Afterlife

by Paul Monette

  More than an athlete or dancer, he capered like a figure on a Greek vase, erotic and in-the-body and far beyond it too. He sweated like a bandit, shaking it like rain from his hair. He wouldn’t have dreamed of cruising here, or connecting up with anyone. This was the warm-up, all for him.

  Upstairs in the weight room was where he made his connections. He had no regular workout partners, always keeping his options open as he moved from station to station. For a while he’d spot a buddy on the bench, somebody from his own league of aching youth. The two of them would trade off and pump, watched by their elders longingly, as if the tableau might at any moment burst into a Matt Sterling saga.

  Then Sonny would wander off and do curls in the mirror or sit-ups on a slant board, hundreds of them, till one or another of the older men would be transfixed. Sonny always knew who was watching him, and which of several different ones was ready to make a move on him. Usually thirty-five to forty, better than a hundred grand a year, and looking for something permanent. It didn’t make Sonny a gold digger that he let them watch or even ask for an evening.

  He’d go out with almost anybody once, if the guy was spellbound enough. Sonny’s youth and beauty were a magic circle. He didn’t think of himself as jaded or a cynic. He simply chose his own reality, as a warrior chooses his fights. He was the existential object.

  He could see Sean Pfeiffer approaching for twenty minutes before he said a word. Eyeing Sonny through the baffle of mirrors that sheathed the place, never looking directly, staying busy with his own workout, but moving inexorably. Sonny was working out with the wooden pole behind his shoulders, swinging back and forth at the hips with abandon, where there already wasn’t an ounce of fat.

  “You gonna do chest?” Sean asked, sidling up and addressing him in the mirror, staying clear of the pendulum swing of the pole.

  “Shoulders,” Sonny replied.

  It didn’t bode to be a very scintillating encounter, but these things always began with body mechanics. Sean was forty-five or there-abouts, running to fat at the waist, his hair spiked like a razorback, trying to look younger than he was. His eyes were blank as binoculars from staring across the gym at men like Sonny. To fill up space he fretted about whether to trade in his XJ-S for a convertible, then about his imminent trip to Australia, where he’d be unable to work out for two weeks. Fearing to lose his hard-won pecs, he sighed: “I wish I could take a trainer with me.”

  At last Sonny stopped bouncing and put the pole aside. Shoulders was still the only word he’d spoken. Now he turned to Sean and grinned. “Great. When do we leave?”

  Sean laughed at the sudden flirtation. He was some kind of banker, or perhaps it was even more raw than that and he was in money, pure and simple. He had a house at the top of Trousdale Estates and was on the road constantly, very nice situation for a boyfriend. Sure, said Sonny, they could have dinner tomorrow. An invitation that had been building for weeks, as Sonny let Sean come closer and closer. Did he find Sean hot? Put it this way: it was hot that Sean found him hot. As Sonny trundled downstairs to the locker room, he realized with a certain irony that Sean was only six years younger than his own father. There was something hot in that as well.

  But then, hot was very imprecise, or at least in constant flux. And never to be trusted, since it evaporated as quick as it flared, usually by the end of the second weekend. Sonny shucked his tank top, shorts, and jock, letting them lie in a heap on the floor as he grabbed his towel from his locker. Twice in the last year his jock had been stolen while he was in the shower. It neither bothered him nor turned him on that there were guys out there with fetishes of him. The queer thing was—as he stepped under the shower, arching his nakedness into the driving spray—he wasn’t all that wed to this body that stopped traffic.

  It was the metaphysical side of him that was truly in competition form. Those myriad men who only knew him by the candlepower of his body were on the wrong track. Not that his body wasn’t a temple—just now with the water coursing down its sinews like a cloudburst—but he didn’t want heathens supplicating there. In the early years it used to be enough for a man to be a Pisces. Like Ellsworth, all they needed to do was hear Sonny out when he spun his tale. Now he wanted an old soul, a fellow prince. Wanted them to understand that this Sonny with the warrior’s form and the gold hair was just one of a hundred incarnations.

  Toweling dry in the white-tiled vestibule, he stroked his vivid limbs in full view of a dozen others who could see they were lesser gods than he. Yet Sonny always gave them the chance, men like Sean Pfeiffer, even as far as going to bed once. After all, it often required the full body to put them in touch with the not-body. This, he had come to see, was where Ellsworth had failed him, by keeping Sonny’s body at the objectified level of pure desire. If only Ellsworth could have broken through metaphysically, he never would have gotten sick at all. In his own way Sonny had truly loved Ellsworth and tried not to judge him. He understood that different men had different karmas to enact. But the last of the grief he felt was indistinguishable from a sort of moral posture, that a man made a journey of his own devising.

  No shadow of the sickness was on him as he padded back to his locker. It wasn’t just him: the sickness did not penetrate the walls of The Body Works. If people got sick, they had the decency to stay home. There had to be a sanctuary somewhere where AIDS did not intrude, where people really meant it when they said they were feeling great.

  Sonny slipped back into his jeans and a sweatshirt, reeling with well-being, drunk on endorphins. He knew he had made the right choice not to be tested for the virus. The real test was the vast aliveness he felt at the end of Prime Time, gathering up his workout clothes and stuffing them in his gym bag, feeling a throb in his groin from the smell of his own sweat. He sauntered through the locker room and out, waving and nodding to several men as he went, including Sean, who blinked at him, dazed at his own good fortune.

  Sean Pfeiffer, thought Sonny, would definitely bear some further investigation. At least he had the proper urgency. Perhaps he could be led beyond the body. Sonny walked out into the lambent evening, the traffic streaming by on Santa Monica Boulevard like a river of light. He stood at the curb, perfect and untouchable, waiting for the WALK sign. His own heart was in no danger, that was the most important thing. After all, it could take forever to find an old soul. In the meantime, Sean Pfeiffer might be just the thing he needed for the next plateau.

  4

  Finally they had lunch.

  Mark had been out of work ten days before he answered the phone, content to stare at the answering machine as Lou Ciotta and all his minions called in on the hour, slimy with apologies. Mark walked around the house on Skyway Lane in his boxer shorts, unshaven. It astonished him to realize that his maid, pool man, and gardener had had the house to themselves for years, while Mark was only in residence from eleven at night to seven in the morning. He felt vaguely guilty being in their way, but knew they would all vanish as soon as he got sick. Meanwhile, one day at a time, he could feel himself recovering from the telephone.

  It was an accident that he took Steven’s call. He was having a cliché nightmare, the lid of a coffin being lowered over his face. He bolted awake from his third nap of the day and grabbed the phone unthinkingly, like oxygen. When he heard Steven’s voice, he thought at first it was about airline tickets. He was about to say his travel days were over when Steven suggested lunch—a Sunday drive up Topanga Canyon. Mark was too groggy to think of a reason not to.

  Steven had no idea that Mark had severed relations with Bungalow 19, nor that heaps of lawyers and network men were frantic to woo him back. Driving out Sunset to the beach, they made an odd pair of retirees. Despite the Hawaiian shirt that covered his ample belly, Steven didn’t look ready for golf or senior discounts. Mark, even with ten days’ beard and nothing pending, tore at the wheel of his big boy’s Jeep, negotiating traffic like a killer deal. They weren’t out of work so much as off it. Vigorous still and in their prime, they loo
ked fit enough to work construction.

  By the time they wound their way up Topanga, the blasted gorse of the beaten hills parched to the brink of conflagration, they were having a gentlemen’s disagreement as to how long they had left. “Two years max,” insisted Mark, parsing it like a contract. “But that’s if I stay above water. Soon as I get sick, I’m checking out.”

  “You don’t know that,” Steven replied with a certain superiority, as if he’d heard the suicide brag before. “You’ll probably want to fight for a while, and besides, the drugs might keep us going. Five years, maybe ten.”

  “Ten,” scoffed Mark with a growl of impatience, and Steven wasn’t sure if ten years seemed to Mark impossibly optimistic or beneath contempt.

  They stopped at a sprouts-and-granola inn at the top of the canyon, sitting on a porch above a dry creek bed, their Zen salads dive-bombed by wasps. They compromised on three good years of marginal stability, suicide not included. Cautiously they traded T-cell numbers—happily in the same neighborhood, or somebody might’ve been walking home. Mark was leery of the blue-and-white capsules, admitting as much when Steven beeped at one-fifteen and gobbled them with his iced tea. Mark was willing to risk a further dip in his numbers and wait for more data.

  Steven didn’t press him, not having much faith in the medicine himself. It was only that he’d spent so many months fighting to get Victor onto the drug, then pleading with Victor to take it. He kept waiting for the conversation to change. He was sick of talking immunology. Mark drove his knife and fork as furiously as he drove the Jeep, attacking his hippie salad with a vengeance. He barked at the shoulder-blond waiter, demanding rolls and dressing on the side, clearly annoyed by the waiter’s easy straightness, by the fact that he didn’t flirt with either of the ticking men from the city. When Mark had at last exhausted all the numbers and the odds, he started to ask about Victor. Nice uncomplicated questions about Montana and their travels.

  It wasn’t behaving like a date at all. Not that Steven would have known what to do with it if it had, but he felt quite mournful turning down dessert. If he was going to be alone, he might as well have the brown rice cheesecake. Yet Mark was trim and meant to stay that way, even if he was dying, so Steven stuck to coffee laced with three packets of Equal.

  There was a sudden cry from the next table, where a burly man was cuddling with his girlfriend. A wasp bit him on the cheek, this after the waiter’s assurance that they were harmless. The ensuing ruckus was oddly cheering to the two men from the leper kingdom. Suddenly the rim of the canyon was charged with violence. The white-gold grass beyond the dry wash bristled in the October heat, alive with snakes and spiders. As the man was led away wailing off the porch, threatening to sue, Mark flashed a dirty smile at Steven.

  “Besides,” insisted Mark, always doubling back, “my insurance is fucked. I’m only covered for eighteen months unless I get a new job. Then what? I gotta go into County?” County was downtown, a public hospital swamped by the indigent, a scream made into a building. Mark shook his head stubbornly. “Sorry, I’m not sticking around for that. And what new job? Who’s gonna hire me? ‘Please describe your general health.’ Dead.”

  Steven looked into the restaurant, where a gaggle of laughing girls was trailing around the buffet table, loading up their plates. All of them untouched. Now this Sunday date was in danger of turning into a suicide pact. “Well,” Steven replied carefully, “sometimes people stick around for other reasons. So they can stay with people they love.”

  His gaze remained on the breezy girls. He could feel the stillness across the table, but also sensed a certain coolness—not aloof, just very self-contained. Obviously Mark didn’t have anyone to stay for. The girls spilled out onto the porch, bearing their bountiful plates. They took a free table and sat in a magic circle. None of the wasps would bother them. Mark stretched and waved for the check.

  Did he want Mark’s body? He couldn’t have said. He studied the play of muscles in the other man’s forearms as Mark signed the credit-card slip. He wasn’t anything like Victor, whose motions were antic and fluid, his heart pouring out of him like laughter. Mark didn’t laugh. As an actor he had been conventionally handsome, Ivy League WASP when it came to casting, despite being a lapsed Jew, and with every gesture predetermined. Not like Victor at all, careening with spontaneity, shrieking hello.

  Steven walked out of the inn behind Mark and studied his walk—shoulders high, a cowboy’s sway in the hips, very butch. But did Steven want all that? Did he want to see it naked? He had not, even unconsciously, checked out Mark’s frontal equipment, not even glanced at the rise in his jeans. This was probably not a good sign. They hoisted themselves into the black Jeep on either side, and Mark headed down the hairpin canyon. The bright western arc of the sun caught them full in the face. The smell of sage in the empty hills was distinct, but it needed the first winter rain before it sharpened and broke your heart. No rain since April. Last year it rained in September, the day of Victor’s funeral. Everything was late this year.

  As to equipment, Steven had scarcely glanced at his own in months. Even at his randiest, in the dim days of his youth, it seemed a waste of spirit to jerk it off. Now he had left it alone so long it had seemingly forgotten all its tricks. Yet something quickened in Steven, sitting beside Mark Inman, especially now that they were quiet. The ocean appeared below in the final V of the canyon. Something he understood about Mark the moment he’d walked into Steven’s house three Saturdays ago. Here was a man as isolated, as dislocated as he. That was the turn-on.

  “How’s Ted?”

  Mark’s face wrinkled in a frown, as if he could hardly remember. “That’s all over,” he said tartly, shrugging it off. “He’s a jerk.” Traffic was smooth on the coast highway, just a beat too early for the beach folk to be heading home. Steven made a small murmur which could have been agreement or dissent. Mark started over. “No he’s not, he’s a kid. It doesn’t have anything to do with him. It never does. Two, three months … that’s like forever to me.” He pouted his lips as if the taste was sour, then clucked his tongue. “I’m such a shallow queen.”

  “Is he negative?”

  “I don’t know. We played it safe, so nobody had to ask. Is anybody negative?”

  “Yeah. Certain genetic freaks.”

  They laughed. As they sailed through Pacific Palisades—Republican ladies staggering down the sidewalks under the weight of boutique loot—they kept playing catch-up with a pickup truck full of retro surfers in the next lane. The skinhead driver was lobster-red, and his buddies in the back slouched on each other like puppies in a cardboard box. Mark fixed on the one in the orange shorts and rattled off something obscene that Steven didn’t quite catch.

  He had never been very good at on-site cruising, and especially at the cold appraisal of flesh in the passing parade. Victor had let no beauty go by unnoticed, scaling them one to ten, while Steven couldn’t bear the thought of being noticed noticing. For politeness’s sake he leered along with Mark, but couldn’t imagine bedding down any of the boys in the pickup, and not just because of the numbness of his dick. They were all too straight. There was something faintly appalling about straight men these days, as if they had all been deferred from the draft, 4-F, ridiculously healthy.

  The dozing surfer reminded Mark of an earlier dude—ten years ago, or was it fifteen? Nothing much to remember really, beyond the stupid good looks, except Mark had been just as young himself, so the memory was of two hot men. “I used to meet him every Monday at Unemployment,” Mark recalled, more wistfully than Steven had ever heard him. “We’d get our checks and go back to his place and fuck.”

  The pickup turned north on Veteran, bearing its gods away, but Mark kept talking, filling in his ancient Mondays blow by blow. Steven was at a loss. He couldn’t quite see how the past and the present meshed for Mark, who shuffled through his men like a deck of cards. For his part, Steven had no one to talk about but Victor. Somehow he couldn’t go back beyond those eight
years. The carnal game, the chase and capture—all of that took place in another life, as unreal now as porno. So he looked away and laughed thinly, while Mark laid the slovenly Mondays to rest.

  By the time they drove uphill to Steven’s house, it was less like a date than ever, or perhaps just like a blind one. Unconsciously Steven’s hands balled into fists, for he couldn’t think of another thing to say. He was nearly forty-one years old, and his tongue was tied like a high-school kid’s. Would a hug be too much to say good-bye? Would a kiss be too effeminate? It suddenly seemed the height of folly, that two men who’d been in the game so long could ever connect at all. Somebody had to be young and undefended, or else forget it.

  “He’s probably dead by now,” said Mark, drawing up in front of Steven’s house. Steven had ceased to hear as they came around the hill, but assumed he was still talking about the guy from Unemployment. “We’ll have to do it again,” said Mark, clapping a hand on Steven’s shoulder, man to man. Steven looked into his grinning eyes and was seized again by the curious rage he’d felt the night of the party. What right did this man have to be courting death, who hadn’t lost anyone real? Steven remembered clearly now how it used to feel to dislike him—cocksure and riddled with power.

  “Yeah, well, I’m free for the rest of my life,” Steven replied wryly, and reached across and mussed Mark’s hair. The gesture was casual, kiddish, more than anything meant to cover Steven’s annoyance, the uselessness of two grown men.

  But Mark, who took everything opposite, seemed startled and cornered by Steven’s touch, as if he finally understood the ambiguous blurred attractions of the afternoon. Steven scrambled out of the Jeep. They shrugged good-bye with careful smiles. He watched Mark disappear down the hill, then went in the house and slumped in a chair, blank for an hour over Victor. Nothing new in that, except there was starting to be a place inside him that was worse than tears.