Dancer From the Dance: A Novel (9 page)

A year went by as if that night had never occurred. Malone was chaste. The widow died the following spring, and Malone moved into town and took an apartment in the northwest section of the city; and he lived a quiet life. He played squash with the associate who had married because he felt one should be married at thirty. He visited museums and gazed at his favorite Watteau, and drove to sites of Civil War battles in the surrounding hills. But his interest in history now seemed to him an interest in death, and the cold skin of his face as he stood on a tawny hill staring at the bare trees against the pale blue sky no longer exhilarated his soul but made him feel condemned against his will to the company of nature. His mind began to stray over the intricacies of loan prepayments and he could no longer plow through the papers on his desk with his usual celerity. In the middle of the day, he fell into that abyss he carried within him now, the knowledge that he could not live alone forever, or without love. This fact changed his attitude toward his work. It seemed little more than a mercenary exchange for dining out, tennis lessons, and a week in summer at the French cathedrals. The bourgeois arrangement of the world, his own parasitical relationship with a vast, impersonal economy by which he drew off his living, repelled him strangely. He read Heine's remark, "Fame isn't worth a milkmaid's kiss," and thought: Neither is money, nor comfort, nor prestige.

On his most miserable nights he would go out to a public park in Washington and simply sit watching these compatriots of his—these citizens of hell, he thought gloomily, this
paseo
of the damned—till birds began to sing around him and he hurried home at dawn, like a man who stands on a beach a long time at the water's edge and then decides not to swim that evening after all. The water is colder than he thought, the sky forbidding; he loses heart. He sat at his desk and, like a penitent in the confessional, pored over the journal his love for the gardener had impelled him to begin. The brief paragraphs therein did not even contain the young man's name, but referred to him as X (so appalled was Malone by his own emotions). Malone had been raised by a lady both Irish and Catholic, in a good bourgeois home in which careless table manners were a sin, much less this storm in his heart.

"My only hope," he wrote in his hardbound ledger, resembling the account books of store clerks in the early part of this century, "is with those men circling the fountain. They are my fate and if I wish to have Life, it must be with
them.
What is most remarkable, I have no choice. I who have never been constrained by poverty, disease, accident, am now constrained by this. God's joke. His little joke. To keep us human. To humble the proud. And I have been so proud."

It seemed sentimental to think of it as the cross he must bear in life, but if it wasn't that, what was it? The sound of a late-night show drifted down the hall from the television of the woman who lived next door to him, and its very laughter, cold and eerie and distant, made his heart beat faster; for he himself was dying. He wrote again: "You are doomed to a life that will repeat itself again and again, as do all lives—for lives are static things, readings of already written papers—but whereas some men are fortunate to repeat a good pattern, others have the opposite luck—and you can surely see by now that your life is doomed to this same humiliation, endlessly repeated.

"Imagine a pleasure in which the moment of satisfaction is simultaneous with the moment of destruction: to kiss is to poison; lifting to your lips this face after which you have ached, dreamed, longed for, the face shatters, every time." And with one final stroke he scrawled across the page: "
IF THE EYE OFFENDS THEE, PLUCK IT OUT."

But how was he to? The great fault in his character was slipping after all these years, was giving way as he went about the empty rituals of his life in the succeeding weeks. His life was a sham. He hated the law; its Pharisaical quibbling over the division of property seemed another aspect of death-in-life. He wasn't even good at it. He had achieved everything only through the most dogged hard work. He hadn't one of those minds that dealt with contract disputes and the Byzantine innuendoes of the tax code, like one of those mechanical devices that slice up a vegetable in twelve seconds. He was more than ever certain that he had a vague romantic destiny. Little wonder that when he looked at strangers on the street now, his unquiet yearning for rescue went out to them. No one came to his aid—till late one night on a visit to New York City he was working in an office on Wall Street, high in a fluorescent cell, on a promissory note for the Republic of Zaire, when a messenger boy came in with a batch of Telexes from his boss in London. Malone, who felt at that moment like a rat gnawing his leg off to get free of a trap, looked up at him. How could he know that his desires, his loneliness, were written on his face as clear as characters on a printed page? For that was his charm, that his feelings were always in his eyes and face. He could hide nothing. The messenger boy, a young Puerto Rican from The Bronx in maroon pants and tennis sneakers, put the Telexes down on the desk and then let his hand fall on Malone's back. The hand drew a circle on his back, and then strayed around to his chest and stomach; and Malone turned to look at him. They kissed. It was the kiss of life. He felt a wild gladness in his heart. Someone entered the outer office, the boy left, and Malone sat there with an expression on his face such as the Blessed Virgin wears in paintings of the Annunciation.

In summer New York is a tropical city—in all seasons, for that matter—and when Malone left the office late that night the streets were thronged with faces that glistened beneath the streetlights. Every street his taxi passed seemed to hold a terrible promise. He went to the Yale Club and wrote a long letter to his parents explaining his unhappiness with the law, and the next day he resigned from Courdet Brothers in order to "pursue a career in journalism." What he wished to pursue was a career in love. One night he had got lost on the subway and had come up in Sheridan Square, which was filled, that summer evening, with young men staring at each other, talking in boisterous throngs. Malone headed there now to find a room nearby. It was the middle of August. He did not wish to be the man to whom nothing was ever to happen. He vanished meanwhile from his former friends and family as if he had gone to Bali, or died in a traffic accident. He was completely free now to pursue with the same passion for success he had brought to squash matches and the law, the one thing that had eluded him utterly till now: love.

For love, he felt as he watched the Puerto Rican boys unloading soda pop for the Gem Spa on his new corner, love was all in life that mattered; without it, there was no point in having lived at all. And so the last Sunday evening of August 1969 found him sitting on his stoop like a monk who comes finally to the shrine of Santiago de Compostela—devoted not to Christ, in whom he no longer believed, but to love.

How vacant, how ghostly some sections of Manhattan are on summer evenings after dark: those cobblestoned streets on whose bluish stones no neon light reflects—at most an isolated bulb above the door of an abandoned factory, on a corner where four deserted warehouses stare blankly at each other—streets resembling New Orleans more than New York, where the dark sidewalks are covered with rusted metal awnings, like the verandas of the South, all deserted under the white summer moon beside the glassy river. If souls whose future has not been decided truly wait in a vacuum between heaven and hell called limbo, then Malone occupied a similar realm on his arrival in New York. That first summer he was a ghost: Sitting in his room late at night, bathed in clammy sweat, he listened to the odd and poignant sounds in the building around him. A woman coughed in the next apartment; someone raised a rotting window in the dark night, a man screamed at his wife, the toilet flushed, a radio chattered an uninterrupted stream of news. By the time he arrived each evening at 125 Wall Street—where he typed up that day's documents for a patent lawyer he never saw—the financial district was as deserted as the floor of a factory after the whistle has blown, and men were scurrying home to their own erotic dreams. By the time he left, there was no one abroad but homosexuals and thieves, and it was with these he wandered.

He wandered—in a very tentative way—through those dark clots of people who coagulate in empty lots, parked tracks, alleyways, worshiping Priapus under the summer moon. Little wonder that he wandered in these ghostly places late summer nights: He was half-waiting to be born. Having vanished from his former life, having shed his previous self with the suits he had left behind in a basement in Washington, he was a ghost, in fact, waiting to come to life through love. He fell in love with people he did not know how to meet. He began carrying around with him the momentary faces of men seen in restaurants, on street-corners, in the subways, and fed on their imagined loves as a roach feeds on crumbs. He knew from the looks on faces he surprised by looking up, that he too was being stored in other human hearts. Then he might have fallen victim to the great homosexual disease—the sanctity of the face seen and never spoken to—but fortunately for Malone this hopeless romanticism was not given time to develop further, for he met someone and fell in love.

He was standing on a subway platform on the Upper West Side very late one night, at the dead hour of four A.M., when out of the darkness Malone had been watching for the lights of the train, emerged four men, like miners coming out of a shaft. They carried lanterns and coiled wire and brooms, and wore bright orange vests, and one of them caused Malone's heart to lurch; for he looked at Malone with eyes so still, and calm, and grave, it was as if a medieval age lived in them, as he came out of the darkness with his lantern. He looked at Malone once, and Malone looked at him, and then he climbed up onto the platform with the other men—and a moment later, with a low rumble, and the toot of a horn, the train roared into the station. Malone got on, feeling he was in some way avoiding the purpose of his life; with the calm despair of someone who goes to his death, he stepped onto the train and composed himself and stared at an advertisement for lamb chops, and the subway started, and took him hurtling away from the central core of his whole life, the reason he had come to New York.

But what does anyone do in those circumstances, but get on the train? The door slides shut, and you go dashing off away from what in the very interior of your heart means most to you.

He carried this face like a banner in his heart for weeks, and then he saw him again on the sidewalk outside the Bank Leumi on Broadway and he smiled with relief at this evidence of another existence; for now he would not have to haunt the tunnels of the subway late at night in search of him. The man got in a taxi and drove off before Malone could reach him. A month went by, but Malone felt he was above ground now, in the streets, and left it up to God if they should meet again; and with this fatalism, and calm, and pure devotion, he was not at all prepared to walk into the V.D. Clinic on Ninth Avenue one afternoon for a blood test and find him sitting there in the waiting room, sullenly reading a magazine. He looked up at Malone from his reading. The same timeless pause occurred, as if the world had suddenly stopped its hysterical motion; and Malone stood there for a moment in the middle of the floor, not knowing what to do. To meet their venereal selves in this place! The nurse called, "Mr. Olivieri," and the man got up and went into the office and Malone sat down, heart pounding, and thought: At least I know his name.

At his own interview with the doctor, in which those physical riots of his soul were so clinically discussed, usually to Malone's amusement, he could only sit on the edge of his chair thinking that all his fornication till now was a blind thrashing about, that he must be healthy this time, for love itself was at that moment in the waiting room. Malone rushed outside to see him on the curbstone, waiting for him. "Hello," he said. "Hello," said Malone. He had wondered what he would say and now as they talked he realized it didn't matter: Anything would serve. They moved into an abandoned building in lower Manhattan. Summer was just beginning, and they were as alone in that part of town as if they had been living in a meadow in Vermont. The rotting factories, cobblestoned alleys, grass growing between the stones, the lots strewn with broken glass and abandoned, rusting fenders had a rural stillness and peace to them under the incandescent clouds floating overhead. Frankie left a wife and child for Malone. He had been living with them in Bayonne, where he had grown up and married. He disliked the city but he moved there to live with Malone. He had the qualities that Malone had learned to notice in boys from New Jersey, who were, somehow, kinder than those who had come to Manhattan to pursue careers. He had a daytime job now, having been promoted in the transit department out of the nighttime crew. Frankie had never gone to a bar, had never wanted to, had heard of Fire Island but considered it "a bunch of queens" and lived a life that, save for the fact that he slept with Malone, was hardly homosexual.