so out-of-the-blue, and spoken in so grave and quiet a voice, that he believed them; even as he watched a fly above them land on the No-Pest Strip that dangled from the ceiling, buzz frantically, and then be still...

The disembodied hiss of a passing car rose up with the vanishing heat; and later when a cool breeze came through the window, as the refrigerator hummed, they made love again. Making love to Frankie had always been like making love to someone underwater. They were like two swimmers kissing beneath the sea, in slow motion; but this very stillness, this very gravity that Malone had found so wondrous—that medieval calm that his eyes had given Malone the first moment he saw them—now seemed to him not so much medieval calm as a lethargy of spirit. Was Frankie a trap? As viscous as the sticky glue on the No-Pest Strip that hung above them like the streamer of a Chinese lantern? He wondered as he lay entangled in his limbs, making love and thinking of a dozen distracting things—the other rooms he had made love in, the death of God, his father's white shirts—how curious it was that he lay there confined in this high tower in the ruins of the city on a summer evening. Through the window, from the lazy perch of his mattress, he saw the snow-white, lighted hull of the S.S.
Canberra
sailing slowly through the harbor to the open sea, and above them another fly buzzed frantically in the glue of the No-Pest Strip and then was still. Malone lay beside Frankie in a state of white, cool, dumb confusion; he was not sure himself what had happened, and he resolved the issue by staring finally at the sky, the blue, empty sky through the tall window, and letting his soul float out into the limitless space there.

"Oh man, oh man," Frankie would say when he came home from work that week, stripping off his tie and lighting a joint. He kissed Malone and he tried, not understanding why an estrangement had occurred, to bring' things back to what they were. Malone was touched by this. He asked Frankie how his day was, but they had little, in fact, to talk about. Before it had never mattered, now the silences ached. Frankie liked to watch TV, Malone could not bear it. And now Malone had to look at him in the middle of the long, dull evenings in which the comedies of the television set spilled out into the air, and Malone asked himself why he was there, with someone who watched TV and got stoned each evening and hated his boss and had a temper; but then Frankie, turning from the refrigerator with a glass of wine, would look at Malone with those cloudy eyes, and Malone would remember...