Afterlife (26 page)

He felt the oddest twinge of jealousy, having no brothers and sisters of his own. The brother he'd found in Victor, and a glimmer again in Mark—that vaguely apprehended shiver of incest whenever two gay men connected. But never anything like a sister. Margaret was too urban and neurotic, despite her fevered loyalty. There was nothing she wouldn't do for Steven, but this plodding walk uphill was something in the blood, stark and single-minded, a fire deeper than armies.

When they heard the car pull up outside, instantly she hurried into the dining room to gather her purse. She drew out an envelope and thrust it in Steven's hand, no nonsense: “There's eight hundred dollars here. I don't know what he's gonna need. Maybe a lawyer.” Steven couldn't understand why she was making so much haste to leave. She hadn't even seen Dell since the police arrived. If anything, Steven wanted them to have some private time alone, but he shrank from intruding, even to offer it.

They went together to the door. Dell was in green fatigues and a tank top, dirt-streaked from the day's interrupted work, a truculent strip of blue bandanna tied about his head. A bandolier of bullets wouldn't have been out of place crisscrossing his chest, or an AK-47 tucked under his arm. And yet for all the sullen pride of his presentation, what Steven picked up immediately was the unmistakable fluster of shame. He seemed to blanch at the sight of his sister as he grunted hello to Steven, who understood now what she was trying to flee, his sense of having failed her.

She practically bolted by him, no embrace and no familiarity. Emilia waited below with the engine running, in a Band-Aid-colored Nova that was a symphony of misfiring. Linda ducked inside without a backward glance, and the Chevy stole guiltily away in the falling dusk.

Dell locked eyes with Steven and erupted in a hollow laugh, like a sneer given voice, and in the brittle sound of it was all the absurdity of the mess he was in. Steven couldn't think of anything smart to say. He motioned Dell to follow him into the living room, and as soon as Dell saw the sofa made up, he lumbered over and flung himself down, then stared up at the ceiling.

The room was nearly dark, but Steven turned no light on. He left to make another call to Mark, engaging the machine again. He puttered about in the kitchen for a while, cooking up three packages of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. The living room stayed dark, and he assumed the terrorist had fallen asleep. As usual these days, he left the pot of food on the stove, knowing Sonny would pad in like a cat later on and finish the remains. Steven thought about leaving notes for both of them to alert them to each other's presence, but then he decided to let them do that dance themselves.

He retired to the bedroom end of the house and closed himself off. He slept fitfully, with long, jagged waking spells, where he'd turn on the light and scribble notes on the bedside table, beginning the Thanksgiving grocery list. The next morning when he came out groggy into the kitchen he'd forgotten Dell was there. Once more he tried Mark and got the machine, and he slammed the phone down, feeling betrayed and enraged that he had to make all the advances. Mark's black mood was no excuse. The old resentment resurfaced, that Mark hadn't really been through fire. He didn't have to watch Ray Lee's body shut down limb by limb.

And just then Sonny shuffled in the kitchen door in bicycle shorts and nothing else, his maddening Adonis body packed like a loaded gun, and Steven wanted to turn and fling the pot of coffee on him. “Hey, we got us a celebrity,” Sonny drawled lazily, plopping the paper on the counter.

Steven glanced at the front page, bottom left:
AIDS TERRORIST ELUDES CAPTURE.
Without missing a beat, he crossed to the swing door and poked his head into the dining room. He could see the swirl of bedding on the sofa, but no Dell. He tried to grope back to the night before, to think if they'd set any ground rules. It should have been strictly specified: now that Dell was here in the safe house, he was grounded. Steven could feel the thin whine of hysteria building behind his eyes. Everything was on the brink of being out of control.

“He's in real deep shit,” continued Sonny with a certain admiration, as he cut himself a quarter of a coffee cake. “I told him, you don't fuck around with Jesus.”

Steven turned and glared at him, scarfing fifteen hundred calories and so lean you could bounce a quarter off his belly. “Where is he?”

Sonny shrugged toward the west end of the house. “My room.”

“Oh really? You fucking him now too?” Sonny looked over, his cheeks bulging like a chipmunk's, but he still managed a grin. “No grass under
your
feet, is there?”

Sonny chortled with a kind of relief, as if he much preferred the bitch stuff out in the open. He swallowed his hunk of cake like a python consuming a rat. “He's borrowing some clothes, Steven,” he declared dryly, playing the moment like a rope, seeing how far he could tease. “I told him to take a shower in my room so he wouldn't bother you. He's not my type at all. I'm not into ethnic. I like white boys.” He reached across the counter for the coffeepot, stretching the ripples of his abdomen taut. “Or should I say white boys like me, 'cause I'm
their
ethnic fantasy.”

Steven knew he was being goaded, that Sonny was just throwing back at him the tawdry clichés he harbored about him. “Nothing's changed, has it?” Steven hissed with contempt. “You're just going to keep getting your rocks off till someday you wake up dead.”

Sonny leaned back with his elbows on the counter. A line of golden hair trailed from his sternum to his abdomen. “Hey, I'm not gonna die. I got a lot of plans for the year 2000. I've been waiting for that since—” He shrugged his shoulders helplessly. Impossible to measure the time in human years. “At least 2000
B
. C. Except we don't really go by the Jesus calendar. We think in terms of dynasties.”

“And all that bullshit makes your dick hard, does it?”

“Not exactly. That's just 'cause I'm young and horny. I could fuck in a nuclear war.” He was teasing himself without any barriers here. They could take it wherever they liked, if Steven would only laugh. But he didn't: he needed to be snappish and gruff and put-upon. So Sonny made the concession. He leaned forward from the counter, drawing up his knees and clutching them with his powerful arms, as if to disengage his body, fold it up like a pocketknife. “I'm not as tortured as you are, Steven,” he said with an odd tenderness. “I never was. Ellsworth and me, we were only in it to have a good time. I'm doing what I'm supposed to.”

It was as if he had blanked out the agony of the vigil at Cedars-Sinai. Steven could see him still, curled in a ball in a plastic chair in the waiting room, sobbing that there was nothing left. The first week Sonny had been the worst of the three of them. And now he flashed a grin over Steven's shoulder, all of the bad behind him, the picture of California. “Hey, here's the masked man now.”

Steven turned as if to a figure in a dream. The gardener's fatigues and bandanna were gone, replaced by a sky-blue muscle T-shirt and baggy French jeans. He'd shaved the black mustache, and the brush of his hair was slicked with gel into tailfins. He nodded to Sonny, acknowledging that they were now members of the same West Hollywood tribe, then turned to Steven, cocky in his new persona, but something in him looking for approval too.

“Well,” said Dell softly, “here we are again, the three of us. All for one and one for all.”

“Listen, we can get you in as a busboy at Monte Carlo,” Sonny declared with eager confidence, as if the real power at the restaurant rested with the best-looking waiter. “Right off the street. No questions asked.”

“You stay put,” Steven growled at Dell, jabbing the air with a finger. “If you leave this house, you don't come back. Got it?” Dell nodded so imperceptibly there was scarcely any motion involved. Steven swung the withering finger to the Greek. “And you, you keep your mouth shut. No sleepover dates until further notice. This is
my
movie you guys are in, and nobody makes a move unless I say so.”

His two guests hardly blinked, maintaining a submissive silence as they waited for further instruction.

“And put that out!” bawled Steven, swiveling back to Dell as the latter flashed a wooden match on his belt buckle and lit his Mexican cigarette. He poked the air again, indicating the courtyard outside the kitchen as the designated smoking area. He looked as if he would've happily cracked their heads together like a pair of coconuts. Then he swept out of there—the two younger men unprotesting, biting their tongues for the sake of a roof—in a lighthearted swoon, like a man who'd been gulping ozone.

It lasted about twenty minutes, until he walked into Ray Lee's apartment and found him sobbing because he couldn't remember half the people in the pictures on his dresser, and one of his ears was full of roaring, as though the sea had broken through. His body was turning against him now with little offbeat tortures. Steven was only there an hour, and he was destroyed for the rest of the day.

Yet the barking tone and the fume of sullen rage continued to sustain him, whenever the pressure got too intense. At Thrifty Drugs he shrilled at the pharmacist, who'd given the wrong milligram dose in Ray Lee's last prescription. The pharmacist blamed the doctor like pharmacists always did, but Steven pounded the counter anyway, making an awful stink, and felt terrific.

His next explosion came in the checkout line at Mayfair, where he'd stopped to pick up a few things for Ray Lee and also grabbed four cans of cranberry sauce and a package of cocktail napkins blazoned with strutting turkeys. Arms loaded, he stood in the 8-Items or-Less line until he was challenged by a doddering pensioner behind him. “You got ten items,” hissed the old man.

Icily Steven explained that his four cans of cranberry constituted a single item. Within five seconds they were screaming, and Steven knocked over the
TV Guide
rack, and the jar of pocket change for Jerry's Kids tumbled off the counter and smashed to the floor. The manager had to be called, who ruled in Steven's favor, but mostly to get the lunatic out of there.

He drove around leaning on his horn, roaring invective at piss-poor drivers on either side. So at least he kept blowing the top off the anger. But the queer thing was, none of it stopped being Mark's fault. There it was, ungainly and irrational: if Mark had only called him back, none of this would be happening. Steven had bent over backward not to fall in love with him, not to crowd him. The idyll of the last two months—the two buddies tooling around in a Jeep, a second chance to be boys at last—had vaporized somehow. All he could see when he thought of Mark was the self-obsession, enameled with those arrogant good looks.

Even Steven could tell he was mixing it up with the rest of his problems. Sonny's cold-blooded rutting, Dell's pointless anarchy, even Margaret's martyrdom and Ray Lee's last pathetic stabs at vanity—everything seemed a projection of what was wrong between Steven and Mark. More than anything, Steven was furious at the constant echo, thinking what Mark would think of things—the random humpy dude on the boulevard, the latest cure-of-the-week. But he also planned to get over it. He would see Mark tonight at the regular Thursday rap and take him out for supper after and not say a word about the irrational rage. They just needed to connect again. Finally Steven would let rip with his whines and complaints about all the others, and Mark would ring down curses on Lou Ciotta's house and issue, and that would be that. They could start over where they left off.

So it was in a peacemaking spirit, putting his tantrum to rest, that Steven bounded up the stairs to the meeting, fifteen minutes late on account of seeing Heather at the office, to let her squirm an apology and then to dump all the work on her. Steven sidled in meekly and sat by Marina, who squeezed his hand hello. The group was in the midst of a role-play, Uncle Fred and Charlene pretending to be Mom and Dad at Thanksgiving, laying on the rest of them a barrage of nosy questions.

The mood was animated and boisterous, a lot of camp and laughter—and Mark wasn't there. When Steven swiveled his head to check behind him on the upper bench, Andy Lakin winked at him. Steven gave him back a wan and distracted smile, feeling a surge of impatience at Mark for being late. The group was getting a little punch-drunk now, the thin gray man pretending to cough up sputum on his Aunt Louise's pumpkin tart. Emmett from Talahassee swore he would pass out condoms at the table when he made his antibody announcement, in case anyone in his family wanted to fuck him over any further.

“Hold it, hold it, one at a time!” bawled Tim like the referee, but without much hope of keeping the group in order. They needed the crazy release and a sense of holiday, safe among their own, before they ventured off one by one to the real families, agendas dense as sweet potato pie. Steven had already decided not to tell about the upcoming feast at his house, for fear they might question his motives.

“I have some announcements,” said Tim, drawing his lumbering clipboard from under his feet, where everything was written down as grayly as a junior-high assembly. Something about vitamin therapy, something about a forgiveness seminar. Steven was trying to whisper a shorthand update on Ray Lee to Marina beside him, when he suddenly stopped dead at the sound of Mark's name.

“—called me last night,” announced Tim blandly. “He said he couldn't be here for the meeting tonight, but he wanted to wish us all a nice holiday. Well, what he actually said was, ‘Don't kill any members of your immediate family because it's very hard to keep your immune system up in jail.'” He read this part from the pad on his clipboard, smiling rather sheepishly as the group cracked up, whistling and applauding.

Steven could feel his face burning red with embarrassment, but he couldn't stop himself from speaking. “Where is he?” he asked in a voice that seemed to tremble with desperation.