Dancer From the Dance: A Novel (29 page)

What lover could possibly have matched what Malone had stored up in his imagination? Or any of us, for that matter. We were lunatics, I'm sorry to say. Our lovers weren't real. Wasn't that finally the strangest thing of all? The way we loved them? We were just queens in the end. We would not even speak to most of them—were we cowards? Shy girls waiting to be serenaded? Or did we all suspect that half the beauty and the shimmer of that life was in our own hypnotic hearts and not out there? If that was the case, then we were fools: for being romantics. You know, we queens loathed rain at the beach, small cocks, and reality, I think. In that order. Anyway, that's why I left—the madness of it all offended me, finally, I wanted a real porch, a real front yard with real live oaks and real flowers in real pots—and that is what I have now, dear, retired faggot that I am, content with the quiet pleasures of life. Even as I put down this pen (my hand is
numb)
I can hear the mockingbirds in the gardenia bush outside my window, and there is,
croyez-moi,
no sweeter sound on earth.

Diane Von Furstenberg

Full Moon

The Lower East Side

Vision,

I have submitted your letter to the Columbia Graduate School Faculty, for I can understand about half of it. As to your friend who thought he saw Malone in Singapore, I heard that story, too. I also heard from a Pan Am steward who swears he saw him in Australia, on a street in Sydney. Could you give me Hank's address? I think I'll write that parochial school in Singapore and inquire after our friend. I have tried to contact his family in Ohio already. Because I, too, want to know where he ended up; it's important, because he was somehow the one who seemed above it all, and what he is doing now that it's over (and it is, I'm afraid, though I hate to admit it) fascinates me. I doubt that he died at the Everard, for the same reasons you do; though it's possible, of course, since the majority of those bodies were just cinders and ash and could not be identified. It would explain why no one has heard a word from Malone—which surprises me, because Malone was the best friend of so many people, even though he probably considered none of
them
his best friend. Do you think that all that time Malone cared for no one? THAT'S an interesting possibility. It's often the case with people who have that profound ability to charm, who charm without even trying, or know too well how to charm. It's possible Malone went off to Singapore or Sydney and has absolutely no interest in any of us back here. Yet I believe he was too genuinely affectionate (his whole tragedy, really). Is the silence due to pride then? Like that countess in Paris who, the day she discovered her first crow's foot, drew the drapes of her mansion and never went out into society again? My dear!

There is another possible explanation for the complete silence, other than pride, indifference, or the extinguishing flames of the Everard Baths—and that brings us to my last theory. Do you remember how fascinated Malone was—stunned, really—by that Italian circuit queen, Mario Pross, who joined the Franciscans? We all knew queens who joked about taking the veil, but when Mario actually did it, Malone was breathless. Mario Pross was, after all, one of the most doomed of doomed queens. One week he was working on his tits at the Sheridan Square Gym (he was really handsome, you recall, and had a terrific body), going to Fire Island, doing poppers and drugs, dancing till dawn, fucking in the Meat Rack, and doing windows for Macy's, and living with a very hard-core crowd, and the next week, poof! he was in bare feet, praying the Stations of the Cross. Without a word to anyone! He just did it. Do you think Malone is pruning grapes somewhere in a monastery above the Hudson?

You see, I think what really explains Malone is that he was
religious:
He had grown up with those nuns in the tiled colonnades in Ceylon, under the thorn trees at noon, and if he loved the sailors sitting on the veranda drinking beer, he loved Christ and Mary and the Saints in the darkness of that church, too. I think the sunlight, the palm trees, the transparent sea, the bronzed sailors, the happiness of his childhood, and the death of Christ all got mixed up and he never knew where the aesthetic stopped and the religious began, and vice versa. You know, when people who were once religious no longer believe in God, they never really change; they just go on, hunting for the ecstatic food, trying to satisfy that hunger. You must admit this search took Malone places he never would have gone otherwise; and who knows where it has taken him now?

Because he dreamed with the best of us, my dear, dreamed even more outlandish dreams—and then when they failed him, he left. In silence, for what could one say? You remember what Sutherland said to me coming back on the train one day when I asked him why Malone was so restless, and talking about moving to Denver, San Francisco, Charleston. "Dreams decompose, darling," he said, "like anything else. And they give off gases, some of which are poisonous and all of which are unpleasant, and so one goes away from the place in which the dreams were dreamed, and are now decomposing before your very eyes. Otherwise, you might die, dear, of monoxide poisoning.
Tant pis,"
he said. Well, maybe that is why Malone split. You think? Decomposed dreams?

Betsy Bloomingdale

Sleepytime

The Deep South

Ecstasy,

I would love to talk about this forever, but don't you see what we've become: old hags chewing the fat, like the men down here who want nothing more than to sit all day at the post office or gas station, chawing and gabbing away. About the fish they caught and whose daughter divorced and went off to Atlanta. Very rural, dear, very golden years. What is so incredible about homosexuals is that, if they live as homosexuals (that is to say, as women: beings whose life consists chiefly of Being Attractive to others), they die much sooner than heterosexual men. Here we are talking as if life were over. Malone has disappeared, true, and we have no idea where he is or what he is doing (as if that would tell
us
what to do and where to go, when in fact we must find the answers in ourselves), and with his departure from the city, the city ceased to be enchanting. (That is what your novel is about in the end, you know: the city. Hot summer nights in that city. So you did what I said a novel should do, for it can't be anything more.) And now that you've done that, you have to go on. We can't just fold our wings and sleep, like two blackbirds in a magnolia tree; and what does one do next? Living for beauty is all very fine, but it's a hard regimen and burns up the heart very quickly. I hope we don't become quiet old farts sitting on a bench in some small town watching the fellas play baseball. Remember Shakespeare's sonnets to the beautiful young man, telling him he must marry or his beauty will die with him? The point is that we are not doomed because we are homosexual, my dear, we are doomed only if we live in despair because of it, as we did on the beaches and the streets of Suck City.

Let us not, after all, dignify Malone too much: He was in the end a circuit queen. He was handsome, true, and good-mannered and kind—and it's sad to think that such a romantic soul will have to wander (if he is alive) like the gypsies, the Jews, expelled from some walled city in the Middle Ages—but then love, in the best of circumstances, is hard to find. Malone was determined. He wouldn't give up. He hung around as long as he could and—who knows? He may come back. We may come back. You remember all the men who tried to escape—who had their firms transfer them to Saudi Arabia, to Cleveland, who went to the country to manage stores, or just retire with their aging parents—and who all reappeared. Once that life is in your blood, my dear, it's hard to live elsewhere.

And even so, do you realize what a tiny fraction of the mass of homosexuals we were? That day we marched to Central Park and found ourselves in a sea of humanity, how stunned I was to recognize no more than four or five faces? (Of course our friends were all at the beach, darling; they couldn't be bothered to come in and make a political statement.) I used to say there were only seventeen homosexuals in New York, and we knew every one of them; but there were tons of men in that city who weren't on the circuit, who didn't dance, didn't cruise, didn't fall in love with Malone, who stayed home and went to the country in the summer. We never saw them. We were addicted to something else: something I lived with so long it had become a technique, a routine. That was the real sin. I was too smart, I built a wall around myself. I might as well have been living in the desert, where the air is, after all, cleaner.

Well, dear, the sun is burning overhead, incinerating every leaf in the garden; the lake is smooth as a sheet of polished lead; the birds are napping; the pine trees look as if they were plugged into an electric socket, their needles glowing with current; the clouds overhead are incandescent, and edged with silver, and in about three hours they will gather to a point in huge, towering cumulus mountains and disgorge a violent thunderstorm that will leave the air exquisitely soft. What I said earlier was wrong: We don't have to do anything with our lives. As long as you are alive, there's an end to it. I feel like a child who's been awakened from his sleep and taken downstairs in someone's arms to see the party and the guests. Who knows how long it will last, who knows when that considerate adult will send you back to bed and life will once more be that poignant band of light beneath the door, beyond which all the voices, laughter, and happiness lie? No, darling, mourn no longer for Malone. He knew very well how gorgeous life is—that was the light in him that you, and I, and all the queens fell in love with. Go out dancing tonight, my dear, and go home with someone, and if the love doesn't last beyond the morning, then know I love you.

Paul

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A
NDREW
H
OLLERAN
studied history and literature at Harvard University. He went on to law school but midway through decided to be a writer. He attended the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, did a tour in the Army, and now works and lives in New York City.
Dancer From the Dance
is his first published novel.