On an unusually cold night in February, 1988, Klara stands onstage at the Committee, a Cabaret theater on Broadway that is typically populated by a comedy troupe of the same name. This Monday, they’ve rented it to Klara, who paid more to perform there than she’ll ever make back. She’s put a business card on every table – The Immortalist, the cards read – but the audience is sparse, guys who filtered over from the Condor and the Lusty Lady or are headed there afterward. Klara is witty in the cup-and-ball act, but nobody’s interested in anything but the Breakaway, and even that has lost its novelty. ‘Enough magic, sweetheart,’ someone shouts. ‘Lemme see your tits!’ When her act is over and a burlesque troupe begins to set up, Klara puts on the long, black duster she wears on performance nights and walks to the bar. She lifts a leather wallet from the heckler’s pocket on her way to the ladies’ room and slips it back, empty of cash, on her return.
‘Hey.’
Her stomach drops. She spins, expecting to see a freckled face and whiskey-colored eyes, a uniform and a badge, but instead she’s faced with a tall man in a T-shirt, loose jeans, and work boots, a man who puts up his hands in surrender.
‘Didn’t mean to startle you,’ he says, but now Klara is staring at his light brown skin and shiny, shoulder-length black hair, both of which she’s sure she’s seen before.
‘You’re familiar.’
‘I’m Raj.’
‘Raj.’ And the light bulb. ‘Raj! My God – Teddy’s roommate. Baksheesh Khalsa’s, I mean,’ she adds, remembering Baksheesh Khalsa’s long hair and steel bracelet.
Raj laughs. ‘I never liked that kid. What kind of white guy up and starts wearing a turban?’
‘The kind who hangs in the Haight, I guess.’
‘They’re all gone now. They work in Silicon Valley, or they’re lawyers. With very short hair.’
Klara laughs. She likes Raj’s quickness and his eyes, which search her. People are filtering out of the theater; when the front door opens, she sees black night, speckled with stars and the neon marquees of the strip clubs. Ordinarily, after gigs, she rides the 30 Stockton to the Chinatown apartment where she lives alone.
‘What are you doing right now?’ she asks.
‘Doing?’ Raj’s mouth is thin lipped but expressive, with a sly curl. ‘Right now, I’m doing nothing. I have no plans at all.’
Ten years have passed. Can you believe it? Ten years! And you’re one of the first people I met in San Francisco.’
They sit in Vesuvio’s, an Italian café across the alley from City Lights. Klara likes it because it was once frequented by Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg, though it’s now occupied by a rowdy group of Australian tourists.
‘And we’re still here,’ says Raj.
‘And we’re still here.’ Klara has hazy images of Raj in the apartment where she and Simon stayed during their first days in the city: Raj reading One Hundred Years of Solitude on the couch or making pancakes in the kitchen with blond, long-limbed Susie, who sold flowers near the ballpark. ‘What happened to Susie?’
‘Ran off with a Christian Spiritualist. I haven’t seen her since seventy-nine. You came with your brother, didn’t you? How’s he?’
Klara has been fingering her martini glass, squeezing the narrow stem, but now she looks up. ‘He’s dead.’
Raj coughs on his drink. ‘Dead? Fuck, Klara. I’m sorry. What of?’
‘AIDS,’ says Klara, and she is grateful, at least, to have a reason for it, a name, which did not exist until three months after Simon’s death. ‘He was twenty.’
‘Fucking shit.’ Raj shakes his head again. ‘It’s a bastard, AIDS. Took one of my friends last year.’
‘What do you do?’ asks Klara. Anything to change the subject.
‘I’m a mechanic. I do car repair, mostly, but I’ve done construction, too. My dad wanted me to be a surgeon. Fat chance of that, I always told him, but he sent me here anyway. He stayed in Dharavi – slum of Bombay – half a million people in a mile, shit in the river, but it’s home.’
‘That must have been hard, coming here without your dad,’ Klara says, looking at him. He has thick eyebrows, but his features are delicate – high cheekbones that taper into a slender jaw and pointed chin. ‘How old were you?’
‘Ten. I moved in with my dad’s cousin Amit. He was the smartest person in our family – got a scholarship to college and moved to California for med school in the sixties on a student visa. My dad wanted me to be just like him. I was never good at science, I don’t like fixing people, but I do like fixing things, so my dad, he was half-right about me; though half isn’t enough, I suppose.’ He has a nervous laugh, the trace of an accent, though Klara has to listen hard to hear it. ‘And you? How long’ve you been doing this?’
‘Mm,’ says Klara. ‘Six years?’
In the beginning, the grind was electrifying, but now it exhausts her: rigging and striking on her own, riding BART to Berkeley in her duster while hip-hop blasts from somebody’s boom box. Home at one in the morning or three if she’s coming from the East Bay, soaking in the tub as the Chinese bakery on the first floor whirs to life. Nights spent sewing the goddamn sequins back onto her dress with the junky machine she’s too poor to replace – there are sequins between the couch cushions, sequins on the stairs, sequins in the shower drain.
One year ago, she was badly injured during the Breakaway. A girl she hired through the Chronicle let go of the rope without checking the safety break, and it slipped three feet on the batten. Klara didn’t clear the floor. When she came to, she was on her hands and knees, her skull throbbing as if she’d taken a punch and her feet puffing up like dark balloons. She didn’t have insurance, and the hospital fees nearly cleaned out the money she inherited from Saul. She spent six weeks in a boot, raging. For the past year, she’s only worked with a nineteen-year-old boy from the circus, but he’s leaving in March to join Barnum.
‘It makes you happy, I see,’ says Raj. He’s grinning.
‘Oh.’ Klara smiles. ‘It did. It does. But I’m tired. It’s hard to do it alone. And it’s hard to get bookings. There are only so many venues that’ll hire me, and there’s only so many times they’ll do it – you perform in the same place for years, word gets around, the hype swells and then it dies and you’re still there, you know, hanging from a rope by your teeth.’
‘I liked that part, the rope trick. What’s your secret?’
‘There’s no secret.’ Klara shrugs. ‘You just hold on.’
‘Impressive.’ Raj raises his eyebrows. ‘You get nervous?’