Afterlife

by Paul Monette

  “Maybe you’ll go back and visit,” he said. “We could send you down for Christmas.”

  “Mm,” she replied vaguely, realizing he hadn’t included himself, and she would never go back alone. He moved toward the house, locked in his stubborn intensity where she could never follow. She reached into her bag again. “I brought you this.”

  He stopped. She held out the spiral notebook that he kept on the shelf under the bedroom phone. “I hid it the day the police came, so they wouldn’t take it away.”

  He nodded rather formally as he took it from her. Of course they had never discussed it, though he’d never tried to hide it either. He flipped through the pages—first names only, measurements, turnons, the full repertoire of sex talk. Dell laughed. “They would have had a great time trackin’ these guys down,” he said. “Whole lotta men out there with cop fantasies.”

  On almost every page a phone number was scribbled beside the name. Though he laughed it off as a dirty joke, he could feel the rage like bile in his gut, that the L.A. pigs would muscle in on these lonely boys, accusing them of consorting with a terrorist. Suddenly he thought of Kevin, whom he hadn’t talked to in almost a month. He wondered if Kevin missed him.

  “It’s none of their business,” Linda declared, blindly loyal, her brother against the authorities. Her black mane framed her lean face, not a trace of makeup. She wore an off-white cotton dress with lace inserts at the shoulders, the dress she’d worn the day of her wedding. “Alfonso brought me fourteen hundred dollars,” she went on, dutifully changing the subject now that the notebook was returned. “He hasn’t lost any customers, and he wants to know can he buy the truck.”

  Alfonso was the hardest worker among Dell’s crew, a tree man who could scamper like a monkey. He was the obvious one to take over the business when Dell went underground. Alfonso was sweet on Linda and never failed to pay over her brother’s cut. Dell shrugged. He trusted Linda’s judgment in business, and only worried that Alfonso Nava might make a move to marry her, and Dell wouldn’t be there to stop it. Alfonso might get rich, but he would always be a peasant.

  A third time Linda reached into the bag, and this time brought out a camera. Dell frowned as soon as he saw it, cornered, looking as if he would turn and run. “I don’t even have a picture of us,” she protested. “If it comes out good, we can send one home, so they won’t forget what we look like.” She was talking rapidly, as if he hadn’t even mentioned her traveling home for Christmas. What she didn’t want him thinking was that she needed a picture before he got sick.

  “Maybe later,” he said.

  “No, now. I don’t have a flash.”

  She was bathed in the dusty sun that dappled through the sycamore, its palomino trunk rising behind her head. Dell reached for the camera. It was really a picture of her that was needed. But then the dining-room door slammed open, and Sonny Cevathas came lurching out, eyes wild as the Furies. He was heading for the room beyond the garage, and Linda called out to him, “Sonny, will you take our picture?”

  He balked. All he wanted to do was get in his room and pound the walls. But something about her plaintiveness stopped him, as if he could hear her fear of where the time would take them if they lost the moment now. He turned. His face was flushed; he was breathing hard, snorting like an animal. Still he might have told them both to go to hell. Perhaps he understood they were all he had left, this marginal bogus family that had ended up at Steven’s house.

  His smile was more of a grimace, but he rolled his shoulders and tossed his hair and reached for the camera. Everyone’s younger brother, he herded Dell over to the whitewashed bench. He made a squeezing gesture with his hands to make them sit close together. And when they still kept a shy space between them, Sonny went up and physically pushed them tight. He grabbed Dell’s wrist and drew the brother’s arm around Linda’s shoulder. Then he scooted back ten feet and crouched. They looked hopelessly stiff and formal in the viewfinder.

  “Hey, guys, could we lighten up a little please? Why don’t you look at each other.”

  Suddenly face to face, they smiled as if a sort of reprieve were being granted, however brief, and they were brother and sister again. Sonny snapped once, twice for good measure. Then they faced him, tilting their heads together. Two more clicks. Steven would have loved it, a holiday reconciliation worthy of prime-time, boding well for a white Christmas.

  The camera got all there was of it, though. When Sonny sprang to his feet and moved to return it to Dell, brother and sister had already pulled a hair apart. “Listen, I better go clean up,” said Sonny, “or Stevie’ll have my ass.” He backed away, still oddly boyish and bobbing his head, riding the last of the nooner’s speed, and trotted away to his own room. Dell and Linda hated to see him go, their only witness here to who they used to be. Pride was welling up again, a passion not to intrude, and the queer double shame that they weren’t good enough for each other. Before the sun had left the dusty branches of the sycamore, their way would be paved again with egg shells.

  “Me too,” declared Dell wearily. “I gotta go put on a tie for Steven’s gringo holiday.” He laughed. “Like I’m going to a funeral.” And gently handed the camera back to Linda, all the evidence in their favor.

  As soon as Sonny walked into his room and slammed the door, he felt caged, but the cage was good. He’d been ready to pound the walls, but now he shrank from them instead. Not half an hour ago Sean Pfeiffer told him they were finished. Told him in the driveway, standing between the limo and the Mercedes. Right after they’d fucked for an hour, Sonny on his hands and knees taking it like a dog, then standing up spread-eagle against a glass door as he gazed west to the ocean. Another toot and they played Marines, Sean smacking his butt with a paddle as Sonny barked out the count: “… forty-nine, fifty, sir!” As if to see how much heat they could cram in an hour, so that Sean would go off to Palm Springs ravenous. Sonny had brought him the paddle.

  And then they were in the driveway, not even time to shower, and Sean handed over an envelope. “I always think it’s better,” he said, “to stop these things before the heat goes. End on an up, you know what I mean? Always better to be a little sorry.” Sonny was speechless, his body still on fire from the crystal. He stared at the envelope, as if to will it to be a love letter, with a key to the house taped inside. Sean slipped into the back of the limo and stuck his head out the window. “Don’t take this wrong, but you really oughta go see a doctor, show him that sore.”

  Sonny let him glide away without even screaming, because above all else he didn’t want to look stupid. He was supposed to have understood the deal from the very beginning. In the envelope were twenty new hundreds, so fresh they seemed unreal. At first he didn’t feel betrayed or even insulted, only relieved that nobody knew. But by the time he got home, he could actually feel his body crawling with all that he hadn’t washed off. He went in the house determined to beg off dinner, pleading sick, but couldn’t find Steven. Then the encounter with Dell and Linda, so lost and afraid to touch, and he figured what the hell, at least it would be clean in there. No one at Steven’s table was going to put their hands on him.

  Now he pulled off his clothes as if he wanted to burn them. The sight of his body in the mirror above the sink made him wince. The red welts on his butt, the head of his dick raw, his swollen nipples, all like a sort of infection. The rest of his perfect body was numb and pale as death, next to the mocking soreness of his love zones. He felt as if he’d raped himself. He’d never done it for money. How far did he have to go to meet his fate halfway?

  He began to blow the mucus from his nose, one nostril and then the other, expelling it into the sink, as bloody as Sean Pfeiffer. He was so sick of men, he could hardly breathe. He had a wild flash of understanding how sex criminals sometimes pleaded to have it cut off. Then he stepped into the shower, where the last thing he expected was to come out clean. And when the hot water hit the raw places, stinging like salt in a wound, still he couldn’t make it hurt like th
e lesion in his armpit, which didn’t hurt at all.

  When Mark arrived at three with his store-bought pies, Steven was bearing the punch bowl full of steaming cider into the living room, where all the others were gathered. Mark crouched to the hearth to light the fire, and an overeager Andy knelt beside him and said, “I’ll take care of that.” Instantly Mark stiffened and backed off. Steven, grinding his teeth against a possible hernia as he set the punch bowl on the coffee table, wished he could call a time-out. It was only because Andy had brought the wood and laid the fire that he wanted the lighting honors. It was nothing more proprietary than that. Yet Steven could see Mark picking up on the fact that the kid had practically moved in.

  Hastily Steven ladled the cider into cups, and Heather plunked a cinnamon stick into each one as she handed them round. Dell came trailing in, looking strangled in his tie, and they were six around the fire as Steven raised his cup, deciding not to wait for Sonny. “Long life, good health,” he said, catching Mark’s eye at last and smiling. The group repeated his hearty prayer and drank, cozy as all the last chapters of Dickens.

  Then there was a funny moment when they didn’t seem to know what to do, all dressed up in the middle of the day. Oh, they were maddeningly polite, right from the get-go. Andy told Mark how great he looked with his Florida tan. Mark lobbed a compliment about Heather’s beaded sweater, which prompted from Steven an equal nicety on Linda’s account. When they’d exhausted that tack, they took turns tossing out random remarks on the holiday, but kept it light, avoiding for politeness’s sake the tortured Strindbergian dreads and scars that so possessed the Thursday group.

  Heather recalled the snowy Thanksgivings in Wisconsin growing up, and her father actually slaughtering the bird on the family farm. “And it’s really true, they run around with their heads cut off, bleeding all over the place.” She laughed a bit shrill, the cider having gone right to her head. And didn’t really notice the strained look that passed between Steven and Linda, or Dell casting his eyes to the fire. Turkey blood had a rather more immediate fix in some of their minds.

  Merry and impromptu, Andy started in on the Pilgrims, recalling all the pious clichés of grade school, red man and white man together like brothers, sharing sharing sharing. He ladled another cup of cider and sat by Steven on the sofa, thigh to thigh. Now he launched into the story of John Alden, sent to propose to Priscilla for Myles Stan-dish, pillar of rectitude but a dork when it came to women.

  “As far as we can tell, ladies and gentlemen,” Andy enthused, “we have here the only example of romantic love in America between 1620 and the films of Greta Garbo.”

  He laid a hand on Steven’s knee. Steven shot a glance at Mark, who pretended not to see the knee maneuver, then pretended not to notice Steven’s look. When Andy got to the punchline, he turned and put his face up close to Steven and delivered it with breathless histrionics: “Speak for yourself, John Alden.” Clutching the front of Steven’s shirt and affecting a swooning passion. They laughed around the fire, but barely. Linda and Dell didn’t get the story at all, the cultural barriers being so queer, even if it hadn’t been played for laughs.

  Steven, rigid as stone, still felt as if the kid was all over him, though they’d resumed the simpler posture of hand on knee. An awful silence was starting to fall, as if they’d exhausted every lead, when they were saved by the creak of the dining-room door. Sonny walked in in a blue blazer and tie, hair spiffed back and squeaky clean, looking for all the world like an Ivy jock.

  “I hope you realize, I only eat white meat,” he announced with an impish smile.

  At the sight of him Steven remembered the purloined hors d’oeuvres from Monte Carlo, and he leaped up from Andy’s smothering proximity and ran to fetch them. He sailed around the kitchen, transferring the cold canapés to a silver tray, rustling up the turkey cocktail napkins, turning a drawer inside out for toothpicks. He couldn’t recall exactly why he’d been so angry with Mark. He certainly didn’t want him anymore, or anyone else for that matter. He only hoped the day would present an occasion when he could be unbearably civil, and prove to Mark there was no lingering romantic burnish.

  The phone rang, and he grabbed it up on a millisecond’s ring. It was Margaret: “Okay, we’re ready, I got him in the car. He’s a hundred and two, but he’s talking English.”

  “Darling, can you wear the shawl? Angela’s coming.”

  “Steven, I’m practically wearing overalls. Please don’t expect a fashion statement. We’ll be there in ten.”

  She rang off. Steven grabbed a mitt and pirouetted to the stove, grabbing the tray of dainties out just before they burned. He was on a roll. He whipped a white napkin onto a second silver tray and began arranging the little cheese cups and bacon-wrapped chestnuts. Then felt a sudden hand on his shoulder, and gasped and burned his finger and bellowed, “Shit!”

  Of course it was Andy. “Steven, I’m sorry,” he whimpered, “I didn’t mean to scare you. I just wanted to help.”

  Steven reached to the sink and ran the sizzled finger under cold water. Then turned an eye on the kid that fairly glittered with domestic madness. “I’ll tell you how you can help,” he said softly. “Stop pawing me.”

  The milky face beneath the shock of sandy hair crumpled in bewilderment. “What do you mean?”

  “This is not the time,” Steven warned him, back to the cheese cups.

  “You mean in there? I’m not supposed to touch you?”

  “I think maul is the word you’re looking for.”

  The face crumpled further, the eyes especially, tortured as only the very young can be by love’s reversals. “I don’t get you, Steven. You spend all your time pulling away. How did you ever last eight years?”

  Not even skipping a beat with the canapés, making a second concentric circle, Steven drawled over his shoulder: “I would suggest that comparing yourself to Victor is very thin ice around here. Very thin ice.”

  “Why are you doing this? I’m supposed to be ashamed that we’re sleeping together? Maybe you have a little more self-hatred about your sexuality than you realize. Did you ever think that?”

  Steven picked up the two trays and faced him. “You take the hot and I’ll take the cold.”

  “That’s it? I don’t get an answer?”

  It had reached a kind of low-level hysterics for the sandy-haired boy. Not a pretty sight. Steven tried to be gentle, but his heart wasn’t in it. “Honey, we’ve got to feed these people,” he said, pleading from reason. “I’m sure you’re right, I hate my dick, but please, I can’t do psychology and dinner for ten at the same time. You’ll survive. You’re cute and sweet and sassy. But I’m not the one.” He shrugged, not cruelly at all. There was more tenderness in him right now than he’d shown all week, and he understood the ache as Andy Lakin swallowed hard. But this was not the time. “Here, you better take the cold. They’re simpler.”

  He handed Andy the cold tray, then whisked around him and through the swing door, no looking back. It didn’t have to be done with such bad timing, except the young were so enamored of things blowing up in their faces.

  Moving around the group by the fire, he was glad to see they had broken at last into smaller units. Sonny was regaling Dell and Linda with the crazy Greeks of Fresno, and Mark was being a trouper, answering Heather’s starry questions about the magic of television. They all attacked the canapés with relish, two at a time as Steven passed.

  “The bird’s got about forty more minutes,” he announced at large, his ace in the hole being Victor’s passionate conviction that Americans overcooked fowl. “We’ll eat by five, so don’t overdo on the nibbles.”

  Andy, he could see, was standing rather gloomily off to the side, holding his tray dispiritedly and making no move to pass it around. He seemed to be trying to figure where he’d gone wrong. Steven let him be. But Heather, supersensitive by reason of a raft of self-help books, seemed to intuit Andy’s blues and jumped up from the sofa. She squealed with pleasure as she popped
hors d’oeuvres from his tray and asked him where he was from originally.

  Steven seized the moment, leaned over Mark’s shoulder, and said, “Can you give me a hand outside?”

  “Sure.” He stood up and followed Steven through the vestibule and out onto the front landing. Steven stopped and looked out over the city, and Mark stood beside him, hands in his pockets. The Catalina Eddy had rolled in over the setting sun, filling the basin below the mountains with chalk-white air, like very cold smoke. The low sun in the west was a disk in the fog. Steven shivered in only a shirt. Mark looked at him expectantly. “Uh, I thought you needed some help.”

  “Yup, in a minute. They should be right here. How’s your dad?”

  “Fine. He’s found himself a fox.” Mark chuckled and shook his head, digging his hands deeper in his pockets. Hooded as ever, his body language as tight as it used to be at the studio, ringed on every side by macho creeps. “He’ll bury us all.”

  “I don’t want to be buried anymore,” said Steven, who in truth hadn’t thought of it at all till now. “I want to be scattered.” He accompanied this announcement with an outstretched hand and a slight flutter of the fingers, rather like a diva waving to the fans.

  “But you have a plot and everything,” retorted Mark. “Right beside Victor.”

  Steven made a soft little humming noise, as if he was trying to establish the pitch of what he would say next. He shivered again, but it didn’t seem like the weather this time. “The first three months I visited every day. But he’s not there.” He was looking down at the roof of Mrs. Tulare’s house, and Mark was looking sidelong at him. “I think I’ll leave a couple of grand in my will. Then Margaret can take my ashes to Europe and have a little vacation too. Crete would be nice, say in the ruins of the palace at Phaistos.” At last he turned and looked at Mark, rueful except it came out wistful. “Maybe I’ll make it five grand, and you can go with her.”