‘I am sorry. I’m sorry for what I did – for leaving you. But I can’t – I won’t . . .’ He trails off, tries again. ‘You picked your life, Ma. I want to pick mine.’
‘Nobody picks their life. I sure didn’t.’ Gertie laughs, a scrape. ‘Here’s what happens: you make choices, and then they make choices. Your choices make choices. You go to college – my God, you finish high school – that’s one way of tipping the odds in your favor. What you’re doing right now, I don’t know what the hell will happen to you. And neither do you.’
‘But that’s the thing. I’m fine with not knowing. I’d rather not know.’
‘I’ve given you time,’ Gertie says. ‘I said to myself, Just wait; I thought, if I waited, you’d come to your senses. But you haven’t.’
‘I have come to my senses. My senses are here.’
‘Have you ever once thought about the business?’
Simon grows hot. ‘That’s what you care about?’
‘The name,’ says Gertie, faltering. ‘It’s changed. Gold’s is Milavetz’s now. It’s Arthur’s.’
Simon feels a wash of shame. But Arthur always encouraged Saul to be forward thinking. The styles Saul specialized in – worsted gabardine slacks, suits with wide lapels and legs – were on their way out by the time Simon was born, and it gives him some relief to think that, in Arthur’s hands, the business will continue.
‘Arthur’ll be good,’ he says. ‘He’ll keep the shop up-to-date.’
‘I don’t care about relevance. I care about family. There are things you do for the people who did them for you.’
‘And there’s things you do for yourself.’
He’s never spoken to his mother like this before, but he is dying to convince her; he imagines her coming to see him at Academy, Gertie clapping from a folding chair as he leaps and turns.
‘Oh, yes. There are plenty of things you do for yourself. Klara told me you’re a dancer.’
Her disdain comes through the receiver so loudly that the cop begins to laugh. ‘Yeah, I am,’ says Simon, glaring at him. ‘So what?’
‘I don’t understand it. You’ve never danced a day in your life.’
What can Simon tell her? It’s mysterious to him, too, how something he thought nothing of before, something that makes him feel pain and exhaustion and quite frequently embarrassment, has turned out to be a gateway to another thing entirely. When he points his foot, his leg grows by inches. During leaps, he hovers midair for minutes, as if he’s sprouted wings.
‘Well,’ he says. ‘I’m dancing now.’
Gertie releases a long, ragged sigh; then she goes quiet. And in that gap – a gap she would typically fill with more argument, even threats – Simon recognizes his freedom. If it’s illegal to be a runaway in California, he would already be in handcuffs.
‘If you’ve made your decision,’ she says, ‘I don’t want you coming back.’
‘You don’t – what?’
‘I don’t want you,’ says Gertie, enunciating, ‘coming back. You made your choice – you left us. So live with it, then. Stay.’
‘Jesus, Ma,’ Simon mutters, pressing the phone to his ear. ‘Don’t be so dramatic.’
‘I’m being very realistic, Simon.’ There is a pause as she inhales. Then Simon hears a quiet click, and the line goes dead.
He holds the receiver in one hand, dazed. Is this not what he wanted? His mother has relinquished him, given him to the world of which he’s longed to be a part. And yet he feels a spike of fear: the filter has been taken off the lens, the safety net ripped from beneath his feet, and he is dizzy with dreadful independence.
The cop walks him to the exit. Outside, on the landing, he grabs the neck of Simon’s T-shirt and yanks upward so forcefully that Simon rises onto the balls of his feet.
He says, ‘You runaways make me sick, d’you know that?’
Simon gasps. His toes search for purchase on the concrete. The cop’s eyes are whiskey-colored and sparsely lashed, his cheeks covered in freckles. On his forehead, near the hairline, is a cluster of round scars.
‘When I was a kid,’ he says, ‘you people arrived by the truckload every goddamned day. I thought you’d’ve learned we didn’t want you, but you’re still here, clogging up the system like fat. You don’t do anything useful with your lives, just live off the city like parasites. I was born in the Sunset, and so were my parents, and so were their parents, all the way back to our relatives who came here from Ireland, and that’s excluding the ones who died ’cause they couldn’t get fed. In my mind?’ He leans in close; his mouth is a pink knot. ‘You deserve whatever you get.’
Simon yanks out of his grip, coughing. In his peripheral vision, he sees a flash of bright red, a flash that becomes his sister. Klara stands at the foot of the stairs in a puff-shouldered black minidress and maroon Doc Martens, her hair blowing behind her like a cape. She looks like a superhero, radiant and vengeful. She looks like their mother.
‘What are you doing here?’ asks Simon, panting.
‘Benny told me he saw cop cars. This was the nearest station.’ Klara runs up the granite steps and stops in front of the cop. ‘What the fuck are you doing with my brother?’
The cop blinks, stopped short. Something flies between him and Klara that Simon can’t quite see, something he can only feel: sparks, heat, a sour fury like metal. When Klara puts an arm around Simon’s shoulders, the young cop shrinks. He looks so straight, so out of place in this new city, that Simon almost feels sorry for him.
‘What’s your name?’ Klara asks, squinting at the little pin on the cop’s blue shirt.
‘Eddie,’ says the man, lifting his chin. ‘Eddie O’Donoghue.’
Klara’s arm around Simon is firm, their recent wounds forgiven. The comfort of her protection makes Simon think of Gertie, and his throat swells. But Eddie is still looking at Klara, his cheeks pink and slightly slack, as if Simon’s sister is a mirage.
‘I’ll remember that,’ she says. Then she walks Simon down the steps of the station and into the heart of the Mission. It’s eighty-five degrees, the sidewalk fruit stands full as Eden, and no one tries to stop them.
6.
‘What’ll it be?’ asks Simon.
He rummages around in the tiny pantry, which is really a closet on whose jutting beams they keep an assortment of nonperishables: boxed cereal, cans of soup, alcohol. ‘I can do a vodka tonic, Jack and Coke . . .’
October: brisk silver-gray days, pumpkins on Academy’s front steps. Someone put a men’s dance belt on a fake skeleton and propped it up in the reception area. Simon and Robert have hooked up at Academy – kissing in the men’s bathroom or the empty dressing room before class – but this is the first time Robert has come to Simon’s apartment.
Robert leans back in the turquoise armchair. ‘I don’t drink.’
‘No?’ Simon pokes his head out of the closet and grins, one hand on the door. ‘I know I’ve got some dope around here, if that’s your trip.’
‘Don’t smoke, either. Not that stuff.’
‘No vices?’
‘No vices.’
‘Except men,’ Simon says.