Dancer From the Dance: A Novel (28 page)

The whole ragtag crowd who came, all the people Sutherland had supplied with drugs all those years, were buzzing with it: the models, illustrators, pimps and hustlers, the boys like Lavalava and Spanish Lily who lived only to dance, the yoga gurus and brahmacharyis, the antique dealers and screenwriters, the jewelry designers and doctors, the psychiatrists and weight lifters, the waiters and the copywriter Nearly everyone assumed Sutherland had killed himself. They talked of karma, and dying the way one had lived, and getting back what you had given out. After all there had been Angel Dust at the party and no one was himself in the hands of that particular drug. And so they went on gossiping that evening, and others that followed. No one bothered to correct anyone's interpretation of the event; it made no difference now, certainly not to the deceased, whose ghostly laughter we could hear whenever we looked at the people in the room: these émigrés of the South Bronx who had become far richer and more successful than Sutherland in careers inconceivable to someone of Sutherland's unbringing; for Sutherland, while he would have been a pimp, would never have been a copywriter.

The tape played at the wake was a tape Sutherland and Malone had once declared the greatest work of art since the Sistine Chapel, made five summers ago, when they had been happiest dancing on Fire Island, by the discaire who was now in Paris recording for a homosexual count. Afterward the mourners went out to the opening of a new discotheque in Soho. There were too many discotheques now, and the songs one heard in them had become what we considered music to roller skate by. But these people would never stop dancing. The only member of Sutherland's family who came north was a bald, well-mannered brother we didn't know he had; but then one couldn't imagine Sutherland as having a family at all, composed of the usual figures in the usual house on the usual corner, with a driveway in which the children played with the hose on hot summer Saturdays. His mother was ill in Richmond and could not stand the journey. It was just as well, somehow; for most of us forgot that anyone had a family, living among queens in New York City. Families belonged to that inscrutable past west of the Hudson, and when a queen walked out a window, and you heard the family had come east to claim the body, it was like hearing that some shroud had come out of the darkness to pick up the dead and return whence the Three Fates sequestered, in the hills of Ohio or Virginia. There was no family to mourn Sutherland. John Schaeffer was at the moment off the coast of Nova Scotia, reading Proust in a skein of silver sunlight that stretched inviolate for miles around him. The only figure who was missed, and missed by everyone who had seen the two of them together for years, thinking they were lovers, was Malone. It was Malone whose absence was the chief topic of conversation; because by then the rumor had become generally accepted that he had died himself, in the flames of the Everard Baths, and the fact that he was not at the wake was considered" proof positive. Malone had gone up in flames with the sleazy mattresses, the queens waking up in drugged confusion in a stranger's arms to find the walls in flame around them, the hundred and thirty beds on which he had adored so many dark-eyed angels like a man drinking at a holy spring.

Whether or not he did, it was that image which I recalled now: of a night in winter, when the Everard had been the place we all went to, especially after a night of blissful dancing at the Twelfth Floor, when the only thing that could cap the music was a lover's embraces. I came upon Malone in the dark hallway of the third floor, beside the little window from which people jumped the morning of the fire, broke their bones and died, like roaches falling from a hot oven. It was cold and snowing that night, and the hallway filled with bodies was even more voluptuous because of it. Malone stood at the window, looking out at the falling snow through the web of ice crystals that had formed on the windowpane, watching the snow fall "on Twenty-eighth Street, on the tops of garbage cans, the silver throats of the streetlights; while against him brushed the bodies of the muscular men who wished to catch his eye, thinking that once Malone saw them, they would have him. But Malone continued standing there, within the house of flesh, the Temple of Priapus, staring out at that sparkling snowfall. That was it That was Malone—standing in the crush of voluptuous limbs, enthralled by the cold, lonely, deserted street.

It was autumn now, however, in the street outside the funeral home, where I stood watching the mourners stream out to go dancing at the opening of Flamingo, and the night was crisp and thrilling. Autumn always gave our lives an inexpressible undercurrent of hope, for winter meant, if not the promise of new love affairs, at the very least a change of clothes. How strange, how perfect, that one did in the end grow tired of summer, and long to leave the beach and see faces in the drama of early darkness once again. I stood there for a moment, the sound of taxi doors closing crisp, the trees fluttering in the frigid wind that had floated down from Canada, along with the geese that even now were flying south down the deserted beach that this crowd had lately quit. Everything—the doors closing, the faces disappearing, to dinner parties, assignations, love affairs, bodies, smiles—was, like Malone, elusive and thrilling. Out of the darkness a voice that resembled Sutherland's addressed us, that low, breathless voice that always gave the impression the speaker had been somewhere marvelous and was going somewhere even more exotic in a moment (the promise, in the end, of New York City). "My dear," said the queen of an earlier generation who had taught Sutherland much of his style, "do you think the girls are right when they tell us only our lovers are our friends? Or even worse, that each of us has only one friend in Gotham? If he had only awakened from that sleep, Sutherland could be dancing with us tonight. Let us pray, darlings, that he has found an angel like himself and that for those of us still left on earth, the music at this dump will not be too dreadful." And with a wave, he disappeared into the darkness that had fallen early, it seemed, for the first time that evening.

Midnight

The Lower East Side

Darling,

By the way—Spanish Lily OD'd on some strange new drug that even the Angel Dust aficionados won't touch, so we won't be seeing her on the dance floor anymore. John Schaeffer went off to Europe to either hike the German Alps or attend the London School of Economics, or both; with twenty-six million it hardly matters—we'll never see her again. Frankie has become a perfect circuit queen—he left that Cuban crowd, and is now being kept by some guy whose family owns Sydney, Australia. Half those people who used to go to Sutherland's to shoot up have moved to San Francisco, and I heard Rafael opened up a plant store in Queens. For the truth is, darling, what happens to most of these people anyway? They have their fling and then they vanish. They have to take jobs
eventually
as telephone operators, bartenders, partners in a lamp shop in some little town in the San Fernando mountains... and others take their places... but mostly they just vanish, and you forget about them unless you hear, one day, a certain song.

Well, no one will forget about Malone; I saw a man one evening this winter coming out of 399 Park Avenue in a Chesterfield, his hair very blond, one of those young associates with Shearman & Sterling, I suppose, and my heart stood still. In the depths of all that grayness, in the late-winter afternoon light, that big man as handsome as a prince, as a Nordic warrior: which is what it's all about. All societies, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., said, are founded on the blood of young men; and if they don't get it through a war they get it some other way just as definite...

Everyone is the same here—suicide notes on Monday, found a lover on Tuesday, divorced on Thursday—the only things that change up here, darling, are apartments, haircuts, and winter coats; and good faggots still go to San Francisco when they die. (All the more reason to, now that the Everard is gone; there is just no place to
go
and everyone's in a funk over it. Do you know they have fifteen
major
baths in San Francisco?) Write soon. I await your reaction to the novel.

Rima, the Bird Girl

The Deep South

Stinking Hot

Raison d'Etre,

The novel is more
vivid
than I had expected, and frankly brought back things that are a little too close to me still. I had to leave New York, you know, not for any practical reason but for a purely emotional one: I simply couldn't stand to have it cease to be enchanted to me. How could it? Our hearts can't change, and yet those riots of the soul that carried us on, sequined swimmers in that aquacade of sex, simply failed us one day and we looked up, as if the refrigerator had stopped humming and the current in our apartments had failed. Those streets, those corners, everyone of which I loved, were just streets, just corners. Malone was possibly more committed to it than any of us—whatever "it" was—for to be perfectly honest, I cannot name the disease, the delirium of the last ten years; even now, having thought and thought about it, I have no idea why I was living that way unless, if you'll excuse me (now that our hair is down, earrings off and shoes too), it was for the same reason a man as reasonable as Malone goes out into the street at night: because he is handsome, infertile, and lonely.

As to where he went—if he ever finished that swim across the bay—I've heard a half-dozen different things. Lots of people in New York are convinced he died at the Everard Baths, where he was headed the night he came back from Fire Island. But I don't think so: The fire broke out at seven in the morning, and Malone seldom stayed long at the Baths. When he first came to New York he used to stay for days, and wanted to live there; the Baths were a kind of paradise. But as the years went on, he would go and stay no more than forty-five minutes, since he either knew everyone there, had gone to bed with them, or worse, could no longer deal with people in that way—the way that used to thrill him (the beauty of the body, the communion of flesh) and which now, as he was growing older, repelled him slightly and could not warm his heart. No, if he went to the Everard that night, I think he stayed an hour at most and then went on his way, a last farewell to places of his youth. He also was seen at the Eagle's Nest that night, you know. (Remember the first night we saw him
there.
I shall never forget that!) I admit that, to you, the novelist, it would have been perfectly appropriate to have him burn up in that fire—because when those baths went up in flames that morning, so did those ten years Malone presided over like an angel, our youth, our dreams, our crazy hearts. But life so seldom imitates art; if only it did, I wouldn't have retired to a farm and be sitting now in the shade of this dreary live oak.

To go on with the rumors—a friend traveling around the world on sabbatical wrote me last February that he'd seen Malone in Singapore, and gathered that he was teaching at a girls' school in the suburbs. But when he took a car to the school the next day, no one had heard of Malone. Malone might have changed his name; age may have changed his looks, for that matter (though it hurts to think this; it means we are aging too), and it's possible the nuns simply didn't understand whom my friend was asking for. Five of their teachers had gone on holiday to Bali that day, and perhaps Malone was one of them—but Hank couldn't stay, he left the next day and never found out. It's odd how it was important to several people to learn how Malone ended up; he was the emblem of so many demented hearts.

So you may take your pick, really—did he bum to ash with the others in the flames of the Everard Baths? Did he slink off to the Far East and is he teaching English there now to a roomful of pale Oriental girls with voices like little birds, who all sing to him verbs and adverbs in the suburban stillness of the morning? And does he have a lover, a slim Eurasian boy, who lives with him in a little bungalow under the oleander trees? Or is he a steward on a passenger ship belonging to a shipping line based in Mombasa, as Jody Myers claims—and does he look now like one of those Dutch sailors he loved as a child, the ones who used to come out on the veranda of the sailor's home next to the church he attended in Ceylon, the sailors in their freshly ironed white shirts who would sit in the shadows of the porch, smoke cigarettes, drink gin and beer and watch the women (and men perhaps) go walking by, those sailors who with their combed hair and cheap cologne symbolized to Malone the radiant world of masculinity? Is he one of those freshly showered, bronze Dutch sailors now, on the porch in some suburb of Djakarta? The one thing I can't imagine is Malone growing old, Malone dying. When I see these old men at the gas station here, sitting in their rocking chairs and waving at the cars that occasionally go by, looking for the expressway to Savannah, I stare at the bones of their sharp or flabby faces and think: These were handsome men once.
Very
handsome men. The city hall is filled with their photographs, of baseball teams of 1910 and July Fourth fish fries and the installation of the county's first telephone pole. Not to mention the fact that I'm in love with half their grandsons!

For what were those summer days we shared, in truth, when I could not sleep, so anxious was I for the next hot morning, afternoon, and night? When I lived like a neurasthenic, when on getting up each morning in that revolting tenement, I was happy because the air baking over those asphalt roofs, which still bore the puddles of the thunderstorm the night before, was incandescent with heat, and the street below adorned with Puerto Ricans walking down the sidewalk with their shirts dangling from their pockets. Those weeks in midsummer when I got on the subway at night to ride back and forth beneath the city meeting drunken soldiers trying to get back to Fort Dix, and queens as haughty as Cleopatra coming back from a night in the bars where they had refused everyone; nights so warm, so beautiful, I could not close my eyes. What was that ragged, jagged craziness, when we could live a whole summer on a cheap song played on WNJR, but the pride of life? It was all in our demented minds, it had to be. The greatest drug of all, my dear, was not one of those pills in so many colors that you took over the years, was not the opium, the hash you smoked in houses at the beach, or the speed or smack you shot up in Sutherland's apartment, no, it wasn't any of these. It was the city, darling, it was the city, unreal city, the city itself. And do you see why I had to leave? As Santayana said, dear, artists are unhappy because they are not interested in happiness; they live for beauty. God, was that steaming, loathsome city beautiful!!! And why finally no human lover was possible, because I was in love with all men, with the city itself. And Malone was crazier than I. You could tell from his face how deep the disease had eaten into his system. The life of his flesh dwindled, but his spirit ascended like the angels into a perfect love—and yet he was still stuck with his mortal body and his mortal lusts and mortal loveliness: You can't live on the promise of a casual smile which passes while you sit on the stoop waiting for the breeze from the river—demented queen! You can't love eyes, my dear, you can't love youth, you can't love summer dusks that washed us out of our tenements' into the streets like water falling over rocks—no, dear, madness that way lies. You must stick to earth, always, you must love another man or woman, a human lover whose farts occasionally punctuate the silence of your bedroom in the morning and who now and then has bad moods that must be catered to.