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 members, 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.’