Dancer From the Dance: A Novel (8 page)

He began to study wines. He joined the Sierra Club. Every time he planned to join them for a hike, he canceled at the last moment—ashamed of his loneliness. He was very proud. He hated being a bachelor. He was at the same time devoted to his family. He called his parents once a month. He sent gifts to his niece and nephew at Christmas. He gave them each a hundred-dollar bond on their birthdays. He began to jog. He ran alone down country lanes in autumns whose beauty left him pained. He ate sensibly, avoided cholesterol, and took brewer's yeast with his morning orange juice. He was a member of his class. The world tortured him: its ugliness, venality, vulgarity. Sundays he spent the afternoon reading the
Times.
When he came to New York City on business, he saw its steaming towers downriver with the eyes of most of his classmates: an asphalt slag heap baking under a brown shroud of pollution. He was the kind of person who telephoned Citizens for Clean Air if he saw black smoke issuing from a building smokestack on Manhattan longer than the legal limit of ten minutes. He considered wearing a mask when he bicycled to his office from the Yale Club, but thought it would look silly. Bus fumes infuriated him. Architecture he anxiously judged. Its mediocrity, the absence of beautiful avenues, lovely squares, pained him. He lay awake nights replanning the city. He joined the Committee to Reforest Fifth Avenue, thinking it could all be saved with trees, but eventually he despaired that this would ever happen and dropped away from their fund-raisers and dinner dances.

He felt impotent, he felt doomed. He despaired of politics; the world, like the city, seemed an unmanageable mess, filled with squawling, venal babies—a vast kindergarten of infantile delinquents who had to be supervised. He got lost on freeways late at night in the amber glare of the Jersey refineries, and he felt sure he was in hell. His wines, cross-country running, excursions to the theater, left him as miserable as the moments of indecision in health food stores, when he felt his life had come to a complete halt over the choice of two brands of vitamins. One night going home on the train to Connecticut he found himself in the air-conditioned car staring at a page of
The New Yorker
on his lap. His mind stopped. The page gleamed with a high, cold gloss in the fluorescent light: He stared at its shining surface, the pale gray pinstripe of his dark pants leg. Eventually his stop appeared. He got off in a somnambulistic daze. No one met him at the station. He felt he should call someone for help—but who?

I saw Malone earlier that night, at a party at Hirschl & Adler, the gallery on East Sixty-seventh Street. It was a preview of an exhibit of portraits by John Singleton Copley. It was crowded with corporate lawyers like himself, their wives, and the older men whose tuxedos had been their father's and grandfather's: They continued to exist as a class, impervious to the disintegration of the city. Malone fitted right in and except for his golden handsomeness, I would never have picked him out—but I did, as I walked through their midst with the tray of cookies and champagne. He talked even then in that animated, electrifying way, but it seemed out of place there, out of proportion even to the surroundings. The smile, so dazzling, seemed brittle—almost like a shriek when viewed from a certain angle. But then a smile is. often a shriek: a soul screaming at you. Malone left early to get the train back to his room in the country—and I saw him say good-night, in his affectionate way, to friends and then disappear in a Chesterfield and scarf from Sulka's, to hail a cab... a very handsome man I should never see again, since those people were seen in New York only by one another; they lived otherwise an invisible existence.

He moved furthermore to Washington for a while and lived an even more monastic existence, going home after a long day with the Penn Central accountants to the house of the widow in the Maryland suburbs. The widow always had about her the faint odor of cold cream. She sat in a wheelchair on the veranda and when Malone came home in the evenings, he sat with her sometimes drinking tea. She talked about her husband as Malone watched the light in the garden change, she talked about the loveliness of Saigon in the twenties. She talked of the beaches they had found on little islands in the Seychelles, as the dusk gathered in the deep garden shaded by towering oaks, embalmed with the scent of gardenias and crape myrtle. He felt as if he were a character in Henry James; he began to suspect he was to be that man to whom nothing whatsoever was to happen. "When you find the right girl," she said to him putting her hand on his affectionately, "you must take her to Sadrudabad in April and see the flamboyant trees in bloom. There is nothing so wonderful as seeing the wonders of this earth with someone you love!"

It was a phrase that might have appeared in an article in the
Reader's Digest,
but Malone believed it completely. He was depressed by the thought that he should never do this. But he was a disciplined fellow and he rose the next morning, obedient soul, and went to work as usual, and played squash at one with a fellow associate who had recently been married because, as he told Malone, he thought everyone should be married by the time they're thirty. Even his favorite game now struck him with melancholy, for his partner, an old friend from school, was always saying, "Anne this," and "Anne that," and "Anne and I are going to drive to Salzburg this summer," and he felt even gloomier when he came off the court. He stopped visiting married friends. Married friends, he decided one evening after returning from a visit, depress me.

The gloom he felt then was nothing, however, compared to the terrifying loneliness that assaulted him on Sunday evening around eight o'clock; for then he had spent the whole day by himself, or driving around shopping for antiques with a fellow bachelor, and as he sat in his room looking down into the beautiful garden—the widow having already gone to bed, slathered in cold cream whose scent clung to the air of the hallway—he felt himself so utterly alone, he could not imagine anyone being sadder. Tears came to his eyes as he sat there. This day, Sunday, was his favorite of the week; this day, Sunday, a family always spent together in the evening as they came home from their various errands for a cold supper and a perusal of the Sunday paper; this day, Sunday, the softest, most human, tenderest time, found him sitting bolt upright at his little desk by the window, hearing around his ears the beating of wings—the invisible birds assaulting him, beating the air about him with their accusing presence. He was alone, like Prometheus chained to his rock. Tomorrow the rush of men, all working for a living, would drown him; but now, at this moment, in this soft green twilight, this soft green Sunday evening, when the heart of the world seemed to lie beating in the palm of his hand, he sat in that huge house upstairs terrified that he would never live.

He resolved to do anything to avoid solitude at this particular moment—which he regarded with the same fear an insomniac does the hour he must go to bed. He began seeing a girl he had been introduced to by a fellow in his firm at a concert of Bach cantatas, a graduate student at the American University whose father was an undersecretary of state for the Far East. She would come up the drive in her little white sports car on Sunday afternoon, tooting the horn, and the widow smiled at what she was sure was a romance—but the romance consisted of discussions of Henry Adam's
Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres
—and when he said good-bye to her, and her little white Triumph disappeared down the drive in the shadow of the big oak trees, he felt more depressed than he did when he spent the evening alone; depressed with all the genteel talk on stained glass, the ache of too many smiles with too little feeling, the kisses they did not say good night with, and the seduction that had not occurred in his room upstairs beneath the eaves. What is wrong with me, he wondered.

And then Michael Floria came to work for the widow after school. Malone had given up by this time his swim after work, his browsing through the bookstores in Georgetown, the chamber music concerts he had taken the girl to, as a ridiculous pretense, all of it. He drove straight home in the evenings now to work in the widow's yard and wipe out the strains of a day of intellectual effort with the cold comfort of the dark earth that dung to his hands as they scooped it up to make room for a new plant. She had in rows and rows of rusted tin cans plants whose seeds she had brought back with her from the highlands of Asia, and the Vale of Kashmir, and these he began transplanting in wintertime. Seeing his interest the widow hired a local high school student whose father was an agronomist with the Department of Agriculture to help Malone. He was a friendly, dark-eyed Italian-American who swam for his school and was applying to several colleges. As they knelt in the old flowerbeds, turning over the soil and patting it down around the newly transplanted tea plants, Malone gave him what helpful advice he could. He was very happy then: the cold black soil around his hands, the light glinting on the dark magnolia leaves above them, and the dark beauty of this young man beside him. "He's a great help!" Malone told the widow happily. "A really nice kid."

He thought of the deep flush of hysteria that comes at that age when you start to laugh. He loved to make Michael laugh. He laughed so hard sometimes he fell over onto the ground and lay, laughing, like someone wounded, between the rows of tea roses and frangipani trees from Kashmir, on a late winter afternoon. But it was not he who was wounded. It was Malone. But like the man who looks down to see what is sticky on his foot, and finds he has been bleeding, Malone was not to know till sometime later.

His own work kept Malone busy and one night he came home from a long day of writing loan agreements and heard the widow tell him it was Michael's last day there. He had taken a job in Colorado for the summer and would be off to college at Beloit in the fall. Malone could not understand the emotion that suddenly drained the blood from his limbs. He walked down from the house in his suit and tie from J. Press, carrying his briefcase full of his rough drafts, as if to appear nonchalant, and found Michael standing with a bag of powdered insecticide, carefully spooning it into a five-gallon jug. It was then he felt his own wounds. It was very definite, as if he had been stabbed. "The very best of luck," Malone smiled as he shook his hand, hoping only that Mike could not see through the gray cloth of his suit the vibration created by the fact that Malone's knees had suddenly started to shake violently. He did not trust his voice either and so he turned away.

This physical betrayal astonished him, and he went back upstairs to his room under a cloud of blackest anger. He kicked the wastebasket, slammed his drawers shut, cursed out loud as he undressed. It was of course completely wrong, the completely inconvenient sort of love; it was the one thing he—who had succeeded at everything else, who had been so virtuous, such a model—could not allow. It was as if he had finally admitted to himself that he had cancer. He saw in that instant a life he could not conceive of opening before him, a hopeless abyss. Either way he was doomed: He did what was wrong, and condemned himself, or he did what was right, and remained a ghost. He could see himself in twenty years in a house like this in the suburbs, twenty-eight rooms and no one in them. It made him furious that he, who had led so disciplined, so correct a life, was reduced now to helplessness and hot tears over this perfectly oblivious senior going off to Beloit College on the swimming team.

He stood up from his bed and looked out the window at the gardener laboring in die azaleas. He felt in one instant the vast indifference of nature—the perfect chaos, the haphazard character of the universe—as he stared through the window at his friend; for it was obvious that he, bent over the plants, was thinking of the proper composition of the liquid poison he was mixing to kill the red spiders that had attacked the camelia bushes, and he, Malone, was going through an unendurable tragedy at the same time.

A sensible man would have laughed at Malone; would have called him melodramatic, sentimental; would have told him to get on with life, and stop thinking he had been cast into outer darkness—nonsense! But Malone was not this sensible man. Some live more for love than others. And he experienced a death that night, as he lay upstairs in the widow's house, on that vast floor of empty rooms in whose hallway outside his own the odor of cold cream, the sound of a television program being watched downstairs, hovered. At the moment when the organism usually fructifies Malone perished, like the marigolds that had shriveled up the week before in their pots for no earthly reason they could see.

His entire love had progressed, like the growing and dying of a plant, from indifference to love to extinction, and not one embrace, not one kiss, not one word had been exchanged between him and his beloved. He heard the widow talking to him down below, he heard the door slam as she withdrew into the kitchen, and he heard the gate open and close by which the boy let himself into the adjacent field and began his walk home, while he lay there staring at the ceiling like the effigy on an Etruscan tomb.

That night he got up out of bed and put on his maroon polo shirt, which everyone said he looked so handsome in, and went downstairs and drove off in his car, where he did not know. He just drove. He drove around that wilderness of gas stations and fast-food franchises that surrounds Washington as once the armies of the Confederacy had, drove around in that crimson glow of doughnut shops and new-car showrooms, in which all things, cars, faces, bodies, gleam with an otherworldly light, and he kept driving—never admitting what he was about—until he came to Dupont Circle and there he stopped and got out binder the green trees and met a man and went into the park and blew him.

All this occurred in a state both trancelike and sharply conscious; as if another being had momentarily occupied the physical shell that was Malone.

When he got home, and emerged from this dream-play, like a man who has just murdered someone and returns to his apartment and sits down to a bowl of soup, Malone took a shower that lasted over an hour and washed his mouth out with soap. He sat up the rest of the night writing in his journal. He wrote a poem. He wrote of the fact that for the first time he had used his mouth for something other than those two blameless functions—speech and the ingestion of food—and that now he had profaned it utterly. Those lips, that throat, which were stained with milk, and apples, bread, and life-giving things, had been soiled beyond redemption now. For Malone believed in some undefined but literal sense that the body was the temple of the Holy Ghost: the pure vessel. He sat and watched the garden outside emerge from the darkness. It was his first miserable, yet strangely vivid, dawn of that sort and he watched it silently in a white, rigid state of self-condemnation before which any judgment of God would have paled.