Dancer From the Dance: A Novel (5 page)

What a carnival of people. One fellow came directly from his tour of duty in the Emergency Room at Bellevue on Saturday nights, and danced in his white coat sprinkled with blood. A handsome blond man whom the nation saw on its television sets almost every day eating a nutritious cereal, came to stand by the doorway to the bathroom, waiting for someone to go in whose piss he could drink. Chatting with him was a famous drug dealer from the Upper East Side who was sending his son through Choate and his daughter through Foxcroft, and who always dressed like a gangster from the forties. They were talking to a rich art collector, who one day had resolved to leave all this, had cursed it and gone to the Orient the next day to live there; within a year he had reappeared standing beside the dance floor, because, as he told his friends, Angkor Wat was not nearly so beautiful as the sight of Luis Sanchez dancing to "Law of the Land" with his chest glistening with sweat and a friend stuffing a rag soaked with ethyl chloride into his mouth.

The art collector walked up to talk to a handsome architect who had also tried to escape this room and the life, and society, which flowed out from it, as a river does from a spring. He had decided one night he was dissipating himself, he had looked in the mirror and decided he was going to waste physically. And so he bought a car and drove west till he found a little shack high in a mountain pass with not a single mirror in the house. Four months of snow, and two of flowers, in the pure mountain air, however, did not arrest the progress of these physical flaws. They were age itself. And so one morning in May, with flowers on the meadows and the valley beneath him, he decided to go back to Manhattan and rot with all the beauties in this artificial hothouse of music and light. For what was this room but a place to forget we are dying? There were people so blessed with beauty there they did not know what to do with it. And so the doctor who came direct from the Emergency Room (whose dark, bearded face was that of a fifteenth-century Spanish saint), the archangelic son of a famous actress, the man who had driven west to leave time behind, breathed now the air of Olympus: Everyone was a god, and no one grew old in a single night. No, it took years for that to happen...

For what does one do with Beauty—that oddest, most irrational of careers? There were boys in that room, bank tellers, shoe salesmen, clerks, who had been given faces and forms so extraordinary that they constituted a vocation of their own. They rushed out each night to simply stand in rooms about the city, exhibiting themselves to view much as the priest on Holy Saturday throws open the doors of the Tabernacle to expose the chalice within.

Nevertheless Malone, the night Frankie nearly beat him up on the sidewalk outside the Twelfth Floor (a commotion I was unaware of long after it had occurred, since I had arrived early that night to watch the place fill up with dancers and hear the music that began the whole night, as an overture begins an opera, and that the dancers never heard) and had to be taken off by the police, had by that time come to loathe being looked at; could not bear the gaze of amorous strangers; and the only reason he came out at all, during that period after he left Frankie, when he wanted to go away and hide forever, was the crazy compulsion with which we resolved all the tangled impulses of our lives—the need to dance.

Everyone there, in fact, like Malone, was a serious dancer and they were by no means beautiful: Archer Prentiss, who had no chin or hair; Spanish Lily, a tiny, wizened octoroon who lived with his blind mother in The Bronx and sold shoes in a local store—but who by night resembled Salome dancing for the head of John the Baptist in peach-colored veils; Lavalava, a Haitian boy who modeled for
Vogue
till an editor saw him in the dressing room with an enormous penis where a vagina should have been; another man famous for a film he had produced and who had no wish to do anything else with his life—all of them mixed together on that square of blond wood and danced, without looking at anyone else, for one another.

They were the most romantic creatures in the city in that room. If their days were spent in banks and office buildings, no matter: Their true lives began when they walked through this door—and were baptized into a deeper faith, as if brought to life by miraculous immersion. They lived only for the night. The most beautiful Oriental was in fact chaste, as the handmaidens of Dionysius were: He came each night to avoid the eyes of everyone who wanted him (though for different reasons than Malone ignored their gaze), and after dancing for hours in a band of half-naked men, went home alone each night refusing to tinge the exhilaration in his heart with the actuality of carnal kisses. The gossips said he refused to sleep with people because he had a small penis—the leprosy of homosexuals—but this explanation was mundane: He wanted to keep this life in the realm of the perfect,, the ideal. He wanted to be desired, not possessed, for in remaining desired he remained, like the figure on the Grecian urn, forever pursued. He knew quite well that once possessed he would no longer be enchanted—so sex itself became secondary to the spectacle: that single moment of walking in that door. And even as he danced now he was aware of whose heart he was breaking; everyone there was utterly aware of one another.

For example: I sat on the sofa watching Archer Prentiss dance with two other men in plaid shirts and moustaches, who looked as if they had just come down from the Maine woods—two people I had seen for years and years, yet never said a word to, as was the case with Archer Prentiss. This technical distance did not keep us from knowing a great deal about each other, however. Although I had no idea who the two strangers on my left were, nor had ever been introduced to Archer Prentiss, I knew, to the quarter inch, the length and diameter of each one's penis, and exactly what they liked to do in bed.

But then so did everyone else in that room.

If one of the figures in this tapestry of gossip woven at the Twelfth Floor vanished—like the man who fled to Cambodia, or the one who drove west—such a disappearance was, in that crowd, less mysterious than most vanishing acts. If a face in that crowd vanished, it was usually for one of three reasons: (1) he was dead, (2) he had moved to another city whose inhabitants he had not all slept with, or (3) he had found a lover and settled down, spending his Saturday nights at home with his mate, going over the plans of the house they hoped to build in Teaneck, New Jersey.

The two strangers in plaid shirts who had sat down on the sofa to my left were discussing at that moment such a move. The big, blond fellow (whose face decorated a dozen billboards on the Long Island Expressway, smiling at a Winston cigarette) said to the dark one: "He wants me to move in with him, after he comes back from Portugal."

"Oh, God, he lives on Beekman Place, doesn't he?"

"Yes, but Howard lives off Sutton, and he wants me to move in, too. Damn, I don't know what to do."

"Marry John! Sutton Place is all Jewish dentists."

And they burst into laughter over their solution to this problem; while at the next instant, the creature who, for a reason I could not put my finger on, fascinated me more than any of the habitu6s of that place came in the door: Sutherland. He swept in trailing a strange coterie of Egyptian cotton heiresses, the most popular male model to come over from Paris in a decade, a Puerto Rican drug dealer, and an Italian prince. Sutherland was dressed in a black Norell, turban, black pumps, rhinestones, and veil. He held a long cigarette holder to his lips and vanished among the crowd. The dark man began to debate idly whether he should go to bed with Archer Prentiss, who was (a) very ugly, but (b) had a big dick.

In the midst of their deliberations, Zulema's "Giving Up" suddenly burst out of the recapitulations of Deodato, and the two woodsmen got up to dance; at their rising, two other boys in black with tired, beautiful eyes, sat down immediately and began discussing the men who had just left: "I call him the Pancake Man," said one.
"He
doesn't use makeup!" said the other. "Oh, no," the first replied. "The opposite! Because he's the kind of man you imagine waking up with on Saturday morning, and he makes pancakes for you, and then you take the dog out for a walk in the park. And he always has a moustache, and he always wears plaid shirts!"

"I agree he's gorgeous," said his friend, "but someone told me he has the smallest wee-wee in New York."

And with that, as if the boy had snapped his fingers, the big, blond woodsman standing by the dance floor in all his radiant masculinity, crumbled into dust.

"Oh please," said the one, "I don't need that." He covered his face with his hands. "I'm already on downs, why did you say that?"

"Because it's true," said the other.

"Oh, God," the first moaned, in the nasal wail of Brooklyn, "Oh, God, I can't believe that. No, he's my Pancake Man."

"They
all
wear plaid shirts, and they all have moustaches," said his friend. "You might as well pick one with a big dick. None of them will look at you, anyway."

He looked out between his fingers at the woodsman, who was now talking animatedly to Sutherland in his black Norell and turban and long cigarette holder, and said, "Who is that woman he's talking to?" And the other side:"Her name is Andrew Sutherland, and she lives on Madison Avenue. She's a speed freak. She hasn't long to live." At that moment, "Needing You" began, buried still in the diminishing chords of "You've Got Me Waiting for the Rain to Fall," and the two boys on the sofa—with hearing sharper than a coyote's, and without even needing to ask each other—bounded up off the sofa and headed for the dance floor. Instantly their seats were taken by an older, gray-haired man and his friend, an even older fellow who because of his hearing aid, toupee, and back brace was known among the younger queens as Spare Parts. "I find him so beautiful," said the man of the boy who had just left, "like a Kabuki, that long neck, those heavy-lidded eyes. He never looks at me, do you think because he's afraid?" They began to discuss a friend on the dance floor who had recently learned he had cancer of the lungs. "No, no," said Spare Parts, "he has cancer of the colon, I think, his mother has cancer of the lungs." "Yes," said the friend, "he used to scream at his mother for smoking too much, and she used to scream at him for eating too fast. And now look." "He flies out to the clinic tomorrow," said Spare Parts. "Do you suppose he wants to go home with someone?" "You know," said the friend, "I would think the fact that he's dying would give him the courage to walk up to all these boys he's been in love with all these years but never had the nerve to say hello to." "Well, he has a look about him," said Spare Parts. "He looks... ethereal." At that moment two Puerto Rican boys, oblivious to everything but their own heated discussion, stopped to snuff out their cigarettes in the ashtray beside the sofa.

"And the reason you don't know any English," the one said suddenly in English to his friend, "is because you waste too much time chasing dick!"

And they hurried off into the crowd, the accused defending himself excitedly in rapid Spanish to his friend.

The gray-haired man on the sofa rolled his eyes, sighed a long sigh as he snuffed out his own cigarette in the ashtray, and said: "My dear, whole
lives
have been wasted chasing dick." He sat up suddenly. "Oh!" he said. "There's that song!"

At that moment, "One Night Affair" was beginning to rise from the ruins of "Needing You," and they both put down their plastic cups of apple juice and started toward the dance floor.

For a moment the sofa was empty, and two tall black boys wearing wide-brimmed hats eyed it as they moved, like sailing barges, very slowly along the edges of the crowd, but before they could cross the space of carpet to its comfortable cushions, I heard a rustle of silk and a distinctive voice. I turned and saw Sutherland sitting down with a thin, pale young fellow in horn-rimmed glasses who looked as if he had just stumbled out of the stacks of the New York Public Library.

For an instant Sutherland, as he fit a cigarette into his long black holder, and the pale boy in spectacles eyed the black boys in hats across the rug; and then the blacks, seeing they had lost their harbor, turned and continued moving along the crowd like two galleons perusing the Ivory Coast on a hot, windless day.

"I find it perfectly expressive of the whole sad state of human affairs at this moment of history, I find it a perfect symbol of the demise of America," said Sutherland in that low, throaty voice that always seemed breathlessly about to confide something undreamed of in your wildest dreams, "that dinge are the only people who take hats seriously!" And he turned to the boy with the cigarette in its rhinestone holder, waiting for a light.

"Dinge?" said the boy in a cracked, earnest voice as he tried three times to finally get a flame from his lighter.

"Oh, darling, are you one of these millionaires who go around with ninety-nine-cent lighters?" said Sutherland as he waited for the flame to ignite.

The boy—who, we later learned, was the heir to a huge farm implement and nitrogen fertilizer fortune—flushed scarlet, for he could not bear references to his money and was terrified that someone would ask him for a loan, or assume that he would pay the bill. Sutherland puffed on his cigarette and removed it from his lips and said through a cloud of smoke, when the boy repeated his request for a definition of
dinge:
"Blacks, darling.
Shvartzers,
negroes, whatever you like. Why are they the better dancers? For they are. They get away with things here that no white boy could in a million years. And why do they get to wear white hats? And all the outrageous clothes? When gloves come back," he said, pulling at his own long black ones, "and I'm sorry they ever went away, you can be sure they will be the ones to wear them first!"

The boy was not looking at Sutherland as he spoke—his eyes had already been caught by something ten feet away from him; his face had that stricken, despairing expression of someone who has seen for the very first time a race of men whose existence he never suspected before, men more handsome than he had ever imagined, and all of them in this tiny room. He looked as if he were about to burst into tears. He leaned closer to Sutherland who was at that moment just finishing with his gloves and who looked about himself now, with a gossamer cloud of stagnant cigarette smoke forming a double veil over his face. "My face seats five," he sighed, "my honeypot's on fire."