Dancer From the Dance: A Novel (4 page)

A single figure was walking along the ravaged beach frowning at the sand and then looking out to sea: alone with the late October sky, the coming storm. As we had watched so many figures approach, and pass, and disappear those furious summers given over to nothing more than watching figures like this one come near, and then finding them flawed or flawless, this late-autumn visitor assumed a face and body—and I recognized one of Malone's first lovers: a Hungarian nuclear physicist we had all adored one summer. This place, the city, was full of Malone's former lovers. He compared them once to the garbage of New York accumulating in a giant floating island off the coast of this very beach, floating nearer each year, as if accumulated loves, like waste, could choke us. The physicist passed by brooding over private sorrows. We had all of us pursued him with scant success. Which recalled a rule of Malone's, with which he used to comfort those who despaired of ever wedding their dreams, spoken with a rueful regret that it was true (for, if true lovers are either chaste or promiscuous, Malone belonged, in the end, to the first school): "Over a long enough period of time, everyone goes to bed with everyone else." And cheap as it was, that was the truth.

They had taken no notice of his disappearance, these people: no funeral pennants on the turrets of their houses, no black sash across the swimming pool. The Island waited now in bleak desuetude for next season; the very beach of that particular summer had been mercifully obliterated by autumn storms so that next summer's strand might assume its shape; and it was right. One came here for very selfish reasons; after all, it was a purely pagan place. Malone would be memorialized in gossip. He would be remembered at a dozen dinner parties next summer, or in those casual conversations after sex in which two strangers discover they know exactly the same people and live exactly the same lives. One would expect as much sentiment for the departure of an Island beauty as one would for the patron of a gambling casino who walks away from the roulette wheel. For such a private place, it was very public: Anyone could come here, and anyone did. If not this gypsy throng, who would mourn Malone? He lived perhaps in my memory: I would always think of this place, this sea, this sky, his face together, and wonder if he had wasted his life.

Can one waste a life? Especially now? "Well," Malone would say when some conceited beauty refused to even meet his eyes, "we're all part of the nitrogen cycle." Oh, yes, and the butterflies rising in golden clouds from the dunes on their way to Mexico, the deer lifting its head on a bluff to gaze down the beach, the silverfish suffocating in the back of the trucks, the very sky would not be subject to anything more. But in that narrower, human sense, of course it can. Malone worried that he had wasted his; and many felt he had. Those smug people who had bought their own houses out here and arrived by seaplane with their Vuittons. Malone only wanted to be liked. Malone wanted life to be beautiful and Malone believed quite literally in happiness—in short, he was the most romantic creature of a community whose citizens are more romantic, perhaps, than any other on earth, and in the end—he learned—more philistine.

He wanted to be liked, and so he ran away to New York—away from his own family—and he vanished on Manhattan, which is a lot easier than vanishing in the jungles of Sumatra. And what did he do? Instead of becoming the success they expected him to be, instead of becoming a corporate lawyer, he went after, like hounds to the fox, the cheapest things in life: beauty, glamour... all the reasons this beach had once thrilled us to death. But the parties, the drugs, the T-shirts, the music, were as capable of giving him his happiness as this sea I sat beside now was of stinging beneath the whips that Xerxes had his servants turn on the waves for swallowing up his ships.

The rain began to fall as the clouds eclipsed the sun and I got up and went back to the intersection where the suitcases of Malone's T-shirts and Lacostes sat as forlorn as the houses in the sparkling rain, and began dragging them down the boardwalk. The wind came up, the rain thickened, now that the first cloud was over this improbable sandbar—and figures appeared from the dense shrubbery hurrying toward the harbor with their own mementos. "Indian summer is like a woman!" someone yelled to his companion as they scurried. "Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle!" It was the opening line of
Peyton Place,
the favorite mockery of an aspiring novelist. Witty people came out in autumn; beauties in July.

Our little boat was covered with a tarpaulin when we came to the harbor, with its countless wagons rusting in the rain—a heap of abandoned souls, lying there in the rain till the bodies attached to them came back—and the owner sat in the shelter of the grocery store porch. We dragged our luggage up the stairs of the Sandpiper, and to our surprise found the back door flapping open in the wind. We went inside and shut it behind us, and heard the ghostly murmur of a couple who had already sat down in a far alcove, just where they sat on those blistering, crowded nights to watch the dancers. The room was plunged into a gray-and-silvery gloom, the mirrors and chrome gleaming in an eerie light. We shook ourselves like dogs, and sat down at a table and looked at the empty dance floor where we had spent so many sweaty, ecstatic nights in the past. That blond rectangle of polished wood that had seemed to be at one point the aesthetic center of the universe. It was here I had first seen Rick Hafner glistening with sweat like an idol around which people knelt in a drugged confusion, unconsciously adoring his beauty, assuming the pose of supplicants at some shrine. It was here Stanley Farnsworth would stop dancing with the boy he was seducing that night (for they all ended up with Stanley Farnsworth) in the middle of a song to embrace and kiss him with long, deep, searching kisses that gradually immobilized his prey, like the poison sea corals inject into fish, while everyone whirled like dervishes around them, and the air grew stale with the odor of used poppers, and we danced in our bare feet on their broken cylinders, as ladies had once danced on rose petals in silver slippers at Tea Dance years ago. It was here lovers had come with hollow-eyed, glum faces the first night after breaking up, and here they had desired each other, eyes floating above the crowd, mournful, romantic. It was here Lavalava used to come in sequined helmets and dance with Spanish Lily in a swirl of veils, it was here Malone had been arrested by the police.

"Tell me," I said to a friend who had come into the room and its ghostly light, "where did you first see Anthony Malone?"

"At the Twelfth Floor," he said. "Six years ago this fall."

"Me, too," I said. "I thought Malone was the handsomest man I'd ever seen. But then I was in love with half those people, and I never said hello or good-bye to any of them."

L
ONG
before journalists discovered the discotheques of Manhattan, long before they became another possession of the middle class, in the beginning, that particular autumn of 1971, two gentlemen whose names I forget opened up a little club on the twelfth floor of a factory building in the West Thirties. The West Thirties, after dark, form a lunar landscape: The streets that are crowded with men running racks of clothes down the sidewalk during the day, and trucks honking at each other to get through the narrow passageways of factory exits, are completely deserted at night. The place is as still as the oceans of the moon. The buildings are all dark. There isn't a soul in sight—not a bum, a mugger, or a cop. But late on Friday and Saturday nights, around one
A.M
., flotillas of taxis would pull up to a certain dim doorway and deliver their passengers who, on showing a numbered card, would go up in a freight elevator to the twelfth floor. Everyone who went there that first year agrees: There was never anything before or since so wonderful.

In a town where clubs open and close in a week, no one expected it to last more than one winter. The second year it was too famous, and too many people wished to go. Film stars and rock stars, and photographers, and rich Parisians, and women from Dallas came to look, and it was finished. There were arguments in the lobby about who was whose guest, and there were too many drugs; and toward the end of it, I used to just sit on the sofa in the back and watch the crowd.

The first year contained the thrill of newness, and the thrill of exclusivity—that all these people who might not even know each other, but who knew who each other were, had been brought together in the winter, in this little room, without having done a single thing to bring it about. They all knew each other without ever having been introduced. They formed a group of people who had danced with each other over the years, gone to the same parties, the same beaches on the same trains, yet, in some cases, never even nodded at each other. They were bound together by a common love of a certain kind of music, physical beauty, and style—all the things one shouldn't throw away an ounce of energy pursuing, and sometimes throw away a life pursuing.

Within this larger group—for some of them came but once a month, or twice all season—was a core of people who seemed to have no existence at all outside this room. They were never home, it seemed, but lived only in the ceaseless flow of this tiny society's movements. They seldom looked happy. They passed one another without a word in the elevator, like silent shades in hell, hell-bent on their next look from a handsome stranger. Their next rush from a popper. The next song that turned their bones to jelly and left them all on the dance floor with heads back, eyes nearly closed, in the ecstasy of saints receiving the stigmata. They pursued these things with such devotion that they acquired, after a few seasons, a haggard look, a look of deadly seriousness. Some wiped everything they could off their faces and reduced themselves to blanks. Yet even these, when you entered the hallway where they stood waiting to go in, would turn toward you all at once in that one unpremeditated moment (as when we see ourselves in a mirror we didn't know was there), the same look on all their faces: Take me away from this. Or, Love me. If there had been a prison for such desperadoes, you would have called the police and had them all arrested—just to get them out of these redundant places and give them a rest.

There was a moment when their faces blossomed into the sweetest happiness, however—when everyone came together in a single lovely communion that was the reason they did all they did; and that occurred around six-thirty in the morning, when they took off their sweat-soaked T-shirts and screamed because Patty Jo had begun to sing: "Make me believe in you, show me that love can be true." By then the air was half-nauseating with the stale stench of poppers, broken and dropped on the floor after their fumes had been sucked into the heart, and the odor of sweat, and ethyl chloride from the rags they clamped between their teeth, holding their friends' arms to keep from falling. The people on downs were hardly able to move, and the others rising from the couches where they had been sprawled like martyrs who have given up their souls to Christ pushed onto the floor and united in the cries of animal joy because Patty Jo had begun to sing in her metallic, unreal voice those signal words: "Make me believe in you, show me that love can be true."

(Or because the discaire had gone from Barrabas's "Woman" to Zulema's "Giving Up," or the Temptations' "Law of the Land." Any memory of those days is nothing but a string of songs.)

When the people finally left, the blood-red sun was perched in the fire escape of a factory building silhouetted on the corner, and the cornices of the buildings were all gold-edged, and they would strip off their T-shirts, in the cold fall morning, and wring them out over the gutter. And the sweat would fall into the gutter like water dripping from a pail, the sweat of athletes after a long and sweaty game of soccer on some playing field to the north, on a fall day as pure as this one; and they would walk up Broadway together, exhausted, ecstatic, their bones light as a bird's, a flotilla of doomed queens on their way to the Everard Baths because they could not come down from the joy and happiness.

They looked, these young men gazing up toward the sky with T-shirts hanging from their belts, like athletes coming from a game, like youths coming home from school, their dark eyes glowing with light, their faces radiant, and no one passing them could have gathered the reason for this happy band.

Toward the end, I used to sit on the sofa in the back of the Twelfth Floor and wonder. Many of them were very attractive, these young men whose cryptic disappearance in New York City their families (unaware they were homosexual) understood less than if they had been killed in a car wreck. They were tall and broad-shouldered, with handsome, open faces and strong white teeth, and they were all dead. They lived only to bathe in the music, and each other's desire, in a strange democracy whose only ticket of admission was physical beauty—and not even that sometimes. All else was strictly classless: The boy passed out on the sofa from an overdose of Tuinols was a Puerto Rican who washed dishes in the employees' cafeteria at CBS, but the doctor bending over him had treated presidents. It was a democracy such as the world—with its rewards and penalties, its competition, its snobbery—never permits, but which flourished in this little room on the twelfth floor of a factory building on West Thirty-third Street, because its central principle was the most anarchic of all: erotic love.