Free Dancer From the Dance: A Novel by Andrew Holleran

miserable as the moments of indecision in health food stores, when he felt his life had come to a complete halt over the choice of two brands of vitamins. One night going home on the train to Connecticut he found himself in the air-conditioned car staring at a page of The New Yorker on his lap. His mind stopped. The page gleamed with a high, cold gloss in the fluorescent light: He stared at its shining surface, the pale gray pinstripe of his dark pants leg. Eventually his stop appeared. He got off in a somnambulistic daze. No one met him at the station. He felt he should call someone for help—but who?
    I saw Malone earlier that night, at a party at Hirschl & Adler, the gallery on East Sixty-seventh Street. It was a preview of an exhibit of portraits by John Singleton Copley. It was crowded with corporate lawyers like himself, their wives, and the older men whose tuxedos had been their father's and grandfather's: They continued to exist as a class, impervious to the disintegration of the city. Malone fitted right in and except for his golden handsomeness, I would never have picked him out—but I did, as I walked through their midst with the tray of cookies and champagne. He talked even then in that animated, electrifying way, but it seemed out of place there, out of proportion even to the surroundings. The smile, so dazzling, seemed brittle—almost like a shriek when viewed from a certain angle. But then a smile is. often a shriek: a soul screaming at you. Malone left early to get the train back to his room in the country—and I saw him say good-night, in his affectionate way, to friends and then disappear in a Chesterfield and scarf from Sulka's, to hail a cab... a very handsome man I should never see again, since those people were seen in New York only by one another; they lived otherwise an invisible existence.
    He moved furthermore to Washington for a while and lived an even more monastic existence, going home after a long day with the Penn Central accountants to the house of the widow in the Maryland suburbs. The widow always had about her the faint odor of cold cream. She sat in a wheelchair on the veranda and when Malone came home in the evenings, he sat with her sometimes drinking tea. She talked about her husband as Malone watched the light in the garden change, she talked about the loveliness of Saigon in the twenties. She talked of the beaches they had found on little islands in the Seychelles, as the dusk gathered in the deep garden shaded by towering oaks, embalmed with the scent of gardenias and crape myrtle. He felt as if he were a character in Henry James; he began to suspect he was to be that man to whom nothing whatsoever was to happen. "When you find the right girl," she said to him putting her hand on his affectionately, "you must take her to Sadrudabad in April and see the flamboyant trees in bloom. There is nothing so wonderful as seeing the wonders of this earth with someone you love!"
    It was a phrase that might have appeared in an article in the Reader's Digest, but Malone believed it completely. He was depressed by the thought that he should never do this. But he was a disciplined fellow and he rose the next morning, obedient soul, and went to work as usual, and played squash at one with a fellow associate who had recently been married because, as he told Malone, he thought everyone should be married by the time they're thirty. Even his favorite game now struck him with melancholy, for his partner, an old friend from school, was always saying, "Anne this," and "Anne that," and "Anne and I are going to drive to Salzburg this summer," and he felt even gloomier when he came off the court. He stopped visiting married friends. Married friends, he decided one evening after returning from a visit, depress me.
    The gloom he felt then was nothing, however, compared to the terrifying loneliness that assaulted him on Sunday evening around eight o'clock; for then he had spent the whole day by himself, or