Afterlife (24 page)

Steven didn't turn around, but he stopped in the hall outside, staring at a safe-sex poster which showed a woman putting a condom on a banana. Just as well that they had five minutes together now—they wouldn't have to talk in the morning and pretend to want lunch, only to cancel by noon. Steven smiled and murmured good night to Uncle Fred, Charlene, the stocky man. When Andy stopped beside him and grinned, Steven had the queerest impulse to look over his shoulder, assuming the grin was for somebody else.

“You run away so fast, I never get a chance to talk to you.”

“About what?” asked Steven, genuinely baffled.

The boy laughed heartily, as if Steven was irrepressibly witty. “I'm Andy Lakin,” he said, extending a hand that Steven didn't want to shake. He was old enough to be the kid's father. “You're Steven. Marina says you've been all over the world.”

“Not unless they've got room service,” Steven replied with instant caution. Since when did the others talk about his non-AIDS life? That wasn't the deal. “And not anymore.”

“Well, I've never been anywhere. And I don't want to die without seeing Paris. Or the pyramids.”

“Uh-huh.” What did the kid want, brochures? Steven squirmed with displacement, and then saw with relief that Mark was coming out of the rap room. He turned and deliberately cut Andy off, perking his face toward Mark, but in the same motion trying not to look too eager. Nothing was simple. Mark, expressionless himself, didn't really notice the mood swings of Steven's face.

“They denied my disability,” Mark declared flatly. “Lou screwed me.”

Steven knew exactly what it meant. Unless Mark got a new job, his insurance would be gone in three months. Even assuming he wanted to work again, he was uninsurable, since the virus was catch-22—a preexisting condition. All Steven could think to say was “What are you going to do?” and he had the good sense to bite his tongue instead. Mark looked more beaten than ever, as if he hadn't been able quite to feel it till he could speak it to Steven.

“Cocksucker,” Steven growled, finding the right pitch at last. Mark gave out with a short dry laugh more raw than tears, and Steven said, “Come on, we'll go have coffee.” The rules of their disengagement were temporarily suspended.

But Mark flicked an eye to Steven's left and replied mildly, “I think you're busy,” with the slightest ironic emphasis on the
you
, as if the shoe were on the other foot at last. Steven furrowed his brow in confusion, even as Mark softly punched his shoulder. “It's okay, we'll talk tomorrow,” said Mark, gliding away and down the stairs.

Leaving Steven blinking in disbelief at Andy, who still hovered attendance. All the others had left by now. They were alone beside the picture of the starlet and the banana. “So you want to go to Paris,” said Steven in his most neutral voice, one hand automatically reaching for the wallet where he no longer carried his Shaw Travel cards.

“Well, eventually,” said Andy, brimming with mirth again. “Right now I'd like to go grab a burger with you.”

“Uh …” Steven looked as if he needed to go to the bathroom, but also as if he meant to hold it till he got home.

“Look, do I have to draw you a map?”

Steven stared at him. He couldn't actually remember the last time a man had come on to him. He felt like a total asshole for being so thickheaded, though he could see that in Andy's eyes he was simply playing hard to get. He was amazed at the kid's cheek, and not a little moved by his willingness to be vulnerable.

“Listen, it's not you,” Steven declared with a certain fervor, feeling as if he were turning down a date for the prom with the class geek. “I'm just not available. Here,” he added, thumping his chest, where two weeks ago he would have thumped his gonads.

“For a
burger?
Look, I don't want to marry you. I just want to talk to a grown-up.”

And still Steven blanched, because that was precisely the last thing he felt like. Andy tossed his head and made a bleating sound—half disgust, half despair—and turned to go down the stairs. It suddenly seemed pathetically absurd, to be so defended. All the ruinous pride that had kept him silent in the group came crashing down around him. He tramped down the stairs, past the dyke at the phone bank, groping his way through the knot of fallen angels hanging about the coffee machine.

He caught up with Andy on the curb outside, kicking his Reebok idly against a parking meter. They looked at each other warily. Steven shrugged and pointed across Highland to All-American Burger. They stuffed their hands in their pockets and crossed against the traffic, Steven suppressing a guilty need to look over his shoulder, in case somebody he knew should see them.

Andy Lakin hadn't been entirely honest, of course. He openly admitted now he was looking for something permanent, and always had his radar out for an older man with a sterling record. Steven's eight-year stint with Victor was thus like money in the bank. This was all shared with such unflinching candor that Steven wasn't sure if the kid was being ingenuous or disingenuous or both. Having grilled Marina two Thursdays running, Andy seemed to know all about him, requiring no further details. And so he filled the glaring fast-food time—the burgers speared with little American flags—relating his own rueful tale of near misses.

Steven relaxed and drank two mocha shakes, realizing there was no pressure to take the kid home to bed. He only wondered why he didn't want to—the eagerness was endearing enough, bright as the agate eyes and the dust of freckles below the tousle of hair. Ann Arbor, Michigan, twenty-six, played hockey in high school. Steven found himself wondering what Mark would have done, how he would have found a way to strip that eagerness bare. What he wouldn't think about was Victor being the same age when they met. As if the life of Steven Shaw—the usefulness of the past, the gathering of what little wisdom—stood utterly discounted, giving him no clue whatever.

“But you think we can beat it, don't you?” asked Andy, half a dare. “Everyone's not gonna die.”

Steven shrugged. “Not right away, anyway. Some guys'll probably make it twenty years. So you might as well live like you have a future.” He didn't think this at all, not a quarter of twenty years, but he wasn't going to be the one to challenge Andy's stubborn optimism. He was secretly pleased that Andy saw him as some kind of renegade in the group. His silence had somehow come across as disdain for the general carping of Thursday's men.

“So tell me about Victor,” said Andy when his plate was empty, every last fry. Ingenuous surely, but dis- around the edges even so.

The question Steven had managed to duck or otherwise freeze in its tracks, never asked once since Victor died. Perhaps because he avoided anyone new. Yet for some reason it didn't threaten or annoy him now—something to do with the agate eyes and the curious Michigan trust, as if Andy really believed Steven Shaw possessed some special key to love.

So he talked, he who'd avoided a bereavement group and fired his shrink and stuffed the condolences in a shoebox. About locking eyes with Victor at a New Year's party in Venice, and ending up two hours later twenty miles up the coast at Zuma, wind-whipped and rolling in the sand as the eighties dawned. How they mightily resisted falling in love—four months, six months, still trying to stay apart two nights a week.

“The
last
thing Victor wanted to be was a couple,” said Steven, his cheeks high-colored, in a whiskey voice, as if he were teasing Victor himself. “He couldn't stand them. He loved being single.”

“So how did you get it to work?”

“My immense charm,” retorted Steven. “Plus three weeks in Europe living like princes. He'd never been anywhere either.”

He smiled across at Andy, making the bridge. The boy blushed easily, owing to his fair complexion, and insisted on paying the check, as if to prove he wasn't looking for any free ride. He was assiduous in fact, as they walked to Steven's car, about explaining that he understood completely. No wonder Steven wasn't ready for something new, after being twinned so deep. It would come in its own time, somebody totally different—certainly not another eager boy who'd never been anywhere. Andy was as unflinching in his pulling back as he had been coming on.

They stood with the door to the Volvo between them, Steven about to get inside, and Andy leaned over and kissed him chastely on the lips. “I'm just glad to know there's men out there who've made it happen,” he said with appalling sincerity, a smile as wide as Lake Michigan. “Gives me hope.”

Which left Steven exactly where he started, not wanting to get entangled, not wanting to be pursued. He drove away up Highland, and the wave that passed between them was a last wave—the ship pulling away from the dock. So why did Steven find himself flashing deliciously hot and cold? Though he'd just had a date that went nowhere, hardly worth a check-in call with Margaret, he felt as if he'd pulled off something quite extravagant, back in the tenth grade stealing a girl from Daryl Sawyer. A girl he didn't want, but let that go. More than anything it seemed to prove he was over Mark Inman once and for all.

He and Mark didn't talk that night or over the weekend, not in person, leaving a cluster of messages on each other's machine. Very nice messages, breezy and open-hearted, Mark full of tough assurance that he didn't give two shits about his disability. Perhaps one or two of the messages were left in the Hollywood way, at those vague dusky hours when no one was ever at home. And Sunday afternoon Ray Lee was released from Cedars. Steven had to be there literally to carry him up the stairs to his apartment. So he wasn't exactly avoiding Mark—just processing other things.

After only two weeks in, Ray Lee was as frail as a ten-year-old, sitting propped up in his little sofa bed and swearing he needed no help, he'd be back to work in a week. That was hard to imagine, since the stroke had left his hand too limp to hold a pencil and his mouth drooped to the left as if it were melting off his face. He could speak all right, if a little slowly, but the crackling hipness had disappeared. Ray Lee had always sounded as American as TV, and suddenly overnight there was a halting Korean accent hovering in his voice, as if he'd begun to emigrate home.

Margaret, of course, collapsed. She'd been on hospital watch for two weeks straight, and now she had to coordinate meals-on-wheels. Steven took her out for dinner on Sunday night and let her cry. Her proud mane of hair was drawn back in a schoolmarm's bun. Victor used to tell her she was getting better-looking every day, ripe to be plucked by a zillionaire mogul. All of which seemed very remote tonight at Loretta's Shanghai Kitchen.

“This is the last one,” said Margaret with bitter emphasis between bites of cashew chicken. “I'll go to the end. It's not going to be long, I can tell that already. But that's
it
. All the beautiful young men of West Hollywood will have to die without Margaret Kirkham's help. I go over to Richard's to spend the night, and all I do is cry. Real sexy.”

Steven murmured agreement, whatever she said, and scarfed the tangerine beef. He didn't raise the obvious technical objection: present company excluded. Of course she'd be there for him, right down to the last handhold, bone-thin and purple with lesions, whatever final horror took him. But meanwhile she kept that corner of her mind uncluttered, believing it wouldn't happen, not to Steven. This was the standard het denial, which came up all the time at the Thursday meeting, infuriating everyone, but Steven was just as glad that Margaret had the breathing room of some small illusion. When it finally hit him full force, Steven already knew he would check out sooner than later, for Margaret's sake alone. He couldn't bear to think of her losing the dusty flower of her second youth on his account.

Meanwhile, he would shoulder some of the burden, which kept him running around for the next two days—renting a wheelchair, retrieving Ray's Siamese from the pet hotel, the small and mindless stuff so that Margaret would have some down time, which she spent watching forties noir thrillers on Ray's VCR. The two of them looked pretty noir themselves as Steven arrived with takeout from Polio Loco—Margaret in robe and peignoir like Gloria Grahame in a lonely place, and Ray Lee curled with his head in her lap, inscrutable as Anna May Wong.

In any case, he didn't talk to Mark for real till Tuesday night. “Are you sure this isn't your machine?” Steven asked impishly when Mark picked up. The answer came back in a monotone: “No, it's me.” And that was about all Steven got out of him, not exactly a stone wall but nearly. Depressed, not hiding it, but nothing to say about it either. And Steven wasn't good enough at bullshit to tell him not to feel it. Despair was part of the cycle. So instead Steven told him about Ray Lee, and they both knew what he was really saying, that this was how the monster would come to them if it hit the nervous system first.

“It'll be in his brain next,” declared Mark grimly. “Then he won't care if he's paralyzed.”

“You know,” ventured Steven, seeing they had dead-ended on the poor Korean, “if it's money you're worried about—”

“You don't get it, do you, Steven?” Mark's voice quickened with anger, as if he'd been waiting to have the chip knocked off. “You're too honest—you never swam with barracudas. Listen, I got
money
money. Stock options, last year's bonus—two hundred grand cash, plus my house. That's enough to die on, even if I last five years. But I don't want to die on
my
dime. I want that fuckin' disability so
they
have to pay.” The tone here wasn't exactly loud or savage, it was cold, ice cold. Steven waited, working overtime like a saint not to take it personally. Mark shifted to withering irony. “You forget, darling, until two months ago I was a scumbag TV executive. You didn't know me. All I did all day was screw people with money. Stuffing it up their hole.”