The Fancy Dancer

another drink. What with my exhaustion and the fact I hadn’t eaten any dinner, the whiskey was starting to do funny things to my biochemistry, but I didn’t give a damn. The bar had emptied out a little, so I was rather conspicuous sitting there on my stool, nursing my shot glass.
    ‘Well, well, what do we have here? A little wallflower?” said a deep male voice in my ear.
    I looked up and saw a sunburned U.S. cavalry officer standing there, complete with sideburns, crop and spurs.
    I turned back to my drink.
    “What other pretty pictures you got there where I can’t see ’em?” he said, laying a hand on my thigh and trying to put his finger through the little square I’d tom out.
    I shook his hand off and looked him in the eye. "You’re late for the Custer Massacre,” I said.
    He shrugged and walked off.
    A few drunken moments later, there was a rustle at my elbow and a wisp of an herbal scent. There stood the girl in watered silk, looking at me with her great drowned eyes.
    “Lonely boy,” she said.
    She didn’t seem to be throwing a pass, so I motioned her to sit down beside me. “What’ll you have?” I said.
    “Gin, straight up,” she said.
    As the bartender slid the drink over to her, she said, “I can’t bear to see people alone.” She sipped the
    gin delicately, this creature of lace curtains, lilacs and old sheet music. “You have a fight with your lover?” “Yeah,” I said. “What about you?”
    “Oh, no. He’s just in there dancing,” she said.
    I considered this statement solemnly. “How do you feel about that?”
    ‘I'm his slave, so it doesn’t matter.”
    We strolled along the veranda, holding our drinks. A summer thunderstorm was blowing up over the mountains, and lightning flickered far off through the great old poplar trees. Her green silk skirt ballooned out; exposing her little slippers of white kid. I kept looking at her, wondering what the reality of her soul was, as God saw it. The illusion she created was so perfect for me—was it for her? Did she even fool God? But nobody fooled God. I remembered the tone of the bishops’ booklet. How did they dust their hands of her? How would God condemn her?
    I also remembered the bishops’ statement about how homosexual loves were short and merry. Maybe the bishops knew something we didn’t—Vidal and I were obviously headed for a lot of grief.
    She took my arm. ‘You look so young under that butterfly face.”
    “I’m not so young.”
    “Yes, you are. A baby. I'm old.”
    I made a lopsided smile. I was getting pretty drunk. “How old are you? Sweet sixteen?”
    “I’m a thousand years old,” she said. “Touch me and I turn to dust.”
    She said it so convincingly that I halfway thought her face would shrink to a mummy’s, then crumble under her veil.
    She started to hum a waltz tune and spun slowly ahead of me along the veranda. I started to laugh with insane delight. The gaslights and the music and the lightning spilled at us. She waltzed back to me and drifted into my arms, and spun me into her slow motion. A puff of milkweed thistle could have moved a boulder into a waltz by blowing against it the way she blew against me. I was falling over my feet and laughing like an idiot.
    “I’m an awful dancer,” I kept saying.
    She finally conned me into the ballroom. Drunk as I was, I knew my motive. I felt safer (i.e., less gay) with her because for all intents and purposes she was a woman.
    We joined the crush and she taught me how to waltz. I looked for Vidal’s peacock feathers, and saw him dancing slow and close with the Lone Ranger. It hurt me to see him catting around like that, to see him touching other men, but I kept laughing.
    We danced past him. He saw us, and his face clouded.
    Suddenly there was a drum roll. The music stopped and a hush fell over the ballroom.
    “La-deez and gentlemen,” said the MC.
    “What’s going on now?’’ I asked the girl.
    “The contests,” she said. “Mr. and Mrs. Montana, the best costume, the ...”
    A flame of fright went through me. I didn’t want to be singled out Neither did she, apparently. We hovered in the background as the contestants filed before the crowd. It was just like a bathing beauty contest, except that here men paraded in the nearnude, in shimmering briefs. The crowd erupted with whoops and wolf whistles, especially when Vidal took his turn in the spotlights. He turned his natural-child grin on them, and the applause was deafening. They