The Immortalists(18)
When he places a hand on the barre, the room becomes silent.
‘First position,’ Gali says, turning his feet out with the heels touching. ‘We prepare both arms and we have: plié one, straighten two. Lift the arm three, lower into grand plié four, five – arms en bas – rise seven. Tendu to second position on eight.’
He might as well have been speaking Dutch. Before they’ve finished with plies, Simon’s knees are burning and his toes cramp. The exercises become more baffling as class continues: there are dégagés and ronds de jambe, the toes making wide circles on the floor and then above it; pirouettes and frappés; développés – the leg unfurling from the body, then enveloped back in – and grand battements to prepare the hips and hamstrings for large jumps. After the warm-up, forty-five minutes so excruciating that Simon can’t imagine continuing for the same amount of time, the dancers clear the barres and process to what Gali calls the center, where they move across the floor in fleets. Mostly, Gali walks through the room shouting rhythmic nonsense – ‘Ba-dee-da-DUM! Da-pee-pah-PUM!’ – but during pirouettes, he appears at Simon’s side.
‘Goodness.’ His eyes are dark and sunken, but they dance. ‘What, it’s laundry day?’
Simon is wearing the same striped, collared shirt he wore on the bus to San Francisco, along with a pair of running shorts. When class finishes, he runs to the men’s bathroom, takes off the black slippers – the pads of his feet are already swollen – and retches into the toilet.
He wipes his mouth with toilet paper and leans against the wall, panting. He didn’t have time to close the door of the stall, and another dancer, entering the bathroom, stops short. He is easily the most beautiful man Simon has seen in person: sculpted as if from onyx, his skin a rich black. His face is round, with wide cheekbones that curve like wings. A tiny, silver hoop hangs from one earlobe.
‘Hey.’ Sweat drips from the man’s forehead. ‘You okay?’
Simon nods and fumbles past him. After the long flight of stairs, he wanders dazedly down Market Street. It’s sixty-five degrees and windy. On an impulse, he takes his shirt off and reaches his arms above his head. When he feels the breeze on his chest, he’s filled with unexpected euphoria.
It is beautiful masochism, what he just did, more difficult even than the half marathon he won at fifteen: hills, thunder of feet and Simon in the midst of it, gasping down the Hudson River waterfront. He fingers the black slippers, which he shoved in his back pocket. They seem to taunt him. He must become like the other male dancers: expert, majestic, invincibly strong.
In June, the Castro blooms. Prop 6 pamphlets drift through the street like leaves; flowers keel over the sides of boxes with such bounty they’re almost a nuisance. On June 25th, Simon goes to the Freedom Parade with the dancers from Purp. He didn’t know that so many gay people existed in the country, let alone in one city, but there are two hundred and forty thousand of them, watching the kickoff by Dykes on Bikes and cheering as the first rainbow flag is hoisted into the air. Harvey Milk’s upper body emerges from the sunroof of a moving Volvo.
‘Jimmy Carter!’ Milk bellows, his red bullhorn held high, as the sea of men roars. ‘You talk about human rights! There are fifteen million to twenty million gay people in this nation. When are you going to talk about their rights?’
Simon kisses Lance, then Richie, wrapping his legs around Richie’s thick, muscular waist. For the first time in his life, he’s dating – he calls it that, though usually, it’s just sex. There is the go-go dancer from the I-Beam and the barista at Café Flore, a mild-mannered Taiwanese man who spanks Simon so hard that his ass cheeks blush for hours. He falls hard for a Mexican runaway with whom he spends four blissful days in Dolores Park; on the fourth day, Simon wakes up alone beside Sebastian’s floppy, green-and-pink hat and never sees the boy again. But there are so many others: the recovering addict from Alapaha, Georgia; the forty-something Chronicle reporter who is always on speed; the Australian flight attendant in possession of the largest cock Simon’s seen.
On weekdays, Klara wakes before seven and dresses in one of two dull, beige skirt suits from Goodwill. She temps first at an insurance company, then at a dentist’s office, and returns so moody that Simon avoids her until she’s had her first drink. She hates the dentist, she says, but that doesn’t explain the exasperation with which she looks at Simon when he primps in the mirror or returns from a shift at Purp – drowsy, ecstatic, purple paint running down his legs in rivulets. He wonders if it’s the voice messages. They arrive daily: emotional missives from Gertie, lawyerly arguments from Daniel, and increasingly desperate appeals from Varya, who moved home after her final exams.
‘If you don’t come back, Simon, I’ll have to put off graduate school,’ Varya says, her voice wavering. ‘Someone needs to stay with Ma. And I don’t understand why it always has to be me.’
Sometimes, he comes upon Klara with the cord wrapped around her wrist, pleading for one of them to understand.
‘They’re your family,’ she tells Simon afterward. ‘You have to talk to them eventually.’
Not now, Simon thinks. Not yet. If he speaks to them, their voices will reach into the warm, blissful ocean in which he’s been floating and yank him – gasping, dripping wet – onto dry land.