Dancer From the Dance: A Novel (3 page)

Well, now the village of Sayville had been left in perfect peace. The strenuous season was behind, and as the taxi drove, more slowly, through the puddles of sunlight and crimson leaves, we passed one tableau after another of small-town life. Kids were playing football in the town park, and another football game swept across the high-school field, and boys on bicycles were drawing lazy circles in the supermarket parking lot, and families were out in their backyards raking leaves. It was the sort of scene Malone turned sentimental over. He always passed through Sayville with a lingering regret for its big white houses and friendly front yards with picket fences and climbing roses. He always looked back as he went through, saying this might be that perfect town he was always searching for, where elms and lawns would be combined with the people he loved. But those summer taxis drove inevitably though it, like vans bearing prisoners who are being transferred from one prison to another—from Manhattan to Fire Island—when all we dreamed of, really, in our deepest dreams, was just such a town as this, quiet, green, untroubled by the snobberies and ambition of the larger world; the world we could not quit.

"Isn't this beautiful!" Malone would exclaim as we drove past the girl doing handstands on the lawn, a young woman walking a flock of children down a dappled sidewalk. "Why don't we take a house here next summer instead?" But he knew we wouldn't, and he knew he wouldn't, for even now the drums were in our blood, we sat forward almost hearing them across the bay, and the van raced on through the streets so that the driver could hustle back for another load of pleasure-seekers, so bent on pleasure they were driving right through Happiness, it seemed, a quieter brand of existence that flourished under these green elms. We kept driving right through all the dappled domesticity, like prisoners, indeed, being moved from jail to jail imprisoned in our own sophistication. The truth was the town reminded Malone of his days at boarding school in Vermont; the sight of a football arcing across a green wall of woods made him sigh with a passionate regret. He always looked like a student who has just come in off the playing fields, eyes glowing from an afternoon of soccer. He always looked like that, even in the depths of a subway station, on the dingiest street in Manhattan.

"People are fools to go back after Labor Day," Malone murmured that sunny afternoon. "We should come
out
after Labor Day," he said; but then he was always trying to refine his pleasures. He loved the shore in autumn when the crowds had vanished, and in the winter he used to go out dancing at five in the morning, and why? Because then the crowd had gone, the discaire was no longer playing for them, but for his friends, and that was the best dancing. And that was why he wanted all his friends to be with him in the country and watch the seasons change in a rustic valley he never found.

The nasal voice that crackled on the taxi's radio in summer was silent now, as silent as the still air, except for a single burst of static requesting the driver to pick up Mrs. Truscott, who wanted to go shopping, at 353 Elm Street. The driver said he would pick the lady up in five minutes—news that must have gladdened her heart, for in the summer Mrs. Truscott had to wait for the minions of advertising agencies, the doctors, designers, models, and producers to get to their houses on the beach.

As we waited at that street-corner in the vivid, fiery air of late October, we stared dumbly through the windows at the autumn we'd forgotten, living in the city, the autumn blazing out here in the villages along the bay. The van went down one last dappled street and then rounded a bend to present us with a sight that never failed to make our hearts beat faster: the marshy inlets where the trees stopped and the masts of ships rose instead into the air.

The ferries had stopped running a month ago, however, and as we waited for the motorboat we'd hired to take us across, the only sound in all that crisp, clean air was the sound of hammers clattering around us as men in woolen caps repaired their boats in dry dock. Malone had said one day. "I am not spending next summer here. I'll go out west, I'll live in a tent in Africa, I'll do anything but waste another summer on the Island."

"Waste?" said Sutherland, turning his head slightly as if he had heard a bird chirp behind him in the bushes. "Who can waste a summer on the Island? Why, it's the only antidote to death we have. Besides," he said, blowing out a stream of smoke, "you know very well that if you did go to Africa, you would be lying in your tent among the gazelles and lions, and you would not even pull back the flap to look at them, because you will be wondering only who is dancing with Bruce West and whether Luis is playing 'Law of the Land.' Don't be a fool," he said. "Don't think for a moment of escaping. You can't!"

There was nothing very sinister about the place that Malone had protested hopelessly against that day when our motor-boat puttered into the harbor across the bay. The Island lay bathed in the same autumn light falling on Sayville. Only one big white boat was still moored there, sharing the inlet with a family of migratory geese, and as we floated past, a big woman in a cerise caftan sat playing cards on the after-deck with a young man in a hooded sweat shirt. They waved to us, improbable couple, and we waved back. The awnings had been taken down from the Botel, the sliding glass doors were boarded up with sheets of plywood, pasted with the dead leaves an earlier rainstorm had blown against them. It had never looked so bare. There wasn't a soul in sight when we got off.

It was easy to see how thieves from the villages of Long Island crossed over in the winter and looted houses. We passed one big, forlorn place after another, houses with turrets and skylights, houses with pennants drooping in the windless air, houses like castles, houses like cottages, houses hiding in the woods, and houses on display. The sagging electrical lines glistened in the clear October light. Leaves had accumulated under the holly trees, and portions of the shrubbery had turned a dull maroon. Above, the thinnest skein of clouds served only to emphasize the aching blue. We walked to a high point and saw, stretching down the beach, in the nooks of houses, a string of bright turquoise swimming pools, absurdly full. When we got to Malone's, we stopped at the pool and stared at it—the pool that all the Puerto Rican boys used to dive into from the balcony, the roof, in the exhilaration of drugs—and then we walked around the deck and looked for a moment at the listless sea. It was the green of an empty Coke bottle. It was very still. But it had been very stormy, for the beach bore no resemblance at all to the one we had sprawled on all summer long—it had been completely washed away, and with it the summer itself: the music, clothes, dances, lovers. The sea had gouged out a new beach, with new coves and hillocks. I turned back to the house—famous for its electricity bills (three thousand a month), for the parties, for the people who had come here and their amusements. In an airy bedroom on the second floor, overlooking the pool and the ocean, we opened the closets and the drawers and began sorting Malone's clothes.

The clothes! The Ralph Lauren polo shirts, the Halston suits, the Ultrasuede jackets, T-shirts of every hue, bleached fatigues and painter's pants, plaid shirts, transparent plastic belts, denim jackets and bomber jackets, combat fatigues and old corduroys, hooded sweat shirts, baseball caps, and shoes lined up under a forest of shoe trees on the floor; someone had once left the house and all he could tell his friends was that Malone had forty-four shoe trees in his closet. There were drawers and drawers of jump suits, shirts by Ronald Kolodzie, Estée Lauder lotions and astringents, and drawers and drawers of bathing suits, of which he had twenty-eight, in racing and boxer styles. And then there were the drawers of the clothes Malone really wore: the old clothes he had kept since his days at boarding school in Vermont—old khaki pants, button-down shirts with small collars (for someone who ran around with the trendiest designers, he loathed changes in style), a pair of rotten tennis sneakers, an old tweed jacket-. There was one drawer filled with nothing but thirty-seven T-shirts in different colors, colors he had bleached them or dyed them, soft plum and faded shrimp and celery green and all shades of yellow, his best color. He had scoured the army-navy surplus stores in lower Manhattan looking for T-shirts, for underwear, plaid shirts, and old, faded jeans. There was a closet hung with thirty-two plaid shirts, and a bureau filled entirely with jeans faded various shades of blue.

I finally stood up, depressed at all these things—for what were they but emblems of Malone's innocent heart, his inexhaustible desire to be liked?

There are boys in New York whose lovers die of drugs, and who give the dead lover's clothes to their new lover without a second thought; but a dead man's clothes have always seemed ghoulish to me, and so I gave up sorting the clothes, and left it all to my friend and began wandering through the rest of the house.

The house, with all its redundant pavilions, had been taken by an Italian princess, who had remained in Manhattan all summer in her air-conditioned rooms above Central Park eating hot dogs—and who wanted the place there in case she should want, some summer day, to go to the beach. She had taken it and Sutherland—with his peculiar talent for producing these bizarre benefactors—had used it the latter half of the summer for himself and Malone.

But the house was silent now, and as I turned and walked back through the empty rooms, they were devoid of the spirits who had once wasted all that electricity, both human and inhuman, humming through the rooms. A succession of houseboys had passed through the place and they had been replaced as casually as fuses. One of them, a dancer from Iowa, had been discovered renting rooms to strangers for fifty dollars a day during the week. He later had his head blown off on St. Mark's Place by a Mafia hit man when he started a new career as a drug dealer; his funeral had been more glittering than any party of the winter.

Well, these personalities had vanished and now the house was empty. And as I wandered through, I felt a guilty pleasure I have always known in places the crowd has departed—a dormitory room on graduation day, a church after mass, bungalows by the sea when the season is past. There was something mute yet eloquent about such places, as if they were speaking a very old tale of loss, futility, and peace. Post offices in small towns, late at night...

October on Fire Island was lovely partly because it had been abandoned by the crowd. And wasn't that the whole allure of love, and why Malone had been such a genius at it: our struggle, always, to isolate from the mob the single individual, having whom society meant nothing? There were lovers whose affair was purely public, whose union consisted of other people's considering them lovers, but the reason I loved the beach in autumn (besides the elegance of the weather, the enameled light that layered everything from carpenters to butterflies to the tips of the dune grass) was that now the false social organism had vanished and left it what Malone had always wished it to be: a fishing village, in which, presumably, no one lied to one another.

A sudden wish to feast on the past made me sit down on the steps leading to the beach for a moment, the steps where in the hot August sunlight we had rested our feet from the burning sand and shaded our eyes to look out at the figures in the dazzling light. There had been a dwarf that summer, a squat hydrocephalic woman who wandered up and down the beach among those handsome young men like a figure in an allegory. And there had been the Viet Nam veteran who had lost a leg, and walked along the water's edge in a leather jacket in the hottest weather, hobbling with a cane. He had drowned that Sunday so many swimmers had drowned. Not twenty feet from the steps on which I sat now, a corpse had lain all afternoon beneath a sheet because the police were too busy to remove it, and five feet away from the corpse, people lay taking the sun and admiring a man who had just given the kiss of life to a young boy. Death and desire, death and desire.

The whole long, mad summer came back in the warmth of that pale, distant sun burning high above the deserted sea. The summer gym shorts had become fashionable as bathing suits, the summer Bruce West (who each spring contemplated suicide because he could not rise to the occasion again—of being the most voluptuous, beautiful man on the Island, the homosexual myth everyone adored—but managed to go to the gym, take his pills, and master yet another season) shaved his body and wore jockstraps to Tea Dance, and his lover died of an overdose of Angel Dust and Quaaludes. The summer "I’ll Always Love My Mama" lasted all season and we never grew tired of it. The summer that began with the Leo Party and ended with the Pink and Green Party (which Sutherland had given, and from which Malone had vanished). The summer nude sunbathing began, the summer Todd Keller, from Laguna Beach, was the "hot number" and Angel Dust the favorite drug. The summer Kenny Lamar was arrested in the bar for sniffing a popper, the summer certain people got into piss, the summer his guests threw a birthday cake into Edwin Giglio's face, they all loathed him so, the summer Lyman Quinn's deck collapsed at the Heat Wave Party, with two thousand people on it; the summer a whale beached itself near Water Island in July, and a reindeer appeared swimming offshore in August. The summer Louis Deron dressed in gas masks, the summer Vuitton became pretentious, along with Cartier tank watches, and Lacostes were out. The summer the backpacking look began, the summer the grocery store changed hands, and people began to worry about the garbage floating three miles out in the Atlantic Ocean, the summer George Renfrew took the Kane House and built a new pool for the Esther Williams party, the summer the new policeman drove everyone crazy, and Horst Jellaby began flying the flag of the country of his lover-of-the-week: One only had to see the flag of Argentina to know he had snared the gorgeous physician visiting from Buenos Aires, or the flag of Colombia to know the coach of the national soccer team was in his bed at that moment. The summer the models moved to Water Island to get away from the mobs who had started to come to this place in greater numbers each summer. The summer two Cessnas collided in midair and the sky rained bodies into a grove of trees where everyone was in the middle of having afternoon sex. The summer some nameless ribbon clerk died trying to sniff a popper at the bottom of a pool... it was a blur, all of it, of faces, and parties, and weekends and storms; it vanished, as did all weeks, months, years in New York in one indistinguishable blur; life speeded up, life so crowded that nothing stood out in relief, and people waited, as they had one autumn weekend here, for a hurricane to provide some kind of sublime climax that never came...