Afterlife (32 page)

She rang off. Steven grabbed a mitt and pirouetted to the stove, grabbing the tray of dainties out just before they burned. He was on a roll. He whipped a white napkin onto a second silver tray and began arranging the little cheese cups and bacon-wrapped chestnuts. Then felt a sudden hand on his shoulder, and gasped and burned his finger and bellowed, “Shit!”

Of course it was Andy. “Steven, I'm sorry,” he whimpered, “I didn't mean to scare you. I just wanted to help.”

Steven reached to the sink and ran the sizzled finger under cold water. Then turned an eye on the kid that fairly glittered with domestic madness. “I'll tell you how you can help,” he said softly. “Stop pawing me.”

The milky face beneath the shock of sandy hair crumpled in bewilderment. “What do you mean?”

“This is not the time,” Steven warned him, back to the cheese cups.

“You mean in there? I'm not supposed to touch you?”

“I think
maul
is the word you're looking for.”

The face crumpled further, the eyes especially, tortured as only the very young can be by love's reversals. “I don't get you, Steven. You spend all your time pulling away. How did you ever last eight years?”

Not even skipping a beat with the canapés, making a second concentric circle, Steven drawled over his shoulder: “I would suggest that comparing yourself to Victor is very thin ice around here.
Very
thin ice.”

“Why are you doing this? I'm supposed to be
ashamed
that we're sleeping together? Maybe you have a little more self-hatred about your sexuality than you realize. Did you ever think that?”

Steven picked up the two trays and faced him. “You take the hot and I'll take the cold.”

“That's it? I don't get an answer?”

It had reached a kind of low-level hysterics for the sandy-haired boy. Not a pretty sight. Steven tried to be gentle, but his heart wasn't in it. “Honey, we've got to feed these people,” he said, pleading from reason. “I'm sure you're right, I hate my dick, but please, I can't do psychology and dinner for ten at the same time. You'll survive. You're cute and sweet and sassy. But I'm not the one.” He shrugged, not cruelly at all. There was more tenderness in him right now than he'd shown all week, and he understood the ache as Andy Lakin swallowed hard. But this was not the time. “Here, you better take the cold. They're simpler.”

He handed Andy the cold tray, then whisked around him and through the swing door, no looking back. It didn't have to be done with such bad timing, except the young were so enamored of things blowing up in their faces.

Moving around the group by the fire, he was glad to see they had broken at last into smaller units. Sonny was regaling Dell and Linda with the crazy Greeks of Fresno, and Mark was being a trouper, answering Heather's starry questions about the magic of television. They all attacked the canapés with relish, two at a time as Steven passed.

“The bird's got about forty more minutes,” he announced at large, his ace in the hole being Victor's passionate conviction that Americans overcooked fowl. “We'll eat by five, so don't overdo on the nibbles.”

Andy, he could see, was standing rather gloomily off to the side, holding his tray dispiritedly and making no move to pass it around. He seemed to be trying to figure where he'd gone wrong. Steven let him be. But Heather, supersensitive by reason of a raft of self-help books, seemed to intuit Andy's blues and jumped up from the sofa. She squealed with pleasure as she popped hors d'oeuvres from his tray and asked him where he was from originally.

Steven seized the moment, leaned over Mark's shoulder, and said, “Can you give me a hand outside?”

“Sure.” He stood up and followed Steven through the vestibule and out onto the front landing. Steven stopped and looked out over the city, and Mark stood beside him, hands in his pockets. The Catalina Eddy had rolled in over the setting sun, filling the basin below the mountains with chalk-white air, like very cold smoke. The low sun in the west was a disk in the fog. Steven shivered in only a shirt. Mark looked at him expectantly. “Uh, I thought you needed some help.”

“Yup, in a minute. They should be right here. How's your dad?”

“Fine. He's found himself a fox.” Mark chuckled and shook his head, digging his hands deeper in his pockets. Hooded as ever, his body language as tight as it used to be at the studio, ringed on every side by macho creeps. “He'll bury us all.”

“I don't want to be buried anymore,” said Steven, who in truth hadn't thought of it at all till now. “I want to be scattered.” He accompanied this announcement with an outstretched hand and a slight flutter of the fingers, rather like a diva waving to the fans.

“But you have a plot and everything,” retorted Mark. “Right beside Victor.”

Steven made a soft little humming noise, as if he was trying to establish the pitch of what he would say next. He shivered again, but it didn't seem like the weather this time. “The first three months I visited every day. But he's not there.” He was looking down at the roof of Mrs. Tulare's house, and Mark was looking sidelong at him. “I think I'll leave a couple of grand in my will. Then Margaret can take my ashes to Europe and have a little vacation too. Crete would be nice, say in the ruins of the palace at Phaistos.” At last he turned and looked at Mark, rueful except it came out wistful. “Maybe I'll make it five grand, and you can go with her.”

Mark snorted. “You think you're going to check out first? Excuse me—who's got four hundred T-cells? Not this pig.”

“Two eighty-nine,” said Steven automatically.

“Two forty,” pounced Mark triumphantly. “So you'll be scattering me. I was thinking the woods behind my high-school gym, since that's where I first sucked dick, but the woods are probably gone by now. Your idea's better. Big Sur maybe, or Puerto Vallarta. Where would you like to go?”

“No fair. You have to pick. It's supposed to be a surprise, because I'll be prostrate.”

Something about it cheered them both. Their shoulders grazed as they stood side by side, which managed to tip the scale from rue to irony. Casually Steven touched the back of Mark's hand, right at the fork of the veins. “Why don't we go there now,” he said, “before one of us has to go in a box?” He seemed to mean this very moment, as if they had no other obligations here.

Mark nodded. “My place or your place?”

“Well, November's awfully windy on Crete. Puerto Vallarta might be terrific, and I can probably get us a shitload of discounts.”

And then Margaret's fiery orange Celica rounded the knoll and drew up to the curb at the foot of the stairs. She got out on the driver's side looking drained and puffy, and no, she wasn't exactly wearing overalls, but the gray sack dress wasn't much of an improvement. She waved up at Steven and Mark as if she were surrendering, and Steven said, “We have to go help with the wheelchair.”

Mark really didn't know anything about the case at all. Steven had told him about the stroke when Ray Lee first went in, but by now it had blurred with a dozen other horror stories currently making the rounds. They headed down the stairs to Margaret's car, the trip to Mexico dispersing into the chalk-white air. Mark and Margaret tossed off a cheery hello, as if they knew each other better than the one night back in September.

Steven opened the passenger's door and greeted Ray Lee, whose face was a skull with the skin stretched tight. “Well, I hope you're hungry, pardner,” Steven said, “'cause we got enough food up there to feed an Olympic team.”

Beaming with excitement, the Korean lifted a covered dish from his lap and offered it to his host. His thin arms wobbled. Quickly Steven relieved him of the dish. “What's this?” he asked, lifting the lid a crack and sniffing. Then turned with a delirious grin to Mark. “The creamed onions!”

“Pie—lookit pie,” retorted Ray impatiently, pointing over his shoulder. And there in the backseat, nested in a towel so it wouldn't be flung around, was the mince pie with the lattice crust. Steven hooted with pleasure, and Ray Lee wagged a bony finger. “Margaret help. She did crust.”

But he looked just awful, pasty white and perspiring, shrunken in his visored cap and jacket, frail as an old, old man. This to Steven, who'd seen him every day for weeks. Mark was speechless, saucer-eyed, even as he shook Ray's wasted hand in greeting. Margaret had meanwhile flipped open the trunk and dragged the wheelchair out, expert as a stevedore. She wheeled it round to the passenger's side, and Mark and Steven stood back as she coaxed and gently tugged the Korean from the car.

He groaned once as he leaned against her, more in frustration than in pain, then collapsed in the chair, panting as if he'd just run up the mountain. Margaret stooped and placed his feet one by one in the footrests, grunting like an overworked nurse but every moment tender. She stood up, swiped a straggle of hair from her brow, and nodded at the two men. “Okay, guys, you take it from here.”

She relieved Steven of the creamed onions and ducked in the back to retrieve her bag and the pie. Steven hadn't exactly worked out the logistics here. Sputtering at Mark, not quite making a sentence, he gestured at the chair and then the flight of steps, indicating they would carry him up. On either side they hunkered down and grabbed the seat bar just in front of the wheel and then the handle behind Ray's head.

“Wait,” the Korean announced, and as they paused he reached in his jacket pocket and drew out the tortoise shades from L.A. Eyeworks. Carefully he put them on under the visored cap, then nodded for them to proceed.

Steven counted to three, and they heaved. It was surprisingly light. The chair was aluminum alloy, and Ray Lee weighed barely a hundred. The tricky thing was the climb upstairs, the space too narrow between the railing and the house to accommodate both men and the chair on one step. So they had to sort of straddle sideways, Steven one step up and Mark one step down, lugging and heaving, while Ray Lee sat serene as an emperor in a sedan chair, Margaret following a few steps behind bearing offerings like a priestess.

About halfway up Steven and Mark exchanged a red-faced look that was partly a goad, cheering each other on, and partly a ghastly SOS, as if the disease had fallen on them like a meteor. Every step got a little harder, and Steven could see the cords standing out taut on Mark's neck. They grunted in unison, hunkered like Sumo wrestlers, and at last they reached the landing, Mark lifting his wheel over the last riser with a final burst of force that left him wheezing and panting worse than the patient himself.

“Thank you, gentamen,” Ray Lee said, declining his head in a small imperial bow. Margaret handed him back his dish of onions and the pie, which he held proudly in his lap. Then she went around behind and made ready to push him in, waiting for Steven and Mark to catch their collective breath. They were both still reeling, but they pulled themselves together nicely, exchanging a nod of their own. Steven flung open the door and led the procession in.

They all knew somebody sick was coming, more or less, but no one was ready for this. The moment was so frozen, five heads turning as they came in the room, that Steven swore he could see the split between the men and the women. Dell and Sonny and Andy, who all had the virus, stared at the enfeebled figure in the movable chair with a kind of disbelieving horror, to see as if in a dark mirror the place where they were bound. Yet there was something else as well, a weird fascination, as if every case was uniquely appalling, and thus another lesson in how to die. Heather and Linda winced in pain, and a terrible grief sharpened their features. Then they both looked up at Margaret, to see if they had the strength to be where she was.

Steven started to introduce them all, but just then Heather sank to her knees beside the chair, laid her head against Ray's arm, and began to sob. Gently he stroked her hair and made a hushing sound. The rest stood dumb while he soothed her, refusing to let her wail that she had abandoned him. But he let her cry for a while, as if he understood that she was crying for all of them there.

Only when she was done, groping for a Kleenex in her bag, did Steven complete the rounds, so that each guest gravely shook Ray's hand. He loved the formality and the attention, then asked for a glass of champagne. Steven looked askance at Margaret, who shrugged as if to say what the hell, and Steven dug out a pony of Mumm's rusting in the back of the fridge.

Margaret came into the kitchen and declared the turkey cooked to a T—for it was she who had instructed Victor in the sin of over-roasting. “Americans like their turkey dry as sawdust,” she announced to no one in particular, implying that those gathered here were devastatingly Continental. It was only three days ago she informed Steven that Richard would not be joining them for dinner. “He's made other plans,” she said succinctly, indicating there would be no further discussion.

Now she insisted, before they carved it, that Steven bear the bird into the living room to present it to the group in its pristine state. Which he did, eliciting a round of cheers and applause. The moment served to galvanize them all, time for the under-chefs and galley slaves to get the feast set out in the banquet hall. Steven felt a knife of pain between his shoulder blades as he tottered with the turkey to the sideboard.

Mark was enlisted to carve, though he swore he hadn't a clue. Heather and Linda donned their aprons and began a frenzy of potato-mashing and gravy-making. Dell and Sonny fetched chairs from all over the house, and Andy filled glasses with water and wine and rather a droopy countenance. Such that Margaret murmured to Steven, both in the midst of bearing tureens, “Why is the boy so melancholy? Did you break his heart already?”

“Mm—cracked it a bit,” he replied, trying not to sound too cavalier.

At last they had the myriad bounty lined up on the sideboard, brimming with delights. Ray Lee begged them to take a picture before it got spoiled, but Linda didn't have a flash. They swore a group oath to memorize it in all its cornucopian glory, and then they attacked. Lining up and serving one another with relish, swords beaten to ploughshares, peaceful as pilgrims and Indians. Steven stood back with folded arms and watched them load their plates, then remembered in a flash of panic that he hadn't put out the place cards.