Dancer From the Dance: A Novel (11 page)

One Sunday afternoon—aware that Malone could no longer bear what had been his favorite day in their sunny perch above the harbor—Frankie bent down and kissed Malone and then, lying beside him as he held his hand, asked if he would come to New Jersey that day and take Frankie's son for a walk. Malone felt something churn within himself. But he went, and hand in hand with Enrico between them, they went to gaudy amusement parks and sat in ice-cream parlors under the blistering sun, and Malone felt sadder and sadder.

It was the habit of recording his thoughts, his days, in his journal that ended Malone's affair. He came home from work one night and found Frankie standing silent in the middle of the floor. The television was dead. Malone looked at Frankie's face and knew instantly what had happened. His journal lay open on the mattress. "What's wrong?" gasped Malone. "So where were you on Monday afternoon?" Frankie said in the furious, hard voice of an interrogator. "And where were you Wednesday afternoon when I called?

And who is George Dillow and Stanley Cohen? You fucking bastard!" he said, and slapped Malone on his cheek and pushed him back against the wall. And Malone thought to himself, with the cool detachment of a man who has just been hurled from a car wreck and sits on the hillside wondering why he isn't in his bed at home: Ah, this is how it happens. They beat you up, they are jealous. Love-nest slaying... For he had always wondered what would happen if Frankie ever turned on him the temper he had shown the day a grocer refused to cash his check, or the afternoon he learned on the telephone that a friend in New Jersey had turned other friends in to a narcotics agent. "Man, he is dead," Frankie had said. "He is going to find himself in the river by tomorrow," and Malone had listened, in disbelief. But here was Frankie now, slapping him again and again on the face, shoving him against the wall and kicking him and punching his ribs. He beat Malone up and Malone, realizing an explanation was impossible, and so heartsick he could not, would not strike back, ran. He ran downstairs into the warm, empty streets, and kept running as best he could with a cracked rib till he stopped in a dark alley near Bond Street and sat down and coughed, and wept, and waited till he had stopped shaking. Then he got up and continued walking north, until he came to a crowded part of the Village, with movie houses, stores still open, and restaurants filled with smiling people behind plants and plate glass windows. He sat down on a stoop. He had no place to go, and he ached in several places. He sat there oblivious to the throngs walking past him on West Tenth Street.

And then someone caught his eye: a wigged duchess emerging from the back door of a warehouse in which the Magic, Fantasy, and Dreams Ball was just breaking up. "Help me," said Malone. "My dear," said

Sutherland after taking one look at his terrified face, "the house of Guiche shall never refuse the protection of its manor to the poorest of its subjects," and he assisted Malone into a cab pulled up at the curb. They rode in silence for some time as Malone panted beside Sutherland, his legs vibrating like windshield wipers. Neither spoke. Sutherland offered Malone a cigarette, Malone shook his head, and Sutherland smoked in silence, glancing at Malone from time to time in the light of passing streets as they floated north. Time had passed since he had stood outside the bookstore in Georgetown, peering in at volumes on the French cathedrals, and Malone no longer looked as if he were a young man peering into a bookstore in Georgetown on a summer night; he looked more like the fellow who had just run in off the playing fields in New Hampshire, his eyes brilliant—a rather exhausted soccer player now, his face scratched from the fray—the earring hidden behind a cluster of golden curls. Malone would always have that ambiguous look, half-fine, half-rough, and it so intrigued Sutherland that when the taxi slowed at his block of Madison Avenue, he turned to Malone and said: "Forgive me for inquiring, but—are you for rent?"

And Malone, as polite as this stranger who sat smoking a Gauloise beside him under a white wig of the seventeenth century, in brocade and rhinestones, smiled weakly and said: "Thank you, no." For he was so softhearted he hated refusing anyone. Rejecting another person upset him far more than being refused himself—and he was one of the few homosexuals in New York who went home with people because he did not wish to hurt their feelings. "I'm recovering from a lovers' brawl," he added. "Unlucky in love."

"Then come to the Carlyle," said Sutherland, extending his arm, "and let's have a drink. I always go to the Carlyle to rub an ice cube, bathed in Pernod, on my bruises. And then go dancing at the Twelfth Floor."

After the Carlyle they went to Sutherland's room above a little gallery on upper Madison Avenue, since one could not arrive at the Twelfth Floor before two
A.M
. and it was just past one. Sutherland pushed off his bed the manuscript on the history of religion that he had been writing the past five years, and lay Malone down to wash his bruises—and it was this, years later, he never forgot, as Christ's definition of charity is the simplest and truest: You took me in when I was wounded. He made Malone tell his story again, as he washed his face with Germaine Monteil astringents, gasping at different parts and saying, his eyes very bright,
"Ah!"
For Sutherland, like the emperor with Scheherazade, could listen for hours to love stories. He knew perfectly well what Malone had run from. "Of course he beat you up," said Sutherland, dabbing with a cotton swab at Malone's lavender temple. "Latins are the last egocentrics on earth! Enslaved as you are to dark beauties, I see only
dolors
ahead for you—heartbreak
dead
ahead," he said. "Couldn't you, wouldn't you, love someone like me instead?"

But this very question was rhetorical, an invitation that Sutherland himself no longer believed in. He looked at Malone even now and said:"God! There are so many people I'm going to have to introduce you to!"

And then, as if preserving in wrapping paper a fine piece of bric-a-brac he had found on the street, he covered Malone in a blanket and said, "Of course he beat you. Let it be a lesson. This ethnic gene pool in which we sit, like children in their own shit."

He poured Malone a glass of Perrier, "The mineral water of aware French women everywhere," he mumbled.

"God knows I looked for it," he resumed when he had sipped his own glass, sighed, and handed Malone a Cuban cigar. "Uptown, downtown. I used to even go out to the boroughs on Saturday nights because there were so many dark-eyed beauties out there. For a while I was commuting to Philadelphia. To Rhode Island. But let's be honest. As divine as they are in bed, a guinea hasn't got a heart! They are ruined by their women from the crib, adored, coddled, assumed to be gods. Sad they happen to be so handsome. The real lovers, alas, are Wasps like you and me, even though
we're
supposed to be the ones who are emotionally stunted—well, of course, we are cold as fish in one sense. In another, we are the only true lovers. Let the Italians and the Jews wave their arms about and claim to be passionate, but they understand nothing, but nothing about love! They are show girls, my friend, and don't forget it! It takes a northern European to really suffer the pangs of heartache." And here he blew out a stream of smoke and stared at Malone; for he was looking at himself ten, even fifteen years before, as he saw Malone sitting there with his bruised ribs and blotchy face in the lamplight on that late-summer evening in Sutherland's room on Madison Avenue. He was Sutherland those many years ago, his visage still capable of registering that romantic hopefulness with which so many came to this city; and Sutherland took pleasure in the spectacle. "My God," he murmured again, in a low voice, "there are so many people I have to introduce you to." Malone sat there amused and fascinated by this strange wisdom pouring from this man and conscious that he had no other place to go. It was half-past midnight and he knew no one in the city but the lover he had just fled.

"We live, after all, in perilous times," Sutherland went on, lighting another cigar, "of complete philosophic sterility, we live in a rude and dangerous time in which there are no values to speak to and one can cling to only concrete things—such as cock," he sighed, tapping his ashes into a bowl of faded marigolds. He stood up and walked over to a closet and opened the door to reveal, like the Count of Monte Cristo his fabulous treasure, the accumulated wardrobe of fifteen seasons on the circuit. They stared silently for a moment at the stacks of jungle fatigues, and plain fatigues, bleached fatigues and painter's pants, jeans with zippers and jeans with buttons, tank tops and undershirts, web belts, plaid shirts, and dozens of T-shirts in every color; nylon bomber jackets hanging beside leather bomber jackets, brown and black; and, on the floor in rows, work boots, engineer boots, cowboy boots, work shoes, hiking shoes, baseball caps, coal miner's caps, and, in one wicker basket, coiled like snakes, the transparent plastic belts that Sutherland found one day in a store on Canal Street and that he had introduced to gay New York, which meant, eventually, the nation, several seasons ago. Whistles, tambourines, knit caps, aviator glasses, aluminum inhalers, double-tipped dark glasses in both Orphan Annie and aviator styles, and huge mother-of-pearl fans occupied another basket that testified to the various accoutrements Sutherland had considered necessary when he went dancing in winters past.

"But after a while you realize," sighed Sutherland, in a dejected mood because he had been rejected that evening at the party by someone he had been waiting to talk to for two years, "that there is nothing but these," he said, picking up a pale orange-and-red plaid shirt from Bloomingdale's and letting it dangle onto a pile of pastel-colored T-shirts from an army-navy surplus store on Canal Street and the basket filled with transparent plastic belts. He put a baseball cap on and left the closet. "Is there anything here you'd like to put on?" he asked. "You must get out of those tennis sneakers."

He tossed Malone a pair of Herman Chemi-Gums from Hudson's on Thirteenth Street. "They're far more sturdy. So what remains for us?" he said, as he sat down beside Malone and lifted his glass of Pernod to his lips. "What, we may well ask, is there left to live for? Why get out of bed? For this dreary round of amusing insincerity? This filthy bourgeois society that the Aristotelians have foisted upon us? No, we may still choose to live like gods, like poets. Which brings us down to dancing. Yes," he said, turning to Malone, "that is all that's left when love has gone. Dancing," he said, indicating with a wave of his hand the stacks of tapes and records in another corner of the room. "There is no love in this city," he said, looking down at Malone with a cool expression, "only discotheques—and they too are going fast, under the relentless pressure of capitalist exploitation..." He looked at Malone a moment more and then said quietly: "And what more appropriate way to begin your education than to take you to the Twelfth Floor?"

Malone slept instead that evening, and slept a lot more those first weeks of autumn—for when we have nothing in our lives, we simply stay in bed—and he would hear, vaguely, through his sleep, or see, through half-opened eyes, the tangle of eyelashes, strange figures slipping in and out of the room, doing their best to keep the silence: It was Sutherland (and friends hebrought by to simply look at Malone, sleeping like a Norman prince on a stone tomb) in huge constructions of papier-mâché—monstrous heads, birds of paradise, courtiers of France and Padua, figures from Fellini films—going to the costume parties of that season. Malone missed, that year, the Fellini Ball in the Rainbow Room, the Leo Party at the Armory, the Illusions and Nightmares affair in the Automat on Forty-second Street, while he lay in bed, hearing, as at the bottom of the sea, the distant, reverberating echo of taxicabs honking in the street—a sound that came up to him from the depths as a memory of childhood, when he had come through New York on his vacations from school. Sutherland had fallen in love with the city in the same way—if New York was to Malone that distant quaver of a taxi horn, deep in the chasms of mid-Manhattan, it was to Sutherland the curious taste of an egg-salad sandwich sold in hotel coffee shops, where he'd sat wide-eyed and wondering as he waited for the bellhops to bring down his mother's luggage before they got a taxi for Pier Forty-seven, where a stateroom on the S.S.
Rotterdam
waited to take them to Europe. He had fallen in love with New York City passing through it as a child, and the distinct smell of its damp, vivid air, the sea gulls circling the masts of his ship as it pushed up the Hudson River to its berth. He had fallen in love with the city then, and even though it was now a different city, this residue of affection remained, overlaid by the loves of his adolescence and manhood. At five o'clock now, the hour at which he had wandered down into the streets with his mother to visit a museum, a department store, a restaurant, and the theater, he awoke from the party of the previous night, doused his face, and rushed downstairs to meet the handsome men coming home from work, and have, if not sex, at least cocktails.

Sometimes Malone would awaken and find Sutherland in the uniform of Clara Barton, washing his face with a bottle of Erno Lazslo and saying: "You must get well, dear, there are so many people who can't
wait
to talk to you! I've had to turn down so many invitations, from the Vicomtesse de Ribes, Babe Paley, that dance maven on Second Avenue with the Art Deco bathroom, you know," he said, putting the cotton swab drenched in cleanser to his neck before returning it to Malone's forehead. He awoke at other hours to find Sutherland trying to perfect his quiche, or sitting in a pinstripe suit beside a lamp reading aloud Ortega y Gasset on love.

Malone lay on the sofa like a convalescent, listening to the words as he watched the lamp's shadows on the ceiling. As for Sutherland, he could not have been happier having a new charge both handsome and willing to listen. It was always a joy to sponsor a new face in the crowd he ran with—among the most bored and frenetic on earth—and it was moving to see someone as charmingly lost as Malone.