Afterlife

by Paul Monette

  “Sonny.” He looked away shyly and didn’t shake hands, for fear he would tremble. “Congratulations,” he said lamely, then laughed to think how earnest he sounded. “I don’t think I get modern art.”

  “Neither does my father. Modern money is what he collects.” The voice was smooth as bourbon. Stupidly Sonny stared at the open throat of Ellsworth’s shirt. He didn’t know where to rest his eyes, so skilled at looking at nothing when other men looked at him. “Are you bidding?” asked Ellsworth. “Or can we get out of here?”

  “Could we just have coffee first?”

  “He wants to know my intentions.” Ellsworth folded his arms, brimming with amusement. “Dishonorable,” he admitted with a small shrug. “But fate is fate, right?”

  Indeed it was. Sonny grinned slyly, his sudden adolescence falling away like scales. The bond of destiny established, they walked out together into the rainy night, leaving the gang of art consultants to settle the details of Lot 31. They zigzagged through the city, stopping for coffee twice, buying a pair of umbrellas at an all-night Walgreen’s. Sonny could not recall ever laughing so much with anyone, as Ellsworth spilled the tale of his checkered dynasty.

  The father was a Florida toy magnate, the mother addicted to plastic surgery. Ellsworth had been disowned three separate times for being an invert, but the old man always took him back, needing an invert’s eye to build his art holdings. Ellsworth was pensioned off in L.A., a continent away from the Aryan supremacist barbecues of his parents. He came East only to buy immortal objects.

  Sonny invented nothing, laying out his dim youth in the hot flats of Fresno. Then all the glancing men he could remember, though his first rule had always been that no man in his life should know another. It took them nearly three hours to reach the East Fifties, pants drenched to their knees, shoes ruined. By the time they got to River House—the Second Cataract at last—Sonny felt what he always knew he would feel. That the married men at the Safeway, and all their kindred who fell in love with him for a night, were part of somebody else’s life, a man who wasn’t a prince.

  They cavorted among the baronial trappings like a couple of orphans loose in a castle. They ate peanut butter and banana sandwiches. They necked in the library and rollicked in the old man’s bed as if the elder Downs were squinting through a peephole. Two nights they curled in each other’s arms, never restless.

  “You realize what I’m giving up for you?” asked Sonny in mock dismay, standing naked in a window arch, flinging out a hand at the hive of the city below.

  “All your sons,” said Ellsworth, “unto a hundred generations.” In a tent-like Sulka robe of his father’s, he backed Sonny onto the window seat, grappled into his arms, and bit his neck softly. “Are you lost yet?”

  “Uh-uh,” Sonny retorted, tickling him to break the clinch, then pinning him in turn beside the open casement. A summer breeze drowsed in off the river. They hadn’t shaved in two days. Sonny whispered: “It’s all happened before, you know.”

  And at last he repeated the ballad Romy used to croon to him in the old kingdom off the Embarkadero, waiting all these years for a bloodbrother. He told it now playfully, interspersed with kisses, the first time he’d ever met a man’s hunger with an equal measure of his own. Always before he had let them want him. More than their wives and children, more than their land and chattels. He could make them give over everything for the hour they played with him.

  “Who does that make me? Pharaoh?”

  “I’m not sure yet.” Sonny licked at the head of Ellsworth’s dick and tasted pre-cum. “Clearly royal. Maybe not immortal.”

  “Just as long as you understand, darling, I don’t believe any of that shit.”

  “You don’t have to. I’m the channel.”

  He dove down and swallowed the other, his throat slack with passion. Ellsworth gripped the gold in his hair and heaved over and over, gritting his teeth with love. It hurt to come, and they cried out in protest, then collapsed in a heap on the window seat. As they groaned and laughed, Ellsworth spoke with a certain awe. “Egypt, I have to tell you,” he drawled, “you were born to live in the Eighties.”

  He must have bruised a muscle because he could feel it throb in his armpit as he walked home Sunday night from the gym. But then, he’d been tense all week, ever since Sean took off for Sydney. The dinner they’d planned had been put off three different times, on account of some business crisis. Sean apologized ripely, swearing to make it up, but all they had time for was a quick drink the night before he left, no chance to turn up the heat. The full overnighter would have to wait till Sean’s return—what Sonny considered his real audition. Meanwhile, he had discovered how very rich Sean was. It wasn’t banking but cable franchise, and the money was all his own, no checks doled out by a patriarch. A situation, in other words, that was starting to look quite princely.

  When he walked into the apartment, he wasn’t really surprised to hear the television in Dirk’s room, loud with the door half-shut. He was used to Dirk’s abrupt arrivals and departures. They weren’t exactly friends in any case, so Sonny didn’t feel impelled to duck his head in. They had made it work as roommates by keeping on separate flight paths.

  So he made himself a couple of bologna sandwiches and went in his own room. After he ate he fell asleep. When he woke at ten he was utterly refreshed, and decided to drop by Rage for a beer, since it wasn’t a zoo on a weeknight. He pulled off the dun-gray sweatshirt and bent to his laundry basket, shaking out a black T-shirt with a zap sign across the front. As he slipped it over his head, tight and sleek along his torso, making his nipples hard, he heard the TV again from Dirk’s room.

  It had been playing all along, all through his nap, but only now did it strike him as queer. Still very loud, blaring a sitcom, as if the station hadn’t been changed or the volume, ever since Sonny came in. He crossed the living room and pushed open the door. He saw Dirk’s uniform laid out neatly on a chair, blue and heroic. Dirk was in bed with the covers pulled up to his chin, maybe asleep. It wouldn’t have seemed weird at all if it hadn’t been for the television, so loud in the room that it hurt Sonny’s ears.

  “Hey, Captain, you think we could break the sound barrier some other time?”

  Dirk tossed his head on the pillow and grunted. Taking this for yes, Sonny moved to the set and hit the dial just as the canned audience erupted in laughter. On the screen was Lou Ciotta, bellowing at his brainy wife, the prizefighter and the professor. Suddenly mute.

  “You want to go grab a beer?” asked Sonny, just to fill up the silence, since he knew there was something wrong.

  “I can’t get warm,” said Dirk in an oddly muffled voice, peering now over the blankets. It was strange that someone so tan could be so pasty-faced. His eyes were hollow with exhaustion, and this in a man with the cushiest run in the business. Sonny walked over and laid a hand on his forehead. Like fire.

  “You got a fever,” he said, almost accusingly. “I’ll get you an aspirin.”

  He walked into Dirk’s bathroom and opened the cabinet above the sink, avoiding his own face in the mirror. The shelves were cluttered with the gray tubes and jars of Clinique, cheek by jowl with a box of Four-X rubbers. Sonny grabbed a bottle of Tylenol, filled a glass with water, and went back to Dirk. “Here,” he said impatiently when Dirk made no immediate move to sit up.

  With a weary moan, the co-pilot came up on one elbow, the coverlet falling away to his chest. It didn’t make sense how thin and frail his torso seemed. Sonny had worked out any number of times with him, had seen the fine broad barrel of that chest hardly a week ago. Dirk took the two white pills and popped them in his mouth. As he tilted back his head to drink, Sonny could see a patch of white fur along the inner side of the lower lip. Sonny’s chest began to pound.

  “Did you call the doctor?” he demanded as Dirk sank back on the pillow, shaking his head no. “Well, don’t you think you better call him?”

  “It’s just a bug,” murmured Dirk.

 
Sonny practically lurched from the room, hurrying out of the apartment as if he was late. He trotted down to the garage and pulled the Mercedes out, though it was only a few blocks to the bar and parking was always a hassle. There was such a wall up between him and Ellsworth’s illness that he didn’t let the memories flood back in, refused to see again the white patches that foamed over Ellsworth’s tongue, or hear the amulet phrase they had repeated over and over: “Just the flu.”

  Sonny didn’t know Dirk very well, but they’d traded sufficient sexual banter, the high points and fine points of their respective voyages, for Sonny to know the bottom line—or perhaps it was the top line. Dirk Ainley didn’t get fucked. This wasn’t especially a matter of pride or superiority. Actually Dirk felt guilty about it, to find himself hung up on such an unliberated posture. Nonetheless his ass was never in the air, so there wasn’t any way he could have picked up the virus. For all the shifting definitions of what constituted safe, one article of faith still held in the bombed-out world they moved in: if you’d never been a bottom, you were home free.

  Sonny had put it out of his mind entirely by the time he parked on Hilldale. He walked quickly to the boulevard and ducked into Rage, nodding at the bouncer, who passed him through without the five-dollar cover. It was mildly crowded, maybe two deep around the bar. Sonny stepped up and waited to order, casting his eyes around. In the first sweep he picked up six men cruising him—precruising actually, not at all sure they were worthy of him. At the end of the bar was an ordinary man, forty-five easy and clearly not a devotee of Prime Time. Mournfully smoking a cigarette, he looked at Sonny with a certain hunger in which there was no hope.

  Sonny took his beer and walked around, passing four other men who were much more suitable and much more ready. “Howdy,” he said, extending a neighborly hand to the smoking man, “I’m Sonny.”

  The guy was from Oklahoma City, for God’s sake. He could barely keep from gaping, he was so flabbergasted that Sonny had approached him. He answered every question earnestly, as if he were being interviewed for a job. He was too overwhelmed to ask anything back, but Sonny was marvelously open, spinning his own Sinbad tale from Fresno to Rage, including his metaphysical detour as Pharaoh’s cousin.

  Within five minutes he made Charlie Bekins of Oklahoma City feel irresistible and witty. When Sonny leaned over to laugh, he grazed his knee against Charlie’s, bumped his shoulder for emphasis. Even as he drained his first beer, Sonny declared with insolent good humor, “So why don’t we go back to your place?”

  Charlie nodded in a dumbstruck way, not even sure it wouldn’t cost him. He had a literal closet back home full of Matt Sterling and his ilk, and no amount of autoerotic swooning had ever made him believe he would have one in the flesh. But yes, even if he had to sign away all the traveler’s checks hidden in his boot, they would go back to his place.

  Which turned out to be the Beverly Hills Hotel, Bungalow 14. Sonny had to laugh at the synchronicity of that, as he followed Charlie down Sunset in the 380. He was going to spend the night first-class, he who would have happily curled up on a couch somewhere so long as he didn’t have to go home.

  The immortal part was over very fast, a double jerkoff in which they barely nodded to each other, let alone touched. But they were very nice, even gentlemanly, and the Oklahoman was quickly sound asleep, leaving Sonny to order a midnight breakfast from room service. He shut the bedroom door and sat in the bungalow living room in the white terry robe with the BH logo. When the food was wheeled in twenty minutes later, the night waiter turned out to be a face from across The Body Works.

  An actor/model/waiter named Bud, as beautiful as Sonny, who competed for the same rich forty-year-olds in the dating pool. They both knew the situation could just as easily have been reversed, with Sonny in the green bolero jacket and black pants. They laughed as if they were playing prince and pauper, Bud whisking the covers from the eggs Benedict and shrimp cocktail. Sonny signed the bill with a flourish and added a ten-dollar tip, then locked eyes with Bud.

  “There’s an awful lot of food here. Why don’t you pull up a chair?”

  “Can’t, I got orders.”

  “What about later?” persisted Sonny, the white robe yawning open.

  “Yeah, well,” replied the other, rolling his shoulders in the monkey jacket, “I go on my break at one.”

  One was fine. It gave Sonny the chance to take a shower and wash his hair with a spate of complimentary BH products. He toweled dry in front of a full-length mirror for the second time that night, this time examining himself inch by inch to make sure there were no bruises, sticking his tongue out. Everything checked out fine, and even the aching muscle under his arm had started to mend. He was brimming with health.

  By the time the waiter returned, Sonny was dozing on the hearth before a crackling fire. Bud woke him coming in, and Sonny stretched and groaned, shinnying out of the robe. Nothing required negotiation. Sonny watched the other strip out of his waiter’s mufti, dispassionate as the locker room. They didn’t even say hello. All the feeling was in their dicks as Bud came down on top of him, head to crotch. They fed on each other, enjoying it precisely the way they enjoyed a workout. It was Charlie Bekins who would have enjoyed it hugely, but he was sleeping serene as a deacon in the bedroom, missing the chance to see Jeff Stryker come to life. He surely would’ve gotten more out of it than they did.

  Not that they weren’t good at it: they came at the same time, their sixth sense for muscular contraction pulling their mouths away at the last possible moment so they shot free and clear, not a drop ingested. Thus on their deathbeds neither one would blame the other. They cleaned it up within ten seconds, using the pink BH napkin. Three minutes later Bud was dressed and gone, leaving Sonny with the ancient pledge of their common faith: “See you at the gym.”

  Actually Sonny was horny again before the creak of the room service cart had faded down the pathway from Bungalow 14. But that would’ve been true even if he’d had another and then another encounter—the desk clerk or the car valet, whoever still might be available in the night’s dead center. Sonny was being very disciplined, for him, to get himself dressed and out of there, without even a black swim in the pool of stars. And without a backward glance at Charlie, who wasn’t so Oklahoma City as to dream they would wake in each other’s arms. It was in the nature of a tumble with Sonny to wake up wondering if it happened at all.

  He drove back into West Hollywood, knowing now how the next part would unfold. He hadn’t decided any of it consciously. As usual, sex was the way he made the decision. Passing Rage, he felt a tug of raw intensity, watching the guys emerge in pairs as the 2 A.M. curfew fell. He left the Mercedes in the loading zone outside the apartment house, top down, trotted up the stairs, and soundlessly let himself in.

  Dirk’s light was off. He listened in the bedroom doorway, the copilot’s breathing heavy as a winter tide. He actually thought of going and getting the Tylenol, since it was close to time for the next dose, but then they would have to talk. It was Dirk who had chosen to be here, wherever the journey was going. Sonny had nothing to do with it. If a man who couldn’t possibly have the virus had it anyway, then he got what he wanted.

  He was able to do it all in two trips. The laundry basket, the orange crate full of books, an armload of clothes on hangers, and one frayed suitcase. This was twice as much as he really needed, but his life was already edited down enough to fill only half the 380’s trunk. He left the apartment keys on the board in the kitchen. No need to leave a forwarding address, since he never got any mail, and as for phone calls, the only one that mattered was Sean Pfeiffer’s, and he wouldn’t be back for ten days.

  By quarter to three he was driving up into the hills above Sunset, turning in at a cul-de-sac, passing a line of ranch houses that hung out over the mountain on stilts. At the end was a vacant lot where a bungalow had been accordioned by a mudslide. Sonny had parked here on several occasions, at the lip of the view, to make out with certain men from The
Body Works, certain men he didn’t want to go home with.

  He balled up a cashmere sweater of Ellsworth’s to make a pillow, then eased the car seat backward till he was nearly prone. He stroked the amethyst crystal that swung from the rearview mirror, then looked up at the starlit night serenely, almost philosophically, as if he was camping out in the wilderness. As he unhitched the buttons of his jeans and drew them down over his flanks, the memory of passion aroused him—the man from Oklahoma chomping his nipples, Bud hunkered above him. Though no one could bring Sonny off like he could himself, he needed all his men to do it—dozens and dozens, trailing back into the deep past, each of them brief and glancing but in the mass like a force of nature.

  He stroked and stroked. No man who had ever touched him was left out, for here all his lives were intact—the confederate soldier, the knight, the monk, the oracle, all his dreams in time. Every civilization had him, high on a mountain moaning in the night. He was the crux in which desire became pure spirit. He ran his other hand across the beautiful ripples of his belly, very nearly grasping what it all was for. He came with his eyes locked on the gibbous moon, viscous and thick and white.

  Then he lay there free of encumbrance, smiling softly, the zap sign glowing on his chest, the sap cooling on his abdomen. Once more he had proven to himself that he wouldn’t be sick. He was too much a moving target. No wonder he needed no permanent home and no baggage, even now, ten years after he’d run from Fresno. Saving himself for the big score, in the person of Sean Pfeiffer. All he needed was an interim arrangement, and it came to him now like everything else, in a burst of understanding.

  The next oasis was Steven Shaw.

  6

  Steven was very good about bringing in the mail. He would hear the van at three or three-thirty and hurry on down to the box, sometimes even chatting giddily with the postperson, a black woman with hair as big as Oprah’s. As he trotted back up the steps, he would rifle through the pile, sorting it into bills and letters and junk. Then he’d head straight for the alcove off the kitchen, which Victor had used as a kind of menu central cum potting shed, where he’d plan parties and arrange flowers. It had a big greenhouse window above a butcher-block counter, the window full of cymbidiums, the counter stacked with exotic cookbooks.