Dancer From the Dance: A Novel (19 page)

M
ALONE
only laughed when Sutherland declared that no one past the age of thirty should have more than three good friends; but he knew an awful lot of people. We had not been in his apartment five minutes the evening we left Bellevue to get the Social Security card the hospital requested, when there was a knock on the door. Two boys came in to go out dancing with Malone; two faces we had seen for years and never spoken to. They were shocked by our news that he had been beaten up, could have no visitors, and was spending the night at Bellevue. "But who did it?" said the short one. "Frankie?" We said no, and when we asked who Frankie was, the tall boy replied: "You can't have known Malone very long. Frankie is a drop-dead Italian who was madly in love with Malone and who, when Malone told him it was all over—"

"An inevitable moment," said the tall one, as he sat down on the edge of an upended milk crate, "an inevitable moment in the lives of all lovers, of every persuasion, a moment we must all learn to accept with grace and dignity."

"However, at that inevitable moment," said the short one, picking up the story, "Frankie did
not
behave with grace and dignity, no, he threw Malone down on the grass in Central Park and began breaking each rib and was about to knife him when Sutherland and the police arrived and saved Malone." It was all inaccurate, but Sutherland with the freedom of an artist had arranged the plot to make the tale more vivid, and so the afternoon when Frankie had sat sobbing beside Malone was now, in the vast library of gossip, a scene of violence. "And ever since," the visitor said, "Frankie has tried to learn the location of Malone's cold-water flat"—he turned to us—"we call this place a cold-water flat, it is
not
an apartment—but with no success."

"Is Sutherland at the hospital?" said the other.

"He's in South America," we explained.

"Oh," said the first, turning to the second, "he's with Kenny Lamar, they went over with that count, you know, the one who has every record the Shirelles ever made, the one Sutherland told you was the direct descendant of Diane de Poitiers,
that's
where he is," he said, with the breathless tone of someone fitting two pieces of rumor together. "Oh, God, they're having a fabulous time."

"Well," said the second, standing up, "so will we. Malone would
not
want us to miss the party." It was five o'clock in the morning, and the laundry lines that sagged between our building and the one behind, the fire escape, the flat tar-paper roofs were emerging in the gray light. A pigeon fluttered in a gutter, a cat stared at it from the window opposite, its tail flicking back and forth, its teeth chattering, its eyes wild with the expression one saw sometimes on the faces of people at the Twelfth Floor. "Especially since all the beauties will be there," the short boy said, "twisted out of their minds. Oh, God! Was Malone tripping when he was assassinated?"

We said we didn't know.

"Probably not," said his friend. "Malone
never
does drugs." They turned to us at the door after saying they would visit Malone tomorrow, finding us suddenly attractive, and introduced themselves before leaving. The vast majority of Malone's friends had slept with one another. "By the way," the tall one said, "you are now a part of a strange brotherhood, you know?" And the other took up the theme: "Yes, you have to come over some evening. We're all very different, but we do have one thing in common." "We adore Malone," his friend said.

And they went out the door, and it was morning.

Sutherland returned from Caracas the following Monday and came down to Malone's in the uniform of a nurse in the Crimean War to sit beside him and read Rudyard Kipling. He appeared each afternoon in his starched white dress, bearing a poppy and a volume of
The Jungle Book.
He put the book down in the middle of a tale, one day, to tell Malone of a project that had come to him, full-blown, while sitting in the courtyard of Nony Dillon's house in Caracas one evening waiting for her to finish playing a hand of bridge. He had decided to sell Malone. Sutherland was a citizen of the Upper, not the Lower, East Side, after all: He had lived so long among people who sold things—Egyptian scarabs, Turkish rugs, party concepts—to alcoholic ladies in residential hotels, rich folk passing through, the affluent in search of objets d'art, that it occurred to him to convert Malone to cash. For you cannot live in New York City very long and not be conscious of the niceties of being rich—the city is, after all, an ecstatic exercise in merchandising—and one evening of his visit to Venezuela Sutherland sat straight up when he read a line of Santayana's: "Money is the petrol of life." He who had been raised to consider money slightly vulgar suddenly wanted, now that the illusion of love gripped him infrequently, material things: He wanted a house in Cartagena, he wanted to go to Rio if he cared to. He wanted to be able to leave New York from time to time, and not to have to be nice to people in exchange for it. He set himself up, then, in the only business his past years in New York had prepared him for: He became a pimp.

Malone—who considered Sutherland essentially insane—said nothing as he heard this plan described, but being rather lost himself, let Sutherland carry on anyway. The little truce he had achieved with the world that peculiar week of Christmas, when everyone had thought him out of town, the mood of that spontaneous retreat, fled more quickly than the crowd when it decides a bar is passé. When we went over to see Malone that week, the place was jammed, for it took some accident such as Malone's to bring New Yorkers together who were otherwise constrained by the rules of public life to be strangers. When did people talk to each other but at a fire, a robbery, a man dropping dead of a heart attack on the street? Yet people took care of their kind. The bums helped each other: You would see them late at night in winter bending over a friend, saying, "Come on, man, get up, get up!" and finally dragging their friend into the entrance of some tenement where they would all sleep on top of each other, out of the cold, and coming home yourself at dawn from the Twelfth Floor, you would step carefully over their bodies on the landing and even stop to look at their faces and wonder what they were dreaming of. Well, our little society (so tiny, in fact) gathered around the wounded, too. But such was our disposition to turn everything into a party, that when we got there we found the detritus of expensive fetes uptown—flowers, caviar, champagne—brightening Malone's room, the gift of boys who had tended bar at openings the previous night. A tape made for Malone by a popular discaire was hardly audible beneath the roar of conversation. How they talked: The quantities of gossip spilled into the air every hour, which convinced you in the end that none of us had the slightest secret trait (we were fools to think so if we did), the analyses of love affairs, apartments, careers, faces, bodies, gymnasiums, parties. Passing through the mob I heard a remark, delivered with a condescending shrug over a glass of carrot juice, which, stood for all of it: "But he shaves his
back!"
Poof, another beauty had bit the dust. "He's the reason I saw a shrink," someone else was saying. "Everything was wrong. He lived on the Upper East Side, he bleached his floors, he thought the Twelfth Floor was for lonely people." As Sutherland went around in a crisp black maid's uniform, emptying ashtrays into a brown paper bag, the most successful model in New York was asking people's advice on how to attract a boy he'd recently fallen in love with who was reputed to be indifferent to clean-shaven men. "I could grow a beard," he said. "But then you know what they say about facial hair."

"What?" said a bearded poet, who had been unable, after all, to leave this round of discos, bars, and baths he had denounced on many occasions.

"That it is the same color as one's pubic hair," said the model. He removed the cigarette holder from his lips and hollowed his cheeks in a comical expression of hauteur. "How many times I've gone to bed with dreamy people, only to discover their pubic hair was a dull, uninteresting gray. Of course my beard would be blond."

"And what if he doesn't look at you then?" said the poet.

"Then I'll try a moustache," the model shrugged. "There must be some look he's crazy for. It's all just a matter of packaging. Perhaps," he frowned, "he doesn't like blonds!"

"Oh, come see," said a boy sitting by the window. "The sunset is very beautiful."

"Then pull the shade," said Sutherland, wiping out an ashtray with his apron. "I never look at the sunset across these rooftops. It is too depressing. The more beautiful the sky, the more hopeless the neighborhood."

"You must track him down, learn his habits," said the poet, once again intrigued by the problem of seduction at hand.

"The way you moved to Montauk to be with the surfers," said the model.

"Yes," he said. "If you are in love with giraffes, you should live on the Serengeti, if you are in love with surfer boy, you must go to Montauk. And that is what I did."

"But, Rafael!" said Sutherland. "You never slept with any of them!"

"So what?" he shrugged. "One smile from them was ten times more thrilling than the most expert blow-job by some queen at the Baths. I did not have sex with them, but I surfed with them, drank with them, baked clams together, fell asleep side by side in motel rooms—who wants a blow-job?"

"Millions of American boys, thank heaven," said Sutherland in his breathless, throaty murmur. "Oh, God," he said, staring at himself in the mirror, "I been bitten by the love bug!"

Several people shrieked and stood up and said they were on their way to dinner; they filed by Malone's bed and all spoke to him—and what was striking, for those people, they sounded sincere. As they left, however, the open door admitted a new flood of visitors. We watched in astonishment as those mysterious faces we had been so in love with came into the room. Janos Zatursky came, a Hungarian physicist who rarely smiled or said a word (and everyone was in love with him), and Andrew Litton, a beautiful boy who had once been his lover, and Stanley Escher, a struggling architect, and Robert Truscott, the heir to a California forest, and then a host of nameless cocoa-colored boys (me sees all around Manhattan, delivering messages, playing handball in empty lots—those Hispanic angels, a blend of Cuba, Africa, and Puerto Rico, whose dark eyes and bone structures no plastic surgeon could create: All of them stopped by to kiss Malone or share their dope with the other people in the room. Raoul Lecluse came, of the Lecluse Gallery years ago, and Felipe Donovan, the owner of the Twelfth Floor, and a man who had pierced his nipples years before it was a fad and shaved his head before that, and John Eckstein, a dancer with the American Ballet Theater, and Prentiss Nohant, the boy famous for appearing in public in costumes made entirely of gas masks.

The circuit queens came: Luis Sanchez (who played the music at the Twelfth Floor on Saturday) and John di Bellas (a gymnast we had loved till learning he was arrogant); Ed Cort and his lover, Bill Walker (an anal masochist who went to work with a seven-pound ball bearing up his ass); Edwin Giglio (who was so disliked that at his birthday party on Fire Island the guests brought in a candlelit cake and then threw it in his face—while he was tripping); George Riley (a melancholy architect who had never recovered from his affair at Stanford with a professor of mathematics); two airline stewards whose names we didn't know; Eddie Rien, Paul Orozco, and Bob Everett (all hustlers who were no more than five feet four, or twenty years of age); Bill Morgan (who looked like a portrait by Titian, always had gonorrhea, and worked at the airport fueling jets); Huntley Fish (the famous tits), Edwin Farrah from Australia; and Bob Chalmers, a millionaire who went to the Baths every night and lived at the Hotel Pierre watching old Tarzan movies till night fell.

Lynn Feight, a handsome man from Philadelphia being kept by an Episcopalian bishop; and Bob Giorgione (the photographer), who had attempted suicide too many times to recall; and Tom Villaverde (who had a penis so large no one would go to bed with him); and Randy Renfrew (whose penis was so small no one would go to bed with him); and Alonzo Moore, who roller-skated through town in a chiffon ball gown waving a wand to passersby, all came by to see Malone.

And, at the very end, Bruno Welling, a famous drug dealer from the Upper East Side, and Leonard Hauter, a short, dark, enigmatic boy who never said a word but went everywhere with Bruno Welling and served, people said, as a human guinea pig for the newest drugs, which Bruno could not sell till he learned their effect on people. They came by and left Sutherland with a lid of Angel Dust and his favorite drug of all: speed. Everyone in New York was waiting for Sutherland to disintegrate before their very eyes—he shot up incessantly—but by some perverse fate, he went on blooming like a cherub, the very seraph of good health.

They were talking to Archer Prentiss, the chinless, ugly boy who was such a good dancer and who lived in our neighborhood, when we arrived. He lived in a fifth-floor walk-up above a Polish funeral home and spent all his time reading newspapers in his room; he went out only to buy cottage cheese, and newspapers, and to dance.