Afterlife (20 page)

At last Steven could see Mark's face in profile, the single-minded hunger as he worked his mouth, the dull glint of the stud in his ear. Several steps behind, Steven wondered irrelevantly why they didn't take their clothes off. They both looked faintly ludicrous with their pants at half-mast, held back somehow from a full embrace. Then it occurred to him that this was how they wanted it, immediate and anonymous, the stolen moment and the dirty little secret.

Mark stood up straight, eye to eye with Sonny, and they traded a humorless smile of dazzling coarseness. Cocking his head, Mark motioned Sonny over to the bed. Sonny obliged, crawling onto the mattress and holding the pose, elbows and knees, of the blond on the video screen. Except in the interim the blond had vanished, and the thug was now being sucked off by a crewcut lad beside a pool. Mark paused on his way to the bed to watch for a moment, as if he didn't want to miss anything.

Even by inching all the way to the corner of the window, Steven found that the bed was mostly out of his range and in the dark to boot. He had to flatten a fish eye against the glass, but even so he could only half see Mark reach out and stroke Sonny's butt. Words were passing between them, slinky with innuendo, but Steven couldn't quite hear.

He had a second of being absolutely crazed, wanting to tear the casement window open. He couldn't bear the shadows and the whispers. They had no right to withdraw from him now. He felt entitled, as if his peeping had made it a threesome. And when he heard the grinding of his own teeth, felt his hands gripping the front of his shirt as if he would rend his garment, he finally recoiled in a kind of horror, pulling his head from the sill. Now he wanted out of there fast, as if the slightest further glimpse would take the last shred of his dignity.

He turned to the right and began to burrow through the lantana toward the driveway. His hands were getting cut up pretty bad as he pushed the web of branches out of the way, but then, he deserved it for being such a sneak. He was at pains to make no rustle or crack a branch, and gritted his teeth as a twig snapped back in his face, drawing a line of blood like a dueling scar along the cheekbone. He was almost out of the woods. He could see the pavement ahead, lit by the streetlight at the bottom of the drive. Then his foot came down on the serpent.

Hard to say who hollered the loudest. The dog let out a yelp as he sprang from his lair, and the shock made Steven scream. But the worst of it was being cornered, the two of them grappling and colliding as they scrambled to kick free of each other. The dog growled and bayed in panic. Steven wanted to strangle it, bellowing at the beast to shut up, unaware of the irony of his own roar. The dog got away first, barreling through the last of the thicket, clearing the path for Steven, who crawled out panting onto the driveway.

The guest-room door swung open, and Mark was there on the threshold, buttoning up his jeans. Tentatively he asked, “Are you all right?”

Steven was still on all fours, scuffed and rumpled and grimy. He peered up at Mark. “Yeah, sure,” he replied, coolly enough given the situation. “This is part of my wilderness training.”

Mark stooped beside him as he sat back on his haunches, brushing the shmutz from his clothes. “Steven,” Mark said quietly, and though there was reproach in it, still more was there an indescribable tenderness. He knew exactly what had been going on, and Steven avoided looking at him, examining a tear in his sweater, trying to think of an exit line. Mark repeated his name, even more quietly, and reached and brushed the hair off Steven's forehead. “Come on, we'll go make some coffee.”

Steven's eyes flashed at him now. “No. You're busy,” he hissed, writhing at the thought of being patronized.

Mark shook his head plaintively, pointing a thumb over his shoulder in the vague direction of Sonny. “This doesn't mean anything,” he said. “It's got nothing to do with you and me.”

“Uh-huh. Will you just go back in there?”

“I don't want to make you crazy. I love you.”

“Then do it in your own house.”

At last he made Mark flinch, if that's what he wanted to do. An awkward silence fell, but neither moved to leave. Steven wondered if Sonny was still waiting spread-eagle on the bed. Probably this little crisis was just another kink to him, and Mark would come back even hotter. Steven, distanced from all of it, couldn't have said just then what turned him on. Given carte blanche—any man he fancied, whatever he wanted to do—he still would have been out the window looking in.

Yet most surprising was that he actually didn't feel so ridiculous right now, sprawled in his own driveway. If anyone had to see him like this, it might as well be Mark. At least it was who he was for real, no pretense left. He certainly didn't feel embarrassed. There was a certain giddy freedom that went with losing face, and a curious sense of release as well, almost as if he'd gotten off.

He turned his head with a crinkled grin. “Hey, go for it, buddy,” he said to Mark, the adolescent balance all restored. “
Somebody
might as well get laid around here.” Then he put a hand on Mark's knee to brace himself and stood up, groaning involuntarily at a sudden twinge in his hip. At the first grapple with the dog, he'd bashed the side of the house. He was going to be very sore tomorrow.

They were standing side by side now, looking off down the canyon as if they'd done no more than come out to watch the moon. “I don't think you realize,” said Mark, “I'm as whacked out as you are.” He was speaking rather carefully, formally even, not quite trusting the sudden breeziness in Steven's tone. “The man I used to be,” he said—groping for it—“I mean, that's over. It's like that video.” Again he gestured vaguely toward Sonny's room. Steven didn't ask if it was the thug or the blond Mark used to be. Even in his addled state he understood it was some of each. “Fuck, nobody's even touched it since … uh, that time with you.”

Mark frowned. His declaration of solidarity hadn't come out quite as solid as he hoped. But Steven didn't bat an eyelash. “All the more reason,” he retorted briskly. “Take it when it comes.”

He nudged Mark's shoulder with his own, furthering their conspiracy but also clearly pushing him back to Sonny's arms, full permission granted. If there was anything shy or unresolved here, it was in Mark. He couldn't seem to match Steven's antic mood. He would go back in there, all right, knowing an easy way out when he saw one. But it felt as if he was doing it more for Steven's sake than his own. And Sonny didn't seem part of it at all, which was probably par for the course. Assuming they picked it up more or less where they left off, it would be over in ten minutes. Fifteen if Mark took a shower after.

He stepped to the threshold again, hand on the doorknob, and turned for a parting shot. “This is the kind I'm used to,” he declared with a shrug, bleakly ironic, nothing if not self-critical. “I don't know how to do the other kind.”

Steven smiled indulgently, not planning to say a thing. “I love you too,” he replied.

Mark was half in and half out, so the playful smile could have been for Sonny as much as Steven. A second later the door clicked closed behind him. Steven limped across the driveway, making for the front door. The dog was lying low in the bushes below the steps, shrinking at Steven's approach but somehow standing his ground too. Steven stopped on the bottom step and peered at him over the rail, making a low sound in his throat, somewhere between a moan and a growl.

After a moment the dog responded in kind, a purring grumble from deep in its lupine past. Then Steven raised the pitch and volume, his lip curling back in a snarl. The beast followed suit and rumbled even louder, though still not raising its head from its paws. The tail Steven had stepped on looked as if it ached to wag, but it stuck to the rules and played dead. The standoff lasted about a minute.

Then Steven started to laugh and tottered up the steps. He wasn't thinking about Mark and Sonny. Who crossed his mind as he headed inside was Angela. He wondered how she was doing at the A event, and his mind flipped back and forth, imagining her in the tiara and the green-ink sheath, then naked except for the panties.

He went into the kitchen, past the counter where Margaret's shawl lay open, and into Victor's alcove. Angela would have a lot to say about the scene in the guest room, proof of her contention that Mark was at war with himself. Steven, she would have insisted, was still the only man in his life. Steven chuckled to think about it, what sort of man he looked like, peeping in the bushes and dumped in the driveway. He was going through drawers of madeleine pans and plant food, balls of elastic bands, Christmas ornament hangers, the ephemera of a life that used to work. He didn't know what he was looking for, only that he was looking.

The last time he said he loved somebody was to Victor, of course, but not like this. When Victor was dying the words were different—a kind of protest, a kind of clinging, the final declaration at the border. This was something else, more glancing and provisional, with a small L. He wasn't sure he believed it even so. There ought to be some other word for in between, less charged, easier on the backswing. He opened the second drawer from the bottom, string and twine and packing tape. There, snaking its way among the scissors and church keys, was a length of rawhide.

A-ha
, he thought, drawing it out. It coiled and shivered around his hand. He turned and headed for his bedroom, limping a little still. After all this time he was finally going to come out and play. All by himself. But a new man had to start somewhere.

7

The ghoul on the corner of Santa Monica and Larrabee was so tame as to be almost invisible. It was still early, with a misty rain clouding the streetlights and slicking the empty street. The boulevard was closed to traffic through Boys' Town from six till two in the morning, but the revelers had only begun to straggle out. A tall man in a bridal gown waved at the door of Revolver. Three beefy white boys cavorted arm in arm in matching spangled pantsuits—The Supremes, 1966. One of them carried a portable cassette player, to which they were all lip-synching “The Happening.”

The sixties had the right retro feel for a Halloween so deep into the plague years. There was Donna Reed and Mary Poppins. The trash/flash thrift marts had yielded up a queer sexless mix of tube dresses and white patent leather, the braised-girl look, innocent and nasty. Somewhere along the interface between Edie Sedgwick and Twiggy.

The ghoul watched impassively. He wore a black nylon jumpsuit that zipped up the back, the front of it painted Day-Glo green with a skeleton's bones. He had a black fright wig, and his face gleamed with white greasepaint, the eyes hollowed with iridescent red. Not like a skull at all but a voodoo head, weirdly androgynous, a lady of the evening straight from hell. Every other dragster and costumed man seemed to be part of a group, or they met one another and shrieked with recognition. But not the ghoul: he was alone and meant to stay that way.

Perhaps it was a kind of shyness, the same that had kept him out of drag. He stood like a man in a bar who would never go up to anyone. The early girls were there for a reason, because they knew the camera crews from the local affiliates had to get their footage by eight in order to go on at eleven. When the carnival reached full throttle, with hundreds passing back and forth along the boulevard, the curbs would be three deep with hets who drove in from the Valley to see the queers at play. The ghoul was somehow not one thing or the other, neither reveler nor spectator. Even on Halloween, it seemed, a man could carry his closet around.

Only once did he seem to stir with a proper haunted passion. Out of the alley by Video West came a troupe of four men in jeans and leather jackets, hardly a costume at all. Each of them held aloft a placard on a stick. One bore a picture of the President grinning like an imbecile,
AIDSGATE
printed across his face. Another said
STOP THE GENOCIDE.
The ghoul stood aside to let them pass, and as they stepped out onto the boulevard, the four began to chant: “Help us, we're dying! Help us, we're dying!”

All of them under twenty-five, hair punked up and swaggering, they didn't look as if they were dying in the least. They seemed exultant and full of fire, more alive than anyone else on the street, which may have been why the ghoul looked after them so longingly. The revelers and drag queens cheered at the arrival of the little protest march. The bride and several others, King Kong and Glinda the Good, trailed along in the marchers' wake, swelling the ranks as they headed for the Channel 7 Minicam crew.

The ghoul had had enough. He turned away—regretful, somehow in exile—and headed up the side street. Above him someone leaned over an apartment balcony and hooted: “Hey, dead man!” The ghoul looked up to see a man in a glitter tuxedo holding a lighted pumpkin, waving as if he were on a float. The ghoul waved back vaguely and hurried along the darkened street, urgent now as a vampire trying to outrun the first pewter streaks of day.

He loped along and turned at the next corner, fishing in the jumpsuit pocket for a jingle of keys. Then he suddenly froze in his tracks. Across the street a truncated three-wheeled vehicle was double-parked beside a pickup truck. A female cop stood with one foot on the bumper of her clownish cop car—
PARKING ENFORCEMENT
stenciled on the side—and laboriously filled in the blanks on a ticket. The pickup was parked in a red zone, underneath a streetlight. Very cut and dried: a twenty-eight-dollar fine, the envelope provided with the ticket. Yet the ghoul stood in a shiver of something like terror, his hands in his pockets kneading his thighs, as if he were about to be sentenced for murder.

The female cop finished her paperwork and tucked the ticket under the pickup's windshield. She glanced in the ghoul's direction as she folded herself back into her little three-wheeler, but the getup didn't appear to stir her fancy. She drove away and around the corner, making for the next hydrant.