Dancer From the Dance: A Novel (24 page)

"He would like to think so," said Sutherland in his most velvet and sinuous voice as he sat down on the bench, fresh as the gardenia in his buttonhole, which he had plucked from the finger bowl served at the dinner he had just left. "However, the issue is in some dispute. Does Allan Miller have the biggest cock? Or Martin Fox, or Jorge Forbes? Or Mitch Graves, for that matter, who used to astonish the janitor in the men's room at Grand Central when he would pull his rubber hose out at the urinal, and who is now in Saudi Arabia working for TWA. Or some unknown apprentice electrician working for Con ED? Unfortunately, there is no entry in the
Guinness Book of Records
on this subject, though I am willing to turn over to them the results of my research if they should inquire."

A man with one leg up on a bench across the path reached down now to insert his pack of cigarettes into his sock. "Oh, I like that," Sutherland cooed. "I find that
very
Merchant Marine, very sexy. He keeps his cigarettes in his sock! I bet
he
doesn't read
GQ!
I am looking for a man who has never heard of
GQ, Women's Wear,
or the Twelfth Floor," he explained. "One gets so tired after a while... should I marry him?" he said, looking at the man from whose white sock a pack of cigarettes protruded.

"That one has no cock at all," someone said. "We went home together last summer. What a mistake!"

"Please," sighed Sutherland. "I am sure his cock is no smaller than mine," he went on with smooth, drunken confidence, the only homosexual Malone knew who was not afraid to admit this. "Do not be harsh on us untouchables. We lepers of homosexual society. In fact, I have only encountered three cocks smaller than mine, now that we're on the subject of that perplexing organ. The first was a medical phenomenon, an ex-monk I met at the Baths who loved Greeks. The second was a Puerto Rican I sucked off in this very park four summers ago. And the third, oh who was the third? I think a boy in Pittsburgh," he said in a musing voice. "But no matter," he said, sitting up. "A homosexual with a small cock makes no sense, that's all, like a man who rushes to the tennis court without a racquet. An opera singer with no voice. Oh, there are hundreds of analogies," he said, but by this time he was talking to Malone, for the others, depressed by this dreary subject, had all gone off to find someone unafflicted in this way. He immediately turned to Malone, holding the gardenia taken from the dinner he had begun the evening with in a building Malone himself had visited on a call, and said: "Well? Don't you want to know what happened? He asked only for you," he said, not waiting for Malone to inquire. "I did not tell him you were downstairs in Thirty-four B slapping your penis against the face of Louis Rothstein and yelling 'You dirty kike, you!' He was crushed. When we went to the Eagle's Nest afterward, where he nearly fainted—"

"Fainted?" said Malone.

"The boy was struck dumb," said Sutherland, "he was petrified at finding himself in the thick of so many fantasies-made-flesh. When I took him out finally he was shaking like a leaf—but still he asked for you. 'Does Malone go there?' he wanted to know. 'Does Malone like that bar? Who were Malone's lovers?' Whenever I propose anything, he asks if you will be there. I have told him you are too busy to run around with ne'er-do-wells like me, and then he asked if I couldn't get you to come to a party, a really big party, if we gave one on Fire Island. He would not be dissuaded. I had to give in. And so," he sighed, "two weeks from tonight, we are giving at the house in the Pines the fete of the season, we are giving," he said, blowing out a stream of smoke, "the Pink-and-Green Party. And all,
moncher,
for you."

"The Pink-and-Green Party?" said Malone, weakly.

"Yes, darling," said Sutherland. "I could think of nothing else at this time. Fellini has been done, Carmen Miranda has been done, Egypt too," he said, ticking off the great and famous parties on Fire Island of the past five years, "Leo has been done, the Big Heat, the Black Party, the White Party, the Fantasy, Magic, and Dreams, the Quo Vadis, the Bombay in July, they have
all
been taken, darling, and we cannot, like any artist burdened by the tradition of those who have gone before, like the novelist who must write after Proust, Joyce, and Mann, we are faced with a constricted area of choice, not to mention a deadline of two weeks. Ah," he said, as a boy staggered out of the bushes zipping up his leather pants, "it is so good to get back to the original source, the Ur-text, of it all," he said, looking around at the dark figures bobbing at crotches, "to refresh ourselves with the original mysteries and rites around which, really, our whole lives revolve. It is just this," he said sitting back to regard the life of our lagoon.

"I'm not going to the beach," Malone said. "I don't ever want to go there again."

"Just for one night, darling!" said Sutherland breathlessly. "Just make an appearance, my sweet, and then leave with John. In fact, the whole party is being given so that you two may leave it," he said. "This enormous mass of people is being gathered so that you and he may feel more satisfactorily alone. Do you understand? This party is being given so that you may leave it?"

"God," Malone sighed, throwing his cigarette away and standing up. He turned on Sutherland. "Don't you think the moral thing to do is just tell John Schaeffer to go back to Princeton, his family's house in Maine, his suite of rooms, and forget this charade? There isn't what he thinks there is out there, and he might as well be told. Look where it got me!"

"Oh, dear," sighed Sutherland, "would you at this moment prefer to cease upon the midnight with no pain?"

"Kind of," said Malone.

"But don't you see that this is all there is?" said Sutherland. "Don't you know what it means to be a woman? My grandmother on her eighty-ninth birthday only wished she could walk down the street and be looked at!"

"Oh, God," Malone said.

"There will be two salsa bands," said Sutherland, walking away with him, "and we will draw up the guest list tomorrow, in deepest secrecy, of course. I am confining it to two thousand intimate friends. Guards, and numbered invitations..." he said as they wandered out of the park, Malone's head down as he went, staring at the ground. In a moment the first birds began to make their noise, and by the time Malone and Sutherland had disappeared down the depressing waste of Second Avenue, the sky was turning light, leaving the pale, human, wasted faces no longer mysterious or beckoning. It was as if a sink had been emptied by someone pulling the plug: the green water gone, odd things clinging to the porcelain. Within five minutes the park was empty and then a local character came in with a ladder and pail and went around to each tree, on the innocent mission, his own spontaneous deed, of feeding the squirrels.

It was very hot that summer by the end of June and even queens who cared nothing about dancing had taken their tambourines to Fire Island. The city was deserted, and Sutherland found a house in the Pines taken by an Italian princess whose husband had once been his lover. Even when he was on welfare his first summer in New York, he managed—like so many others in the same straits—to make the annual migration to Fire Island; it hardly mattered how you got there, who you were, or where you came from. He was handsome; he was witty; he was taken in, even though he moved soon afterward to the more domestic pastures of East Hampton. But there was a part of his character that always brought him back to Fire Island. It was there he could wander down to meet the arriving boats in a nun's habit, it was there he could have two hundred intimate friends over for drinks and to see him burn his Lacostes. It was there he would appear at dawn on the deck of a strange house, daiquiri in hand, claiming to have just seen a man get fucked by another man's wooden leg in the dunes, where he had gone simply to chant his mantra to the rising sun. Fire Island was for madness, for hot nights, kisses, and herds of stunning men: a national game preserve annually replenished by men who each summer arrived from every state in the Union via an Underground Railway of a most peculiar sort. Dressed as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sutherland went down to the dock each time a boatload of new protégés was to arrive.

The fact that there was little in their heads was what finally shifted his loyalties to the Hamptons, however, where, if the homosexuals tended to be fatter, older, and attired in pastel-colored slacks, they could at least discuss, over cocktails on a clipped lawn, Samuel Beckett or the latest novel of Iris Murdoch.

As for Malone—though now the most gorgeous stretch of beach was inferior in his mind to the most dingy street of the Lower East Side where Ramon and Angel were playing handball against a tenement wall—he felt he had found Paradise, his first visit to Fire Island; and it took him three or four summers to even admit it was anything else. Both Sutherland and Malone, in fact, had been coming out to the resort more summers than they cared to admit; for it was always there, all summer long, and irresistible, at the very least, to people who loved to dance. And so Sutherland—who found it vulgar—and Malone—who found it cruel—still came, because nowhere else on earth was natural and human beauty fused; and because nowhere else on earth could you dance in quite the same atmosphere.

Each summer saw a hundred parties, but Sutherland's was greeted with great anticipation: because of the house it was to be given in, because of Sutherland's reputation, because it was the perfect time to end the season with a blowout. The guest list was already a matter of sensation, and the usual rumors that Liza Minnelli and Truman Capote were coming circulated the community. They were rumored to be coming several times each summer, and rumored to have been there, but were never seen. This year Florinda Balkan and Bianca Jagger were mentioned besides. Sutherland laughed his low, throaty laugh. It had entered his mind to give a really tasteless party, to do something against the mode, since he considered the Pines a community of window dressers incapable of intelligible conversation. At the same time his inherent playfulness spurred him to do something astonishing and memorable, and outdo the past; he regretted halfway through the preparations that he hadn't made it an SM affair, since several boys he knew had already offered to hang from a cross and perform unnatural acts onstage during the gala.

He flew out from time to time to see how our work was coming along—he had come down one afternoon and hired us to get the beach house ready. We washed windows, polished banisters, swept decks, and began installing the pink and green panels, the sculptures made of teaspoons, the mannequins, the sacks destined to release carnations, glitter, and pills on the guests. A crew of men from Sayville came over to install the lighting, and the premier discaire of New York came out to hang the speakers and set up the playing booth. Sutherland arrived each time with a different entourage: a man who had been writing novels in Rome for ten years, with no success; a tall, gaunt, bearded fellow who lived in the woods of upstate New York; prophets, intellectuals, artists, models. We walked down to the harbor one day to meet them. "You must write a story,
the
Fire Island story," Sutherland said excitedly under his breath to the novelist as we walked past the big white boats moored in the harbor, "about a very rich Jewess on one of these boats, and a young man, her social secretary, playing canasta on board her boat in autumn. Oh!" he gasped, as a woman in a cerise caftan came out of the cabin of her Chris Craft and lighted a cigarette as she surveyed the harbor with the grim, puffy face of someone who has just arisen from sleep, "there she is now! Her
entire
fortune is based on vacuum cleaners! Yes!" he said breathlessly. "If you press a single button, her boat vacuums itself! What
will
the children think of next?" He smiled nervously at the world in general, and then hissed suddenly between clenched teeth as we passed two beautiful young men coming from the grocery store like barefoot angels with sacks of yogurt. And he continued muttering, hissing, gasping, and urging us to look at some extraordinary example of philistine display, or physical beauty, as we walked back to the house. "Do you think the reason Americans are boring," he said breathlessly, turning once at the edge of the harbor to look back on the white boats, the boutiques, the awnings, the hotel, "is that they believe in happiness on earth?"

There was a man Sutherland saw nowhere else but here, once a year—a Swiss pediatrician who spent his annual vacation in the Pines the last two weeks of August. Each year they saw each other, the doctor's face grim with longing as he stared at Sutherland on the beach, at parties, in the bar, and each year they failed to speak. For the past month Sutherland had been going daily to a gymnasium to resuscitate the body he brought back to life each year at this time. "My breasts," he said in a husky voice as he leaned forward with arms crossed on his chest and a finger massaging each nipple, "are now bigger than my mother's. It is these breasts they want to suck, and rip, and tear," he sighed, as we walked down the beach. "Do you understand? As Auden says, we want not only to be loved, but to be loved alone," he said as he saw the man on the beach in front of the house he rented each summer, watching him, his annual dream-made-flesh.