Dancer From the Dance: A Novel (23 page)

He paused like a little boy entering a cathedral at the gate of the dark park, as if wondering whether or not to dip his hand in the font of holy water, and then began walking slowly up and down with a pale, frightened face. He knew Malone sometimes came here to smoke a cigarette. He did not wish to appear as if he were looking for Malone—he did not want Malone to realize how he was suffering—but at the same time he hoped desperately his Malone would be here. But the dark figures he peered at as he walked down the benches, half of whom assumed he was cruising and " asked him to sit down, were not Malone. Then he came to us, and he sat down and blurted, "I'm looking for Malone!" We said he was out of town. "Out of town! For how long? When will he be back? Where did he go?" he gasped. And we told him he would be back that night. He was drunk, and excited, and the tension of his search, the warm darkness, made him confess with the gentlest of questions how he felt about our mutual friend.

"He's all the boys I've ever loved in all my life," he said as the black man in the trench coat snored on the bench beside us, and the glowing butts of cigarettes floated about in the darkness like votive candles beneath a shrine, "the boy I fell in love with at Le Rosey, the boy who was mowing the lawn of Hampshire House the day we drove by to my grandfather's funeral, my cousin Paul, the Irish medical student I met in Africa that night in the hut above Ngorongoro, all of them I'll never forget! On my deathbed I will remember their faces! But Malone, Malone is all of them, all of those boys, those summers, the smell of grass when it's cut in August, the heat of a summer day, talcum powder, empty rooms, tiles gleaming, the Swiss lakes, the fir forests around Heidelberg, Malone is all of them!" he said. And with that, he lurched to his feet and rushed out of the park and hailed a cab.

That was the last we saw of them for a while—John went off to Maine, to sail up and down its coast with his family, all in white, and Dr. Valeriani-Winston returned to Argentina. Sutherland remained uptown. Malone went out on calls. It got very hot very soon that summer—tremendous heat that made the East Village almost sensual for a spell: shadows, and breezes, and the sun beating down till dusk, when it broke up and rose in shimmering waves from the pavements toward the clear blue sky. The fire hydrants were open, gushing day and night. Peaches were ripe in the fruit stalls on Second Avenue, the streets south of Astor Place were empty at dusk, and every figure you came upon walking south shimmered for a moment in the distance, then materialized into a group of boys playing ball in a lot littered with broken glass. Even Sutherland, when you ran into him on Fifth Avenue after the office workers had rushed home for a game of tennis in the country before the light had failed, was ecstatic as he stopped to talk, after an afternoon in the men's room at Grand Central, picking pubic hair out of his teeth: "Oh, my dear, there is no other time, no other time at all, but now, when the city is overripe, like a fruit about to drop in your lap, and all the young stockbrokers' underwear is damp! My dear!"

In the worst of the heat, we sat in our park till four in the morning because the apartment was an oven.

The park was the only place to go to get cool in that neighborhood, and as the nights got hotter, it got very crowded. The park was used by two classes of people, who came there at different hours. The first group came early to walk their dogs before going to sleep in the air-conditioned bedrooms of their town-houses, which lined the northern side of the park; they were usually gone by midnight, and then, like ghosts, like gremlins, the derelicts, faggots, drunks, and freaks moved in. It was where the slimiest creatures of the Lower East Side swam to the surface for a moment, in the dark, when the middle class had left the beach, only to go back to the bottom before dawn. At dawn, they vanished. Dawn, that most insulting moment for the homosexual, when the sky goes white above him, and the birds begin to chatter, and still on his knees he looks up from the cock he's been sucking to see the light, like a man making love in a dark bedroom when the door has been flung open. Until that moment, however, it was the perfect place to rub the itchy sore of lust—the perfect cave in which to lick your wounds—for half the lamps did not work, and in the shadows of those trees, it was very, very dark.

We were sitting on our usual bench one hot August night watching the characters come and go. We hadn't seen Malone or Sutherland for weeks and assumed they had gone to Fire Island for good. There wasn't any wind at all, and the dregs of life were busy in the bushes. Around one o'clock a man came in and sat on a bench nearby and began to croon, with the careful modulation of the would-be nightclub singer, songs by Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart. "I've got you... under my skin," he sang, loud, as if trying to project to the balconies, the farthest tables at El Morocco, "I've got you... deep in the heart of me." And after a few songs, the black men trying to play craps farther down the benches yelled, "Shut up!" and he went right on with his extensive repertoire. He sang of a New York City many blocks and many years away from where we sat now—making our own kind of music when he finally left, the beautiful music of regret, rising to a roar like cicadas in high grass in summer:

"But what is life
for?"
a man who ran a bookstore on St. Mark's Place said unhappily. "You must admit there is no real reason for us to
do
anything. We have as much
pur
pose in existing as these trees."

"But you'll never find an intellectual reason for living," said the next. "It has to come from the heart. There is no reason per se to live. People do things from the heart, not from reason. There
is
no reason to live."

"Exactly," said another. "But isn't the idea of using our reason the most irrational thing of all?"

"It was so simple," someone else sighed, "when you just had to get an A on your exam. I was very good at that, but now that it's no longer a case of making the Honor Roll..." and his voice trailed off.

"Did you see Frank Gilbert last night at Flamingo? He shaved his body," someone said, bringing philosophy down to earth and banishing our malaise with the concrete magnetism of gossip. "And waxed his stomach. He looked incredible!"

"Someone said he never wipes his ass, he goes out dirty on purpose. Now
that's
confidence! And he can get away with it!"

And they went on like cicadas, like crickets, in the summer night, sawing their legs together, a quartet playing the music of regret—regret over places they hadn't lived, decisions they hadn't made, men they wanted to sleep with—till Malone appeared at the western gate and sat down with a cigarette. "Oh, God, I'm exhausted," he said. "I've just come from two enemas and a fist-fucking!"

"Oh, what was it like?" said someone who had been writing fiction for ten years now with no success. "Who were your customers?"

And Malone, knowing this fellow wanted to write a novel about a homosexual callboy, would patiently recount the fantasies he had pandered to that night. He himself always looked so cool as we sat there in the stagnant heat, the thick air laden with the fumes of passing cars lying on our skin like the soiled, damp towels in a cheap bathhouse. He always wore white pants and a pale blue polo shirt, and he always asked how our day had been: our day! Our stagnant little day! Filled with the most awful trivialities! He was like the officer visiting the amputees in the hospital after a battle, and everyone poured out his thoughts to Malone, his complaints, hopes, opinions, and vanities—never dreaming they were of no consequence to the fellow listening. They would have gone on forever. No one listened like Malone. No one asked the intelligent, perceptive questions he did, questions that opened up a further flow of revelation, which would not have stopped if the others had not grown impatient with their woes. Malone would have listened indefinitely. "But tell me about the people you see!" said the fellow anxious to gather material for his novel.

The bright red nylon of a striped bathing suit was sticking out of his coat pocket, and as Malone took this out and held it up, he told us about the man who paid him to stand in his bedroom in these Speedo trunks impersonating the captain of the swimming team. Another client pretended to be a fifteen-year-old German Jew at Buchenwald, and Malone was the camp guard he begged for mercy. Another pretended that Malone and he were in bed at his college fraternity, and that his fraternity brothers would be returning at any moment from a mixer at a nearby sorority. He gave enemas to some, tied up others in their bathtub and pissed on them, or simply sat on the sofa and listened to them talk about their mother. He saw Moroccan millionaires, and Mafia men in Brooklyn, men from Detroit on business trips, bankers and marine biologists, film producers, newscasters, ballet dancers. He impersonated sailors, Vietnam veterans, British lords, dead cousins. "But the most peculiar," he added,
"and
the most charming, I think, of them all, is the man who comes to town from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, once every two months and who just wants to smell my hair when it's wet." He turned to his interrogators. "But this must bore you all."

"Oh, no!" came a chorus.

"What did you do this evening, for example," someone said. "Did anything crazy happen to you tonight?"

"Well, one extraordinary thing," Malone said, blowing out a stream of smoke. He was tired, and this incident had been more unsettling than he had allowed it to be at the time. "I answered a call on East Sixty-fourth Street," he said after a pause, in a voice hollow with fatigue, "and when the door opened—there was a boy I'd gone to school with, in Vermont! A boy I'd had a crush on, in fact. We were both astonished."

"Did you have sex?" said the novelist, who saw a two-act play trembling on the horizon.

"No," Malone laughed. "I couldn't. I played soccer with him in school. He was my proctor sophomore year, I worshiped him! So we took out his yearbook and talked about everyone. It was fun." There was a pause, and then someone asked, "Hey, when is the marriage?" for they knew about John Schaeffer.

"Soon, I guess," said Malone. "We're building up to it, gradually. It's like training for the Olympics," he laughed.

He fell silent then, too tired to go on, and caught by the memory of that yearbook photograph with its list of his activities and awards underneath. He sat there thinking that he had, over the past ten or fifteen years, erased that photograph, bit by bit, until that person had vanished utterly. The people he knew now he had not known last year. As homosexuals tend to do, he had simply ceased to communicate with his former world; like a brother who, once he enters the monastery, renounces all his former life. And so he wrote in his journal that night: "I hate to see John Schaeffer falling for all this. I should just say to him, 'Don't bother, it's a mirage.' Or must everyone discover for himself?"

He felt himself growing more and more tired, deep inside, as he sat there, so tired he was literally unable to move. He blessed the darkness, the fact that gradually the people on the bench began slipping away with a deprecating joke to pursue some boys who had just slipped in through the gate. The sudden arrival of a trio we'd never seen before caused everyone but myself to slip off the bench and go after the new boys. Malone and I fell silent for a long time, watching the activity around us, listening to the occasional wail of a siren down Second Avenue. There was something almost peaceful in the park that faced us: the bell tower of the church bathed in floodlights, the banks of leaves etched in brass by the amber-colored streetlights, the flower-bordered fountain, all might have been in a little park in Baltimore or Boston. In fact, as we watched from our dark grotto, a young couple strolled past, arm in arm, as their Irish Setter ran around the cleared space of dust beneath two trees. They stopped and watched the dog run off, and then the man started to call it back. "Sugar! Sugar!" he called. His voice carried in the dark summer night, gentle, calm, domestic: "Su-u-u-u-gar..." and finally the Irish Setter burst out of the darkness and stopped, panting, at his feet. The man put the leash on its collar, and together they drifted out of the park, passing for a moment beneath the streetlight. "Oh," Malone said, passing a hand over his face, "how easy it must be, how easy... to come out in the evening, to call your dog, to walk home with your wife's arm in yours. Have you ever noticed," he said, stirred now by this vision of domestic bliss that was beyond his reach, and shocked earlier that evening to find himself crying in the subway on his way home from a client, "that gay people secrete everything in each other's presence but tears? They come on each other, they piss on each other, or shit, but never tears! The only sign of tenderness they never secrete in each other's presence. They come, piss and shit together, but they cry alone! God!" he said, with a short, hard laugh. And then beside me I felt a shudder pass through his body and he fell silent. A man stopped at the bench and held out his hand. Malone removed a roll of bills from his pocket and gave it to him. The bum walked on, too drunk to know how much had been given him. It was the money Malone had earned by impersonating so many dreams, on his trips to these apartments all over town. He liked to get rid of that money as fast as he earned it, spending it on things that left no trace. I looked at his face in the half-light of one of the streetlights. He looked like a man who has been crossing a desert, a place without shadows, for some time now. He resembled those people at the beach in summer who fell asleep in the sun and awakened with parched, dry lips, and skin drawn so tight it gave their eyes the hollow look of a prophet who has long been in the wilderness. There was no shelter for him anywhere and so he continued to sit there in the darkness, watching the others look for what had once enraptured him and which now left him sick with loneliness. We were still sitting there, in fact, with some people who were arguing over who had the biggest cock in New York, when Sutherland walked into the park after dropping John Schaeffer off after an evening on the town together. "Oh, you must know!" one of them said to Sutherland. "Doesn't Allan Miller have the biggest dick in New York?"