Afterlife

by Paul Monette

  He flipped one more, and the next was a woman. Finally, something that raised an eyebrow. Christ, he was bi. Sonny nearly laughed, to think there was anything in a man that could still surprise him. An entire series of women, mostly blondes, naked like the men and just as crudely objectified, but no S&M. They were posed modest and girlish, touching their breasts and smiling shyly, knees together. Not carnal at all—in fact, nothing that could be remotely construed as dirty.

  Sonny felt an involuntary sneer of contempt, recalling with disdain the string of married men who’d hungered for his ass, all the way back to his bag-boy days in Fresno. They kept their whores and madonnas separate, even as far as separate sexes. After twelve years in the trenches, Sonny still wasn’t especially gay, not in the sense of brotherhood, but he was a thousand lifetimes more evolved than those who were neither one thing nor the other.

  And then he came to the last picture.

  Another blonde, but he knew right off from the prickle of heat that rose up the back of his neck. Anyone else would have said they were all the same, the boys in thrall and the bashful women, but Sonny would have recognized her anywhere, even without the green shock that zigzagged like a lightning bolt across her bangs. Romy. Her cat’s eyes were red in the Polaroid glare, but her smile was fixed on him alone, full of the pearls and agates with which she had cast his runes. His key to the XVIIth Dynasty, his window on the journey to his rightful place, commanding the land below the Second Cataract.

  Whenever you come to an oasis, she said, think of Romy.

  The joy of connection was so intense it almost choked him. He slipped all the pictures back in the pouch and closed the drawer, not even retaining the image of Romy, because he was free of things. He was all power as he rose from the desk and capered across the great hall. His life was his own again, completing the circle at last, his journey to the place he owned in every incarnation. He glided into the bedroom, drunk on the promise of sanctuary. Sean Pfeiffer lay on his back and snored greedily, as certain the world was his as Pharaoh, even in sleep. They would make a great team, he and Sonny, synchronized beyond the zodiac. The Greek would be transient no more.

  He floated across to the bathroom to kill the lights and caught his myriad beauty in the mirrors one last time. He stretched his arms over his head, and his eyes went like a laser to the red spot under his arm. Of course it wasn’t a birthmark. A month now and it hadn’t gone away, and the lymph node under it swollen like a golf ball. The only way out, he’d known all along, was to find again the river and source of his ancient fate. The one thing that would freeze his beauty, aligning himself with a destiny deeper than all the dying men of West Hollywood, wed to a single incarnation.

  He hit the lights and retreated once more to the royal bed, in a chamber protected by Nubian warriors and lions on golden chains. The only part of his body still here was the flesh with which he would capture and enchant the beast beside him. Otherwise he was a hundred generations, beyond decay and pestilence. From now on it was he who would call down plagues. And Death, he saw as he fell into a slumbering swoon, Death was only for slaves.

  10

  Dinner was called for four, and since the turkey was twenty-eight pounds, it had to go in the oven at eight in the morning. Heather delivered the dressing the night before, sausage and corn-bread, mounds of it, so all Steven had to do was get up and stuff it and stick it in. But then around midnight Wednesday, while he was stewing the peaches and cranberries and layering the sweet potato fool, Margaret called in a terrible state. Ray Lee had spiked to a hundred and four, talking deliriously in Korean, and she couldn’t get hold of the doctor.

  Steven dropped everything and went over. They bathed him with alcohol and washcloths dipped in ice water, bringing the fever down to 101 and bringing Ray back to English. The doctor called at two but didn’t sound impressed. No need to bring him into the hospital, especially on a holiday, unless it stuck at 104, in which case go to the E.R.

  So Steven didn’t get home till almost three, and then had to finish the cranberry sauce and sweet potatoes. He dragged himself to bed at four—and nearly shrieked to discover the kid lying there fast asleep. They hadn’t slept together since Sunday, and there was distinctly no standing invitation. But while Steven was at Ray’s, Andy had come by, his trunk full of firewood, which Sonny helped him stack in the garage. He must’ve thought it would be a nice surprise for Steven, to find him curled up in his bed. But it only made Steven more sleepless, since it wasn’t working at all. The upshot being that he overslept, and the turkey didn’t go in till after ten.

  Mark had finally called on Tuesday afternoon, biting his own bitter tongue that Steven hadn’t called first, to welcome him home from Florida. For a minute they were excruciatingly formal, till they established that Sonny had never passed along the message that Mark had called. Then they got off a nice little riff of bitchiness at Sonny’s expense, about his one-track piglet mind, and after the playfulness of that exchange Mark found himself promising a pair of pumpkin pies for Thursday. He didn’t mention what Sonny had told him about Andy Lakin, nor did Steven bring it up. In some dim region of wishful thinking Steven still hoped to establish to Andy before the Thanksgiving dinner that their shipboard romance was over and let’s be pals.

  But the logistics of the coming feast grew madder with every hour, giving Steven time for nothing, and he ended up wishing Victor were there to make it all work. Not that he didn’t have an army of help. Linda was there all day Wednesday cleaning the house, crawling in behind the stove and swabbing out cupboards that swarmed with weevils. Even Dell got off his ass, foregoing the afternoon talk shows to prune and clip the yard. And Sonny came home mid-afternoon having ripped off a centerpiece floral arrangement from Monte Carlo that was big enough for a concert hall. Also two trays of hot and cold hors d’oeuvres, which he didn’t quite deliver to a catered affair in Hancock Park.

  And even with all the blizzard of preparations reaching a sort of crescendo, Thursday morning didn’t lack for a certain endearing camaraderie. One after another, Steven shooed Sonny and Dell and Andy from the kitchen, each of them snatching a bit of breakfast as he fled. Once he had the turkey cooking and had checked in with Margaret to make sure Ray had survived the night, Steven grabbed a mug of decaf and padded into the living room. The three were lined up on the sofa eating a box of doughnuts, watching the Macy’s parade on tape delay.

  “Maybe I’ll go to New York,” Dell announced as the camera panned the crowd in Herald Square. “Be easy to hide out there.”

  “But what would you do?” asked Sonny. “They don’t have yards.”

  “I could bomb the U.N.,” came the casual reply, and Steven whacked the back of his head.

  He turned to see if Andy noticed, but the kid was dunking a doughnut and fixed on the parade. Dell was under strict house rules not to discuss with anyone on the premises his urban guerrilla status. As far as Andy or anyone else was concerned, he was a fellow widower down on his luck and bunking temporarily with Steven. Fortunately the police hadn’t made any public announcement that Dell Espinoza was the AIDS saboteur. Presumably they were still watching his apartment, and Linda was very careful when she took the bus to Steven’s house, in case she was being followed.

  But already the case had been supplanted in the media by a serial killer of hookers and a crack bust involving a deputy mayor of Beverly Hills. The AIDS terrorism was yesterday’s news, and Steven and Linda figured Dell could resurface again by Christmas, new name and new apartment, just another wetback, and start all over with a battered truck. That was what Linda hoped for anyway, and Dell hadn’t contradicted the scenario of his resurrection.

  Steven headed back to the kitchen to check the bird, something he would be doing compulsively every fifteen minutes for the next seven hours, and Andy called after him, “Can I help?”

  Steven turned and faced the trio on the sofa. “Not right now. But you’re all on call, so don’t go far. And we have ladies coming, so I want some
fancy clothes and the most piss-elegant manners you can muster.”

  “Shit, what time is it?” blurted Sonny in a minor panic. “I got a date.”

  “What date?” demanded Steven. “You can’t go anywhere. You’re booked.”

  But Sonny was already bolting, pulling off his T-shirt. “Don’t worry, it’s just a nooner. I’ll be back by two,” he said, slipping out through the dining-room doors and racing around the garage.

  “What’s a nooner?” asked Dell, culturally deprived.

  “A fuck date,” Andy informed him pleasantly. “Usually you have them during your lunch hour.”

  Sonny hadn’t told anyone yet about Sean Pfeiffer. Indeed he was running up to Trousdale for a midday tryst, before Sean took off for Palm Springs and dinner with his family. Sonny preferred them all to think he was just going out for a meaningless fuck, not wanting to jinx the delicate negotiation of the permanent bond. Meanwhile, Steven stooped to the oven, annoyed at Sonny’s casualness. You’d think that for one day he could leave his dick alone and just be part of the family. There was no getting around it: Steven wanted everything perfect. It was going to be that kind of holiday, brimming with expectations, the kind that left mothers weeping at the end as they dried the Waterford goblets one by one.

  There were no juices to baste with yet, as the turkey had barely started cooking, but Steven crouched and peered into the oven window, counting the onions in the roasting pan as if the turkey might have eaten one. Suddenly he felt a hand ruffle his hair, and Andy leaned down and kissed the back of his neck. Steven stood up and faced him, the muscles quivering slightly in his jaw. Andy’s eyebrows creased in an anxious frown.

  “You didn’t get much sleep,” he said, stroking the stubble of beard on Steven’s cheek. “Can you take a nap? I’ll watch the turkey. How ’bout I give you a back rub?”

  “No thanks.” His voice was tight. Andy, constantly misreading, kneaded Steven’s shoulders, as if he could be the cure instead of the cause of the tension.

  “Sweet, sweet man,” murmured the kid. On his upper lip was a milk mustache, which made Steven feel like a pedophile. Andy trailed out through the swing door.

  Steven leaned his forehead against the refrigerator, between the two star magnets. He wasn’t going to worry about what Dell might reveal, anarchy or otherwise. Steven would be crackers if he had to monitor all eight of them. Let them appall one another if they must. He turned with a sigh to survey his kitchen, the calm before the storm, all the counters clear. He realized—perverse as ever—he could hardly wait to see them mix it up. When the phone rang, he didn’t tense at all. He was ready for anything. “Hello?”

  “Steven Shaw? This is Angela. Ciotta. Lou’s wife.” She was halting and uncertain.

  Steven’s heart leaped at the total unexpectedness. “Well, of course. How are you? Happy Thanksgiving.”

  “Yeah. I don’t know why I called, but like—I wanted to thank you.”

  “No, no, I should be thanking you. You had us up for that lovely tea, a month ago already. And I didn’t even send a bread-and-butter note.” My, but he was a veritable fruitcake of Sunday manners today.

  “Hey, no problem. You were so nice. You remember that talk we had upstairs? In the closet?” Steven reached in the fridge and pulled out a double bunch of celery. As she talked, he cradled the phone with his shoulder, stripping and washing the celery stalk by stalk. “I been doin’ a lotta coke, this whole last year. Kinda keepin’ Lou company. And like, that day with you I started to realize, who am I foolin’? Ya know?”

  She didn’t expect an answer, though he murmured affirmatively. He started to cut the celery into three-inch lengths, finger-size. “So Lou and me, we been fightin’ ever since. I tell him to stop, he tells me to go to hell. And with all that shit around, I can’t stop takin’ a taste. So I split.” In the pause that followed, he heard her drag deeply on a cigarette and the clink of ice in a glass as she drank.

  “You left him?”

  “Yeah, night before last. I’m here at the Beverly Wilshire. But I’m checkin’ in to Betty Ford tomorrow.”

  “Oh. Good for you,” he said lamely.

  “Like that was the first call I made. Second was Marvin Mitchelson. I’m gonna clean Angela up and clean Lou out.” She laughed, but the joke was hollow. “Anyway, I just wanted you to know, it was you got the ball rolling. My moon’s in Cancer, so this is a real healing time. But listen to me, so fulla myself. How you doin’? How’s Mark?”

  “Fine, fine. What’re you doing for dinner?”

  “Huh? Me, I’m just drinkin’ Tab. My internist got me on Valium till I get to the clinic, just so I don’t climb the walls.”

  “But it’s Thanksgiving. Why don’t you come here?”

  She gave a little astonished laugh. Protesting right away: she didn’t have any clothes, she was still in bed, her hair was a wreck. But he could tell she wanted to come. Flustered and insecure, she needed to be reassured, so he gave her the lay of the land, gently but insistently. The guest list, the menu, the geography of the house. No need to drive, she could take a cab. Her tiny phobic bursts of uncertainty began to abate. She did have a little black cocktail dress, and maybe it would be a distraction, but he had to promise to meet her at the door and tell her if she looked horrible. She’d leave the cab running.

  Anything, anything. She promised to be there by six and then had to ring off, determined to drag her hairdresser out to the hotel, at least to give her a comb-out. By the time he hung up the phone, Steven had the celery fingers arranged on a serving plate, and he was spooning Kraft pink cheese and olives from a jar, slathering it on the celery. The Kraft was a bit low-class for the dinner he was serving, but was more or less a tradition here. Victor’s mother in Montana always had a tray of stuffed celery on the table at Thanksgiving, and Victor had kept it up as a sort of kitsch homage to his frontier youth. But the irony was lost on Steven, who stuffed the celery now with grave attention. There were also jars of spiced crab apples and corn relish for condiments, exactly the brands that Victor used to buy. As if to veer even in small ways was to tempt chaos.

  Through the kitchen window, as he worked, Steven could see the mangy dog dozing under the sycamore, lying on his back with his paws in the air. Except he wasn’t looking especially mangy anymore. His coat shone sleek and thick from all the veal bones Sonny brought him. Steven had failed utterly to keep the beast in the jungle.

  And as if to mock him further, Dell and Andy trotted out to the garden and started flinging a Frisbee, bringing the dog leaping to his feet and barking energetically. He sprang in the air as the disk floated back and forth between the two men. Where had they gotten a Frisbee? It seemed to Steven such a straight boy’s prop, almost as suspicious as a football. But for all of that, he was smiling as he watched, doting again, as if there was something unimaginably safe about the day.

  Heather and Linda arrived on top of each other, Heather apologizing profusely when she realized she’d driven right by as Linda trudged up the hill from Sunset, a crock of guava pudding under her arm. Linda hastened to reassure her, guilty to think she made anyone else feel guilty. The two women exchanged a smile, both overanxious not to offend, then converged on the kitchen. They shooed out Steven, who needed to shave and shower, then rearranged the masses of food with an inner logic that had escaped their host. Heather put up a pot of cider to mull, while Linda chopped greens for the salad. The bird had by now begun to spellbind the entire house with the smell of its roasting, bringing the boys in to pick at the cold hors d’oeuvres. The dog sat in a rapture of hope by the kitchen door, nose quivering.

  Linda and Dell were still a bit tentative with each other, both tucking in like turtles when Heather teased them that they looked like twins. But once she had the salad fixed, Linda tugged her brother out to the backyard and drew a thick letter from her shoulder bag. Written by one of the sisters-in-law in Morelia, but dictated by Beatriz Espinoza. Linda sat on the whitewashed bench and read it aloud—the lazy n
arrative of days in the baking sun, punctuated by strings of Spanish names as her mother went through the roll call of everybody’s children.

  Dell listened quietly, gazing up the hill at the twisted chaparral above the house. November had been unseasonably dry, no rain since Halloween, and nothing was green. A dust shroud hugged the mountain. The turmoil in his heart rode so deep even Linda couldn’t see it, and she was accustomed by now to his broods and glooms. He’d listened to dozens of letters from home, bored and vaguely embarrassed, annoyed to think that his mother imagined he cared about any of that. But today the flat details of life going nowhere, the slow-witted cast of characters, all of it left him agitated, listening like a man condemned. The final dispatch from a sunlit world beyond the prison wall.

  For the first time in a hundred letters, he wished he could speak in answer, write back in the flowing hand that used to send letters to Linda herself. To thank his pious mother for the prayers with which she sealed each missive. To tell her that he loved and honored her every day and would one day rear a son who would know her name. All lies, of course, but just for the moment he wished he could tell them. As if he longed to be something else before he died—the gay son who had never left home, who stayed in the closet and took care of family, never moving out of the shadow of the mountain.

  Linda read off the final flourishes, God and mother love mixed in passionate exhortation, but managed to keep her own voice carefully indifferent. As if she had learned too well not to be emotional in his presence, any emotion at all, or else he might shut down further. She folded the letter up matter-of-fact and tucked it back in her bag, filial duty done. She made no comment on any of its details and didn’t dream of hazarding anything like a reminiscence. So it must have surprised her when he spoke, still looking up the hill and so softly melancholy she barely heard.