Dancer From the Dance: A Novel (17 page)

The question remained unanswered while the two men who had just engaged in fellatio in the flowerbed zipped up and went on their separate ways without a word, and the wind rustled the leaves of the trees. It must have been the contemplative atmosphere of the darkness and quiet, or the sight of so many bums on the benches, or the desire to escape the trivia he had just objected to, that made Malone say next: "I want to get a job. In a little town with big front lawns and white frame houses and lots of trees."

"My dear," breathed Sutherland.

"I want to live in a big white house and sit on my porch and see fireflies blinking in the evening, and smell burning leaves in the fall, and see my children playing on the lawn."

"Children require a womb," said Sutherland, "and a womb is connected to a vagina, and the thought of cooze makes you vomit. Such a small detail. But I'll tell you what," he said. "A very rich Argentinian is coming to New York next month, and all he wants is a young man to keep. He doesn't particularly want to have sex with him, or even see him, but he wants to keep him from afar, as it were, like sending ten dollars each month to one of those orphans in Hong Kong. Well, he's coming next month and why don't we introduce him to you, and you might be able to settle down in your midwestern villa for the rest of your life, courtesy of Dr. Molina y Pran."

"But I don't want to be kept," said Malone. "I want . to get a job."

"Get a job?" said Sutherland. "As what? A discaire? A janitor? What will you put on your r6sum£ for the past ten years?"

"I..." said Malone.

"The only thing you could do at this point," said Sutherland, "would be to say you've been a prisoner of war in Red China. It would be far easier than what you were doing. What were you doing, darling?" said Sutherland.

"Looking for love," said Malone in a quiet voice.

"Looking for love," said Sutherland. He paused and then said, "No, I don't think that would get very far with Union Carbide. Or Ogilvy & Mather. Or the Ford Motor people. Looking for love is not one of the standard entries on the résumé. You see,
you
have been writing a journal for the past ten years, and everyone else has been composing a résumé. Don't think you will be forgiven that," he said. "After all, the Empire State Building is nothing but a mass of sublimated love." At this point we all looked at its silver spire, which rose above the trees of the park not twenty blocks away, agleam with floodlights, an almost domesticated vision rising as it did from the banks of leaves.

At that moment a bedraggled bag lady came out of the darkness and stopped in front of their bench and said to them in a grating, raw voice as she bent over, a little hat on her head, a shopping bag in one hand: "Gimme a quarter, huh? I'm an alcoholic."

Malone reached into his pocket and gave her a quarter, and as she put it in her purse she said: 'Thanks, pal." And then, still bent over, turning her head once to the bench across from her, where two men sat smoking cigarettes and waiting for each other to make the first move, she said: "Fucking queers, they should be arrested!" And she moved on to accost the people on a bench farther down the path.

"My dear," said Sutherland. And then: "That is what you are, you know. You can hardly go back to Winesburg, Ohio, or wherever it is you're from and live there. And lest we forget—does your family know? You're gay as a goose?"

"No," said Malone.

"Well, darling, don't you think you should send them a telegram? Or do you plan to stand at your father's grave, and wonder why you never told him the most important truth of your otherwise opaque life? And think of the emotions at Mummy's grave! No, I think you owe it to them both to let them in on your dark, Hawthornian little secret. Let them know you're gay."

"I can't," said Malone quietly.

"Then I think you should drop this mythopoetic fantasy of the white house, the big lawn, the fornicating fireflies."

"I'll go live in the woods," said Malone.

"You'll be lonely," said Sutherland. "Even Thoreau went to town in the afternoon to gossip."

"You could come with me," said Malone.

"Not for a moment," said Sutherland. "I exist only in New York, take me off this island and I evaporate.

I'm like a sea plant that is beautiful beneath the sea, but taken from the ocean turns another color altogether. You wouldn't like me in the country," he said, and paused to change cassettes. "There'd be no laughter, no gossip, we'd be deathly bored and begin to hate one another. Imagine having dinner each night, alone, the two of us. I'm amusing, I'm full of life, I'm a creature of the city. Transplant me and I'd die in your very hands."

"Well, I do love you," said Malone.

"Don't talk dirty," said Sutherland.

"But I do love you," said Malone.

"Would you carry my child?" said Sutherland.

"Are you taping this?" said Malone.

"Of course, darling, I am now taping everything. I'm doing a nonfiction novel."

"Well, I don't love anyone but you," Malone said.

"Only because I amuse you, that's not love," said Sutherland.

"Well, what is, then?" said Malone.

"Love is not caring whether he sees the bags beneath your eyes when you wake up, that first hour every day before they fade. That
must
be love! Or is it what Dr. Rose Franzblau says in the
Post?"
he said. "The mutual support of two mature people involved in separate quests for self-realization. It isn't love you need, anyway," he said. "It's money. All problems are essentially financial."

"Don't be absurd," said Malone.

"You have looks, intelligence, an excellent education—you're a National Merit Scholar—now get yourself a good price, Gigi," he said.

A black man suddenly raised his head and said, "Whas happening, baby?" And when no one answered him, he said: "Shit! Nothin' but faggots heah... shit! Nothin' but faggots! Shit!" He sat up and slapped one hand against his thigh, and then he said, "Got a cigarette, brother?" And Sutherland handed him a Gauloise. "Thanks, man. Boy, I was
supposed
to be in... I was
supposed
to be in Chicago yesterday. Whas today?" he said. "Saturday," said Sutherland. "The feast of St Agnes, Virgin and Martyr."

"Thas right, thas right," he said. "Well, I was supposed to be in Chicago on
Wed
nesday, but I was too drunk... too damn drunk. And I'm still drunk!" he said, lying down and smoking his cigarette as he looked up at the trees. "Hmmmmmm," he said, lying there with one hand at his throat, clutching his collar. He turned over on his side with his back to everyone.

"You know, John Schaeffer," said Sutherland, "whose family, I learned last week, owns Union Carbide, has three thousand acres in the Tetons. Would you like to get your health back there?"

"No, but we do have to get out of New York."

"But don't you see?" said Sutherland. "We can't. We haven't got a
sou.
And even if we did, where would we go? They warn you about drugs, but this city is the worst drug of all. Where could we go, really? Oslo? Marrakech? The South Seas? Buenos Aires? Caracas, Santiago? Rome, Munich? Ibiza, Athens? Kabul? Perhaps Kabul," he said. "We could wear blue eye shadow and live in a mud hut and listen to the wind, just listen to the wind... Of course there's that wonderful story of the English queen who threw herself ass-up across a pile of sheepskins outside Kabul and was raped by twenty-five members of a passing caravan.
That's
something to look forward to. Shall we go to Kabul?" he said.

"Actually I'd like to be an air traffic controller at a tiny airport in the Florida Keys," Malone said as if dreaming aloud. "I want to wear white pants and a white shirt. And a pair of silver airplane wings on my pocket. I want to sit in a tiled breezeway at dusk and have a beer while we're waiting for the mail flight from Miami. I am sitting in my starched white pants and my starched white shirt, I want to be an air traffic controller in a sleepy tropic town," he said. "That would be heaven."

"Is that what you really want?" said Sutherland. "You want to be a man?"

"How do I know," sighed Malone. "We are free to do anything, live anywhere, it doesn't matter. We're completely free and that's the horror."

"Perhaps you would like a Valium," said Sutherland. "I happen to have four or five hundred with me in my pocket."

But Malone was thinking now and as he watched the men lighting cigarettes for each other in the dark, having sex beneath the trees, he turned to his friend and said in a wondering voice: "Isn't it strange that when we fall in love, this great dream we have, this extraordinary disease, the only thing in which either one of us is interested, it's inevitably with some perfectly ordinary drip who for some reason we cannot define is the magic bearer, the magician, the one who brings all this to us. Why?"

Sutherland stood up and sighed. "I think we've both been taking the windows at Bendel's too seriously. We have brain fever. We've forgotten that elemental truth: that if the windows of Bendel's change from week to week, we, nevertheless, cannot."

"Are you leaving?" said Malone.

"I've run out of cassettes," said Sutherland. "Not to mention cigarettes. Good night, sweet prince! I'll be in East Hampton till Thursday."

"Good-bye," said Malone quietly.

We all sat there about another hour or so—the only sound was Malone sighing from time to time, heartfelt sighs. He got up finally and walked away, and we ourselves got up and left by the south gate and started down Second Avenue in the orange glare of those new safety lamps. The whores, the bums, the pimps, the boys folding up from too many downs, the pieces of garbage blowing in the wind, the metallic tops of garbage cans all stood out in the surreal, radioactive glare of an atom bomb. There wasn't a shadow in the place. Halfway down to St. Mark's Place we saw Malone walking ahead of us; and when we caught up with him, he greeted us with that straightforward friendliness that was his manner, and made you think you were anywhere but Second Avenue at three-thirty a.m. ignoring the bum who was asking us for money to buy a beer. "How are you?" he said, putting an arm around our shoulders. "I've just been in your park. I love it! Did you see the fellow who came in with the Irish setter? Those beautiful eyes? His, I mean, not the dog's," he smiled. "What a kind, beautiful, civilized face! I simply wanted to go up and say: Will you marry me?'" He was referring to a handsome mining engineer who lived in a townhouse on the northwestern block of the park, and who came in each night to let his Irish setter run; he usually smoked a cigarette and sat down and introduced himself to someone and chatted—in the sweetest, calmest, most amiable way, poised, adult, and wise. You fell in love with him right away: with his fine blue eyes, his moustache, his red hooded sweat shirt and tennis sneakers, his slender form, his chestnut hair, the way he looked at you with that blend of humor, intelligence, and relaxed confidence. It was the confidence that was so rare in that park; for all women want to be swept off their feet. Why did so many men stand in that park immobile for hours, except in obedience to some profound law of psychology that causes a woman to insist the man come court her, seduce her, take her away? The mining engineer had just that poise and confidence. We all loved him, but he never went home with anyone; he sat beside you, smoked a cigarette, you fell in love with him, and he excused himself—saying he had to get up at six the next morning for work—and went off with his Irish setter through the trees toward his townhouse. It left us breathless. And of course he had sat down beside Malone one evening—who made even the mining engineer nervous for a moment, till he found how amiable Malone was—and they had spoken with wonderful pleasure in each other and then, to Malone's amazement, he had stood up and said good night Malone was bereft. He still fell in and out of love like a baby. The next time he saw the man, nearly a year later, Malone had grown a beard, and when he came up to Malone and lighted his cigarette and glanced over, Malone remembered everything they had said a year ago. He thought of saying: "I know you, we met here a year ago last spring. Did I have a beard then? It doesn't matter. You've lived in New York seven years, you tried San Francisco for six months, but you'd rather be closer to Europe, you love Europe and New York, and you have to get up at six tomorrow morning to go to work. Now sit down. You wouldn't go to bed with me last time, but we're going to this time. What do you like to do? Do you like to get fucked a long time, deeply, slowly, searchingly? For such a nice person, I bet you're a bastard in bed—you probably love cruelty, you probably love pain. So come on, we're going to your place now and let's cut the small talk." It would have taken him by surprise; he would have gone; Malone knew very well that was all these people were waiting for, the mystical rape, as they stood immobile in the darkness, waiting like Spanish ladies of the fifteenth century to be courted.

But he looked away from the man and simply thought to himself: Why bother, for by that time, he had already given up on this game and was doing something even more perverse himself: He was going home, not with the beauties from that park, but the ugly ones. He went home with huge, fat grocers from Avenue D, tiny boys with smashed-in noses who could barely speak comprehensible sentences, ugly boys, deformed boys, fat boys; everyone unattractive and repulsive Malone went off with and made love to. The neighborhood was now the perfect outer counterpart of his inner state: Its filth and ugliness corresponded to his lust. He wanted people the same way. The streets that had once enchanted him, that he had once set out on each night with exhilaration in his heart, now were ashen and sere—and he felt, not like an enchanted lover setting out for Baghdad, but like a roach scurrying down the sidewalk in the orange glare of the streetlights, the particles of mica glittering at him in mockery of all that was brilliant and bright He gave up his trek westward to the purlieus of the West Village, in fact, and simply shuffled up Second Avenue to our little park along with all the bums.

But you would never have suspected any of this as he went on gossiping about the people he had come to recognize in our little park, thinking, no doubt, that was what we were interested in. And finally he stopped abruptly and said: "But how have you been? And what are you doing these days? Tell me everything!"