Afterlife

by Paul Monette

  Steven squirmed his head through the neck of the shirt, relieved to tent his belly again. “So how’s Tim?” he asked, and the irony had returned intact, as if after a bout of amnesia.

  “Tim who?”

  Steven sighed. “How quickly they forget. Tim the facilitator. Tim from Thursday night.”

  Mark looked no less bewildered now that he had placed the name. “What’re you talking about?”

  “Well, didn’t you … I mean the two of you …” He petered out. Stalled in the intersection, he bent to retrieve the brick-red briefs.

  “Steven, he’s straight.” Mark laughed effortlessly, still in the muzzy swoon of release. “He fuckin’ announced it. I guess you weren’t there yet. At the end he was pestering me for the name of an agent. He wants to be an actor.” Steven’s mouth made a motion of saying Oh, but without a sound. As he put a foot in the briefs, Mark protested. “Don’t put those on—they’re all messed up. Here, take these.”

  He leaped up from the sofa, pulled off the white shorts, and handed them over. Steven, grateful not to have to grin and bear the ick factor, accepted the loan gratefully. He tried not to romanticize the moment as he slipped into Mark’s underpants. This was not a favor bestowed on a knight.

  “You promise it’s nothing, right?” asked Mark, pointing again to the spot on his thigh, as if there had been no interim.

  “I promise,” Steven replied, and did up the buttons of his 501’s.

  “Here, take something.” Mark walked over to the corner full of treasure, hugging himself excitedly. “You need a camera? You want this lamp?” His ass was faintly luminous, given the bronze of the rest of him. Steven shook his head slowly, a fount of desirelessness, but Mark insisted. “Come on, take something. The stuff’s just gonna keep coming. How about this?”

  And he picked up the telescope—black matte finish, two feet long, too phallic for words. But strangely he hit the right nerve, a place where Steven yearned for something he’d never got for Christmas, when his father gave him a .22 instead. He didn’t nod and didn’t reach out, but Mark knew he’d won the point.

  He stooped and laid the instrument in the velvet bed of its case, then snapped it shut. When he rose to present it to Steven, he was flushed with pride, a kid not notable in his green years for sharing his toys. Steven—who couldn’t stand things, who hadn’t acquired any tangible goods since Victor died, not a sock—hefted it by the handle, swinging it gladly as he followed his naked companion to the door.

  “Thanks for making a house call, Doc,” said Mark, pulling the door open a foot, not quite enough for Steven to leave. He seemed not the least disconcerted to be undressed. Steven was feeling more naked than he.

  “Couple of aspirin, lots of liquids,” Steven drawled. “You’ll be fine by morning.”

  Mark drew the door open wider, standing slightly behind it in case a car went by. “I guess we’ll uh … you going to the meeting Thursday?”

  “Maybe. We’ll see.”

  Still they hovered in the doorway, still no answer to Mark’s conundrum. They were closer here than when they were kissing, more open-hearted and casual, free of whether they liked it or not. Finding it hard to let the moment go, perhaps, the gong they couldn’t unring. Friends were not the same. They understood they’d never be so naked again. From now on they’d have to be dumb as boys, elaborate as straight men paying no attention to one another’s winkies, snapping towels in the locker room. The male bond: everything but desire.

  And no good-byes. As the door swung shut, each of them gave a small vague wave, hardly more than the twitch that passes between a pitcher and a catcher. Steven could smell night jasmine somewhere nearby and made a hasty step toward the Volvo, needing no floral reminders. He knew just what to say to himself as he drove away. If he’d wanted it, he’d have wanted it. There were other things besides passion, which only frizzed the nerves and left you vacant for days after. One grew too old for boyfriends anyway. Better to know it now than later. A bad case of missed connections, that’s all it was.

  Just two guys, resolved at last. Steven careened down Laurel Canyon, glad they had brought the moment to its crisis so now they could move along to something real. He chose to think he was happy. The canyon pass was unbearably still, his the only car. If an earthquake had struck just then along the Inglewood Fault, it would have brought the whole mountain down around his head—but none did. The ground remained the ground, and Steven was free to go home.

  The ice cream beside him on the seat would go back in the freezer and be as good as new tomorrow, except for a few ice crystals. Otherwise nothing had altered. Though he now possessed the wherewithal to seize the riddled dome of the star-shot sky, Steven would have protested that he was an ordinary man again, lucky to be alive. The nice thing about friends was being able to leave intact. Tender was better than carnal; intimate didn’t require a hard-on. It was all turning out to be very postmodern, dating in the apocalypse.

  5

  No matter where he landed, Sonny was always lucky with room mates. Something—an energy, a polar drift—guided him to people possessed with a gift. He could see it all as a pattern now. Every couple of years he needed to hole up and incubate the next transition. Just then, a safe place would present itself, an island in the river. Oasis was his hieroglyph, green his color, six his number. Of course he didn’t know any of that at first. Life taught him the order and character of his life by repetition.

  First was the girl with the green shock in her long blond hair. He met Romy in a greasy spoon near the Embarkadero, the very night he walked out on the lighting designer. He hadn’t actually planned to walk out for good; he was mostly trying to escape a roomful of overly decorated men, lit like African violets. Sonny ordered eggs and sausages. Beside him, Romy scooped a handful of pearls and agates from her purse, laid them on the counter, and worked out for him his place in the XVIIth Dynasty: Pharaoh’s cousin on his mother’s side. Sonny was nineteen.

  He slept in Romy’s bed for seven months, a sword of chastity between them. Of course he still cruised and woke up in other places, having morning coffee with perfect strangers. That was just desire. But Romy was further evolved than the men he met and discarded. She was the first philosopher he had ever known who could walk through the walls of her own metaphysics.

  They lay around in their underwear, dropping tabs of acid like vitamins, and Romy would lullabye him with the scope of his ancient kingdom. Pharaoh’s cousin, she said, commanded the land below the Second Cataract and personally oversaw the painting of Pharaoh’s tomb. Synchronicity alone demanded that the two of them should drive down to L.A. for the Tutankhamen show, and they sailed down Route 5 on purple haze.

  They stood in line for half a day at the County Museum, swooning with the fumes that wafted from the La Brea Tarpits to the east. “The bones of mastodons,” she murmured, waving a scarf at the primal ooze. You could not just stand in line with Romy; there was always something shimmering at the edges.

  The Tut exhibit was mobbed, and they went around it arm in arm, Romy gasping with recognition at every gilded shape. “This was my period, I know it,” she whispered, her arms wrapped around him as they stood before a Plexi case in which an alabaster cat with emerald eyes sat on its haunches. “I used to worry that I was just a handmaiden, or even worse a slave. Now I can feel my lineage was royal.”

  Sonny wasn’t listening. He was staring through the case at a square-jawed man in black-rimmed glasses—thirty-five, no wedding ring—who wasn’t looking at the cat either. By the time they reached the hammered gold mask of the boy-king himself, Sonny and the guy were rubbing shoulders. Romy melted into the crowd, no prearranged signal required.

  His name was Larry. From Houston: lizard boots and a Stetson in his room at the Beverly Hilton, discreetly shed for his sojourn in L.A. He had a smutty mouth and a fantasy that Sonny was his little brother. A speculator in real estate, beachfront on the Gulf. “The Second Cataract,” murmured Romy when Sonny told her. He laug
hed; for him it was just a weekend lark. It was Romy who convinced him to go when Larry proposed to take him home to Texas.

  “Life doesn’t happen, you make it happen,” she said, the shimmering green of her eyelids playing off the green in her hair. Their good-bye was in the Hilton lobby. She pressed a brass scarab into Sonny’s palm, which she’d bought at the Tut souvenir pavilion. “Never forget, you are a prince of Thebes. Whenever you come to an oasis, think of Romy.”

  Houston lasted about five months, with endless humid commutes to the Gulf. Larry would oversee the demolition of rows of beach-board bungalows, then follow the progress of his poured motels and mini-malls. The memory trace of Athens Construction wasn’t lost on Sonny, even to the burly foremen who stared at him with famished eyes as he sat in Larry’s pickup.

  But Sonny wasn’t giving it away anymore. He didn’t ever love Larry, though he liked the little-brother part, especially in bed. Other than sex, Larry didn’t expect much from Sonny, which seemed a fair bargain, like getting paid to eat sandwiches. Sonny worked out in a gym on Montrose for two or three hours a day. He took a few units in business at U of H, but ducked the exam. Otherwise he drifted in Larry’s wake. The Texas men they bothered with, coarse and unreconstructed, were a bracing change of air after the lighting queens of San Francisco.

  If Sonny missed anything, it was metaphysics. Romy had been for him like a book of changes, tapping the well of the deep past, unleashing his uniqueness. He couldn’t seem to do it on his own. All the Gemini data in all the astrology columns left him cold. He needed a medium tuned to him alone—needed to be a medium for someone else’s gifts, as he had been for Romy. It wasn’t the same as being desired. Whatever it was he yearned for, his love life was the opposite.

  After Houston he landed in Provincetown, with a lyricist who wrote only eight lines in the year he was beached with Sonny. There followed a spate of sane and passionless roommates, the sort who divvied the phone bill to the penny, while Sonny tended bar in Boston. His boyfriend at the time was a dean at Somerset College. The dean, married with four, was able to transfer the incomplete from Houston. Sonny put in a semester of night school, the dean’s car waiting afterward under the elms. The diploma was left on his bedside table.

  Sonny felt nothing; he had no plans. He still had nobody gay to talk to. All that he had to say seemed to fit the space of a single night. He was twenty-four, and he wanted to be a man now—enough of being everybody else’s kid fantasy. The gold in his curly hair had tarnished. His bright, astonished eyes had narrowed, squinting like a scout. The summer after the dean he pulled in, flicking the remote in his Comm Av apartment, watching reruns of “Lucy” and “Beaver.” At night he ventured out to tend bar at Foley’s, a watering hole that was blissfully straight and single.

  He passed for straight himself that summer. His roommate at the time was a film student who came home every night reeling from the movie of his life. Aaron would shake his head and talk about “Boston women” as if they were a breed apart, impossibly self-possessed. Sonny grunted sympathetically, man to man, one eye on “Bewitched.” He set Aaron up with free drinks at Foley’s. They were summer buddies, all the carnality focused on the blondes Aaron couldn’t score with.

  His student film was a docu-portrait of Signora Guardi, a psychic from Somerville with a sign in her dining-room window: PAST AND FUTURE READINGS. Aaron would come home and play back his Super 8’s on the walls of the apartment, laughing delightedly at the cracked ideas of his seeress. Sonny watched, casually tagging along for the next shoot. They stepped into an apartment whose curtains were drawn for good, the atmosphere redolent of sausages and marinara sauce. She was garbed in a flowered housedress, the bags under her eyes like black crepe. She didn’t require a crystal or a trance. Aaron asked her questions, and she chatted about the future, very matter-of-fact, the triumphs and pitfalls that lay ahead for Michael Jackson and Cher.

  Modestly, even reluctantly, she would speak of things predicted in the past. She had a near-perfect record on the Oscars and the Triple Crown. Sonny hung back and tried not to lock eyes with her son Carmine, who took time off work to oversee every interview, to make sure the Signora was not ripped off. He stood by the sofa in his blue delivery uniform and stared at Sonny. The Signora confined her predictions to National Enquirer matters—earthquakes, serial killers, cancer cures. A crackball, just as Aaron had said. The movie was only a comedy after all.

  When the film ran out, it was time to leave. Carmine walked Aaron to the car, wanting to ask in private about the foreign rights. Signora Guardi offered Sonny a sweet from a dusty bowl of hard candy by the door. He took a green one. She said: “So how come you never been in love?”

  He sucked the lime for a moment. “No reason,” he replied with careful indifference.

  “Well, it’s time.” Sonny looked at her. She shrugged her lower lip in a very Sicilian way. “How long you supposed to wait? A thousand more years?”

  She made a scoffing sound at the stubbornness of time and sent him on his way. He walked to Aaron’s car without so much as a nod good-bye to Carmine; they hadn’t even been introduced. Nevertheless, Sonny got the number off the panel truck in the driveway: GUARDI MOVING AND STORAGE. He met Carmine the following night at the Guardi warehouse in the South End. Married with twin girls. The next weekend Carmine drove a shipment of country furniture to New York, and Sonny sucked him off twice in the back of the truck on the way down.

  He didn’t even pack a change of clothes. They unloaded sturdy fat-legged tables and chests of drawers into the rear of a store on Amsterdam Avenue. The antique dealer, exhausted with connoisseurship, haggled halfheartedly with Carmine. It didn’t much matter what it cost, since the markup was so precipitous. Jonathan Clare, the dealer—older than he looked, younger than he talked—paid over a check to Carmine for the truckload, then asked Sonny if he’d like to have dinner. Carmine eyed them briskly back and forth, shrugged and left. He wasn’t a sentimental man.

  Sonny barely registered this phase, except to notice that Jonathan’s apartment was the mirror image of the lighting designer’s on Sutter Street. It was all transition now, a sort of free-fall that had begun the moment the psychic opened the window. Sonny plummeted toward love. All through August Jonathan had a marvelous time, driving Sonny back and forth to the Hamptons to show him off to clients. Sonny stood in a green Speedo on innumerable bleached decks, staring out over the rippling dune grass.

  He was unfailingly polite to all the summer millionaires, never locking eyes. Jonathan wasn’t deluded and didn’t pretend they were going anywhere. The sex was perfunctory, though here too they were courteous to a fault: quick spurts and hand towels. Jonathan was avoiding the real summer, having opted out of his share in the Pines for the first time in a decade. Too many housemates sick. In the Hamptons at least, his clients never discussed night sweats and purple bruises.

  Nevertheless, Sonny woke up beside him in moonlit guest rooms, and Jonathan’s pillow was drenched, the sweat streaming off him. It didn’t mean anything to Sonny. Discreetly he moved to the other side of the bed, beyond the circle of damp. He had no idea what sort of man he was meant to fall in love with, but this excited rather than troubled him. He imagined a figure moving toward him, nudged perhaps by a seer of his own, heading for a crossroads. Sonny could feel the imminence. His past was about to slough like a snakeskin.

  By September he had visited with Jonathan all of New York’s summer camps, but no man touched him. Seized with bouts of colitis, Jonathan grew irascible and insisted Sonny stay in a separate room. When the ailanthus trees turned yellow in the alley behind the store, they went together to an auction in Tribeca. Jonathan sat with his bidding paddle, eyes keen for a bargain despite the wilted look on his face. One after another, ungainly blotched paintings were knocked down in the high fives. Sonny fidgeted.

  Then a big painting with a ladder and a chair nailed to it crept toward two hundred thousand, and the room began to murmur. It wasn’t the money that
made Sonny turn, it was more like a surge of power. He saw the paddles waving as the action narrowed to two bidders. Two-eighty, then three hundred. Jonathan coughed dryly beside him. Sonny could see that one of the green paddles was numbered 66. He lifted slightly off his chair to look.

  Number 66 was a man about thirty in a rumpled suit, matinee-idol good looks and the wary smile of a fallen aristocrat. His face was slightly puffy, as if he’d just woken up from a nap. Three-forty. Three-fifty. His eyes flicked away from the auctioneer and locked on Sonny. The planets shifted. Sonny, pounding with joy, lifted a tentative hand. He was either waving at 66 or telling him to wait. The gavel came down.

  “Four hundred ten thousand, to you, sir,” announced the house to general applause. For an awful moment Sonny thought he’d bought it. Two or three people around 66 beamed with exhilaration and hugged him, pulling his gaze from Sonny, who left his seat abruptly as the next lot went up. Jonathan glanced sideways to see him go, never sure if Sonny was leaving a room for good.

  Sonny staggered into the vestibule, his heart throbbing. He hugged his arms, squeezing the useless strength of his biceps. Huddled in the hollow shell of his body, he tried to think who to be. An armed guard at the door could see he was deranged, but clearly no harm to anyone but himself. Sonny could not recall the family he always said he was from, or the country town or the college. In the space of ten seconds he went through an entire adolescence of uncertainty. Having tumbled easily into a hundred beds, armed with one night’s story, suddenly he had forgotten how to dance.

  “That was a very expensive look,” said a voice behind him, sultry and ironic. “Lucky for you, I wanted the picture.” Sonny turned, a mask of confusion on his face. 66 grinned. His eyes were the color of black jade. “Don’t worry, it wasn’t my money. It never is. I’m Ellsworth.”