Dancer From the Dance: A Novel by Andrew Holleran Read Free Book Online

about him," said Spare Parts. "He looks... ethereal." At that moment two Puerto Rican boys, oblivious to everything but their own heated discussion, stopped to snuff out their cigarettes in the ashtray beside the sofa.
    "And the reason you don't know any English," the one said suddenly in English to his friend, "is because you waste too much time chasing dick!"
    And they hurried off into the crowd, the accused defending himself excitedly in rapid Spanish to his friend.
    The gray-haired man on the sofa rolled his eyes, sighed a long sigh as he snuffed out his own cigarette in the ashtray, and said: "My dear, whole lives have been wasted chasing dick." He sat up suddenly. "Oh!" he said. "There's that song!"
    At that moment, "One Night Affair" was beginning to rise from the ruins of "Needing You," and they both put down their plastic cups of apple juice and started toward the dance floor.
    For a moment the sofa was empty, and two tall black boys wearing wide-brimmed hats eyed it as they moved, like sailing barges, very slowly along the edges of the crowd, but before they could cross the space of carpet to its comfortable cushions, I heard a rustle of silk and a distinctive voice. I turned and saw Sutherland sitting down with a thin, pale young fellow in horn-rimmed glasses who looked as if he had just stumbled out of the stacks of the New York Public Library.
    For an instant Sutherland, as he fit a cigarette into his long black holder, and the pale boy in spectacles eyed the black boys in hats across the rug; and then the blacks, seeing they had lost their harbor, turned and continued moving along the crowd like two galleons perusing the Ivory Coast on a hot, windless day.
    "I find it perfectly expressive of the whole sad state of human affairs at this moment of history, I find it a perfect symbol of the demise of America," said Sutherland in that low, throaty voice that always seemed breathlessly about to confide something undreamed of in your wildest dreams, "that dinge are the only people who take hats seriously!" And he turned to the boy with the cigarette in its rhinestone holder, waiting for a light.
    "Dinge?" said the boy in a cracked, earnest voice as he tried three times to finally get a flame from his lighter.
    "Oh, darling, are you one of these millionaires who go around with ninety-nine-cent lighters?" said Sutherland as he waited for the flame to ignite.
    The boy—who, we later learned, was the heir to a huge farm implement and nitrogen fertilizer fortune—flushed scarlet, for he could not bear references to his money and was terrified that someone would ask him for a loan, or assume that he would pay the bill. Sutherland puffed on his cigarette and removed it from his lips and said through a cloud of smoke, when the boy repeated his request for a definition of dinge: "Blacks, darling. Shvartzers, negroes, whatever you like. Why are they the better dancers? For they are. They get away with things here that no white boy could in a million years. And why do they get to wear white hats? And all the outrageous clothes? When gloves come back," he said, pulling at his own long black ones, "and I'm sorry they ever went away, you can be sure they will be the ones to wear them first!"
    The boy was not looking at Sutherland as he spoke—his eyes had already been caught by something ten feet away from him; his face had that stricken, despairing expression of someone who has seen for the very first time a race of men whose existence he never suspected before, men more handsome than he had ever imagined, and all of them in this tiny room. He looked as if he were about to burst into tears. He leaned closer to Sutherland who was at that moment just finishing with his gloves and who looked about himself now, with a gossamer cloud of stagnant cigarette smoke forming a double veil over his face. "My face seats five," he sighed, "my honeypot's on fire."
    The boy, transfixed and terrified, leaned closer to Sutherland and said, "Who