‘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.” ’