Dancer From the Dance: A Novel (13 page)

And Malone would go off to the Upper West Side with Rafael, or Jesus, or Luis, and lie in a room, a prisoner of a pair of eyes, a smooth chest, enveloping limbs. But love was like drinking seawater, Malone discovered. The more he made love the more he desired the replicas of his current lover he inevitably found on every corner. Malone was love-sick, he was feverish, and it glowed in his eyes so that other people only had to look at him to realize instantly he was theirs. Yet each time he looked at someone tenderly, he felt he was seeing a double exposure in which the face behind the one in front of him bore the outlines of Frankie—and the half an inch between his lips and these others was a crevasse he could not cross. ThenMalone would walk back across the park with a miserable heart to find Sutherland hanging out his window in an orange wig, frilly peasant blouse, and gas-blue beads, screaming in Italian to the people passing on the street below to come up and suck his twat. The mask of comedy was sometimes difficult to put on; and Malone might linger in the doorway of the Whitney Museum for an hour or so, watching Sutherland finger the avocados in his blouse, throw out his arms, pat his hair, finger his beads, wave coquettishly like a marionette, before he felt himself able finally to cross the street. Sutherland was happy without love. So could he be. He waited till this lady who had just put out her wash, chattering happily as she drank in the life of the street and waited for Mario to come home, spotted him and then he went upstairs, with the melancholy heart of a sailor who is returning from an unsuccessful voyage. "Darling!" Sutherland gasped, at the sight of Malone coming into his room after so long an absence. "Is he playing poker? Did he give you the afternoon off?"

And Sutherland gave him the elaborate parody of a cocktail kiss, which he was fond of: missing, by a foot, at least, both cheeks.

"Entre nous,"
Malone said, "it's over."

"Ahhhhh," said Sutherland in a melancholy tone, fingering his beads,
"l'amore non fa niente."
He collapsed on the sofa in a cloud of perfumed powder. "There have been so many parties while you were away," he sighed. "There have just been too many to respond to. Does love mean never having to say you're sorry," he said, dabbing his upper chest with a bit of perfume, "or too sore to get fucked again?" He threw more cologne on the inside of his thighs. "I've been sitting home all afternoon hoping to receive the stigmata," he said, closing the autobiography of Saint

Theresa, which he had been reading when he began his impersonation of a Neapolitan whore, "but all I got were invitations to brunch this weekend. No more quiches, please! One could die of quiches!"

He looked at Malone, tender and serious for a moment. "It's not like Plato, is it?" he said, taking down a volume of the
Symposium
from his bookshelf. "It's not like Ortega y Gasset, or even Proust, is it?" he said. "Or, for that matter, Stendhal. It's so hopelessly ordinary—I don't even think people have souls anymore. And not having souls, they cannot be expected to have love affairs..."

He removed the avocados from his blouse and mixed daiquiris for himself and Malone. The telephone rang and Sutherland picked it up and said: "I'm sorry, I have to keep this line open for sex." He hung up, for he was, once again, waiting for a boy he had met in the street the previous night to call. "Oh, God," he sighed to Malone as he regarded his gleaming refrigerator—which contained a kind of emblem of life on the circuit: a leftover salmon mousse and a box of poppers—"the young ones are so cruel. Such oblivious assassins! He was so wonderful, such huge dark eyes, such a long-limbed body, such good sex, and this morning he can't even remember my name." He went to the window and said: "He's out there somewhere, that perfect beauty!" He turned, handed Malone his daiquiri and plate of salmon mousse and said: "The cruelty of people is beyond measure. Well," he sighed, "though it is very soon after the divorce, could we twist your arm to go dancing tonight? After, of course, we take a beauty nap. One can't go out dancing anymore before four. And hope to make an entrance, I mean."

And he sighed and grew drowsy as the light turned blue in the street, and murmuring a request to Malone to pass the vial of Vitamin E to him, Sutherland applied the oil to the area beneath his eyes—with the gentle, upward strokes of the weakest finger of his hand, the fourth—and then fell into a deep sleep. His body began discharging whatever drug he had taken that morning, and refreshed itself for the next endeavor. He would awaken at three and take another drug and begin to dress for the evening at the Twelfth Floor. Malone, who could not sleep, left a note that said he would meet Sutherland there, and went downtown. A sliver of a moon floated in the sky above the West Side Highway. Malone walked down the cobble-stoned street to the old factory building where he and Frankie had lived that summer. He walked up the riverside till he came to that forlorn neighborhood whose awning-covered sidewalks, and meat-packing plants, and air of rural desertion he loved. He saw the dark figures crossing the piazzas far ahead of him; he paused to see the carcasses of pigs, blue-white and bright red, slide on steel wire from the trucks into the refrigerated depths of the butcher's, while at his back homosexual young men trod that Via Dolorosa searching in a dozen bars, a string of parked trucks, abandoned piers, empty lots, for the magician of love. Malone paused beneath the pale, chaste moon and watched the dark figures vanish and appear again; he drew in the silvery air with one hand the Sign of the Cross and then he went dancing.

He danced till seven that morning, and he danced for three winters after that. He was a terrible dancer at first: stiff and unhappy. I used to see him standing on the floor with a detached look of composure on his face while Sutherland danced brilliantly around him. Sutherland danced with a cigarette in one hand, hardly moving at all, as he turned slowly around and surveyed the other dancers for all the world like someone at a cocktail party perusing the other guests. He always danced with a cigarette, with very subtle movements, loose, relaxed, of the shoulders and hips; except when a song came on he loved from the old days—for Sutherland had been dancing long before any of us—such as "Looking for My Baby," and then he would cut away and leave Malone standing self-consciously on the floor while Sutherland cut back and forth across the room in a choreography only a natural dancer can improvise. Then he would calm down again and stand there with his cigarette, barely moving to the music. I was once in a place with Sutherland when, over the din of the music, I became aware of a single high note being sustained, and, deciding it was in the record, thought no more until I heard it again in another song and realized finally it was Sutherland singing a piercing, high E-flat as he danced to Barrabas.

The two of them began to dance the winter the Twelfth Floor opened, the year we returned from Fire Island in September distressed because—what with the demise of Sanctuary—there was as yet no place to dance. Such was our distress at that time: We would not stop dancing. We moved with the regularity of the Pope from the city to Fire Island in the summer, where we danced till the fall, and then, with the geese flying south, the butterflies dying in the dunes, we found some new place in Manhattan and danced all winter there. The composition of our band of dancers changed, but it usually included one doctor, one hustler, one designer, one discaire, one dealer, and the assorted souls who had no idea what they were doing on earth and moved from disguise to disguise (decorator, haircutter, bank teller, magazine salesman, stockbroker) with a crazy look in their eyes because their real happiness was only in music and sex.

We danced the fall of 1971 in a dive off Times Square, living on rumors that the Twelfth Floor would open soon after Thanksgiving; and that is when we first saw Malone with Sutherland. Sutherland we all knew, or knew of: even among us, he was thought to come from another planet. Now of all the bonds between homosexual friends, none was greater than that between the friends who danced together. The friend you danced with, when you had no lover, was the most important person in your life; and for people who went without lovers for years, that was all they had. It was a continuing bond and that is what Malone and Sutherland were for years, starting that fall: two friends who danced with one another.

The bar we saw them in that first season was frequented by a mean crowd, messengers and shop-girls and dealers by day, conceited beauties by night. The first evening we stood behind Malone waiting to go in, and heard the Mafia bouncer ask him twice (for Malone hadn't heard the first time) if there were a "gun, knife, or bottle" in the bag he was carrying, Malone bent forward politely, and when he finally understood, said, "Ah! No," and then was ushered into paradise. It was extraordinary, the emotions in those rooms: At the beach, the music floated out of open windows, wandered over the bay, lost itself in the starry night, just as sexual desire on summer evenings in the city rose into the sky with the pigeons and the heat itself. But in winter, in those rooms in the city, with the music and the men, everything was trapped, and nature being banished, everyone was reduced to an ecstatic gloom. How serious it was, how dark, how deep—how aching, how desperate. We lived on certain chords in a song, and the proximity of another individual dancing beside you, taking communion from the same hand, soaked with sweat, stroked by the same tambourines.

Malone was appalled the first night he went to that particular bar, by the music (the likes of which he had never heard before, and hadn't the ears to hear at first) and the rudeness of the crowd, while Sutherland loved the very sordidness. Later that night, a queen spun around and embraced Malone at the waist and threw her head back and began dancing to him as if to some idol in the jungle—pulled him out onto the floor, where he tried to dance because even then he could not bear to reject anyone. He was wise to do so. Egos were huge and tempers quick in that place; the slightest insult could set off a fight with hidden knives. The queen spun around Malone, some Rita Hayworth in a movie that was never made, until the song ended and then Malone smiled, murmured something, and drifted unobtrusively back to Sutherland, who was shaking with laughter. Malone still had only one set of manners, for all people, and they were somewhat too polite for this place. In fact he was abducted many times that way until he began standing in the corners, behind several lines of people, for he was shy and did not want to be out there on the floor. Furthermore, he was not a good dancer. They were all good dancers in that place. It was a serious crowd—the kind of crowd who one night burned down a discotheque in The Bronx because the music had been bad. As Sutherland murmured one night when he began to look around for an emergency exit (we all would have been snuffed out in a minute had that place caught on fire, as was the case with nearly every place we went, from baths to bars to discotheques): "If there were a fire in this place, darling, no one would be a hero." We stayed until closing anyway, because the music was superb, dancing beside those messenger boys so drugged they danced by themselves in front of mirrors (with their eyes closed), and when we finally emerged, it was in time to see the sun come up from the empty sidewalks of Times Square, which at that hour was as empty, as clean, as ghostly as the oceans of the moon.

We had all seen Malone, yet going home on the subway no one spoke of him, even though each one of us was thinking of that handsome man—and he had seen us. What must he have thought of us at that time. What queens we were! We had been crazed for several years already when we danced at the Bearded Lady that winter. We lived only to dance. What was the true characteristic of a queen, I wondered later on; and you could argue that forever. "What do we all have in common in this group?" I once asked a friend seriously, when it occurred to me how slender, how immaterial, how ephemeral the bond was that joined us; and he responded, "We all have lips." Perhaps that is what we all had in common: No one was allowed to be serious, except about the importance of music, the glory of faces seen in the crowd. We had our songs, we had our faces! We had our web belts and painter's pants, our dyed tank tops and haircuts, the plaid shirts, bomber jackets, jungle fatigues, the all-important shoes.

What queens we were! With piercing shrieks we met each other on the sidewalk, the piercing shriek that sometimes, walking down a perfectly deserted block of lower Broadway, rose from my throat to the sky because I had just seen one of God's angels, some languorous, soft-eyed face lounging in a doorway, or when I was on my way to dance, so happy and alive you could only scream. I was a queen ("Life in a palace changes one," said another), my soul cries out to Thee. The moon, which already floated in the sky when we awoke, above the deserted buildings on the Bowery was more beautiful to me than any summer moon that I had seen hanging over the golden walls of the city of Toledo. Some strange energy was in the very air, the pigeons fluttering to rest in the gutters of the tenement behind the fire escape. In the perfect silence the telephone would ring, thrilling, joyous, and we would slip into the stream of gossip as we would slip into a bath, to dissect, judge, memorialize the previous night and forecast the one to come.

The queen throws on her clothes, discarding at least ten shirts, five pairs of pants, innumerable belts before she settles on her costume, while the couple next door throws things at each other. She has her solitary meal, as spartan as an athlete's before a race (some say to avoid occlusion of the drugs she plans to take), as they scream drunkenly. And then, just as the Polish barbers who stand all evening by the stoop are turning back to go upstairs to bed, she slips out of her hovel—for the queen lives among ruins; she lives only to dance—and is astride the night, on the street, that ecstatic river that flows through New York City as definitely as the Adriatic washes through Venice, down into the dim, hot subway, where she checks the men's room. An old man sits morosely on the toilet above a puddle of soggy toilet paper, looking up as she peeks in, waiting himself for love. The subway comes; she hurries to the room in which she has agreed to dance this night. Some of the dancers are on drugs and enter the discotheque with the radiant faces of the Magi coming to the Christ Child; others, who are not, enter with a bored expression, as if this is the last thing they want to do tonight. In half an hour they are indistinguishable, sweat-stained, ecstatic, lost. For the fact was drugs were not necessary to most of us, because the music, youth, sweaty bodies were enough. And if it was too hot, too humid to sleep the next day, and we awoke bathed in sweat, it did not matter: We remained in a state of animated suspension the whole hot day. We lived for music, we lived for Beauty, and we were poor. But we didn't care where we were living, or what we had to do during the day to make it possible; eventually, if you waited long enough, you were finally standing before the mirror in that cheap room, looking at your face one last time, like an actor going onstage, before rushing out to walk in the door of that discotheque and see someone like Malone. Through those summers, at the beach, and those winters, in the city, we seldom lost him for very long. He was at the huge parties in the Pines, one of which Sutherland arrived at by helicopter, lowered on a huge bunch of polyethylene bananas, dressed as Carmen Miranda, and he was at the most obscure bars in Hackensack where we sometimes went because we heard a certain discaire was playing. In fact, as it all became a business and the public began to dance, we had to abandon places when they became too professional, too knowing, too slick. Places we had loved—such as the dive off Times Square we often saw Malone in—were written about now in
New York
magazine,
Newsweek,
and
GQ,
and then, the final stage of death, we would pass their doors one evening and see, where we had once thronged to begin those ecstatic rites of Dionysius, a mob of teen-agers and couples from Queens whose place it was now. And so we would go out to New Jersey on those perfumed Saturday nights of summer, against the river of young Puerto Ricans in flowered shirts and thin leather jackets, taking their girls into the city to dance, crowds of people drenched in sweet cologne. But every time we got to this obscure bar in Queens or Jersey City, who was there already? Sutherland (and Malone), for Sutherland, as far as being jaded was concerned, was way ahead of any of us; Sutherland had danced at Sanctuary, the Alibi, the Blue Bunny, for that matter, when places never lasted more than a month and gay life was a floating crap game that moved about the city as nomads pitch and strike their tents, before we had even come to this city. So we traveled in parallel careers, and Malone eventually became a very good dancer, and it was wonderful to dance beside him, on Fire Island, in Jersey City, in those hot, hot rooms, or at the beach, his shirt off, his chest silver with sweat, his face as serious as ours, enveloped in the same music.