Page 16 of The Immortalists

“Clubs.”

“Clubs. Where no one was watching you, right? Where you were just another face in the crowd? Well, they’re watching you now. And my guys? They can dance. They’re good. I need you”—he points the sponge at Simon—“to keep up.”

Simon’s pride stings. Sure, he might have been a little stiff, but by the end of the night, he was jiving like the rest of them—wasn’t he?

“What about Colin?” he asks, boldly imitating Colin’s limpid sway, his mime act. “Is he keeping up?”

“Colin,” says Benny, “has a shtick. The art fags are into him. You need a shtick, too. Whatever you were doing last night? Shuffling around the pedestal like you had bugs in your pants? That wasn’t it.”

“Hey, man. It’s not like I’m in bad shape. I’m a runner.”

“So what? Anyone can run. Baryshnikov, Nureyev—you look at those guys, they don’t run. They fly. And that’s ’cause they’re artists. You’re a good-looking guy, no doubt about that, but the guys who come here have standards, and you’ll need more than your looks to keep up.”

“Like what?”

Benny exhales. “Like presence. Charisma.”

Simon watches as Benny opens the cash register and counts the previous night’s earnings. “So you’re firing me?”

“No, I’m not firing you. But I’d like you to take a class. Learn to move. There’s a dance school at the corner of Church and Market—ballet. They get a lot of guys in there, so you wouldn’t be hanging around with a bunch of chicks.”

“Ballet?” Simon laughs. “Come on, man. That’s not my scene.”

“And you think this is?” Benny takes out two thick stacks of bills and wraps them in rubber bands. “You’re out of your comfort zone, kid—that’s a fact. What’s one more step?”

4.

From the outside, the Ballet Academy of San Francisco is nothing but a narrow, white door. Simon climbs a tall staircase, turns right at the landing, and finds himself in a small reception area: creaking wooden floors, a chandelier furry with dust. He didn’t think ballet dancers would be so loud, but women chatter in groups as they stretch against the wall and men in black tights shout at one another, kneading their quads. The receptionist signs him up for the twelve thirty mixed level—“Trial class is free”—and hands him a pair of black canvas slippers from the lost and found bin. Simon sits to pull them on. Seconds later, the French doors behind him bang open. Teenage girls in navy leotards stream out, hair pulled back so tightly their eyebrows lift. Behind them, the studio is as large as a school cafeteria. Simon presses against the wall to let the girls pass. It takes all of his resolve not to bolt down the stairs.

The other dancers gather their bags and water bottles and begin to amble into the studio. It’s an old, dignified room, with high ceilings, worn floors, and a raised platform for the piano. Students carry heavy-looking metal barres from the perimeter to the center as an older man enters the studio. Later, Simon will learn that this is the Academy’s director, Gali, an Israeli émigré who danced with the San Francisco Ballet before a back injury ended his career. He looks to be in his late forties, with a powerful stride and the dense body of a gymnast. His head is shaved, and so are his legs: he wears a maroon unitard that ends in shorts, revealing smooth thighs striated with muscle.

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.