Afterlife (10 page)

“Fuck it all,” he declared, bitter and finished, and trudged off down the hill.

Prime Time at The Body Works was five to seven-thirty. The actor/models had the place to themselves in the afternoons, but then they would have to hustle home for their white shirts and black bow ties. Copies of
Drama-Logue
and
Daily Variety
littered the floor by the treadmills. By five the working class would start arriving—tie clerks from Bullocks, paralegals, men who provided assistance. The men's aerobics hour from five to six was as rigid as a Ballanchine class, and to miss it was to miss the point entirely. Norm, who led the class, had single-handedly raised the tone from early-bird disco to Olympic trials.

Six to seven was weights. By now the professional class had started to filter in, the lawyers and dentists and realtors. Nightly the choice would have to be made: chest, shoulders, abs, or legs. In the age of triage a man couldn't work on everything; focus was all. Here was where the social cutting edge was honed, in the little groups that formed around the bench press and the lats machine.

These were the guys who had always been chosen last in the schoolyard, banished to the outermost outfield, and now they made up for lost time with murderous concentration, forming a sort of Little League of lost preadolescence. In the mindless banter and shorthand of the weight room, they recovered the willful merriment of boys. And given the fact that they pushed so hard, showing off their bodies muscle group by muscle group, it wasn't surprising that they traded numbers and paired off for weekend nights. The Body Works was a dating pool where one could be certain at the minimum of a proper ratio of fat to body weight.

If five to six was the dance of life, and six to seven boys' phys ed, seven to seven-thirty was the waters. Ripe and glistening, they would strip off their second skin, the bicycle shorts and tank tops, T-shirts from the
Nebraska
tour. White towels round their waists, they lumbered into the steam room or the sauna opposite. In the milky smoke they were languid and muzzy, a Rousseau dream of the tropics. They stared at each other dry-eyed in the crackling air of the sauna, their superheated skin prickling, as if they longed to dive in the snow. In the Jacuzzi they sat in churning water chest-high, a circle of missionaries being boiled by cannibals.

But in all of the waters, especially the showers, what they were doing mostly was appraising one another. Mirroring themselves, catching a glimpse of who they used to be or where they were going. They did not exactly represent the seven ages of man, for the first two and the last were banished utterly from The Body Works. But the arc from twenty to fifty was played out in top form, worked on and sculpted and purged of excess flesh. Were all of them gay? The question was moot. Straight ones did slip in every now and again, actors and other archetypes of fitness, but they kept their affections private. Mostly their sexual preference was themselves.

Sonny Cevathas was one of the gods of Prime Time. His own waitering schedule was clustered on the weekend, so that all he needed to pick up during the week was a couple of lunches. Not that he ever missed a day at the gym, sometimes going twice if he felt like a swim in the morning. It was only a block from Dirk Ainley's apartment, where Sonny occupied the cubbyhole second bedroom, hardly room for a mattress and an orange crate full of New Age texts. Even though Dirk was away more days than he was home, shuttling back and forth to Hawaii on American, Sonny never felt the place was really his. It was temporary quarters. The Body Works was Sonny's living room, his office, and his yard.

He was principal dancer of the 6
P.M.
aerobics class. Norm the instructor, who had a terrible crush on him, would let Sonny choose the music from a box of tapes. There were a dozen regular Adonises in the class, but Sonny had the edge of being mascot. His regular place was first row far right, where he flung himself into a thousand hieroglyphs. It was Norm on the foot-high stage in front who issued the orders and counted off, a drill sergeant with a slight twinge of the ballerina, but it was Sonny the class watched.

More than an athlete or dancer, he capered like a figure on a Greek vase, erotic and in-the-body and far beyond it too. He sweated like a bandit, shaking it like rain from his hair. He wouldn't have dreamed of cruising here, or connecting up with anyone. This was the warm-up, all for him.

Upstairs in the weight room was where he made his connections. He had no regular workout partners, always keeping his options open as he moved from station to station. For a while he'd spot a buddy on the bench, somebody from his own league of aching youth. The two of them would trade off and pump, watched by their elders longingly, as if the tableau might at any moment burst into a Matt Sterling saga.

Then Sonny would wander off and do curls in the mirror or sit-ups on a slant board, hundreds of them, till one or another of the older men would be transfixed. Sonny always knew who was watching him, and which of several different ones was ready to make a move on him. Usually thirty-five to forty, better than a hundred grand a year, and looking for something permanent. It didn't make Sonny a gold digger that he let them watch or even ask for an evening.

He'd go out with almost anybody once, if the guy was spellbound enough. Sonny's youth and beauty were a magic circle. He didn't think of himself as jaded or a cynic. He simply chose his own reality, as a warrior chooses his fights. He was the existential object.

He could see Sean Pfeiffer approaching for twenty minutes before he said a word. Eyeing Sonny through the baffle of mirrors that sheathed the place, never looking directly, staying busy with his own workout, but moving inexorably. Sonny was working out with the wooden pole behind his shoulders, swinging back and forth at the hips with abandon, where there already wasn't an ounce of fat.

“You gonna do chest?” Sean asked, sidling up and addressing him in the mirror, staying clear of the pendulum swing of the pole.

“Shoulders,” Sonny replied.

It didn't bode to be a very scintillating encounter, but these things always began with body mechanics. Sean was forty-five or there-abouts, running to fat at the waist, his hair spiked like a razorback, trying to look younger than he was. His eyes were blank as binoculars from staring across the gym at men like Sonny. To fill up space he fretted about whether to trade in his XJ-S for a convertible, then about his imminent trip to Australia, where he'd be unable to work out for two weeks. Fearing to lose his hard-won pecs, he sighed: “I wish I could take a trainer with me.”

At last Sonny stopped bouncing and put the pole aside.
Shoulders
was still the only word he'd spoken. Now he turned to Sean and grinned. “Great. When do we leave?”

Sean laughed at the sudden flirtation. He was some kind of banker, or perhaps it was even more raw than that and he was in money, pure and simple. He had a house at the top of Trousdale Estates and was on the road constantly, very nice situation for a boyfriend. Sure, said Sonny, they could have dinner tomorrow. An invitation that had been building for weeks, as Sonny let Sean come closer and closer. Did he find Sean hot? Put it this way: it was hot that Sean found
him
hot. As Sonny trundled downstairs to the locker room, he realized with a certain irony that Sean was only six years younger than his own father. There was something hot in that as well.

But then, hot was very imprecise, or at least in constant flux. And never to be trusted, since it evaporated as quick as it flared, usually by the end of the second weekend. Sonny shucked his tank top, shorts, and jock, letting them lie in a heap on the floor as he grabbed his towel from his locker. Twice in the last year his jock had been stolen while he was in the shower. It neither bothered him nor turned him on that there were guys out there with fetishes of him. The queer thing was—as he stepped under the shower, arching his nakedness into the driving spray—he wasn't all that wed to this body that stopped traffic.

It was the metaphysical side of him that was truly in competition form. Those myriad men who only knew him by the candlepower of his body were on the wrong track. Not that his body wasn't a temple—just now with the water coursing down its sinews like a cloudburst—but he didn't want heathens supplicating there. In the early years it used to be enough for a man to be a Pisces. Like Ellsworth, all they needed to do was hear Sonny out when he spun his tale. Now he wanted an old soul, a fellow prince. Wanted them to understand that this Sonny with the warrior's form and the gold hair was just one of a hundred incarnations.

Toweling dry in the white-tiled vestibule, he stroked his vivid limbs in full view of a dozen others who could see they were lesser gods than he. Yet Sonny always gave them the chance, men like Sean Pfeiffer, even as far as going to bed once. After all, it often required the full body to put them in touch with the not-body. This, he had come to see, was where Ellsworth had failed him, by keeping Sonny's body at the objectified level of pure desire. If only Ellsworth could have broken through metaphysically, he never would have gotten sick at all. In his own way Sonny had truly loved Ellsworth and tried not to judge him. He understood that different men had different karmas to enact. But the last of the grief he felt was indistinguishable from a sort of moral posture, that a man made a journey of his own devising.

No shadow of the sickness was on him as he padded back to his locker. It wasn't just him: the sickness did not penetrate the walls of The Body Works. If people got sick, they had the decency to stay home. There had to be a sanctuary somewhere where AIDS did not intrude, where people really meant it when they said they were feeling great.

Sonny slipped back into his jeans and a sweatshirt, reeling with well-being, drunk on endorphins. He knew he had made the right choice not to be tested for the virus. The real test was the vast aliveness he felt at the end of Prime Time, gathering up his workout clothes and stuffing them in his gym bag, feeling a throb in his groin from the smell of his own sweat. He sauntered through the locker room and out, waving and nodding to several men as he went, including Sean, who blinked at him, dazed at his own good fortune.

Sean Pfeiffer, thought Sonny, would definitely bear some further investigation. At least he had the proper urgency. Perhaps he could be led beyond the body. Sonny walked out into the lambent evening, the traffic streaming by on Santa Monica Boulevard like a river of light. He stood at the curb, perfect and untouchable, waiting for the
WALK
sign. His own heart was in no danger, that was the most important thing. After all, it could take forever to find an old soul. In the meantime, Sean Pfeiffer might be just the thing he needed for the next plateau.

4

Finally they had lunch.

Mark had been out of work ten days before he answered the phone, content to stare at the answering machine as Lou Ciotta and all his minions called in on the hour, slimy with apologies. Mark walked around the house on Skyway Lane in his boxer shorts, unshaven. It astonished him to realize that his maid, pool man, and gardener had had the house to themselves for years, while Mark was only in residence from eleven at night to seven in the morning. He felt vaguely guilty being in their way, but knew they would all vanish as soon as he got sick. Meanwhile, one day at a time, he could feel himself recovering from the telephone.

It was an accident that he took Steven's call. He was having a cliché nightmare, the lid of a coffin being lowered over his face. He bolted awake from his third nap of the day and grabbed the phone unthinkingly, like oxygen. When he heard Steven's voice, he thought at first it was about airline tickets. He was about to say his travel days were over when Steven suggested lunch—a Sunday drive up Topanga Canyon. Mark was too groggy to think of a reason not to.

Steven had no idea that Mark had severed relations with Bungalow 19, nor that heaps of lawyers and network men were frantic to woo him back. Driving out Sunset to the beach, they made an odd pair of retirees. Despite the Hawaiian shirt that covered his ample belly, Steven didn't look ready for golf or senior discounts. Mark, even with ten days' beard and nothing pending, tore at the wheel of his big boy's Jeep, negotiating traffic like a killer deal. They weren't out of work so much as off it. Vigorous still and in their prime, they looked fit enough to work construction.

By the time they wound their way up Topanga, the blasted gorse of the beaten hills parched to the brink of conflagration, they were having a gentlemen's disagreement as to how long they had left. “Two years max,” insisted Mark, parsing it like a contract. “But that's if I stay above water. Soon as I get sick, I'm checking out.”

“You don't know that,” Steven replied with a certain superiority, as if he'd heard the suicide brag before. “You'll probably want to fight for a while, and besides, the drugs might keep us going. Five years, maybe ten.”

“Ten,” scoffed Mark with a growl of impatience, and Steven wasn't sure if ten years seemed to Mark impossibly optimistic or beneath contempt.

They stopped at a sprouts-and-granola inn at the top of the canyon, sitting on a porch above a dry creek bed, their Zen salads dive-bombed by wasps. They compromised on three good years of marginal stability, suicide not included. Cautiously they traded T-cell numbers—happily in the same neighborhood, or somebody might've been walking home. Mark was leery of the blue-and-white capsules, admitting as much when Steven beeped at one-fifteen and gobbled them with his iced tea. Mark was willing to risk a further dip in his numbers and wait for more data.

Steven didn't press him, not having much faith in the medicine himself. It was only that he'd spent so many months fighting to get Victor onto the drug, then pleading with Victor to take it. He kept waiting for the conversation to change. He was sick of talking immunology. Mark drove his knife and fork as furiously as he drove the Jeep, attacking his hippie salad with a vengeance. He barked at the shoulder-blond waiter, demanding rolls and dressing on the side, clearly annoyed by the waiter's easy straightness, by the fact that he didn't flirt with either of the ticking men from the city. When Mark had at last exhausted all the numbers and the odds, he started to ask about Victor. Nice uncomplicated questions about Montana and their travels.