Dancer From the Dance: A Novel (12 page)

Still there were enormous differences between them, and as Malone watched Sutherland move through his mottled days he found much that appalled. Why then did he stay? Years later he would wonder why he remained with Sutherland that evening, and the years that followed. He never knew. As he listened to Sutherland's tales, as he spent the afternoons reading the volumes of Santayana, Plato, and Ortega y Gasset with which Sutherland left him alone, he began to think that the city is the greatest university of all, the real one, and all his education until now had been a mime. He who had spent hours poring over the history of the Supreme Court, the rise of the Protestant Ethic, the religious credo of Herman Melville, lay there now through the first crisp days of autumn as immobile on his sofa as a man recovering from some radical operation. And then one day he got up and went downtown in the early afternoon, when he knew Frankie was at work, to get his things; and he walked into their old factory building to find their home stripped bare... only a small pile of jeans huddled in one corner, and his journal, open still to the very page on which Frankie had read of his adulteries, on the mattress. Malone went to the window and looked down on the sparkling blue harbor and remembered how they had stood there in the hot breezes of July, embracing; he looked at the refrigerator, where Frankie seemed to be always standing with a tray of ice cubes; at the mattress, now dusty in a shaft of sunlight—and he suddenly bolted from the room. It was all over: dead. He had no idea where Frankie had gone.

But what was worse, he was everywhere: Going back uptown to Sutherland's room, Malone saw, in the subway, on the streets, half a dozen boys whose grave expressions and dark eyes invited him to turn back, his heart racing. This was his first taste of despair. He got to Sutherland's and closed the door behind him like a man fleeing the police.

And so Malone was grateful to remain behind, shut away from the city, on the most splendid afternoons of autumn when Sutherland would spend the day in the men's rooms of subways, or the rush hour at Grand Central Station, catching the explosive desires of insurance brokers trapped between a day at the office and an evening at home with the wife. Malone read and sighed and reflected, but he seldom spent the day alone; for people were constantly running up the stairs to Sutherland's room.

"How do you live?" Malone asked Sutherland one day, and he replied: "Hand to mouth." The usual exigencies didn't seem to apply in his case; people sent him plane tickets, and the latter half of October Sutherland spent in Cartagena playing bridge. Malone lay there and watched a whole race of handsome men come through the apartment, men he had never seen before. They were the faces that helped sell cereal and gin to the masses, and they came by at all hours of the day and night until finally Sutherland, on his return from Colombia, established "office hours" and sat at his desk in a big black picture hat, with painted nails and a gardenia on the lapel of his Chanel suit, ringing up sales on an office calculator. "Ignore them, darling," he breathed to Malone. "They are simply people who will take anything in pill form. Does the sight of a syringe bother you?" he asked in a solicitous voice. "If so, we can go downstairs..."

It was a rainstorm rather that drove Malone downstairs; a storm that drifted down from Boston and stayed for two days in late October made Malone put on a pair of tennis sneakers, take an umbrella, and flee the apartment. Lovers were everywhere: waiting for each other outside grocery stores with lost, annoyed expressions till the mate emerged with a sack of groceries, and hand in hand, they walked off together to cook dinner. Bearded students and their girl friends standing in the subway close together mesmerized Malone, staring at the man's white, veined hand resting lightly on the girl's neck. He tramped around the streets for hours and ended up lost in the Chambers Street station at three in the morning, all alone in the damp, chill, fluorescent light, thinking as he waited for the uptown train that he had first seen Frankie walking down one of these tracks with a lantern in his hand at about this hour one night long ago. Later he found himself walking home on Madison Avenue, having massacred, walked to death, the night whose gentle rain undid him. He saw a man he'd seen earlier lurch into a doorway for protection from the storm walking unsteadily toward him now. The man suddenly stopped on the sidewalk, in the slanting clouds of rain, looked at Malone, his face etched in the garish glow of the streetlight, and said:"Take me home with you. Please." Malone said nothing and walked on, just as he had learned to walk by lunatics giving speeches and beggars asking for money, horrified.

He went home to Ohio at Thanksgiving on the train along the Susquehanna, in the early darkness filled with snowflakes at bends in the dark woods. He took the slowest way home, like a diver who must allow himself time coming up from the depths in order to avoid poisoning. He was so sad he felt ill. He sat beside an anxious college student whose problems were maintaining an academic average good enough to secure him a place in medical school; Malone listened to him talk about his fears with a certain relief. He watched this fellow being greeted by his parents on the train platform, and felt suddenly that he could not face his own family. But when he arrived at his sister's house, the slamming of car doors, the screams of nephews and nieces flocking around him in the thickening snow flurry with the new puppies the family had acquired, the terror he had felt evaporated. "When are you going to get married?" chirped his youngest niece as she leaned against him at the Thanksgiving table. "Why don't you have a car?" These were the two things in her five-year-old mind that constituted—and was she wrong?—adulthood in America. He made some excuse as his parents, who had returned to Ohio that fall, hung on every word; even though they, out of that austere respect for one another's privacy peculiar to his family, had never asked the question themselves. They thought he was writing a book on jurisprudence. Later in the evening, dozing beneath a coverlet of newspapers in the den, the fire crackling beside him, the house filled with the faraway shouts of children playing in rooms upstairs, of adults playing cards in the dining room, he looked up once at the dog—and the dog looked up, inquiring, at him. "I'm gay," he whispered to the dog. The snow was falling lightly through the delicate branches of the fir trees pressed against the windowpanes, and he thought of it falling on all the shopping centers in the hills around that town, filled with families just like this one, and he heard the hiss of station wagons passing on the road outside, filled with children in Eskimo hoods, dozing in each other's laps. He smiled at the quirk of fate that kept him from it all like a prisoner being escorted down the corridor of a hospital in handcuffs, past the other patients, and then he fell asleep. When he awoke, much later in the night, the fire embers, the house suddenly chill and silent, his lips were damp with spittle and he thought, I was dreaming of Frankie, and he had, for an instant, a desire to rush down to the airport on some pretext and fly back to New York because he could not bear to be without what now seemed the source of his being: those dark-eyed, grave young men passing in the light of liquor stores on dingy streets, their eyes wide and beautiful, in the early winter darkness of that hard, unreal city.

When he did return to New York a week later laden with good wishes and fudge, he found Sutherland standing in the middle of the room with a mudpack on his face, round earrings, and a red dress pulled down to his waist—all that remained of a costume in which he had gone to a dinner dance as La Lupe—and the twenty-five-foot telephone cord wrapped around his body. He squirmed, like Laocoön trapped by snakes, and made an anguished face at Malone.

"I simply must get off," he said into the phone, "the bank beneath us is on fire and we're being evacuated." He hung the telephone up and said, as he shook Malone's hand gravely: "My sister, in Boston. Our brother just cut off three toes in the lawn mower, after defaulting on a bank loan, our other sister has hepatitis and will have to finish school in Richmond, Mother is drinking, Father refuses to see anyone, and the woman across the street went into her garage yesterday and turned on the automobile and asphyxiated herself. What is wrong with this country, for God's sake?" he said, pulling off the red clip earrings. "Americans, for my money, are just too damned sophisticated!" He waved his arms in the air. "But, darling, how was the Heartland? So good to go home," he said. "So good to be with the family after a divorce. Who else will comfort?" But when he handed Malone a glass of Pernod, he saw his melancholy face and said: "I told you, dear, you shouldn't go."

They sat down and Sutherland began removing his facial with a warm washcloth, and Malone, feeling more depressed than ever, could not refrain from asking: "Do you sometimes not loathe being—gay?"

"My dear, you play the hand you're dealt," said Sutherland as he examined his face in the mirror. "Which reminds me, I'm due for bridge at Helen Auchincloss's."

"What do you mean?" said Malone anxiously.

"I mean," said Sutherland, who turned frosty at the slightest sign of complaint, self-pity, or sentimentality on this or any subject (for beneath his frivolity, he was hard as English pewter), "that if Helen Keller could get through life, we certainly can."

"Oh," said Malone weakly, leaning back in his chair.

"You, however, may be a homosexual
manqué,"
said Sutherland, turning back to the mirror. "Oh God," he said, "I'm late again."

"Where are you going?" said Malone sadly.

"I'm supposed to be at the opening of Teddy Ransome's gallery on Seventy-eighth Street, I'm supposed to be playing bridge with Helen Auchincloss, I'm supposed to be reading to the blind, and going out to East Hampton at eight, but you see I'm stuck right here," he said, sitting down with a sigh and the bright eyes of a koala bear, "because the exterminator is coming."

"The exterminator?" said Malone.

"Yes," he said. "He exterminates the roaches with his insecticide, then exterminates
me
by tugging at his crotch to adjust his scrotum. He is the most
divine
Puerto Rican you've ever seen. The most beautiful Puerto Rican in New York—and God assigned him to
this
building," he said, spilling some wine on the rug as a libation. "Now that's an accolade!" he said, picking up the phone to dial his regrets to four different people and cancel his dates because of the imminent arrival of this exotic visitor. "Don't you love these winter nights," he said, turning to Malone as he dialed a number, "and the possibility of so much dick?"

All winter long Malone declined the many invitations to parties and dinners that Sutherland gave him; till one crisp February night he met Sutherland in the Oak Room, where Sutherland often went after an hour or two in the men's room at Grand Central, and had drinks while he read the notes he and strange men had passed to one another from stall to stall on segments of toilet paper. "The trouble with this one was," said Sutherland in a cloud of cigarette smoke as he raised his martini to sip, "his shoes. Cheap shoes, you see. American men will not spend money on their foot-wear, whereas in Europe it is crucial. I found his notes quite dreamy," he said, expelling another stream of smoke, "but the shoes were out of the question. Don't look now," he murmured, lowering his eyes demurely, "but the most handsome man in Brookfield, Connecticut, has just walked in the room. He's married now and has two kids, but we were once very much in love. Like a young Scott Fitzgerald, don't you think? Almost a Gibson boy, no, don't look yet, I'll tell you when," he said to Malone, who could feel someone sitting down behind him. "I must only add as a brief footnote that besides the hyacinth hair, the classic teeth, he sports one of the greatest schlongs in the Northeast Corridor. Try catching him on the shuttle to Washington sometime," he said, and finished off his drink. "We were deeply in love."

When they finally left, the twilight was filled with men hurrying on errands, handsome, dark-eyed messenger boys disappearing into the vaulted, steel-gray lobbies of tall office buildings; businessmen hurrying to catch a taxi to the airport; pale proofreaders going on the night shift at law firms on Park Avenue; waiters going to the Brasserie; students returning to the boroughs; and Malone began to feel the promise of the city once again. He did not go off like Sutherland with cashew nuts and dried apricots in his pockets to spend the day in the men's rooms of the BMT and IRT, but he began to meet him more often in the evenings, to linger on the boulevards and watch the throngs of people rushing past: a messenger boy from Twentieth-Century-Fox, a researcher at Sloan-Kettering, a public relations man hurrying about the business of Pan American Airways. "He lives with his parents in Forest Hills, he subscribes to the
Atlantic Monthly
and
After Dark,
his bedroom is all wicker, he falls in love with boys on the tennis courts," Sutherland would say.

"Have you met him?" asked Malone. "No," said Sutherland as they watched the handsome figure disappear into Rizzoli's. "That would be quite superfluous." They strolled on, peering, like cupids, not at the Beatific Vision, but the windows of Bendel's.

And then out of the evening would materialize a pair of eyes that would lock with Malone's eyes with the intensity of two men who have reduced one another to immobility as wrestlers. It happened one evening altering a church on Fifth Avenue to hear a concert—a young man handing out programs, a dealer named Rafael who had come in fact to deliver cocaine to a priest. It was with a heavy heart that Malone whispered to Sutherland as they paused to anoint themselves with holy water after the concert, staring even then at Rafael's dark eyes with the dumb helplessness of an animal poisoned by a scorpion: "Can I call you later at the apartment?"

"The heart is a lonely hunter," sighed Sutherland, who understood perfectly that either one of them could disappear at any moment, alone in the end, to pursue the superior call of love...