The Immortalists

by Chloe Benjamin

  “Right.” Robert stubs his cigarette out on a small blue dish. “I did okay in school—my mom was a teacher—but what I really had was physical power. Football was my game. In tenth grade, I was starting for the varsity team as a safety. My mom thought I’d get a scholarship to college. And when a scout came out from Mississippi, I started to think that way, too.”

  Other guys haven’t talked to Simon like this. Actually, with other guys, Simon hasn’t talked much at all, and certainly not about his family. But this is how it is with most of the men in the Castro—men suspended in time as if in amber, men who don’t want to look back.

  “So did you get the scholarship?” he asks.

  Robert pauses. He seems to be gauging Simon.

  “I was real close with this other guy on the team,” he says. “Dante. I was on defense. Dante was our wide receiver. I could tell there was something different about him. And he could tell there was something different about me. Nothing happened until my junior year, last practice of the off-season. Dante was supposed to leave that summer; he had a scholarship from Alabama. I figured it was the last time we’d see each other. We waited till everyone else had left the locker room, took our time putting our street clothes on. And then we took them off again.”

  Robert takes a drag and exhales. Outside, Simon can still see the light of the march. Each candle marks one person. They flicker, white, like grounded stars.

  “I swear to God I never heard anyone come in. But I guess somebody did. Next day, I get kicked off the team, and Dante loses his scholarship. They didn’t even let us clean our shit out of the locker room. Last time I saw him, he was standing at the bus stop. He had his hat pulled down low. His jaw, it was shaking. And he looked at me like he wanted to kill me.”

  “Jesus.” Simon shifts on the bed. “What happened to him?”

  “A group of guys on the team caught up with him. They caught up with me, too, but they didn’t get me so bad. I was taller, stronger. Defense—that was my job, you know? But it wasn’t Dante’s. They bashed his face in, broke his back with a bat. Then they took him to the field and tied him to the fence. They said they left him breathing, but what kind of dumb-ass motherfucker would have believed that?”

  Simon shakes his head. He is nauseous with fear.

  “The judge. That’s who,” Robert says. “I knew I’d go crazy if I stayed down there. That’s why I came to San Francisco. I started taking dance classes ’cause I knew that was one place they wouldn’t kick me out for being queer. Nothing gayer than ballet, man. But there’s a reason Lynn Swann does dance training. It’s tough as shit. It makes you strong.”

  Robert scoots down to rest his face on Simon’s chest, and Simon holds him. He wonders what he can do to protect Robert, to soothe him—whether to squeeze Robert’s hand or to speak, whether to stroke his newly shaved head. This responsibility, newly gifted, is nothing like fucking: more intimidating, grown-up, so much wider margin for failure.

  • • •

  In April, Gali calls Simon and tells him to come to the theater, fast. Simon splurges on a cab, his dance bag in his arms. Gali meets him outside the stage door.

  “Eduardo went down in rehearsal,” Gali says. “He rolled his ankle on a saut de basque. A freak accident—terrible. We hope it is only a sprain. Even so, he’s out for the month.” He nods at Simon. “You know the choreography.”

  It isn’t a question; it’s a job offer for Birth of Man. Simon’s heart clenches. “I mean—yeah, I know it. But I . . .”

  What he wants to say is, I’m not good enough.

  “You’ll be at the end of the line,” Gali says. “We have no choice.”

  Simon follows him down the long corridor to the dressing rooms. Eduardo sits on the floor with his leg propped up on a crate, a bag of ice on one ankle. His eyes are pink, but he cracks a smile for Simon.

  “At least,” he says, “you won’t need to be fitted for a costume.”

  In Birth of Man, the men wear nothing but dance belts. Even their ass cheeks are exposed. In this regard, Purp has been good training: onstage, Simon feels little self-consciousness and can instead focus only on his movements. The lights are so bright that he can’t see the audience, so he pretends they don’t exist: there are only Simon and Fauzi, Tommy and Beau, all of them straining to support Robert as he navigates their man-made canal. They bow as a group, and Simon squeezes their hands until his own hurt. Afterward, they cab to the QT on Polk in their stage makeup. In a surge of ecstasy, Simon grabs Robert and kisses him in front of everyone. The other men cheer, and Robert grins with such bashful indulgence that Simon does it again.

  That fall, Simon is given his own role in The Naughty Nut, Corps’s Nutcracker. A write-up in the Chronicle doubles ticket sales, and Gali throws a party at his house in the Upper Haight to celebrate. The rooms are filled with brown leather furniture, and everything smells like the clove-pricked oranges that sit in a gold bowl on the mantel. Academy’s pianist plays Tchaikovsky on Gali’s Steinway. The doorways have been hung with mistletoe, and the party’s hum is periodically interrupted by shrieks of delight as odd pairs are forced to kiss. Simon arrives with Robert, who wears a maroon button-down with black dress pants; he’s replaced his silver hoop earring with a diamond the size of a peppercorn. They mingle with donors by the hors d’oeuvres before Robert pulls Simon down the hall and through a glass door that leads to the garden.

  They sit on the deck. Even in December, the garden is lush. There are jade and nasturtiums and California poppies, all hearty enough to grow amidst fog. It occurs to Simon that he would like to have a life like this: a career, a house, a partner. He’s always assumed that these things are not for him—that he’s designed for something less lucky, less straight. In truth, it is not only Simon’s gayness that makes him feel this way. It’s the prophecy, too, something he would very much like to forget but has instead dragged behind him all these years. He hates the woman for giving it to him, and he hates himself for believing her. If the prophecy is a ball, his belief is its chain; it is the voice in his head that says Hurry, says Faster, says Run.

  Robert says, “I got the place.”

  Last week, he applied for an apartment on Eureka Street. It’s rent controlled, with a kitchen and a backyard. Simon went to the showing with Robert and marveled at the dishwasher, the washing machine, the bay windows.

  “You get a roommate?” he asks.

  The nasturtiums wave their festive red and yellow hands. Robert leans back on his forearms, grinning. “You want to room with me?”

  The thought is bewitching: a tingle runs across Simon’s scalp. “We’d be close to the studio. We could get a used car and drive to the theater together on performance days. We’d save gas.”

  Robert looks at Simon like he’s just said he’s straight. “You want to live together to save gas.”

  “No!—No. It’s not the gas. Of course it isn’t the gas.”

  Robert shakes his head. He’s still smiling when he looks at Simon. “You can’t admit it.”

  “Admit what?”

  “How you feel about me.”

  “Sure I can.”

  “Okay. How do you feel about me?”

  “I like you,” says Simon, but it comes out a little too fast.

  Robert throws his head back and laughs. “You are a bad fucking liar,” he says.

  7.

  They are unpacking the apartment, Simon and Robert and Klara, who didn’t mind the move; she seemed relieved to have the Collingwood apartment to herself. After a balmy December, temperatures have dipped into the forties. This would be nothing in New York, but California has made Simon soft: he wears legwarmers under his tracksuit as he runs between the apartment and the U-Haul. When Klara leaves, Simon and Robert kiss pressed up against the dishwasher: Robert’s hands sure on Simon’s waist, Simon groping for Robert’s ass, his dick, his magnificent face.

>   It is 1980, the beginning of a new decade as well as a new year. In San Francisco, Simon is insulated from the global recession and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He and Robert pool their money to buy a TV, and though the evening news makes them uneasy, the Castro is like a fallout shelter: there, Simon feels powerful and safe. He rises through the ranks at Corps, and by spring, he is a full company member instead of an understudy.

  Klara has returned to the dentist’s office, working days as a receptionist and nights as a restaurant hostess in Union Square. She spends weekends scripting her show and puts each month’s sliver of leftover income into savings. On Sundays, Simon meets her for dinner at an Indian restaurant on Eighteenth Street. One evening, she brings a manila folder, rubber-banded twice and stuffed with photocopies: grainy black-and-white photos, old newspapers, vintage programs and ads. She uses the full length of their table to lay everything out.

  “This,” she says, “is Gran.”

  Simon leans over the table. He recognizes Gertie’s mother from the photo tacked above Klara’s bed. In one image, she stands with a tall, dark-haired man on top of a galloping horse, stocky in her shorts and tied-off Western blouse. In another, the cover of a program, she is tiny-waisted and teeny-footed. She lifts the lip of her skirt with one hand; with the other, she walks six men on leashes. Below the men are the words, “The QUEEN of BURLESQUE! Come see Miss KLARA KLINE’S muscles shake and shiver like a BOWL of JELLY in a GALE of WIND—the DANCE that John the Baptist LOST HIS HEAD over!”

  Simon snorts. “That’s Ma’s mom?”

  “Yup. And that,” says Klara, pointing to the man on the horse, “is her dad.”

  “No shit.” The man isn’t quite handsome—he has thick, mustache-like eyebrows and Gertie’s large nose—but he has a glowering sort of charisma. He looks like Daniel. “How do you know?”

  “I’ve been researching. I couldn’t find her birth certificate, but I know she arrived at Ellis Island in 1913 on a ship called the Ultonia. She was Hungarian; I’m pretty sure she was an orphan. Aunt Helga arrived later. So Gran came with a girl’s dance troupe and lived in a boarding house: the De Hirsch Home for Working Girls.”

  Klara picks up a piece of paper on which several pictures have been photocopied: a large stone building, a dining hall full of seated, brown-haired girls, and the portrait of a severe-looking woman—the Baroness de Hirsch, reads the caption—in a high-necked blouse, gloves, and square hat, all of them black.

  “I mean, God knows—Gran was Jewish, and she had no family. If it weren’t for the home, she’d’ve probably been on the street. But this place was really proper. It taught all the girls to sew, get married young, and Gran wasn’t like that. At some point, she left, and that’s when she started doing this.” Klara fingers the burlesque program. “She got her start in vaudeville. She performed in dance halls, dime museums, amusement parks—nickel dumps, too, which is what they called movie theaters. And then she met him.”

  Carefully, she lifts a page hidden under the program and passes it to Simon. It’s a marriage certificate.

  “Klara Kline and Otto Gorski,” says Klara. “He was a Wild West rider with Barnum & Bailey, a world champion. So here’s my theory: Gran met Otto on the way to a gig, fell in love and joined the circus.”

  Klara pulls a folded piece of paper out of her wallet. It’s another picture, but this one shows Klara Sr. sliding from the top of the circus tent to the bottom, suspended only from a rope that she holds in her teeth. Below the photo is a caption: Klara Kline and her Jaws of Life!

  “Why are you showing me all this?” asks Simon.

  Klara’s cheeks are pink. “I want to do a combination show: mostly magic, plus one death-defying feat. I’m teaching myself the Jaws of Life.”

  Simon stops chewing his vegetable korma. “That’s nuts. You don’t know how she did it. There must have been some trick.”

  Klara shakes her head. “No trick—it was real. Otto, Gran’s husband? He was killed in a riding accident in 1936. After that, Gran moved back to New York with Ma. In 1941, she did the Jaws of Life across Times Square, from the Edison Hotel to the roof of the Palace Theater. Halfway through, she fell. She died.”

  “Jesus Christ. Why didn’t we know about this?”

  “Because Ma never talked about it. It was a pretty big story back then, but I think she’s always been ashamed of Gran. She wasn’t normal,” says Klara, nodding at the photo of Gertie’s mother on the horse, a denim shirt hiked up to reveal her muscular stomach. “Besides, it was such a long time ago—Ma was only six when she died. After that, Ma went to live with Aunt Helga.”

  Simon knows Gertie was raised by her mother’s sister, a hawkish older woman who spoke mostly Hungarian and never married. She came to 72 Clinton on Jewish holidays, bringing hard candies wrapped in colored foil. But her nails were long and pointed, her smell was that of a box unopened for decades, and Simon was always afraid of her.

  Now he watches Klara put the photocopies back in her folder. “Klara, you can’t do this. It’s insane.”

  “I’m not going to die, Simon.”

  “How the hell do you know that?”

  “Because I do.” Klara opens her bag, puts the folder inside, and zips it shut. “I refuse to.”

  “Right,” says Simon. “You and every other person who’s ever lived.”

  Klara doesn’t respond. Simon knows this is how she gets when she has an idea. Like a dog with a bone, Gertie used to say, but that isn’t quite true; it’s more that Klara becomes impermeable, unreachable. She exists somewhere else.

  “Hey.” Simon flicks her arm. “What’ll you call it? Your act?”

  Klara smiles in her feline way: the sharp little canines, a shake of glitter in her eyes.

  “The Immortalist,” she says.

  • • •

  Robert holds Simon’s face in his hands. Simon has woken in a panic from another bad dream.

  “What are you so afraid of?” Robert asks.

  Simon shakes his head. It’s four in the afternoon, a Sunday, and they’ve spent the entire day in bed, save for the half hour when they made poached eggs and bread slathered in cherry jam.

  It’s too good, this feeling, is what he wants to say. It can’t last. By next summer, he’ll have lived for two decades—a long life for a cat or a bird, but not for a man. He’s told no one of his visit to the woman on Hester Street or the sentence she gave him, which seems to be drawing toward him in double time. In August, he takes the 38 Geary bus to the edge of Golden Gate Park and walks the steep, jutting trail at Land’s End. There, he sees cypress and wildflowers and what’s left of the Sutro Baths. A century ago, the baths were a human aquarium, but now the concrete is in ruins. Still, had it not been a luxury once? Even Eden—especially Eden—didn’t last forever.

  When winter comes, he begins to rehearse for Corps’s spring program, Myth. Tommy and Eduardo will open the show as Narcissus and his Shadow, their movements mirrored. Next is The Myth of Sisyphus, in which the women perform a series of motions at intervals, like a song in a round. In the final piece, The Myth of Icarus, Simon will perform his first starring role: he is Icarus, and Robert is the Sun.

  On opening night, he soars around Robert. He orbits closer. He wears a pair of large wings, made of wax and feathers, like those Daedalus fashioned for Icarus. The physics of dancing with twenty pounds on his back compounds his dizziness, so he is grateful when Robert removes them, even though this means that they have melted, and that Simon, as Icarus, will die.

  When the music—Addinsell’s “Warsaw Concerto”—climbs its final summit, Simon’s soul feels like a body lifted above ground, its feet hovering midair. He yearns for his family. If you could see me now, he thinks. Instead, he clings to Robert, who carries him to center stage. The light around Robert is so bright that Simon can see nothing else: not the members of the audience or the other company mem
bers, who crowd in the wings to watch them.

  “I love you,” he whispers.

  “I know,” Robert says.

  The music is loud; no one can hear them. Robert lays him on the ground. Simon arranges his body the way Gali showed him, with his legs curled and his arms reaching for Robert. Robert uses the wings to cover Simon before he backs away.

  • • •

  They spend two years like this. Simon makes the coffee; Robert makes the bed. Everything is new until it isn’t anymore: Robert’s frayed sweatpants, his groan of pleasure. How he trims his nails weekly—perfect, translucent half-moons in the sink. The feeling of possession, foreign and heady: My man. Mine. When Simon looks back, this period of time feels impossibly short. Moments come to him like film slides: Robert making guacamole at the counter. Robert stretching by the window. Robert going outside to snip rosemary or thyme from the clay pots in their garden. At night, the street lamps shine so brightly, the garden is visible in the dark.

  8.

  Your movements,” says Gali. “They must. Have. Integrity.”

  December 1981. In men’s class, they are practicing fouetté turns, in which the body spins, balanced on the ball of one foot, with the other leg extended sideways. Simon has fallen twice, and now Gali stands behind him—one palm against Simon’s stomach, the other against his back—while the rest of the men look on.

  “Lift the right leg. Keep the tightness in the core. Keep the alignment.” It’s easy to keep the alignment when both feet are on the ground, but as Simon’s leg lifts, his lower back arches and his chest drops back. Gali claps in disapproval. “You see? This is the problem. You lift the leg, the ego takes over. You must start with the foundation.”