Afterlife

by Paul Monette

  Afterlife

  A Novel

  Paul Monette

  For Stephen Kolzak

  my partner in time

  From far, from eve and morning

  And yon twelve-winded sky,

  The stuff of life to knit me

  Blew hither: here am I.

  Now—for a breath I tarry

  Nor yet disperse apart—

  Take my hand quick and tell me,

  What have you in your heart.

  Speak now, and I will answer;

  How shall I help you, say;

  Ere to the wind’s twelve quarters

  I take my endless way.

  —A. E. Housman

  1

  If everyone hadn’t died at the same time, none of this would have happened. Steven Shaw hung up the phone at the first break in Dell’s harangue, then padded naked into the kitchen to stick the lasagna in the oven. He wondered if Dell would remember to stop for beer, which was why Steven had called him in the first place. Don’t hold your breath. Steven opened the cupboard above the sink and lifted four Chips Ahoy from their plastic cradle, popping them into his mouth as he transferred the casserole from counter to oven. Margaret had dropped the lasagna off on her way to meeting a planeload of Valley dentists back from Zihuatanejo. “Put it in to warm at seven,” she told Steven, who realized now he hadn’t a clue what warm was. He set the oven at 400. On his way out he opened the freezer and took a Mud Pie, wrestling furiously with the cellophane as he headed back to the bedroom. The cellophane reminded him of unwrapping hypodermics.

  Steven watched himself eat the pie in the bathroom mirror. For a man who’d ballooned in a year from 160 to 185, he’d exhibited remarkable concentration in confining the pounds to his gut. His armor against desire. He had no tan to speak of, a mockery of all the beaches he’d dragged his ass to over the years. Pale just now like his Scottish grandfather, despite the swath of hair that covered his chest and ran down his belly, courtesy of the bleak Slavs on his mother’s side. His eyes were the color of cool tea, all cried out. Steven had no beer; he had no salad; no milk for the coffee; no peanuts; no bread. And seven people were coming in half an hour.

  “Vic,” said Steven to himself in the mirror, “what am I going to do?” The question was rhetorical. The man he addressed had been dead a year and six days, dragged under at the end by a mix of horrors that racked his skeletal frame and produced a continuous low groan which still seemed to rattle the house in the hills like a tremor. In or out of the mirror, Steven was in the habit of addressing Victor rather than himself. “Honey, I’m such a wreck,” he sighed, meaning how could he possibly entertain.

  He tossed the last quarter of the sweet into the toilet and flushed it away. Then turned to wash his hands, only to find the Dial in the dish had dwindled to a sliver. He bent to the cupboard under the sink: no soap. Annoyed, he yanked open a drawer. Among the low-dose medicaments were several small plastic cases embossed with hotel logos. He pried open one from the Nile Hilton and plopped out the little soap. As he crouched and lathered his hands, an aching perfume hit him like a bolt of African spring—patchouli and myrrh and sweet grass. Victor in the Valley of the Kings, cavorting in angular poses, mimicking the Pharaohs on the walls.

  Fumbling now in a panic, Steven stuffed the offending soap back in its Hilton case and flung it into the wastebasket. Vigorously he rinsed his hands, trying to expunge the heady scent. Then had a pang of sudden fear that he would throw away everything that murmured Victor’s name and be left with nothing.

  “I can’t—” he said to the mirror softly. “It’s like I can’t …” But he couldn’t think what he couldn’t do, there was so much. His shoulders began to heave as his face squinched up, for of course it was all a lie that he couldn’t cry anymore. He just couldn’t bring up much in the way of tears. Though his mouth was all contorted, bleating like a small animal in pain, he was bone dry.

  * * *

  A female evangelist with a rabid platinum grin, interviewed on “News at 6,” allowed as how Jesus would never have cured a man with AIDS, despite his record on leprosy. “After all, there’s limits,” said Mother Evangeline. “These homosexuals eat each other’s feces. Do you think people like that deserve a miracle?”

  Dell Espinoza spent the next ten minutes calling KLAX, screaming obscenities, two out of three in Spanish, till they hung up on him and he’d dial again. His balcony doors were open, but the wind was strong in the shaggy palm outside, and its clatter muted his bellowing voice. The balcony looked down on a horseshoe courtyard, ringed by six bungalow units which rented from $390 to $550. But Dell could not have told you what kind of profit he was clearing. Though his dining room table was two inches thick with paperwork, he hardly managed to keep the bills current. It was his sister Linda who kept the books, while Dell took the summer off to relive the one before.

  Which meant he spent a lot of time at night at Marcus’s desk, where the papers were deep as a snowdrift. Dell did not expect to understand the scholarly side of it all, but reading his slow way through things, he’d started to sort the exuberant chaos of Marcus’s work. The chairman of Marcus’s department had told Dell the college library would like the historian’s papers, at least the ones on the Mayans. So Dell was methodically separating the Mexico research from the gay stuff—the latter a blizzard of caucuses and panels, letters to Sacramento, testimony at countless hearings.

  Just now Dell was angry at Steven, who would not share his fury over Mother Evangeline. But then, he couldn’t persuade anyone to get as regularly angry as he did, erupting in uncontrollable rage if he had to wait too long in any line. Though Dell wasn’t sophisticated about the mechanics of displacement, at least he knew he had reached the stage of yelling instead of crying.

  He was due at Steven’s in half an hour, having promised to get there first to help. In his green fatigues with the frayed cuffs and his mottled camouflage shirt, he looked vaguely like a mercenary cooling his heels between insurrections. In any case he didn’t feel like changing clothes and acting as if it were Saturday night for real. Linda had left three messages for him that afternoon, but Dell had been up at the scattering site, sitting on his haunches like a glazed coyote. He picked up the phone to call her now, though he could just as easily have gone out onto the balcony and hollered across the courtyard.

  At the second ring a recorded voice answered: “Howdy. Welcome to 976-LOAD, the hottest call-in service in Southern California.”

  It was a natural mistake. Calling the jerkoff line was as automatic to him as calling the hospital used to be. At twenty cents a minute, some months it cost him more than all his utilities combined, immersing him in the vast pool of random longing that coursed just under the skin of the city. A burr of static sounded in Dell’s ear like the sea in a shell. Then a voice broke in: “Hi, this is Kevin. What’s goin’ on?”

  “Not a whole hell of a lot,” Dell replied, dryly charming. The kid at the other end was very nervous and very horny. Already Dell could tell that Kevin would never volunteer his number. Casually Dell drew a spiral notebook from the shelf under the phone, then turned through pages crowded with vital statistics to a clean sheet. He grabbed a well-chewed pencil. “So what do you look like?”

  The response was immediate, precise as a military drill. “Five-ten, one forty-five, kinda dirty blond. Medium hairy. Twenty-four years old. Good abs, nice legs.” The kid laughed, perhaps at the absurdity of speaking in the shorthand of the classifieds. The laugh pulled it all together for Dell. He could see the kid sharp as a Kodachrome. “Your turn,” prompted Kevin.

  “Lorenzo,” said Dell, his own real name, which nobody in the States ever called him. “Thirty-three. Latino. We’re about the same size.” Dell looked across at the left-hand page of the not
ebook, where a man named Vito was represented by an extensive list of abbreviations and one descriptive notation at the bottom: stepfather fucked him. Dell had no memory of Vito whatsoever.

  “Sounds like fate. I got a thing for Latin men.”

  “Yeah? Is it a big thing?” Dell retorted. The smutty grin in his voice set the invisible man to laughing again. The sound of it was so young it fairly took Dell’s breath away. He glanced at the clock and tried to think how many beers he had in the fridge, so at least he wouldn’t have to stop on the way. “Why don’t you take my number?” said Dell, and recited it very carefully, as if it were the combination to a safe.

  Sonny Cevathas sailed along Sunset, top down on the gray Mercedes. His curly gold hair was still wet from the gym, and he loved the feel of it whipping dry in the night wind, defiantly unstyled. There was altogether too much mousse in West Hollywood anyway. Yet somebody snapping Sonny’s picture from the curb would have carried away a totem souvenir of the place. Twenty-eight and in a 380 convertible, fresh from a Bruce Weber locker room, Sonny was as richly surfaced as the run of billboards looming above the Strip on either flank. On the tape deck Linda Ronstadt was wailing “Desperado.”

  It was all an illusion, of course, like the funk glam of the crowd that waited on line for the early show at the Roxy. In truth the gray 380 was all Sonny had in the way of real property. His apartment was a room in someone else’s, a mattress on the floor and a bureau full of Italian sweaters that belonged to Ellsworth. Sonny hadn’t legally inherited anything. Twelve months to the day, he’d come home from Ellsworth’s memorial service to find the locks changed at the Bel-Air house. Ellsworth’s father stood in the upstairs bay window staring down at him, utterly expressionless. Sonny understood immediately that he had already lost the only person who could have protected him.

  At the instant of being shut out, Sonny didn’t even stop to wonder if he was giving in too easily. The Greek in him—a clan of manic depressives in Fresno, none of whom spoke to the others—could have exploded through the front door like Bruce Lee. Instead he’d turned on his heel and sprinted across the terrace to the garage, where he still had a key that worked, along with the fat key to the Mercedes convertible. The only other place he had access to was the cedar closet off the garage, so he ran in and grabbed a double armload of cashmere. Nobody tried to stop him as he drove away.

  Now he swung onto Sunset Plaza Drive and zigzagged up the hill. His shoulders tensed at the thought of seeing Dell and Steven. Their Saturday widowers’ gatherings had lately grown contentious and redundant, at least to Sonny. He would have stopped coming months ago, except he felt a certain duty. After all, when he came unhinged in the awful final vigil at Cedars-Sinai, staring Death in the face, it was Dell and Steven who kept him from going out the window.

  None of the three had ever met before the waiting room on the ninth floor, where each had come to watch the world end. Victor was in 904, Marcus in 916, Ellsworth in 921. The death-watch lovers quickly became a kind of combat unit, reeling in and out of their separate chambers of horrors, outdoing one another with unspeakable details. By the time it was all over—Marcus on Tuesday, Victor Thursday, Ellsworth midnight Friday—the widowers knew one another better than anyone. Or at least how they cried and took their coffee.

  Sonny reached up and fingered the amethyst crystal that hung from the rearview mirror. No more thoughts. He had put all that behind him now, every night but Saturday, and could feel the life-force urging him to move on. The only thing that got him here tonight was Steven’s decision to make a proper dinner—with real people and real food, not just the three of them pissing and moaning over Chinese takeout. Once the widowers’ spell was broken, they would all be free to negotiate their own Saturday nights.

  He forked onto a narrow lane and wound around a ridge that was tinder-dry, raw with the smell of sage and aching for the first inferno of autumn. Steven’s house stood on a point of land, a bungalow faced with rosy stucco and a red-tile roof. Sonny swung into the steep driveway and parked in front of the garage. He flipped the mirror to check himself out, and the amethyst swung like a hypnotist’s medallion.

  He got out of the car and loped up the steps to Steven’s landing, the unspoken agenda of the evening in his outlaw swagger. There might be somebody new in there, ready for the spin of fate, a man whose heart was tuned like Sonny’s to the higher planes, who loved himself so purely that no bad energy would ever gain a foothold. A man he would know from an ancient place, unafraid and wonderfully evolved. A Pisces would be perfect. No question about it, Sonny was in the market again.

  * * *

  From the kitchen Steven could hear his guests and knew it was going badly, even as he gaped at the salad bowl and the groaning array of produce waiting to be chopped. Margaret Kirkham, his copilot at the agency, was telling the others a merry tale about a tour bus lost in Costa Rica, and the trading of forty Mastercards for safe passage through a guerrilla skirmish. Margaret had brought along the over-divorced Lynn Heller, who laughed with aching abandon at everybody’s stories. Also Ray Lee, the sleek Korean who ran the computer at Shaw Travel, up to his neck tonight in black Armani.

  It sounded at first like any other dinner west of Laurel Canyon. What Steven was really listening to was the silence from Dell and Sonny, who were doubtless staring at Margaret with unconcealed contempt. Dell was still gnashing his teeth over the lady preacher on KLAX. How was Margaret to know that everyone straight had better duck? Sonny had clearly mistaken Ray for the half-blind date Steven reluctantly promised to invite. The real thing hadn’t arrived yet, but meanwhile Sonny was outraged at the vast inappropriateness of the willowy Asian with rings on four fingers.

  Steven wasn’t going to worry about it. He had lately begun to notice—irritably—that meetings of the widowers’ league always took place at his house. It was Steven who ordered the pizzas and Chinese takeout, Steven who always paid. He was sick of being the oldest, exceedingly put out just now because Dell had arrived with three cans of Coors, Sonny with nothing at all, and the two of them dressed like bums besides. The ripped knees of Sonny’s jeans were not Steven’s idea of a fashion statement.

  He hefted a red cabbage, poised it on the cutting board, and whacked it in half with a cleaver. Neatly nicking the tip of his thumb in the process. It was scarcely a wound at all, and it didn’t even hurt, but the blood bloomed and ran down his thumb, ghastly as Macbeth. He clutched his fingers around the thumb, made a seething sound, and suddenly felt queasy at the slipperiness of the blood in his hand.

  “Don’t ever get on a bus during a revolution,” Margaret observed from the next room. “They’re too easy to commandeer. So, Dell, I understand you’ve seen a lot of Mexico.”

  “You mean because I’m a spick?”

  “Uh, no. But I thought … didn’t your friend …?”

  “Marcus,” Dell replied, softening a bit, as Steven ransacked a drawer for a Band-Aid. Damn them all for not getting along. The thumb was bleeding too much for the little strip of flesh-colored plastic. What he really needed was gauze and tape, but he didn’t dare go to the medicine chest in the bathroom, for fear of confronting the ranks of Victor’s prescriptions. Powerless to throw them away, he figured to use them once he got sick himself.

  Now he wet a length of paper towels and wadded it around the clotting thumb. There was a burst of laughter from the living room as Ray Lee vamped, Joan Collins in high dudgeon. Fuck the salad, Steven thought, moving to sweep the vegetables into the sink. The doorbell rang.

  Though Margaret would have answered, Steven bolted from the kitchen to get there first. Passing through the living room, he saw the five of them grouped about the fireplace. Margaret billowed in harlequin silk, while Lynn was tailored in white cotton, absurdly spotless. Ray refilled their wineglasses with effortless worldliness, more Blake than Alexis now. Side by side on the sofa, Dell and Sonny sat stiffly, as if they were waiting to see the dentist. Sonny should perk up in a moment, thought Steven, as soon a
s he saw Ted Kneeland.

  Steven opened the door in the vestibule and grinned at Ted, unnervingly handsome as ever, tan as a Polynesian prince. “Long time,” said Steven vapidly as Ted threw a bear hug around him.

  The next second was very “Twilight Zone.” Steven looked over Ted’s shoulder and saw another figure standing under the porch light, a dark-haired man about Steven’s age, with a hunted look in his eye. Of course he knew it was Mark Inman, but the name arrived a beat behind the face, since he hadn’t seen Mark in two years. Steven flashed to the time before the nightmare, when he’d expended considerable energy avoiding the likes of Mark at parties. What was Mark doing up here? Had his car broken down in the street?

  “Oh,” said Ted, unclenching from Steven and glancing in at the group around the fireplace, “I thought this was a party.”

  “Mark, how are you?” Steven reached to grip Mark Inman’s hand, then stopped because of the halfwit bandage on his thumb. Instead they locked eyes. Steven thought: Why is he in so much pain? He hasn’t lost anyone.

  “Look, Steve, I’m sorry. Ted said there’d be a lot of people—”

  “All my fault,” purred Ted apologetically. “We’ll just stay for a drink.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” retorted Steven. “There’s tons of food. Really.” With his good hand he coaxed Mark over the threshold and watched as the two men exchanged a tentative look, feeling each other out. Suddenly Steven realized they were an item. He felt a curl of rage in his gut.

  “Well, if I knew you were going to be here,” said Margaret, sweeping into the vestibule, “I would have brought your tickets.” She nuzzled the air beside Mark’s cheek, then turned and held out a hand to Ted. “I book all Mark’s reservations. He can’t make a move without me.”

  As she introduced herself to Ted, Steven realized he didn’t even know Mark was a client of the agency. That wouldn’t have happened a year ago. “Where are you going?” he asked Mark.