Afterlife (19 page)

“This is darling,” he said. “You can wear it over the harness and go as Laura Ashley.”

Steven fixed him with a dead-bolt stare. “You think I could have a little warning next time?”

“You did great, babe.”

Steven tried to remain in a wounded huff, but he couldn't sustain it. There was too much to dish. By the time they reached Sunset, they were talking on top of each other, roaring about the overdetermined tea and Cary Grant and the lugubrious retinue of servants. They swung down Melrose shrieking with glee, Steven spilling the details of the boudoir.
Why does it look like rhinestones on me?
would be their anthem from now on.

Boisterous and bumping shoulders, they rolled into Johnny Rocket's diner and took a booth, the oldest adolescents in the place. They ordered the burgers and fries they'd never quite got their fill of in high school. Steven fed quarters into the table juke so they could debrief each other to a rockabilly beat.

It had all been very calculated on Mark's part. He'd been out of work six weeks, and they were closing fast on the sixty-day AWOL clause that would let them break his contract. He didn't care about the job anymore, or if he ever worked again, but he was too much of a businessman not to hedge his bets. Because what if he didn't die so soon? He had enough put away for a couple of years, maybe three if he sold his house, but then what? He decided to come clean to Lou and try to trigger a disability settlement, an area so gray you could hardly read the print in the contract.

“I got him feeling so sorry for me, I figure he'll break his butt with the studio. Fuck, if I get disability, we can retire to Hawaii.” He rolled his eyes at Steven and hitched up the sleeves of his leather jacket, cocky as if he'd just robbed a bank.

“But what did he
say
?”

“When I told him? Well, he pushed his chair back a couple of feet, and he stared at my teacup. You could tell he was trying to figure out what I'd touched in the house. Then he said, ‘Did Steve give it to you?'”

“Thanks, Lou. Patient Zero over here.”

“Then he asked me how long I had. I said two years.” At Steven's sudden frown, he flashed defensive. “It
sounds
better. If I don't look like Camille, he won't get in there and fight.”

“So what was
I
doing there?” asked Steven, waving his last french fry in the air.

“Ours is a tragic love, dear. We cling together in the whirlwind. It's practically a movie of the week. He loved that part.”

Steven's beeper went off, and he washed his pills down with a chocolate malted, screw the popcorn and melon. Mark was stunned at his affectionate defense of Angela Ciotta, killer shopper and chatelaine of Coldwater Canyon. He accused Steven of being simply perverse, Steven who was usually such a misanthrope, especially about the overfed and unplagued straights of the Westside. Steven stood his ground and kept insisting that, despite being a moron, she was sweet and had a certain intuition.

They ogled the buns of the counterman. They rollicked across the street to the punk newsstand and scooped up an armload each of tawdry magazines. They headed back to the Jeep, pumped still with adrenaline from the adventure and wired on a fast-food high. They slapped each other five as they got in, and Steven leaned over and flicked Mark's ear.

“Very hot,” he said with a certain smutty undertone. “I can't wait to see the rhinestone.”

It was barely nine o'clock when Mark pulled up in front of Steven's, but both of them could feel the nimbus of exhaustion waiting on the down side of the day's excitement. They were so attuned to each other now that they didn't have to push it, didn't have to prove they could dance all night. Tomorrow was soon enough. They said good night without touching, being as they had no audience. Steven trotted up the steps as Mark gunned away, then turned as the Jeep roared back in reverse. Mark jumped out with the shawl, swept it around his shoulders, and strutted up the steps like Carmen.

“You forgot your wrap, Miss Thing.”

“So butch,” said Steven dryly, tugging it gently off his friend.

“Genderfuck.” Mark winked. “The last taboo.”

Then the phone began to ring in the house, and Steven had to fumble fast to get the door open, letting Mark go a second time without a kiss good-bye. Steven ran through to the kitchen, not even turning on any lights, and grabbed it up on the third ring, an instant before the machine.

“Steven, it's Margaret.”

“
Please
—I was just going to call you. I spent the day with a Russian princess, and I've got a major acquisition for you.” He batted the wall switch with an elbow and flung open the shawl on the white-tiled counter. It looked even more costly and exotic outside the Aladdin's cave of Angela's closet.

“Steven, there's something I haven't told you—”

“The background's coral, it'll go just great with your china-doll skin. She's a redhead too.”

“I just got home from the hospital. It's Ray.”

A synapse seemed to malfunction in Steven's brain. His first thought was to protest:
No, no, that's over with
. Meaning Victor. He couldn't imagine who Ray was; the only Ray he knew was Ray Lee at the office. Which was exactly who it was, though Steven kept resisting, even as the details tumbled out.

“He's been having pains in his joints for months—some kind of arthritis. He's been on a cane for a couple of weeks. Then last night he had this stroke. His left arm's paralyzed, and he slurs when he talks. He's all upset, but you know how proud he is.”

Steven continued to stare at the hand-painted birds on the linen, tracing a parrot's wing with a finger. “But he's too young to have arthritis,” he said with a certain sullenness. Ray Lee was barely thirty.

“Steven, it's
AIDS
.” Only now could he hear the irritation and weariness in her voice.

“But he's not—” Steven stopped abruptly. Not what—not gay? Of course he was gay, the impish Korean who could do simultaneous impersonations of Linda Evans and Joan Collins, Ray who would
love
this shawl. What Steven meant was that Ray Lee wasn't sexual. He seemed somehow above all that, androgynous and rarefied. He had even been some kind of monk for a while, or at least he'd gone to monk school. Steven had always considered him rather lucky, to be so removed from mantalk and the purely carnal.

“We'll have to close the office for a couple of weeks,” said Margaret, sad but firm. “I can't do the hospital
and
Shaw Travel. Unless you want to go in, but you don't.” No accusation there, just a statement of fact.

“What about Heather?” asked Steven automatically, amazed to have remembered the name.

“Heather quit yesterday. She's been acting weird ever since Ray got the cane. She's scared. I can't deal with it.”

Steven felt a vast protective urge, for Margaret more than Ray. She'd brought him into the office a year ago and trained him. She loved orphans, and Ray had no one, not even a wizened mother to write home to in Seoul. Margaret had even admitted he'd become a sort of replacement for Victor, at least for her. Now Steven offered all of himself, without any qualification, just as Margaret had done for him. He would spell her at County General; bring in meals when Ray got home. More than anything, he would be there as now, for the last phone call of the day. No problem about the office at all. Shaw Travel would take a collective vacation for the next two weeks, per order of Steven Shaw himself. Done.

“You won't be so glad at the end of the month,” observed Margaret, ever the rueful manager. “We've already got no business. We're riding on the hubcaps as it is.”

Steven wouldn't hear another word. All she was to think about was getting Ray Lee on his feet. He promised to join her at the hospital tomorrow afternoon for the conference with the neurologist. Skillfully he got her to finish up the thousand details of the hospitalization—Ray Lee's cat, his towed car, his unpaid rent, all of life that ground to a halt at the hospital door. Then he managed to turn the talk to Angela Ciotta, and before they were through Margaret was laughing, gasping really, demanding to know the worst.

For Margaret's sake he dished poor Angela mightily, even going so far as to trash the green-ink sheath. “She looked like a hooker,” he lied, just for the laugh.

By the end of the story, Margaret was punchy, a laugh that could just as easily have been tears. But the feeling of being strung like piano wire had broken, and she was ready to go to sleep. With a promise to meet her at the coffee shop across from the emergency room, Steven purred a final good night and hung up feeling satisfied. Doubtless he would be feeling a good deal less plucky tomorrow, when he had to actually sit at the counter where he'd been eating pie while Victor died; but one day at a time.

He trailed back through the darkened living room to where the front door stood open. The moon was practically staring him in the face in the western sky, three-quarters full. He stepped outside on the landing to gaze at it, thinking idly that he ought to go in and grab the telescope. His eye fell to the street below, and there was the black Jeep, just beyond the driveway, across from Mrs. Tulare's house. Not exactly hidden, but Steven wouldn't have seen it if he'd stayed in the house.

Oh, how he wished he'd stayed in the house. He could actually feel a dull throbbing ache behind his breastbone, as if Novocaine had worn off. He slipped back in and shut the door, leaning his forehead against it a moment, trying not to think. Then he turned and floated through the dark of his own house, gliding open the glass door in the dining room and emerging onto the back terrace.

It was utterly still, the moon cold on the stripped white trunk of the eucalyptus. Steven turned left past the garage, trying now to stop himself, loathing every footfall. The guest room was pie-shaped, tucked into the fold of the hill beyond the garage, a kind of afterthought. The bathroom was in the wedge end of the pie, its small square window flinging light on the chaparral as Steven came around. He flattened against the wall, ridiculous as a spy, and peered one eye in.

Nobody there, the shower dripping. But just the sight of Sonny's gym clothes tangled on the floor, the jock in a sweaty ball as if he'd just peeled out of it, tilted Steven's stomach like a roller coaster. And Sonny did nothing for him.

He couldn't see into the bedroom, since the bathroom door was nearly shut. Nor hear any voices, though there was music playing. Still he had room to snap out of it. The point of no return was the corner. He groped through the sagebrush like an Indian scout. Then the point of no return was the side window, its banded light filtering through the blinds. Steven had a sudden panic, even as he held his breath and inched forward, that the blinds would be drawn enough to baffle his line of vision. He lost his last scruple as he hunkered down and came up to the sill like a periscope.

Mark and Sonny were at either end of the sofa watching the television, the backs of their heads about four feet away from Steven. Shockingly, they were simply sitting there, dressed and everything. They might have been watching a football game. Except on the screen were two men fucking.

The blond was on his elbows and knees in the bed, presenting his ass to a hairy overmuscled thug who stood by the bed dicking him—long, deep thrusts accompanied by a rhythmic slapping of the blond boy's cheeks. An indifferent disco beat thunked along in the background, not quite drowning out the slaps and moans, the grunted obscenities of the thug.

Otherwise there were no production values, and the set was like a motel room in hell. Not that the sleaze and bluntness weren't intentional, but leave it to Steven to feel the emptiness at the heart of it—the Pauline Kael of porno. Far from feeling left out, he was relieved not to be watching it with the guys. It might have engaged him if the scene had been two men kissing. But this—did people still go this far? It seemed like a loop from ancient history. And why was the thug not wearing a rubber?

Steven was far too literal for fantasies. Indeed, he might have tiptoed quietly away and left it at that. A little burned not to be invited to the party, but let it go. It was only a movie. Then suddenly Sonny stood up, and his ass was bare, his jeans around his knees.

He turned toward Mark, a surly pout on his face as he hawked spit in his hand. Then he reached to stroke his swollen dick, which was wrapped with a length of rawhide that also bound his balls, the ends of the string trailing between his legs. He was standing now so he blocked Steven's view of the video, but the moans and the guttural dirty talk still punctuated the disco beat.

“Yeah,” grunted Sonny, cheering on the thug. He mauled at his knob, squeezing out pre-cum, seeming to present himself to Mark for inspection. “We should get us a kid,” murmured Sonny, half to himself, “and work him over good. Get him real down and dirty. Right, dude?”

For a moment Mark didn't move, sitting on the sofa watching Sonny instead of the video. Steven had a weird and sudden thought, a hope almost, that Mark wasn't really involved in any of this, but just waiting for a break to excuse himself. Then Mark reached out and gripped Sonny's balls, pulling him toward the sofa, the pressure so intense that Sonny's head lolled back and he let out a fierce, abandoned groan, drowning out the video at last. Steven's chin was on the windowsill, his jaws clenched, wincing that Mark might be hurting the boy. He felt hopelessly naive and out of his depth, scared even, but worst of all he could feel the blip of arousal in his groin.

It all happened very fast now, as if there were a script at work. Mark rose up off the sofa—him with his pants down too. One hand still gripping the ball sack, he yanked up Sonny's T-shirt, baring his rippled abdomen and chest. Still Sonny's head lolled back, his big hands swaying at his sides, not touching his dick at all now, letting Mark set the carnal agenda. Mark leaned forward and took one of Sonny's nipples in his mouth, biting it softly, or maybe not so softly if the growl in Sonny's throat meant anything.