The Humble Lover by Edmund White

Author:Edmund White
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Aldwych claimed he’d never danced and couldn’t even do the fox trot, which wasn’t true since in fifth and sixth grades he’d taken classes in ballroom dancing and as an extra man he’d whirled across the marble floors some of Tuxedo Park’s most visible debutantes. It’s also where he’d had his first gay experiences. The paunchy president of the Bachelors’ Cotillion had lured him up as a fifteen-year-old to his suite in the Roosevelt Hotel on Madison, where he got him drunk on Scotch, loosened his suspenders, and fell on the floor before his bare ass and gave him his first rim job. His subsequent kisses tasted of Johnnie Walker and unwiped bottom.

As a young teen, Aldwych spent hours and hours alone in his father’s Princeton House on Brookstone Drive. The “staff” went home at night and his father usually stayed in Manhattan with his mistress, a painter on Bond Street who thought children were small, inferior adults though she declared them “adorable.” In the big twelve-room house he liked to play a recording of Ravel’s Menuet antique and leap about in the nude, all the lights extinguished. It was what he called “interpretive dance,” and he would twirl and thump and stoop and jump, imagining how he looked naked with his muscular rump and still hairless torso, his penis too small to signify, his beardless face creamy to the touch. He always imagined an astonished observer, a clothed man sitting in the shadows, feverishly attentive.

He took his cue from the music, which he knew by heart. He would stand on his toes, lie briefly and lightly on his back on the sofa, fluttering his legs in entrechats in the air, stand suddenly and weave his hands in mystical Oriental patterns, practice the Scottish sword dance he’d learned for a school production of Brigadoon, waltz an invisible partner around the room in giant, reeling steps, cling to the back of a chair in order to extend his right leg far, far behind him without losing his balance. He felt so free, so exalted, so pagan as he spun, crouched, leapt, imagining that his bluish-white body was exciting the imagined adult male observer in the shadows. He was intensely aware that he was beautiful, though “being beautiful” required a putative observer.

Veering headlights heralded his father’s unexpected return. Aldwych doused the deafening music, climbed into his clothes, restored the furniture to its customary positions, flipped the rug back into place, wiped the sweat from his face, tried to catch his breath, switched on a lamp, and picked up a book. His father saw him from a room away and said “Time for bed, champ,” before staggering drunkenly up the stairs. His father seemed in a bad mood; perhaps he’d quarreled with his “lady friend” once again. Aldwych wondered what his father would have thought if he’d caught his son interpreting us all in his splendid naked dance.

So Aldwych had a vivid memory of the expressiveness and ecstasy of dance; he hoped that

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