Afterlife (11 page)

It wasn't behaving like a date at all. Not that Steven would have known what to do with it if it had, but he felt quite mournful turning down dessert. If he was going to be alone, he might as well have the brown rice cheesecake. Yet Mark was trim and meant to stay that way, even if he was dying, so Steven stuck to coffee laced with three packets of Equal.

There was a sudden cry from the next table, where a burly man was cuddling with his girlfriend. A wasp bit him on the cheek, this after the waiter's assurance that they were harmless. The ensuing ruckus was oddly cheering to the two men from the leper kingdom. Suddenly the rim of the canyon was charged with violence. The white-gold grass beyond the dry wash bristled in the October heat, alive with snakes and spiders. As the man was led away wailing off the porch, threatening to sue, Mark flashed a dirty smile at Steven.

“Besides,” insisted Mark, always doubling back, “my insurance is fucked. I'm only covered for eighteen months unless I get a new job. Then what? I gotta go into County?” County was downtown, a public hospital swamped by the indigent, a scream made into a building. Mark shook his head stubbornly. “Sorry, I'm not sticking around for that. And
what
new job? Who's gonna hire me? ‘Please describe your general health.' Dead.”

Steven looked into the restaurant, where a gaggle of laughing girls was trailing around the buffet table, loading up their plates. All of them untouched. Now this Sunday date was in danger of turning into a suicide pact. “Well,” Steven replied carefully, “sometimes people stick around for other reasons. So they can stay with people they love.”

His gaze remained on the breezy girls. He could feel the stillness across the table, but also sensed a certain coolness—not aloof, just very self-contained. Obviously Mark didn't have anyone to stay for. The girls spilled out onto the porch, bearing their bountiful plates. They took a free table and sat in a magic circle. None of the wasps would bother them. Mark stretched and waved for the check.

Did he want Mark's body? He couldn't have said. He studied the play of muscles in the other man's forearms as Mark signed the credit-card slip. He wasn't anything like Victor, whose motions were antic and fluid, his heart pouring out of him like laughter. Mark didn't laugh. As an actor he had been conventionally handsome, Ivy League WASP when it came to casting, despite being a lapsed Jew, and with every gesture predetermined. Not like Victor at all, careening with spontaneity, shrieking hello.

Steven walked out of the inn behind Mark and studied his walk—shoulders high, a cowboy's sway in the hips, very butch. But did Steven want all that? Did he want to see it naked? He had not, even unconsciously, checked out Mark's frontal equipment, not even glanced at the rise in his jeans. This was probably not a good sign. They hoisted themselves into the black Jeep on either side, and Mark headed down the hairpin canyon. The bright western arc of the sun caught them full in the face. The smell of sage in the empty hills was distinct, but it needed the first winter rain before it sharpened and broke your heart. No rain since April. Last year it rained in September, the day of Victor's funeral. Everything was late this year.

As to equipment, Steven had scarcely glanced at his own in months. Even at his randiest, in the dim days of his youth, it seemed a waste of spirit to jerk it off. Now he had left it alone so long it had seemingly forgotten all its tricks. Yet something quickened in Steven, sitting beside Mark Inman, especially now that they were quiet. The ocean appeared below in the final V of the canyon. Something he understood about Mark the moment he'd walked into Steven's house three Saturdays ago. Here was a man as isolated, as
dis
located as he. That was the turn-on.

“How's Ted?”

Mark's face wrinkled in a frown, as if he could hardly remember. “That's all over,” he said tartly, shrugging it off. “He's a jerk.” Traffic was smooth on the coast highway, just a beat too early for the beach folk to be heading home. Steven made a small murmur which could have been agreement or dissent. Mark started over. “No he's not, he's a kid. It doesn't have anything to do with him. It never does. Two, three months … that's like forever to me.” He pouted his lips as if the taste was sour, then clucked his tongue. “I'm such a shallow queen.”

“Is he negative?”

“I don't know. We played it safe, so nobody had to ask. Is anybody negative?”

“Yeah. Certain genetic freaks.”

They laughed. As they sailed through Pacific Palisades—Republican ladies staggering down the sidewalks under the weight of boutique loot—they kept playing catch-up with a pickup truck full of retro surfers in the next lane. The skinhead driver was lobster-red, and his buddies in the back slouched on each other like puppies in a cardboard box. Mark fixed on the one in the orange shorts and rattled off something obscene that Steven didn't quite catch.

He had never been very good at on-site cruising, and especially at the cold appraisal of flesh in the passing parade. Victor had let no beauty go by unnoticed, scaling them one to ten, while Steven couldn't bear the thought of being noticed noticing. For politeness's sake he leered along with Mark, but couldn't imagine bedding down any of the boys in the pickup, and not just because of the numbness of his dick. They were all too straight. There was something faintly appalling about straight men these days, as if they had all been deferred from the draft, 4-F, ridiculously healthy.

The dozing surfer reminded Mark of an earlier dude—ten years ago, or was it fifteen? Nothing much to remember really, beyond the stupid good looks, except Mark had been just as young himself, so the memory was of two hot men. “I used to meet him every Monday at Unemployment,” Mark recalled, more wistfully than Steven had ever heard him. “We'd get our checks and go back to his place and fuck.”

The pickup turned north on Veteran, bearing its gods away, but Mark kept talking, filling in his ancient Mondays blow by blow. Steven was at a loss. He couldn't quite see how the past and the present meshed for Mark, who shuffled through his men like a deck of cards. For his part, Steven had no one to talk about but Victor. Somehow he couldn't go back beyond those eight years. The carnal game, the chase and capture—all of that took place in another life, as unreal now as porno. So he looked away and laughed thinly, while Mark laid the slovenly Mondays to rest.

By the time they drove uphill to Steven's house, it was less like a date than ever, or perhaps just like a blind one. Unconsciously Steven's hands balled into fists, for he couldn't think of another thing to say. He was nearly forty-one years old, and his tongue was tied like a high-school kid's. Would a hug be too much to say good-bye? Would a kiss be too effeminate? It suddenly seemed the height of folly, that two men who'd been in the game so long could ever connect at all. Somebody had to be young and undefended, or else forget it.

“He's probably dead by now,” said Mark, drawing up in front of Steven's house. Steven had ceased to hear as they came around the hill, but assumed he was still talking about the guy from Unemployment. “We'll have to do it again,” said Mark, clapping a hand on Steven's shoulder, man to man. Steven looked into his grinning eyes and was seized again by the curious rage he'd felt the night of the party. What right did this man have to be courting death, who hadn't lost anyone real? Steven remembered clearly now how it used to feel to dislike him—cocksure and riddled with power.

“Yeah, well, I'm free for the rest of my life,” Steven replied wryly, and reached across and mussed Mark's hair. The gesture was casual, kiddish, more than anything meant to cover Steven's annoyance, the uselessness of two grown men.

But Mark, who took everything opposite, seemed startled and cornered by Steven's touch, as if he finally understood the ambiguous blurred attractions of the afternoon. Steven scrambled out of the Jeep. They shrugged good-bye with careful smiles. He watched Mark disappear down the hill, then went in the house and slumped in a chair, blank for an hour over Victor. Nothing new in that, except there was starting to be a place inside him that was worse than tears.

If they weren't going to be an item, perhaps they would try to be buddies. That was how Steven read the next call, ten days later, time enough to draw the line in the dirt between them. The message on Steven's machine asked if he wanted to go to a meeting at the gay center. A drop-in group for seropositives, what they called in the crisis trade a “rap/support.” No reference whatsoever to their Sunday lunch.

Steven was surprised that Mark would even consider such a gathering, given its potential for whining and general bullshit. Dysfunctional himself when it came to groups of strangers, since Victor's death he had avoided all movies and malls and public events. The only groups Steven ever saw anymore were at funerals. But yes, he told Mark's machine, he'd be there Thursday night, and agreed it would be easier if they went in separate cars.

Gay and Lesbian Central was a former hooker motel on Highland, deep in the tatters of Hollywood, a warren of makeshift offices around a central court. Runaways sat on folded chairs waiting for someone to make it all better, dreading another night on the street. Meanwhile, underpaid staffers churned about with sign-up sheets, putting groups together: gay fathers, the semi-recovered, bulimics and overeaters twinned like Laurel and Hardy.

In Polo shirt and jeans, Steven walked over to the main counter, where a dyke in a hooded sweatshirt sat before the switchboard, fielding the night's calls. When she answered she was very brisk, her voice as clipped as her mackerel hair, making it clear that she didn't consider herself a hotline. Haltingly Steven started to ask where the seropositives were. She pointed upstairs before he even finished the “sero” word, making him wonder how sick he looked.

The battered meeting room was about the size of a second bedroom, with two tiers of carpeted benches built around the walls, and perhaps a dozen people sitting, mostly men and mostly younger. Mark sat across from the door and smiled as Steven came in. The meeting had already started, so Steven took a quick seat beside a boy with a platinum buzz-cut and a cluster of earrings along one lobe.

A middle-aged man—too thin, too gray—was railing at the group about his doctor. “Just the art in his office looks like a fuckin' museum! Why should he get rich off us? By the time I croak, he's gonna have a house in Malibu.”

“So what?” asked a pumped-up man on the tier below. “It's not his fault you're sick. Stop displacing.”

“I'm not
sick
,” the thin man shrieked.

“It's no one's
fault
,” clamored a voice beside him, a willowy girl in Esprit pastels.

She, it turned out, had been infected by a hemophiliac boyfriend, the only man she'd ever slept with. Dead now, proclaiming till the very end that he was “innocent.” The girl, Marina, had nowhere else to go for support besides Gay Central. The same was true for the black woman next to Mark—Charlene, who got it from a man who shot speedballs.

In fact they were all bizarrely different from each other, random as a planeload of refugees. And as far as Steven could tell, nobody listened to anyone else. They were all too angry, too upset, and everything got lost in cross talk. Before ten minutes was up Steven was feeling extremely claustrophobic.

The hemophiliac's girl was especially hard on a tall sandy-haired kid who sat under the wheezing air conditioner. He declared he had no intention of getting sick, and all the people who did were full of bad attitude. He was maybe twenty-five. “There's too much negative shit in here,” he concluded with a grimace. “Can't we lighten up?”

“Listen, Andy,” Marina hissed at him, “my Jim had great attitude, and he died like a vegetable anyway. So don't tell me to look on the bright side. We're all going to die here.”

“Easy, easy,” said the buzz-cut boy by Steven, who turned out to be the facilitator. “Let's keep it to feelings, shall we? Let's not judge. Try to say ‘I,' not ‘we.'”

Marina apologized to Andy. Steven looked at his watch. He knew already he would never open his mouth in this group. He couldn't begin a single sentence with “I,” and besides, he liked being judgmental. He'd already judged the whole room, in fact, with its rancid smell of old Reeboks, and found them all wanting. He was damned if he would be their token widow.

At least he wasn't the oldest. Following up the facilitator, a bearded type in a tweed jacket said he felt like the group's gay uncle. “I'm fifty-seven years old,” he announced proudly, “and when I came out there were no parades. It doesn't surprise
me
that they're letting us die.”
They
were the Feds, whose informed neglect was a leitmotif of the group's rage. “But I'm not gonna go quiet. They'll have to drag me outa here kicking and screaming. I've seen those camps where they locked up the Japanese.” He folded his arms, proud and stubborn. For a moment the room was charged with defiance.

Who did these people love? thought Steven as an envelope was passed to him for the night's donation. Who loved them back? He slipped two dollars in, guilty as a parishioner. The uncle was taking care of his mother, eighty-three and bonkers, and only hoped he wouldn't die or be shipped to the camps before she went. Nobody in the group told him the idea of camps was paranoid. An initiative on the November ballot required all those infected with the virus to be on a master list in Sacramento. The state health commissioner—Dr. Mengele to his gay friends—would be given broad power to quarantine at will. “Yes on Proposition 81” was running sixty/forty in the polls.

“Don't matter where I die,” said a red-faced man with a Southern accent, “long as I don't die alone.”

Vic
, thought Steven, his mind reaching out still, trying to pull Victor back from the edge for a year, then trying to help him go over. Steven had missed the actual moment by ten minutes, gulping Sanka in the hospital cafeteria. Died alone.