Free Dancer From the Dance: A Novel by Andrew Holleran Page A

driving around shopping for antiques with a fellow bachelor, and as he sat in his room looking down into the beautiful garden—the widow having already gone to bed, slathered in cold cream whose scent clung to the air of the hallway—he felt himself so utterly alone, he could not imagine anyone being sadder. Tears came to his eyes as he sat there. This day, Sunday, was his favorite of the week; this day, Sunday, a family always spent together in the evening as they came home from their various errands for a cold supper and a perusal of the Sunday paper; this day, Sunday, the softest, most human, tenderest time, found him sitting bolt upright at his little desk by the window, hearing around his ears the beating of wings—the invisible birds assaulting him, beating the air about him with their accusing presence. He was alone, like Prometheus chained to his rock. Tomorrow the rush of men, all working for a living, would drown him; but now, at this moment, in this soft green twilight, this soft green Sunday evening, when the heart of the world seemed to lie beating in the palm of his hand, he sat in that huge house upstairs terrified that he would never live.
    He resolved to do anything to avoid solitude at this particular moment—which he regarded with the same fear an insomniac does the hour he must go to bed. He began seeing a girl he had been introduced to by a fellow in his firm at a concert of Bach cantatas, a graduate student at the American University whose father was an undersecretary of state for the Far East. She would come up the drive in her little white sports car on Sunday afternoon, tooting the horn, and the widow smiled at what she was sure was a romance—but the romance consisted of discussions of Henry Adam's Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres —and when he said good-bye to her, and her little white Triumph disappeared down the drive in the shadow of the big oak trees, he felt more depressed than he did when he spent the evening alone; depressed with all the genteel talk on stained glass, the ache of too many smiles with too little feeling, the kisses they did not say good night with, and the seduction that had not occurred in his room upstairs beneath the eaves. What is wrong with me, he wondered.
    And then Michael Floria came to work for the widow after school. Malone had given up by this time his swim after work, his browsing through the bookstores in Georgetown, the chamber music concerts he had taken the girl to, as a ridiculous pretense, all of it. He drove straight home in the evenings now to work in the widow's yard and wipe out the strains of a day of intellectual effort with the cold comfort of the dark earth that dung to his hands as they scooped it up to make room for a new plant. She had in rows and rows of rusted tin cans plants whose seeds she had brought back with her from the highlands of Asia, and the Vale of Kashmir, and these he began transplanting in wintertime. Seeing his interest the widow hired a local high school student whose father was an agronomist with the Department of Agriculture to help Malone. He was a friendly, dark-eyed Italian-American who swam for his school and was applying to several colleges. As they knelt in the old flowerbeds, turning over the soil and patting it down around the newly transplanted tea plants, Malone gave him what helpful advice he could. He was very happy then: the cold black soil around his hands, the light glinting on the dark magnolia leaves above them, and the dark beauty of this young man beside him. "He's a great help!" Malone told the widow happily. "A really nice kid."
    He thought of the deep flush of hysteria that comes at that age when you start to laugh. He loved to make Michael laugh. He laughed so hard sometimes he fell over onto the ground and lay, laughing, like someone wounded, between the rows of tea roses and frangipani trees from Kashmir, on a late winter afternoon. But it was not he who was wounded. It was Malone. But like the man