Dancer From the Dance: A Novel (18 page)

It was the old, original part of Malone, that terrific friendliness that was so instinctive a part of his character—even when he had concluded that it was something he would have to repress intentionally, like a twitch. Malone was simply too well-mannered. Too good-natured. How often Sutherland told him he must edit his friends; which meant, in Sutherland's eyes, getting rid of ninety percent of them. But Malone could not. He really was no snob. Dozens of people telephoned him daily with the fundamental rudeness of those who never think their own problems and desires are of little interest to anyone else; and Malone bore their rudeness and listened. And all because he was a friendly, affectionate, naive fellow—who, when you came up to him on the street, even this street, put his arm around your shoulder and said: "Tell me what happened with that boy on Thursday night! Are you still in love?"

It snowed that winter and the snow gave to Manhattan those weeks before Christmas a surge of happiness of which Sutherland and Malone seemed to have more than their share. Throngs of people poured out of their offices at five, going to parties, visiting travel agents, hiring bartenders. On cold winter days when the ice lay crusted on the sidewalks of the Lower East Side, trumpets blared from the transistor radios the Puerto Ricans carried down the street with them, like tigers on a snowy glacier, and the naked branches of the trees gleamed in the sunlight against the sky. Forty blocks northward Malone and Sutherland swept through the department stores sampling perfume, trying on coats, giving people little presents of dope and handwritten poems, and attending the astonishing number of parties raised, to an exponential degree, by the time of year, including the slave auction the Fist Fuckers of America held a week before Christmas to benefit an orphanage in Hackensack. One afternoon I saw Sutherland surrounded by a group of drunken bums east of Astor Place—giving each one a dop kit from Mark Cross (he'd bought them all at a discount from the Mafia) and wishing them a good trip south. For, like his friends, the alcoholic ladies who lived in residential hotels, and the various millionaires he knew, they all went to sunnier regions at this time of year. Sutherland loved more than anything to shop at Christmastime: He liked to go to Gucci on Fifth Avenue and fart noisily at the counter, and if any of the help in his favorite stores—Cartier, Bendel's, Brooks, and Rizzoli—were rude, he would stop in a phone booth and have the store evacuated by phoning in a bomb scare. Malone followed him through the glittering rooms of merchandise thinking helplessly of Frankie and what he would buy for him. Sutherland presented Malone on Christmas Eve with a heap of gifts: a goose-down parka, hiking boots and backpack (for he saw this as the next fashion trend and wanted Malone to exemplify it), an amber scarab from the Fifth Dynasty,
The Duino Elegies,
a record of trained canaries singing to an organ recital (the product of a woman who had a shop beneath Rockefeller Center), a bottle of Joy, scented soaps from France, a first edition of Yeats, a recording of Pachelbel's canon (the music he played endlessly when alone in his apartment), and a cabochon emerald. All of these things were stolen. He went into Bendel's dressed as Mrs. Charles Dickens and came out with trifles hidden in his skirts. Each evening he read the Gospel of Christ's birth to Malone and then jumped in a cab and went to the Everard Baths.

We all rushed to the Baths at that time of year: The halls were filled with circuit queens and out-of-towners who converged there before going back to Ohio or Maine or wherever it was they must return to participate in the family ceremonies. The rude old men whose attitude of contempt always chilled me as I slipped the money across the counter (framed now in a garland of Christmas cards from all around the world), the Puerto Rican attendant who walked me to my locker with an expression of hopeless melancholy, the fellow in his laundry cubicle on the third floor, glassy-eyed with boredom beneath the defiant centerfold of a big-breasted woman he had taped to the wall, slipping into slumber till a voice on the loudspeaker ordered him to change the sheets in Room Fourteen, the toilets filled to overflowing, the occasional turd that lay unaccountably in the middle of the hallway, the hot moans and hisses from the rooms you passed, the distant sound of someone being patiently spanked with the steady rhythms of a metronome, the leather queens standing in their red-lighted doorways in cowboy hats, dangling handcuffs—none of it mattered; only the rush of affection you felt when you rounded the corner and saw a friend you hadn't seen in five months, the two of you wishing each other "Merry Christmas!" before you went on your way, the soles of your feet turning black as you cruised the red, chill, fake-pine-paneled halls of the Everard Baths. It was Christmas in the Temple of Priapus.

Sutherland always brought several bottles of Campari and a wicker basket of pâté, apricots and breast of chicken to the Baths and took a room in which to entertain. He poured Guerlain all over his crotch, and then popped around the corner, a cherub in a towel, his bright eyes and hilarious mouth making perfect strangers burst into laughter at the expression on his face. We always ended up outside his room at some point, watching his friends drop in for pâté and Negronis, and Sutherland himself dash out after a beautiful boy he'd just seen passing, trailing his towel like a child, revealing in his insouciance the cause of his problematical sex life. The Baths were humiliating to Sutherland: He entered rooms, closed the door, and emerged two minutes later. They had felt—like a housewife examining eggs or squeezing cantaloupes—his cock, and found it wanting. He returned to his room and got drunk. Malone came out far less frequently than Sutherland, and when he did he nearly slid down the wall, in the shadows. But people saw him, and walking down the hall behind Malone used to amuse me, because I could watch the various expressions on the faces of people passing—even those who, catching sight of Malone suddenly, crashed into one another at a corner or simply walked into a wall. You had to bite your lip: Laughter was not
de rigueur
at the Baths. The Baths were serious. But to walk down the hallway behind Malone was to marvel at the various reactions people had to a fantasy-made-flesh: frowns, glares, studious attempts to avoid looking at him (so they would not be rejected; these were the proudest of all), in which the face assumed an almost prim, pained expression for an instant, like a maiden aunt who disapproved of all this; and then the wonderful expression of sheer joy, and awe, when the young boys gaped and turned to follow his progress. The uninhibited hissed and talked to him from their doorways as he went past, like whores soliciting on a street-corner, or jumped up from the beds on which they'd been lying to call after him. The aggressive came up to Malone and offered him dope if he would come to their room, or simply grabbed his crotch; and soon, they had all left their doorways and were following Malone around like myself. Malone hardly went out of the room for this reason. He waited till very late at night, when most everyone was asleep, like little children who have just had a glass of milk, only it wasn't milk, it was another fluid. The halls were dark, and quiet, and chill, and only in the distance the sound of someone's moans, or the rheumatic wheeze of a stopped-up toilet, or the hum of the water fountain marked the otherwise unblemished silence. The Baths were almost peaceful then: The hot gloom of lust had lifted. The place for a moment just before dawn became an ordinary hall of closed doors, or open doors in which the occupant, lying invitingly on his bunk, had fallen asleep and was snoring ferociously. It was then Malone went out and took whomever he found, and made love. We all knew people who had their most magical experience very late one night at the Everard Baths with a man they never saw again, but of whose embraces they would think of periodically for the rest of their lives.

That year one of those predawn embraces gave Malone venereal warts, and we saw him shortly before Christmas in the lobby at Bellevue, leaning against a pillar as he listened to a Bach cantata being sung by a group of doctors and nurses for their patients gathered in wheelchairs around them. The snow fell outside the huge windows as they sang. Malone was a sentimental man and he grew sad as he watched this scene. His Christmases had always been religious, charitable, and familial; this year he was staying in New York alone. "I've got venereal warts," he said with a wry smile when the concert had ended and we asked him what he was doing at Bellevue. We were still just people who saw each other when we went out dancing, but Malone was nothing if not friendly. "I'm staying in town to have them painted. But how about you?" And he stood there listening to our plans with his customary consideration. "Well, Merry Christmas," he said with a smile. "And let's get together, please? Sutherland's in Venezuela, and I'll be all alone," he said, "and God knows one hates to be alone at this time of year." He went out the door, turning once to wave to us in a crowd of poor people who came to the free clinic as he did now, for he was poorer than any of them.

Christmas came and went: a dull, gray day on which the snow blew across the empty streets and the bums lighted fires in trash cans on the Bowery. Malone came home one night from a party and was unable to sleep. In the darkness the frivolous evening he had just spent evaporated and he was left with the certainty that he had neglected the very people he truly loved. He had ignored them for the company of people who meant nothing to him but with whom he danced, had fun, and spent the weekends. He sat up, his heart racing in the darkness, flooded with the memory of those members of his family who had been kind to him, and loved him as no one else did with a fundamental, unquestioning love—and he resolved, an hour before dawn, to write them all tomorrow, to return home even, and cling to these souls for the rest of his life. It was then—alone, panic-stricken, flooded with a strange love as he sat there in bed, hearing only the hiss of the pipes—Malone convinced himself that Frankie was only waiting for a sign from him. He would get him a Christmas present for that Latin day of celebration, the Feast of the Epiphany. And the next day he went out—all thoughts of his family forgotten in the brilliant sunshine—to raise money for his gift by seeing a few clients. And that was how he spent those gray and snowy afternoons after Christmas, rushing across the city amid the crowds that flowed out of the huge department stores exchanging gifts, a merchant among merchants.

We ran into him on the street a few hours before midnight on New Year's Eve. He was in black tie and black coat (like most of Halston's entourage, like most of us who had been living in New York awhile, we had all arrived at the color black; it was in the end a preference that I never could decide was our sophistication or the fact that we were in mourning for our lives), and carried a bottle of champagne in his free hand. He had just left a dinner party uptown because New Year's Eve (like Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Easter) was a sentimental occasion he had always celebrated with his family; he did not want to kiss strangers at the stroke of midnight who meant nothing to him. He was on his way to the Plaza Hotel to visit an executive from Minneapolis staying there whom he had taken to the discos the previous night—the easiest work was as an escort—and who wanted to photograph Malone. He seemed glad to see us, and asked us up to his room for a drink and dancing afterward. In fact, we had spent the entire day on the telephone trying to ascertain from the jungle drums where everyone was going that night; there were so many discotheques now that life was no longer a simple matter of going to the Twelfth Floor its first year and finding in that tiny room everyone you wished to love. No, even that precious fraternity was splintered now, and half were in the Caribbean, or Paris, or various clubs that had opened around town now that discotheques were an Industry. Not only did we not know where to go that night, but we had no heat in our apartment, and when Malone learned this he gave us his keys and said to wait in his place till he got back. "I've got a portable heater," he said in his brisk, cheerful way. "The couple next door have violent fights and you can listen to them till I get back. I'll just be gone an hour!"

We went inside the building and began going up the stairs under the thin tubes of fluorescent lighting fluttering spasmodically on the vomit-colored walls. At the very top we found Number Thirty-Six and unlocked the door. It was an old apartment and it was simply a cell—except for the telltale signs of one-night affairs who had left cigarettes stubbed out on saucers, and notes scrawled on the wall ("Call me! 555-3721. John"), a bottle of wine and glasses, and a wicker basket filled with scraps of paper on which more phone numbers and more names were written, no one might have been living there. A squash racket and the Bible and the first issue of
Playgirl
lay on a desk. We sat down and looked around at the filthy walls, and sure enough the couple next door began to fight in angry, drunken voices. Time passed. We grew depressed at their brutal dialogue and turned on the radio to drown them out. Outside snow began to fall past the filthy windows, into the chasm of fire escapes behind Malone's apartment, while uptown it drifted past the tall windows of the suite rented to an executive of a Minneapolis encyclopedia firm who had decided not to pay Malone for the pictures he'd just taken of him nude since the price was too high.

"I'll leave your camera at the desk downstairs," Malone said as he picked it up from the coffee table, "but the film I'm going to remove, of course." Before he got to the desk in the lobby two security guards met Malone and took him to a room on the second floor, and broke his arm. They called a doctor several hours later. It was shortly before three when the telephone rang; we had just begun to think of going on without him. "Hate to bother you," his voice, strangely hollow underneath the familiar briskness, said, "but something unpleasant has occurred, which I thought only happened in East Germany. I'm kind of in jail, and need to see a doctor, kind of thing? Perhaps
this
is the place to spend New Year's Eve. There's a girl here wearing a coat Sutherland and I have been looking all over Manhattan for." And that is what he did, with the muggers, thieves, rapists, and lunatics: saw 1977's first dawn bleach the towers of Wall Street south of his window, eating a wooden peanut butter sandwich with a black girl who had slit a woman's throat while trying to rob her purse on Riverside Drive. But the choicest irony awaited Malone when we took him up to Bellevue after they had released him to have his arm set. The doctor attending him turned out to be a man he had slept with several times. "Oh, God," Malone said weakly just before surrendering to the drug they had given him, afloat on the white pillows of the hospital bed, "is it really time to move to San Francisco?"