December 1981. In men’s class, they are practicing fouetté turns, in which the body spins, balanced on the ball of one foot, with the other leg extended sideways. Simon has fallen twice, and now Gali stands behind him – one palm against Simon’s stomach, the other against his back – while the rest of the men look on.
‘Lift the right leg. Keep the tightness in the core. Keep the alignment.’ It’s easy to keep the alignment when both feet are on the ground, but as Simon’s leg lifts, his lower back arches and his chest drops back. Gali claps in disapproval. ‘You see? This is the problem. You lift the leg, the ego takes over. You must start with the foundation.’
He strides to the center to demonstrate. Simon crosses his arms.
‘Everything,’ says Gali, looking at the men. ‘Everything is connected. Watch.’ He places his feet in fourth position and pliés. ‘This is when I prepare. This is when it matters. I feel the connection between my chest and my hips. I feel the connection between my knees and the balls of my feet. The structure of the body has alignment and it has integrity, you see? So when I push off’ – he lifts his back leg and turns – ‘there is unity. It is effortless.’
Tommy, the British wunderkind, catches Simon’s eye. Effortless? he mouths, and Simon grins. Tommy is a jumper, not a turner, and he likes to commiserate with Simon.
Gali is still turning. ‘From control,’ he says, ‘comes freedom. From restraint comes flexibility. From the trunk’ – he puts one hand to his core, then gestures, with his free hand, to his raised leg – ‘come the branches.’
He returns to the ground down in a deep plié, then lifts a palm as if to say, See?
Simon sees, but doing is a different matter. When class ends, Tommy slings an arm over Simon’s shoulder and groans as they walk toward the dressing room. Robert glances at them. Rain batters the windows, but the room is steamy with sweat and most of the men are bare chested. When Simon leaves with Beau and Tommy for lunch, Robert doesn’t join them.
They walk to Orphan Andy’s on Seventeenth. Simon tells himself that he isn’t doing anything wrong: most of the men at Academy are flirtatious, and it isn’t his fault if Robert doesn’t join in. He loves Robert – he does. Robert is intelligent and mature and surprising. He likes classical music as much as he likes football, and though he’s not yet thirty, he’d prefer to read in bed than go to Purp with Simon. ‘He’s classy,’ said Klara, the first time she met him, and Simon beamed with pride. But this is also part of the problem: Simon likes raunch, likes being spanked and ogled and sucked off, and he has some appetite for depravity – or at least, what his parents would have called depravity – that he is finally beginning to acknowledge.
After lunch, they head to Star Pharmacy for rolling papers. Simon pays while the other two wait outside. They’re both staring at the pharmacy’s glass window when he comes back.
‘Oh my God, you guys,’ Tommy says. ‘Have you seen this?’
He points at a homemade flier taped to the window. THE GAY CANCER, it reads. Below are three Polaroid photos of a young man. In the first photo, he holds up his shirt to reveal purple splotches, raised and rippling like burns. In the second, his mouth is open wide. There’s a splotch in there, too.
‘Shut up, Tommy.’ Tommy is a notorious hypochondriac – he’s always complaining of aches in muscle groups no one else has ever heard of – but Beau’s voice is sharper than usual.
They huddle under the awning at Toad Hall to smoke. Simon inhales, sweetness and damp, and it should calm him but it doesn’t: he feels like he could jump out of his skin. For the rest of the day, he can’t erase the images from his mind – those terrible lesions, dark as plums – or the words that someone else scrawled at the bottom of the flier in red pen: Watch out, guys. There’s something out there.
Richie wakes up with a red dot on the white of his left eye. Simon covers his shift so Richie can go to the doctor; he wants to make sure it’s gone by Christmas Eve, the night of Purp’s annual Jingle Bell Cock. Few of Purp’s patrons visit family over the holidays, so the dancers paint themselves red and green, hang bells from the waists of their G-strings. The doctor sends Richie home with an antibiotic. ‘They’re like, “Maybe it’s pink eye,” ’ Richie says the next day, spraying Adrian’s backside purple. ‘This sweet little lab tech, she’s probably nineteen, she goes, “Any chance you came into contact with fecal matter?” I’m like’ – hand to heart – ‘ “Oh no, honey, I wouldn’t touch the stuff,” ’ and the men are laughing, and Simon will remember Richie like this later, his guffaw, his military buzz cut with the slightest hint of gray, because by the twentieth of December, Richie is dead.
How to describe the shock? The splotches appear on the flower seller in Dolores Park and on the beautiful feet of Beau, who once spun eight times without stopping and is now taken to San Francisco General in Eduardo’s car, seizing. These are Simon’s earliest memories of Ward 86, though it will not be named for another year: the squeak of meal carts; the nurses at the phone desk, their remarkable calm (No, we don’t know how it’s transmitted. Is your lover with you now? Does he know you’re coming to the hospital?); and the men, men in their twenties and thirties sitting wide-eyed on cots and in wheelchairs as if hallucinating. Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals, says the Chronicle, but nobody knows how you get it. Still, when the lymph nodes in Lance’s armpits begin to swell, he finishes his shift at Purp and cabs to the hospital with the article in his backpack. Ten days later, the lumps are large as oranges.
Robert paces the apartment. ‘We need to stay here,’ he says. They have enough food for two weeks. Neither of them has slept in days.
But Simon is panicked by the thought of quarantine. He already feels cut off from the world, and he refuses to hide, refuses to believe this is the end. He’s not dead yet. And yet he knows, of course he knows, or at least he fears – the thin line between fear and intuition; how one so easily masquerades as the other – that the woman is right, and that by June 21st, the first day of summer, he’ll be gone, too.
Robert doesn’t want him working at Purp. ‘It isn’t safe,’ he says.
‘Nothing is safe.’ Simon takes his bag of makeup and walks to the door. ‘I need the money.’
‘Bullshit. Corps pays you.’ Robert follows him and grabs his arm, hard. ‘Admit it, Simon. You like what you get there. You need it.’
‘Come on, Rob.’ Simon forces a laugh. ‘Don’t be such a drag.’
‘Me? I’m a drag?’
There is a blaze in Robert’s eyes that makes Simon feel both intimidated and turned on. He reaches for Robert’s cock.
Robert yanks back. ‘Don’t play me like that. Don’t touch me.’