Afterlife (27 page)

“He went to Florida to see his dad,” said Tim, unctuous with self-congratulation, as if he took personal credit for the reconciliation.

Steven was all alone with it, his chest constricting, a cold sweat creeping across his neck. To choose blood over Steven's ramshackle family of Thanksgiving orphans. Although it wasn't really fair to think that, since Steven hadn't quite got around to inviting Mark, who didn't even know Steven's dinner was happening—but Steven had had enough of being fair. He preferred to just stew in it, thank you, and cut his losses. He began to see how he might expend more passion getting rid of Mark Inman than he would in having him.

Marina nudged his ribs with her elbow. He looked at her blankly. “Your turn,” she said. He stared around at the group, all of them watching him expectantly.

“I think he's somewhere else,” observed Charlene, but gently, being a major drifter herself.

“We're making a wish list,” reiterated Tim, his fabled patience intact. “We're going around the room saying what we hope to get out of the holiday.”

“Like I decided to tell my chirren,” Charlene said helpfully. “The oldes' anyway, she be nine.”

“Emmett's gonna go by Century City and visit the AIDS ward,” said Tim.

“Yeah, and give 'em all a massage with my magic fingers,” Emmett drawled, who had a Florida mail-order license in chiropractic.

They all looked at Steven, more expectant still. He knew what he wanted, of course, but couldn't say it. To put Mark Inman behind him; to rid his house of squatters; to host a feast they would never forget. He really didn't have any other idea when he opened his mouth, but what came out was: “I just hope Ray Lee dies right after. This can't go on till Christmas.”

And his eyes filled up with tears, so that Marina put her arm around him and rocked her head on his shoulder. The others were all so moved by his finally having spoken a feeling out loud that they didn't ask him to say any more. The meeting broke up with a final plea from Tim for openness and healing. “Don't come from anger, come from love,” he said, increasingly oracular, his parting wave more than ever like a Papal blessing.

People would have come over to Steven. Marina herself wasn't finished smothering him. But as soon as they all began to gather their sweaters and bags, Steven turned around to Andy, totally unrehearsed. “You want to come over to my place?” he asked. “I'll make some hot chocolate.”

Andy looked confused. The hot chocolate was really a bit much. “Sure, but I thought—” And he let it hang there, waiting for clarification.

A wrinkled smile, utterly endearing, rippled across Steven's face. “Does it have to be so serious? Can't we just play?”

A pause the length of a held breath, in which they couldn't seem to read each other's eyes. Andy shrugged. “Why not?”

He preceded Steven out the door, and Steven nodded good night to the others as he followed, wishing them all a happy Thanksgiving. Not caring who saw the two of them leave together—wanting to be seen, in fact. Steven Shaw, who'd never been calculating enough, hopelessly straight, heart on his sleeve, never cold-bloodedly gone after anyone, fairly strutted down the stairs now behind the sandy-haired boy. Feeling nothing. As if it had all twisted around, and he who always fell plummeting into love had become like all his hoodlum gang. The thing he'd never quite got to work before and everyone else was trying to grow out of—a man who just wanted to get laid.

9

On the fourth tee of the Pitch 'n' Putt, a gaggle of blue-rinse ladies in pastel jumpsuits took a break from their golfing labors and waved in unison up at Rob Inman's third-floor balcony. Dapper Rob, sporting a cancerous tan and a matching sky-blue golf shirt and visored cap, stood up and returned the wave. “Morning, girls,” he called, doffing the cap and grinning like Eisenhower. The ladies tittered with pleasure and went on with their game, none of them quite having given up on Rob, despite the obvious smolder between him and that bitch Roz Schwartz. Rob Inman never stopped flirting.

He sat down heavily on the slatted plastic chair, the balcony so narrow that his knees scraped the stucco unless he sat with them wide apart. Behind him the sliding door slid back with a screech, and his only son and heir stepped out with a cup of coffee and a danish. Mark sat down in the other chair, still muzzy with sleep. In his gym shorts and cut-off sweatshirt he looked a good bit younger than his thirty-eight years, but that may have been an optical illusion, given the fact that he looked so much like his dad. It was Rob who had the mottled skin, the belly sag, the crepey under-chin, the dwindling hair. This was the way it was supposed to be, but neither man seemed very comforted just now by the natural order of things.

They didn't speak right away, even to say good morning. Roz Schwartz, who'd poured the coffee and microwaved the danish, would have livened things up immeasurably, since she was a nonstop talker, but she had decided to leave father and son alone. They were pretty well talked out. The first two nights, Mark had let his father have the floor—railing in equal measure at his triglycerides, his doctor, and his pigshit diet. Alternately gushing with pride about the autumn beauty of Roz, then taking Mark aside to bewail the wound that never healed, the loss of his precious Kate.

He was a man given to bursts of drama in his old age, as if to compensate for forty years of pencil-pushing drabness. Growing up, Mark had thought of him as being almost pathologically even-tempered, a gelid smile for every occasion. Now he was a veritable tropical storm of highs and lows. At the dog track on Friday night, he'd been a Damon Runyon swell, back-slapping and leering one-liners. Then back at the condo two hours later, glazed with the fear of death, he'd wondered with thin-lipped eloquence where his life had gone.

There was no right time for Mark to speak, and no wish to make a drama of it. Saturday noon Rob took his son out for deli in downtown Lauderdale, sneaking a plate of knockwurst and beans while Roz got a manicure. Mark told him the gay part first. Rob stiffened and said he'd always suspected, then two minutes later began to sob that it was all his fault, not Kate's. Mark didn't have much patience for any of this, but gave it about five minutes, murmuring politically correct responses as he rolled the big gun out. Then he let him have it as matter-of-fact as he could, fancying it up with T-cell projections and the latest antivirals, surprising himself with his optimistic tone.

Rob stared at him stone-faced till Mark had run out of statistics. Then he said, “So how long you got?”

“Who knows? Two years. Maybe five, if they find a drug that works.”

Grimly Rob went back to his knockwurst, asking no more questions. His silence was so profound for the rest of the day that Roz Schwartz took Mark aside. He told her the whole thing, partly because he refused to hide it anymore, partly because he liked her hummingbird intensity. She didn't blanch at the news, being a sophisticated lady who'd always had gay friends, far beyond the beauty parlor. She promised to talk to Rob.

But Saturday night's dinner had been a disaster. The three of them sat in front of the television, Rob spitting a running commentary, railing at every bad sitcom joke. As if Mark were to blame, as if all the insulting and mindless prime-time doodoo had been personally okayed by Rob Inman's son. It was hopelessly transparent, Rob displacing the anger he felt about Mark's double whammy. Anger that was patently self-centered: How could the father keep pissing and moaning about the indignity of his ailments, life on the edge of the cliff, when the son was already tumbling down the mountain? Mark had expected fear and lousy coping skills, but not this sense of having been cheated, as if he'd stolen his father's thunder.

And so he wasn't expecting a goddamn thing this morning, sitting beside the old man, staring out over the Pitch ‘n' Putt to the palm-lined humid green of the Intercoastal. Mark was fine, because he realized more than ever that he wanted nothing at all. The one thing left to say was that he meant to go it alone when he got sick. Rob Inman didn't need to make an appearance, gritting his teeth like Job.

This was another way of saying Mark would not be flying in the other direction either. Rob would have to manage without the ancient bond of sons who helped their fathers die. They might get lucky, of course, and have years and years to go, both of them. But the bottom line of the visit was clearer with every hour. They weren't here to fix a thing, to make the relationship better. No, this was all about good-bye.

“Do you have someone?” asked Rob abruptly, watching his pant-suited foursome as they clumped to the fifth hole.

“You mean a lover?”

“Someone special,” replied his father carefully, not quite comfortable yet with the idioms.

“No. I don't think I'm the bonding type.” Amazed at his own casualness, as if there was no pain attached to it at all. It was just a quirk, like being left-handed.

“What do you do, just sleep around?”

“More or less. I don't sleep too good either.”

He wondered if this part would have worked any better if they'd had it out ten years ago. Then it would have just been the gay stuff. Now it seemed ridiculous for a man this old to be telling his dad about his love life. Besides which, the whole territory was moot. It struck him with bitter irony that his father was getting it up more than he was.

“Well, actually there
is
somebody,” Mark declared. “A friend, anyway. It's not like I'm alone.”

“Do you love him?”

A strange prickle of shyness, like a dry sweat, crept across Mark's shoulders. He supposed he was blushing, a sensation entirely new to him and deeply unappealing. “I guess,” he said. “But not like you mean.” At this the father finally turned and looked at his son. Not judgmental, not even ironic, just curious to know how many meanings love could have. If he noticed the pink flush on Mark's face, he gave no sign, or chalked it up to the Florida sun. Mark shrugged and sighed. “The problem is, he's in love with me. So he gets hurt.”

Rob was utterly absorbed now. He seemed to have gotten beyond whatever it was that still made him squeamish about gay. Or perhaps it simply astonished him that after four decades of avoiding his son, he finally had some advice to give.

“But that's exactly what happened with Roz and me,” he said, more animated than he'd been since the knockwurst declaration. “She loved me first. I wasn't lookin' at all. It was never gonna happen to me again. But Roz, she just wouldn't let go. Thank God.” He shivered with gooseflesh at his own good fortune, then reached out a hand and slapped his boy's bare knee. “So why don't you listen to him. What's his name?”

“Steven. It won't work, Dad. I'm not attracted to him.”

Rob made an impatient waving motion, determined not to let the kid off the hook. “How old is he? He's your age?” Mark nodded curtly. “Good, good,” said Rob, as if the numbers were very important here. “And he's got this virus too?”

“Uh-huh. He buried his lover last year.”

“Well, then,
he
knows,” retorted the father, his ruddy face beaming with satisfaction.

“Knows what?” Mark bit the question off, not quite sure what he was angry at.

“That's all there is, son. Someone to love. You ask anybody here.” And he gestured grandly out over the Pitch ‘n' Putt, but also included the mid-rise condos banked on every side, full of seniors in lonely efficiencies. “They've either been married forty years, and they're holding on to what little time they got left, or they're widowed and only half alive. The lucky ones are like Roz and me, we get another chance. We know it's not for long. Two years, three years—just like you say. But it's all there is, so you'll take even a little. Everything else is shit.”

This final comment he delivered with both arms wide, like a prince abdicating a kingdom. He never used to have this fierce dumb pride back in Manhasset. He used to be as meek and laconic as he was even-tempered, ceding to his hard-eyed wife the monologues and sweeping judgments. Mark felt a knot in his gut, building like a hairball of sourness as Rob extolled the glory of love. Resisting it with every fiber of contempt he could summon up. He saw as if in a diorama the string of Hallmark cards along the mantel, marking every holiday and milestone. “To my beloved wife,” “To the world's greatest husband,” all that mawkish packaged sentiment. No accident, perhaps, that Mark had turned into a man who flinched at the very mention of the “L” word.

“I think it's great, Dad,” he said, swallowing the bile. “She's a classy lady.”

“But that's what I'm
telling
you, boy. I didn't look twice at her. Not my type.” He uttered a short, coarse laugh at himself for having been so blind. “If a woman didn't look like Kate, I didn't even see her. Even then I couldn't get my pecker up.”

Now it was Mark's turn to swivel and stare. His father had never mentioned his penis before, had hardly ever appeared naked around his son. He'd been sexless in fact, as far as Mark could ever tell, until this very conversation, despite all the romantic gush around the memory of his mother. And not very well-endowed. In the savage world of his adolescence, Mark had experienced a surge of superiority when he saw that his own heavy equipment would favor the genes of the donkey uncles on his mother's side and not the pencil of his father.

“But Roz, she took time,” went on Rob Inman, unaware in the spell of his own story that his son was fairly gaping at him. “We built up to it real slow. Sometimes you have to trust the other person.”

Where had he come by this appalling casualness about sex? From watching Phil and Oprah? Fortunately he was so wrapped up in the sunniness of his own renewal that he seemed to have forgotten the relation of it all to Mark and Steven. And when the sliding door creaked behind them, bringing all the banality to a merciful end, Rob Inman turned with a beatific smile to greet his new beloved. Roz Schwartz, smart in a gray silk dress—the husband left her plenty, no polyester in
her
closet—glided between the two chairs, laid a manicured hand on Mark's shoulder, and leaned down and tenderly kissed his father's temple. They laughed as if at some private joke, at the sheer delight of being together.