Afterlife

by Paul Monette

  “I feel so free right now,” she said, even though her teeth were faintly grinding from the coke withdrawal.

  “Yeah. For the first time in years I feel like my journey’s beginning again.”

  Andy Lakin had been acting restless ever since Ray Lee’s accident, and had done about as much avoiding of Steven as he could handle. Being so unfailingly polite and helpful, he was the obvious candidate for breaking the women’s lock on the cleanup crew. He did take a load of cups and saucers into the kitchen, but seeing Steven at the back door laughing, tossing scraps to the dog outside, suddenly he’d had it. Stiff with dignity, he walked over and touched Steven’s shoulder. “I’ve got to be going,” he said. “Could I talk to you for a second?”

  Only fair. Steven followed him into the bedroom. Andy closed the door behind them, and Steven prepared for a dressing down. “There’s really nothing to say,” said Andy, cool and rather arch. “I don’t think you’re the type who’s going to connect again. It’s like climbing up a glass wall, trying to reach you.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I never should’ve come up here in the first place. I don’t need men who run the other way.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Andy opened Steven’s closet and grabbed up a gym bag off the floor, his tidy overnight kit, underwear and jeans and a mini hair dryer. Then he ducked into the bathroom, unexpectedly touching as he rooted around in the medicine chest for his toothbrush, razor, allergy pills. Steven stood watching in the bathroom doorway, admiring his tough-mindedness and flashing pride and—wistfully—his perfect butt, ripe as a pair of melons. Steven wished he could say something very sage, so Andy would only remember the nice part.

  “I deserve better,” Andy declared, pushing him aside. He darted a glance around the room to make sure he’d gotten everything. So little mark did anyone leave behind, thought Steven. “On second thought, Steven, you might find somebody after all. Some guy who’s given up just like you have. I wish I’d known you when you were my age.”

  Steven smiled. “Before the automobile.”

  But Andy was out the door. Making his rounds of all the remaining guests, saying good-bye with withering good manners. He even remembered to pick up his trifle bowl as he left the kitchen. And still Steven wanted to toss the kid a pearl of wisdom, hoping it would come to him at the last moment, right on the threshold with the city of diamonds below.

  But then he opened the front door and followed Andy out, and Angela’s cab was just pulling up. They ended up going down the stairs all four together, too many good-byes at once. At the curb Angela threw her arms around Steven’s neck. “Thank you for saving my life today,” she said, and Steven looked helplessly over her shoulder as Andy shook Sonny’s hand. “And for letting me meet this extraordinary man,” continued Angela, pulling back to look soulfully into Steven’s eyes. Her Bronx accent seemed to evaporate on this high plain. “He is of the pharaoh’s lineage. Your house will be blessed for a hundred generations.”

  “Take care, Steven,” Andy called.

  Steven, trapped in the priestess’s arms, looked up to see him already walking away to his car across the street. “Yeah,” he called after him lamely, and that was as wise as it got.

  Angela turned to Sonny with a last Cleopatra smile. Wisdom poured out of her like musk. “Be free of things and be free with men,” she said. “The path never stops.” And then ducked into the back of the cab like a queen entering a golden coach. “Beverly Wilshire,” she told the driver, and as they lurched away she called back over her shoulder like the scarf of Isadora: “I’ll be home for Christmas!”

  For a moment Steven and Sonny stood silent. Then Sonny said: “Unbelievable.”

  When they walked in the house, just four of them left around the fire, it was starting to feel like Ten Little Indians. And right away Heather announced she was driving Linda home. For they had become fast friends in the kitchen, or at least Heather had. Linda seemed much more tentative altogether, but it may have had more to do with her brother being present, as if she was betraying him in his isolation by laughing with somebody new. But Dell was the lightest of all, bantering with Heather that next time maybe she could give his sister a lift up the hill as well.

  “And then teach her to drive,” he teased, playfully tugging Linda’s ponytail. “We gotta get her off the bus before she’s an old lady.”

  Linda flushed with pleasure to see him cheerful at all. Her heart was easy as she gathered her bag and her camera, precious with the pictures of the two of them. Heather had promised to show her how the computer worked at Shaw Travel, one small lesson at a time. Already Linda imagined how it would be to have a job in an office and not be a maid. And by then the ruckus would all have blown over, and she and Dell could be together again. A two-bedroom apartment, so she could take better care of him. By next Thanksgiving maybe. She hadn’t felt so ambitious since Marcus died.

  Once again Steven did the honors, walking them to the door. “It breaks my heart to see him like that,” said Heather, tugging Steven’s arm. “I hope it didn’t show in my face.”

  “No, you were wonderful,” Steven reassured her. He had seen the stricken look on all of them, as if Death himself had walked into the room.

  Linda was too demure to touch him, but clasped her hands together as fervently as Beatriz Espinoza at Mass. “Thank you, Steven,” she said, wrenched with emotion. “You are so good to us.”

  It was the same intonation with which Beatriz called the parish priest a saint. Of course Linda meant a great deal more than dinner. In the fullness of her love for Dell, she thought of Steven as the man who’d saved him, simply by the influence of his sterling character and spotless life, like some kind of fag scoutmaster. Steven didn’t like the responsibility one little bit, but he didn’t want to seem ungrateful either, so he bore the canonization with a plucky smile. The two women going downstairs arm in arm were as improbable together as their hair—Heather’s frizzed and frosted, piled on top of her head, and Linda’s modest ponytail, clasped with the white barrette she had worn since grammar school in Morelia.

  When Steven came back in, the musical chairs were down to three. They were all looking thoughtfully into the fire, Mark on the sofa and Sonny and Dell in the overstuffed chairs. Steven took a seat on the sofa but distinctly at the other end from Mark, a reflex shyness. Sonny was eating a bunch of grapes, spitting the seeds into the fire, but nobody’s mom was around to tell him it was gross. He seemed completely at ease and untroubled, a tribute to the soul aerobics of Angela Ciotta, since he had otherwise been stalking around in a nervous pitch for days.

  Yet it was Sonny, mellow as Buddha, who broke the silence with a mordant laugh. “That was a dead man, wasn’t it?”

  Nobody contradicted him. The only thing that happened was that Mark laid his hand on Steven’s. Not smothering like Andy Lakin, not proprietary in any way, but enough to make Steven blush crimson. Curiously, a not unpleasant feeling.

  “You think he knows?” asked Dell.

  “It’s weird, isn’t it?” offered Mark, glad somebody else noticed. “He’s just floatin’ away. Doesn’t seem angry or anything.”

  “Antidepressants,” said Steven succinctly, still two spots of pink on his cheekbones.

  “Oh yeah? When do I start?” Dell put his feet on the coffee table, nudging the dish of Godiva.

  “Not me,” said Mark. “I don’t want to get too fuzzy to pull the plug.”

  None of them wanted to talk about it for real. The only reason they mentioned it at all was by way of perfunctory good manners, like removing their hats in the street as a funeral lumbered by. The three widows had memories they couldn’t bear. It wasn’t just anti-depressants. All of them had watched the disengagement of the brain, when the men with the tubes in their arms couldn’t remember they were dying anymore. No more than they could remember being alive, or who the figure was sitting weeping softly by the bed. Steven, always so good about letting the memories of Victor flood in, cou
ld feel himself leaning like Atlas against the dike, a mountain of sorrow behind it.

  “How old is he?” asked Dell.

  “Twenty-nine, thirty.” Steven shrugged.

  “He looked fifty,” Sonny declared, spitting the last of the seeds.

  And then Sonny’s eyes shifted from the fire to the two hands clasped on the sofa, chaste as a couple of pilgrims. He smiled slyly. He was the least romantic creature in all of West Hollywood, or at least possessed of a romance that had nothing whatsoever to do with love. The night he had gotten it on with Mark was full of the old disappointment that had dogged him ever since Fresno: one more man who wasn’t quite as hot or dirty as he was. Almost, but not quite; never enough to get him over the top. And Steven to him was utterly sexless, but that was true of anybody married, though not including the wayward husbands who tore themselves to pieces at his feet.

  He looked at the two men’s faces, Steven then Mark. He could see quite clearly they were both in love. They were wholly undefended, and for the moment anyway there wasn’t a trace of vanity in either of them. You couldn’t have said, for instance, how old they were, though Sonny knew perfectly well they were both around forty. Not that they looked younger, just that it didn’t matter.

  Sonny reached over and swatted Dell’s feet from the coffee table. “Where’d you learn your manners, boy? C’mon, or we’ll miss the beginning.”

  “Of what?”

  “The movie.” And when Dell looked at him totally bewildered, Sonny’s grin was as innocent as a bag boy at Ralph’s. “Don’t you know when it’s time to take a night off? These dudes want to be alone.”

  Guiltily Steven slipped his hand out from under Mark’s. “We don’t want to be alone,” he said, more than a little alarmed.

  Dell was still lagging behind. It had taken him days to fully comprehend what Andy Lakin was doing there, assuming he was just another sudden tenant of the safe house. Besides, Dell was no friend of Sonny. They had kept a courteous distance ever since Dell moved in. But dead though his heart might be, it wasn’t blind. He saw the heat in Steven’s cheeks, the eyes that couldn’t keep a secret. For all his sullen despair, he owed this man his freedom. Mark protested laughing that they didn’t know what they wanted, but Dell was on his feet, beckoning Sonny.

  “So get off your ass. I been waiting to ride in that sissy white car. Maybe after we’ll cruise the boulevard, pick up a couple nineteen-year-olds.”

  “Dell, you can’t go out,” said Steven, rising as if to block him.

  “It’s okay, Steve, I don’t have a bomb on me.”

  “Oh, that’s real funny. Why don’t you call 911 and tell ’em which movie you’re going to?”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of him.” Sonny darted across to the vestibule and pulled open the coat closet. He grabbed his leather bomber jacket and tossed Dell the orange parka.

  Steven turned helplessly to Mark. “They’re going to get in trouble.”

  “They’re grown-ups,” Mark retorted with a shrug.

  Sonny walked over and shadow-boxed at Steven. “I only got one request, guys. Name the firstborn after him and me.” Steven reached out to strangle him, and he danced away.

  Dell was already out the door into the night. Steven caught Sonny’s arm as the Greek headed over the threshold, and he looked back at his landlord with antic defiance. “It’s not a joke,” Steven hissed. “I promised his sister.”

  “Stevie, there’s only a minute left—a second.” He snapped his fingers in Steven’s face, here and gone in the wink of an eye. “Me and the spick, we’re the last two lonely guys. We got nothing to lose.”

  And he was gone, leaving Steven maddened in the doorway, a housemother who’d lost control of the curfew. He heard the Mercedes roar with power in the street below, and as it shot away down the hill, Steven slammed his door so hard the doorbell above his head shimmered like a muffled phone. He turned to find Mark at his shoulder, but hanging back with a quiet smile, giving Steven room to explode. Steven made a sound between a whimper and a growl. “They’re both—” he began, but the mix defeated him. He sputtered. “It’s like living in a juvenile detention center.”

  “But he’s right. There’s only a minute left.”

  “Oh yeah? How do you know? They may come up with a cure tomorrow, and then we’ll have to endure each other for decades.”

  “Please—I’m practicing being a hopeless romantic.” He grabbed Steven’s skinny tie, pulling him close, then bent and began to bite softly at his neck.

  Steven slipped his hands under Mark’s sweater, riding up the bare flesh to his chest, where he took a firm pinch of both nipples. “I’m just trying to inject a little dose of reality around here.”

  “If it’s your dick you’re worried about, I promise not to touch it for the first six months.”

  Steven squeezed, and Mark gave a barely audible gasp. “Dick works fine. I just had the transmission overhauled.”

  Mark drew back and grinned. “Well, then.”

  “That’s not the problem. How do we get out of it once we get into it?”

  “You think too much.” Playfully he began to push Steven back, out of the vestibule and into the study.

  “No—for once in my life I’m not gonna leave a fucking thing unsaid.”

  “Do you have to say it all now?”

  Still he shoved Steven’s shoulder lightly, teasing him like a bully as they moved in a queer tango toward the bedroom. It took an immense act of will for Steven to stand his ground, catching Mark’s wrist and gripping it tight as a pit bull. They staggered against the bookshelves, breaking the neat lineup of photo albums, where the past was bound up in a hundred shuttered rooms.

  They were laughing now, giddy from so many feints, duelists sick of honor. They grappled into a breathless embrace, holding each other steady. And Steven made his final demand, swearing it like a blood oath: “You can’t die, okay? Not for years and years. I won’t go through it again.”

  Mark gave him back the steadiest look, his gray eyes clenched in a kind of amazement, about to go over a cliff. “It’s a deal,” he said in a husky whisper—his ancient bond, worth millions in the days of Bungalow 19.

  “How many years?” goaded Steven, never satisfied.

  “How many do you need?”

  “Eight—no, ten.” Shooting the moon.

  “Deal.”

  There was nowhere else to go now. Freely like brothers in arms, they went to meet their fate, closing the last door. But the laughter continued, rippling under the door and through the feasted house. If this didn’t work they were out of luck, and not a minute left for the next time. Somehow, waiting so long, it must have got easy. No one was ever supposed to laugh, yet there it was, like a knife through butter.

  11

  At the first session, the balding man swathed in Polo seemed as ordinary, as colorless as a white-bread shrink. Indeed, Sonny did most of the talking, beside a pool in the Palisades, the chairs placed so the man called Salou could take the sun on his cordovan face. If it hadn’t been for Angela’s enthusiasm, Sonny might never have stayed. And yet it surprised him to hear his own voice, spilling the long tale of the men in his life, details he’d never told anyone. He had to force himself to return to the Second Cataract.

  Salou’s eyes were mostly closed as he drank the November sun. At four o’clock he looked directly at Sonny, so piercingly that he stopped talking mid-sentence. “You’re not gay,” announced the channeler, not exactly dismissive but almost droll, as if someone had played a harmless trick on Sonny. “But you’ve stayed too long in one place. You’ve clipped your own wings.”

  In that moment Sonny lost all doubt of the other’s gift. He felt a sudden pound of surf in his ears, and the hair at his nape shivered. An unbearable weight was lifted from him. It was as if he’d been waiting to hear it all his life, and always it was the opposite, one man after another wild to make him a pagan god. He understood there would be no further elaboration today, that the fi
rst session was meant to end with a sort of psychic diagnosis. Sonny was grateful for the breathing room, a chance to savor it overnight, pure as ozone. But he couldn’t just walk away with his release. One thing had to be said, though his eyes flinched from the channeler’s in shame as he spoke the words.

  “But I have the gay disease.”

  “That will pass,” declared Salou. “Once you leave the path. Your soul is too old to die young.”

  Sonny stared at the sun on the water. It flowed like a river in flood, uncontrollable, seething with life. He hardly remembered leaving the channeler’s house and driving home. The evening had passed in a dream as he waited, awesomely calm, for the next day’s session. Before he went to bed he cleaned his house. Tossed in a Hefty bag his porno tapes, his poppers, butt plug, leather straps. Even his jock-strap. All the evidence he could gather of his carnal ride across the world of the body. He regretted none of it, missed none of it, as he dumped it all in the trash can at the curb. Just an immeasurable sense of relief. For the first time since the summer of his twelfth birthday, he didn’t come before he slept.

  Immediately things began to go downhill, in a way that was horribly déjà vu. Ray Lee slept twenty-four hours straight after Margaret got him home, barely able to swoon up into consciousness so she could feed him his pills. His brave little plateful of turkey and fixings, topped with a sliver of mince, turned out to be the last solid food he ever took. He drenched his sheets with sweat every three or four hours, and a murmur of soft Korean scored his dreams, playing like incidental music as Margaret stared at the VCR, one forties weeper after another.