And embracing Frankie those hot afternoons, Malone returned to the core of his existence: the hot afternoons beneath the rustling date palms on a green patio, his mother's perfume, the odor of his father's crisp white shirts and the air conditioning that clung to them, the lapis lazuli lagoons, schooners, palm tree fronds glistening in the light as if water streamed down their tips, the hot blast of a factory whistle at one o'clock, naps in the afternoon, the black women in scarves praying the rosary at church; and the false years of dutiful behavior fell away and Malone felt as peaceful as he had sitting by the washtubs with Irene as she sang songs and straightened "her hair with a hot iron. Love was the key: The popular songs he heard on the radio, Malone realized now, were in the end perfectly accurate. Each time he ran his lips across the concave depression of Frankie's stomach, he banished further the nights of loneliness, the widow's cold cream, the sterile years of his wasted youth, and he burrowed deeper at the thought of it into Frankie's flesh. He looked up at those moments to find, Frankie gazing down at him with an expression of mild curiosity, and wonderment, at Malone's passion.
Frankie wondered about Malone's past: Frankie had left, after all, his wife and child for him. But it made Malone curiously impatient when he detected in Frankie an eagerness to hear about the schools he had attended and the places he had lived, for that aspect of himself he had decided was worthless. Frankie read the papers, asking Malone to pronounce for him the words he had never come across before, and tell him what they meant. Malone no longer read the papers. They meant nothing to him. He was in love. Newspapers only summoned up to him the forlorn Sundays of his past; in the same way Frankie hated tuna fish because he had eaten it so much when he was poor. Frankie was no longer poor, but he still wanted to make more money; he read the want ads, and wrote down the addresses of schools he heard advertised on the radio. He came home with ideas and schemes. "Maybe I should be an electrician," he said, "we could move to Jersey and have a house. Just you and me and all those honkies." He wanted to have a skill, he believed in the unions, he planned for a while to go into the television repair business. He was good with his hands. He was never sick a day at work, even while he discussed his future with Malone, but he wanted to be his own boss. "You need a skill," he said. He blew out a stream of smoke and added: "Even the chicks in the massage parlors have been trained." He said, "Even the hookers." And Malone thought what a fascinating life that would be: the life of a prostitute. For something had happened in him—having renounced the world of work, duty, caution, and practicality, he now wished to live the life of a bohemian. Whores fascinated him, people who lived solely for love, artists, neurotics, and with these the city was filled...
"But you've been to school, man," he would say to Malone, holding his head in both his hands, cupping it beneath the ears so that Malone felt as if his skull could be crushed between Frankie's huge hands like a grapefruit; and Malone thought how miraculous the hands and arms of a lover are. "The world is too much with us," he said, and shut Frankie up with a kiss. But Frankie would not be silent; it obsessed him that Malone was better educated than he. Frankie was proud of his Italian past and did not like being taken for a Puerto Rican. He wanted his son to be a doctor, perhaps, he told Malone shyly. For himself? He wanted to improve his lot; he wanted to learn a skill, fix TVs, and move to New Jersey with Malone to a house in the pine barrens. He was a true American. Malone let these words pass, like a summer rain he knew would end.
The two of them were as alone with one another in that building as two apes in a tree. Nothing intruded in this neighborhood, which hadn't even a name, and seemed to be filled with more parked trucks than human beings, this region of grassy lots, huge, faceless warehouses, and the hulks of switching stations of New York Telephone. They lived in an institutional graveyard. They would have gone on living this placid, rural existence had Malone not gone over to Grand Street to buy watermelon one blistering afternoon—and found there a young man as beautiful, as strangely moving, as Frankie. They hardly said a word to one another before making love in his apartment above a hardware store. It was as if he had fallen from a tree, in fact, for going home to that game preserve in which he lived with Frankie high above the ghostly cables of the telephone company, he encountered more dark-eyed stray young men wandering south from the purlieus of homosexuals. He made love with them in the ensuing afternoons. He did not know what would happen, but he knew he would have to lie. What he was not prepared for was the subtle current of knowledge that passed from his own limbs into Frankie's one evening while making love—no more than a brief pause, the mere skip of a heartbeat, a momentary detachment that Frankie felt instantly, and as Malone lay back with a sigh, caused him to look at Malone with his gorgeous, prepossessing eyes and say in a calm voice :"If you leave me, I will kill you."
It was as if the electricity had failed in the entire city, as if suddenly the current had been shut off, and a tremendous stillness suddenly settled down over the echoing avenues beneath them. Malone shuddered.
The words were so out-of-the-blue, and spoken in so grave and quiet a voice, that he believed them; even as he watched a fly above them land on the No-Pest Strip that dangled from the ceiling, buzz frantically, and then be still...
The disembodied hiss of a passing car rose up with the vanishing heat; and later when a cool breeze came through the window, as the refrigerator hummed, they made love again. Making love to Frankie had always been like making love to someone underwater. They were like two swimmers kissing beneath the sea, in slow motion; but this very stillness, this very gravity that Malone had found so wondrous—that medieval calm that his eyes had given Malone the first moment he saw them—now seemed to him not so much medieval calm as a lethargy of spirit. Was Frankie a trap? As viscous as the sticky glue on the No-Pest Strip that hung above them like the streamer of a Chinese lantern? He wondered as he lay entangled in his limbs, making love and thinking of a dozen distracting things—the other rooms he had made love in, the death of God, his father's white shirts—how curious it was that he lay there confined in this high tower in the ruins of the city on a summer evening. Through the window, from the lazy perch of his mattress, he saw the snow-white, lighted hull of the S.S. Canberra sailing slowly through the harbor to the open sea, and above them another fly buzzed frantically in the glue of the No-Pest Strip and then was still. Malone lay beside Frankie in a state of white, cool, dumb confusion; he was not sure himself what had happened, and he resolved the issue by staring finally at the sky, the blue, empty sky through the tall window, and letting his soul float out into the limitless space there.
"Oh man, oh man," Frankie would say when he came home from work that week, stripping off his tie and lighting a joint. He kissed Malone and he tried, not understanding why an estrangement had occurred, to bring' things back to what they were. Malone was touched by this. He asked Frankie how his day was, but they had little, in fact, to talk about. Before it had never mattered, now the silences ached. Frankie liked to watch TV, Malone could not bear it. And now Malone had to look at him in the middle of the long, dull evenings in which the comedies of the television set spilled out into the air, and Malone asked himself why he was there, with someone who watched TV and got stoned each evening and hated his boss and had a temper; but then Frankie, turning from the refrigerator with a glass of wine, would look at Malone with those cloudy eyes, and Malone would remember...
One Sunday afternoon—aware that Malone could no longer bear what had been his favorite day in their sunny perch above the harbor—Frankie bent down and kissed Malone and then, lying beside him as he held his hand, asked if he would come to New Jersey that day and take Frankie's son for a walk. Malone felt something churn within himself. But he went, and hand in hand with Enrico between them, they went to gaudy amusement parks and sat in ice-cream parlors under the blistering sun, and Malone felt sadder and sadder.
It was the habit of recording his thoughts, his days, in his journal that ended Malone's affair. He came ho
me from work one night and found Frankie standing silent in the middle of the floor. The television was dead. Malone looked at Frankie's face and knew instantly what had happened. His journal lay open on the mattress. "What's wrong?" gasped Malone. "So where were you on Monday afternoon?" Frankie said in the furious, hard voice of an interrogator. "And where were you Wednesday afternoon when I called?
And who is George Dillow and Stanley Cohen? You fucking bastard!" he said, and slapped Malone on his cheek and pushed him back against the wall. And Malone thought to himself, with the cool detachment of a man who has just been hurled from a car wreck and sits on the hillside wondering why he isn't in his bed at home: Ah, this is how it happens. They beat you up, they are jealous. Love-nest slaying... For he had always wondered what would happen if Frankie ever turned on him the temper he had shown the day a grocer refused to cash his check, or the afternoon he learned on the telephone that a friend in New Jersey had turned other friends in to a narcotics agent. "Man, he is dead," Frankie had said. "He is going to find himself in the river by tomorrow," and Malone had listened, in disbelief. But here was Frankie now, slapping him again and again on the face, shoving him against the wall and kicking him and punching his ribs. He beat Malone up and Malone, realizing an explanation was impossible, and so heartsick he could not, would not strike back, ran. He ran downstairs into the warm, empty streets, and kept running as best he could with a cracked rib till he stopped in a dark alley near Bond Street and sat down and coughed, and wept, and waited till he had stopped shaking. Then he got up and continued walking north, until he came to a crowded part of the Village, with movie houses, stores still open, and restaurants filled with smiling people behind plants and plate glass windows. He sat down on a stoop. He had no place to go, and he ached in several places. He sat there oblivious to the throngs walking past him on West Tenth Street.
And then someone caught his eye: a wigged duchess emerging from the back door of a warehouse in which the Magic, Fantasy, and Dreams Ball was just breaking up. "Help me," said Malone. "My dear," said
Sutherland after taking one look at his terrified face, "the house of Guiche shall never refuse the protection of its manor to the poorest of its subjects," and he assisted Malone into a cab pulled up at the curb. They rode in silence for some time as Malone panted beside Sutherland, his legs vibrating like windshield wipers. Neither spoke. Sutherland offered Malone a cigarette, Malone shook his head, and Sutherland smoked in silence, glancing at Malone from time to time in the light of passing streets as they floated north. Time had passed since he had stood outside the bookstore in Georgetown, peering in at volumes on the French cathedrals, and Malone no longer looked as if he were a young man peering into a bookstore in Georgetown on a summer night; he looked more like the fellow who had just run in off the playing fields in New Hampshire, his eyes brilliant—a rather exhausted soccer player now, his face scratched from the fray—the earring hidden behind a cluster of golden curls. Malone would always have that ambiguous look, half-fine, half-rough, and it so intrigued Sutherland that when the taxi slowed at his block of Madison Avenue, he turned to Malone and said: "Forgive me for inquiring, but—are you for rent?"
And Malone, as polite as this stranger who sat smoking a Gauloise beside him under a white wig of the seventeenth century, in brocade and rhinestones, smiled weakly and said: "Thank you, no." For he was so softhearted he hated refusing anyone. Rejecting another person upset him far more than being refused himself—and he was one of the few homosexuals in New York who went home with people because he did not wish to hurt their feelings. "I'm recovering from a lovers' brawl," he added. "Unlucky in love."
"Then come to the Carlyle," said Sutherland, extending his arm, "and let's have a drink. I always go to the Carlyle to rub an ice cube, bathed in Pernod, on my bruises. And then go dancing at the Twelfth Floor."
After the Carlyle they went to Sutherland's room above a little gallery on upper Madison Avenue, since one could not arrive at the Twelfth Floor before two A.M. and it was just past one. Sutherland pushed off his bed the manuscript on the history of religion that he had been writing the past five years, and lay Malone down to wash his bruises—and it was this, years later, he never forgot, as Christ's definition of charity is the simplest and truest: You took me in when I was wounded. He made Malone tell his story again, as he washed his face with Germaine Monteil astringents, gasping at different parts and saying, his eyes very bright, "Ah!" For Sutherland, like the emperor with Scheherazade, could listen for hours to love stories. He knew perfectly well what Malone had run from. "Of course he beat you up," said Sutherland, dabbing with a cotton swab at Malone's lavender temple. "Latins are the last egocentrics on earth! Enslaved as you are to dark beauties, I see only dolors ahead for you—heartbreak dead ahead," he said. "Couldn't you, wouldn't you, love someone like me instead?"
But this very question was rhetorical, an invitation that Sutherland himself no longer believed in. He looked at Malone even now and said:"God! There are so many people I'm going to have to introduce you to!"
And then, as if preserving in wrapping paper a fine piece of bric-a-brac he had found on the street, he covered Malone in a blanket and said, "Of course he beat you. Let it be a lesson. This ethnic gene pool in which we sit, like children in their own shit."
He poured Malone a glass of Perrier, "The mineral water of aware French women everywhere," he mumbled.
"God knows I looked for it," he resumed when he had sipped his own glass, sighed, and handed Malone a Cuban cigar. "Uptown, downtown. I used to even go out to the boroughs on Saturday nights because there were so many dark-eyed beauties out there. For a while I was commuting to Philadelphia. To Rhode Island. But let's be honest. As divine as they are in bed, a guinea hasn't got a heart! They are ruined by their women from the crib, adored, coddled, assumed to be gods. Sad they happen to be so handsome. The real lovers, alas, are Wasps like you and me, even though we're supposed to be the ones who are emotionally stunted—well, of course, we are cold as fish in one sense. In another, we are the only true lovers. Let the Italians and the Jews wave their arms about and claim to be passionate, but they understand nothing, but nothing about love! They are show girls, my friend, and don't forget it! It takes a northern European to really suffer the pangs of heartache." And here he blew out a stream of smoke and stared at Malone; for he was looking at himself ten, even fifteen years before, as he saw Malone sitting there with his bruised ribs and blotchy face in the lamplight on that late-summer evening in Sutherland's room on Madison Avenue. He was Sutherland those many years ago, his visage still capable of registering that romantic hopefulness with which so many came to this city; and Sutherland took pleasure in the spectacle. "My God," he murmured again, in a low voice, "there are so many people I have to introduce you to." Malone sat there amused and fascinated by this strange wisdom pouring from this man and conscious that he had no other place to go. It was half-past midnight and he knew no one in the city but the lover he had just fled.
"We live, after all, in perilous times," Sutherland went on, lighting another cigar, "of complete philosophic sterility, we live in a rude and dangerous time in which there are no values to speak to and one can cling to only concrete things—such as cock," he sighed, tapping his ashes into a bowl of faded marigolds. He stood up and walked over to a closet and opened the door to reveal, like the Count of Monte Cristo his fabulous treasure, the accumulated wardrobe of fifteen seasons on the circuit. They stared silently for a moment at the stacks of jungle fatigues, and plain fatigues, bleached fatigues and painter's pants, jeans with zippers and jeans with buttons, tank tops and undershirts, web belts, plaid shirts, and dozens of T-shirts in every color; nylon bomber jackets hanging beside leather bomber jackets, brown and black; and, on the floor in rows, work boots, engineer boots, cowboy boots, work shoes, hiking shoes, baseball caps, coal miner's caps, and, in one wicker basket, coiled like snakes, the transparent plastic belts that Sutherland found one day in a store on Canal Street and that he h
ad introduced to gay New York, which meant, eventually, the nation, several seasons ago. Whistles, tambourines, knit caps, aviator glasses, aluminum inhalers, double-tipped dark glasses in both Orphan Annie and aviator styles, and huge mother-of-pearl fans occupied another basket that testified to the various accoutrements Sutherland had considered necessary when he went dancing in winters past.
"But after a while you realize," sighed Sutherland, in a dejected mood because he had been rejected that evening at the party by someone he had been waiting to talk to for two years, "that there is nothing but these," he said, picking up a pale orange-and-red plaid shirt from Bloomingdale's and letting it dangle onto a pile of pastel-colored T-shirts from an army-navy surplus store on Canal Street and the basket filled with transparent plastic belts. He put a baseball cap on and left the closet. "Is there anything here you'd like to put on?" he asked. "You must get out of those tennis sneakers."
He tossed Malone a pair of Herman Chemi-Gums from Hudson's on Thirteenth Street. "They're far more sturdy. So what remains for us?" he said, as he sat down beside Malone and lifted his glass of Pernod to his lips. "What, we may well ask, is there left to live for? Why get out of bed? For this dreary round of amusing insincerity? This filthy bourgeois society that the Aristotelians have foisted upon us? No, we may still choose to live like gods, like poets. Which brings us down to dancing. Yes," he said, turning to Malone, "that is all that's left when love has gone. Dancing," he said, indicating with a wave of his hand the stacks of tapes and records in another corner of the room. "There is no love in this city," he said, looking down at Malone with a cool expression, "only discotheques—and they too are going fast, under the relentless pressure of capitalist exploitation..." He looked at Malone a moment more and then said quietly: "And what more appropriate way to begin your education than to take you to the Twelfth Floor?"
Dancer From the Dance: A Novel Page 8