He strides to the center to demonstrate. Simon crosses his arms.
“Everything,” says Gali, looking at the men. “Everything is connected. Watch.” He places his feet in fourth position and pliés. “This is when I prepare. This is when it matters. I feel the connection between my chest and my hips. I feel the connection between my knees and the balls of my feet. The structure of the body has alignment and it has integrity, you see? So when I push off”—he lifts his back leg and turns—“there is unity. It is effortless.”
Tommy, the British wunderkind, catches Simon’s eye. Effortless? he mouths, and Simon grins. Tommy is a jumper, not a turner, and he likes to commiserate with Simon.
Gali is still turning. “From control,” he says, “comes freedom. From restraint comes flexibility. From the trunk”—he puts one hand to his core, then gestures, with his free hand, to his raised leg—“come the branches.”
He returns to the ground down in a deep plié, then lifts a palm as if to say, See?
Simon sees, but doing is a different matter. When class ends, Tommy slings an arm over Simon’s shoulder and groans as they walk toward the dressing room. Robert glances at them. Rain batters the windows, but the room is steamy with sweat and most of the men are bare chested. When Simon leaves with Beau and Tommy for lunch, Robert doesn’t join them.
They walk to Orphan Andy’s on Seventeenth. Simon tells himself that he isn’t doing anything wrong: most of the men at Academy are flirtatious, and it isn’t his fault if Robert doesn’t join in. He loves Robert—he does. Robert is intelligent and mature and surprising. He likes classical music as much as he likes football, and though he’s not yet thirty, he’d prefer to read in bed than go to Purp with Simon. “He’s classy,” said Klara, the first time she met him, and Simon beamed with pride. But this is also part of the problem: Simon likes raunch, likes being spanked and ogled and sucked off, and he has some appetite for depravity—or at least, what his parents would have called depravity—that he is finally beginning to acknowledge.
After lunch, they head to Star Pharmacy for rolling papers. Simon pays while the other two wait outside. They’re both staring at the pharmacy’s glass window when he comes back.
“Oh my God, you guys,” Tommy says. “Have you seen this?”
He points at a homemade flier taped to the window. THE GAY CANCER, it reads. Below are three Polaroid photos of a young man. In the first photo, he holds up his shirt to reveal purple splotches, raised and rippling like burns. In the second, his mouth is open wide. There’s a splotch in there, too.
“Shut up, Tommy.” Tommy is a notorious hypochondriac—he’s always complaining of aches in muscle groups no one else has ever heard of—but Beau’s voice is sharper than usual.
They huddle under the awning at Toad Hall to smoke. Simon inhales, sweetness and damp, and it should calm him but it doesn’t: he feels like he could jump out of his skin. For the rest of the day, he can’t erase the images from his mind—those terrible lesions, dark as plums—or the words that someone else scrawled at the bottom of the flier in red pen: Watch out, guys. There’s something out there.
• • •
Richie wakes up with a red dot on the white of his left eye. Simon covers his shift so Richie can go to the doctor; he wants to make sure it’s gone by Christmas Eve, the night of Purp’s annual Jingle Bell Cock. Few of Purp’s patrons visit family over the holidays, so the dancers paint themselves red and green, hang bells from the waists of their G-strings. The doctor sends Richie home with an antibiotic. “They’re like, ‘Maybe it’s pink eye,’” Richie says the next day, spraying Adrian’s backside purple. “This sweet little lab tech, she’s probably nineteen, she goes, ‘Any chance you came into contact with fecal matter?’ I’m like”—hand to heart—“‘Oh no, honey, I wouldn’t touch the stuff,’” and the men are laughing, and Simon will remember Richie like this later, his guffaw, his military buzz cut with the slightest hint of gray, because by the twentieth of December, Richie is dead.
How to describe the shock? The splotches appear on the flower seller in Dolores Park and on the beautiful feet of Beau, who once spun eight times without stopping and is now taken to San Francisco General in Eduardo’s car, seizing. These are Simon’s earliest memories of Ward 86, though it will not be named for another year: the squeak of meal carts; the nurses at the phone desk, their remarkable calm (No, we don’t know how it’s transmitted. Is your lover with you now? Does he know you’re coming to the hospital?); and the men, men in their twenties and thirties sitting wide-eyed on cots and in wheelchairs as if hallucinating. Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals, says the Chronicle, but nobody knows how you get it. Still, when the lymph nodes in Lance’s armpits begin to swell, he finishes his shift at Purp and cabs to the hospital with the article in his backpack. Ten days later, the lumps are large as oranges.
Robert paces the apartment. “We need to stay here,” he says. They have enough food for two weeks. Neither of them has slept in days.
But Simon is panicked by the thought of quarantine. He already feels cut off from the world, and he refuses to hide, refuses to believe this is the end. He’s not dead yet. And yet he knows, of course he knows, or at least he fears—the thin line between fear and intuition; how one so easily masquerades as the other—that the woman is right, and that by June 21st, the first day of summer, he’ll be gone, too.
Robert doesn’t want him working at Purp. “It isn’t safe,” he says.
“Nothing is safe.” Simon takes his bag of makeup and walks to the door. “I need the money.”
“Bullshit. Corps pays you.” Robert follows him and grabs his arm, hard. “Admit it, Simon. You like what you get there. You need it.”
“Come on, Rob.” Simon forces a laugh. “Don’t be such a drag.”
“Me? I’m a drag?”
There is a blaze in Robert’s eyes that makes Simon feel both intimidated and turned on. He reaches for Robert’s cock.
Robert yanks back. “Don’t play me like that. Don’t touch me.”
“Come with me,” Simon slurs. He’s been drinking, which Robert dislikes almost as much as his work at Purp. “Why don’t you ever come anywhere?”
“I don’t fit anywhere, Simon. Not with you white guys. Not with the black guys. Not in ballet or in football. Not back home, and not here.” Robert speaks slowly, as though to a child. “So I stay home. I keep myself small. Except when I’m dancing. And even then—every time I get onstage, I know there’s people in that audience who have never seen somebody like me dance like I dance. I know that some of them won’t like it. I’m scared, Simon. Every day. And now you know what that’s like. ’Cause you’re scared, too.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” says Simon, hoarse.
“I think you know exactly what I’m talking about. This is the first time you’ve felt like me—like there’s nowhere that’s safe. And you don’t like it.”
Simon feels his pulse in his skull. He is staked by the truth of what Robert has said like an insect to a board, his wings flapping.
“You’re jealous,” he hisses. “That’s all. You could try harder, Rob, but you don’t. And you’re jealous—you’re jealous—that I do.”
Robert holds his ground but swings his face, abruptly, to one side. When he looks at Simon again, the whites of his eyes are pink.
“You’re just like the rest of them,” he says, “all the twinks and the art fags and the motherfucking bears. You guys, you go on about your rights and your freedoms, you cheer at all the parades, but all you really want’s the right to fuck some leatherman in a den on Folsom or spew your shit all over a bathhouse. You want the right to be as careless as any other white guy—any straight one. But you’re not any other white guy. And that’s why this place is so dangerous: because it lets you forget that.”
Simon burns with humiliation. Fuck you, he thinks. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck
you. But Robert’s speech has stricken him silent, in anger and in shame—why is it that those feelings are so inextricable? He turns and pushes out of the door, toward the dark blur of Castro Street, the lights and the men that always seem to be waiting for him.
• • •
Purp’s new hires are terrible—they’re sixteen and freaked, they can’t even dance—and the audience is thin, a couple of guys huddled in the corners and a few more grinding feverishly near the platforms. After their shift, Adrian is jumpy. “I need to get the fuck out of here,” he mutters, toweling off. So does Simon. He gets in Adrian’s car to cruise the Castro, but the owner of Alfie’s is sick, and the scene at the QT’s as depressing as it is at Purp, so Adrian takes a sharp turn and heads downtown.
Cornholes and Liberty Baths aren’t open. They stop in Folsom Gulch Books—Committed to Pleasure, the tagline reads—but the movie booths are occupied and nobody’s in the arcade. Boot Camp Baths on Bryant is empty. They wind up at Animals, a leather den, and neither Adrian nor Simon are wearing leather but thank God, at least there are people here, so they dump their clothes in the lockers before Adrian leads them through a dark maze of rooms. Men in chaps and dog collars ride each other in the shadows. Adrian disappears into a corner with a kid in a harness, but Simon can’t bring himself to touch anyone. He waits by the entrance for Adrian, who returns in an hour with wide pupils and a slick red mouth.
Adrian drives him home. Simon breathes. He hasn’t messed up, not irrevocably, not yet. They park a block away from Simon and Robert’s apartment and stare at each other for seconds before Simon reaches for Adrian, and this is how it begins.
• • •
Klara stands onstage beneath a pool of blue light. The stage is a small platform designed for musicians. A scattering of audience members sits at round tables or on stools at the bar, though Simon can’t tell how many of them are there to see her and how many are just regulars. Klara wears a men’s tuxedo jacket with her pinstriped pants and Doc Martens. Her tricks are skillful, but they aren’t big magic, they’re quippy and clever, and her script has an air of studied perfectionism, like a graduate student at a dissertation defense. Simon swirls his martini with a straw and wonders what he’ll tell her afterward. Over a year of planning and this is the result: scarf tricks in the only place that would take her, a jazz club on Fillmore whose patrons are already drifting into the cold spring night.
Only a handful are still there when Klara uncoils a rope from a nearby music stand and puts a small brown mouthpiece between her teeth. The rope hangs from a cable that hangs from a pipe on the ceiling, controlled by a pulley Klara rigged herself and which is now held, at her direction, by the bar manager.
“You trust him with that?” Simon asked last week, when Klara explained the procedure. “Do you want me to do it?”
“I don’t mix business with pleasure.”
“I’m pleasure?”
“Well, no,” she said. “You’re family.”
Now he watches her rise to the second-story windows. During a brief intermission, she changed into a sleeveless dress, nude-colored and covered with gold sequins; its fringed skirt hits mid-thigh. Klara drifts in ghostly circles before pulling her arms and legs close to her body. Suddenly, she’s a blur: red and gold, hair and glitter, a vortex of light. As she slows, she becomes his sister again—sweat gleams at her hairline, and her jaw is beginning to shake. Her feet stretch toward the stage, knees buckling once she’s low enough to reach it. She spits the bit into her palm and bows.
There is the clink of ice, the screech of chairs being adjusted, before the applause begins to surge. It isn’t magic, what Klara has done. There’s no trick—just a curious combination of strength and strange, inhuman lightness. Simon can’t tell whether it reminds him of a levitation or a hanging.
While the next act sets up, Simon finds Klara in the greenroom. He waits outside as she talks to the manager, a broad man in a tracksuit who looks to be in his fifties. When he shakes her hand and wraps his other one around her back, resting it on the curve of her bottom, Klara becomes rigid. After he leaves, she glances at the door before walking to the chair on which the manager left his leather jacket. A wallet bulges from one pocket. She takes a wad of bills and stuffs them down the side of her dress.
“Seriously?” asks Simon, stepping inside.
Klara whirls. The shame in her face turns to righteousness. “He was an asshole. And they paid me like shit.”
“So?”
“So what?” She pulls on her tuxedo coat. “He had hundreds. I took fifty.”
“How noble of you.”
“Really, Simon?” Klara is stiff-backed, packing supplies into Ilya’s black box. “I do my first show, the show I’ve been working on for years, and this is all you have to say to me? You want to talk about being noble?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means word gets around.” Klara closes the box and holds it between her arms like a shield. “My coworker is Adrian’s cousin. Last week, she said, ‘I think my cousin’s dating your brother.’”
Simon blanches. “Well, that’s bullshit.”
“Don’t lie to me.” Klara leans toward him, her hair brushing his chest. “Robert is the best fucking thing that ever happened to you. You want to throw it away, that’s your choice, but at least have the decency to break up with him.”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” says Simon, but the worst part is that Klara doesn’t know half of it. Cruising Golden Gate Park in the early hours of the morning, fucking strangers in Speedway Meadows or the public restrooms at Forty-First and JFK. Hand jobs in the back row of the Castro Theatre while Little Orphan Annie sings onscreen. Hordes of men at the Wasteland at Ocean Beach, warming one another.
And the worst night: May, the Tenderloin. A drag queen in a spangled silver dress and chunky heels leads him to a single-occupancy hotel on Hyde. Someone’s pimp grabs Simon by the collar and searches for his wallet, but Simon knees him in the crotch and stumbles upstairs. They take a room and flick on a bedside lamp, and it is then that Simon sees his partner is Lady. She hasn’t been at Purp in weeks; they all assumed the worst, that the gay cancer got her, and for seconds, Simon feels a gust of relief. But Lady doesn’t recognize him. She takes a miniature vodka bottle out of her dress pocket. It’s empty, with an aluminum foil screen. She stuffs a rock into the chamber and inhales.
• • •
On the first day of June, Simon stands in the shower. Last night’s Myth performance was the first time that Simon touched Robert in days, the first time they stood together without arguing. Now, Simon tries to masturbate, thinking of Robert, but he can’t come until he remembers Lady crouched over her homemade pipe.
He picks up the shampoo bottle and throws it at the shower caddy with all his strength. The caddy jolts upward to smack the showerhead, which jumps out of its setting and swings wildly, wetting the ceiling, until Simon is able to turn the goddamned thing off. He slides down to sit against the tub’s cool porcelain and sobs. The dark mark still leers from his abdomen, though when he leans in, it looks more like a mole than it did the day before. Yes: it could definitely be a mole. He stands and adjusts the shower caddy, then steps onto the bath mat. Sunlight glazes the bathroom. Simon doesn’t notice that Robert is standing in the doorway until he speaks.
“What is that?” He stares at Simon’s stomach.
Simon grabs a towel. “Nothing.”
“Like hell it’s nothing.” Robert puts one hand on Simon’s shoulder and pulls the towel off. “Oh my God.”
They stare at it together for seconds. Then Simon hangs his head.
“Rob,” he whispers. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry for what I’ve done to us.” Then, madly: “There’s a show tonight. We have to get to the theater.”
“No, baby,” says Robert. “That’s not where we need to go,” and in minutes, he’s
called them a cab.
9.
There are twelve beds in Simon’s ward at San Francisco General. The swinging door that leads inside has a laminated sign—MASK GOWN GLOVES PUNCTURE PROOF NEEDLE BOX IN ROOM NO PREGNANT WOMEN—and a smaller sign that reads No Flowers.
Klara and Robert stay overnight in Simon’s room, sleeping in chairs. His bed is separated from another by a thin white curtain. Simon doesn’t like to look at his roommate, a former chef whose bones now protrude; he can’t keep anything down. Within days, the bed is empty again, the partition drifting in the breeze.
Robert says, “You have to tell your family.”
Simon shakes his head. “They can’t know I went like this.”
“But you haven’t gone,” says Klara. Her lap is covered with pamphlets—When a Friend Has Cancer; Affection, Not Rejection—and her eyes are slick. “You’re right here, with us.”
“Yeah.” Simon’s throat feels tight: the glands in his neck are swollen. One night, when Robert and Klara leave to get takeout, Simon scoots to the edge of the bed and reaches for the phone. He’s ashamed to realize he doesn’t even have Daniel’s number, but Klara left a pile of belongings on her chair, including a slender red address book. Daniel picks up on the fifth ring.
“Dan,” says Simon. His voice is raspy and his left foot twitches, but he floods with gratitude.
There is a long pause before Daniel speaks. “Who is this?”
“It’s me, Daniel.” He clears his throat. “It’s Simon.”
“Simon.”
Another pause, which stretches so long Simon knows it won’t end unless he fills it.
“I’m sick,” he says.
“You’re sick.” A beat. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
Daniel speaks stiffly, as if to a stranger. How long has it been since they’ve talked? Simon tries to imagine how Daniel’s face might look. He’s twenty-four years old.