Dancer From the Dance: A Novel

by Andrew Holleran

  We all rushed to the Baths at that time of year: The halls were filled with circuit queens and out-of-towners who converged there before going back to Ohio or Maine or wherever it was they must return to participate in the family ceremonies. The rude old men whose attitude of contempt always chilled me as I slipped the money across the counter (framed now in a garland of Christmas cards from all around the world), the Puerto Rican attendant who walked me to my locker with an expression of hopeless melancholy, the fellow in his laundry cubicle on the third floor, glassy-eyed with boredom beneath the defiant centerfold of a big-breasted woman he had taped to the wall, slipping into slumber till a voice on the loudspeaker ordered him to change the sheets in Room Fourteen, the toilets filled to overflowing, the occasional turd that lay unaccountably in the middle of the hallway, the hot moans and hisses from the rooms you passed, the distant sound of someone being patiently spanked with the steady rhythms of a metronome, the leather queens standing in their red-lighted doorways in cowboy hats, dangling handcuffs—none of it mattered; only the rush of affection you felt when you rounded the corner and saw a friend you hadn't seen in five months, the two of you wishing each other "Merry Christmas!" before you went on your way, the soles of your feet turning black as you cruised the red, chill, fake-pine-paneled halls of the Everard Baths. It was Christmas in the Temple of Priapus.

  Sutherland always brought several bottles of Campari and a wicker basket of pâté, apricots and breast of chicken to the Baths and took a room in which to entertain. He poured Guerlain all over his crotch, and then popped around the corner, a cherub in a towel, his bright eyes and hilarious mouth making perfect strangers burst into laughter at the expression on his face. We always ended up outside his room at some point, watching his friends drop in for pâté and Negronis, and Sutherland himself dash out after a beautiful boy he'd just seen passing, trailing his towel like a child, revealing in his insouciance the cause of his problematical sex life. The Baths were humiliating to Sutherland: He entered rooms, closed the door, and emerged two minutes later. They had felt—like a housewife examining eggs or squeezing cantaloupes—his cock, and found it wanting. He returned to his room and got drunk. Malone came out far less frequently than Sutherland, and when he did he nearly slid down the wall, in the shadows. But people saw him, and walking down the hall behind Malone used to amuse me, because I could watch the various expressions on the faces of people passing—even those who, catching sight of Malone suddenly, crashed into one another at a corner or simply walked into a wall. You had to bite your lip: Laughter was not de rigueur at the Baths. The Baths were serious. But to walk down the hallway behind Malone was to marvel at the various reactions people had to a fantasy-made-flesh: frowns, glares, studious attempts to avoid looking at him (so they would not be rejected; these were the proudest of all), in which the face assumed an almost prim, pained expression for an instant, like a maiden aunt who disapproved of all this; and then the wonderful expression of sheer joy, and awe, when the young boys gaped and turned to follow his progress. The uninhibited hissed and talked to him from their doorways as he went past, like whores soliciting on a street-corner, or jumped up from the beds on which they'd been lying to call after him. The aggressive came up to Malone and offered him dope if he would come to their room, or simply grabbed his crotch; and soon, they had all left their doorways and were following Malone around like myself. Malone hardly went out of the room for this reason. He waited till very late at night, when most everyone was asleep, like little children who have just had a glass of milk, only it wasn't milk, it was another fluid. The halls were dark, and quiet, and chill, and only in the distance the sound of someone's moans, or the rheumatic wheeze of a stopped-up toilet, or the hum of the water fountain marked the otherwise unblemished silence. The Baths were almost peaceful then: The hot gloom of lust had lifted. The place for a moment just before dawn became an ordinary hall of closed doors, or open doors in which the occupant, lying invitingly on his bunk, had fallen asleep and was snoring ferociously. It was then Malone went out and took whomever he found, and made love. We all knew people who had their most magical experience very late one night at the Everard Baths with a man they never saw again, but of whose embraces they would think of periodically for the rest of their lives.

  That year one of those predawn embraces gave Malone venereal warts, and we saw him shortly before Christmas in the lobby at Bellevue, leaning against a pillar as he listened to a Bach cantata being sung by a group of doctors and nurses for their patients gathered in wheelchairs around them. The snow fell outside the huge windows as they sang. Malone was a sentimental man and he grew sad as he watched this scene. His Christmases had always been religious, charitable, and familial; this year he was staying in New York alone. "I've got venereal warts," he said with a wry smile when the concert had ended and we asked him what he was doing at Bellevue. We were still just people who saw each other when we went out dancing, but Malone was nothing if not friendly. "I'm staying in town to have them painted. But how about you?" And he stood there listening to our plans with his customary consideration. "Well, Merry Christmas," he said with a smile. "And let's get together, please? Sutherland's in Venezuela, and I'll be all alone," he said, "and God knows one hates to be alone at this time of year." He went out the door, turning once to wave to us in a crowd of poor people who came to the free clinic as he did now, for he was poorer than any of them.

  Christmas came and went: a dull, gray day on which the snow blew across the empty streets and the bums lighted fires in trash cans on the Bowery. Malone came home one night from a party and was unable to sleep. In the darkness the frivolous evening he had just spent evaporated and he was left with the certainty that he had neglected the very people he truly loved. He had ignored them for the company of people who meant nothing to him but with whom he danced, had fun, and spent the weekends. He sat up, his heart racing in the darkness, flooded with the memory of those members of his family who had been kind to him, and loved him as no one else did with a fundamental, unquestioning love—and he resolved, an hour before dawn, to write them all tomorrow, to return home even, and cling to these souls for the rest of his life. It was then—alone, panic-stricken, flooded with a strange love as he sat there in bed, hearing only the hiss of the pipes—Malone convinced himself that Frankie was only waiting for a sign from him. He would get him a Christmas present for that Latin day of celebration, the Feast of the Epiphany. And the next day he went out—all thoughts of his family forgotten in the brilliant sunshine—to raise money for his gift by seeing a few clients. And that was how he spent those gray and snowy afternoons after Christmas, rushing across the city amid the crowds that flowed out of the huge department stores exchanging gifts, a merchant among merchants.

  We ran into him on the street a few hours before midnight on New Year's Eve. He was in black tie and black coat (like most of Halston's entourage, like most of us who had been living in New York awhile, we had all arrived at the color black; it was in the end a preference that I never could decide was our sophistication or the fact that we were in mourning for our lives), and carried a bottle of champagne in his free hand. He had just left a dinner party uptown because New Year's Eve (like Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Easter) was a sentimental occasion he had always celebrated with his family; he did not want to kiss strangers at the stroke of midnight who meant nothing to him. He was on his way to the Plaza Hotel to visit an executive from Minneapolis staying there whom he had taken to the discos the previous night—the easiest work was as an escort—and who wanted to photograph Malone. He seemed glad to see us, and asked us up to his room for a drink and dancing afterward. In fact, we had spent the entire day on the telephone trying to ascertain from the jungle drums where everyone was going that night; there were so many discotheques now that life was no longer a simple matter of going to the Twelfth Floor its first year and finding in that tiny room everyone you wished to love. No, even that precious fraternity was splintered now, and half were in the Car
ibbean, or Paris, or various clubs that had opened around town now that discotheques were an Industry. Not only did we not know where to go that night, but we had no heat in our apartment, and when Malone learned this he gave us his keys and said to wait in his place till he got back. "I've got a portable heater," he said in his brisk, cheerful way. "The couple next door have violent fights and you can listen to them till I get back. I'll just be gone an hour!"

  We went inside the building and began going up the stairs under the thin tubes of fluorescent lighting fluttering spasmodically on the vomit-colored walls. At the very top we found Number Thirty-Six and unlocked the door. It was an old apartment and it was simply a cell—except for the telltale signs of one-night affairs who had left cigarettes stubbed out on saucers, and notes scrawled on the wall ("Call me! 555-3721. John"), a bottle of wine and glasses, and a wicker basket filled with scraps of paper on which more phone numbers and more names were written, no one might have been living there. A squash racket and the Bible and the first issue of Playgirl lay on a desk. We sat down and looked around at the filthy walls, and sure enough the couple next door began to fight in angry, drunken voices. Time passed. We grew depressed at their brutal dialogue and turned on the radio to drown them out. Outside snow began to fall past the filthy windows, into the chasm of fire escapes behind Malone's apartment, while uptown it drifted past the tall windows of the suite rented to an executive of a Minneapolis encyclopedia firm who had decided not to pay Malone for the pictures he'd just taken of him nude since the price was too high.

  "I'll leave your camera at the desk downstairs," Malone said as he picked it up from the coffee table, "but the film I'm going to remove, of course." Before he got to the desk in the lobby two security guards met Malone and took him to a room on the second floor, and broke his arm. They called a doctor several hours later. It was shortly before three when the telephone rang; we had just begun to think of going on without him. "Hate to bother you," his voice, strangely hollow underneath the familiar briskness, said, "but something unpleasant has occurred, which I thought only happened in East Germany. I'm kind of in jail, and need to see a doctor, kind of thing? Perhaps this is the place to spend New Year's Eve. There's a girl here wearing a coat Sutherland and I have been looking all over Manhattan for." And that is what he did, with the muggers, thieves, rapists, and lunatics: saw 1977's first dawn bleach the towers of Wall Street south of his window, eating a wooden peanut butter sandwich with a black girl who had slit a woman's throat while trying to rob her purse on Riverside Drive. But the choicest irony awaited Malone when we took him up to Bellevue after they had released him to have his arm set. The doctor attending him turned out to be a man he had slept with several times. "Oh, God," Malone said weakly just before surrendering to the drug they had given him, afloat on the white pillows of the hospital bed, "is it really time to move to San Francisco?"

  MALONE only laughed when Sutherland declared that no one past the age of thirty should have more than three good friends; but he knew an awful lot of people. We had not been in his apartment five minutes the evening we left Bellevue to get the Social Security card the hospital requested, when there was a knock on the door. Two boys came in to go out dancing with Malone; two faces we had seen for years and never spoken to. They were shocked by our news that he had been beaten up, could have no visitors, and was spending the night at Bellevue. "But who did it?" said the short one. "Frankie?" We said no, and when we asked who Frankie was, the tall boy replied: "You can't have known Malone very long. Frankie is a drop-dead Italian who was madly in love with Malone and who, when Malone told him it was all over—"

  "An inevitable moment," said the tall one, as he sat down on the edge of an upended milk crate, "an inevitable moment in the lives of all lovers, of every persuasion, a moment we must all learn to accept with grace and dignity."

  "However, at that inevitable moment," said the short one, picking up the story, "Frankie did not behave with grace and dignity, no, he threw Malone down on the grass in Central Park and began breaking each rib and was about to knife him when Sutherland and the police arrived and saved Malone." It was all inaccurate, but Sutherland with the freedom of an artist had arranged the plot to make the tale more vivid, and so the afternoon when Frankie had sat sobbing beside Malone was now, in the vast library of gossip, a scene of violence. "And ever since," the visitor said, "Frankie has tried to learn the location of Malone's cold-water flat"—he turned to us—"we call this place a cold-water flat, it is not an apartment—but with no success."

  "Is Sutherland at the hospital?" said the other.

  "He's in South America," we explained.

  "Oh," said the first, turning to the second, "he's with Kenny Lamar, they went over with that count, you know, the one who has every record the Shirelles ever made, the one Sutherland told you was the direct descendant of Diane de Poitiers, that's where he is," he said, with the breathless tone of someone fitting two pieces of rumor together. "Oh, God, they're having a fabulous time."

  "Well," said the second, standing up, "so will we. Malone would not want us to miss the party." It was five o'clock in the morning, and the laundry lines that sagged between our building and the one behind, the fire escape, the flat tar-paper roofs were emerging in the gray light. A pigeon fluttered in a gutter, a cat stared at it from the window opposite, its tail flicking back and forth, its teeth chattering, its eyes wild with the expression one saw sometimes on the faces of people at the Twelfth Floor. "Especially since all the beauties will be there," the short boy said, "twisted out of their minds. Oh, God! Was Malone tripping when he was assassinated?"

  We said we didn't know.

  "Probably not," said his friend. "Malone never does drugs." They turned to us at the door after saying they would visit Malone tomorrow, finding us suddenly attractive, and introduced themselves before leaving. The vast majority of Malone's friends had slept with one another. "By the way," the tall one said, "you are now a part of a strange brotherhood, you know?" And the other took up the theme: "Yes, you have to come over some evening. We're all very different, but we do have one thing in common." "We adore Malone," his friend said.

  And they went out the door, and it was morning.

  Sutherland returned from Caracas the following Monday and came down to Malone's in the uniform of a nurse in the Crimean War to sit beside him and read Rudyard Kipling. He appeared each afternoon in his starched white dress, bearing a poppy and a volume of The Jungle Book. He put the book down in the middle of a tale, one day, to tell Malone of a project that had come to him, full-blown, while sitting in the courtyard of Nony Dillon's house in Caracas one evening waiting for her to finish playing a hand of bridge. He had decided to sell Malone. Sutherland was a citizen of the Upper, not the Lower, East Side, after all: He had lived so long among people who sold things—Egyptian scarabs, Turkish rugs, party concepts—to alcoholic ladies in residential hotels, rich folk passing through, the affluent in search of objets d'art, that it occurred to him to convert Malone to cash. For you cannot live in New York City very long and not be conscious of the niceties of being rich—the city is, after all, an ecstatic exercise in merchandising—and one evening of his visit to Venezuela Sutherland sat straight up when he read a line of Santayana's: "Money is the petrol of life." He who had been raised to consider money slightly vulgar suddenly wanted, now that the illusion of love gripped him infrequently, material things: He wanted a house in Cartagena, he wanted to go to Rio if he cared to. He wanted to be able to leave New York from time to time, and not to have to be nice to people in exchange for it. He set himself up, then, in the only business his past years in New York had prepared him for: He became a pimp.

  Malone—who considered Sutherland essentially insane—said nothing as he heard this plan described, but being rather lost himself, let Sutherland carry on anyway. The little truce he had achieved with the world that peculiar week of Christmas, when everyone had thought him out of town, the mood of that spontaneous retreat, fled more quickly
than the crowd when it decides a bar is passé. When we went over to see Malone that week, the place was jammed, for it took some accident such as Malone's to bring New Yorkers together who were otherwise constrained by the rules of public life to be strangers. When did people talk to each other but at a fire, a robbery, a man dropping dead of a heart attack on the street? Yet people took care of their kind. The bums helped each other: You would see them late at night in winter bending over a friend, saying, "Come on, man, get up, get up!" and finally dragging their friend into the entrance of some tenement where they would all sleep on top of each other, out of the cold, and coming home yourself at dawn from the Twelfth Floor, you would step carefully over their bodies on the landing and even stop to look at their faces and wonder what they were dreaming of. Well, our little society (so tiny, in fact) gathered around the wounded, too. But such was our disposition to turn everything into a party, that when we got there we found the detritus of expensive fetes uptown—flowers, caviar, champagne—brightening Malone's room, the gift of boys who had tended bar at openings the previous night. A tape made for Malone by a popular discaire was hardly audible beneath the roar of conversation. How they talked: The quantities of gossip spilled into the air every hour, which convinced you in the end that none of us had the slightest secret trait (we were fools to think so if we did), the analyses of love affairs, apartments, careers, faces, bodies, gymnasiums, parties. Passing through the mob I heard a remark, delivered with a condescending shrug over a glass of carrot juice, which, stood for all of it: "But he shaves his back!" Poof, another beauty had bit the dust. "He's the reason I saw a shrink," someone else was saying. "Everything was wrong. He lived on the Upper East Side, he bleached his floors, he thought the Twelfth Floor was for lonely people." As Sutherland went around in a crisp black maid's uniform, emptying ashtrays into a brown paper bag, the most successful model in New York was asking people's advice on how to attract a boy he'd recently fallen in love with who was reputed to be indifferent to clean-shaven men. "I could grow a beard," he said. "But then you know what they say about facial hair."