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

who looks down to see what is sticky on his foot, and finds he has been bleeding, Malone was not to know till sometime later.
    His own work kept Malone busy and one night he came home from a long day of writing loan agreements and heard the widow tell him it was Michael's last day there. He had taken a job in Colorado for the summer and would be off to college at Beloit in the fall. Malone could not understand the emotion that suddenly drained the blood from his limbs. He walked down from the house in his suit and tie from J. Press, carrying his briefcase full of his rough drafts, as if to appear nonchalant, and found Michael standing with a bag of powdered insecticide, carefully spooning it into a five-gallon jug. It was then he felt his own wounds. It was very definite, as if he had been stabbed. "The very best of luck," Malone smiled as he shook his hand, hoping only that Mike could not see through the gray cloth of his suit the vibration created by the fact that Malone's knees had suddenly started to shake violently. He did not trust his voice either and so he turned away.
    This physical betrayal astonished him, and he went back upstairs to his room under a cloud of blackest anger. He kicked the wastebasket, slammed his drawers shut, cursed out loud as he undressed. It was of course completely wrong, the completely inconvenient sort of love; it was the one thing he—who had succeeded at everything else, who had been so virtuous, such a model—could not allow. It was as if he had finally admitted to himself that he had cancer. He saw in that instant a life he could not conceive of opening before him, a hopeless abyss. Either way he was doomed: He did what was wrong, and condemned himself, or he did what was right, and remained a ghost. He could see himself in twenty years in a house like this in the suburbs, twenty-eight rooms and no one in them. It made him furious that he, who had led so disciplined, so correct a life, was reduced now to helplessness and hot tears over this perfectly oblivious senior going off to Beloit College on the swimming team.
    He stood up from his bed and looked out the window at the gardener laboring in die azaleas. He felt in one instant the vast indifference of nature—the perfect chaos, the haphazard character of the universe—as he stared through the window at his friend; for it was obvious that he, bent over the plants, was thinking of the proper composition of the liquid poison he was mixing to kill the red spiders that had attacked the camelia bushes, and he, Malone, was going through an unendurable tragedy at the same time.
    A sensible man would have laughed at Malone; would have called him melodramatic, sentimental; would have told him to get on with life, and stop thinking he had been cast into outer darkness—nonsense! But Malone was not this sensible man. Some live more for love than others. And he experienced a death that night, as he lay upstairs in the widow's house, on that vast floor of empty rooms in whose hallway outside his own the odor of cold cream, the sound of a television program being watched downstairs, hovered. At the moment when the organism usually fructifies Malone perished, like the marigolds that had shriveled up the week before in their pots for no earthly reason they could see.
    His entire love had progressed, like the growing and dying of a plant, from indifference to love to extinction, and not one embrace, not one kiss, not one word had been exchanged between him and his beloved. He heard the widow talking to him down below, he heard the door slam as she withdrew into the kitchen, and he heard the gate open and close by which the boy let himself into the adjacent field and began his walk home, while he lay there staring at the ceiling like the effigy on an Etruscan tomb.
     
    That night he got up out of bed and put on his maroon polo shirt, which everyone said he looked so handsome in, and went downstairs and drove off in his car, where he did not know.