Dancer From the Dance: A Novel (21 page)

He sat there with his shirt open, bathing himself in the breeze blowing across town, up those ascending streets, which curved away to a blue horizon and then dropped down to the Hudson. The fire hydrants gushed water with a soothing splash. Two Puerto Rican mothers sat on the adjacent stoop feeding their babies bottles of orange Nehi, and halfway down the block a man played the guitar while two women in shorts and curlers danced the merengue together. How the city baked! The geysers of water, the gushing gutters, the cool breeze at sunset that touched his sweaty stomach with a chill, the deep blue of night that thickened in that square of sky at the end of Eighth Street to the west, and then became a deep, heartbreaking indigo, while a dozen radios blared advertisements for Clorox and Goya flour through a dozen windows, all bathed him in beauty; and as the city began to cool at last, sitting in the camaraderie of queens, he sat thinking that at least he had stripped his life down to that one single thing—love—and this was where love had led him, this was where he was, as his father had been led to Ceylon in search of oil.

Furthermore he saw as he sat there that what he truly was in love with—or any of us, for that matter—was not Rafael, or Jesus, or the man we had been watching on the dance floor for four years now, but our own senses, the animal bliss of being alive. He had come to adore, true climber on the ladder of love, not only Rafael but all the Rafaels in this street—and what he loved, finally, was only the city. And that if we had no human lover at the moment, we had instead the color of that indigo that precipitates like an extraordinary dye on late-summer evenings at the end of city streets; the breeze bathing his face and shoulders; the sweet comfort of the sweat, drying on his chest; the merengue coming through a window, the fragrant heat, the warm, redolent, perfumed evening; the little moon hanging in the band of light blue sky high above the indigo, floating in a silvery blaze high above the island, the rooftops. He sat there long after everyone else had gone inside, finally brought to rest, a witness of the summer moon.

His only concession to self-improvement began when his arm healed—around eight o'clock each evening he would leave us and go to a gymnasium uptown to lift weights and use the rings and parallel bars for an hour. He who had given up on a human lover nevertheless maintained the temple, as if some day, years from now, the god might return. For if anything is prized more in the homosexual subculture than a handsome face, or a large cock, it is a well-defined, athletic body. Having all three is devastating; add to them the peculiar charisma of Malone, his capacity for love, for giving himself, and the parade of prosperous men who came up those steps is understandable.

Sutherland had to schedule them, in fact—he had divided up Malone's week very neatly. On Wednesday evenings he would pull up in a taxicab with the fertilizer heir, in a Hawaiian shirt and dark glasses. The fertilizer heir had just come from a game of squash at the Racquet Club, and his black hair was slicked down from his shower; in his chinos and white polo shirt and sneakers, he might have been on the deck of his family's boat, which had been sailed up from Florida for the summer at Mt. Desert, only the week before. Sutherland (still picking up the tab when they went out together) had never carried a wallet in his life and simply pulled out a fistful of bills from the pockets of his painter's pants, half of which flew away in the wind, so that we had to chase them down on the sidewalk. Sutherland said breathlessly when we returned them: "Thank you so much, I have so little rapport with
physical
money, you see. Like keys and locks. You know Scriabin put on white gloves to pay his rent!" And with that he thrust the bills through the window and said something in Italian to the driver, who smiled and drove off.

"These cab drivers are so young, and so beautiful," he breathed as he stood there. "Am I terribly late? Has Malone come home yet? We were involved with Mrs. Farouk-Hasiid at Bendel's, she had lost her charge plate and couldn't decide on a picture hat, anyway, which, I assured her, is never out of style."

"He hasn't come back," we said.

"Ah!" said Sutherland, looking askance for a moment at the filthy stoop on which he finally sat down, smudging his white pants. "Then we shall wait. We shall drown for a moment in the life of the street. And what a street! Not since Juvenal have such harlots and fags been seen parading through a major capital!"

And he began to explain to the fertilizer heir the various meanings of the outfits going by: the red handkerchief in the left pocket (fist-fucker), or right pocket (fist-fuckee), the yellow handkerchief (piss), the shaved heads, chains and leather, the bare chest with tiny gold rings inserted in the nipples. "Oh, I know her!" said Sutherland when one such went by, to the wonderment of the fertilizer heir. "We used to work at Bloomingdale's together. When the store closed, we'd put on their very best suits and go to drinks in the Oak Room—and then put them back in the morning."

"How is the Oak Room?" someone said. "Has it changed?"

"Yes, dear," said Sutherland. "It's all black." He blew out a stream of cigarette smoke. "Poor baby," he said, still looking at his old acquaintance who had paused to buy a newspaper at the corner. "She looks
very
tired, of course she has been in New York since the fall of Constantinople. She achieves orgasm only after hot wax is dropped on her pierced nipples, they say. When I knew her she was all cashmere sweaters and penny loafers. I, however, had just invented velvet nipple clamps."

"You what?" said the fertilizer heir as he looked up at Sutherland.

"Velvet nipple clamps," Sutherland repeated in that low, breathless voice, his face a mask of innocence and raised eyebrows.

"Velvet nipple clamps," repeated our visitor.

"I invented them," said Sutherland. "Please, darling. In those days I never had to use the toilet, I—"

"Enough!" said Archer.

"I was the household god, the mascot of sadomasochistic New York. I was in the taxi when John Jerome bit his lover's nose off outside Sanctuary. One of the legends of SM New York. I used to shit on John's lips and then
he
would turn to his lover and kiss him with my shit. Heavy," he said with a long sigh. "I was into heavy SM. Now all I want is a hug and a kiss." He stubbed his cigarette out on the stoop, and said in an aside to the garbage can, as he tossed it there: "And an emerald parure." He looked up to see a gaunt, handsome young man go by with half-moon shadows beneath his eyes, and the grim expression of someone living for lust. "Now there's a boy who spent the night tied to a bed, in a room in Chelsea!" said Sutherland happily.

"I—I don't understand sadomasochism," said the fertilizer heir in a tentative voice, with the frown of a scholar, as he sat on the bottom step holding his squash racket and paperback volumes of Hawthorne and Henry Adams, which he was reading for his master's exam in July. "Why would you want to feel pain?"

"My dear," sighed Sutherland. "You would have to read all of
The Fall of the House of Savoy
to understand that," he said, referring to an obscure six-volume work of German history, which was his favorite reading. "Not to mention the
Autobiography of St. Theresa,
and the life of Mahatma Gandhi. Darling, it would take at least a year on Fire Island to make you understand. Don't worry, you shall have it," he said, for Sutherland had taken a house in the Pines and already moved a large part of Malone's wardrobe out there, where he might be seen in a setting more appealing than St. Mark's Place by prospective clients who would not have been caught dead on the Lower East Side.

"Fire Island?" said the fertilizer heir.

"Fire Island Pines," sighed Sutherland. "A strange seaside community where people are considered creative because they design windows at Saks. But don't worry—it has other things. Wild deer, in the fall, and even wilder beautiful boys at almost any time of the year. You'll see. I'll show you the Dangerous Island," he added.

"Why dangerous?" said his tutee.

"Dangerous because you may lose your heart," he said, standing up. "Or mind. Or reputation. Or contact lenses," he said. "Horst!" he called, waving at a boy across the street who had recently told Sutherland he had four thousand Quaaludes to sell at seventy-one cents apiece—a very low price, and a chance Sutherland could not pass up now that he was escorting John around. "Excuse me," he said to us, "I have to see a man about a shipload of bananas. I'll be
right
back!" And he dashed off around the corner to follow Horst up Second Avenue.

As we were watching him rash off after Horst, another cab pulled up at the curb, and out stepped Malone, looking still like the German sailor recuperating in Malta. His arm was in a sling (which he still wore to certain clients), and he wore white pants and a pale, blue-striped polo shirt. "Hello, everyone," he said with a smile when he turned around after paying the driver. He had just come from an hour with an elderly retired psychiatrist who had paid him a hundred dollars to stand on his Aubusson in a pair of blue Speedo bathing trunks while he, the psychiatrist, masturbated at his feet. John stood up and said he was waiting for Sutherland to return from some errand he had just dashed off on. "Something about a shipload of bananas," John said slowly.

"Oh," Malone laughed, recognizing a line of Sutherland's. "Well, let's wait for him upstairs. We'll have a beer if you like."

John stood up and said, "Oh, I'd like that." And then he went pale at the thought. Like all shy lovers, the last thing he wanted was to be alone with his love—he wanted to adore him secretly for a while longer. But he could not say no; the moment of truth was here. He nodded at us, and the two of them went inside. A moment later Sutherland returned to the stoop. "And where is my chickadee?" he said. "He went up with Malone," we explained.

"Ah!" said Sutherland. "Perfect! I shall leave them alone for just a little bit. But not too long!" he said, sitting down on the stoop with us. "Falling in love is such a delicate matter," he said, lighting up a Gauloise. "Really like timing a roast."

"Timing a roast," said Hobbs.

Sutherland stood up. "But even that is small potatoes," he said. "Wait till we marry him off!"

"Marry him," we said. "To whom?"

"Why, Malone, of course," said Sutherland, as he went up the steps. "The contract is already drawn up. Malone gets several buildings in midtown, and I... well, I shall button my lips. But you'll come to the party, won't you?" he said breathlessly. "I promise it will make the marriage of Venice to the Adriatic look like a policemen's ball. And Lally's do at the Plaza," he added, sticking his head out the door of our tenement, "look like a Tupperware party!"

And he vanished inside.

John Schaeffer had dropped an envelope, however, in getting up to accompany Malone upstairs, an envelope that had fallen out of one of his books, and someone reached down now and picked it up off the steps. Queens inured to gossip, we listened rapt as he read it out loud. The letter was not what one would have expected from this recent graduate of Princeton, whose own shyness had led us to regard him as a snob, and whose life—Sutherland assured everyone—had been spent in that longitude that circles the globe but appears on no maps and is inhabited solely by the very rich. He had spent nearly all his life away at schools in France and England, Sutherland said, learning Latin with the van der Heydens and the Goelets, or on his grandparents' ranch in Montana, or simply his father's schooner; and life had always been for him—and would always be—an almost rural, certainly seasonal, nomadic existence. He had never had to deal with reality, Sutherland declared with a passionate sense of triumph. People had appeared and disappeared in his life like the islands he sailed through with his family each summer, a different one each day, as permanent as the cantaloupes they ate beneath an awning on the stern. "John Schaeffer," Sutherland said, "has, in a curious way, been brought up with the stillness, the manners, the loneliness of a shepherd!"

But the letter disclosed a soul more complicated than that. "Dear Andy," it read.

First let me say how much I miss everyone. I lay for three days in my room after commencement and could not even come down for food. My parents understood. I think you, and a few others, and myself, were very, very happy. Hopefully we shall be once again in life. At any rate, I'm in New York right now, since the trip down the Danube fell through, and while I hate cities, I have met someone absolutely wonderful whom I want you to meet, too, if you manage to come home this fall. He runs around with a dreadful crowd, lots of drugs and insincerity, and lives in a roach-infested slum (on the Lower East Side), but it's because he's in hiding from a former friend who wants to kill him. Yes, I'm afraid that not only have I fallen in love for the first time, but fallen in the wrong, the
inconvenient
sort of way, if you understand. He is perfectly calm and humane about it all; I think he's suffered, too, though his manner is very—straightforward and high-spirited. He's someone you'd love to play squash with. He reminds me a bit of Tom Esterhazy—and, in a way, of Bunny Molyneux—and yet he's not like anyone else. You know, life is so dreadful now—for all of us, I mean—so dull, that all that matters to me, more and more, are individual people. The few people I care about. He seems so strangely lost, so sweet-natured, and kind, and bewildered. But he strikes everyone that way, I think. That's why so many people are after him—God, the vulgarity of some of them! I am so happy when he just looks at me. His eyes are so extraordinary that when he does, I feel that same deep peace we felt at Mont-Saint-Michel, remember, that October evening in the chapel. The same
calm
is in his eyes. They are grayish blue. He is almost a painting by Burne-Jones. In fact, he affects me so much that when I'm with him—when we meet on the street, say—my legs actually shake. I can hardly stand up. This has never happened to me before! I of course never even dreamed that he had noticed me, but this friend of mine who's been taking me everywhere (an unusual person in his own right), told me last evening that he is interested in
me.
I couldn't believe it! But he insists it’s true. As you can imagine, I'm living in a kind of dream.