Dancer From the Dance: A Novel (26 page)

As Sutherland surrendered to the white pill he had extracted from the little silver case, sacks of ice arrived in wheelbarrows trundled over from the grocery store, and the caterers set up the bars around the rooms. Outside, the beach emptied as people went back to get their costumes ready and the beautiful, unnoticed twilight fell on the deserted sea. To the seaplanes descending from the violet sky the Island glowed one last instant in the rays of the sun sinking into the Great South Bay. Its golden dune grass caught the light and burned in intenser gold as the rest of the Island was bathed in blue light and rumors of suicide. It lasted, this peerless dusk, for just an instant as Malone sat gossiping on the harbor dock, and he came nearer to the people in the seaplanes, with the faces, trees, and boats, and they could almost hear the soft roar of gossip rising from the holly trees. Everyone at Tea Dance was talking about the boy who had jumped to his death that afternoon from a rooftop in the city, and when that topic was exhausted, their love affairs of the previous week, the new faces, the music last night, the party to come, and—at least in the circle who sat with Malone when I arrived at the dock and joined him there—how they planned to fly back to the city after the party to go to the Everard Baths. Before leaving to return to their house for cocktails, they had persuaded Malone that he would fly back with them.

But once they left, Malone looked at me with a smile and only shrugged: happy to watch in silence the air turn milky blue, the white steeples and sails across the bay, without the demands and needs of other people. A great peace descended on us. We hardly had a thing to say to one another because we had seen this so many summers. I glanced at the fellow beside me. He was one of us now—and I began to wonder why Malone had fascinated us so. He wasn't, in the end, any of the things we had thought all these years: a doctor, a designer, a victim of bone disease, an Episcopalian protégé. Of all the faces we had been in love with, some in fact had been these things; but most of them, whoever they were, had disappeared to farms upstate, California, or the Hamptons. Only we were still on the circuit. In a country where one is no more than what one does (a country of workers) or the money one possesses, Malone had ceased, like us, to have any identity at all. He was simply a smile now, a set of perfect manners, a wistful promise, as insubstantial as the breeze blowing the hair across his forehead. And he had been, all those years, just as lost as we were, living on faces, music, the hope of love, and getting farther and farther away from any chance of it. In a year he would be cleaning houses and living alone in some obscure room in the East Village and seeing none of his former friends; and when he went out to the old places to dance, he wouldn't dance—but stand on the edge of the floor, dancing alone, perhaps, or shaking a tambourine when an especially good song came on. It happened to us all. It was either that or travel somewhere else, like Montana, Oregon, where he could begin the illusion again, with new faces, bodies, eyes to fall in love with: the occasional stranger passing through. A beautiful dark-eyed boy in a red bathing suit was floating past on a sailboat at that moment. He looked at Malone. Their glances held, and the dark-eyed youth continued moving, out into the channel, turning his head in the sunset breeze to keep his eyes on Malone as long as he could, until his boat was but a blue and rosy blur in the viscous dusk settling on the bay. "That's where I want all my relationships," Malone smiled. "Disappearing into the sunset in the west." For there were Latin youths in San Francisco, surely, and in Chicago, too; in Los Angeles, and in the public parks of Bogota and Rio de Janeiro. This thought—of all the boys he might sleep with still (the comfort of every romantic heart)—vanished in the memory of the one boy he had not slept with, when another boat went by. It bore four water skiers going out for a final run, and one of them, a handsome Puerto Rican doctor, called to Malone: "Did you hear about Bob? It broke my heart!" And Malone only nodded, and then shook his head.

It was the most beautiful illusion of homosexuals and romantics alike: if only I'd loved that one...

What had that twenty-three-year-old young man, whose blond beauty had caused even Malone to believe in the springs of his wasted youth again the day he saw him at the gym, done by dying? His face took on a sad cast as he spoke of the news that had put the whole island into shock, as shocked as it could be, and which, as he spoke of it now, made Malone's limbs begin to tremble under his cotton shirt. That twenty-three-year-old beauty who had his whole life before him; that boy from Idaho—who had slashed his wrists, and then his throat, and then hurled himself nine floors from the top of his apartment building to the steaming pavement below on this hottest of all hot afternoons just four hours ago in the city? What had he accomplished by that? Malone knew the dead boy's lover, he had been Malone's own ideal once, and their love had been for him one of the reassuring things of this neurotic life; and now the boy, with his fine bones, his gazellelike grace, his long thighs, and high buttocks, had slashed his veins, hurled himself down to that soiled, grimy sidewalk Malone himself had walked nearly every day, lined with a dozen cheap grocerias and bodegas in front of which men sat drinking whiskey and making bets. This blond youth from Idaho had smashed himself against the hot, hard sidewalk before the eyes of those drunken cardplayers, hating his youth, his beauty, his lover. Of all the people Malone had listened to, had tried to help, he now felt responsible somehow for this one's suicide; for he had spent many afternoons at the YMCA with him doing gymnastics. "Why didn't I sleep with him?" he said. "When we're all so terribly alone. The least we can do in this life is love one another... just a hug and a kiss..."

He was right, of course; but how could you love everyone? If only enough of us loved enough—perhaps by some arithmetical progression, everyone would be given this gift. But that was useless speculation for those of us left behind, who were not going to hurl ourselves off a building in the pressure of a summer beat wave, a lover's quarrel, a drug, I thought as we sat there now. There was no such end for the rest of us, or glorious legacy of love: Fate in America was quite different, as Malone knew staring at the waters at his feet—one went back to work, bought a house, accepted. As a child Malone had consecrated his life to Christ; as an adult, to some adventurous ideal of homosexual love—well, both had left him flat. We sat there in silence for a while as the throngs who had come down to the bay with drinks to see the sunset went back to their boats, and parties, and restaurants. "Well, darling," Malone said, standing up with that necessary ability, acquired over the years, to eschew the serious and return to the blithe, to move, literally, from funeral to party, "I'm off to set my hair and choose the right nail polish." He looked down at me and smiled. "This is my engagement party, after all." And we walked off the dock, even as a seaplane at our backs touched down with John Schaeffer, two elderly designers holding Lhasa Aposos in their laps, and the discaire who would play at Sutherland's party, a seventeen-year-old Moroccan from Brooklyn they had discovered on one of their forays to the boroughs.

By the time the pontoons touched the water, darkness had descended, and John Schaeffer came ashore into a crowd of people streaming home from Tea Dance, brushing their bare chests, bronze arms, listening to their warm voices spilling laughter and gossip on the evening air. The lights in the harbor came on, their reflections trembled in the water, a breeze fluttered the awnings, and the millionaire and the discaire—who had never been here before—searched up and down the boardwalks till they found Sutherland standing in a nightgown and wig atop a house blazing in floodlights and a mist of sea salt. Sutherland had awakened to eat supper. The three of them shared fried chicken, as Sutherland, still groggy with sleep, tried to dispose of John Schaeffer's excited questions. "These men I flew out with," John Schaeffer said, "one was taking a German friend here for the first time, and I overheard him tell the German, 'You must remember that the boys who come out here are all in love with themselves.'" He put down the fried chicken. "Do you think that's all it is?" said John Schaeffer. "They're in love with themselves?"

Sutherland dangled a wing and looked at him, speechless, for a moment. "Well, surely you know we homosexuals are just a form of ingrown toenails..."

"But—" said John Schaeffer. "But I'm in love with Malone, not with myself."

"Of course," said Sutherland. "Oh, don't worry," he sighed, nibbling at the wing, "you have a cock thick as a sausage, love will most certainly come your way in one form or another. By the way," he said to the discaire, "what are you doing tonight? I think it very important for the hostess and the discaire to be on the same drug. Do you think I should have put it on the invitation? I suspect that most girls will be doing THC, don't you?" And they began to discuss, Sutherland and the discaire, the various drugs that had risen and fallen in popularity that summer, and if any Angel Dust had arrived recently from the Coast. John Schaeffer took this opportunity to move to the sink and begin washing dishes as he listened to this outlandish conversation.

"Oh," Sutherland yawned, "I'm too
old
for this. Centuries ago these affairs used to leave me a quivering lump of jelly, but now, I want them all to go home, and they haven't even come. Oh good evening, darling," he smiled as the first huge headdress swayed through the door.

There are parties and there are parties on Fire Island, and Sutherland, who had devoted himself to nothing very purposefully the past fifteen years of his life, had learned along the way to give a party: He had been to so many, he knew exactly why the great ones were great. It was a public event. People had come by train and boat for this one, from the Hamptons, and Montauk; from Paris and San Francisco by plane. People from the past he had not seen in five years reappeared and were lined up on the boardwalk outside, feathers rustling in the breeze. People had spent a week's salary on their costumes, had made sure
Women's Wear
would be there, and
Interview;
someone from cable TV was interviewing the guests on the boardwalk for Anton Parrish; but so strange were most of the faces to Sutherland that he was grateful to be suddenly embraced by the Swamp Lady—an ancient queen who had been coming to the Pines since it was a collection of shacks occupied by poets, and who had seen it become a Malibu mobbed each summer by hordes of youths. She came. Theatrical agents and actresses, models and a new designer's entourage; the Warhol stars of ages past; men who flew in from Topeka and Dallas, eye surgeons from Omaha and Phoenix; boys who had been living in Rome for ten years: All of them came. To Sutherland's dismay. "My dear," he breathed as another crowd of strange queens went by, "who are these people?". And they began lamenting their old age.

By three the discaire was playing sambas for this crowd of unknown creatures, and the platform built over the pool had begun to bounce visibly to the beat of the dancers, when a stockbroker from Kuhn, Loeb cleared the floor to whirl around in a passionate dance in swirls of pale green organdy. Sutherland tried to place a scene vaguely similar in his mind: Had he cleared the floor at the Leo Party in 1969 too? In the same dress? But the memory failed him, and he sighed and said to Malone: "Each tab of acid, they tell me, destroys a hundred neurons."

So Sutherland and Malone gawked at a quintet of handsome Latin youths who were dancing with their arms on each other's shoulders under the holly tree. "Young girls who come into the canyon," Malone decided.

At four there was a commotion in the room and they were delighted to recognize Lavalava and Spanish Lily at the door arguing with a guard. "She threw garbage in my face!" the guard said. "She doesn't have an invitation and I told her to go home!" Lavalava flicked a pink boa at the guard and began expelling a rapid stream of Spanish. "Oh, she may stay!" Sutherland said, loyal to his nights at the Twelfth Floor and remembering that Lavalava had murdered a friend of his years ago by voodoo. "We don't want her going home and making little dolls of
us,"
he murmured to Malone. The furious guard left. Lavalava beckoned to a companion to come forward, a tall, dark, handsome man in pink tights and green suspenders over his bare chest. There was something prepossessing about him as he stood for a moment surveying the crowd, something still, motionless, and sinister even before Sutherland gasped: "Frankie!"

Was it Frankie? Or someone who looked like Frankie, for there are a dozen Frankies every season on the circuit in New York: dark, saturnine boys with grave eyes and faces that one instantly imagines on a pillow in a shadowy room. There were several Frankies at this party alone, and when Malone arrived from his dinner party in Water Island and Sutherland told him his fears, Malone said, "Oh, I know, he was on the boat coming over. Don't worry. It's over at last. He's staying with this rich old Cuban feather queen, he loves the Island, he has as much interest in me as a used popper." They watched the real Frankie from the balcony, standing on the floor beneath them in a circle of people who were putting poppers to his nose, and dancing around him, and when Frankie stripped off his shirt, Malone smiled. For it had come full circle. It was the final proof, the final piece of data that confirmed Malone's view of the whole world: watching Frankie dance without his shirt, adored by all the people near him, conscious of his beauty. And he wasn't the only one. Malone stood with Sutherland on the balcony marveling over the number of them. So many of the people at this party they did not even know—especially the young ones, come into the canyon for the first time, quiet as deer, some of them, coming to your hand for salt: their dark eyes wide and gleaming with the wonder and fear we had all felt at seeing for the first time life as our dreams had always imagined it... at seeing so many others like themselves, at seeing so many people with whom they could fall in love. The old enchantment composed of lights, music, people was transfixing them for the first time, and it made their faces even more touching.