There was a man Sutherland saw nowhere else but here, once a year—a Swiss pediatrician who spent his annual vacation in the Pines the last two weeks of August. Each year they saw each other, the doctor's face grim with longing as he stared at Sutherland on the beach, at parties, in the bar, and each year they failed to speak. For the past month Sutherland had been going daily to a gymnasium to resuscitate the body he brought back to life each year at this time. "My breasts," he said in a husky voice as he leaned forward with arms crossed on his chest and a finger massaging each nipple, "are now bigger than my mother's. It is these breasts they want to suck, and rip, and tear," he sighed, as we walked down the beach. "Do you understand? As Auden says, we want not only to be loved, but to be loved alone," he said as he saw the man on the beach in front of the house he rented each summer, watching him, his annual dream-made-flesh.
"He is sick with lust," Sutherland smiled softly as he paused in the shallow water and pretended to be looking for shells, "he glowers at me, like a dog dying of poison. He has a sensation in the pit of his stomach," he smiled, "which, I am glad to say, is beyond the reach of commercial antacids, beyond the reach even of drugs, beyond the reach of anything but these tits," he said, his hand straying to a nipple and gently touching it, in the pose of Botticelli's Venus arriving on the foam. "Yet he will make no move, and neither will I. Come children," he sighed, beginning to walk down the beach again, "enough meanness for one day."
"What a novel!" said the man from Rome. "Two people come to a beach resort each fall, once a year, they never speak to one another—"
"Never speak," said Sutherland in his low, throaty voice, looking straight ahead as we marched past the people viewing us like guests selecting food from a vast buffet, "and then at the end of their lives, when they are both old, but still coming to this beach resort, they finally speak. And!"
"And?" said the man from Rome.
"You are the novelist," sighed Sutherland.
"But I have no imagination," he said, gnawing his lip as he stared down at the water splashing his ankles. "I can't make anything up."
"What would they say?" someone asked.
"They would say," sighed Sutherland, "one of three things. 'Are you Jewish?' 'Do you come here often?' 'Do you live with your parents?' Love is, after all, my darlings, all anticipation and imagination, and when they finally met they would say something perfectly mundane! Too, too mundane. It is merely the story of Fire Island you have just recounted." He stopped and said, "The story of the Dangerous Island. Well," he sighed, "there is nothing in that direction but what the copywriters refer to as sun, sea, and sky. Let's go back."
He turned in the direction of the Swiss doctor and the people watching the parade of flesh, and said to himself with a shudder, "Oh, God, the years I've wasted here! The dear friends gone!" And then in a louder voice: "We're going home now. Has everyone seen my tits?"
Malone came over Tuesday afternoon to see a client and when he was through, he lay with us on the beach for a while. But he was too keyed up to lie there like a corpse turning brown. Just when he seemed to have finally surrendered to the stillness, and the others were nearly asleep, he sat up suddenly and lighted a cigarette and stared at the people passing by along the water's edge. "You must admit," he whispered to me as he lay back down with a sigh, "that sunbathing is far more arduous than chopping down trees. I'd rather be clearing a forest," he said, blowing out a stream of smoke, and then smiling at me. And finally, when the others had gone back to their houses to shower and dress for Tea Dance, and he and I remained behind to enjoy the dusk, he said: "You know, I spent the whole afternoon sunbathing on the beach between a discaire and one of Gotham's biggest dealers. A drug dealer, a callboy, and a discaire. This has been," he smiled gently, looking out at the wheeling gulls, the foam tinning gold and rose in the setting sun, the clear blue sky, "the nadir of my life." He laughed and lay back down again and fell silent. The moon appeared, very clean and very silver, and the skein of clouds strung across the sky, no larger than the fantail of a passing jet, turned gold, and apricot, and lavender. Later, when everything was turning blue again, he was lying on his stomach watching two people struggle with a kite, when he said in an idle, musing voice, "Isn't it peculiar, where you end up through what seem like such minor decisions? Really, in life, if you just let yourself float," he said in the voice of a child wondering over some extraordinary fact, "you can end up anywhere! There are tides flowing anywhere!" he said, looking over at me with his chin still resting on his hands.
"Why," I said, "do you think you've wasted your life?"
"Does it matter?" he smiled. "And do I have enough strength to save it? If I do want to?" he said.
He shuddered, got to his knees, and turned to look out to sea, where two shrimp boats were marooned on the horizon. Down the beach, in both directions, people faced the sea in the Lotus position, meditating. The sky behind us was a tumult of gold-and salmon-colored clouds in the west, and before us the day had already died, unwitnessed, to give birth to the primal dream of this particular place, the musical, glittering, erotic night. Everyone—everyone except us, and the people meditating on the ridge of sand facing the sea—was preparing now for that magical night, showering, dressing, locating the pills they would take at nine o'clock after a light supper so that by midnight the night would be even more illusive.
Already people in white pants, their faces blooming with a day spent by the sea, in the sun, were walking up the beach to cocktail parties in Water Island; a very popular model came down with her Afghan and her agent, to stand at the water's edge on tiptoe, in the pose of a nymph by Maxfield Parrish, as she held up a transparent blue scarf that fluttered from her fingertips in the breeze; and two lovers lingered to play with one another in the surf, their bathing suits cast on the sand, their buttocks white as the chaste moon floating above the green waves in which they stood waiting for the next breaker.
"Why am I such a puritan?" Malone said all of a sudden. He stood up, gathered his towel and cigarettes, and looked down at me, as if I could answer him. "A puritan is like an inveterate criminal," he smiled. "He can never be reformed." Then he excused himself to get ready for the seven o'clock boat back to the mainland, and walked off, leaving the world to twilight and to me.
It became very hot in the city—so hot we lay in bed at night, immobile and streaming with sweat. Cats lay about the sidewalk in the sprawl of animals who've been struck by automobiles. Everyone moved into the street and sat there as long as he could till it was time to go to bed. Sutherland and Malone went back and forth to the beach, which bored Malone to distraction at this point, since he was in love with the very heat of the city. He loved to go downstairs in the morning and find the Puerto Ricans walking down the streets with their shirts dangling from their pockets. He would set off these summer days to wander the city. He wandered the streets and parks with the deep pleasure of someone who is saying good-bye to a place, which, once it has been relegated to the past, now seems especially touching. He lay on the grass in Central Park watching the faces that had so held him in thrall pass by, or flash about in games of soccer on a dusty field.
Malone realized at this point in his life that he had ceased to be a homosexual, so much as he had become a pederast. The fellow who caused him to stop one afternoon and sit down on a grassy rise to watch the soccer game was no more than twenty, in the first flush of beauty; and yet, as he ran with the ball through clouds of dust stirred by the game, Malone watched him with a certain detachment, earned by years of desperation. Five years before, this person would have stabbed him in the heart, engendered such despair that he would have obsessed Malone the rest of that day and night; and he would have gone out to the bars or baths hoping to find someone of his type. And the next afternoon he would have returned to the Sheep Meadow on the chance that he might be playing. Now it was something else. He wore old white gym shorts and a faded red polo shirt. He had black, black hair and large dark eyes and he had not spent the su
mmer in the sun, for his skin was ivory-white. Years before, Malone would have gone home and called someone up and said, "You should have seen the kid I saw in the Park today!" as if something, someone had to memorialize such wonders. Now he simply accepted it. Now he knew very well that this young man's beauty was just that—a fact: his beauty—and that he, Malone, could not worship it, or worse (the fault of so many people he knew still), possess it, consume it, digest it. The boy's beauty became for Malone as he lay there on the grass watching him run around in those clouds of white dust, handsome as a myth on the plain of Troy, an impersonal fact, as impersonal as the beauty of a tree, or a sky, or a seacoast, a fact that did not compel him to embrace it any more than it seemed necessary for him to embrace a particularly lovely copper beech. He lay there watching the boy play his heated game of soccer, but he looked at the clouds passing over the sun, too, and when the team finally broke up and walked across the grass toward Central Park West, Malone rose and walked away, a calm spirit.
And so Malone came that afternoon to a kind of truce with the city: He was leaving it, now he had found a way, and its faces no longer kept him there against his will. He was free. Free to go. Free even to please Sutherland one last time and show up at the party on Fire Island, which till now had seemed reprehensible. He was very cheerful when we all got on the train, for a reason we could not imagine, and sat down with Sutherland, who promptly fell asleep. Halfway to Sayville a young man with moustache and glasses, looking as if he were on his way home from a piano lesson in Kew Gardens, sat down across from our little band of gypsies, and after half an hour of staring at Malone with the bright intensity of an anarchist about to blow up the train, began to masturbate. "How many people I fell in love with on this train," Malone said as he raised his head from his book, his eyes sparkling. He nudged Sutherland and explained in a low voice why we would have to move; but Sutherland only yawned and said, "It depends, darling, on how big it is." He leaned forward and then remarked: "My dear, I don't think that's any reason to call the porter. If there is a porter on this ancient caboose," he murmured, closing his eyes again; and then the train came to a stop and the conductor shouted, "Sayville!" and we all said goodbye to Sutherland and got off.
Sutherland remained on the train to go to East Hampton to pick up a wig a woman had borrowed from him months ago, "and with the usual tact of the obscenely rich," he said with that breathless high dudgeon, "allowed her Irish wolfhound to pee on it and then forgot to return it to me." The wig, he learned on arriving in East Hampton, had gone back to the city the previous week with the woman's maid, and so,
Sutherland, on the eve of his party, found himself riding back and forth across Long Island in stuffy trains pursuing his favorite false hair. "The story of a generation!" he gasped when he finally arrived by seaplane the next afternoon in the Pines. His arrival was a sight I shall not forget, in fact: Sutherland on the pontoon of the seaplane as it drifted into shore shortly after three, spike heels in one hand, a daiquiri in the other, and a bright red wig on his head, and tiny pearl earrings. He had fourteen pieces of luggage for us to take to the house, and was nonplussed when he Teamed Malone was somewhere far down the beach in another town reading the collected works of St. Augustine.
"Mummy's very nervous," he said breathlessly as we came up to him, wading into the water, "about too many other things. Have the flowers come?"
We assured him they had, and then hoisted the Vuitton onto our heads.
"I'm so sorry about the luggage," he said, "I know it's pretentious." He gnawed at his lip. "But it wasn't when my grandmother bought it, in 1926."
We followed him ashore, like slaves in the Cameroons following their master, past the crowded deck of the Botel where four hundred glassy homosexuals drank cocktails beside the white Chris Crafts on which Jewish families played canasta, oblivious to the mob ten feet away; a talent for ignoring people bred in the elevators of New York.
"Do you think this house," said Sutherland, as he wiped his brow in the resplendent, mirrored living room, "is ostentatious enough? They offered me the one next door at four thousand the month, but I told them it wasn't enough. No," he said as he strolled about, "I wanted something really meretricious. So this is the room in which we are to give our daughter away. Reading St. Augustine," he snorted, "in Point o' Woods. Malone has, I'm afraid to say, a streak of melancholy that is quite unfortunate—though half the secret of his success. We're all in love with the sadness of life—that wistful, grave, forlorn rue that suffuses his eyes like a perfume of Guerlain whose name I can't recall. I've tried to keep him blithe," he said, standing at the glass door and staring out at the sea, "but he wants more than Estée Lauder can give, poor baby. Reading St. Augustine indeed! He's a perfect match for John Schaeffer, who, if he reads one more book, is going to ruin his complexion. Well," he said, turning back to arrange the gladiolas and white nasturtiums in a spray more to his liking. "Darling, is there any Perrier in the fridge?" he said, removing a pill from his little box. "Mummy thinks she'd like to take a nap."
He went to the glass wall and stared out at the bodies baking on the beach in the crisp, ferocious heat, just over a sand dune. "You don't think they'll get so burned they will be in a bad mood and come to our do with tempers as hot as their skin. Well," he sighed, turning away to ascend the polished staircase, his fragile form reflected in half a dozen mirrored walls, "one can't, at their age, insist they come in out of the sun and take a nap... which is what sensible girls from Richmond have done since they were tiny tots..." His voice trailed off, and he turned on the balcony to regard the room below, as a hand strayed up to remove the pearl clip earrings. "Do you quite know," he said, "what it means to be a mother? To bring out of the womb a child, and rear this child, worrying about her teeth, piano lessons, first period? To get her the best French teacher, the best playmates, the best schools. To hope against hope that she will be beautiful and witty and wise? And then to have her reject the millionaire you've chosen? If you knew how John Schaeffer is suffering!" he gasped. "Malone said the only reason he would go through with this affair tonight is the chance that John will meet someone else and fall in love. The reason, of course, everyone comes to this island. Lord, what fools these mortals be!" he sighed. "Awaken me only for the most vile of emergencies! Otherwise, I wish to sleep, and receive the full benefit of my moisture-pack!" And with that, he turned and vanished in a billow of white curtains, murmuring about the ghosts of parties past.
As Sutherland surrendered to the white pill he had extracted from the little silver case, sacks of ice arrived in wheelbarrows trundled over from the grocery store, and the caterers set up the bars around the rooms. Outside, the beach emptied as people went back to get their costumes ready and the beautiful, unnoticed twilight fell on the deserted sea. To the seaplanes descending from the violet sky the Island glowed one last instant in the rays of the sun sinking into the Great South Bay. Its golden dune grass caught the light and burned in intenser gold as the rest of the Island was bathed in blue light and rumors of suicide. It lasted, this peerless dusk, for just an instant as Malone sat gossiping on the harbor dock, and he came nearer to the people in the seaplanes, with the faces, trees, and boats, and they could almost hear the soft roar of gossip rising from the holly trees. Everyone at Tea Dance was talking about the boy who had jumped to his death that afternoon from a rooftop in the city, and when that topic was exhausted, their love affairs of the previous week, the new faces, the music last night, the party to come, and—at least in the circle who sat with Malone when I arrived at the dock and joined him there—how they planned to fly back to the city after the party to go to the Everard Baths. Before leaving to return to their house for cocktails, they had persuaded Malone that he would fly back with them.
But once they left, Malone looked at me with a smile and only shrugged: happy to watch in silence the air turn milky blue, the white steeples and sails across the bay, without the demands and needs of other people. A great peace descended on us. We hard
ly had a thing to say to one another because we had seen this so many summers. I glanced at the fellow beside me. He was one of us now—and I began to wonder why Malone had fascinated us so. He wasn't, in the end, any of the things we had thought all these years: a doctor, a designer, a victim of bone disease, an Episcopalian protégé. Of all the faces we had been in love with, some in fact had been these things; but most of them, whoever they were, had disappeared to farms upstate, California, or the Hamptons. Only we were still on the circuit. In a country where one is no more than what one does (a country of workers) or the money one possesses, Malone had ceased, like us, to have any identity at all. He was simply a smile now, a set of perfect manners, a wistful promise, as insubstantial as the breeze blowing the hair across his forehead. And he had been, all those years, just as lost as we were, living on faces, music, the hope of love, and getting farther and farther away from any chance of it. In a year he would be cleaning houses and living alone in some obscure room in the East Village and seeing none of his former friends; and when he went out to the old places to dance, he wouldn't dance—but stand on the edge of the floor, dancing alone, perhaps, or shaking a tambourine when an especially good song came on. It happened to us all. It was either that or travel somewhere else, like Montana, Oregon, where he could begin the illusion again, with new faces, bodies, eyes to fall in love with: the occasional stranger passing through. A beautiful dark-eyed boy in a red bathing suit was floating past on a sailboat at that moment. He looked at Malone. Their glances held, and the dark-eyed youth continued moving, out into the channel, turning his head in the sunset breeze to keep his eyes on Malone as long as he could, until his boat was but a blue and rosy blur in the viscous dusk settling on the bay. "That's where I want all my relationships," Malone smiled. "Disappearing into the sunset in the west." For there were Latin youths in San Francisco, surely, and in Chicago, too; in Los Angeles, and in the public parks of Bogota and Rio de Janeiro. This thought—of all the boys he might sleep with still (the comfort of every romantic heart)—vanished in the memory of the one boy he had not slept with, when another boat went by. It bore four water skiers going out for a final run, and one of them, a handsome Puerto Rican doctor, called to Malone: "Did you hear about Bob? It broke my heart!" And Malone only nodded, and then shook his head.
Dancer From the Dance: A Novel Page 19