Afterlife

by Paul Monette

  Now he surveyed his half-acre, the sprinklers playing on the dusty prow of the hill. A lunatic idea bloomed in Steven’s brain: the hillside covered with ferns and orchids. He thrashed around to the side of the house, skirting a sprinkler’s halo, making for the faucet on the northeast corner. All along this flank the lantana, thriving on thirst, had blanketed the slope in a twisted thicket. To reach the tap Steven had to crash his way through a maze of branches.

  As he bent to turn the water on, he saw the dog, curled in a shady hollow in the underbrush about four feet away. Its nose was on its paws, its glowering eyes on Steven. The animal growled threateningly, just this side of bared fangs. “Fuck you,” retorted Steven.

  He turned the faucet on hard, and the sprinklers in the eastern quarter burst with spray. Since one of these was a bare stone’s throw from where they crouched, it began to rain lightly through the bushes. The dog didn’t move from his burrowed place, or even lift his head. Getting wet was the given of a rainy day. Ringed around him in the hollowed-out cave in the bushes were the stubs of bones he had scavenged on Wednesday nights. The two of them blinked at each other with studied indifference.

  “Just don’t get any ideas,” Steven murmured disdainfully, rising out of the brambles.

  He slogged to the front of the house again, the squish of mud around his shoes. Across the hill the sprinklers’ mist was shot with minor rainbows. Irrelevantly Steven wondered: If he had Thanksgiving here, could he keep it to eight people, since eight was all the movable chairs he had? A startling thought for a man who, except for his funeral, never planned anything more than two months in advance.

  He was trying to wish smaller than Christmas, apparently, thrown for a moment back to life Before, when he and Victor took in all their circle’s refugees for a plate of turkey. Even as he smiled at the memory, he stopped in his tracks in the ivy, soaking wet from the knees down, squinting into the afternoon sun. Aside from Margaret Kirkham and now Mark Inman, he couldn’t think who else to invite.

  Ray Lee, perhaps, and maybe Heather, though it wouldn’t do to make Thanksgiving a company picnic. Of course he had to include Dell and Sonny, being as it was a holiday. But he couldn’t avoid the sinking feeling of having no one left for the eighth chair. Then he remembered Dell had a sister, even though he’d never met her. He felt better already, just having his table full, and rambled around to his front door, candying yams in his head. Drenched in the fullness of his reprieve.

  When Mark got back from London, ready to kill, there were a hundred and nineteen calls on his call list. His plane touched down at two-thirty, and he told the driver to take him directly to the studio. He was still reeling with jet lag from flying the other way four days ago, but since he’d never had time for jet lag before—a wimp’s condition—he wasn’t buying it now. No, this was the start of dying. There wasn’t a test for it exactly, any more than he could put his finger on a symptom. He just felt sapped. And even if no one could tell him how long, he knew it was only a matter of time before the shrunken shell of him went into its final spasm.

  He sat dully in the back of the limo, hands hanging limply over his knees. His briefcase lay bewildered beside him. He could’ve returned ten calls between LAX and Burbank, but he didn’t. At the Dorchester he’d confined his telephoning to doctors, all over Europe, trying to get a straight answer about drugs. It was quickly obvious there was no sure deal on a magic bullet. Maybe, maybe not, they told him in Paris, Zurich, Stockholm. He thought he’d explode if he heard them say “promising” one more time.

  The guard at the Barham Boulevard gate waved them in, with a fawning smile at the smoked-glass window in the back. The limo wound its stately way through the outskirts of the lot, past the post-nuclear silence of a dusty New York street. Behind the executive building a row of tall eucalyptus trees swayed lazily, trailing along the ridge of a dry wash where savages used to slaughter noble cavalry. At the end of the ridge stood a cluster of thirties bungalows.

  Mark climbed out in his Bond Street grays, the driver promising to leave off his luggage at the house on Skyway Lane, also to lay in milk and juice. Mark stood on the bungalow stoop for a moment, as if he had suffered a brief amnesia. For two years he’d rocketed through this door at full throttle. Now there was something oddly timid about his hand on the screen door latch, dangerously quiet, like men who arrive at work one morning smiling, with a bullet for everyone.

  Connie Hinton, Mark’s dogged secretary, was up from her desk and firing the instant he stepped inside. “Lou’s in Chicago, he wants to buy a horse,” she said without preamble. “A million two, and he doesn’t have his checkbook.” She followed her boss as he headed silently into his inner office. Everything here was gray, and as subtly tailored as the Bond Street suit. The window blinds were tilted to banish the afternoon light. “Eric’s been calling all morning,” Connie continued as Mark went around his desk. “He tried to call your plane. Paramount’s upped their offer, Sid says no, Angela wants him to do it.”

  Eric was Lou Ciotta’s lawyer, Sid his bug-eyed manager, Angela his wife. None of them knew that Mark was gay, or at least they never said so, at least to Mark. Connie, who would’ve taken this job for half the pay, so mystical was the place to her, knew everything but didn’t speak either. “Ted Kneeland just called,” she added neutrally, about as far as she went into lifestyle matters.

  Mark stood at his desk but didn’t sit down. The full list of the hundred and nineteen calls was typed out on three neat pages, edge to edge on the blotter. He sent Connie out to gather all the principals of the Paramount deal, then glanced down the roster of players who wanted a piece of Lou. Still he did not sit down, the briefcase still in his hand.

  The fifth season of “Hard Knocks” was scheduled to commence two weeks from Wednesday. By spring the show would be ready for sale to syndication, and then Lou would have enough cash to buy all the horses of Arabia. The Paramount deal was for a feature, a good cop/bad cop comedy, to be shot during Lou’s hiatus. Angela, formerly Miss Arizona, who shopped with a murderous vengeance day after day, never lost sight of the golden goose in all of this. Eagerly she encouraged Lou’s product spokesmanship throughout the western world: batteries, soft drinks, fitness parlors.

  On the wall opposite, Lou Ciotta grinned from a shiny Cibachrome print, the prototype for a poster that had sold seven million units in the last two years. Lou’s bedroom eyes were full of dirty linen, and he wore a baby-blue tank top that showed a lot of pumped and hairy cleavage. Mark’s job was to graph the national turn-on that Lou evoked, working with total abstractedness, since Lou did nothing for him personally. He’d sat through countless meetings poolside at Lou’s house in Malibu, himself in a tie and Lou in a tank suit, peaceable as a eunuch while Lou scratched his voluminous basket.

  Connie buzzed: Sid Rawls on the line. Mark picked up and went into automatic overdrive, parsing the Paramount deal. Quickly they worked out a counteroffer, its tax loopholes intricate as crochet. Sid didn’t ask how London was or tell a joke. The deal was all there was between them, until the end, when Sid tossed out, “So, who’s the lucky girl you’re bringing Sunday?”

  Mark chuckled dryly. “Sorry, I haven’t got that far yet,” he replied, but promised he’d drop by Sid’s house after the show. He hung up and glared at his week-at-a-glance, where Connie had written in red for Sunday: EMMYS, 5 P.M. His jaw tightened decisively. He tapped a number and flicked the phone to the speaker box, moving around to swing his door shut.

  “Hello?” Ted Kneeland’s voice was bright and inexhaustible, like the boy himself.

  “Hi, it’s me.”

  “Hey, welcome home. How’s Fergie and Di?” Like a cheerleader with a megaphone. “I decided I’m cooking you dinner. Nothing drab and English, I promise.”

  “Listen, I’m busy tonight.”

  “Oh, I thought we said …” Mark could hear the younger man shift gears and swallow the protest. Ted was right, of course: there was a date. “No problem. I’ll come by lat
er.” In just five weeks he was so well trained.

  “Look, Ted, I want to be alone right now. I’ll call you, okay?”

  There was a moment’s silence, during which Ted must have calculated the odds of pushing the point. Not worth it. “Right now” was forever, as far as they were concerned. Or maybe Ted was shrewder than that, stopping to wonder what he had left behind in Mark’s house. A pair of jeans, a couple of CD’s, nothing that couldn’t be replaced. “Yeah, sure,” he said evenly. “Take care, huh? I’ll see you around.”

  That was how easily it was done, as economical as a telegram. Mark’s pace seemed to quicken now as he swung the door open again, his private deal done with. He tossed the briefcase onto the sofa. Connie called out the executive’s name at Paramount, and he flicked off the box and grabbed the receiver, flinging down the new offer like a gauntlet. Before Paramount could catch its breath, Mark was on with Lou’s publicist, leaking the counteroffer. A call to the network, one to the agent, then touching base again with Sid. For the space of five minutes Mark seemed fully reconnected, but as soon as the circle of calls was done it all dissipated. Sitting down at last, he felt bloated and queasy, as if he’d just wolfed down a dozen doughnuts.

  Nobody knew anything. Mark talked to his Studio City doctor like a bachelor, the way he talked to the excitable women he took to black-tie functions. They knew and they didn’t know; they didn’t want to know. Eighteen months before, he had taken the antibody test anonymously at a gay clinic, sitting for twenty minutes’ counseling with a man who knew only his first name.

  Ted’s five weeks was short by the usual standard. Typically they lasted about three months. Even Ted would have lasted the full nine innings, except for the call from Brad’s father in San Bernardino. Until that night, Mark had succeeded in plotting his course on the good side of the percentages. There were guys who were going to squeak through and survive this thing, and he meant to make the cut. Otherwise he kept his fluids to himself, or shot them harmlessly into the air, like a gun on New Year’s Eve.

  Connie lobbed him a bunch of sucker calls, the kind he could put away with his eyes closed. The main piece of business right now was trying to find Lou Ciotta himself, whose chestnut stallion stamped the ground impatiently, longing to be in his retinue. Every few minutes, like a tongue on a sore tooth, Mark would glance at his call list, dissatisfied and impatient, trying to find someone he felt like calling. Mostly it was the standard cast of those who lunched too much. Some were gay and wanted checks. Some were friends who never missed a screening, but even they didn’t know he was dying.

  It wasn’t till his eye swept the third page for the fourth time that he registered his own name: Rob Inman. Sometimes Connie typed Your Dad instead, and among the list of agents’ names it sounded as if an Indian mystic had called. The number beside the name, beginning with 305, was indelible as a tattoo.

  The static on the line was heavy when Rob Inman picked up the phone in Fort Lauderdale. “Hello,” they called to each other, sailors on a stormy deck. “I said I was in London,” Mark repeated slowly. It was considered too much of a fuss by the elder Inman to call back and try for a better connection.

  “The show last night was a dog,” complained Rob Inman, ignoring London pointedly, unless it was a short in his hearing aid. “Where did you dig up that landlady? She don’t know how to play off Lou, and she don’t look Italian either. You need a guy.”

  “Thanks, Dad. I’ll have the casting people call you. How you doing?”

  “I should be a Nielsen home,” announced the old man. “Roz Schwartz is a Nielsen home, and she don’t watch nothin’ but soaps and Oprah.”

  Mark laughed and asked how Roz was doing, but the question got drowned in the static. The bristle of one-upmanship between Rob and Roz was the one safe topic, much to be preferred to what followed now, the recitation of the mortal ills of the father. Cholesterol 280, triglycerides up, suspicious swelling in the prostate. Mark never paid much attention, considering it a form of white noise, but lately there was anger too. Mark had blood counts of his own, as well as a chain of swollen lymph nodes in his neck.

  Yet even the list of ills was to be preferred, compared to what came next. “It’s her birthday next Wednesday,” declared Rob gravely. Mark said he knew. “She’d be seventy-one,” his father went on, the catch in his voice sharp enough to override the static.

  Mark didn’t think about his mother unless he had to. When she died eleven years ago, after three sudden months of cancer, people told him it was a blessing. Mark agreed with everyone who said it—agreed with everything anyone said, however vacuous. At the time he was still an actor; still straight. No end to the ways he could duck.

  “What are you planning for Wednesday?” he interjected when the old man paused between memories of the house in Manhasset, sold so Rob could flee to the waiting room of Lauderdale.

  “Nothing special. Roz and me’ll go to the track, maybe get a bite. I try to keep busy.”

  He had never yet said he and Roz were an item, however an item worked in south Florida. They had separate condos across the pool. They each had children in California—once, Mark endured an appalling call at the office from Nelson, son of Roz, inviting him to a barbecue. Sometimes Mark thought his father wanted to say more about Roz, but he never seemed to give the right cue.

  “So who’s your date for the Emmys?”

  Mark chuckled a bit louder this time. “I haven’t got that far yet,” he said.

  “You mean you got Friday and Saturday first. Hell, you can go three for three.”

  Mark never picked up on the playboy talk, but that didn’t stop it. A fantasy of the old man’s, from a youth cut short by marriage. Yet it was only after Eileen died that Rob started thinking about what he’d missed. The blondes he saw at the Emmys mocked him. It was a most ambiguous consolation that one of these walked in on the arm of his only son.

  “When you coming down to see us?”

  “Oh, I’ll get there,” Mark replied, the answer as rote as the question, their way of saying good-bye. Thus it was uncharted territory—Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff—when Mark added haltingly, “We need to sit down and talk.”

  Even as it tumbled out, he loathed the banality of it. There was a startled silence at the other end. Mark saw the two of them sitting on the condo’s narrow balcony, overlooking a Pitch ‘n’ Putt, but he wasn’t sure which he wanted to say: gay or dying. Probably both, but he hadn’t got that far either.

  “Well, you come on down whenever you like,” replied his father briskly. It wasn’t clear why they couldn’t do this talking on the phone. “Least we can help you blow your savings on the ponies. We’ll be watchin’ for you Sunday night. Good luck.”

  “Thanks, Dad, but I haven’t even been nominated.”

  “You’re a winner in our book, son.” The sincerity in his voice was real, even if the clichés were slightly askew. All Rob Inman could do with his heart was wear it on his sleeve. Their actual good-byes were clumsy and glancing as ever, the work of two men who avoided embracing. They hung up at exactly the same moment so nobody had to do it first.

  Connie buzzed in with lightning speed: “We found him. They’re transferring now. On two.”

  Mark waited for the prince of the Wednesday lineup, his eyes moving without thinking to the graven image of same across the room. Lou Ciotta, the current national mascot, radiated health. Untold thousands of hopeful actors looked as good, the beautifully unemployed with their bad glossies and puffed résumés, but this one happened to have won the lottery. Happily he was also a moron, so he never lost sleep wondering if he deserved it.

  Two flashed, and Mark picked up: “Hey, Tiger.”

  “Okay, what’s the problem? If I want a fuckin’ horse, it’s my business.”

  “I don’t know about the problem,” Mark responded smoothly, poising pen over paper.

  “Eric’s doin’ this trip on Angela—like we can’t afford it. I don’t want to hear that shit. It’s all
I ever heard growin’ up.”

  “Eric’s just being protective,” said Mark. On the memo pad he wrote horse.

  “Call the bank and get ’em to wire the money. Today.” End of discussion. Mark wrote 1.2 under horse. “Now, about this picture. Angela says the other guy’s got all the laughs. I want the laughs.”

  “Lou, you’ve got just as many laughs. It’s a buddy picture. You’re both hysterical.”

  “Yeah, well, either they change it or they can sit on it.”

  Underneath 1.2 Mark wrote laughs. “I think it’s a little premature. Counteroffer’s two and a half mill. They may tell us to sit on it.”

  “Whatever,” Lou retorted dismissively, as if the deal-making procedure were beneath his notice. The full tantrum would wait till the deal was done. “Angela needs a new psychic. Make sure he does house calls.”

  “What’s wrong with the one she has?”

  “He don’t do channeling.” Under laughs Mark wrote channeler. “Listen, what am I gonna get her for her birthday? I was thinkin’ a boat. What do you think?”

  “Why don’t you get her a feed bag?”

  “What?”

  Mark set down the pen beside the memo. “Well, it’s like this, Lou. I don’t really give a fuck.”

  There was an odd aphasic pause at the other end, longer than Ted Kneeland, longer than Rob Inman. Mark glanced across at the poster again, to savor the shit-eating grin that had vanished just now in Chicago. Lou said: “This is a joke, right?”

  “I don’t think so, Lou. You get all the laughs, remember?”

  Mark could hear him breathing heavy, as if he’d just worked out, a photogenic film of sweat gleaming on his charmed torso. “Listen, if this is some kind of fag shit, I don’t got the time. Talk straight to me, man. What’s the deal?”

  “No deal, Lou. I was just thinking, maybe Angela can get it on with the horse. That ought to channel her pretty good.”