Dancer From the Dance: A Novel (20 page)

"But I have never seen you, in the
faubourg!"
said Sutherland in a voice whose passionate excitement gave you the impression he had just been someplace marvelous and was going to be someplace marvelous again.

"I'm a recluse," said Archer in his warped monotone.

"Ah," said Sutherland, tilting the cigarette holder by his lips. "Ah," he breathed.

"A real recluse," said Archer.

"Tell me," said Sutherland. There was a pause, and Archer leaned forward. "What does one wear?"

Archer stared at him until Sutherland said, with a wave of his hand, "No, no, surely there are more intelligent questions than that, it is not your fault I am concerned," he said, "with surfaces."

"With surfaces?"

"Yes, with hats, with gloves, you understand," he said. "I was a recluse myself once, due to a... grocery store," he said, waving his hand. He spoke with the most fluid languor, and never above a breathless rush, and as you looked at him, reclining on some pillows that had been thrown onto an old sofa in the corner beside Malone's bed, he produced an impression of almost soporific languidness until your eyes traveled down the figure and saw his one foot, tapping the air with the regularity of a metronome.

"But the whole affair blew away," he murmured throatily, "and I shop at D'Agostino now. Why did
you
become a recluse?" he asked Archer.

"Because I was burned out," droned Archer, "because I was a doomed queen, because I got tired of the same faces, and the same places, because I had been standing in the Eagle's Nest for ten
years."

"My dear," breathed Sutherland as he expelled a stream of smoke. "At least you weren't in the men's room at Grand Central."

"I know just how you feel," said Malone all of a sudden. "I want to become a recluse, too."

"The Schaeffers have a place in the Berkshires," said Sutherland, turning to Malone. "Will that do? Is a thousand acres enough for you to be alone with the wild-flower and the loon? Will a thousand acres suffice, darling?" he said.

"I think so," said Malone, looking at him with a smile.

"Don't you think he looks just like a wounded airman of the First World War recuperating at Sandringham?" said Sutherland, getting up to hover around Malone like Betty Furness displaying a refrigerator. "If you walked in and saw him, could you resist? Could you?" he said. "I wonder," he said, standing back like a designer appraising a gown, "if we should hang dog tags around his neck. Or sprinkle talcum powder all over everything? Talcum powder and cheap after-shave cologne?" he said, asking us all to survey Malone.

"You see," he said, turning to us, "this is what our client will see when he walks through the door tomorrow. We mustn't make a mistake!" He put a hand to his lips. "We could always ask Harry Kaplan to come down. He's done brilliant things with the windows at Bendel's."

But evidently this was not required, for the next afternoon when we came up with his groceries and his mail, Malone looked as we had left him. And the handsome young man with horn-rimmed glasses whom I had last seen sitting beside Sutherland on the sofa at the Twelfth Floor was now sitting on a pillow in the corner. "You really can't think of five things in life you've always wanted to do," Sutherland said to him when we walked in.

"Well," he said, "I've always wanted to spend a year on the Serengeti, and go up the Amazon, and visit the Galapagos, but do you mean things like that? I imagine everyone wants to do those."

"Well, not everyone," breathed Sutherland. "Some of us prefer, like Thoreau, to journey in the
mind.
I was thinking, nevertheless, of fantasies deep within you. Secret wishes of the heart, so to speak."

"Well," said the boy, whose calm had given Sutherland no entree till now, "I suppose what we all want is to—not be lonely," he said, his voice growing small. "What I really want is someone to love."

"Ah," said Sutherland.

"But you see," he said, "I don't think two men
can
love each other... in that way. It will always be a sterile union, it will always be associated with guilt. Sometimes I think that God was sitting up above the world one day, after He had created it," the boy sighed, "and someone said, 'Now what could we throw in to spoil it? You've created such a perfect existence, how could it go amuck?' And someone said, 'Confuse the sexes. Have the men desire men instead of women, and the women desire women. That would do it!' And that's what they did," he said. "You see, life
would
be marvelous if we weren't homosexual. To grow up, to fall in love, to have children, grow old and die. It's rather nice. But then God threw in that monkey wrench. As if out of sheer mischief!" he said.

"Does your family know you're gay?" said Malone, from his bed.

"Oh, no," said the fertilizer heir. "Oh never. I can't imagine. I simply can't imagine it." He stared at the floor and he said, "They were talking about it one night in Maine, and my uncle said, 'If I were queer, I'd put a rifle in my mouth and pull the trigger.'" He looked up.
"That's
what they think of it."

"They wouldn't cut you out of the will, would they?" said Sutherland in a breathless voice.

"I don't think so," he said.

Sutherland quickly fanned himself before the boy looked up at him.

"But then they'll never know," he said.

"It's just as well," said Sutherland. "But I must disagree with you totally about the impossibility of love! There are hundreds of beautiful young men who want just what you do," he said, "but they are afraid! Cynical! Pessimistic! Self-loathing! Love bids them follow, and they say, 'No! I'd rather spend my evenings in the men's room at Grand Central!' But you, you are too intelligent, too sensitive, for that. You need, in the words of the Jefferson Airplane, someone to love. And before the summer is through, you'll have him."

"I will?" said the boy with a smile that dissolved in the irony of his little shrug. "Ah, then show me, please, I am anxious for this person."

"Wonderful," said Sutherland. "I have someone in mind at this very moment."

"Who?" he said.

"Ah, that is not the issue just yet," said Sutherland. "As Ortega y Gasset says, 'Love is an experience few people are capable of,' and I must first find out if you yourself are one of those happy few. Let's go. I'm taking you to a cocktail party on Bank Street"

"Oh," said the boy as he got to his feet. There was an expression of disappointment on his face. He had been happy sitting there in the shaft of sunlight by the fire escape telling Sutherland the answers to his questions while Malone lay there listening.

"All
the boys you saw at the Twelfth Floor last night will be there," said Sutherland.

"Oh," said the boy.

"At least you love beauty," said Sutherland.

The boy walked over to the bed and shyly shook Malone's free hand, and then, after bidding us good-bye, went out the door. "He is deeply in love with you," said Sutherland to Malone the moment the door had closed.

"What do you mean?" Malone said. "He hates being gay and said that he doesn't believe in love between men."

"My dear, that was all for your benefit!" said Sutherland. "He wasn't talking to me, he was talking to you! He was pouring out his innermost doubts, and fears and despair! He was putting forward all the reasons he couldn't believe in love, while he was already dreaming of your damp kisses! He wasn't talking to me, he was talking to
you!"
he said, gathering up his cigarettes and dark glasses and beret. "He was saying, 'Love is difficult, love is impossible, help me make it through the night!' You'll be in the will by Labor Day. Good-bye, darlings, I'm taking him to the overdecorated home of a burned-out queen whose beautiful and alcoholic guests will only make him long for you, Malone, recuperating in this slum! I'll call you tonight!"

He gave Malone a cocktail kiss and turned at the door. "He is young, he is innocent, he still thrills to Patty Jo when she sings 'Make me believe in you, show me that love can be true,' and not only that, he believes the lyrics! Have you never been sitting beneath a tree beside a lake, when a young girl comes on her bicycle, and thinking she is alone, walks down to the water and wades out to swim? Have you never seen a nine-year-old boy on a Georgia road playing by himself in the noonday sun? Have you never seen innocence? Well, this afternoon, you have!" And he was out the door.

"He believes the lyrics?" said Archer with a grin.

Malone waved his hand, and smiled. "So do I," he said, as he leaned forward to breathe the scent of a single rose that John Schaeffer had brought that afternoon.

"But the one who just left—is nuts!"

"Oh, he believes the lyrics, too," said Malone. "At the same time, I have no idea what he wants from life, or where he thinks he is heading, or what really matters to him. But then"—he shrugged, smiling at the absurdity of a statement so unlike everything in which he had been taught to believe—"he says no man can know anything for certain in this life, except how to be well-dressed."

Sutherland loathed money—partly because he belonged to an old Virginia family that considered it vulgar, and partly because Sutherland, while not serious, was a man to whom wit and beauty were the true source of happiness. He loved to tell the story of his paternal grandfather, who spent hours in the bathroom reading novels, and who was doing so the afternoon a remote cousin came by from Atlanta with a block of stock in a new company that he wished Sutherland's grandfather to buy; but his grandfather refused to come down, engrossed as he was in a novel by Jane Austen. "Tell him I'm taking a very long shit," the old man said to his sister at the bathroom door; and the young man went away, and with him, a fortune in Coca-Cola stock. The family remained poor.

And so we sat on the stoop those spring evenings and watched the bidders for Malone come and go. Sutherland was hardly interested in the sympathy of circuit queens who could do nothing but shake a tambourine and look pretty. He was suddenly all business. The fact that he was joining rich men and a beautiful friend did not bother him at all—he loved to do it, rather—but the fact that he was doing something for money bothered him a great deal. The right hand knew not what the left was doing. As he waited on the sidewalk beneath us for a client to arrive, a beggar approached Sutherland and held out his hand and said: "I'm hungry." And Sutherland said to him, with that suppressed hysteria that lurked behind his breathless voice: "I am hungry, too, for love, self-esteem, religious certainty. You are merely hungry for food." And he gave the man a Valium. And standing there in the twilight waiting for some enormously wealthy art dealer to arrive—an art dealer who had seen Malone at dinner parties with Sutherland and always ached to know him—he nervously tapped his foot against the pavement, hating, even now, the fact that he was doing one thing for gold. "But I have all the things money can't buy," he wailed to the waiting moon, the whores clustering at the soda counter, "charm, taste, a curious mind. Why run after
gelt?
Because," he reminded himself as he stood there, "plane tickets cost money. God! Not to mention houses in Greece."

Since coming to New York Malone had received numerous offers from wealthy men amounting to very little effort on his part. People wanted Malone the way they wanted vases from China,
étagères,
Coromandel screens. And so, while spring arrived on the Lower East Side, and we sat out on our stoop in the evenings, we watched them come and go: the fertilizer heir, the Argentinian architect, rich screenwriters, decorators, owners of textile firms—Sutherland had them all filing through that apartment, like the people uptown at Parke-Bernet viewing the works of art before they go up on the block.

Meanwhile the Poles in their dark suits and hats watched it all go by, their hats pushed back on their heads, as if a funeral were about to begin in the church down the street. The street had come down to that, the Poles and Puerto Ricans, the two races of man, northern and southern, inundated in the garish chaos of hustling for a buck.

One evening we came downstairs and saw an ambulance pulled up in front of the building—and five minutes later a body covered up on a stretcher came out. It was one of the tenants, the Coughing Lady, who had lived alone on the fourth floor for thirty-five years in the same apartment and who had died nearly a week ago without anyone knowing.

"Oh, God, that's how we're all going to end up," droned Archer in his flattest monotone.

"Not if we use
lots
of Estée Lauder," said Sutherland breathlessly as he went inside to bring Malone some ice cream and cigarettes.

Sometimes Malone sat with us on the stoop at dusk and watched the rectangle of sky at the western end of our street glow a burnished orange as the sun set, and then red, and then a pale blue that deepened and deepened at the cornices of buildings till it turned a rich and intriguing indigo that one saw only in the city. Malone was perplexed by men like our clump of Poles who stood for hours talking and watching the crowds go by. "You know, when I first came to the city," he said one evening, "I could not understand how these people could just sit out in front of their building all day and in the evening, too, just watching people go by. It drove me mad! I thought, how can anyone be so stationary, how can anyone reduce his life to that, and just waste his life standing in front of a tenement watching the crowd go past! I used to think it was their Eastern European souls," he said, "some dark sloth and pessimism, you know, that allowed them to do this. But now," he said with a sigh as he himself turned his attention back to the passing throngs, "I understand perfectly why they do it." And there he sat, his chin on his hand, an American no longer chary of time.