The Immortalists Read online

  “Guys!” he says. “Stop it! Just shut up, okay? Dad is dead. So can you fucking shut up?”

  He’s surprised by the authority in his voice. Even Daniel seems to shrink.

  “Simon says,” says Daniel.

  • • •

  Varya and Daniel go downstairs to sleep in their beds, but Klara and Simon climb up to the roof. They bring pillows and blankets and fall asleep on the concrete beneath the glow of the smog-veiled moon. They’re shaken awake before dawn. At first, they think it’s Gertie, but then Varya’s thin, drawn face comes into focus.

  “We’re leaving,” she whispers. “The taxi’s downstairs.”

  Daniel looms behind her, his eyes distant behind glasses. The skin below them has a silver-blue, piscine tinge, and the past week has carved deep parentheses around his mouth—or have they always been there?

  Klara throws an arm over her face. “No.”

  Varya lifts it, smooths Klara’s hair. “Say goodbye.”

  Her voice is gentle, and Klara sits up. She wraps her arms around Varya’s neck so tightly she can touch her own elbows.

  “Goodbye,” she whispers.

  After Varya and Daniel leave, the sky glows red, then amber. Simon presses his face to Klara’s hair. It smells like smoke.

  “Don’t go,” he says.

  “I have to, Sy.”

  “What’s out there for you, anyway?”

  “Who knows?” Klara’s eyes are watery with fatigue, and her pupils seem to shine. “That’s the whole point.”

  They stand and fold the blankets together.

  “You could come, too,” Klara adds, eyeing him.

  Simon laughs. “Yeah, right. Skip out on two more years of school? Ma’d kill me.”

  “Not if you got far enough away.”

  “I couldn’t.”

  Klara walks to the railing and leans against it, still in her blue, fuzzy sweater and cut-off shorts. She isn’t looking at him, but Simon can feel the force of her attention, how she vibrates with it, as if she knows that only by feigning nonchalance can she say what she does next.

  “We could go to San Francisco.”

  Simon’s breath catches. “Don’t talk like that.”

  He crouches to pick up their pillows, then stuffs one under each arm. He’s five-eight, like Saul was, with swift, muscular legs and a lean chest. His plump, reddish lips and dark blond curls—the contribution of some long-buried Aryan ancestor—have won him the admiration of the girls in his sophomore class, but this isn’t the audience he wants.

  Vaginas have never appealed to him: their cabbage-like folds, their long, hidden corridor. He craves the long thrust of the cock, its heady insistence, and the challenge of a body like his. Only Klara has ever known. After their parents fell asleep, she and Simon climbed out of the window, mace in Klara’s fake leather purse, and took the fire escape down to the street. They went to Le Jardin to hear Bobby Guttadaro play, or rode the subway to 12 West, a flower warehouse turned discotheque where Simon met the go-go dancer who told him about San Francisco. They sat in the rooftop garden while the dancer said that San Francisco has a gay city commissioner and a gay newspaper, that gay people can work anywhere and have sex anytime because there are no laws against sodomy. “You can’t imagine it,” he said, and from then on Simon could do nothing else.

  “Why not?” asks Klara, turning now. “Yeah, Ma would be angry. But I see what your life would be like here, Sy, and I don’t want that for you. You don’t want it, either. Sure, Ma wants me to go to college, but she got that with Danny and V. She has to understand that I’m not her. And you aren’t Dad. Jesus—you aren’t meant to be a tailor. A tailor!” She paused, as if to let the word sink all the way in. “It’s all wrong. And it isn’t fair. So give me one reason. Give me one good reason why you shouldn’t start your life.”

  As soon as Simon allows himself to picture it, he is nearly overcome. Manhattan should be an oasis—there are gay clubs, even bathhouses—but he’s afraid to reinvent himself in a place that has always been home. “Faygelehs,” Saul muttered once, glaring as a trio of slender men unloaded a panoply of instruments into the unit the Singhs could no longer afford. That Yiddish slur was also adopted by Gertie, and though Simon pretended not to hear it, he always felt they were talking about him.

  In New York, he would live for them, but in San Francisco, he could live for himself. And though he does not like to think about it, though he in fact avoids the subject pathologically, he allows himself to think it now: What if the woman on Hester Street is right? The mere thought turns his life a different color; it makes everything feel urgent, glittering, precious.

  “Jesus, Klara.” Simon joins her at the railing. “But what’s in it for you?”

  The sun rises a rich, bloody red, and Klara squints at it.

  “You can go one place,” she says. “I can go anywhere.”

  She still has the last of her baby fat, and her face is round. Her teeth, when she smiles, are slightly crooked: half-feral, half-charming. His sister.

  “Will I ever find someone I love as much as you?” he asks.

  “Please.” Klara laughs. “You’ll find someone you love much more.”

  Six stories below, a young man runs down Clinton Street. He wears a thin white T-shirt and blue nylon shorts. Simon watches the muscles of his chest undulate beneath the shirt, watches the powerful trunks of his legs do their work. Klara follows his eyes.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she says.

  2.

  May arrives in a blur of sunshine and color. Crocus shoots thumb the grass of Roosevelt Park. After her last high school class, Klara bursts through the door with her empty diploma frame. The diploma will be sent once the calligraphy is finished, but by then she will be gone. Gertie knows that Klara is leaving, so her suitcase sits in the hallway. What she doesn’t know is that Simon—whose suitcase is jammed beneath his bed—is coming with her.

  He is leaving behind most of his belongings, bringing only those that are utilitarian or precious. Two collared, striped velour T-shirts. The red drawstring bag. The brown corduroy flares he was wearing when a young Puerto Rican man caught his eye on the train and winked: his most romantic experience yet. His leather-banded gold watch, a gift from Saul. And his New Balance 320s: blue suede, the lightest running shoes he’s worn.

  Klara’s bag is larger, as it includes something that Ilya Hlavacek gave Klara during her last day of work. The night before they leave, she tells Simon the story of the gift.

  “Bring me that box over there,” Ilya told her, pointing.

  The box, made of wood and painted black, accompanied Ilya from sideshows to circuses until he contracted polio in 1931—“Good timing,” he often joked, “because by then the pictures had killed vaudeville anyway.” He always referred to it as that box, though Klara knew it was his most precious possession. She did as he directed, hoisting it up onto the counter so Ilya wouldn’t have to get up from his chair.

  “Now, I want you to have this,” he said. “All right? It’s yours. I want you to use it and I want you to enjoy it. It’s meant to be on the road, my dear, not stuck indoors with an old cripple like me. You know how to take it apart? Here, I’ll show you.” Klara watched as he stood with the help of his cane and turned the box into a table as he had so many times before. “Here’s where you put your cards. You stand behind it like so.”

  Klara tried it out. “There you go,” he said, smiling his old man’s leprechaun smile. “It looks marvelous on you.”

  “Ilya.” Klara was embarrassed to realize she was crying. “I don’t know how to thank you.”

  “Just use it.” Ilya waved a hand and hobbled to the back room with his cane—ostensibly to restock the shelves, though Klara suspected he wished to mourn in private. Klara carried the box home in her arms and filled it with her tools: a trio of silk scarves; a set of s
olid silver rings; a coin purse full of quarters; three brass cups with an equal number of strawberry-sized red balls; and a deck of cards so worn that the paper is flexible as fabric.

  Simon knows that Klara is talented, but her interest in magic unsettles him. When she was a child, it was charming; now, it’s just strange. He hopes it’ll fade once they arrive in San Francisco, where the real world will surely be more exciting than whatever’s in her black box.

  That night, he lies awake for hours. With Saul’s passing, an old prohibition has lifted: Arthur can run the business, and Saul won’t have known the truth about Simon. How, though, to account for his mother? Simon builds his case. He tells himself that this is the way of the world, the child leaving the parent for adulthood—if anything, humans are pitifully slow. Frog tadpoles hatch in their fathers’ mouths, but they hop out as soon as they lose their tails. (At least, Simon thinks this is so; his mind always drifts in biology class.) Pacific salmon are born in freshwater before they migrate to oceans. When it is time to spawn and die, they journey hundreds of miles, returning to the waters where they themselves were born. Like them, he could always come back.

  When he finally sleeps, he dreams he’s one of them. He floats through semen, a glowing coral egg, and lands in his mother’s nest on the streambed. Then he bursts from his shell and hides in dark pools, eating what matter comes his way. His scales darken; he travels thousands of miles. At first, he is surrounded by masses of other fish, so close they brush sleekly together, but as he swims farther away, the pack thins. By the time he realizes they started home, he can’t remember the way to the old, forgotten stream where he was born. He has gone too far to turn back.

  • • •

  They wake in early morning. Klara rustles Gertie awake to say goodbye, then soothes her back to sleep. She tiptoes down the stairs with both suitcases while Simon ties his sneakers. He steps into the hallway, avoiding the plank that always squeaks, and carefully makes his way toward the door.

  “Going somewhere?”

  He turns, his pulse leaping. His mother stands in the doorway of her bedroom. She is swaddled in the large, pink bathrobe she’s worn since Varya’s birth, and her hair—usually set in curlers at this time of day—is loose.

  “I was just . . .” Simon shifts from one foot to the other. “Going to get a sandwich.”

  “It’s six in the morning. Funny time for a sandwich.”

  Gertie’s cheeks are pink, her eyes wide. A glint of light illuminates her pupils: small knots of dread, shining like black pearls.

  A shock of tears springs to Simon’s eyes. Gertie’s feet—pink slabs, thick as pork chops—are squared beneath her shoulders, her body taut as a boxer’s. When Simon was a toddler, and his siblings were in school, he and Gertie played a game they called the Dancing Balloon. Gertie set the radio to Motown—something she never listened to when Saul was home—and blew up a red balloon halfway. They boogied through the apartment, bopping the balloon from the bathroom to the kitchen, their only mission to make sure it didn’t fall. Simon was nimble, Gertie thunderous: together, they could keep the balloon in the air for whole radio programs. Now, Simon remembers Gertie lunging through the dining room, a candlestick clattering to the floor—“Nothing broke!” she bellowed—and stifles a hiccup of inappropriate laughter that, if released, would surely have morphed into a sob.

  “Ma,” he says. “I gotta live my life.”

  He hates the way it comes out, like he’s pleading. Suddenly, his body longs for his mother’s, but Gertie looks out at Clinton Street. When her gaze returns to Simon, there’s a surrender in her expression that he’s never seen before.

  “All right. Go get your sandwich.” She inhales. “But go to the shop after school. Arthur’ll show you how things are done. You should be going there every day, now that your father—”

  But she doesn’t finish.

  “Okay, Ma,” says Simon. His throat burns.

  Gertie nods gratefully. Before he can stop himself, Simon flies down the stairs.

  • • •

  Simon imagined the bus ride in romantic terms, but he spends most of the first leg asleep. He cannot bear to think any more about what happened between him and his mother, so he rests his head on Klara’s shoulder as she plays with a deck of cards and a pair of miniature steel rings: every so often, he wakes to faint clinking, or to the flapping noise of shuffling. At 6:10 the next morning, they get off at a transfer station in Missouri, where they wait for the bus that will take them to Arizona, and in Arizona they catch a bus to Los Angeles. The final leg takes nine hours. By the time they arrive in San Francisco, Simon feels like the most disgusting creature on earth. His blond hair is an oily brown, and his clothes are three days old. But when he sees the gaping blue skies and leather-clad men of Folsom Street, something inside him leaps like a dog into water, and he cannot help but laugh, just once: a bark of delight.

  For three days, they stay with Teddy Winkleman, a boy from their high school who moved to San Francisco after graduation. Now Teddy hangs with a group of Sikhs and calls himself Baksheesh Khalsa. He has two roommates: Susie, who sells flowers outside Candlestick Park, and Raj, brown skinned with shoulder-length black hair, who spends weekends reading Garcia Marquez on the living room couch. The apartment is not the cobwebby Victorian Simon pictured but a dank, narrow series of rooms not unlike 72 Clinton. The décor, though, is different: tie-dyed fabric is pinned to the wall belly-up, like animal hide, and chili pepper lights wind around the perimeter of each doorway. The floor is strewn with records and empty beer bottles, and the smell of incense is so dense that Simon coughs whenever he comes inside.

  On Saturday, Klara circles an apartment listing in red pen. 2 BD/1 BA, it reads. $389/mo. Sunny/spacious/hardwood fl. Historic building!! MUST LIKE NOISE. They take the J to Seventeenth and Market, and here it is: the Castro, that two-block heaven of which he has dreamed for years. Simon stares at the Castro Theatre, the brown awning of Toad Hall, and the men, sitting on fire escapes and smoking on stoops, wearing tight jeans and flannel shirts or no shirts at all. To have wanted this for so long—to have it both at last and so early—makes him feel as though he is glimpsing his future life. This is present, he tells himself, dizzy. This is now. He follows Klara to Collingwood, a quiet block lined by bulbous trees and candy-colored Edwardians. They stop in front of a wide, rectangular building. The first floor is a club, closed at this hour, with windows that stretch to the ceiling. Through the glass, Simon sees purple couches and disco balls and tall platforms like pedestals. The name of the club is painted across the glass: PURP.

  The apartment sits above the club. It isn’t spacious, nor is it a two-bedroom: the first bedroom is the living room, and the second bedroom is a walk-in closet. But it is sunny, with golden wood floors and bay windows, and they can just afford the first month’s rent. Klara spreads her arms. Her ruched, orange halter top rides up, exposing the soft pink of her belly. She spins once, then twice—his sister, a teacup, a dervish in the living room of their new apartment.

  • • •

  They buy mismatched kitchenware from a thrift store on Church Street and furniture from a garage sale on Diamond. Klara finds two twin mattresses on Douglass, still in their plastic packaging, which they wrestle upstairs.

  They go dancing to celebrate. Before they leave, Baksheesh Khalsa supplies hash and tabs. Raj strums a ukulele with Susie on his knee; Klara sits against the wall and stares at a fortune-telling fish she found in the novelty aisle at Ilya’s. Baksheesh Khalsa leans toward Simon and tries to engage him in a conversation about Anwar el-Sadat, but the windows are waving hello to Simon and he thinks he would rather kiss Baksheesh Khalsa instead. There’s not enough time: now they’re at a club, dancing in a mass of people painted blue and red by flashing lights. Baksheesh Khalsa yanks off his turban, and his hair whips through the air like a rope. One man, tall and broad and covered in beautiful green glitter, tr
ails light like a fireball. Simon plunges through the crowd, reaching for him, and their faces crash together with startling intensity: the first kiss Simon’s ever had.

  Soon they’re flying through the night in a cab, bodies straining in the backseat. The other man pays. Outside, the moon flaps like a number come loose on a door; the sidewalk unrolls for them, a carpet. They enter a tall, silver apartment building and ride an elevator to some high-up floor.

  “Where are we?” asks Simon, following him into a unit at the end of the hall.

  The man strides into the kitchen but leaves the lights off, so that the apartment is illuminated only by the street lamps outside. When Simon’s eyes adjust, he finds himself in a clean, modern living room, with a white leather couch and a chrome-legged glass table. A splattered, neon painting hangs on the opposite wall.

  “Financial district. New to town?”

  Simon nods. He walks to the living room window and looks at the gleaming office buildings. Many stories down, the streets are mostly empty, save for a couple of bums and the same number of cabs.

  “Want anything?” the man calls, his hand on the refrigerator handle. The tabs are rapidly wearing off, but he doesn’t look any less attractive: he is muscular but lean, with the tidy features of a catalog model.

  “What’s your name?” Simon asks.

  The man retrieves a bottle of white wine. “This all right?”

  “Sure.” Simon pauses. “You don’t want to tell me your name?”

  The man joins him on the couch with two glasses. “I try not to, in these situations. But you can call me Ian.”

  “Okay.” Simon forces a smile, though he feels mildly sickened—sickened to be grouped with others (how many?) in these situations, and by the man’s caginess. Isn’t disclosure the reason gay men come to San Francisco? But perhaps Simon has to be patient. He imagines dating Ian: lying on a blanket in Golden Gate Park or eating sandwiches at Ocean Beach, the sky streaked orange-gray with seagulls.