The Immortalists(21)

‘What are you, thick?’ asks the cop.

‘Screw you,’ mutters Simon.

‘What’d you say?’

The man shoves him by the shoulders. Simon’s chair skids back, and he scrambles for his footing. When he scoots back to the table and reaches for the receiver, his left shoulder throbs.

‘Hello?’

‘Simon.’

Who else would it be? Simon could kick himself for being so stupid. Immediately, the cop seems to disappear, and so does the pain in his shoulder.

‘Ma,’ he says.

It is terrible: Gertie is crying the way she did at Saul’s service, guttural and heavy like the sobs are something in her stomach she can physically expel.

‘How could you?’ she asks. ‘How could you do it?’

He winces. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘You’re sorry. Then I expect you’ll be on your way home.’

There is a bitterness in her voice that he has heard before but which has never been directed at him. His first memory: lying on his mother’s lap at two as she ran her hands through his curls. Like an angel, she clucked. Like a cherub. Yes, he left them – all of them – but he left her most of all.

And yet.

‘I am sorry. I’m sorry for what I did – for leaving you. But I can’t – I won’t . . .’ He trails off, tries again. ‘You picked your life, Ma. I want to pick mine.’

‘Nobody picks their life. I sure didn’t.’ Gertie laughs, a scrape. ‘Here’s what happens: you make choices, and then they make choices. Your choices make choices. You go to college – my God, you finish high school – that’s one way of tipping the odds in your favor. What you’re doing right now, I don’t know what the hell will happen to you. And neither do you.’

‘But that’s the thing. I’m fine with not knowing. I’d rather not know.’

‘I’ve given you time,’ Gertie says. ‘I said to myself, Just wait; I thought, if I waited, you’d come to your senses. But you haven’t.’

‘I have come to my senses. My senses are here.’

‘Have you ever once thought about the business?’

Simon grows hot. ‘That’s what you care about?’

‘The name,’ says Gertie, faltering. ‘It’s changed. Gold’s is Milavetz’s now. It’s Arthur’s.’

Simon feels a wash of shame. But Arthur always encouraged Saul to be forward thinking. The styles Saul specialized in – worsted gabardine slacks, suits with wide lapels and legs – were on their way out by the time Simon was born, and it gives him some relief to think that, in Arthur’s hands, the business will continue.

‘Arthur’ll be good,’ he says. ‘He’ll keep the shop up-to-date.’

‘I don’t care about relevance. I care about family. There are things you do for the people who did them for you.’

‘And there’s things you do for yourself.’

He’s never spoken to his mother like this before, but he is dying to convince her; he imagines her coming to see him at Academy, Gertie clapping from a folding chair as he leaps and turns.

‘Oh, yes. There are plenty of things you do for yourself. Klara told me you’re a dancer.’

Her disdain comes through the receiver so loudly that the cop begins to laugh. ‘Yeah, I am,’ says Simon, glaring at him. ‘So what?’

‘I don’t understand it. You’ve never danced a day in your life.’

What can Simon tell her? It’s mysterious to him, too, how something he thought nothing of before, something that makes him feel pain and exhaustion and quite frequently embarrassment, has turned out to be a gateway to another thing entirely. When he points his foot, his leg grows by inches. During leaps, he hovers midair for minutes, as if he’s sprouted wings.

‘Well,’ he says. ‘I’m dancing now.’

Gertie releases a long, ragged sigh; then she goes quiet. And in that gap – a gap she would typically fill with more argument, even threats – Simon recognizes his freedom. If it’s illegal to be a runaway in California, he would already be in handcuffs.

‘If you’ve made your decision,’ she says, ‘I don’t want you coming back.’

‘You don’t – what?’

‘I don’t want you,’ says Gertie, enunciating, ‘coming back. You made your choice – you left us. So live with it, then. Stay.’

‘Jesus, Ma,’ Simon mutters, pressing the phone to his ear. ‘Don’t be so dramatic.’

‘I’m being very realistic, Simon.’ There is a pause as she inhales. Then Simon hears a quiet click, and the line goes dead.

He holds the receiver in one hand, dazed. Is this not what he wanted? His mother has relinquished him, given him to the world of which he’s longed to be a part. And yet he feels a spike of fear: the filter has been taken off the lens, the safety net ripped from beneath his feet, and he is dizzy with dreadful independence.

The cop walks him to the exit. Outside, on the landing, he grabs the neck of Simon’s T-shirt and yanks upward so forcefully that Simon rises onto the balls of his feet.

He says, ‘You runaways make me sick, d’you know that?’

Simon gasps. His toes search for purchase on the concrete. The cop’s eyes are whiskey-colored and sparsely lashed, his cheeks covered in freckles. On his forehead, near the hairline, is a cluster of round scars.