Afterlife

by Paul Monette

  They locked eyes again, for the first time since Mark had entered the house, but now there was something antic in the look they exchanged. At last they had stumbled on a minor issue. “Steven,” said Mark, trying it out in a diplomatic sort of way. Then they laughed, like two kids in a half-naked Polaroid.

  Suddenly they were comrades, merry and sly. Mark Inman dug his hands in his jacket pockets, his car keys clinking dully. The exactor in him flashed a quarter smile. He wasn’t half so tan as his boyfriend Ted, and besides, the squint lines around his eyes were deeper than the sun. Without moving a millimeter, Steven puffed his chest and pulled in his belly and started to think inanely about what diet he ought to begin tomorrow.

  They could have happily gone outside and joined the others now, drawing the group together at last, a one-night family. They’d gotten through all the sad part. But plainly Mark had something more to say, for his face clouded again. Steven realized he hadn’t looked in anybody’s eyes in over a year, not since the light began to go for Victor. Not even in his own eyes, not even in the mirror.

  “I’m positive,” Mark declared with ashen calm. “I’ve known for a long time, but it’s like I didn’t believe it. Not till I was driving back from the desert the other morning. You know what I mean? Here I am—I’m going to die.”

  Steven nodded, unable somehow to lie in the face of so much naked truth. “Me too,” he replied flatly.

  Then Margaret billowed into the room, beaming with proprietary feeling. “Where the hell are the coffee filters?” When they looked at her blankly, too many fences down, she glanced from one to the other, her radar on red alert. Before Steven could think which cupboard, she said, “I’ll find them,” and backed out.

  When they turned to each other again the two men looked askance, but only slightly, a bare degree from locking eye to eye. It wouldn’t have much mattered what they said. Where are you staying in London? You’re lucky to have her in the office. But now there interposed a small insistent beep. Steven slipped a hand in his pants pocket and drew out a small white plastic container with digital readout: his pill timer. He slid back the little drawer and scooped out two white capsules banded in blue. Mark’s eyes were fixed on him the whole time, as if he was trying to memorize a code. “Welcome to the valley of the dolls,” Steven said wryly.

  He punched in the 4 A.M. call on the timer and slipped it back in his pocket. Now he needed a very tall glass of water to try to outwit the nausea. Thus they moved to leave without another word, back to the missed connections of a widower’s Saturday night. They sauntered into the living room, not quite shoulder to shoulder, but effortless and casual. They were two grown men, as old as each other, and each, if nothing else, knew how to segue.

  No one would have supposed they’d connected at all, from the vast indifference they maintained in the short half-hour that ended things. Sonny and Ted, the two beauties, were much more notable for the texture of their approach/avoidance. Brittle and clumsy, they talked without any of the fluid grace that marked their Olympian passage through the gym. Ray Lee was cruelly disappointed that no one had skimmed the latest Star. Indeed, as a group they seemed unable to dish with any flair, even at the most basic level of Liz and Liza. Ray wanted out of this cultural wasteland, as did Lynn Heller, whose own stomping ground was Beverly Hills and Malibu, where she was booked for the rest of her life.

  Still, it was Dell who made the first move to go, murmuring to Steven that he had a phone date at midnight. All it took was one of them, and the general move began, gathering their jackets, making the vaguest promises to see one another again. Mark and Steven didn’t even say good night. When Ted and Mark paired up to go, it was Ted who took care of the flashier good-byes, hugging Steven close and whispering in his ear. Between Mark and Steven there only passed the briefest nod, like moguls bidding at an auction.

  Margaret remained behind and stood at Steven’s side on the landing, waving with him as the others went to their cars. But though she stayed till well after midnight, till every plate was back on the shelf, nothing further was said about the private talk in the study. Margaret castigated Steven for the grim dryness of the lasagna, swearing next time she would bring it over hot from her own oven. When everything was clean she had a last cup of decaf, while Steven packed away the two Mud Pies. He declared an end to the widowers’ Saturday club.

  “Our weeds have officially changed from black to dark purple,” he announced, walking his friend to the door with her Pyrex under her arm.

  “Just to be safe,” retorted Margaret, “I’m taking you out next Saturday night myself. They’ll get the idea.” This was above and beyond the call of duty, since Margaret had a b.f. of her own—Richard—whose unrepentant straightness required that he be kept separate from the bent world of Steven Shaw. But the drying up of Steven’s grief was Margaret’s primary mission. Hands-on action was required.

  Poor Dell, thought Steven, poor Sonny. He watched Margaret fold herself into her white Toyota. The headlights flashed on, flooding the patch of chapparal west of the house. A coyote froze by the trash cans, then slunk away into the dry sage. Steven felt no fear or annoyance at the scavenger. Nothing surprised him anymore, even that he would pull back from his fellow mourners, who’d seemed for the entire last year more real to him than brothers.

  He wasn’t being entirely truthful, but couldn’t say that to himself. He closed the door and reentered the emptiness of the house. “You little devil,” he said out loud to Victor, “what did you ever see in him?” He cocked his head, seeming to wait for an answer, but not for long. Then he glanced down at his two bare hands, one with the clotted blood on the thumb, the other that had taken Mark Inman’s pulse.

  “I can’t take care of them anymore,” he said, meaning Dell and Sonny. There was no sign of protest. “I need …” he continued tentatively. “I need to …” But he quickly fizzled out, stumped for a verb, as if he couldn’t translate fast enough from another tongue. He stared into the living room, where the gas fire still rippled in the fireplace. His party had vanished like a parlor trick. There was no more mud in the freezer. He couldn’t even imagine what he needed.

  2

  Victor Diamond had worked for Pacific Bell on a four-day week—in the business office, that is, not up a pole in a stud leather belt heavy with tools. Nobody loved a weekend more than Victor. He and Steven day-tripped with murderous abandon, malls and museums and endless capuccinos. But each free Wednesday was his soft spot, his time for self-improvement and various errands so arcane they seemed invisible. Also the occasional midday drop-by at the baths, what Victor would later call his window of vulnerability.

  He was diagnosed with a single lesion on his ankle in October, a month before his thirty-fourth birthday. The next one, above the left nipple, didn’t appear till fourteen months later. In the meantime Victor shook the fear and dread and convinced himself he was once again a special case. He was still the only gay man in the western world from northern Montana. Besides, he swore he never felt better than he did in the fourteen months. He nicknamed his lesion Spot and patted it every night when he took off his socks: “Good dog.”

  Steven longed so much to believe him, and there were so many places left to see, that they defied it together from Bora Bora to Moscow to Rome. Steven practically traveled free, there were so many outlets hungry to seduce his client list. Victor took all the vacation and medical leave they owed him at the phone company, without ever having to use the “A” word. So every two months they fled to a different poster, sharp as the blue-flaked cart beside the Tuscan wall.

  When the second lesion appeared it wasn’t given a name, but still he felt terrific, his energy inexhaustible. They flew to New York for Valentine’s Day, then on to the Bahamas for a freebie at a mob resort. Steven didn’t want him getting too much sun, but Victor wouldn’t listen. “Stop acting like I’m fragile, it’s bad luck,” said Victor, collapsing under a banana palm, blond hair stiff with salt.

  Right after that they
started appearing in clusters, two or three every week, but Steven never dared to blame it on the sun. Still they traveled: to Sonoma for the opening of a winery, to Provincetown for a rainy Memorial Day. Victor was getting docked for missing so many Mondays at Pacific Bell, but he rather liked the three-day week, and still hadn’t told his supervisor anything about AIDS.

  He lost weight in the summer but not very much, and the proof of how stable he was were the men who had started to fall all around them, battered from weeks of pneumonia, curling into a ball. Their neighbor up the street was on a respirator for seventy-seven days, some kind of world’s record. Victor was very early for L.A.; New York was already half gone. By autumn he was tired, but still they went away again, to Tuscany for real.

  It was close to the unspoken second anniversary of Spot. Though now that mark was indistinguishable from a hundred others, none were above the neck, and Victor looked quite spiffy in his long-sleeved Brooks Brothers shirts. Steven had the pictures to prove it, on the last page of the last album in the study. Victor at a rusty table on a terrace west of Siena, with a view out over a tawny, smoky meadow dotted with cypresses. Victor’s arms were open in a giant laughing embrace. He was singing a garbled aria, making it up as he went along. A cone of roasted chestnuts sprawled on the table.

  That night or the next, Steven woke from a nap in the hotel room. The balcony doors were open to the chill November evening. The hotel was an old nunnery, with a cloister just below their windows. They were planning to eat a baronial dinner in the cove-ceilinged dining room, and had starved themselves all day to get ready.

  Steven jumped up and ran to the light in the bathroom, thinking to scoop Victor out of the tub and kiss him all over, lesions or no. And found him sitting on the edge of the tub, naked except for his purple welts, staring into the mirror. He pointed to a spot along his chinline, below his ear. Steven bent forward with hammering heart. It wasn’t even purple yet, barely a quarter-inch across. Victor said, “It’s time to go home.” And they never went anywhere again.

  Sonny was the youngest of three Cevathas boys. The older two had worked construction for their father every summer through high school. Thus they were always ready, come September, to lumber into the backfield for Orange High, kicking butt through the brutal heat of the Central Valley fall. Sonny, youngest by half a dozen years, considerably leaner and golden-haired from the sun, followed suit in the summer of his fifteenth year and picked up a shovel for Athens Construction.

  By the middle of June he had seduced the foreman, also a Greek and extremely married, who could not bear the guilty wages of desire and fired Sonny before he killed him. Stathis Cevathas, the rhyming patriarch of the family and the Greekest man in Fresno, never quite understood what had transpired. But with a sixth sense for the horrors of fate, he kept his third son clear of the business ever afterward.

  It didn’t deliver Sonny from the dreams of married men. At sixteen he was a bag boy at Safeway, working “12 Items or Less” from five to seven, when business types would stop off on the way home with the sudden lists of their wives. Sonny would stare them down in their three-piece suits, and every couple of weeks a white card would flash and exchange hands as Sonny gave over the paper sack. “Why don’t you give me a call?” they’d say.

  He did it in high-rise offices, as high as they rose in Fresno anyway. In BMWs and Jeep Comanches, in weekend cabins in the high Sierra. Once in a barn in a rusty sleigh, with a man who owned two mountains. Sonny never really felt gay; he had nobody gay to talk to. He never felt anything. Years later, a therapist at a walk-in clinic suggested that Sonny had spent his adolescence being sexually abused, but he never went back to find out why.

  When he was seventeen he was meant to go to college, despite functional illiteracy. Stathis Cevathas had decided his questionable son would be a professional man. The Cal/State branch in the next county was willing to overlook the C’s and D’s on Sonny’s record, being as Athens Construction had built the entire campus from the ground up. Sonny had no opinion in the matter.

  He was required to make up a failing grade in Spanish with summer work, and his father hired as tutor the non-Greek loser husband of his sister Urania. The husband of Urania was a professor of Romance Languages at NYU, not a loser at all. He loathed the Cevathas clan of Fresno, but nevertheless spent summers there for his wife’s sake. The Spanish lesson was from five to seven, necessitating a rearrangement of Sonny’s hours as bag boy. It was only a matter of time between irregular verbs and fate.

  One searing day in July, an ocean of heat surging across the valley floor, Stathis came home with terrible heartburn. He lumbered into the bathroom for Gelusil and drank it from the bottle, staring at a picture of his wife and three boys. His eyes welled with the fullness of life. Carol the wife was out doing good works of an Orthodox nature, and the backfield brothers were pouring concrete at a shopping center. The ache of love in Stathis’s heart was so intense, he moved blindly to the room of his third son, feeling he would burst if he didn’t hug someone.

  He threw open the door and stepped inside, the king come to visit the prince. At first he couldn’t even see what he saw. He averted his eyes to the desk where Sonny should have been sitting, with the Spanish grammar and the dictionary. Instead the boy was naked and leaning against the dresser, being fucked from behind by the husband of Urania. The rutting pair were strangely silent, no moans or gasps, and hadn’t even heard the door open. It was Stathis who gave the first groan as his heart broke.

  The husband of Urania, his pants around his ankles, turned and looked in horror. Instantly he pulled out of the boy. His big shiny penis swayed before him, foolish and ungainly. Sonny was more languid as he glanced over his shoulder at his father. His bare butt was still thrust out coyly, the look on his face more fascinated than surprised.

  Rock-hard from a life of shoveling, Stathis lunged at the husband of Urania and threw him against the closet door. All of the screaming went on in Greek, but the motif word was incest. Though Stathis was three times stronger, the professor abominated his brother-in-law, so they were equally matched in passion. They grappled and gouged and crashed to the floor, spitting like Medea.

  Sonny darted across to the pool of his clothes beside the desk. He slipped into his jeans and a work shirt, then sat on the desk chair to pull on his socks and sneakers. Even as his father and uncle rolled in fury, heaving up against the furniture, Sonny’s mind was icy-clear. He swept the room with his eyes, abandoning all the paraphernalia of his childhood. He didn’t really need a thing.

  By now Stathis had started to scream—cunt, whore—and gladly would’ve turned his rage on the son who had blackened his name. But the husband of Urania had gotten the upper hand, pinning the patriarch to the floor and banging his head like a gavel. Sonny opened the center drawer and lifted out an envelope full of his bag boy savings. He took a last look at the clutter on his desk, almost wishing there was something worthy of a souvenir, but nothing sentimental caught his eye.

  Sonny skirted by the two men on the floor and out the door. He flew down the stairs, the walls swirling with red and gold flocked paper. As he ran outside he had a wondering moment: Could he really leave without any plan at all?

  A midnight-blue LTD was just pulling into the driveway. His mother was at the wheel, his Aunt Urania in the passenger’s seat. Sonny grinned and waved, sprinting away down the sidewalk as if he’d been sent to buy milk and the evening paper. He never looked back and never wrote, thus escaping the wrath of Stathis Cevathas. Yet even as he took to the open road, to wander the next ten years, Sonny never lost the feeling of being a hairsbreadth away from getting torn apart.

  When Lorenzo Delgado Espinoza arrived in Los Angeles, on the third of June in 1978, he had been on the road four months, overland fifteen hundred miles. The village he left behind, on the shore of a marshy lake south of Morelia, with a view to the humid slopes of Taucitaro, mountain of the lost gold, was not equipped with a telephone or even a post office. In order
to send money to his mother and three sisters, Lorenzo Delgado had to ricochet every dollar through a cousin in Mexico City. The cousin creamed twenty-five cents off the top, as did the traveling lawyer who wound his circuitous way to the marshy lake three times a year. Even so, the Espinoza girls were the best dressed in the district school. On her sixteenth birthday Linda Espinoza was able to buy in the market at Morelia a pair of Calvin Klein jeans. This was what it meant that her brother had gone to the end of the earth to be a gardener’s helper, armed with a leaf blower and not a submachine gun, but a revolutionary all the same.

  By the time Linda was nineteen, her brother had reached the stature of myth. He’d been living in California for five years, moving from leaf blower to a truck of his own and a couple of assistants. The money orders increased proportionally, such that the cousin in Mexico City was able to reupholster his living room. For her part, Linda’s mother vacated the mud house on the marsh and moved into town with her three daughters, to a house of concrete blocks sturdy as an air-raid shelter.

  Beatriz Espinoza lit candles daily to her wonderful son. Within a year the prosperous older daughters had taken husbands. Linda began to write letters to Lorenzo Delgado, for at last they were on a postal route and could get their money direct. Linda gave sharp and ironic descriptions of her brothers-in-law, and of the doctor’s office in Morelia where she worked as a receptionist. She always ended by asking, “When are you coming to visit?”

  He never exactly answered her, but took to scrawling a note with the money order, sending his love to all. Linda wasn’t remotely hurt. Her brother was so superior to the bewildered young men of Morelia, even to those who took off for the States themselves. Lorenzo Delgado, ten years older than Linda, had seemed heroically handsome when he left the weed-choked lake at twenty-three. He hadn’t been saddled with wife or even girlfriend, his dreamy smile fixed instead on the life he would make for himself alone. Even at thirteen, with her black pigtail and her somber eyes, Linda understood there was more to life than settling down.