Afterlife (3 page)

Over a beer Mark listened sullenly to the china doll swathed in Armani. “The mall people have discovered Rodeo Drive,” observed Ray Lee ominously, bravely filling the gap with Margaret and Steven away in the kitchen. Understandably Ray overcompensated, since the four other men in the room stuck to monosyllables, stalking one another with their eyes, and somebody had to talk to poor Lynn Heller. On opposite sides of the fireplace, Ted Kneeland and Sonny jostled like thoroughbreds pawing their stalls. Dell Espinoza, sunk in an easy chair, continued to look as if his pockets were full of explosives. The social fabric was stretched very thin by the time they got the call to come to dinner.

They all moved intently toward the dining room, breaking off conversation. Margaret had whipped together a bloodless salad and garlic bread in minutes, so the questionable lasagna was buffered on all sides. Everyone laughed when Steven swore he would never entertain again, even Margaret who believed him. They grazed around the table, a shred of manners surfacing at last as they helped one another to bread and olives. With their plates for ballast they moved outside to the brick terrace, which floated along the brow of the hill above the white-flecked tide of the city.

Somehow they fell into little groups that worked. Dell and Lynn straddled the chaise longues under the sycamore, its dry leaves rattling softly. Nearby Sonny sat cross-legged on the bricks beside a wooden bench on which Ray Lee perched primly, plate between his knees. Sonny rambled animatedly about his splintered youth, the nuclear exchange with his father that put him on the road at seventeen. Charmed though Ray was by the story, it was told for Ted Kneeland's sake, who slouched against one arm of the bench and talked to Margaret about poor Steven and how he was getting on. Margaret lied and swore there had been a noticeable turnaround.

Which left Mark Inman standing half in, half out of the dining room, poised on the brink with his pasta rapidly cooling. He seemed to survey the others, making sure they were all engaged but not committing himself. As if he were trying to choose the “A” conversation, or as if he had one ear cocked for a phone call that would draw him away from the place entirely.

Steven hardly noticed that Mark was waiting, as he put together a mechanical plate of food he didn't want. He was actually thinking about the two remaining Mud Pies in the freezer, but that would have to wait till later. He poured himself a glass of Finnish seltzer and turned toward the terrace doors, only to have Mark pivot neatly and smile at him. “Why don't we eat in here?” he asked conspiratorially. “I like to see what I'm putting in my mouth.”

“Oh, sure.” Steven gestured vaguely for Mark to take a chair, but instinctively he looked outside, as if longing for reinforcements. Steven sat down lightly on a chair opposite Mark. He poked at his pasta and took a guarded bite. For a moment he thought they were going to be lucky and not have to speak at all. Steven relied on other people's bouts of uncomfortable shyness in his presence.

But then Mark rolled his shoulders and stared at Steven's thumb. “I'm sorry I never wrote you about Victor.”

“Mm,” replied Steven mildly, on automatic pilot. “After all, it's not like we were friends.”

“No, it was chickenshit of me. He was a really sweet man. I should've—” Mark stopped mid-sentence, shaking his head, as if he couldn't bear his own inadequacy.

Suddenly Steven felt weary and annoyed. “Don't worry about it, Mark. We had all kinds of people around. Besides, you hardly even
knew
him.”

Mark glanced up bewildered. “But we—” And he stopped again, but this time Steven got it. He stared blankly in Mark's gray eyes till Mark looked away, visibly squirming. “It was ten years ago. I thought you knew.”

Before Steven. As if Ted Kneeland weren't bad enough, his deeply tanned presence teasing Steven with all the summers of Victor's twenties. Why was it he'd never been jealous of Victor's past during all their eight years together, and now he was? He couldn't even remember asking Victor anybody's name from the deep past. Ten years ago Steven still lived in Boston, being tormented by a man who was half Portuguese and half crazed. Nino: faceless now, a character in a book Steven never quite finished. Who cared about ten years ago?

But Mark was clearly mortified. There was something almost endearing about the deep flush that washed across his face. He was not someone who ever had to back down in a business deal, and his temper was legion in the close quarters of Bungalow 19. It was other people who did the wincing and the flinching. Yet even as Mark struggled to frame an apology, Steven stood up, set his plate down, and walked away through the front hall.

Mark blinked after him, feeling stunned and ridiculous. He glanced outside to the group on the terrace, to see if anyone had noticed his appalling gaffe. But everyone was happily engaged in dinner chitchat, and Mark's gaze focused instead on Ted Kneeland, who happened to be laughing, his head thrown back, the sculpted swell of his chest taut against his shirt. A queer chill of contempt went through him. Ted wasn't just not beautiful to him anymore; there was something almost repellent about the Perry Ellis perfection. How long had they known each other? They'd slept together for five weeks, having circled each other for some months prior. They didn't know each other at all.

Sonny stood up and moved toward the house to get more food, and Mark hastily bolted from the room. Once in the vestibule he decided impulsively to leave. There was no way to apologize to Steven without making more of a fool of himself. Let Ted hitch a ride with the Greek kid. Mark's hand was on the doorknob when he heard Steven beckon from the room beyond: “Here, look at this.”

Startled at the conspiratorial echo in Steven's voice, Mark walked into the study. Steven was standing at the desk with a big book open in front of him. Behind his head was a poster of an Italian hill town, a blue-streaked painted cart in a meadow beside a crumbling wall. Steven smiled as if there had been no awkwardness whatever. He pointed to a picture in the album, and Mark approached and dutifully bent to look. It was a Polaroid of Victor and another man, both shirtless, leaning shoulder to shoulder and laughing.

“Summer of 'seventy-seven, right?” asked Steven, precise as a scholar.

Mark's gaze widened to take in the pictures on both pages. Victor Diamond in his mid-twenties, scrappy and muscular and in constant motion, racing in and out of the camera's frame, as if he could be caught only by accident. Mark sighed. “He looks about eighteen.”

“Vic always looked eighteen. I mean not at the end …”

Mark could feel the sudden shiver of tension in the man beside him, like one who had looked too long from a high place. Scrambling for something to say, Mark touched a finger to the print of the two laughing boys. “Who's this?”

“Why, Ted of course,” retorted Steven, recovering his balance.

“Oh, right.” Mark recognized now the tilt of the chin, cocky and self-satisfied. More than ever he felt as if he'd never met this man. It was a case of mistaken identity, five weeks at the wrong address, like everyone else Mark ended up with. Abruptly he said, “Guy I knew just died.”

Steven felt the empathy like a hot rush. They were standing side by side, and he reached out and touched the back of Mark's hand where it rested on the desk. Steven retracted all his censorious thoughts, now that the pain in the hunted eyes was real. Neither man spoke for a moment, Steven's fingertips resting on the vein that coursed from the wrist to the knuckles. He might have been taking Mark's pulse. Finally Mark, whom no one touched except in bed, began to talk in a cautious voice.

“Thursday night, out in Riverside. Nobody else was there but me, but it didn't matter. He was in a coma.”

Still Steven waited, staring down at the pictures of Victor a decade ago. He only had a fear that one of the others would walk in before the story was done.

“I went out with him last winter,” continued Mark, then hastened to qualify that. “Couple of months, no big deal. Then I had to go away on location, and when I got back he'd split. I just thought he was gone.” The last word came out with a certain torque of bitter irony, as if “gone” were a whole other story. “Then last week his father called, because Brad left me a note. I don't think I was supposed to get it till after he died.”

Silence again, and this time Mark's hand stirred under Steven's fingers, restless and unsure. Steven recalled the lame and useless remarks he'd heard by the thousand in the last year, how angry every attempt at comfort made him. All except Margaret, who never even tried but only asked the plainest questions, solid and dull as her lasagna. Steven said, “How old was he?”

“Twenty-eight.”

Eight years less than Victor, five less than Marcus, three less than Ellsworth. Steven always asked how old. He read the obituaries only of men under fifty. He tried not to feel a spurt of triumph that Vic had lived longer than Mark's friend. But then, Steven spent so much time trying not to feel that he sometimes couldn't recall what was still allowable.

“I'm sorry, Steve, I wasn't even going to tell you that. You've had enough.”

“I don't mind,” Steven replied mildly. Since the night he last walked out of Victor's hospital room, nothing surprised him anymore. Nothing was too horrible or too much a reminder. He knew they were lying in comas all over the city.

“Nobody knows I even knew him. ‘Mark,' he wrote, ‘thanks for a wonderful time. At least I got a taste.'”

In one dispassionate room of his mind Steven waited for Mark to cry. It amazed him how much of the story Mark had managed without a break, and wondered now if he'd heard him right that it happened just two days ago.

“I can't cry,” Mark announced with a certain psychic precision, as if they were playing chess by mail. At that he withdrew his hand from Steven's touch, restoring the equal distance, man to man. Nobody seemed to have anything safe or comfortable to say. Steven closed the album and turned to slip it back on a shelf, where Mark could see half a dozen more, leatherbound in a row. These, he supposed, were the sum of Victor's life, organized year by year, all of it compact enough to fit in a baby's coffin.

Steven turned back and shrugged at Mark. “It doesn't really matter,” he said, “but nobody calls me Steve.”

They locked eyes again, for the first time since Mark had entered the house, but now there was something antic in the look they exchanged. At last they had stumbled on a minor issue. “Steven,” said Mark, trying it out in a diplomatic sort of way. Then they laughed, like two kids in a half-naked Polaroid.

Suddenly they were comrades, merry and sly. Mark Inman dug his hands in his jacket pockets, his car keys clinking dully. The exactor in him flashed a quarter smile. He wasn't half so tan as his boyfriend Ted, and besides, the squint lines around his eyes were deeper than the sun. Without moving a millimeter, Steven puffed his chest and pulled in his belly and started to think inanely about what diet he ought to begin tomorrow.

They could have happily gone outside and joined the others now, drawing the group together at last, a one-night family. They'd gotten through all the sad part. But plainly Mark had something more to say, for his face clouded again. Steven realized he hadn't looked in anybody's eyes in over a year, not since the light began to go for Victor. Not even in his own eyes, not even in the mirror.

“I'm positive,” Mark declared with ashen calm. “I've known for a long time, but it's like I didn't believe it. Not till I was driving back from the desert the other morning. You know what I mean? Here I am—I'm going to die.”

Steven nodded, unable somehow to lie in the face of so much naked truth. “Me too,” he replied flatly.

Then Margaret billowed into the room, beaming with proprietary feeling. “Where the hell are the coffee filters?” When they looked at her blankly, too many fences down, she glanced from one to the other, her radar on red alert. Before Steven could think which cupboard, she said, “I'll find them,” and backed out.

When they turned to each other again the two men looked askance, but only slightly, a bare degree from locking eye to eye. It wouldn't have much mattered what they said.
Where are you staying in London? You're lucky to have her in the office
. But now there interposed a small insistent beep. Steven slipped a hand in his pants pocket and drew out a small white plastic container with digital readout: his pill timer. He slid back the little drawer and scooped out two white capsules banded in blue. Mark's eyes were fixed on him the whole time, as if he was trying to memorize a code. “Welcome to the valley of the dolls,” Steven said wryly.

He punched in the 4
A.M.
call on the timer and slipped it back in his pocket. Now he needed a very tall glass of water to try to outwit the nausea. Thus they moved to leave without another word, back to the missed connections of a widower's Saturday night. They sauntered into the living room, not quite shoulder to shoulder, but effortless and casual. They were two grown men, as old as each other, and each, if nothing else, knew how to segue.

No one would have supposed they'd connected at all, from the vast indifference they maintained in the short half-hour that ended things. Sonny and Ted, the two beauties, were much more notable for the texture of their approach/avoidance. Brittle and clumsy, they talked without any of the fluid grace that marked their Olympian passage through the gym. Ray Lee was cruelly disappointed that no one had skimmed the latest
Star
. Indeed, as a group they seemed unable to dish with any flair, even at the most basic level of Liz and Liza. Ray wanted out of this cultural wasteland, as did Lynn Heller, whose own stomping ground was Beverly Hills and Malibu, where she was booked for the rest of her life.

Still, it was Dell who made the first move to go, murmuring to Steven that he had a phone date at midnight. All it took was one of them, and the general move began, gathering their jackets, making the vaguest promises to see one another again. Mark and Steven didn't even say good night. When Ted and Mark paired up to go, it was Ted who took care of the flashier good-byes, hugging Steven close and whispering in his ear. Between Mark and Steven there only passed the briefest nod, like moguls bidding at an auction.