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opera, and that the dancers never heard) and had to be taken off by the police, had by that time come to loathe being looked at; could not bear the gaze of amorous strangers; and the only reason he came out at all, during that period after he left Frankie, when he wanted to go away and hide forever, was the crazy compulsion with which we resolved all the tangled impulses of our lives—the need to dance.
    Everyone there, in fact, like Malone, was a serious dancer and they were by no means beautiful: Archer Prentiss, who had no chin or hair; Spanish Lily, a tiny, wizened octoroon who lived with his blind mother in The Bronx and sold shoes in a local store—but who by night resembled Salome dancing for the head of John the Baptist in peach-colored veils; Lavalava, a Haitian boy who modeled for Vogue till an editor saw him in the dressing room with an enormous penis where a vagina should have been; another man famous for a film he had produced and who had no wish to do anything else with his life—all of them mixed together on that square of blond wood and danced, without looking at anyone else, for one another.
    They were the most romantic creatures in the city in that room. If their days were spent in banks and office buildings, no matter: Their true lives began when they walked through this door—and were baptized into a deeper faith, as if brought to life by miraculous immersion. They lived only for the night. The most beautiful Oriental was in fact chaste, as the handmaidens of Dionysius were: He came each night to avoid the eyes of everyone who wanted him (though for different reasons than Malone ignored their gaze), and after dancing for hours in a band of half-naked men, went home alone each night refusing to tinge the exhilaration in his heart with the actuality of carnal kisses. The gossips said he refused to sleep with people because he had a small penis—the leprosy of homosexuals—but this explanation was mundane: He wanted to keep this life in the realm of the perfect,, the ideal. He wanted to be desired, not possessed, for in remaining desired he remained, like the figure on the Grecian urn, forever pursued. He knew quite well that once possessed he would no longer be enchanted—so sex itself became secondary to the spectacle: that single moment of walking in that door. And even as he danced now he was aware of whose heart he was breaking; everyone there was utterly aware of one another.
    For example: I sat on the sofa watching Archer Prentiss dance with two other men in plaid shirts and moustaches, who looked as if they had just come down from the Maine woods—two people I had seen for years and years, yet never said a word to, as was the case with Archer Prentiss. This technical distance did not keep us from knowing a great deal about each other, however. Although I had no idea who the two strangers on my left were, nor had ever been introduced to Archer Prentiss, I knew, to the quarter inch, the length and diameter of each one's penis, and exactly what they liked to do in bed.
    But then so did everyone else in that room.
    If one of the figures in this tapestry of gossip woven at the Twelfth Floor vanished—like the man who fled to Cambodia, or the one who drove west—such a disappearance was, in that crowd, less mysterious than most vanishing acts. If a face in that crowd vanished, it was usually for one of three reasons: (1) he was dead, (2) he had moved to another city whose inhabitants he had not all slept with, or (3) he had found a lover and settled down, spending his Saturday nights at home with his mate, going over the plans of the house they hoped to build in Teaneck, New Jersey.
    The two strangers in plaid shirts who had sat down on the sofa to my left were discussing at that moment such a move. The big, blond fellow (whose face decorated a dozen billboards on the Long Island Expressway, smiling at a Winston cigarette) said to the dark one: "He wants me to move in with him, after he comes back