Afterlife

by Paul Monette

  They stood with the door to the Volvo between them, Steven about to get inside, and Andy leaned over and kissed him chastely on the lips. “I’m just glad to know there’s men out there who’ve made it happen,” he said with appalling sincerity, a smile as wide as Lake Michigan. “Gives me hope.”

  Which left Steven exactly where he started, not wanting to get entangled, not wanting to be pursued. He drove away up Highland, and the wave that passed between them was a last wave—the ship pulling away from the dock. So why did Steven find himself flashing deliciously hot and cold? Though he’d just had a date that went nowhere, hardly worth a check-in call with Margaret, he felt as if he’d pulled off something quite extravagant, back in the tenth grade stealing a girl from Daryl Sawyer. A girl he didn’t want, but let that go. More than anything it seemed to prove he was over Mark Inman once and for all.

  He and Mark didn’t talk that night or over the weekend, not in person, leaving a cluster of messages on each other’s machine. Very nice messages, breezy and open-hearted, Mark full of tough assurance that he didn’t give two shits about his disability. Perhaps one or two of the messages were left in the Hollywood way, at those vague dusky hours when no one was ever at home. And Sunday afternoon Ray Lee was released from Cedars. Steven had to be there literally to carry him up the stairs to his apartment. So he wasn’t exactly avoiding Mark—just processing other things.

  After only two weeks in, Ray Lee was as frail as a ten-year-old, sitting propped up in his little sofa bed and swearing he needed no help, he’d be back to work in a week. That was hard to imagine, since the stroke had left his hand too limp to hold a pencil and his mouth drooped to the left as if it were melting off his face. He could speak all right, if a little slowly, but the crackling hipness had disappeared. Ray Lee had always sounded as American as TV, and suddenly overnight there was a halting Korean accent hovering in his voice, as if he’d begun to emigrate home.

  Margaret, of course, collapsed. She’d been on hospital watch for two weeks straight, and now she had to coordinate meals-on-wheels. Steven took her out for dinner on Sunday night and let her cry. Her proud mane of hair was drawn back in a schoolmarm’s bun. Victor used to tell her she was getting better-looking every day, ripe to be plucked by a zillionaire mogul. All of which seemed very remote tonight at Loretta’s Shanghai Kitchen.

  “This is the last one,” said Margaret with bitter emphasis between bites of cashew chicken. “I’ll go to the end. It’s not going to be long, I can tell that already. But that’s it. All the beautiful young men of West Hollywood will have to die without Margaret Kirkham’s help. I go over to Richard’s to spend the night, and all I do is cry. Real sexy.”

  Steven murmured agreement, whatever she said, and scarfed the tangerine beef. He didn’t raise the obvious technical objection: present company excluded. Of course she’d be there for him, right down to the last handhold, bone-thin and purple with lesions, whatever final horror took him. But meanwhile she kept that corner of her mind uncluttered, believing it wouldn’t happen, not to Steven. This was the standard het denial, which came up all the time at the Thursday meeting, infuriating everyone, but Steven was just as glad that Margaret had the breathing room of some small illusion. When it finally hit him full force, Steven already knew he would check out sooner than later, for Margaret’s sake alone. He couldn’t bear to think of her losing the dusty flower of her second youth on his account.

  Meanwhile, he would shoulder some of the burden, which kept him running around for the next two days—renting a wheelchair, retrieving Ray’s Siamese from the pet hotel, the small and mindless stuff so that Margaret would have some down time, which she spent watching forties noir thrillers on Ray’s VCR. The two of them looked pretty noir themselves as Steven arrived with takeout from Polio Loco—Margaret in robe and peignoir like Gloria Grahame in a lonely place, and Ray Lee curled with his head in her lap, inscrutable as Anna May Wong.

  In any case, he didn’t talk to Mark for real till Tuesday night. “Are you sure this isn’t your machine?” Steven asked impishly when Mark picked up. The answer came back in a monotone: “No, it’s me.” And that was about all Steven got out of him, not exactly a stone wall but nearly. Depressed, not hiding it, but nothing to say about it either. And Steven wasn’t good enough at bullshit to tell him not to feel it. Despair was part of the cycle. So instead Steven told him about Ray Lee, and they both knew what he was really saying, that this was how the monster would come to them if it hit the nervous system first.

  “It’ll be in his brain next,” declared Mark grimly. “Then he won’t care if he’s paralyzed.”

  “You know,” ventured Steven, seeing they had dead-ended on the poor Korean, “if it’s money you’re worried about—”

  “You don’t get it, do you, Steven?” Mark’s voice quickened with anger, as if he’d been waiting to have the chip knocked off. “You’re too honest—you never swam with barracudas. Listen, I got money money. Stock options, last year’s bonus—two hundred grand cash, plus my house. That’s enough to die on, even if I last five years. But I don’t want to die on my dime. I want that fuckin’ disability so they have to pay.” The tone here wasn’t exactly loud or savage, it was cold, ice cold. Steven waited, working overtime like a saint not to take it personally. Mark shifted to withering irony. “You forget, darling, until two months ago I was a scumbag TV executive. You didn’t know me. All I did all day was screw people with money. Stuffing it up their hole.”

  “So how about dinner tomorrow?”

  “And now that they’ve screwed me, you know what I’d like to do? Pour blood all over their office, just like that terrorist out there. I’d like to see Lou Ciotta prancing around on his show, him so cute in his underwear, and he opens a beer and takes a swig and spits it out. ’Cause it’s blood.”

  “I’ll pick you up at eight, we’ll go have Chinese.” Big of Steven, whose heart still burned from the tangerine beef, but he couldn’t answer rage for rage. He was only trying to give it room, like Margaret’s exhaustion.

  “Look, I’m better off by myself right now,” said Mark, milder now and almost apologetic. “It’s nothing to do with you. I get in these black moods—even before AIDS. I just have to sit with it.” Steven nodded gravely, not wanting to say the wrong thing. He thought they’d pretty much wound it up when Mark threw a final curve. “So how was Andy Lakin?”

  “Oh … nothing,” Steven blurted, suddenly feeling cornered. “I mean, he’s very earnest. I told him I wasn’t available.”

  “Why not? He’s got a great ass.”

  “Yeah, well, there’s this small problem about my dick.” Which was a lie now, of course. The instrument in question had been quivering like a tuning fork these days. Yet he seemed to want to hide it, as if the recovery of his carnal edge might somehow threaten Mark.

  “Steven, you think too much.”

  They let it go at that. Still Steven would have pressed it again on Wednesday, maybe even done the unthinkable—driven over to Skyway Lane and dropped in with takeout. His life was a constant round of takeout now, and what was one more stop? But then, Wednesday turned out to be a nightmare start to finish, so he didn’t have time to think. Ray Lee had an appointment with the eye doctor, and Margaret’s car wouldn’t start, so Steven had to pick them up and run them over to Cedars.

  They sat all three in the front seat, Ray Lee regaling Steven with the plot of a stinko B, Ida Lupino and Robert Stack, convict on the lam holing up on a widow’s farm. “Lotsa chickens, lotsa heartache,” Ray Lee concluded, lilting the air with a delicate fine-boned hand—the hand that still worked. In the eye clinic waiting room he vamped about whether he might need glasses, promising himself a pair of tortoiseshells from L.A. Eyeworks. “Please, I rather be fashion victim than AIDS victim.”

  None of them said a word about the deeper issue—that if he was having neurological problems, overnight the horror might seep into the bright jet of his eyes. There were blind men all over West Hollywood now, some
who saw shadows, some who saw Christmas lights, and four or five of them were sitting right there in the clinic, staring at nothing.

  While Ray Lee was in with the doctor, Margaret told Steven he had to go by the office and pay the bills—by the fifteenth or the phone would be turned off. Steven felt a spurt of irrational rage, to think he had to take care of his own affairs, and as if it was all Margaret’s fault. Which made him plummet with guilt, so that when Ray Lee came out of the eye exam with his sight intact, dancing in his wheelchair, Steven invited them both for Thanksgiving.

  “You’re going to do Thanksgiving?” Margaret asked, incredulous.

  “Well, sure, why not? We’ve always done it.”

  “Victor, you mean,” she observed skeptically.

  Touché. Last year Steven had spent the whole of Thursday under the covers, sobbing over the Macy’s parade. But he’d been planning it ever since his last encounter with Dr. Buckey, even if he hadn’t quite got his invitations out. Things being lately blurred with Mark, the moment never seemed right for making party plans. He’d been keeping his options open as to the guest list all along, with a vague idea of springing it on them the day before, so they wouldn’t have time to dread it.

  Ray Lee gave out with a shriek of delight, drowning Margaret’s irony, and promised to make creamed onions and mince pie. “With a lattice crust,” he enthused breathlessly, flashing his crooked smile at Steven, right side grinning, left side down, a Noh mask of the tragicomic.

  An hour later, Shaw Travel was as still as Pharaoh’s tomb. Inside the door where the letter slot dumped was a daunting pile of mail. Steven stepped over it as if it were a body and went around to Margaret’s desk. He flipped the phone machine to playback, turned the volume up, then waded back into the mail. As the messages began to spill out, he pawed through the endless brochures and come-ons, trying to sort out the bills.

  They’d been closed for only sixteen days, but it seemed like years. Call after call swept over him, people wanting holiday reservations, sometimes leaving three or four messages before they gave up. Old customers were especially persistent, leaving word for Margaret or Steven himself, cuddly with familiarity: “Fran and I want to go someplace special for Christmas. Some inn in the middle of nowhere—big fireplace, no phones. You know what we like.”

  Steven found the phone bill, water and power, American Express. As he padded around to retrieve the checkbook from Margaret’s desk, the calls grew increasingly desperate. A party of forty-eight teachers bound for a convention in Vegas gave up on the third try. Various gay professionals, used to princess treatment, sounded more and more wounded with every call. “I’m missing all the discounts,” they whined, then pettishly rang off. The husband of Fran left a little mini-lecture, the text of which was I-scratch-your-ass-you-scratch-mine, and therefore Margaret shouldn’t expect a discount anymore at Fran’s killer boutique on Beverly Drive.

  Frankly, by the time Steven had written the three checks, he wondered if they had any business left at all. He looked around at the silent office, no more eager to dive back in than ever. Ray Lee was out of there for good, and Margaret had made not a peep when they passed the two-week limit on the office closure. There was nobody left. But while the thought of closing down made Steven wince with emptiness, even that finality couldn’t make him throw himself back in. He couldn’t do this and tick at the same time. Could only keep himself from not waiting to die by staying adrift of time. And Shaw Travel was time-obsessed—every departure down to the minute, every checkout, every three-day cruise to nowhere.

  Then, after a call from a frantic woman on Maui who’d missed her connecting flight, came a soft and tentative voice. “Hi, it’s Heather. I don’t know who’s picking up messages, but I owe you all an apology. I feel just terrible. It’s because I was scared, but that’s no excuse. I want to see Ray, and I want to come back to work if you’ll have me. You’re the most fun people I ever met. Tell Ray I make a meatloaf that’s to die.”

  Well now, wasn’t that fortuitous? Shaw Travel would snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, all because Heather had faced her fear of death. Good for her! Steven felt positively lumpy with sentiment as he flipped the phone machine back to answer. He would make her Assistant Office Manager and send her on the next free gig from Princess Cruises. He’d call her tonight, and the agency would reopen again by morning.

  He closed the door behind him with relief, still without a clue what the cash flow was these days, how close to the brink. What he was really thinking driving home was: if she made a dynamite meatloaf, she could probably pull together a passable sausage dressing for the turkey.

  When he got to the house, he called Mark, not to push for tonight but to rope him in for the Norman Rockwell feast. Nobody home, and he didn’t want to leave it on the machine, so he hung up. He stood in the dining-room doorway and studied his table. Nine: Ray Lee and Margaret and Richard and Mark and Sonny and Heather and him—

  The doorbell. For some reason, as he moved to the foyer, he was certain it was Mark, as if he’d pulled him here by telepathic means. He threw open the door laughing. But no: a lean and pony-tailed Latina in jeans and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt. Immediately she looked away shyly from Steven’s laugh. She was frightened, almost trembling, like a deer caught out of cover. Steven composed a meek and helpful smile, assumed she wanted to sell him something, or collect for some desperate cause. At last she sought his eyes again, miserable but trying not to plead.

  “I’m sorry—I’m Linda Espinoza.”

  He didn’t connect it right away, offering his own name in return, trying not to sound patronizing. She nodded as if she knew it already, presumably working from a canvasing list. She looked sad enough to be a Democrat. Then, because she could see he was still in the dark, she added with a certain stubborn dignity, “Dell’s my brother.”

  Steven beamed. “Well, of course he is,” he said eagerly, bustling her into the house. And she didn’t get a word in edgeways for the next two minutes. He put a light on under the kettle, chattering all the while about Thanksgiving dinner. How he had meant to invite them all along, and there he’d been working out the seating when she rang.

  To her he seemed slightly delirious, which maybe he was, with so many balls in the air. But something about him had seized on the holiday, something to do with pulling a family together around Ray Lee, who might not last till Christmas. Something to counter the awful gathering of blood clans everywhere, hiding their distances one from another, smothering them in gravy.

  “Don’t feel you have to cook or anything,” Steven hastened to assure her, “but if there’s something special you’re good at and you have the time—”

  He turned to hand her a mug of tea and saw the patience in her eyes. He held his breath to hear, and she spoke: “Dell’s in trouble. He’s the one trashed that church.”

  Of course, he’d known it all along. She was fighting back tears. He led her into the dining room and sat her down exactly where he planned to have her next week. Brokenly she told him about the police arriving with a subpoena. Dell had left a trail that was ridiculously easy to follow. Several of Mother Evangeline’s parishioners had seen the pickup truck from which the ghoul emerged. Once it was ascertained that the blood was turkey, it was simple to track down the farmer in Riverside. Even a rookie could have followed the trail to the thirty-five-dollar deposit at Western Costume.

  It all converged this morning at Dell’s apartment, the banging of the police rousing Linda across the court. When they got no answer, they broke down Dell Espinoza’s door. The mistake they made was coming at seven, when the gardener was always out by six. They found the tapes in the kitchen cabinet. They told Linda her brother was wanted for desecrating a church, for tampering with the mails, for attempted murder.

  “He tried to kill somebody?”

  “Because of the reservoir. They say he try to give people AIDS.”

  Finally she let out some of the tears, not squalls of them like Margaret did, but a few
small sobs with her shoulders hunched. Steven laid a hand gently on her arm and murmured like a lullaby. He was juggling so many cases at the moment, he wasn’t sure how much he had left to offer. Besides, his first instinct was fury at Dell for putting his sister through this, so if Steven did rush in to help, it would be for Linda’s sake. And if Dell Espinoza thought he was going to ruin Thanksgiving, he was sorely mistaken.

  “Where is he now?”

  “He’s at my friend Emilia’s, but he can’t stay. She’s afraid her kids’ll get hurt. He’s waiting for me to call him.”

  “And tell him what? That he can stay here?”

  He didn’t say it so roughly, but her silence told him he was right. She took a deep breath. Steven looked forlornly past her into the living room, where the big leather sofa hadn’t seen someone sleep over since they had nurses around the clock. He pictured what the terrified Emilia must be imagining: a shootout by the L.A. police, Sheriff Noonan announcing to the Minicam crews that they’d bring him out dead or alive. Even if she survived, they’d send Emilia back to Mexico on a slow boat. Ruefully Steven conceded that his house would work much better for a Shootout—no minors involved, nobody to deport.

  “All right, but just for a few days,” he said, and even as she clasped his hand in gratitude, he recalled saying something of the same sort to Sonny, and that was almost a month ago.

  Only after Steven had agreed to give her brother sanctuary did Linda begin to pour out all her terror. How she had seen him withdraw deeper and deeper for months now, willfully almost—the opposite of putting the passion of his grief behind him, letting it fade to a dull ache the way it had with her. Dell Espinoza’s passion only seemed to grow more violent and secret. In the month that followed the anniversary, she thought he was going to kill himself, and could even feel that the one thing holding him back was Linda herself—the last protective urge he felt as head of the family.