Afterlife

by Paul Monette

  “Or Raid,” said Emmett, thick as Florida honey.

  Steven was detached as ever, sitting beside the one narrow window looking down on Highland, but he’d also developed a certain idle affection for the Thursday group. After five weeks he found himself perking up at the next chapter—Emmett’s two-week fling with the dancer, Charlene’s mother and grandmother who shared a room and didn’t speak. He could see how the thin gray man was more peaked every week, the slight catarrh in his throat more pronounced. The group didn’t really talk about how it would change if one of them got sick. It was part of the magic of meeting like this that they would keep the full-blown nightmare at bay if they just stayed in a circle.

  No one knew very much about Steven yet. Like the others, he gave himself over to small talk before and after the meetings, always exchanging a word with Marina. But he rarely spoke in the meeting proper, confining himself to chiming in when the group cheered or groaned. By doing so he seemed to ventriloquize the feelings that otherwise escaped him. He didn’t dare verbalize certain things, like his suspicion that Dell Espinoza was the Halloween saboteur. He shrank from knowing for certain, trying instead to keep his focus simple, like the rest of the group. Just to stay healthy, one step ahead of the creeping horror.

  “I hate my friends who haven’t been touched,” said a stocky man on the bench below Steven. It was his second time here, and he’d cried last time. He didn’t sound proud of what he just said. The room stirred with a murmur of guilty agreement. “The straight ones I can’t even talk to anymore. They all say the same thing: ‘You’re not gonna get sick.’ That just means they don’t want to hear about it. And my roommate’s negative, so he doesn’t give a shit. He’s got the rest of his life.”

  He stopped. It seemed as if he would cry again. The entire group poised to hug him. But he caught himself with a huge sigh that lifted the weight from his belly to his chest. He shook his head, ashamed of hating, and the group was silent a moment, ashamed too.

  And Steven was thinking about the roommate: negative. Was anyone he knew negative? He couldn’t imagine such a thing. For years, it seemed, ever since Spot appeared on Victor’s ankle, he had assumed the worst scenario, that all gay men would die. Of course he meant the urban ones, and lately at least he’d come to see that the young ones would squeak through. But nobody he knew. They had connected one with another all too well. And though he heard now and then about somebody testing negative, he put no faith in it. The test was bullshit like everything else. Some time bombs ticked louder than others, and some were hidden very deep in the caves of a man, but still it was only a matter of time. In the black hole of his grief, Steven had taken some comfort in that, and he felt no guilt at all.

  The thin gray man groaned with exasperation. “This is a big revelation to you, that straight people don’t care? Where have you been? They just want us to shut up and cut their hair.”

  “Hey, chill out,” snarled Marina. “It was us straight people knocked down 81.” This was true. Just last week the quarantine proposition had gone down to defeat, fifty-three to forty-seven, surprising the pollsters and pundits.

  “Gimme a break,” scoffed the thin gray man. “You want to know who fucked Prop 81? The guy with the blood. He scared all the breeders. They decided to protect our useless civil rights so we won’t go psycho on em.”

  “Easy, easy,” said Tim, “we’re getting on soapboxes again.” He smiled around at his group, blaming no one. He was as drab as his turd-brown sleeveless sweater and the leatherette clipboard he held on his knee. Yet his very blandness served as a kind of anchor, backing them off from confrontation. “Remember, we’re here to support each other. Let’s try to say what we need and give it. Find the feeling.”

  This last was delivered in a Zen-like hush. There passed between Marina and the thin gray man a small nod of truce. It was like grammar school, thought Steven, learning how to behave for the teacher.

  “Look, I’ll be honest,” said Andy. “I came here to get laid.” The dumb laugh that erupted here was more like junior high, somewhere behind the boys’ gym. “No, I’m serious. I thought this was going to be like a dating pool.”

  A bouffant queen with a murderous manicure, very Joan Crawford, stroked an eyebrow. “We call it a cesspool now, darling.”

  “I don’t want to be with a guy who’s not positive,” continued Andy, ignoring the bitchy intrusion. “But he’s gotta want to beat it as much as I do.”

  “Oh, you can beat it just as good yourself,” drawled Miss Crawford, but no one laughed.

  “Are you taking applications?” asked Mark, smiling across at Andy.

  “Not from you guys. You’re all just waiting to die.”

  “I resent that,” blurted one of the new recruits, fierce in a Silver-lake leather vest.

  And they started the round again, just like they did every week, about whether it was worth it to get close to someone who might get sick. They would split down the middle as usual, between the romantics, who wanted to seize the day, galloping on white stallions toward the cliff, and the pragmatists, who wanted a little unentangled nooky but nothing more. Paramount was immunity, and whether love would boost your numbers or stress you out.

  Steven tuned out of the discussion and watched the night traffic below on Highland, the straggling homeless shuffling up and down. The mere idea of courting someone was exhausting, like hauling cement uphill. Not to mention the rejection.

  At least he was over Mark. Maybe not over the ache or the awkwardness, but the bristle of expectation had finally abated. He could tell, because he wasn’t wiggy with jealousy watching Mark’s casual flirt with the sandy-haired boy. Over four different lunches they’d talked it through about Sonny and the peeping Tom, managing somehow to laugh about it, as if it were some kind of porn fantasy gone awry. They gave their predictable alibis. Mark ruefully hung his head, bemoaning his need for meaningless sex, passion without feeling, something he had been working on in therapy since Sonny Cevathas was eight years old. Steven pinned his own behavior on grief, the usual suspect. The loneliness and brokenness had left him with his nose against the window, watching life from the outside. He apologized for the laughable wrongheadedness of being hung up on Mark. Mark, they decided together, was just a symbol anyway.

  But though they determined to put it behind them, a perceptible shadow had fallen. They still pretended to make plans every day to tool around like buddies, but half the time they canceled. Errands blew up out of nowhere, or one of them had the sniffles, or Steven was holding Margaret’s hand in Ray Lee’s room at Cedars. Worse, there was a palpable sadness when they did connect, as if their friendship had gone too far and they didn’t know what to replace it with. Didn’t know how to undo the nakedness.

  There had been no repeat performance with Sonny. He was still in residence in the room beyond the garage, which may have been masochistic on Steven’s part. He would have made a terrible landlord, a regular doormat. In any case, Sonny stayed rigorously out of his way for days afterward, all the while making himself indispensable with chores and little fix-it projects. Perhaps Steven let him stay to prove it didn’t matter—plus a dogged sort of pride in keeping things intact, no matter how problematic.

  Mark incidentally swore that he had barely gotten it up that night, despite Sonny’s sultry demeanor and a mouth as foul as the Master Mario video. This was part of a larger picture Mark took pains to clarify, over cup after cup of decaf capuccino—that sex didn’t mean anything to him anymore, he could take it or leave it. He didn’t expect to solve that puzzle, not in the time he had left. Whenever he said it, he seemed to hope Steven would feel better, not take it somehow so personally. Fat chance.

  Yet he looked across at Mark now, sitting between Marina and Uncle Fred, and felt the oddest dispassion. He didn’t suppose he had loved Mark at all, nothing beyond the blur of infatuation, or just the idea of filling the empty hole in his heart. Meanwhile, the only notable change in his own dysfunction was a most ambiguous g
ift of heat. Now he jerked himself off at night, sometimes snapping a cockring on, sometimes a full trussing with the rawhide. Even in the fugue state of desirelessness that gripped him after Victor’s death, he had managed to whip it up once or twice a month, but now it was every night. He’d even stocked in a few stroke books. But the fantasies were very careful—never Mark, certainly never Victor. In fact, he found himself roaming way back, to Boston fifteen years ago or his randy first summer in Europe, dicks of the ancient world. The deep past was the one safe place where a man could still let go.

  “I ain’t never had a date,” declared Charlene with comic wistful-ness, and Steven shook his self-absorption. “Girls I know,” said Charlene, “they don’t expect a man. They just wanna have chirren.”

  Charlene was the thirdest world among them by a long shot, however disenfranchised the militant gay ones felt. They never knew what to say to her, an ex-hooker with two kids no father would claim, four generations of women accordioned into an apartment off Pico. Yet Charlene never truly complained, so accustomed was she to bad shit, and seemed content with the sheer diversion of Thursday’s men.

  “Seem like you boys wanna fall in love awful bad,” she drawled. “You better get movin’, huh? I got me my chirren, where’s your man? Time goin’. Stop talkin’ about it.”

  A fitting enough end to a night of talking in circles. Tim announced there would be no meeting two weeks hence, on account of the dreaded holiday, and suggested they all come back next Thursday prepared to do some role-playing around the turkey issue. Instantly the mood was lighter as they fell to talking one on one. They’d all OD’d on angst and romantic longing, and now all they wanted to do was keep it simple and go have coffee with a Thursday comrade.

  But not Steven, who grabbed his jacket and prepared to make a beeline for the door. He’d talked to Marina before the meeting, so there were no further courtesies required. He was over the threshold when Mark called out: “Hey, Steven, wait up, will you?”

  Steven didn’t turn around, but he stopped in the hall outside, staring at a safe-sex poster which showed a woman putting a condom on a banana. Just as well that they had five minutes together now—they wouldn’t have to talk in the morning and pretend to want lunch, only to cancel by noon. Steven smiled and murmured good night to Uncle Fred, Charlene, the stocky man. When Andy stopped beside him and grinned, Steven had the queerest impulse to look over his shoulder, assuming the grin was for somebody else.

  “You run away so fast, I never get a chance to talk to you.”

  “About what?” asked Steven, genuinely baffled.

  The boy laughed heartily, as if Steven was irrepressibly witty. “I’m Andy Lakin,” he said, extending a hand that Steven didn’t want to shake. He was old enough to be the kid’s father. “You’re Steven. Marina says you’ve been all over the world.”

  “Not unless they’ve got room service,” Steven replied with instant caution. Since when did the others talk about his non-AIDS life? That wasn’t the deal. “And not anymore.”

  “Well, I’ve never been anywhere. And I don’t want to die without seeing Paris. Or the pyramids.”

  “Uh-huh.” What did the kid want, brochures? Steven squirmed with displacement, and then saw with relief that Mark was coming out of the rap room. He turned and deliberately cut Andy off, perking his face toward Mark, but in the same motion trying not to look too eager. Nothing was simple. Mark, expressionless himself, didn’t really notice the mood swings of Steven’s face.

  “They denied my disability,” Mark declared flatly. “Lou screwed me.”

  Steven knew exactly what it meant. Unless Mark got a new job, his insurance would be gone in three months. Even assuming he wanted to work again, he was uninsurable, since the virus was catch-22—a preexisting condition. All Steven could think to say was “What are you going to do?” and he had the good sense to bite his tongue instead. Mark looked more beaten than ever, as if he hadn’t been able quite to feel it till he could speak it to Steven.

  “Cocksucker,” Steven growled, finding the right pitch at last. Mark gave out with a short dry laugh more raw than tears, and Steven said, “Come on, we’ll go have coffee.” The rules of their disengagement were temporarily suspended.

  But Mark flicked an eye to Steven’s left and replied mildly, “I think you’re busy,” with the slightest ironic emphasis on the you, as if the shoe were on the other foot at last. Steven furrowed his brow in confusion, even as Mark softly punched his shoulder. “It’s okay, we’ll talk tomorrow,” said Mark, gliding away and down the stairs.

  Leaving Steven blinking in disbelief at Andy, who still hovered attendance. All the others had left by now. They were alone beside the picture of the starlet and the banana. “So you want to go to Paris,” said Steven in his most neutral voice, one hand automatically reaching for the wallet where he no longer carried his Shaw Travel cards.

  “Well, eventually,” said Andy, brimming with mirth again. “Right now I’d like to go grab a burger with you.”

  “Uh …” Steven looked as if he needed to go to the bathroom, but also as if he meant to hold it till he got home.

  “Look, do I have to draw you a map?”

  Steven stared at him. He couldn’t actually remember the last time a man had come on to him. He felt like a total asshole for being so thickheaded, though he could see that in Andy’s eyes he was simply playing hard to get. He was amazed at the kid’s cheek, and not a little moved by his willingness to be vulnerable.

  “Listen, it’s not you,” Steven declared with a certain fervor, feeling as if he were turning down a date for the prom with the class geek. “I’m just not available. Here,” he added, thumping his chest, where two weeks ago he would have thumped his gonads.

  “For a burger? Look, I don’t want to marry you. I just want to talk to a grown-up.”

  And still Steven blanched, because that was precisely the last thing he felt like. Andy tossed his head and made a bleating sound—half disgust, half despair—and turned to go down the stairs. It suddenly seemed pathetically absurd, to be so defended. All the ruinous pride that had kept him silent in the group came crashing down around him. He tramped down the stairs, past the dyke at the phone bank, groping his way through the knot of fallen angels hanging about the coffee machine.

  He caught up with Andy on the curb outside, kicking his Reebok idly against a parking meter. They looked at each other warily. Steven shrugged and pointed across Highland to All-American Burger. They stuffed their hands in their pockets and crossed against the traffic, Steven suppressing a guilty need to look over his shoulder, in case somebody he knew should see them.

  Andy Lakin hadn’t been entirely honest, of course. He openly admitted now he was looking for something permanent, and always had his radar out for an older man with a sterling record. Steven’s eight-year stint with Victor was thus like money in the bank. This was all shared with such unflinching candor that Steven wasn’t sure if the kid was being ingenuous or disingenuous or both. Having grilled Marina two Thursdays running, Andy seemed to know all about him, requiring no further details. And so he filled the glaring fast-food time—the burgers speared with little American flags—relating his own rueful tale of near misses.

  Steven relaxed and drank two mocha shakes, realizing there was no pressure to take the kid home to bed. He only wondered why he didn’t want to—the eagerness was endearing enough, bright as the agate eyes and the dust of freckles below the tousle of hair. Ann Arbor, Michigan, twenty-six, played hockey in high school. Steven found himself wondering what Mark would have done, how he would have found a way to strip that eagerness bare. What he wouldn’t think about was Victor being the same age when they met. As if the life of Steven Shaw—the usefulness of the past, the gathering of what little wisdom—stood utterly discounted, giving him no clue whatever.

  “But you think we can beat it, don’t you?” asked Andy, half a dare. “Everyone’s not gonna die.”

  Steven shrugged. “Not right away, an
yway. Some guys’ll probably make it twenty years. So you might as well live like you have a future.” He didn’t think this at all, not a quarter of twenty years, but he wasn’t going to be the one to challenge Andy’s stubborn optimism. He was secretly pleased that Andy saw him as some kind of renegade in the group. His silence had somehow come across as disdain for the general carping of Thursday’s men.

  “So tell me about Victor,” said Andy when his plate was empty, every last fry. Ingenuous surely, but dis- around the edges even so.

  The question Steven had managed to duck or otherwise freeze in its tracks, never asked once since Victor died. Perhaps because he avoided anyone new. Yet for some reason it didn’t threaten or annoy him now—something to do with the agate eyes and the curious Michigan trust, as if Andy really believed Steven Shaw possessed some special key to love.

  So he talked, he who’d avoided a bereavement group and fired his shrink and stuffed the condolences in a shoebox. About locking eyes with Victor at a New Year’s party in Venice, and ending up two hours later twenty miles up the coast at Zuma, wind-whipped and rolling in the sand as the eighties dawned. How they mightily resisted falling in love—four months, six months, still trying to stay apart two nights a week.

  “The last thing Victor wanted to be was a couple,” said Steven, his cheeks high-colored, in a whiskey voice, as if he were teasing Victor himself. “He couldn’t stand them. He loved being single.”

  “So how did you get it to work?”

  “My immense charm,” retorted Steven. “Plus three weeks in Europe living like princes. He’d never been anywhere either.”

  He smiled across at Andy, making the bridge. The boy blushed easily, owing to his fair complexion, and insisted on paying the check, as if to prove he wasn’t looking for any free ride. He was assiduous in fact, as they walked to Steven’s car, about explaining that he understood completely. No wonder Steven wasn’t ready for something new, after being twinned so deep. It would come in its own time, somebody totally different—certainly not another eager boy who’d never been anywhere. Andy was as unflinching in his pulling back as he had been coming on.