Afterlife

by Paul Monette

  If they weren’t going to be an item, perhaps they would try to be buddies. That was how Steven read the next call, ten days later, time enough to draw the line in the dirt between them. The message on Steven’s machine asked if he wanted to go to a meeting at the gay center. A drop-in group for seropositives, what they called in the crisis trade a “rap/support.” No reference whatsoever to their Sunday lunch.

  Steven was surprised that Mark would even consider such a gathering, given its potential for whining and general bullshit. Dysfunctional himself when it came to groups of strangers, since Victor’s death he had avoided all movies and malls and public events. The only groups Steven ever saw anymore were at funerals. But yes, he told Mark’s machine, he’d be there Thursday night, and agreed it would be easier if they went in separate cars.

  Gay and Lesbian Central was a former hooker motel on Highland, deep in the tatters of Hollywood, a warren of makeshift offices around a central court. Runaways sat on folded chairs waiting for someone to make it all better, dreading another night on the street. Meanwhile, underpaid staffers churned about with sign-up sheets, putting groups together: gay fathers, the semi-recovered, bulimics and overeaters twinned like Laurel and Hardy.

  In Polo shirt and jeans, Steven walked over to the main counter, where a dyke in a hooded sweatshirt sat before the switchboard, fielding the night’s calls. When she answered she was very brisk, her voice as clipped as her mackerel hair, making it clear that she didn’t consider herself a hotline. Haltingly Steven started to ask where the seropositives were. She pointed upstairs before he even finished the “sero” word, making him wonder how sick he looked.

  The battered meeting room was about the size of a second bedroom, with two tiers of carpeted benches built around the walls, and perhaps a dozen people sitting, mostly men and mostly younger. Mark sat across from the door and smiled as Steven came in. The meeting had already started, so Steven took a quick seat beside a boy with a platinum buzz-cut and a cluster of earrings along one lobe.

  A middle-aged man—too thin, too gray—was railing at the group about his doctor. “Just the art in his office looks like a fuckin’ museum! Why should he get rich off us? By the time I croak, he’s gonna have a house in Malibu.”

  “So what?” asked a pumped-up man on the tier below. “It’s not his fault you’re sick. Stop displacing.”

  “I’m not sick,” the thin man shrieked.

  “It’s no one’s fault,” clamored a voice beside him, a willowy girl in Esprit pastels.

  She, it turned out, had been infected by a hemophiliac boyfriend, the only man she’d ever slept with. Dead now, proclaiming till the very end that he was “innocent.” The girl, Marina, had nowhere else to go for support besides Gay Central. The same was true for the black woman next to Mark—Charlene, who got it from a man who shot speedballs.

  In fact they were all bizarrely different from each other, random as a planeload of refugees. And as far as Steven could tell, nobody listened to anyone else. They were all too angry, too upset, and everything got lost in cross talk. Before ten minutes was up Steven was feeling extremely claustrophobic.

  The hemophiliac’s girl was especially hard on a tall sandy-haired kid who sat under the wheezing air conditioner. He declared he had no intention of getting sick, and all the people who did were full of bad attitude. He was maybe twenty-five. “There’s too much negative shit in here,” he concluded with a grimace. “Can’t we lighten up?”

  “Listen, Andy,” Marina hissed at him, “my Jim had great attitude, and he died like a vegetable anyway. So don’t tell me to look on the bright side. We’re all going to die here.”

  “Easy, easy,” said the buzz-cut boy by Steven, who turned out to be the facilitator. “Let’s keep it to feelings, shall we? Let’s not judge. Try to say ‘I,’ not ‘we.’”

  Marina apologized to Andy. Steven looked at his watch. He knew already he would never open his mouth in this group. He couldn’t begin a single sentence with “I,” and besides, he liked being judgmental. He’d already judged the whole room, in fact, with its rancid smell of old Reeboks, and found them all wanting. He was damned if he would be their token widow.

  At least he wasn’t the oldest. Following up the facilitator, a bearded type in a tweed jacket said he felt like the group’s gay uncle. “I’m fifty-seven years old,” he announced proudly, “and when I came out there were no parades. It doesn’t surprise me that they’re letting us die.” They were the Feds, whose informed neglect was a leitmotif of the group’s rage. “But I’m not gonna go quiet. They’ll have to drag me outa here kicking and screaming. I’ve seen those camps where they locked up the Japanese.” He folded his arms, proud and stubborn. For a moment the room was charged with defiance.

  Who did these people love? thought Steven as an envelope was passed to him for the night’s donation. Who loved them back? He slipped two dollars in, guilty as a parishioner. The uncle was taking care of his mother, eighty-three and bonkers, and only hoped he wouldn’t die or be shipped to the camps before she went. Nobody in the group told him the idea of camps was paranoid. An initiative on the November ballot required all those infected with the virus to be on a master list in Sacramento. The state health commissioner—Dr. Mengele to his gay friends—would be given broad power to quarantine at will. “Yes on Proposition 81” was running sixty/forty in the polls.

  “Don’t matter where I die,” said a red-faced man with a Southern accent, “long as I don’t die alone.”

  Vic, thought Steven, his mind reaching out still, trying to pull Victor back from the edge for a year, then trying to help him go over. Steven had missed the actual moment by ten minutes, gulping Sanka in the hospital cafeteria. Died alone.

  Then suddenly Mark was speaking, slow and uncertain, and Steven looked over. Mark held out the palms of his hands, as if backing the world off. “I used to be an actor,” he said. “Closest I ever let anyone come was Row G.” He laughed, but nobody else got the joke. “That’s where the critics sit,” he added lamely, unsure where he was going now. “I even had a series for a while. I was twenty-eight, but I played nineteen. I let the camera get real close.” The irony in his voice was fierce, but the rest of them continued to look perplexed, as if Mark had come to the wrong room.

  “Excuse me,” asked Marina, “but what’s that got to do with AIDS?”

  “Nothing, really,” Mark admitted with a shrug. “Except now I want to be close to people, and it’s too late. I’m on my way out, and I still put up all these walls.”

  “It’s never too late to fall in love,” observed the Southern man. “I do it at least once a month, whether I need it or not.”

  They all laughed. The ball bounced back to the uncle and his mother—something Charlene could relate to, since her mother and grandmother both lived with her. A straw poll was taken around the room, and it turned out no one had told his family but the thin gray man, whose American Gothic mom and dad had advised him to go to church and disinvited him for Christmas, saying they were keeping it small this year.

  Steven wasn’t interested in anybody’s family, especially his own, strewn across southern Ohio in sullen bungalows off interstates, never quite living in one town or another. He checked in with the parents once a month, usually Sunday mornings when his father was out hunting. His mother would give him an automatic chronicle of his sisters and cousins and all their brood, the union layoffs and small arrests. Never a word about Victor since he died, or the grief or Steven’s precarious health. Steven’s life didn’t exist at all, which was fine with him. Or Victor’s father would call sometimes from Montana, drunk and late at night. He’d cry and tell Steven how sorry he was, and when he was done he would say, “Good night, son,” making Steven blush.

  He wanted to veer the discussion back to relationships again, but he couldn’t be the one to do it. Back and forth the group played with the family issue, Steven tuning out. Telling meant nothing to him. Ever since Victor left the phone company, since the day the f
irst lesion bloomed on his face, everyone waited for Steven to be next.

  Finally Andy piped in: “I’d like to go back to what Mark said.” Steven perked up and smiled crookedly. “I’m twenty-six, and I feel like I’m never going to be with a man again. I don’t know which is deader, me or my dick.”

  Murmurs of assent around the room. The Southern man—Emmett—drawled the tale of a boyfriend who walked out on him the day Emmett found out he was positive.

  “Sounds like you’re lucky to be rid of him,” said Mark. “He sounds like an asshole.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” sighed Emmett. “But I miss the body heat.”

  Marina objected again. She didn’t come to the group to listen to the problems of gay dating. She’d apparently been a regular at the Thursday rap for months, and had evolved to a sort of den-mother status, in her own mind anyway. She was more than a little appalled by the constant refrain of the men, who still acted as if their major goal was finding a boyfriend. Survival was their main job, she told them, and for once the facilitator didn’t stop her from saying “we.”

  So the boys backed off from their lonely hearts, as conversation shifted now to medication and research. Everyone seemed to be taking something different and was armed with newsletters and offprints, fierce as an eighth-grade science project. Not that the line wasn’t utterly blurred between science and metaphysics, as several people shared their regimens of macro suet and imaging. Andy was especially eloquent here, with his peaks of self-hypnosis.

  Steven didn’t hear a word of it. He’d become aware that Emmett was cruising Mark from the moment of his freefall declaration of love. The Southern boy was chunky, with sloe-gin eyes and a constant antic smile, overripe and slightly bruised, like a fallen peach. He raised his eyes to the ceiling when Marina dampened the boy friend talk, a look meant solely for Mark. And all through the rest of the meeting Emmett stretched his legs out, hitched at his crotch, plumped his hair, a veritable symphony of self-consciousness. Steven couldn’t see how Mark was responding to the dumb show of courting, but figured Emmett wouldn’t keep it going if he weren’t getting teased back.

  High school again. Steven was suddenly back in the bleachers beside his buddy Daryl, who squirmed and strutted in his seat as he locked eyes with Lisa Connor, the flame of his roaring pubescence. In the gloomy algebra of life, Daryl had been to Steven what Lisa was to Daryl, but all unrequited. Steven had sat stone still in the bleachers, swallowing his hard-on, his knee in a faint as it brushed Daryl’s thigh.

  The last thing he needed right now was a repeat of Daryl Sawyer. Yet he found himself staring across at Emmett with the same lip-curling contempt he used to feel for Lisa Connor. Hussy. Cow.

  The meeting broke at eight-thirty, with Tim the facilitator coaxing them to return again. The group fell into twos and threes as they gathered their things. Steven watched Emmett stand up and stretch his back, rolling his hips forward in a lurid thrust. Steven, who couldn’t somehow avoid the view from crotch level, noted the curve of the boy’s Southern dick, heavy in the cradle of his sweatpants. Emmett’s eyes danced as he leaned past Steven toward the upper bench where Mark was sitting.

  “You want to grab a bite?” asked Emmett.

  Steven felt his stomach tilt, thinking of Mark’s face buried in Emmett’s groin, the queasy porno of jealousy. But it was the uncle who answered yes to Emmett’s invitation. Steven turned bewildered to find he’d got it all wrong. Mark was crouched on the upper bench, scribbling his number on a scrap of paper, then handing it to Tim the facilitator. The look that passed between them was careful and correct, but there wasn’t any question where they were going.

  Steven felt doltish and slow, watching the uncle and Emmett saunter out together, wishing now he’d been nice to someone so he wouldn’t have to leave alone. But he must leave now, that was clear. It would be more humiliating to wait for Mark, who stayed crouched while Tim borrowed his pen to write a number of his own. Steven prayed his face wasn’t burning as he trampled past Andy and out of the room. It didn’t even cross his mind then that anyone looked at him, that Andy might have been lingering there in the doorway hoping for an older man.

  The dyke, still on the phone, was powdering her coffee with Coffeemate. She winked at Steven as he passed. The street kids on the folding chairs looked up like a litter of spaniels at the pound, and Steven shrank with guilt, wishing he could rain down dollars on them. He stepped outside, gasping with an overwhelming sadness, which for once had nothing to do with Victor. That was the saddest thing of all.

  “We didn’t hear much from you,” said a sudden voice beside him. Statement of fact; no accusation.

  He turned. It was Marina. “I don’t think I’m the group type,” he said, trying to be as direct as she.

  “You sent me to Holland,” she replied without any transition. He stared at her, confused. “I was on my way to Israel, and you convinced me to lay over in Amsterdam.” Steven nodded vaguely, amazed that he’d ever been so forceful, even in the throes of Shaw Travel. “All those Rembrandts and Van Goghs,” she declared with a wondering smile. “I always meant to call and thank you.”

  Steven made a scoffing sound, modest as Mother Teresa. Not that he could recall the encounter. He’d probably suggested the layover flight because he got a better cut from KLM.

  “Now that I’m afraid to travel,” she said, “those little side trips seem more special. I’m sorry about your friend.”

  Steven made another sound of dismissal, but this one sputtered. She laid her hand on his arm, and he froze as if someone were trying to put in an IV. She knew too much about him. He didn’t want to be solicited anymore. But she seemed content to have him say nothing in reply, and he looked beyond her shoulder and waited for the touch to be over. Then the door opened behind them, and Mark and Tim walked out, close in conversation, too absorbed to notice Steven and Marina. The two men turned and headed down Highland shoulder to shoulder, and Steven felt like Barbara Stanwyck peering in the final window.

  “I’m too hard on the boys,” said Marina, withdrawing her hand at last, leaving a numbness on his arm. “I guess it’s because I’m not ready myself. To love, I mean.” Mark and his new boyfriend had reached the black Jeep, parked at the curb about halfway down the block. “Are you?”

  They were figuring out whether to take one car or two. Whose place to go. Steven forced himself to look back at Marina’s face, framed in a tumble of curls. “Am I what?”

  “You know … open.”

  “I guess,” he replied, deflated. Not till now did he think of her as a fellow widow. She’d only been engaged to the bleeder; only known him two years before he got sick. But Steven wasn’t in the mood to act superior. “It’s all a mess,” he admitted. “I can’t make it work anymore.”

  Marina nodded gravely. “I’m never going to have a child,” she said. “That’s the hardest part.”

  There was no self-pity, only a kind of amazement. She looked so spunky in her white silk blouse with the floppy bow, not wilted at all by her two hours in the locker room with the guys. Steven reached out and touched her arm in the hollow of the elbow, just where she had touched him. Out of the corner of his eye Steven saw Tim trot across the street to his car, jump in, and peel off in a U-turn to follow Mark.

  “Main job,” said Steven gently. “Survival, right?”

  “Yeah, right,” she sighed. “See you next Thursday, huh?”

  And she strolled away before he could tell her no, he wasn’t coming back. He couldn’t stand the responsibility. Why else had he sat in his house for a year, avoiding the phone, avoiding daylight? They all took off into the night—Marina, Emmett and the uncle, Mark and Tim—and Steven was left on the sidewalk, stupid as a panhandler.

  He knew the difference between jealousy and love. He spent the next few days de-escalating. Maybe they could be buddies, maybe even friends, but not yet. He didn’t blame Mark for any of it. Steven had whipped these emotions up all on his own. There was a message on his machine
the following day: “How did you sneak out of there last night? There was something I wanted to tell you.” Well, it would wait.

  He didn’t have anything else to do, but that was nothing new. Margaret brought him supper one night, veal chops and twice-baked potatoes. She asked him only once about Mark, whom he dismissed with airy vagueness, as if they hadn’t laid eyes on each other since the party three weeks ago. There was tension between Margaret and her boyfriend Richard, because he’d been pestering her to go away for a three-day weekend, and she was too busy running Shaw Travel. “He mopes when he thinks you get all the attention,” Margaret declared. “He says I spoil you. But I spoil everybody.”

  Steven was really quite recovered by Monday night. Saturday and Sunday he went to Forest Lawn to visit Victor but managed not to cry. The anniversary echoes seemed to have subsided. Mark was just a symptom of the residue of pain. At least, thought Steven, he’d held himself from blurting it out. No hopeless declarations to take back.

  It was nine o’clock and he was standing on the back terrace, peering along the side of the hill. In the dark he couldn’t see if the dog was in his burrow beneath the lantana. “Hey,” Steven called gruffly, tossing one of the veal bones. As it thumped to the ground, he could hear the animal scramble for it, crashing out of the thicket. The barest shadow of him was visible beyond the light that poured from the house. “Now get out of here!” Steven barked as the phone began to ring. The dog growled horribly, hunkered over his bone. Steven padded back to the kitchen, slamming the door on sentiment.

  It was Mark. “How come you didn’t call me back?”

  “Oh, hi.” Steven opened the freezer door, determined to be casual. “I was out of town. In Santa Barbara. Sailing.”

  “Look, Steven, can you come over?”

  “Why?” He reached for the Häagen-Dazs. He could hear the upheaval in the other man’s voice. He couldn’t stand how much it excited him.