Dancer From the Dance: A Novel (14 page)

We danced near one another for several years and never said a word; even at the very end of an evening, when everyone converged at an after-hours club on Houston Street where the people who could not stop went, who artificially extended the night by remaining in rooms whose windows were painted with black paint, where the dregs of night, the bartenders, the discaires themselves, all tumbled down into one room in which pretensions were impossible. The bathroom was jammed with people sharing drugs, drag queens danced with designers, hustlers played pool, sharing another kind of communion, till, hours later, I would look up to see Malone standing with a drink on the edge of the crowd, and above him the light glowing in the ribs of the ventilating fan over the door—which gave away the whole fiction, the pretense that it was still night, and proved not only that day had come, but it was maturing rapidly—and I would wonder in the sudden stillness why I did not speak to him. It was not simply his beauty—having danced with these people as long as we had, that was no bar to introducing oneself; it was the expression cm his face. It was deeply serious, and more, it seemed to promise love. But how could that be? We were too smart to believe in that. We wished to keep him at a distance, as a kind of untried resource, a reward we should have in our secret hearts.

We wanted to be loved by Malone, with this egotistic detail: that it would be an exclusive love. At first we thought he was a medical student; then we heard he worked on Seventh Avenue for Clovis Ruffin; besides that, he was dying of an incurable bone disease. Then someone said he didn't work at all and was being kept by an Episcopalian bishop; and so Malone went through as many guises as the discotheques we danced at. But that look never vanished from his eyes. Sutherland—who looked like a lumberjack one night, a Gucci queen the next, a prep school swim star, or an East Village dropout—dressed Malone like a doll each night and ushered him out into the city to be a fantasy for someone. How much was Malone aware of what he was doing? At that time he didn't know he was the object of so many eyes; he didn't care that we possessed each other through the medium of gossip.

And then Malone would vanish for a while, in love with one of the young Latin beauties who made up half our crowd (the other half being the doctors, designers, white boys who loved to dance), and of whom Frankie had been the first. But there were so many Frankies—that was the horror—and eventually Malone would return to find Sutherland hanging out the window of his apartment, swinging his gas-blue beads and talking in Italian to the passersby. Sutherland would see Malone, clutch the avocados in his blouse, and scream, "My son! He is back from that bitch he married!" and Malone would walk into the apartment with a rueful smile and sit down and tell Sutherland what had gone wrong with his latest marriage. Then they would go out dancing. Seeing Malone, we would realize how much we had missed him.

One night he ran into the real Frankie in a bar in Hackensack where Luis Sanchez was playing (our favorite discaire who eventually went off to Paris to play for a count and who seemed to take the best music with him). Frankie was, after all, Malone's first love. Malone was a sentimental soul and when he asked to meet him the next afternoon to talk, Malone agreed. They met in Central Park. Frankie had since been promoted at work and was even wearing glasses to appear more intellectual (though his vision was perfect, and the glass clear), and as they sat by the pond near Seventy-second Street, the conversation was polite. Then Frankie began to query Malone on the crowd into which he had disappeared as totally as a mermaid returning to the sea who leaves her human lover staring blankly at the waves, and of which Frankie disapproved utterly. Frankie was a Latin, Catholic, a conservative soul who hated queens. He had no use for them. He had one dream in life: a home, a wife, a family, and if Nature had made a joke of this, he was not about to smile with her; he would have it anyway, with Malone, in a room somewhere. For such a handsome boy, his soul was a dead weight; the very seriousness Malone had loved at first now seemed to Malone lugubrious, and in fact, as they continued sitting there, Frankie began to cry. Then he lost his temper. He hit Malone twice in the face and stopped only when a policeman came up, at which point Malone fled without a word.

He ran all the way back to Sutherland's apartment, where he found Sutherland in a black Norell standing beside the baby grand piano and singing in a velvet voice: "This time we almost made the pieces fit, didn't we?" He held out his long-gloved arm to Malone and said: "Were you a model of propriety? Did you conduct yourself with dignity?" And then, seeing Malone was distraught, he took off his long gloves, made him a cup of tea, and sat with him on the sofa and listened to his tale of regret and loss until it was time to go to the White Party.

The next afternoon when they awoke with the empty heads of angels being born, pushed their costumes off their limbs, and walked to the window to see if it was day or night, Malone saw Frankie on the corner opposite. Malone drew back; he was convinced, once again, that Frankie was mad. "To take love so seriously!" said Sutherland in a thrilled voice as he came to the window. "Only Latins take love seriously, and he is
so
beautiful. We northern Europeans are cold as fish," he smiled, and wrapped his robe around him as he sat down with a bottle of Perrier. But then Malone looked out at him and felt a vague melancholy: He was crazy, but at least he valued love more than anything, and had adored him. And his very seriousness, his very earnest fury, as he stood there on the corner looking across the street at Sutherland's windows, took Malone's breath away. He knew nothing of discotheques and gossip, body-building and baseball caps, bleached fatigues and plaid shirts, the whole milieu of trends on which the city, and the society that revolved around the Twelfth Floor, thrived, even originated. He stood there in his jeans (the wrong kind, cheap knock-offs from a discount house in Jersey City) and wind-breaker (shapeless and green), frowning at Sutherland's window, his dark eyes cloudy as the sky filled that afternoon with an impending thunderstorm, and dark hair blowing about his ears, a creature from a different planet, unfashionable, unself-conscious, unknowing. Yet vain in his own way, Malone reminded himself as he put down the binoculars and turned from the window with a feeling of sadness.

"I don't know if he's waiting to take me to lunch," Malone said, "or stick a knife in my ribs."

"I ask myself the same question every time I go over to Ceil Tyson's for dinner," said Sutherland, peering out the window. "Perhaps you should go to Rome until we clear this up."

"But I can't leave the city," said Malone miserably, "as long as he's in it."

"Poor baby," said Sutherland, withdrawing from the window. "Then what do you plan to do?"

It began to rain and Frankie stepped under the portico of the museum as Malone said: "I want to disappear. Can I leave Manhattan without leaving Manhattan? I'd just better vanish in the metropolitan equivalent of one of those holes scientists have discovered in the universe."

"Well," said Sutherland, putting a finger to his lips judiciously, "you could move to Harlem. One hundred thirtieth Street? But then, northern blacks are so rude. No, I think you should go in the other direction," he said. "I think you should go to the Lower East Side."

That day friends found for Malone—who had little money now—a small apartment on St Mark's Place in which to hide till Frankie went home himself. "They forget
me,"
said Sutherland enviously, "within five minutes after leaving the apartment. But then I have such a tiny wink," he sighed.

And so late one night a caravan of taxicabs rolled down Second Avenue south of Fourteenth Street—where Sutherland had once lived as part of Warhol's stable—down the sordid streets of the East Village, bathed in the orange glare of the latest streetlights designed to prevent street crime, and which made each street into a Gaza Strip lacking only barbed wire to prevent the pedestrians on one block from migrating to the one opposite. The whores watched them rumble past; the bums were already sprawled in the doorway of the Ottendorf Library, and the bag ladies were asleep on the sidewalk beside baby carriages heaped with trash. "So much local color!" said Sutherland as the three yellow cabs rolled down the bricks of Second Avenue. "So much raw life. Very Hogarth. Very pretty!" he said, as a man stood shaking his penis against the windshield of a car stopped for a red light, whose driver, a young woman, stared bravely off into the distance, ignoring its presence. "Do you know who used to live along Second Avenue in all these buildings in the twenties?" he said, leaning forward on the seat to look up at the big stone apartment houses in which lighted windows glowed. "Jewish gangsters! Yes!" he said excitedly. "The famous Rosy Segal lived here, and Bugsy Levine and all the boys who used to hang around the Café Metropole. They kept mistresses in these buildings, just like me," he said, for he still got occasional checks from his Brazilian neurosurgeon and his Parisian art dealer. "The biggest Jewish gangsters of the twenties, this was their block," he said, as the pale cornices went by beneath the radiance of a yellow summer moon. "They are huge apartments," said one of the friends who were accompanying them downtown, an urban planner from Boston, "as big as the ones on the Upper West Side."

"And who lives in them now?" Sutherland said. But before the friend could answer, Sutherland replied himself. "Faggots!" he said. "Faggots where the Jewish gangsters used to keep their mistresses! Ah, this avenue has never been anything but déclassé, it is the perfect place in which to disappear," he said, turning back to Malone. "The perfect place for social oblivion. Not only will nobody know where you are, but when they do find out, they won't visit you after four o'clock in the afternoon!" he said, as they got out of the cab and stepped over the supine body of a man sleeping in the gutter.
"Mira!"
he said, pointing to a young Puerto Rican man bent at the waist, as he reached for something on the sidewalk at his feet—but as they gazed at him, he remained in that impossible pose, immobilized by a drug he had taken earlier that evening. "I believe," said Sutherland breathlessly, "I believe he is trying to pick up his comb! Welcome," he said, turning to Malone. "Welcome to Forgetfulness!"

The Lower East Side reminds some people of photographs of Berlin just after the war. And in fact along certain blocks the walls of tenement houses are thin as movie sets, whose windows disclose the rubble of collapsed buildings. I used to have a dream that bombs had leveled the entire neighborhood and grass and trees and flocks of sheep been allowed to flourish there instead. But this will never be. The Lower East Side will go on just as it is, shimmering in waves of heat rising from the asphalt in summer, shrinking in winter in the pale light till it is nothing but a long gray wall hung with fire escapes on whose sidewalks every particle of dirt and trash stands out in the ashen air. Poor people live there. Artists and ghosts—Poles whose neighborhood it used to be and hippies who gathered there in the early sixties. But both of these have had their day, and St. Mark's Place now belongs to hair stylists, pimps, and dealers in secondhand clothing. The building in which Malone took a room is a kind of history lesson of that part of town: It once housed the Electric Circus, a discotheque that began fashionable and white, and eventually became unfashionable and black, and then it was a center for the fifteen-year-old Maharajah Mutu who held prayer meetings there, when I used to see men in dark gray suits running down the sidewalk at five-thirty after work not to be late for meditation—and then a country-and-western discotheque, if that's not a contradiction in terms, that never got off the ground. Finally they closed the place down, and music no longer throbbed out the door on winter nights, and black boys no longer stood around the stairs combing their hair, and no one came in search of spiritual insight And it just sat there, a huge hulk of a building painted shocking blue... a tax write-off for the Mafia. In the very highest part of the big black rounded roof a single window glowed late at night—and that was Malone, trying on T-shirts.

He found himself by now with a collection of clothes nearly as various as die contents of the closet Sutherland had showed him the night they met. He found himself with fatigues and painter's pants, transparent plastic belts, and plaid shirts, work boots and baseball caps, and T-shirts in every hue manufactured and sold in stores, and then the shades he had created himself by bleaching and fading. He found himself on his empty, lazy afternoons, such as a hooker must spend, trying on clothes and looking at himself in the mirror. The mirror was a cracked shard and the clothes were heaped about the room in cardboard boxes and grocery bags, but he didn't care. He was like an actor in his dressing room, always preparing for a performance. He was free. Free to be vain, to be lazy, to dream. To stand in front of the mirror trying on one T-shirt after another, apple-green, soft yellow, olive drab, black, bright red, faded pink, beige, turquoise blue, and to discard T-shirts, pants, belts before he finally chose the clothes in which he went out into the street.