Dancer From the Dance: A Novel

by Andrew Holleran

  "It was so simple," someone else sighed, "when you just had to get an A on your exam. I was very good at that, but now that it's no longer a case of making the Honor Roll..." and his voice trailed off.

  "Did you see Frank Gilbert last night at Flamingo? He shaved his body," someone said, bringing philosophy down to earth and banishing our malaise with the concrete magnetism of gossip. "And waxed his stomach. He looked incredible!"

  "Someone said he never wipes his ass, he goes out dirty on purpose. Now that's confidence! And he can get away with it!"

  And they went on like cicadas, like crickets, in the summer night, sawing their legs together, a quartet playing the music of regret—regret over places they hadn't lived, decisions they hadn't made, men they wanted to sleep with—till Malone appeared at the western gate and sat down with a cigarette. "Oh, God, I'm exhausted," he said. "I've just come from two enemas and a fist-fucking!"

  "Oh, what was it like?" said someone who had been writing fiction for ten years now with no success. "Who were your customers?"

  And Malone, knowing this fellow wanted to write a novel about a homosexual callboy, would patiently recount the fantasies he had pandered to that night. He himself always looked so cool as we sat there in the stagnant heat, the thick air laden with the fumes of passing cars lying on our skin like the soiled, damp towels in a cheap bathhouse. He always wore white pants and a pale blue polo shirt, and he always asked how our day had been: our day! Our stagnant little day! Filled with the most awful trivialities! He was like the officer visiting the amputees in the hospital after a battle, and everyone poured out his thoughts to Malone, his complaints, hopes, opinions, and vanities—never dreaming they were of no consequence to the fellow listening. They would have gone on forever. No one listened like Malone. No one asked the intelligent, perceptive questions he did, questions that opened up a further flow of revelation, which would not have stopped if the others had not grown impatient with their woes. Malone would have listened indefinitely. "But tell me about the people you see!" said the fellow anxious to gather material for his novel.

  The bright red nylon of a striped bathing suit was sticking out of his coat pocket, and as Malone took this out and held it up, he told us about the man who paid him to stand in his bedroom in these Speedo trunks impersonating the captain of the swimming team. Another client pretended to be a fifteen-year-old German Jew at Buchenwald, and Malone was the camp guard he begged for mercy. Another pretended that Malone and he were in bed at his college fraternity, and that his fraternity brothers would be returning at any moment from a mixer at a nearby sorority. He gave enemas to some, tied up others in their bathtub and pissed on them, or simply sat on the sofa and listened to them talk about their mother. He saw Moroccan millionaires, and Mafia men in Brooklyn, men from Detroit on business trips, bankers and marine biologists, film producers, newscasters, ballet dancers. He impersonated sailors, Vietnam veterans, British lords, dead cousins. "But the most peculiar," he added, "and the most charming, I think, of them all, is the man who comes to town from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, once every two months and who just wants to smell my hair when it's wet." He turned to his interrogators. "But this must bore you all."

  "Oh, no!" came a chorus.

  "What did you do this evening, for example," someone said. "Did anything crazy happen to you tonight?"

  "Well, one extraordinary thing," Malone said, blowing out a stream of smoke. He was tired, and this incident had been more unsettling than he had allowed it to be at the time. "I answered a call on East Sixty-fourth Street," he said after a pause, in a voice hollow with fatigue, "and when the door opened—there was a boy I'd gone to school with, in Vermont! A boy I'd had a crush on, in fact. We were both astonished."

  "Did you have sex?" said the novelist, who saw a two-act play trembling on the horizon.

  "No," Malone laughed. "I couldn't. I played soccer with him in school. He was my proctor sophomore year, I worshiped him! So we took out his yearbook and talked about everyone. It was fun." There was a pause, and then someone asked, "Hey, when is the marriage?" for they knew about John Schaeffer.

  "Soon, I guess," said Malone. "We're building up to it, gradually. It's like training for the Olympics," he laughed.

  He fell silent then, too tired to go on, and caught by the memory of that yearbook photograph with its list of his activities and awards underneath. He sat there thinking that he had, over the past ten or fifteen years, erased that photograph, bit by bit, until that person had vanished utterly. The people he knew now he had not known last year. As homosexuals tend to do, he had simply ceased to communicate with his former world; like a brother who, once he enters the monastery, renounces all his former life. And so he wrote in his journal that night: "I hate to see John Schaeffer falling for all this. I should just say to him, 'Don't bother, it's a mirage.' Or must everyone discover for himself?"

  He felt himself growing more and more tired, deep inside, as he sat there, so tired he was literally unable to move. He blessed the darkness, the fact that gradually the people on the bench began slipping away with a deprecating joke to pursue some boys who had just slipped in through the gate. The sudden arrival of a trio we'd never seen before caused everyone but myself to slip off the bench and go after the new boys. Malone and I fell silent for a long time, watching the activity around us, listening to the occasional wail of a siren down Second Avenue. There was something almost peaceful in the park that faced us: the bell tower of the church bathed in floodlights, the banks of leaves etched in brass by the amber-colored streetlights, the flower-bordered fountain, all might have been in a little park in Baltimore or Boston. In fact, as we watched from our dark grotto, a young couple strolled past, arm in arm, as their Irish Setter ran around the cleared space of dust beneath two trees. They stopped and watched the dog run off, and then the man started to call it back. "Sugar! Sugar!" he called. His voice carried in the dark summer night, gentle, calm, domestic: "Su-u-u-u-gar..." and finally the Irish Setter burst out of the darkness and stopped, panting, at his feet. The man put the leash on its collar, and together they drifted out of the park, passing for a moment beneath the streetlight. "Oh," Malone said, passing a hand over his face, "how easy it must be, how easy... to come out in the evening, to call your dog, to walk home with your wife's arm in yours. Have you ever noticed," he said, stirred now by this vision of domestic bliss that was beyond his reach, and shocked earlier that evening to find himself crying in the subway on his way home from a client, "that gay people secrete everything in each other's presence but tears? They come on each other, they piss on each other, or shit, but never tears! The only sign of tenderness they never secrete in each other's presence. They come, piss and shit together, but they cry alone! God!" he said, with a short, hard laugh. And then beside me I felt a shudder pass through his body and he fell silent. A man stopped at the bench and held out his hand. Malone removed a roll of bills from his pocket and gave it to him. The bum walked on, too drunk to know how much had been given him. It was the money Malone had earned by impersonating so many dreams, on his trips to these apartments all over town. He liked to get rid of that money as fast as he earned it, spending it on things that left no trace. I looked at his face in the half-light of one of the streetlights. He looked like a man who has been crossing a desert, a place without shadows, for some time now. He resembled those people at the beach in summer who fell asleep in the sun and awakened with parched, dry lips, and skin drawn so tight it gave their eyes the hollow look of a prophet who has long been in the wilderness. There was no shelter for him anywhere and so he continued to sit there in the darkness, watching the others look for what had once enraptured him and which now left him sick with loneliness. We were still sitting there, in fact, with some people who were arguing over who had the biggest cock in New York, when Sutherland walked into the park after dropping John Schaeffer off after an evening on the town together. "Oh, you must know!" one of them said to Sutherland. "Doesn't Allan Miller have the biggest dick in New
York?"

  "He would like to think so," said Sutherland in his most velvet and sinuous voice as he sat down on the bench, fresh as the gardenia in his buttonhole, which he had plucked from the finger bowl served at the dinner he had just left. "However, the issue is in some dispute. Does Allan Miller have the biggest cock? Or Martin Fox, or Jorge Forbes? Or Mitch Graves, for that matter, who used to astonish the janitor in the men's room at Grand Central when he would pull his rubber hose out at the urinal, and who is now in Saudi Arabia working for TWA. Or some unknown apprentice electrician working for Con ED? Unfortunately, there is no entry in the Guinness Book of Records on this subject, though I am willing to turn over to them the results of my research if they should inquire."

  A man with one leg up on a bench across the path reached down now to insert his pack of cigarettes into his sock. "Oh, I like that," Sutherland cooed. "I find that very Merchant Marine, very sexy. He keeps his cigarettes in his sock! I bet he doesn't read GQ! I am looking for a man who has never heard of GQ, Women's Wear, or the Twelfth Floor," he explained. "One gets so tired after a while... should I marry him?" he said, looking at the man from whose white sock a pack of cigarettes protruded.

  "That one has no cock at all," someone said. "We went home together last summer. What a mistake!"

  "Please," sighed Sutherland. "I am sure his cock is no smaller than mine," he went on with smooth, drunken confidence, the only homosexual Malone knew who was not afraid to admit this. "Do not be harsh on us untouchables. We lepers of homosexual society. In fact, I have only encountered three cocks smaller than mine, now that we're on the subject of that perplexing organ. The first was a medical phenomenon, an ex-monk I met at the Baths who loved Greeks. The second was a Puerto Rican I sucked off in this very park four summers ago. And the third, oh who was the third? I think a boy in Pittsburgh," he said in a musing voice. "But no matter," he said, sitting up. "A homosexual with a small cock makes no sense, that's all, like a man who rushes to the tennis court without a racquet. An opera singer with no voice. Oh, there are hundreds of analogies," he said, but by this time he was talking to Malone, for the others, depressed by this dreary subject, had all gone off to find someone unafflicted in this way. He immediately turned to Malone, holding the gardenia taken from the dinner he had begun the evening with in a building Malone himself had visited on a call, and said: "Well? Don't you want to know what happened? He asked only for you," he said, not waiting for Malone to inquire. "I did not tell him you were downstairs in Thirty-four B slapping your penis against the face of Louis Rothstein and yelling 'You dirty kike, you!' He was crushed. When we went to the Eagle's Nest afterward, where he nearly fainted—"

  "Fainted?" said Malone.

  "The boy was struck dumb," said Sutherland, "he was petrified at finding himself in the thick of so many fantasies-made-flesh. When I took him out finally he was shaking like a leaf—but still he asked for you. 'Does Malone go there?' he wanted to know. 'Does Malone like that bar? Who were Malone's lovers?' Whenever I propose anything, he asks if you will be there. I have told him you are too busy to run around with ne'er-do-wells like me, and then he asked if I couldn't get you to come to a party, a really big party, if we gave one on Fire Island. He would not be dissuaded. I had to give in. And so," he sighed, "two weeks from tonight, we are giving at the house in the Pines the fete of the season, we are giving," he said, blowing out a stream of smoke, "the Pink-and-Green Party. And all, moncher, for you."

  "The Pink-and-Green Party?" said Malone, weakly.

  "Yes, darling," said Sutherland. "I could think of nothing else at this time. Fellini has been done, Carmen Miranda has been done, Egypt too," he said, ticking off the great and famous parties on Fire Island of the past five years, "Leo has been done, the Big Heat, the Black Party, the White Party, the Fantasy, Magic, and Dreams, the Quo Vadis, the Bombay in July, they have all been taken, darling, and we cannot, like any artist burdened by the tradition of those who have gone before, like the novelist who must write after Proust, Joyce, and Mann, we are faced with a constricted area of choice, not to mention a deadline of two weeks. Ah," he said, as a boy staggered out of the bushes zipping up his leather pants, "it is so good to get back to the original source, the Ur-text, of it all," he said, looking around at the dark figures bobbing at crotches, "to refresh ourselves with the original mysteries and rites around which, really, our whole lives revolve. It is just this," he said sitting back to regard the life of our lagoon.

  "I'm not going to the beach," Malone said. "I don't ever want to go there again."

  "Just for one night, darling!" said Sutherland breathlessly. "Just make an appearance, my sweet, and then leave with John. In fact, the whole party is being given so that you two may leave it," he said. "This enormous mass of people is being gathered so that you and he may feel more satisfactorily alone. Do you understand? This party is being given so that you may leave it?"

  "God," Malone sighed, throwing his cigarette away and standing up. He turned on Sutherland. "Don't you think the moral thing to do is just tell John Schaeffer to go back to Princeton, his family's house in Maine, his suite of rooms, and forget this charade? There isn't what he thinks there is out there, and he might as well be told. Look where it got me!"

  "Oh, dear," sighed Sutherland, "would you at this moment prefer to cease upon the midnight with no pain?"

  "Kind of," said Malone.

  "But don't you see that this is all there is?" said Sutherland. "Don't you know what it means to be a woman? My grandmother on her eighty-ninth birthday only wished she could walk down the street and be looked at!"

  "Oh, God," Malone said.

  "There will be two salsa bands," said Sutherland, walking away with him, "and we will draw up the guest list tomorrow, in deepest secrecy, of course. I am confining it to two thousand intimate friends. Guards, and numbered invitations..." he said as they wandered out of the park, Malone's head down as he went, staring at the ground. In a moment the first birds began to make their noise, and by the time Malone and Sutherland had disappeared down the depressing waste of Second Avenue, the sky was turning light, leaving the pale, human, wasted faces no longer mysterious or beckoning. It was as if a sink had been emptied by someone pulling the plug: the green water gone, odd things clinging to the porcelain. Within five minutes the park was empty and then a local character came in with a ladder and pail and went around to each tree, on the innocent mission, his own spontaneous deed, of feeding the squirrels.

  It was very hot that summer by the end of June and even queens who cared nothing about dancing had taken their tambourines to Fire Island. The city was deserted, and Sutherland found a house in the Pines taken by an Italian princess whose husband had once been his lover. Even when he was on welfare his first summer in New York, he managed—like so many others in the same straits—to make the annual migration to Fire Island; it hardly mattered how you got there, who you were, or where you came from. He was handsome; he was witty; he was taken in, even though he moved soon afterward to the more domestic pastures of East Hampton. But there was a part of his character that always brought him back to Fire Island. It was there he could wander down to meet the arriving boats in a nun's habit, it was there he could have two hundred intimate friends over for drinks and to see him burn his Lacostes. It was there he would appear at dawn on the deck of a strange house, daiquiri in hand, claiming to have just seen a man get fucked by another man's wooden leg in the dunes, where he had gone simply to chant his mantra to the rising sun. Fire Island was for madness, for hot nights, kisses, and herds of stunning men: a national game preserve annually replenished by men who each summer arrived from every state in the Union via an Underground Railway of a most peculiar sort. Dressed as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sutherland went down to the dock each time a boatload of new protégés was to arrive.

  The fact that there was little in their heads was what finally shifted his loyalties to the Hamptons, however, where, if the homosexuals tended to be fatter, older, and attired in pastel
-colored slacks, they could at least discuss, over cocktails on a clipped lawn, Samuel Beckett or the latest novel of Iris Murdoch.

  As for Malone—though now the most gorgeous stretch of beach was inferior in his mind to the most dingy street of the Lower East Side where Ramon and Angel were playing handball against a tenement wall—he felt he had found Paradise, his first visit to Fire Island; and it took him three or four summers to even admit it was anything else. Both Sutherland and Malone, in fact, had been coming out to the resort more summers than they cared to admit; for it was always there, all summer long, and irresistible, at the very least, to people who loved to dance. And so Sutherland—who found it vulgar—and Malone—who found it cruel—still came, because nowhere else on earth was natural and human beauty fused; and because nowhere else on earth could you dance in quite the same atmosphere.

  Each summer saw a hundred parties, but Sutherland's was greeted with great anticipation: because of the house it was to be given in, because of Sutherland's reputation, because it was the perfect time to end the season with a blowout. The guest list was already a matter of sensation, and the usual rumors that Liza Minnelli and Truman Capote were coming circulated the community. They were rumored to be coming several times each summer, and rumored to have been there, but were never seen. This year Florinda Balkan and Bianca Jagger were mentioned besides. Sutherland laughed his low, throaty laugh. It had entered his mind to give a really tasteless party, to do something against the mode, since he considered the Pines a community of window dressers incapable of intelligible conversation. At the same time his inherent playfulness spurred him to do something astonishing and memorable, and outdo the past; he regretted halfway through the preparations that he hadn't made it an SM affair, since several boys he knew had already offered to hang from a cross and perform unnatural acts onstage during the gala.

  He flew out from time to time to see how our work was coming along—he had come down one afternoon and hired us to get the beach house ready. We washed windows, polished banisters, swept decks, and began installing the pink and green panels, the sculptures made of teaspoons, the mannequins, the sacks destined to release carnations, glitter, and pills on the guests. A crew of men from Sayville came over to install the lighting, and the premier discaire of New York came out to hang the speakers and set up the playing booth. Sutherland arrived each time with a different entourage: a man who had been writing novels in Rome for ten years, with no success; a tall, gaunt, bearded fellow who lived in the woods of upstate New York; prophets, intellectuals, artists, models. We walked down to the harbor one day to meet them. "You must write a story, the Fire Island story," Sutherland said excitedly under his breath to the novelist as we walked past the big white boats moored in the harbor, "about a very rich Jewess on one of these boats, and a young man, her social secretary, playing canasta on board her boat in autumn. Oh!" he gasped, as a woman in a cerise caftan came out of the cabin of her Chris Craft and lighted a cigarette as she surveyed the harbor with the grim, puffy face of someone who has just arisen from sleep, "there she is now! Her entire fortune is based on vacuum cleaners! Yes!" he said breathlessly. "If you press a single button, her boat vacuums itself! What will the children think of next?" He smiled nervously at the world in general, and then hissed suddenly between clenched teeth as we passed two beautiful young men coming from the grocery store like barefoot angels with sacks of yogurt. And he continued muttering, hissing, gasping, and urging us to look at some extraordinary example of philistine display, or physical beauty, as we walked back to the house. "Do you think the reason Americans are boring," he said breathlessly, turning once at the edge of the harbor to look back on the white boats, the boutiques, the awnings, the hotel, "is that they believe in happiness on earth?"