Afterlife (14 page)

“You just do it,” said Steven.

“I don't even know what to say to you half the time. I feel stupid.”

“Mark, you don't have to apologize. You're fine.”

With the evidence all expunged, not including being naked, there was no way of telling they'd made love at all. Pillowed side by side, they were more like a pair of combat vets in a foxhole, between shellings. At least they weren't so afraid of silence. After a long moment of looking out at the inland sea of light, Mark wondered aloud: “Don't you think we'll make better friends than lovers?” Steven didn't answer right away, but that was fine. Undoubtedly he would have said yes after a decent interval, even if he was wrong, even if he was lying. But then the phone rang, making them jump a little. The second ring kicked in the answering device, informing the world at large that Mark was never home.

“I never answer the phone,” said Steven.

“But I just called you. You picked right up.”

“A mere fluke,” he replied as the beep sounded.

“Hey, Tiger, it's me,” purred Lou Ciotta, his bedroom voice echoing off the tape. “How come you don't wanna talk to me? How many times I gotta apologize? Angela'n me don't care who you sleep with. You're my goom-bah. What you want from me, huh? So I'm an asshole sometimes. Don't mean I don't love you. Why don't you come out to the beach, have a steak?”

“He's coked to the tits,” said Mark dispassionately.

There was a clunking sound, as if Lou had dropped the phone. Then another voice came on, raw and charred like barbecued meat. “Yeah, Mahk,” murmured Angela, half in a slur, “we're family, right? Lou and me, we got more money than brains. Widdout you, hey, we're in the toilet. I got your chart right here. You got long life, good health, success—
if you stay with the family
. This is not bullshit. You come here and I'll show you. Bring your boyfriend.”

Imprecisely, blind and in the dark, she hung up the phone in Zuma Beach. Mark and Steven—containing the laugh throughout her spiel, fearful her radar might pick it up—now let spill. They rocked nicely against each other like a couple of co-conspirators. They didn't need to speak about any of it, they shared it so completely.

And the laughing gave them just the right transition. There was nothing clumsy or tentative in Steven's rolling away and off the sofa. He reached for his sweatshirt from the lamp, sending it teetering like a whooping crane. Mark seemed willing to let it end here, grateful that they'd managed to come through with such light casualties.

Steven squirmed his head through the neck of the shirt, relieved to tent his belly again. “So how's Tim?” he asked, and the irony had returned intact, as if after a bout of amnesia.

“Tim who?”

Steven sighed. “How quickly they forget. Tim the facilitator. Tim from Thursday night.”

Mark looked no less bewildered now that he had placed the name. “What're you talking about?”

“Well, didn't you … I mean the two of you …” He petered out. Stalled in the intersection, he bent to retrieve the brick-red briefs.

“Steven, he's straight.” Mark laughed effortlessly, still in the muzzy swoon of release. “He fuckin'
announced
it. I guess you weren't there yet. At the end he was pestering me for the name of an agent. He wants to be an actor.” Steven's mouth made a motion of saying
Oh
, but without a sound. As he put a foot in the briefs, Mark protested. “Don't put those on—they're all messed up. Here, take these.”

He leaped up from the sofa, pulled off the white shorts, and handed them over. Steven, grateful not to have to grin and bear the ick factor, accepted the loan gratefully. He tried not to romanticize the moment as he slipped into Mark's underpants. This was not a favor bestowed on a knight.

“You promise it's nothing, right?” asked Mark, pointing again to the spot on his thigh, as if there had been no interim.

“I promise,” Steven replied, and did up the buttons of his 501's.

“Here, take something.” Mark walked over to the corner full of treasure, hugging himself excitedly. “You need a camera? You want this lamp?” His ass was faintly luminous, given the bronze of the rest of him. Steven shook his head slowly, a fount of desirelessness, but Mark insisted. “Come on, take
something
. The stuff's just gonna keep coming. How about this?”

And he picked up the telescope—black matte finish, two feet long, too phallic for words. But strangely he hit the right nerve, a place where Steven yearned for something he'd never got for Christmas, when his father gave him a .22 instead. He didn't nod and didn't reach out, but Mark knew he'd won the point.

He stooped and laid the instrument in the velvet bed of its case, then snapped it shut. When he rose to present it to Steven, he was flushed with pride, a kid not notable in his green years for sharing his toys. Steven—who couldn't stand things, who hadn't acquired any tangible goods since Victor died, not a sock—hefted it by the handle, swinging it gladly as he followed his naked companion to the door.

“Thanks for making a house call, Doc,” said Mark, pulling the door open a foot, not quite enough for Steven to leave. He seemed not the least disconcerted to be undressed. Steven was feeling more naked than he.

“Couple of aspirin, lots of liquids,” Steven drawled. “You'll be fine by morning.”

Mark drew the door open wider, standing slightly behind it in case a car went by. “I guess we'll uh … you going to the meeting Thursday?”

“Maybe. We'll see.”

Still they hovered in the doorway, still no answer to Mark's conundrum. They were closer here than when they were kissing, more open-hearted and casual, free of whether they liked it or not. Finding it hard to let the moment go, perhaps, the gong they couldn't unring. Friends were not the same. They understood they'd never be so naked again. From now on they'd have to be dumb as boys, elaborate as straight men paying no attention to one another's winkies, snapping towels in the locker room. The male bond: everything but desire.

And no good-byes. As the door swung shut, each of them gave a small vague wave, hardly more than the twitch that passes between a pitcher and a catcher. Steven could smell night jasmine somewhere nearby and made a hasty step toward the Volvo, needing no floral reminders. He knew just what to say to himself as he drove away. If he'd wanted it, he'd have wanted it. There were other things besides passion, which only frizzed the nerves and left you vacant for days after. One grew too old for boyfriends anyway. Better to know it now than later. A bad case of missed connections, that's all it was.

Just two guys, resolved at last. Steven careened down Laurel Canyon, glad they had brought the moment to its crisis so now they could move along to something real. He chose to think he was happy. The canyon pass was unbearably still, his the only car. If an earthquake had struck just then along the Inglewood Fault, it would have brought the whole mountain down around his head—but none did. The ground remained the ground, and Steven was free to go home.

The ice cream beside him on the seat would go back in the freezer and be as good as new tomorrow, except for a few ice crystals. Otherwise nothing had altered. Though he now possessed the wherewithal to seize the riddled dome of the star-shot sky, Steven would have protested that he was an ordinary man again, lucky to be alive. The nice thing about friends was being able to leave intact. Tender was better than carnal; intimate didn't require a hard-on. It was all turning out to be very postmodern, dating in the apocalypse.

5

No matter where he landed, Sonny was always lucky with room mates. Something—an energy, a polar drift—guided him to people possessed with a gift. He could see it all as a pattern now. Every couple of years he needed to hole up and incubate the next transition. Just then, a safe place would present itself, an island in the river.
Oasis
was his hieroglyph, green his color, six his number. Of course he didn't know any of that at first. Life taught him the order and character of his life by repetition.

First was the girl with the green shock in her long blond hair. He met Romy in a greasy spoon near the Embarkadero, the very night he walked out on the lighting designer. He hadn't actually planned to walk out for good; he was mostly trying to escape a roomful of overly decorated men, lit like African violets. Sonny ordered eggs and sausages. Beside him, Romy scooped a handful of pearls and agates from her purse, laid them on the counter, and worked out for him his place in the XVIIth Dynasty: Pharaoh's cousin on his mother's side. Sonny was nineteen.

He slept in Romy's bed for seven months, a sword of chastity between them. Of course he still cruised and woke up in other places, having morning coffee with perfect strangers. That was just desire. But Romy was further evolved than the men he met and discarded. She was the first philosopher he had ever known who could walk through the walls of her own metaphysics.

They lay around in their underwear, dropping tabs of acid like vitamins, and Romy would lullabye him with the scope of his ancient kingdom. Pharaoh's cousin, she said, commanded the land below the Second Cataract and personally oversaw the painting of Pharaoh's tomb. Synchronicity alone demanded that the two of them should drive down to L.A. for the Tutankhamen show, and they sailed down Route 5 on purple haze.

They stood in line for half a day at the County Museum, swooning with the fumes that wafted from the La Brea Tarpits to the east. “The bones of mastodons,” she murmured, waving a scarf at the primal ooze. You could not just stand in line with Romy; there was always something shimmering at the edges.

The Tut exhibit was mobbed, and they went around it arm in arm, Romy gasping with recognition at every gilded shape. “This was my period, I know it,” she whispered, her arms wrapped around him as they stood before a Plexi case in which an alabaster cat with emerald eyes sat on its haunches. “I used to worry that I was just a handmaiden, or even worse a slave. Now I can feel my lineage was royal.”

Sonny wasn't listening. He was staring through the case at a square-jawed man in black-rimmed glasses—thirty-five, no wedding ring—who wasn't looking at the cat either. By the time they reached the hammered gold mask of the boy-king himself, Sonny and the guy were rubbing shoulders. Romy melted into the crowd, no prearranged signal required.

His name was Larry. From Houston: lizard boots and a Stetson in his room at the Beverly Hilton, discreetly shed for his sojourn in L.A. He had a smutty mouth and a fantasy that Sonny was his little brother. A speculator in real estate, beachfront on the Gulf. “The Second Cataract,” murmured Romy when Sonny told her. He laughed; for him it was just a weekend lark. It was Romy who convinced him to go when Larry proposed to take him home to Texas.

“Life doesn't happen, you make it happen,” she said, the shimmering green of her eyelids playing off the green in her hair. Their good-bye was in the Hilton lobby. She pressed a brass scarab into Sonny's palm, which she'd bought at the Tut souvenir pavilion. “Never forget, you are a prince of Thebes. Whenever you come to an oasis, think of Romy.”

Houston lasted about five months, with endless humid commutes to the Gulf. Larry would oversee the demolition of rows of beach-board bungalows, then follow the progress of his poured motels and mini-malls. The memory trace of Athens Construction wasn't lost on Sonny, even to the burly foremen who stared at him with famished eyes as he sat in Larry's pickup.

But Sonny wasn't giving it away anymore. He didn't ever love Larry, though he liked the little-brother part, especially in bed. Other than sex, Larry didn't expect much from Sonny, which seemed a fair bargain, like getting paid to eat sandwiches. Sonny worked out in a gym on Montrose for two or three hours a day. He took a few units in business at U of H, but ducked the exam. Otherwise he drifted in Larry's wake. The Texas men they bothered with, coarse and unreconstructed, were a bracing change of air after the lighting queens of San Francisco.

If Sonny missed anything, it was metaphysics. Romy had been for him like a book of changes, tapping the well of the deep past, unleashing his uniqueness. He couldn't seem to do it on his own. All the Gemini data in all the astrology columns left him cold. He needed a medium tuned to him alone—needed to
be
a medium for someone else's gifts, as he had been for Romy. It wasn't the same as being desired. Whatever it was he yearned for, his love life was the opposite.

After Houston he landed in Provincetown, with a lyricist who wrote only eight lines in the year he was beached with Sonny. There followed a spate of sane and passionless roommates, the sort who divvied the phone bill to the penny, while Sonny tended bar in Boston. His boyfriend at the time was a dean at Somerset College. The dean, married with four, was able to transfer the incomplete from Houston. Sonny put in a semester of night school, the dean's car waiting afterward under the elms. The diploma was left on his bedside table.

Sonny felt nothing; he had no plans. He still had nobody gay to talk to. All that he had to say seemed to fit the space of a single night. He was twenty-four, and he wanted to be a man now—enough of being everybody else's kid fantasy. The gold in his curly hair had tarnished. His bright, astonished eyes had narrowed, squinting like a scout. The summer after the dean he pulled in, flicking the remote in his Comm Av apartment, watching reruns of “Lucy” and “Beaver.” At night he ventured out to tend bar at Foley's, a watering hole that was blissfully straight and single.

He passed for straight himself that summer. His roommate at the time was a film student who came home every night reeling from the movie of his life. Aaron would shake his head and talk about “Boston women” as if they were a breed apart, impossibly self-possessed. Sonny grunted sympathetically, man to man, one eye on “Bewitched.” He set Aaron up with free drinks at Foley's. They were summer buddies, all the carnality focused on the blondes Aaron couldn't score with.