Dancer From the Dance: A Novel (15 page)

For whom was he dressing? The love he inevitably met in the street. Malone regressed when he came to live alone on the Lower East Side: He went back to the dreams of adolescence, became the girl on her prom night, dreaming of clothes, of love, of the handsome stranger, of being desired. He'd wanted to live a life like this, of self-indulgence, long days, gossip and love affairs, and in his shabby room on the Lower East Side he was completely free to live this timeless existence.

For there is no sense of time passing when you live in that part of town. The Polish men stand in front of the stoop in dark suits and hats watching the crowd go by for hour after hour. The Puerto Rican women sit on the stoops down the street feeding their babies soda pop at dusk, and sometimes they dance with each other while a husband plays the guitar. The music on the jukebox in the bar the Polish men sit at every day, their hats pushed down over their noses, is ten years out of date. No one bothers to change the selections. They listen to Dean Martin sing, "I Want to Be Around to Pick Up the Pieces," over and over again, as a pall of incinerator smoke settles over the neighborhood.

There is no sense of time—the bums come and go; you learn to recognize a few, and then they disappear, on the train to Florida. The whores stand on the corner in their hot pants, shivering under the cold moon, and the sirens of half a dozen police cars rushing to a murder on First Avenue rise up into the sky like a chorus of heavenly voices and then die down. The palm reader dressed like a gypsy has been sitting in her window for years. The funeral home is next to the travel agency, and they look exactly alike. In the window of the travel agency is a poster of five young Polish girls running from a metallic house trailer toward a marshy pond; they have been running for years.

It is difficult to say how long Malone had been there, but it was long enough for him (who had been horrified at the men begging for money, the boys folding up on the corner from drugs, the bag ladies asleep on their trash, the shrews screaming at the fruit-sellers on First Avenue over pennies of change, the decrepit, strange creatures on platform shoes with attenuated silhouettes) finally to feel he belonged there. He'd finally found a place whose streets he could roam, where time passed and one wasn't conscious of it, no one cared. He was a literal prisoner of love. Lying in his bed late at night, utterly exhausted, he would rise—completely against his will—to run up to the little park on Fifteenth Street because there might be a boy standing under a tree there looking for love. He loved everything while this erotic fever lasted: the empty streets in winter raked by the wind late at night, the bums sleeping in clouds of steam on the heating vents; in summer, the fragrant heat, the flies droning over the fruit stalls, the plash of water from the fire hydrants; the children screaming, the odor of cookies from the Polish bakery, days lived in a T-shirt and tennis sneakers, the acrid smoke of the incinerator smokestacks settling onto the street. He saw sunsets from his roof. In spring he loved the rains that left the subway stations damp and chilly, and he stopped in the men's rooms and made love there. Only the autumn, that crisp, hard, exhilarating season, made him feel ashamed; made him feel trapped in the street, but it passed, and he resumed his life without consciousness of time. And so he lived there for years—and who can say if he stayed in that dismal tenement that so horrified and enthralled him simultaneously, pursuing love, or performing some strange penance for all the advantages he'd had? Love, and humiliation, at once. Malone became one of those boys you see walking home against the crowd at eight in the morning, his face wan, his eyes shadowed after a night with some man in Chelsea: a prisoner of love.

In fact the entire realm of daytime existence became meaningless to Malone, and he wondered how it was possible for men to do anything but pursue amorous interests; how it was possible for them to found businesses, build buildings, play squash. He found himself coming home on the subways in the morning, with crowds of people on their way to work—and while the man hanging onto the strap beside him was on his way to the headquarters of Citibank, he was coming home from a long night of love with one of its tellers. They swayed beside one another, hanging onto the straps, as the car hurtled through the tunnel: the one the servant of Vulcan, and he the servant of Priapus. When he saw, leaving his room at night, the hookers gathered on Third Avenue in their sequined hot pants and black halter tops, he only blessed them secretly in his heart. Rushing up Park Avenue one night on his way to a tryst, he saw an associate from his old firm leaving the offices of Union Carbide. He waited behind a pillar to avoid being seen.

He made love in deserted warehouses at three in the afternoon, and in piers along the river, with huge patches of sunlight falling through the ruined roof; he made love at night in curious apartments high above the city. He made love at rush hour in the men's rooms of subway stations; he made love at noon, at midnight, at eight in the morning; and still he found himself alone. He hurried back and forth across the city on the subway, on its sidewalks, rushing only on errands of love. And still he found himself on Sunday evening rushing out to quell the inevitable sadness of that moment. He made love with Puerto Rican anesthetists at Bellevue, psychiatrists and Belgian chefs, poets and airline pilots, anarchists and bankers, corporate attorneys and copywriters, and he discovered that after the most passionate night of lovemaking, in someone's bed or at the Baths, he only wanted more. He went from going to bed with handsome people to going to bed with ordinary people, and finally ugly men; with Jews, Italians, Slavs and Brazilians, Dutchmen, Germans, Greeks and Arabs. He made a vow to sleep with everyone just once. He grew gaunt, even more handsome, his eyes shadowed and turgid with lust: He was a prisoner of love.

The building in which Malone and I lived, like a big blue mosque in the center of that neighborhood, was filled with prisoners of other things. The lower floors were full of elderly Jewish widows living on Social Security who were kept alive with the sandwich the Puerto Rican boy from the grocery downstairs brought them once a day. There were Polish couples left over from the days when this had been their neighborhood. There was a Japanese family who ran a tempura takeout restaurant on the street. There was a woman who coughed quietly throughout the night and whom no one ever saw. There was a sad young man in a wheelchair whose cousin came down from Queens each day to take him out. There was a courteous, old-fashioned German man who took his dogs out for a walk three times a day and said a courtly greeting to everyone, as if they were strolling on the Ringstrasse in Vienna. There was a hillbilly family who screamed at each other day and night and lived with twenty-nine cats and dogs. There was the teller at Chemical Bank who returned home, changed into an old black Chanel, put a lot of Cole Porter records on his record player, and lay on a chaise longue all evening smoking dope as he leafed through old issues of
Vanity Fair.
And finally there was the woman who so affected Malone—just the sight of her, on the stairs, a tipsy blond woman with faded blue eyes who paused on each landing to get her breath before climbing to the next, and who smiled and said, "Go ahead," to whoever was behind her. She had once been pretty and she now lived with a husband who yelled at her, as she yelled at him, each evening. She once missed an entire landing coming downstairs, but she was so drunk she just picked herself up off the tiles and went wavering out the door. Her face, in the fluorescent light of that vomit-colored stairwell, had so much sadness and resignation stamped on its Dresden prettiness (long faded, wrinkled now) it sent a chill to Malone's heart and he could not look at her or smell her perfume without a feeling of panic.

Everybody was a flop there: failed artists, artists who'd never made it, disoriented people. Archer had nearly had his doctoral degree at Harvard when he decided that it didn't matter to him what Blake's opinion of applied science was, and he came to New York and lived as a callboy. He spent two hours a day in a local gymnasium, and his tits were now bigger than his mother's. On the weekends he went to different cities along the East Coast just to stand in bars and show them off. The English girl downstairs came from a very good family and was forever being beaten up by her black lovers. She would call up at three in the morning when she was baking her organic bread, and her lover was breaking into apartments in the building, to see if you were home, and if you answered she would ask in her Oxford accent: "Oh,
do
you have any unbleached soy flour?"

Why was she, or any of us, still there in that place when anyone of modest sense would have moved out long ago? Rent was cheap. But that is too simple an explanation. The streets were made of quicksand, the air was an odorless gas, time passed and we couldn't rouse ourselves. It was simply easier to stay—and satisfy whatever appetites had brought us here in the first place; appetites that, once satisfied, left us exhausted. We became like the ashen air, the fire escapes, the warren of roofs and laundry lines glistening on a wet April morning. We were ghosts. And that's why I went to the discotheques last winter, and even worked in one: serving punch. It was the perfect form of life for a ghost such as I...

And ghostly I was—weak, without a will, or vision of another life—for years. I came to New York for love, too, like Malone, and I had been here so long by the time I first saw his incredible eyes, I could not remember. The first day of my life in that building I went to see an old woman who lived in an apartment on the first floor, two rooms in the back filled with the bottle-blue, milky light that gathered like glue at the base of the air shafts of these buildings. How horrified I was by that light! Exactly how long I had lived there I learned only when, going downstairs one day many years after this visit, I ran into the old woman at the mailbox, and she turned to me and said brightly as she turned the key: "Oh, hello! Are you still here?"

Yes, I was still here: trapped, like a fly in amber, in love with the sordid streets, the rooftops, the Puerto Rican boys, the little park at midnight where I could always find boys hungry as I was, their faces gloomy with lust, as they stood beneath the trees waiting to be picked up. I had come to town—when I no longer remembered—and stayed, and time ceased even to be measured, nothing was measured except the cyclical progress of love.

In the city nothing changes: It becomes cold part of the year, and hot another, but no trees lose their leaves, no crops ripen, there are only the streets, the fire escapes, the sky; the telephone, the echoing gymnasium, the angelic face of the Italian boy selling Christmas trees whom you see walking home from the Baths one cold winter night, glowing in the flames he has started in an old oil can to keep warm as he stands there on Second Avenue. Each winter you dance, and each summer you go to the beach. Each year you love someone new: Orientals in 1967, Italians in 1968, blacks in 1969, and bearded blonds in 1970; and always the Puerto Ricans, the angels, who take the form of messenger boys, waiting to cross the street across the pavement from you in their jeans and sneakers, their old leather jackets, on a cold winter day. You remember the eyes, as beautiful as bare trees against a sky: naked, cold, as they glance at you for a moment and then look away. Years pass loving such eyes. And the only way you know you're older is that you (once loved by older men) now find yourself loving boys younger than you...

How did time pass in this way? How was it possible for five years to seem like five weeks? I stalked people with the oblivious slowness of a man to whom time does not apply. If it took five or six years to finally speak to a man like Malone, no matter. Watching them so long made possession itself almost secondary. Love is a career with its own stages, rewards, and failures... a vocation as concrete as a calling in the Church, worth giving a lifetime to. So I do not know how long I had been on the circuit when I first saw Malone; but this sense of paralysis, of life without movement, had surely begun to affect him, too, by that time.

For that is the curious quality of the discotheque after you have gone there a long time: In the midst of all the lights, and music, the bodies, the dancing, the drugs, you are stiller than still within, and though you go through the motions of dancing you are thinking a thousand disparate things. You find yourself listening to the lyrics, and you wonder what these people around you are doing. They seemed crazed to you. You stand there on the floor moving your hips, wondering if there is such a thing as love, and conscious for the very first time that it is three twenty-five and the night only half over. You put the popper to your nostril, you put a hand out to lightly touch the sweaty, rigid stomach of the man dancing next to you, your own chest is streaming with sweat in that hot room, and you are thinking, as grave as a judge: What will I do with my life? What can any man do with his life? And you finally don't know where to rest your eyes. You don't know where to look, as you dance. You have been expelled from the communion of saints.

And so we come to the night John Schaeffer, up from Princeton for the weekend, was taken to the Twelfth Floor and saw Malone come in the door and greet his friends. Friends who were nothing more than people he went to parties with, and who had long since lost their capacity to enchant. He stood talking to him and listening to the music with an oddly detached, critical ear. He was waiting for a song, the right song, a face, the magic face, to kindle in him again the old ecstasies—and when he found himself on the floor again, putting back his head when Patty Jo began to sing, "Make Me Believe in You," and touching Bruce West's voluptuous chest streaming with sweat, and wondering who the next boy would be, he was, like everyone else, just a prisoner of habit.

But he hadn't been there in a long time, living as he was with Rafael on the other side of town, and it was for some a thrill to see him again. For if Malone was, in the end, only a face I saw in a discotheque one winter, he was somehow the figure on which everything rested. The central beautiful symbol. As long as he was enmeshed, as long as that room could draw him back (as it now had), so was I. As long as it compelled that face it compelled me. You form relationships like that in a city, and especially in a society as romantic as homosexual society, with faces you never even come near but which stand for a great deal. Why did I never try to know these people whom I adored? I do not know. But though I'd never spoken to Malone, I loved him, and though I'd never tried to meet him, / he was the only person in that huge city whose life, whose fate, I found absorbing; and the moment he appeared in that doorway once again, the moment he came back to the Twelfth Floor, I felt a great joy, as if the illusion of love were once more possible.