The Immortalists

by Chloe Benjamin

  “Sit,” says the cop.

  On the table is a scuffed black phone. The cop takes a crumpled piece of paper from his shirt pocket and jabs at the buttons with one hand. Then he holds the receiver out to Simon, who looks at the phone with apprehension.

  “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.

  “When I was a kid,” he says, “you people arrived by the truckload every goddamned day. I thought you’d’ve learned we didn’t want you, but you’re still here, clogging up the system like fat. You don’t do anything useful with your lives, just live off the city like parasites. I was born in the Sunset, and so were my parents, and so were their parents, all the way back to our relatives who came here from Ireland, and that’s excluding the ones who died ’cause they couldn’t get fed. In my mind?” He leans in close; his mouth is a pink knot. “You deserve whatever you get.”

  Simon yanks out of his grip, coughing. In his peripheral vision, he sees a flash of bright red, a flash that becomes his sister. Klara stands at the foot of the stairs in a puff-shouldered black minidress and maroon Doc Martens, her hair blowing behind her like a cape. She looks like a superhero, radiant and vengeful. She looks like their mother.

  “What are you doing here?” asks Simon, panting.

  “Benny told me he saw cop cars. This was the nearest station.” Klara runs up the granite steps and stops in front of the cop. “What the fuck are you doing with my brother?”

  The cop blinks, stopped short. Something flies between him and Klara that Simon can’t quite see, something he can only feel: sparks, heat, a sour fury like metal. When Klara puts an arm around Simon’s shoulders, the young cop shrinks. He looks so straight, so out of place in this new city, that Simon almost feels sorry for him.

  “What’s your name?” Klara asks, squinting at the little pin on the cop’s blue shirt.

  “Eddie,” says the man, lifting his chin. “Eddie O’Donoghue.”

  Klara’s arm around Simon is firm, their recent wounds forgiven. The comfort of her protection makes Simon think of Gertie, and his throat swells. But Eddie is still looking at Klara, his cheeks pink and slightly slack, as if Simon’s sister is a mirage.

  “I’ll remember that,” she says. Then she walks Simon down the steps of the station and into the heart of the Mission. It’s eighty-five degrees, the sidewalk fruit stands full as Eden, and no one tries to stop them.

  6.

  What’ll it be?” asks Simon.

  He rummages around in the tiny pantry, which is really a closet on whose jutting beams they keep an assortment of nonperishables: boxed cereal, cans of soup, alcohol. “I can do a vodka tonic, J
ack and Coke . . .”

  October: brisk silver-gray days, pumpkins on Academy’s front steps. Someone put a men’s dance belt on a fake skeleton and propped it up in the reception area. Simon and Robert have hooked up at Academy—kissing in the men’s bathroom or the empty dressing room before class—but this is the first time Robert has come to Simon’s apartment.

  Robert leans back in the turquoise armchair. “I don’t drink.”

  “No?” Simon pokes his head out of the closet and grins, one hand on the door. “I know I’ve got some dope around here, if that’s your trip.”

  “Don’t smoke, either. Not that stuff.”

  “No vices?”

  “No vices.”

  “Except men,” Simon says.

  A tree branch waves in front of the living room window, blocking the sun, and Robert’s face goes out like a lamp. “That’s not a vice.”

  He gets up and brushes past Simon to the sink, where he pours himself a glass of water from the tap.

  “Hey, man,” says Simon. “You’re the one who likes to keep this shit quiet.”

  In class, Robert still warms up alone. Once, Beau saw Robert and Simon leaving the bathroom and whistled with both pinkies in his mouth, but when he asked Simon about it, Simon feigned innocence. He senses that Robert would disapprove of any disclosure, and his moments with Robert—Robert’s low, murmured laughter, his palms on Simon’s face—are too good to give up.

  Now Robert leans against the sink. “Just because I don’t talk about it doesn’t mean I keep it quiet.”

  “What’s the difference?” Simon puts his index fingers through Robert’s belt loops. He never dreamed he’d have the confidence to do such a thing, but San Francisco is a drug. Though he’s only been here five months, it feels like he’s aged by a decade.

  “When I’m at the studio,” says Robert, “I’m at work. I stay quiet out of respect—for the workplace, and for you.”

  Simon pulls him close, until their hips are pressed together. He puts his mouth to Robert’s ear. “Disrespect me.”

  Robert laughs. “You don’t want that.”

  “I do.” Simon unfastens Robert’s jeans and shoves his hand inside. He grabs Robert’s cock and pumps. They still haven’t had sex.

  Robert steps back. “Come on, man. Don’t be like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Cheap.”

  “Fun,” Simon says, correcting him. “You’re hard.”

  “So?”

  “So?” repeats Simon. So everything, he wants to say. So please. But what comes out is different. “So fuck me like an animal.”

  It’s something the Chronicle reporter once said to Simon. Robert looks as though he might laugh again, but then his mouth twists.

  “What we’re doing here, you and me?” he says. “Ain’t nothing wrong with it. Nothing.”

  Simon’s neck grows hot. “Yeah, I know that.”

  Robert grabs his jacket from the back of the turquoise chair and slips it on. “Do you? Sometimes I really don’t know.”

  “Hey,” says Simon, panicked. “I’m not ashamed, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  Robert pauses by the door. “Good,” he says. Then he pulls the door shut behind him and disappears down the stairwell.

  • • •

  When Harvey Milk is shot, Simon is in the dressing room at Purp, waiting for a staff meeting to begin. It’s eleven thirty in the morning, a Monday, and the men are resentful of coming in during their off-hours, even more resentful that Benny is late. They have the TV on while they wait. Lady lies on a bench with cold tea bags on her eyes; Simon is missing men’s class at Academy. The mood is somber, done in: one week before, Jim Jones led a thousand followers to death in Guyana.

  When Dianne Feinstein’s face fills the TV, her voice wavering—“It’s my duty to make this announcement: Both Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot and killed”—Richie cries out so loudly that Simon jumps up from his chair. Colin and Lance are silent with shock, but Adrian and Lady are crying thick tears, and when Benny arrives—harried, pale; traffic is stopped for blocks around Civic Center—his eyes are swollen pink. They close Purp for the day, hanging a black scarf of Lady’s across the front door, and that night, they join the rest of the Castro to march.

  It’s late November, but the streets are warm with bodies. The crowd is so large that Simon has to take a back route to Cliff’s to buy candles. The clerk gives him twelve for the price of two, and paper cups to cut the wind. Within hours, fifty thousand people have joined them. The march to City Hall is led by the sound of a single drum, and those who weep do so quietly. Simon’s cheeks are slick. It is Harvey, but it is more than Harvey. This mass, grieving like fatherless children, makes Simon think of his parents, both gone from him now. When the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus sings a hymn by Mendelssohn—Thou, Lord, Hast Been Our Refuge—Simon hangs his head.

  Who is his Lord, his refuge? Simon doesn’t think he believes in God, but then again, he’s never thought God believed in him. According to the Book of Leviticus, he’s an abomination. What kind of God would create a person of which He so disapproved? Simon can only think of two explanations: either there’s no God at all, or Simon was a mistake, a fuck-up. He’s never been sure which option scares him more.

  By the time he wipes his cheeks, the other Purp dancers have been carried along in the swell. Simon scans the crowd and snags on a familiar face: warm, dark eyes; a glint of silver in one earlobe, bobbing above a bright white candle. Robert.

  They’ve barely spoken since that October evening in Simon’s apartment, but now they push against the crowd, reaching for each other, and meet somewhere in the middle of that sea.

  • • •

  Robert’s studio is nestled in the steep, winding streets by Randall Park. By the time he unlocks the door and they stumble into the hallway, they’re pulling at each other’s shirts and fumbling with belt buckles. On a double bed beside the window, Simon fucks Robert, and Robert fucks him. Soon, though, it doesn’t feel like fucking; once the initial frenzy gives way, Robert is tender and attentive, pushing into Simon with such emotion—emotion for whom? For Simon? For Harvey?—that Simon feels unusually shy. Robert takes Simon’s cock in his mouth and sucks. When the pressure inside Simon builds to the point of bursting, Robert looks up from below, and their eyes meet with such startling intensity that Simon keels forward to cradle Robert’s head as he comes.

  Afterward, Robert turns on a bedside lamp. His apartment is not spartan, as Simon expected, but curated with objects Robert found during Corps’s first international tour: painted Russian bowls, two strands of Japanese cranes. A wooden shelf across from the bed is filled with books—Sula; The Football Man—and the galley kitchen is hung with an assortment of pans. A cardboard cutout guards the entrance to the bedroom, the life-sized image of a football player mid-catch.

  They sit propped up against pillows to smoke.

  “I met him once,” Robert says.

  “Who? Milk?”

  Robert nods. “It was after he lost his second campaign—’75? I saw him at a bar down the street from the camera shop. He was being propped up in the air by all these guys, and he was laughing, and I thought: That’s the kind of person we need. Someone who doesn’t stay down. Not a bitter old man, like me.”

  “Harvey was older than you.” Simon smiles, though he stops when he realizes he’s used the past tense.

  “Yeah, he was. He didn’t act like it, though.” Robert shrugs. “Look, I don’t go to the parades. I don’t go to the clubs. I sure as hell don’t go to the bathhouses.”

  “Why not?”

  Robert eyes him. “How many people do you see around here that look like me?”

  “There are black guys here.” Simon flushes. “Not a lot, I guess.”

  “Yeah. Not a lot,” says Robe
rt. “Try and find me one that does ballet.” He stubs out his cigarette. “That cop who picked you up? Think about what he’d have done if you looked like me.”

  “Worse,” says Simon. “I know.”

  He likes Robert so much that he is reluctant to face the obvious difference between them. He wants their sexuality to be an equalizer; he wants to focus on the discrimination they face in common. But Simon can conceal his sexuality. Robert can’t conceal his blackness, and almost everyone in the Castro is white.

  Robert lights a new cigarette. “Why don’t you go to the bathhouses?”

  “Who says I don’t?” asks Simon. But Robert snorts, and Simon laughs. “Honestly? They scare me a little. I don’t know if I could take it.”

  Is there such a thing as too much pleasure? When Simon imagines the bathhouses, he thinks of a carnival of gluttony, an underworld so endless it seems possible to stay there forever. What he’s said to Robert isn’t a lie—he is afraid he wouldn’t be able to take it—but he’s also afraid he would, that his greed would have no edges and no end.

  “I hear that.” Robert wrinkles his nose. “Nasty.”

  Simon props himself up on one arm. “So why did you come to San Francisco?”

  Robert raises an eyebrow. “I came to San Francisco because I didn’t have a choice. I’m from Los Angeles. South Central—neighborhood called Watts. You ever heard of it?”

  Simon nods. “That’s where the riots were.”

  In 1965, when he was four, Simon went to the movies with Gertie and Klara while the older siblings were in school. Though he does not remember the film, he does remember the newsreel shown directly before it. There was the cheerful tootle of Universal City Studios and the familiar, rhythmic voice of Ed Herlihy, both of which were markedly unlike the black-and-white footage that appeared next: dim streets clouded by smoke and buildings billowing with fire. The music turned foreboding as Ed Herlihy described brick-throwing Negro hoodlums—snipers shooting firefighters from rooftops, looters who stole liquor and playpens—but Simon only saw police officers with flak jackets and guns walking through empty streets. Finally, two blacks appeared, but these could not be the hoodlums Ed Herlihy mentioned: handcuffed and flanked by white officers, they walked with stoic nonresistance.