Dancer From the Dance: A Novel by Andrew Holleran

Author:Andrew Holleran
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780060937065
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Published: 1978-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

And so we come to the night John Schaeffer, up from Princeton for the weekend, was taken to the Twelfth Floor and saw Malone come in the door and greet his friends. Friends who were nothing more than people he went to parties with, and who had long since lost their capacity to enchant. He stood talking to him and listening to the music with an oddly detached, critical ear. He was waiting for a song, the right song, a face, the magic face, to kindle in him again the old ecstasies—and when he found himself on the floor again, putting back his head when Patty Jo began to sing, "Make Me Believe in You," and touching Bruce West's voluptuous chest streaming with sweat, and wondering who the next boy would be, he was, like everyone else, just a prisoner of habit.

But he hadn't been there in a long time, living as he was with Rafael on the other side of town, and it was for some a thrill to see him again. For if Malone was, in the end, only a face I saw in a discotheque one winter, he was somehow the figure on which everything rested. The central beautiful symbol. As long as he was enmeshed, as long as that room could draw him back (as it now had), so was I. As long as it compelled that face it compelled me. You form relationships like that in a city, and especially in a society as romantic as homosexual society, with faces you never even come near but which stand for a great deal. Why did I never try to know these people whom I adored? I do not know. But though I'd never spoken to Malone, I loved him, and though I'd never tried to meet him, / he was the only person in that huge city whose life, whose fate, I found absorbing; and the moment he appeared in that doorway once again, the moment he came back to the Twelfth Floor, I felt a great joy, as if the illusion of love were once more possible.

Nor have I even said what this man looked like, in a story that is really about physical beauty more than anything else—Malone was one of the few blonds I ever found handsome. In New York one is in love with Italians and Jews, and Puerto Ricans and Hungarians, with Sicilians and Venezuelans—the dark-eyed, dark-haired beauties in whom you wish to extinguish yourself, to drown, to disappear in, like a dark night—and blonds were as bland as the bankers and attorneys striding Park Avenue: the blank minions of a vast workhouse, who understood nothing of the secrets of the blood. Then there was Malone. He was the other kind of blond. He resembled those stylized warriors drawn with black lines on the umbrian hue of Greek amphorae, whose thighs were sheaths of muscle so clearly defined they might be plates of armor on the leg. He had the grace of a gazelle grazing on some golden plain in the heat of an African noon.

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