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

study calculus and trudge two miles through the drifts for breakfast down the road, he had suppressed some tremendous element in himself that took form in a prudish virginity. While his life was impeccable on the surface, he felt he was behind glass: moving through the world in a separate compartment, touching no one else. This was painful. He walked in one night to find his proctor standing nude from the shower in the middle of his room: He was unstrung. He wrote letters to girls in Ceylon, but they were just that: letters. He listened to stories of boys from Connecticut who had made love their first night home of vacation, to girls in Chevrolets; he listened to stories about the town whore, and he leafed through the copies of Playboy that everyone kept; and he was utterly untouched. This dissociation between his feelings and the feelings of all his friends baffled Malone. He simply suppressed it all, and studied harder, and dreamed of Ceylon. In New Haven he learned to ignore the tie his roommate hung on the doorknob of his room whenever he had a girl in bed with him, but ties remained for him the symbol of the rich erotic life that other men enjoyed. He himself was still a virgin when he took a room in a large house in the Maryland suburbs in 1968. The house belonged to the widow of an ambassador who had been a friend of his grandmother's when they were girls; and he rented a similar one in Brookfield, Connecticut, since his work was in two cities. Like most of his classmates he loathed cities. His married friends lived in North Salem and he visited them on Sundays. He found it touching and curious that they wanted his company; for he assumed, never having been in love, that they would find another person intrusive. It was important to him that they were happily married and when they got divorced a year later, he was stunned. He felt his presence, somehow, had been a jinx. He had other married friends in the suburbs, but seeing them made him feel more solitary.
    He began to study wines. He joined the Sierra Club. Every time he planned to join them for a hike, he canceled at the last moment—ashamed of his loneliness. He was very proud. He hated being a bachelor. He was at the same time devoted to his family. He called his parents once a month. He sent gifts to his niece and nephew at Christmas. He gave them each a hundred-dollar bond on their birthdays. He began to jog. He ran alone down country lanes in autumns whose beauty left him pained. He ate sensibly, avoided cholesterol, and took brewer's yeast with his morning orange juice. He was a member of his class. The world tortured him: its ugliness, venality, vulgarity. Sundays he spent the afternoon reading the Times. When he came to New York City on business, he saw its steaming towers downriver with the eyes of most of his classmates: an asphalt slag heap baking under a brown shroud of pollution. He was the kind of person who telephoned Citizens for Clean Air if he saw black smoke issuing from a building smokestack on Manhattan longer than the legal limit of ten minutes. He considered wearing a mask when he bicycled to his office from the Yale Club, but thought it would look silly. Bus fumes infuriated him. Architecture he anxiously judged. Its mediocrity, the absence of beautiful avenues, lovely squares, pained him. He lay awake nights replanning the city. He joined the Committee to Reforest Fifth Avenue, thinking it could all be saved with trees, but eventually he despaired that this would ever happen and dropped away from their fund-raisers and dinner dances.
    He felt impotent, he felt doomed. He despaired of politics; the world, like the city, seemed an unmanageable mess, filled with squawling, venal babies—a vast kindergarten of infantile delinquents who had to be supervised. He got lost on freeways late at night in the amber glare of the Jersey refineries, and he felt sure he was in hell. His wines, cross-country running, excursions to the theater, left him as