‘We’re leaving,’ she whispers. ‘The taxi’s downstairs.’
Daniel looms behind her, his eyes distant behind glasses. The skin below them has a silver-blue, piscine tinge, and the past week has carved deep parentheses around his mouth – or have they always been there?
Klara throws an arm over her face. ‘No.’
Varya lifts it, smooths Klara’s hair. ‘Say goodbye.’
Her voice is gentle, and Klara sits up. She wraps her arms around Varya’s neck so tightly she can touch her own elbows.
‘Goodbye,’ she whispers.
After Varya and Daniel leave, the sky glows red, then amber. Simon presses his face to Klara’s hair. It smells like smoke.
‘Don’t go,’ he says.
‘I have to, Sy.’
‘What’s out there for you, anyway?’
‘Who knows?’ Klara’s eyes are watery with fatigue, and her pupils seem to shine. ‘That’s the whole point.’
They stand and fold the blankets together.
‘You could come, too,’ Klara adds, eyeing him.
Simon laughs. ‘Yeah, right. Skip out on two more years of school? Ma’d kill me.’
‘Not if you got far enough away.’
‘I couldn’t.’
Klara walks to the railing and leans against it, still in her blue, fuzzy sweater and cut-off shorts. She isn’t looking at him, but Simon can feel the force of her attention, how she vibrates with it, as if she knows that only by feigning nonchalance can she say what she does next.
‘We could go to San Francisco.’
Simon’s breath catches. ‘Don’t talk like that.’
He crouches to pick up their pillows, then stuffs one under each arm. He’s five-eight, like Saul was, with swift, muscular legs and a lean chest. His plump, reddish lips and dark blond curls – the contribution of some long-buried Aryan ancestor – have won him the admiration of the girls in his sophomore class, but this isn’t the audience he wants.
Vaginas have never appealed to him: their cabbage-like folds, their long, hidden corridor. He craves the long thrust of the cock, its heady insistence, and the challenge of a body like his. Only Klara has ever known. After their parents fell asleep, she and Simon climbed out of the window, mace in Klara’s fake leather purse, and took the fire escape down to the street. They went to Le Jardin to hear Bobby Guttadaro play, or rode the subway to 12 West, a flower warehouse turned discotheque where Simon met the go-go dancer who told him about San Francisco. They sat in the rooftop garden while the dancer said that San Francisco has a gay city commissioner and a gay newspaper, that gay people can work anywhere and have sex anytime because there are no laws against sodomy. ‘You can’t imagine it,’ he said, and from then on Simon could do nothing else.
‘Why not?’ asks Klara, turning now. ‘Yeah, Ma would be angry. But I see what your life would be like here, Sy, and I don’t want that for you. You don’t want it, either. Sure, Ma wants me to go to college, but she got that with Danny and V. She has to understand that I’m not her. And you aren’t Dad. Jesus – you aren’t meant to be a tailor. A tailor!’ She paused, as if to let the word sink all the way in. ‘It’s all wrong. And it isn’t fair. So give me one reason. Give me one good reason why you shouldn’t start your life.’
As soon as Simon allows himself to picture it, he is nearly overcome. Manhattan should be an oasis – there are gay clubs, even bathhouses – but he’s afraid to reinvent himself in a place that has always been home. ‘Faygelehs,’ Saul muttered once, glaring as a trio of slender men unloaded a panoply of instruments into the unit the Singhs could no longer afford. That Yiddish slur was also adopted by Gertie, and though Simon pretended not to hear it, he always felt they were talking about him.
In New York, he would live for them, but in San Francisco, he could live for himself. And though he does not like to think about it, though he in fact avoids the subject pathologically, he allows himself to think it now: What if the woman on Hester Street is right? The mere thought turns his life a different color; it makes everything feel urgent, glittering, precious.
‘Jesus, Klara.’ Simon joins her at the railing. ‘But what’s in it for you?’
The sun rises a rich, bloody red, and Klara squints at it.
‘You can go one place,’ she says. ‘I can go anywhere.’
She still has the last of her baby fat, and her face is round. Her teeth, when she smiles, are slightly crooked: half-feral, half-charming. His sister.
‘Will I ever find someone I love as much as you?’ he asks.
‘Please.’ Klara laughs. ‘You’ll find someone you love much more.’
Six stories below, a young man runs down Clinton Street. He wears a thin white T-shirt and blue nylon shorts. Simon watches the muscles of his chest undulate beneath the shirt, watches the powerful trunks of his legs do their work. Klara follows his eyes.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ she says.
2.
May arrives in a blur of sunshine and color. Crocus shoots thumb the grass of Roosevelt Park. After her last high school class, Klara bursts through the door with her empty diploma frame. The diploma will be sent once the calligraphy is finished, but by then she will be gone. Gertie knows that Klara is leaving, so her suitcase sits in the hallway. What she doesn’t know is that Simon – whose suitcase is jammed beneath his bed – is coming with her.
He is leaving behind most of his belongings, bringing only those that are utilitarian or precious. Two collared, striped velour T-shirts. The red drawstring bag. The brown corduroy flares he was wearing when a young Puerto Rican man caught his eye on the train and winked: his most romantic experience yet. His leather-banded gold watch, a gift from Saul. And his New Balance 320s: blue suede, the lightest running shoes he’s worn.
Klara’s bag is larger, as it includes something that Ilya Hlavacek gave Klara during her last day of work. The night before they leave, she tells Simon the story of the gift.
‘Bring me that box over there,’ Ilya told her, pointing.
The box, made of wood and painted black, accompanied Ilya from sideshows to circuses until he contracted polio in 1931 – ‘Good timing,’ he often joked, ‘because by then the pictures had killed vaudeville anyway.’ He always referred to it as that box, though Klara knew it was his most precious possession. She did as he directed, hoisting it up onto the counter so Ilya wouldn’t have to get up from his chair.
‘Now, I want you to have this,’ he said. ‘All right? It’s yours. I want you to use it and I want you to enjoy it. It’s meant to be on the road, my dear, not stuck indoors with an old cripple like me. You know how to take it apart? Here, I’ll show you.’ Klara watched as he stood with the help of his cane and turned the box into a table as he had so many times before. ‘Here’s where you put your cards. You stand behind it like so.’
Klara tried it out. ‘There you go,’ he said, smiling his old man’s leprechaun smile. ‘It looks marvelous on you.’