Afterlife

by Paul Monette

  Dell used to complain that Marcus would have been better off marrying Linda. From the day she arrived—with a suitcase full of her mother’s crochet, enough doilies to last three lifetimes—she and the professor were captivated by each other. In her mind she had expected an older man, cerebral and laconic, probably stout, requiring silence in order to work. But he loved to talk and waste time in the kitchen, gulping pots of tea. He darted and feinted like a middleweight boxer, with his flattened nose and broad Midwestern vowels. There was nothing bookish about him: he was all ideas.

  She had sworn it would only be a month’s exploratory visit, not really believing she’d find a life of her own, content to watch her brother’s for a while. Marcus swept her up, grilled her in English, swamped her with idioms. Her resident status was permanent to him from the very beginning. Dell was away all day, overseeing his teams of yardmen and tree crews. Marcus took her to K-Mart and Ralph’s and Farmer’s Market. Linda saw the furious mix of peoples—broods of children, old women with vinyl shopping bags. Nobody fit in any better than Linda. The poverty and chaos of East L.A. were at least a step up from Morelia.

  Besides, she couldn’t be more alone than she had been there. In the afternoons Marcus would work in his study, counting the jaguars on Mayan glyphs, and Linda would sit on the terrace writing long letters home to her mother and sisters. She mentioned Marcus only obliquely—never in the same breath with Lorenzo Delgado—but the subtext was that she had a protector. She said it for their sake, not her own. It helped her to dare to think they would let her stay, since clearly she’d had no luck finding a man in the shadow of Taucitaro.

  She began by helping Rosa Diaz, who came to clean on Wednesdays for Dell and Marcus. Rosa was in her fifties, iron-gray, and disdained to speak any English. She took on Linda not as a favor to Dell, but because all her own daughters and nieces had better jobs—some even had maids of their own. Linda went with her to fussy apartments up and down Wilshire, cranky retired couples seething with smudges and cobwebs.

  Linda did kitchens and bathrooms while Rosa attended to subtler matters, dusting and tidying, watching the soaps as she made up the beds. Linda felt like Rosa’s maid, but she wasn’t proud. Within a few months she had three clients of her own, friends of Dell and Marcus. Her English was good enough now that she could tell a joke. She pronounced herself ready to seek a place of her own to live.

  Marcus wouldn’t hear of it. By then they were a family of three, eating suppers around the table, and Marcus always making plans for Saturday outings to Magic Mountain and the Salton Sea, as if he was determined to be Linda Espinoza’s tour guide to all of California. He insisted she couldn’t move out till she’d found a proper roommate. In this he was more conservative than the brothers-in-law she left at home. But secretly she was glad because she loved being with the two men, seeing how much they loved each other, always jostling and teasing. Her small room at the back of the apartment on Lucile was all she needed. She lived there quietly so as not to be a burden, not even playing the radio Marcus gave her unless both men were out.

  And though it took her awhile to be invisible, she was curious and fascinated by the gatherings that took place in the cluttered living room, where Marcus read four different daily papers. Large florid men in bracelets battled back and forth with buzz-cut types in leather vests, as they worked out the wording for a letter of protest. Sometimes the smoke was suffocating, the room sour with political sweat and coffee breath, as ten or a dozen men and women accused one another of betrayal.

  Linda would stand in the doorway, listening. The arcana of gay and lesbian politics were difficult to sort out. Some rode their agendas like dead horses. Linda could never understand why they bothered to meet at all if they couldn’t agree more. What she loved best were the times when Marcus would speak, patiently and softly. He would always focus the talk back on people—gay teens especially, lost and bashed in high school, no one to talk to but drug dealers. No wonder every group would choose him to lead the delegations to Sacramento.

  “Is my sister a dyke?” Dell had asked suddenly one night, curling to sleep beside the professor. Marcus, a strict insomniac, was propped on pillows and slogging his way through a bad dissertation.

  “I don’t know. Would that be so awful?”

  “No,” Dell retorted defensively, “but you have to admit it’s a little, uh, queer, brother and sister.”

  “Sounds like self-loathing to me.” Marcus reached down and twisted Dell’s ear, and the darker man growled and ducked beneath a pillow. “Wherever she’s going she’ll get there by herself. You’re just worried about what the parish priest would say. Don’t sweat it, dear, you’re already damned in hell.”

  Dell peered out from under the pillow. “I just don’t want some fat-ass dyke puttin’ the moves on my little sister.”

  “Tsk, tsk—sexist stereotype.”

  “Yeah, well, if I’m such a pig, you should marry her.”

  Which he did in the end, though Dell had only been fooling. It wasn’t a white wedding, not in June, not happy at all. Just five or six friends in the garden below the apartment on Lucile, an aching clear Sunday in February, presided by a lady judge. Linda wore a navy dress with a crocheted shawl sent by her mother. Rosa Diaz bought a bouquet of nasturtiums wrapped in tinfoil. Everyone cried. Marcus stood up from his wheelchair and leaned on Dell’s shoulder, his other arm curled through Linda’s.

  “I now pronounce you,” said Margo the judge, “husband and wife. May you thrive in joy.”

  And the three of them folded in, Dell and Linda and Marcus, and cried if not with joy, then a sense of completion. It wasn’t a green-card marriage. Amnesty was on the way to becoming law, so Linda would’ve become a citizen soon enough. This union was to assure that the cousins of Marcus—rabid bird-dog Baptists sniffing the spray of death all the way from Missouri—would not swoop down and take everything when Marcus died.

  In the end she took care of both men. Three meals a day and still kept up with every client, cleaning apartments where nothing was dirty, then home to dispense the medicines. She learned to give IV so he wouldn’t have to be in the hospital. By the time he was bedridden most of the day, his beautiful mind beginning to wander, she dealt with all the doctors too.

  “I am his wife,” she said with furious dignity, her shivering mane swept atop her head.

  It wasn’t that Dell wasn’t wonderful. He would sit by Marcus’s bed all evening, holding the professor’s hand and reading the papers out loud. When the fevers were high he would wipe Marcus down with cold cloths, humming softly. Then later during the sweats he toweled Marcus dry, tweaking his nipples to make him laugh. All night like a guard on duty Dell watched him sleep, no matter how much Linda pleaded with him to rest.

  Late afternoon was the best time. It was Marcus’s strongest hour, with the terrace doors wide open and the wind chimes dozing, the white sun bellying down on the western hills. Dell would be home from work and showered, wrapped in a towel and lying beside the professor. The IV drip would be going into a catheter in Marcus’s chest. Linda would bring in a tray of melon and iced tea—they had to keep his fluids up—and they’d sit and laugh and tell stories.

  Linda had no stories, not about herself, making do with the baroque affairs of the neighbors in Morelia. She much preferred coaxing details out of Marcus, hearing his limpid, eloquent voice as he recounted his trips to Yucatán, his shyness of other men. It was only the year before he met Dell that he started dating the men he marched with. Till then, he would say, he was gay only in theory. Then Linda would make them repeat again their chance and sudden meeting, so perfectly California. Bumper-to-bumper traffic, southbound on the 405—Marcus in lane 2, Dell in lane 3, flirting like truckers all the way to Laguna. How else did professors and gardeners meet?

  “At last,” said Marcus, swatting a thin hand at Dell’s bare chest, “I found myself a Mayan king in the flesh.”

  “He means a Mayan dick,” retorted Dell, and they all erupted
laughing.

  Linda was sure that if they filled the room with life there would be no chink for the dark to enter. She panicked only when they had to bundle him into the car to go get a test. Then the three of them would seem very small, without a chance in the world. Her terror was that he’d have to go into the hospital. She never forgot the teeming wards of Dr. Sandina, the blue-gowned orderlies wheeling their useless machines and wiping down the walls of dying. As long as she and Dell had him safe in the apartment on Lucile, they could make their stand, night by watchful night.

  “What are the two of you going to do?” he asked one day.

  She turned startled from the terrace doors, thinking he was asleep. Dell wasn’t home yet. Marcus’s face was liver-gray, the skin stretched tight along his cheekbones. She smiled. “As soon as you’re strong, we’re going to take you to visit the family. See if my sisters can figure who’s married to who.”

  He didn’t seem to be listening. That was what he had lost this month: the hawk’s intensity of his eyes as he leaned forward to listen. “Don’t spend money on anything churchy,” he said. “Keep it simple, and scatter the ashes up in the hills.” He nodded vaguely toward the window.

  “Stop it,” she hissed.

  She hurried over to check the drip, tapping the IV bag to see how much was left. He reached a hand—so thin you could almost see through it—and stroked her bare arm. “Bunky,” he said gently, “don’t be like that.” Bunky was a girl in a book he’d read as a kid, who rode a stallion bareback on a beach. “I can’t say it to Dell. You have to let me.” Her eyes didn’t move from the tubing. Milliliter by milliliter, the clear liquid seeped into his heart. “There’s life insurance,” he continued, his voice quickening now, savoring what was still concrete. “Maybe you can buy some units. But don’t go back to Mexico, all right? And don’t let him.”

  “You’re not going to die. I won’t let you.”

  “It’ll be very hard for a while, but you mustn’t go back. This is where your life is now.” His hand slapped the mattress beside him, though he meant the city outside. If he had been stronger, he would have stamped his foot. “Linda, promise me.”

  For a moment she pretended she didn’t hear. The wind chimes mocked them, thoughtless and bored. At last she nodded. He tugged her hand. “Now come and cry,” he said. And she sank to the bed and clung to her husband’s neck—but carefully, for he was so bone-thin and frail. “I know, I know,” he whispered, rocking softly, his cheek against her hair.

  It was good she had it out then, before Dell got home, before the tea and the stories. An hour later they laughed as loud as ever, the terror and misery all but vanished. Of course she couldn’t cry later, once he had slipped beneath the waves. Three weeks delirious, neither awake nor asleep, his mouth slack in a gape of disbelief. Linda and Dell sat on either side of the hospital bed, curtains drawn against the horrors of the ward.

  And when Dell staggered away to use the bathroom, Linda leaned close to Marcus and spoke with tender force. “Marcus, you can let go,” she said, “it’s all right. We’ll stay, and we’ll buy a nice building. I’ll take care of him.” No sign that he heard. His useless breath whistled like wind down a canyon.

  At the memorial service she and Dell stood side by side on the steps of the auditorium. The students and faculty shook Linda’s hand and said they were sorry, then murmured and nodded to Dell as they turned away. The gay people went to Dell, clasped him tight and keened for all their losses. Linda remembered several from the meetings in the living room on Lucile.

  She picked up the box of ashes herself from the mortuary, riding with them beside her in a shopping bag on the number-four bus. For weeks she kept the box on her windowsill, beneath a hummingbird feeder that hung from the eaves—a Christmas present from Marcus her first year in L.A. She held her breath whenever a bird would hover close, dipping its slender beak in the feeder’s honey cup. She wanted to believe it was Marcus, his spirit alive in the blur of wings, but wanting didn’t make it so.

  When two months had passed and the rainy season started, she told her brother the time had come for the scattering. He had moved about twenty feet since Marcus died, from wailing and beating the pillows to staring sullen at the TV set. Dell shrugged listlessly but didn’t protest. He left all the forms to Linda.

  They drove late at night in the pickup, weaving along Mulholland Drive, past dozens of cars nosed off the road and pointed at the view, rapt couples swimming in one another’s arms. They pulled off onto the shoulder near Outpost, no houses in sight, and walked uphill through the wet sage in the moonlight. Linda cradled the box in her arms. Dell had never once held it. He wanted to bring a shovel from the truck, but Linda was very firm about Marcus’s wishes. Scatter, he’d said.

  By way of compromise, she counted fifty paces up the hill and stood on a cracked rock beneath a towering century cactus. Its great spear of a stem shot ten feet into the night, exploding at the top in a clot of white blossoms. “This will be our place,” she declared, staking claim to a mourning ground.

  Dell stood slightly away from her as she lifted the top from the box. She had no fear of remains. In the moonlight she saw the box was full of white knobs and broken shells—more gravel than ashes. She flung out an arm as if freeing a bird, and the gravel flashed in the sage like buckshot. She could feel Dell flinch beside her. She looked at the sky to keep the tears in. Over the brow of the ridge the Big Dipper was rising, but that wouldn’t help her mark the place, for she had no idea which stars were fixed.

  “You want to say something?” Linda asked quietly, widow to widow.

  “Fuck it all,” he declared, bitter and finished, and trudged off down the hill.

  Prime Time at The Body Works was five to seven-thirty. The actor/models had the place to themselves in the afternoons, but then they would have to hustle home for their white shirts and black bow ties. Copies of Drama-Logue and Daily Variety littered the floor by the treadmills. By five the working class would start arriving—tie clerks from Bullocks, paralegals, men who provided assistance. The men’s aerobics hour from five to six was as rigid as a Ballanchine class, and to miss it was to miss the point entirely. Norm, who led the class, had single-handedly raised the tone from early-bird disco to Olympic trials.

  Six to seven was weights. By now the professional class had started to filter in, the lawyers and dentists and realtors. Nightly the choice would have to be made: chest, shoulders, abs, or legs. In the age of triage a man couldn’t work on everything; focus was all. Here was where the social cutting edge was honed, in the little groups that formed around the bench press and the lats machine.

  These were the guys who had always been chosen last in the schoolyard, banished to the outermost outfield, and now they made up for lost time with murderous concentration, forming a sort of Little League of lost preadolescence. In the mindless banter and shorthand of the weight room, they recovered the willful merriment of boys. And given the fact that they pushed so hard, showing off their bodies muscle group by muscle group, it wasn’t surprising that they traded numbers and paired off for weekend nights. The Body Works was a dating pool where one could be certain at the minimum of a proper ratio of fat to body weight.

  If five to six was the dance of life, and six to seven boys’ phys ed, seven to seven-thirty was the waters. Ripe and glistening, they would strip off their second skin, the bicycle shorts and tank tops, T-shirts from the Nebraska tour. White towels round their waists, they lumbered into the steam room or the sauna opposite. In the milky smoke they were languid and muzzy, a Rousseau dream of the tropics. They stared at each other dry-eyed in the crackling air of the sauna, their superheated skin prickling, as if they longed to dive in the snow. In the Jacuzzi they sat in churning water chest-high, a circle of missionaries being boiled by cannibals.

  But in all of the waters, especially the showers, what they were doing mostly was appraising one another. Mirroring themselves, catching a glimpse of who they used to be or where they were goin
g. They did not exactly represent the seven ages of man, for the first two and the last were banished utterly from The Body Works. But the arc from twenty to fifty was played out in top form, worked on and sculpted and purged of excess flesh. Were all of them gay? The question was moot. Straight ones did slip in every now and again, actors and other archetypes of fitness, but they kept their affections private. Mostly their sexual preference was themselves.

  Sonny Cevathas was one of the gods of Prime Time. His own waitering schedule was clustered on the weekend, so that all he needed to pick up during the week was a couple of lunches. Not that he ever missed a day at the gym, sometimes going twice if he felt like a swim in the morning. It was only a block from Dirk Ainley’s apartment, where Sonny occupied the cubbyhole second bedroom, hardly room for a mattress and an orange crate full of New Age texts. Even though Dirk was away more days than he was home, shuttling back and forth to Hawaii on American, Sonny never felt the place was really his. It was temporary quarters. The Body Works was Sonny’s living room, his office, and his yard.

  He was principal dancer of the 6 P.M. aerobics class. Norm the instructor, who had a terrible crush on him, would let Sonny choose the music from a box of tapes. There were a dozen regular Adonises in the class, but Sonny had the edge of being mascot. His regular place was first row far right, where he flung himself into a thousand hieroglyphs. It was Norm on the foot-high stage in front who issued the orders and counted off, a drill sergeant with a slight twinge of the ballerina, but it was Sonny the class watched.