Afterlife (23 page)

“I won't send it,” she said quietly.

He wanted to gather her into his arms. She didn't know she was the only thing keeping him from the edge, the last thing of life that mattered. But he was stuck in his foolish pride like any of his moron brothers-in-law, ridiculed by the love he had gotten wrong between the two women. It almost made him feel cuckolded. “Send it,” he said, cold and blunt. “I don't want it around here.”

She nodded and stepped by him, and he didn't reach out with an aching hand. Emilia, sober as a sentry by the door, fell into step with Linda as they headed outside. “
Buenos nochas
,” the plump woman said punctiliously, bowing to her host as she left.

And now it was as if it hadn't happened at all, his victory over the forces of darkness. The million names of his enemies frittered away in the closet. His mask was over, his brazen disguise evaporated like the wisp of an old nightmare. He stood dumbstruck in his borrowed robe, neither reveler nor spectator, and couldn't even make himself plod to the phone for a little relief. The darkness was over the world, and he and Linda would never escape it. Half alive, they would wander the world like ghouls, locked in a death embrace, afraid to love anything else except each other.

8

Hey, wake up and smell the coffee, guys. I'm alive.” The sandy-haired boy hunkered on the upper bench, elbows on his knees, his rangy frame like that of a cowboy sitting astride a fence. “This group is a fuckin' downer,” said Andy, caustic with contempt. “Sometimes I think you guys wanna die.”

“Excuse us, Mary Sunshine,” said the thin gray man. “If your life's such a dream, then why don't you join a Tupperware group? We like a little reality here.”

“I, not we,” cautioned Tim with an upraised finger.

The planeload of refugees numbered about twelve tonight. Sometimes there were twenty-five or thirty, lined up body to body on the carpeted benches. But all the regulars were here. Charlene, philosophical and far too patient, knitting her cocoa hands quietly in her lap. Emmett from Tallahassee, who lost his heart twice in October, unrequited, and stood determined to be in love by Christmas. The bearded uncle, Fred, racked with certainty that his mom would be putting the star on the tree this year for the last time.

But please, they had Thanksgiving to get through first. November 11, and already the holidays yawned before them like a primal swamp, full of the bones of mastodons and the bodies of lost explorers. Nobody in the group had informed his blood family about his antibody status, except for the thin gray man, whose people had basically told him to make a reservation for one with a TV dinner. Several members of the group were planning to make the annual pilgrimage to home and hearth, and dread was thick. Not that they didn't feel it every year, but now the stakes were dizzily raised by what could not be said.

“It's bad enough they ask if I'm seeing someone,” said Marina, looking lost tonight in her big Italian sweater. “They knew Jim died, but they don't know how. They keep waiting for me to get over it. My sisters'll flaunt their kids, and I'll want to die.”

“Uh-uh—don't use the ‘D' word,” Mark piped in, and a ripple of black laughter went around the little room.

“Sorry,” said Marina, wincing. “But how do I sit there smiling and passing the gravy, pretending I'm dating, when all I want to do is crawl in my mother's bed and cry?”

No answer. The gay men looked at the floor and the ceiling, unable to imagine such a wish. Tim the facilitator licked his lips delicately and offered: “So maybe you should tell them?”

“And ruin Thanksgiving?” retorted Marina, bitter and comic at once. “You think they'll care? We're talking Chula Vista. My sisters'd have their kids out of there in five minutes. And Mother would spray me with Lysol.”

“Or Raid,” said Emmett, thick as Florida honey.

Steven was detached as ever, sitting beside the one narrow window looking down on Highland, but he'd also developed a certain idle affection for the Thursday group. After five weeks he found himself perking up at the next chapter—Emmett's two-week fling with the dancer, Charlene's mother and grandmother who shared a room and didn't speak. He could see how the thin gray man was more peaked every week, the slight catarrh in his throat more pronounced. The group didn't really talk about how it would change if one of them got sick. It was part of the magic of meeting like this that they would keep the full-blown nightmare at bay if they just stayed in a circle.

No one knew very much about Steven yet. Like the others, he gave himself over to small talk before and after the meetings, always exchanging a word with Marina. But he rarely spoke in the meeting proper, confining himself to chiming in when the group cheered or groaned. By doing so he seemed to ventriloquize the feelings that otherwise escaped him. He didn't dare verbalize certain things, like his suspicion that Dell Espinoza was the Halloween saboteur. He shrank from knowing for certain, trying instead to keep his focus simple, like the rest of the group. Just to stay healthy, one step ahead of the creeping horror.

“I hate my friends who haven't been touched,” said a stocky man on the bench below Steven. It was his second time here, and he'd cried last time. He didn't sound proud of what he just said. The room stirred with a murmur of guilty agreement. “The straight ones I can't even talk to anymore. They all say the same thing: ‘You're not gonna get sick.' That just means they don't want to hear about it. And my roommate's negative, so he doesn't give a shit. He's got the rest of his life.”

He stopped. It seemed as if he would cry again. The entire group poised to hug him. But he caught himself with a huge sigh that lifted the weight from his belly to his chest. He shook his head, ashamed of hating, and the group was silent a moment, ashamed too.

And Steven was thinking about the roommate: negative. Was anyone he knew negative? He couldn't imagine such a thing. For years, it seemed, ever since Spot appeared on Victor's ankle, he had assumed the worst scenario, that all gay men would die. Of course he meant the urban ones, and lately at least he'd come to see that the young ones would squeak through. But nobody he knew. They had connected one with another all too well. And though he heard now and then about somebody testing negative, he put no faith in it. The test was bullshit like everything else. Some time bombs ticked louder than others, and some were hidden very deep in the caves of a man, but still it was only a matter of time. In the black hole of his grief, Steven had taken some comfort in that, and he felt no guilt at all.

The thin gray man groaned with exasperation. “This is a big revelation to you, that straight people don't care? Where have you been? They just want us to shut up and cut their hair.”

“Hey, chill out,” snarled Marina. “It was us straight people knocked down 81.” This was true. Just last week the quarantine proposition had gone down to defeat, fifty-three to forty-seven, surprising the pollsters and pundits.

“Gimme a break,” scoffed the thin gray man. “You want to know who fucked Prop 81? The guy with the blood. He scared all the breeders. They decided to protect our useless civil rights so we won't go psycho on em.”

“Easy, easy,” said Tim, “we're getting on soapboxes again.” He smiled around at his group, blaming no one. He was as drab as his turd-brown sleeveless sweater and the leatherette clipboard he held on his knee. Yet his very blandness served as a kind of anchor, backing them off from confrontation. “Remember, we're here to support each other. Let's try to say what we need and give it. Find the feeling.”

This last was delivered in a Zen-like hush. There passed between Marina and the thin gray man a small nod of truce. It was like grammar school, thought Steven, learning how to behave for the teacher.

“Look, I'll be honest,” said Andy. “I came here to get laid.” The dumb laugh that erupted here was more like junior high, somewhere behind the boys' gym. “No, I'm serious. I thought this was going to be like a dating pool.”

A bouffant queen with a murderous manicure, very Joan Crawford, stroked an eyebrow. “We call it a cesspool now, darling.”

“I don't want to be with a guy who's not positive,” continued Andy, ignoring the bitchy intrusion. “But he's gotta want to beat it as much as I do.”

“Oh, you can beat it just as good yourself,” drawled Miss Crawford, but no one laughed.

“Are you taking applications?” asked Mark, smiling across at Andy.

“Not from you guys. You're all just waiting to die.”

“I resent that,” blurted one of the new recruits, fierce in a Silver-lake leather vest.

And they started the round again, just like they did every week, about whether it was worth it to get close to someone who might get sick. They would split down the middle as usual, between the romantics, who wanted to seize the day, galloping on white stallions toward the cliff, and the pragmatists, who wanted a little unentangled nooky but nothing more. Paramount was immunity, and whether love would boost your numbers or stress you out.

Steven tuned out of the discussion and watched the night traffic below on Highland, the straggling homeless shuffling up and down. The mere idea of courting someone was exhausting, like hauling cement uphill. Not to mention the rejection.

At least he was over Mark. Maybe not over the ache or the awkwardness, but the bristle of expectation had finally abated. He could tell, because he wasn't wiggy with jealousy watching Mark's casual flirt with the sandy-haired boy. Over four different lunches they'd talked it through about Sonny and the peeping Tom, managing somehow to laugh about it, as if it were some kind of porn fantasy gone awry. They gave their predictable alibis. Mark ruefully hung his head, bemoaning his need for meaningless sex, passion without feeling, something he had been working on in therapy since Sonny Cevathas was eight years old. Steven pinned his own behavior on grief, the usual suspect. The loneliness and brokenness had left him with his nose against the window, watching life from the outside. He apologized for the laughable wrongheadedness of being hung up on Mark. Mark, they decided together, was just a symbol anyway.

But though they determined to put it behind them, a perceptible shadow had fallen. They still pretended to make plans every day to tool around like buddies, but half the time they canceled. Errands blew up out of nowhere, or one of them had the sniffles, or Steven was holding Margaret's hand in Ray Lee's room at Cedars. Worse, there was a palpable sadness when they did connect, as if their friendship had gone too far and they didn't know what to replace it with. Didn't know how to undo the nakedness.

There had been no repeat performance with Sonny. He was still in residence in the room beyond the garage, which may have been masochistic on Steven's part. He would have made a terrible landlord, a regular doormat. In any case, Sonny stayed rigorously out of his way for days afterward, all the while making himself indispensable with chores and little fix-it projects. Perhaps Steven let him stay to prove it didn't matter—plus a dogged sort of pride in keeping things intact, no matter how problematic.

Mark incidentally swore that he had barely gotten it up that night, despite Sonny's sultry demeanor and a mouth as foul as the Master Mario video. This was part of a larger picture Mark took pains to clarify, over cup after cup of decaf capuccino—that sex didn't mean anything to him anymore, he could take it or leave it. He didn't expect to solve that puzzle, not in the time he had left. Whenever he said it, he seemed to hope Steven would feel better, not take it somehow so personally. Fat chance.

Yet he looked across at Mark now, sitting between Marina and Uncle Fred, and felt the oddest dispassion. He didn't suppose he had loved Mark at all, nothing beyond the blur of infatuation, or just the idea of filling the empty hole in his heart. Meanwhile, the only notable change in his own dysfunction was a most ambiguous gift of heat. Now he jerked himself off at night, sometimes snapping a cockring on, sometimes a full trussing with the rawhide. Even in the fugue state of desirelessness that gripped him after Victor's death, he had managed to whip it up once or twice a month, but now it was every night. He'd even stocked in a few stroke books. But the fantasies were very careful—never Mark, certainly never Victor. In fact, he found himself roaming way back, to Boston fifteen years ago or his randy first summer in Europe, dicks of the ancient world. The deep past was the one safe place where a man could still let go.

“I ain't
never
had a date,” declared Charlene with comic wistful-ness, and Steven shook his self-absorption. “Girls I know,” said Charlene, “they don't expect a man. They just wanna have chirren.”

Charlene was the thirdest world among them by a long shot, however disenfranchised the militant gay ones felt. They never knew what to say to her, an ex-hooker with two kids no father would claim, four generations of women accordioned into an apartment off Pico. Yet Charlene never truly complained, so accustomed was she to bad shit, and seemed content with the sheer diversion of Thursday's men.

“Seem like you boys wanna fall in love awful bad,” she drawled. “You better get movin', huh? I got me my chirren, where's your man? Time goin'. Stop
talkin
' about it.”

A fitting enough end to a night of talking in circles. Tim announced there would be no meeting two weeks hence, on account of the dreaded holiday, and suggested they all come back next Thursday prepared to do some role-playing around the turkey issue. Instantly the mood was lighter as they fell to talking one on one. They'd all OD'd on angst and romantic longing, and now all they wanted to do was keep it simple and go have coffee with a Thursday comrade.

But not Steven, who grabbed his jacket and prepared to make a beeline for the door. He'd talked to Marina before the meeting, so there were no further courtesies required. He was over the threshold when Mark called out: “Hey, Steven, wait up, will you?”