Dancer From the Dance: A Novel (6 page)

The boy, transfixed and terrified, leaned closer to Sutherland and said, "Who is that?"

"His name is Alan Solis, he has
huge
balls and does public relations work for Pan Am." They looked at him together for a moment. "Ask me about anyone, darling, I know them all. I have been living in New York since the Civil War."

And it was true: Sutherland seemed to have been alive, like the Prime Mover, forever. He had been a candidate for the Episcopalian priesthood, an artist, a socialite, a dealer, a kept boy, a publisher, a film maker, and was now simply—Sutherland. And yet—behind the black veil his face was still as innocent and wonder-struck as it was the day he arrived in New York; his face, though everyone was waiting for it to crumble—from the speed he took—was open, honest, friendly, and looked, even more than that of the boy on his left, as if it were gazing on all of this for the first time.

"I used to be in love with Alan Solis," he said in his low, breathless voice, "when I came to New York. I was so in love with him, with him," he said (for he stuttered, and repeated phrases, not through any impediment of speech, but for effect), "that when he used the bathroom on the train to Sayville, I used to go in right after him and lock the door, just to smell his farts! To simply breathe the gas of his very bowels! A scent far lovelier to me than Chanel Number Nine, or whatever the ladies are wearing these days."

"You know," said the boy, bending over as if in pain, his eyes on Alan Solis with all the intensity of a mongoose regarding a snake, "if I can only find a flaw. If I can find a flaw in someone, then it's not so bad, you know? But that boy seems to be perfect!" he said. "Oh, God, it's terrible!" And he put a hand to his forehead, stricken by that deadliest of forces, Beauty.

"A flaw, a flaw," said Sutherland, dropping his ash into the ashtray on his left, "I understand perfectly."

"If I can just see a flaw, then it's not so hopeless and depressing," said the boy, his face screwed up in agony, even though Solis, talking to a short, muscular Italian whom he wanted to take home that night, was completely oblivious to this adoring fan whose body was far too thin to interest him.

"I've got it," said Sutherland, who turned to his companion now. "I remember a flaw. His chest," he said, "his chest is so hairy that one can't really see the deep, chiseled indentation between the breasts. Will that do, darling?"

The boy gnawed on his lip and considered.

"I'm afraid it will have to. There isn't a thing else wrong with the man, other than the fact that he knows it."

"You know," the boy said, "when my family was living in England and I came home from school on vacation, there was a boy who worked at our butcher's in the village. And he was astonishing! He had white, white skin, and rosy cheeks, and the most beautiful golden hair! He was as beautiful as an angel! I'm not exaggerating. And all that winter I used to dream of him, walking over the fields, at home at night. And at Princeton, a boy who used to dive at the pool. I was in love with him, and I used to ache walking home in autumn from the gym and think of him for days! And that's why I'm here, I guess, I'm looking for the English butcher boy, the diver at Princeton," he said as Alan Solis wandered onto the dance floor, "because I'm so tired of dreaming of faces and bodies. I want to touch one this time," he said, his voice suddenly choking.

"Well, how about that one over there?" said Sutherland, waving his cigarette holder at a tall, square-jawed fellow who taught English to children of the Third World in Harlem. "Greg Butts. I've always found him very Rupert Brooke; however his cock is very small, they tell me, and would hardly sustain a major fantasy on the scale of yours."

"You know, I hate being gay," said the boy, leaning over toward Sutherland, "I just feel it's ruined my life. It drains me, you know, it's like having a tumor, or a parasite! If I were straight I'd get married and that would be it. But being gay, I waste so much time imagining! I hate the lying to my family, and I know I'll never be any of the things they expect of me," he said, "because it's like having cancer but you can't tell them, that's what a secret vice is like."

Sutherland was speechless at this declaration; he sat there for a moment, with the cigarette holder to his lips, perfectly still; and then he said, "Perhaps what you
need
... perhaps what you need," he said, in a speculative tone, "is a good facial." He turned quickly to his friend and said: "Oh, darling, for heaven's sake, don't take it so seriously! Just repeat after me: 'My face seats five, my honeypot's on fire.'"

"My face seats five, my honeypot's on fire," said the boy with a constipated smile.

"That's right, that will, get you into the spirit of things! And please don't feel you have an obligation to be secretary of state!" he said, as his two Egyptian heiresses came by. "Their great great great great great great grandfather was a pharaoh, while yours was just a potato farmer in Würzburg!" And he waved at his two Egyptian women, who were wandering around the French model, wreathed in the happiest of smiles. The floor had cleared momentarily to watch a tall, thin girl dance who came dressed each night in the latest work of a famous designer, and who prided herself on sleeping with all the handsomest homosexuals in New York. "Perhaps what you need is this."

He held out his black-gloved arm, and a little red pill sat in the center of his palm.

"What's that?" said the boy.

"Oh don't ask, darling," said Sutherland. "If it's a pill, take it."

The boy looked askance at the rosy pebble in Sutherland's palm, glowing like a ruby on black velvet in a vault at Bulgari. "I don't..." he said.

"Don't you trust me?" said Sutherland. "I would never ask you to take anything that does not enhance lucidity."

"But... speed kills," blurted the boy, looking up at Sutherland over his glasses.

"And Dial prevents wetness twenty-four hours a day," breathed Sutherland in his lowest tone. "Darling. Don't believe everything you hear. You mustn't for instance read the newspapers, that will destroy your mind far faster than speed.
The New York Times
has been responsible for more deaths in this city than Angel Dust,
croyez-moi."
He put the red pill on the arm of the sofa and said: "There are many drugs I would not have you take. I am not like these queens whose names I wouldn't mention, but who, if you glance at the dance floor, you can certainly pick out, and who are on
hog tranquilizer.
My dear," he breathed, nodding toward a certain Michael Zubitski, a blond man wandering past the sofa now with no awareness of where he was: a sleepwalking queen whom Sutherland had not spoken to since he alienated a boy with whom Sutherland had been in love. "I do not pickle myself in formaldehyde or drench my brain pan in a drug used to tranquilize pigs, I have no desire to be turned, like Ulysses's men, into beasts, I am not envious of the profound ease felt by a Nebraska hog about to be castrated and bled to death," he said, straight into the face of Michael Zubitski, who, trying to see who this person was, had stopped and bent down to stare into Sutherland's black veil, five inches from his forehead, and hung there now like a huge sea gull poised above a swimming fish, "for the tables of all-American families in Duluth and Council Bluffs, no, you'll have to forgive me, darling, I am old-fashioned, I believe in General Motors and the clarity of the gods..."

And here, raising his ponderous blond head, Michael Zubitski withdrew from Sutherland's face and began moving, like a zombie, across the rug till he came to rest against the wall beside a potted plant.

"Who was that?" said the boy, ogling.

"A woman of no importance," said Sutherland, expelling a stream of cigarette smoke. "A vengeful queen. For that great blond beast, that Nazi storm trooper, has a cock that if it were any smaller would be a vagina, and if people, for whatever reason, go to bed with him, they inevitably leave in the middle of it, saying 'I'm tired,' or 'I've already had sex today,' or one of those classic excuses. The boy became so bitter about his fate that when he developed a case of syphilis he went to the Baths and infected everyone he could who sported an enormous organ. Well, darling, I guess it's better than assassinating a president." He expelled a long stream of smoke. "For don't you see, even after the dinge are taken care of and the amputees and Eurasians and the fags, even after all of them are provided for, who will ease the pains of that last minority, that minority within a minority, I mean those lepers of New York, the queens with small cocks? Truly Christ blessed the lepers and the whores, but there is
no
comfort in the Bible for boys with small winks, and they are the most shunned of all. People go to bed with me once, and I never hear from them again!" he said with the bright eyes of a koala bear, confessing what others in his situation spent a lifetime concealing. "What will the government do for
them?
Ah well, no matter," he sighed, "it's certainly not your problem." He squeezed his hand and smiled. "There are three lies in life," Sutherland said to his young companion, whose first night this was in the realm of homosexuality and whose introduction to it Sutherland had taken upon himself to supervise. "One, the check is in the mail. Two, I will not come in your mouth. And three, all Puerto Ricans have big cocks," he said. And with that he leaned forward and cupped the young man's hand in his long black gloves and said to him in that low, breathless voice: "You are beginning a journey, far more bizarre than any excursion up the Nile. You have set foot tonight on a vast, uncharted continent. Do let me take you as far as I can. I shall hold your hand as far as we can go together, and point out to you the more interesting flora and fauna. I will help you avoid the quicksand in which you can drown, or at least waste a
great
deal of time, the thorn-thickets, the false vistas—ah," he sighed. "We have many of those, we have
much
trompe l'oeil in this very room!" he said ecstatically, cocking his cigarette holder at a sprightly angle. "So let us go upriver together as far as we may," he resumed, once more cupping his charge's white, slim hand, "and remember to ask questions, and notice everything, the orchids and the fruit flies, the children rummaging for food in piles of shit, and the ibis that flies across the moon at dusk. Let us go at
least
as far as the falls. What a journey! If only I can help you avoid the detours, culs-de-sac, fevers, and false raptures that I have suffered." He squeezed the fellow's hand and said, echoing the signal phrase of a Bar Mitzvah he had once attended in the guise of a Jewish matron from Flatbush: "For tonight, my dear, you are a homosexual!"

And with that he returned his attention to the men coming through the doorway, of whom they had the only unobstructed view from that sofa by the coat check. In the midst of this late-arriving throng (for the desire of everyone to arrive after everyone else had created a ripple effect so that no one could go out anymore before two
A.M
. at the earliest), in a kind of rest between the arrivals of two of the larger "families," a young man appeared in the doorway by himself; and the fertilizer heir said, 'Oh, who is
that?
Find a flaw, I can't find a flaw."

"That is Malone," said Sutherland in his lowest, most dramatic voice, "and his only flaw is that he is still searching for love, when it should be perfectly clear to us all by now that there is no Mister Right, or Mister Wrong, for that matter. We are all alone. He used to be a White House fellow, darling, and now he talks of suicide, if a certain Puerto Rican maniac doesn't kill him first."

I watched as this individual walked into the room and was immediately greeted by several of the handsomest boys there, the ones so handsome they never looked at anybody, but went to the darkness of back rooms merely to piss on perfect strangers and have their asses licked. They were the first to go over to Malone. He put an arm around their shoulders or shook their hands, with his almost old-fashioned manners. He put his head close to theirs when they spoke to him, as if he didn't want to miss a word, and when he replied he spoke almost against their ear: a charming gesture ostensibly to defeat the noise of the room, but one that made you feel you were being winnowed out, selected, for some confidential revelation. The courtesy with which he moved on through that crowd of zombies who stepped on one another with the oblivious brusqueness of a crowd in a subway, and stopped to talk to whoever tugged at him, was reflected in his smile. He had a face you liked with the certainty that, though you had no idea who he was, he was a good man. He introduced his admirers to one another and then left them new friends and vanished in the crowd. I had no idea who he was, he was just a face I saw in a discotheque one winter; but he was for me the central symbol on which all of it rested.

"He had the misfortune to fall in love with a thug," said Sutherland when the fertilizer heir asked him again about this man, "who has threatened to kill Malone simply because Malone no longer loves him and was foolish enough to say so. Another rule,
caro,
which may help you—if blacks are the only ones who wear hats anymore," he breathed, raising his cigarette holder to his lips, "then Latins, my dear, are the only ones who take love seriously. Malone is now being chased around Manhattan by knives and bullets. He
never
has sex."

The two Egyptian women came up to Sutherland, leaned down, and spoke rapidly in French to him for a few moments; they shrieked with laughter and went on their way. When the fertilizer heir asked what that was all about, Sutherland replied: "They want to know if they should paint their cunts. What do
you
think?"

"Me?" said the boy, his face alarmed.

"Does the thought of cooze make you vomit?" said Sutherland, blowing out a stream of smoke. "Well, to be dead-honest, I find it, the very thought of it, loathsome beyond words! However, I love my girls! They are being driven mad by the presence of so many handsome young men—so many handsome young men who have absolutely no interest whatsoever in dining between their legs this evening. But,
croyez-moi,
my friend, there is steam rising from those pussies!"