Afterlife (6 page)

“If you don't lose some weight, Mr. Shaw, you'll be dead of a coronary before you ever get AIDS.”

He patted Steven's belly in the same way Margaret had. Steven was beginning to feel like Buddha. He didn't retort that Buckey was just as overblown as he, because he knew this place wasn't a democracy. As Buckey filled out the bill, Steven looked over at the shelf above the blood-pressure gauge, where a cluster of Plexiglas frames were full of pictures of Buckey's wife and children. The dividing line between the two men could not have been more sharply drawn. And the prospect of a coronary suddenly seemed as lush as an oasis, like dying in your sleep at ninety.

The bill was sixty-five dollars. As Steven handed his VISA to the receptionist, Buckey instructed him to come in again in three months. They shook hands philosophically, a certain understanding between them that nothing of a medical nature had just transpired. In December they would try to have the same non-meeting again, everything blissfully stable. Buckey called in the next patient, who happened to be the sleepy boy with the lesions. He came in bent like an old man, but what made Steven turn his face away was the yearning in the boy's eyes. This one wanted to be healed. He still trusted that Dr. Buckey would find him a magic bullet.

Steven passed guiltily through the waiting room, eyes straight ahead, not wanting to doom anyone else with his awful dose of reality. Tears welled up for Victor as he groped across the desert wastes of the parking garage. It wasn't till the Volvo lurched out onto the boulevard that he permitted himself a small throb of being alive. He didn't feel like murdering anybody in traffic. For the first time in weeks he felt he might make it home without a dozen glazed doughnuts from Winchell's.

To be sure, it was only the most provisional kind of alive. It wouldn't have done to ask him where he'd be two years from now, because the answer was still “Dead.” But the stasis of his numbers gave the next three months a sort of burnish, like the light in Margaret Kirkham's hair. He wasn't going to be sick between now and Christmas. He never would have verbalized it so, especially to himself, not wanting to spoil his record as a fatalist. But for now, anyway, the white had gone out of his knuckles.

At Hollywood and Fairfax, traffic slowed to a crawl around a broken-down sanitation truck. Its tattooed crew, up since dawn, sat on the rear bumper dozing like cats as they waited for a tow. Steven inched forward, patient and serene, opening the glove compartment to fetch himself a diet mint, just nine calories. Instead he pulled out the Thomas street guide, the spiral-bound Bible of the Southland grid. Back and forth from the brake to the gas, he moved toward the light at Fairfax. One hand on the wheel, he leafed through to the index, trying to act random, stopping at S. About halfway down the third column he spied
Skyway Lane: 23, E-6
. Quickly he thumbed to Map 23, Hollywood and the hills. He traced the E longitude to Mulholland Drive, east of Laurel Canyon.

So he lived up there, thought Steven, dispassionate as a realtor. Then on the map he spied “Skyway,” a squiggle off Mulholland on the spine of the mountains. The view would be out to the Valley, the opposite of Steven's. A car behind him pounded its horn, and he looked up startled. The road ahead was clear. Steven lurched forward and took the turn, nodding guiltily at the sanitation crew as he passed.

Four minutes later, heading uphill to his own aerie, he sucked the diet mint with innocent abandon. He swung onto his winding street and sailed the Volvo into the garage. Scrambling out, he paused at the top of the driveway, trying to think what to do first with the rest of his life. Down below, the 2
P.M.
haze was pale as sherry, hunched across the city like a bad sleep. High up where Steven was, the sun beat unambiguously on the hills, scorching every vacant lot. Overhead a pair of hawks circled the canyon, their wings utterly still.

Steven lifted up onto his toes like a diver.
Wish small
, as Victor always used to caution whenever a cake was lit for anyone's birthday. With a lazy smile and nothing decided, Steven headed around to the front of the house. He went past the front steps and tramped through the ivy, ducking behind a white oleander. A couple of copper pipes with faucets stuck out from the house foundation.

He opened both taps full force. There was a surge of pressure from under the house, then a sputter as several sprinklers began to spray. Steven hadn't watered in months. The ivy and stunted shrubs that covered the hill below the house had done the best they could, brown and crumpled at every edge, holding out for the rainy season. Anything too possessed with being green was long gone in Steven's yard. More than once, Dell had offered to hook up an automatic system with a timer, but Steven never pursued it. Let the desert reclaim itself, he decided grandly, wistful for the millennium.

Now he surveyed his half-acre, the sprinklers playing on the dusty prow of the hill. A lunatic idea bloomed in Steven's brain: the hillside covered with ferns and orchids. He thrashed around to the side of the house, skirting a sprinkler's halo, making for the faucet on the northeast corner. All along this flank the lantana, thriving on thirst, had blanketed the slope in a twisted thicket. To reach the tap Steven had to crash his way through a maze of branches.

As he bent to turn the water on, he saw the dog, curled in a shady hollow in the underbrush about four feet away. Its nose was on its paws, its glowering eyes on Steven. The animal growled threateningly, just this side of bared fangs. “Fuck you,” retorted Steven.

He turned the faucet on hard, and the sprinklers in the eastern quarter burst with spray. Since one of these was a bare stone's throw from where they crouched, it began to rain lightly through the bushes. The dog didn't move from his burrowed place, or even lift his head. Getting wet was the given of a rainy day. Ringed around him in the hollowed-out cave in the bushes were the stubs of bones he had scavenged on Wednesday nights. The two of them blinked at each other with studied indifference.

“Just don't get any ideas,” Steven murmured disdainfully, rising out of the brambles.

He slogged to the front of the house again, the squish of mud around his shoes. Across the hill the sprinklers' mist was shot with minor rainbows. Irrelevantly Steven wondered: If he had Thanksgiving here, could he keep it to eight people, since eight was all the movable chairs he had? A startling thought for a man who, except for his funeral, never planned anything more than two months in advance.

He was trying to wish smaller than Christmas, apparently, thrown for a moment back to life Before, when he and Victor took in all their circle's refugees for a plate of turkey. Even as he smiled at the memory, he stopped in his tracks in the ivy, soaking wet from the knees down, squinting into the afternoon sun. Aside from Margaret Kirkham and now Mark Inman, he couldn't think who else to invite.

Ray Lee, perhaps, and maybe Heather, though it wouldn't do to make Thanksgiving a company picnic. Of course he had to include Dell and Sonny, being as it was a holiday. But he couldn't avoid the sinking feeling of having no one left for the eighth chair. Then he remembered Dell had a sister, even though he'd never met her. He felt better already, just having his table full, and rambled around to his front door, candying yams in his head. Drenched in the fullness of his reprieve.

When Mark got back from London, ready to kill, there were a hundred and nineteen calls on his call list. His plane touched down at two-thirty, and he told the driver to take him directly to the studio. He was still reeling with jet lag from flying the
other
way four days ago, but since he'd never had time for jet lag before—a wimp's condition—he wasn't buying it now. No, this was the start of dying. There wasn't a test for it exactly, any more than he could put his finger on a symptom. He just felt sapped. And even if no one could tell him how long, he knew it was only a matter of time before the shrunken shell of him went into its final spasm.

He sat dully in the back of the limo, hands hanging limply over his knees. His briefcase lay bewildered beside him. He could've returned ten calls between LAX and Burbank, but he didn't. At the Dorchester he'd confined his telephoning to doctors, all over Europe, trying to get a straight answer about drugs. It was quickly obvious there was no sure deal on a magic bullet.
Maybe, maybe not
, they told him in Paris, Zurich, Stockholm. He thought he'd explode if he heard them say “promising” one more time.

The guard at the Barham Boulevard gate waved them in, with a fawning smile at the smoked-glass window in the back. The limo wound its stately way through the outskirts of the lot, past the post-nuclear silence of a dusty New York street. Behind the executive building a row of tall eucalyptus trees swayed lazily, trailing along the ridge of a dry wash where savages used to slaughter noble cavalry. At the end of the ridge stood a cluster of thirties bungalows.

Mark climbed out in his Bond Street grays, the driver promising to leave off his luggage at the house on Skyway Lane, also to lay in milk and juice. Mark stood on the bungalow stoop for a moment, as if he had suffered a brief amnesia. For two years he'd rocketed through this door at full throttle. Now there was something oddly timid about his hand on the screen door latch, dangerously quiet, like men who arrive at work one morning smiling, with a bullet for everyone.

Connie Hinton, Mark's dogged secretary, was up from her desk and firing the instant he stepped inside. “Lou's in Chicago, he wants to buy a horse,” she said without preamble. “A million two, and he doesn't have his checkbook.” She followed her boss as he headed silently into his inner office. Everything here was gray, and as subtly tailored as the Bond Street suit. The window blinds were tilted to banish the afternoon light. “Eric's been calling all morning,” Connie continued as Mark went around his desk. “He tried to call your
plane
. Paramount's upped their offer, Sid says no, Angela wants him to do it.”

Eric was Lou Ciotta's lawyer, Sid his bug-eyed manager, Angela his wife. None of them knew that Mark was gay, or at least they never said so, at least to Mark. Connie, who would've taken this job for half the pay, so mystical was the place to her, knew everything but didn't speak either. “Ted Kneeland just called,” she added neutrally, about as far as she went into lifestyle matters.

Mark stood at his desk but didn't sit down. The full list of the hundred and nineteen calls was typed out on three neat pages, edge to edge on the blotter. He sent Connie out to gather all the principals of the Paramount deal, then glanced down the roster of players who wanted a piece of Lou. Still he did not sit down, the briefcase still in his hand.

The fifth season of “Hard Knocks” was scheduled to commence two weeks from Wednesday. By spring the show would be ready for sale to syndication, and then Lou would have enough cash to buy all the horses of Arabia. The Paramount deal was for a feature, a good cop/bad cop comedy, to be shot during Lou's hiatus. Angela, formerly Miss Arizona, who shopped with a murderous vengeance day after day, never lost sight of the golden goose in all of this. Eagerly she encouraged Lou's product spokesmanship throughout the western world: batteries, soft drinks, fitness parlors.

On the wall opposite, Lou Ciotta grinned from a shiny Cibachrome print, the prototype for a poster that had sold seven million units in the last two years. Lou's bedroom eyes were full of dirty linen, and he wore a baby-blue tank top that showed a lot of pumped and hairy cleavage. Mark's job was to graph the national turn-on that Lou evoked, working with total abstractedness, since Lou did nothing for him personally. He'd sat through countless meetings poolside at Lou's house in Malibu, himself in a tie and Lou in a tank suit, peaceable as a eunuch while Lou scratched his voluminous basket.

Connie buzzed: Sid Rawls on the line. Mark picked up and went into automatic overdrive, parsing the Paramount deal. Quickly they worked out a counteroffer, its tax loopholes intricate as crochet. Sid didn't ask how London was or tell a joke. The deal was all there was between them, until the end, when Sid tossed out, “So, who's the lucky girl you're bringing Sunday?”

Mark chuckled dryly. “Sorry, I haven't got that far yet,” he replied, but promised he'd drop by Sid's house after the show. He hung up and glared at his week-at-a-glance, where Connie had written in red for Sunday:
EMMYS, 5 P.M
. His jaw tightened decisively. He tapped a number and flicked the phone to the speaker box, moving around to swing his door shut.

“Hello?” Ted Kneeland's voice was bright and inexhaustible, like the boy himself.

“Hi, it's me.”

“Hey, welcome home. How's Fergie and Di?” Like a cheerleader with a megaphone. “I decided I'm cooking you dinner. Nothing drab and English, I promise.”

“Listen, I'm busy tonight.”

“Oh, I thought we said …” Mark could hear the younger man shift gears and swallow the protest. Ted was right, of course: there
was
a date. “No problem. I'll come by later.” In just five weeks he was so well trained.

“Look, Ted, I want to be alone right now. I'll call you, okay?”

There was a moment's silence, during which Ted must have calculated the odds of pushing the point. Not worth it. “Right now” was forever, as far as they were concerned. Or maybe Ted was shrewder than that, stopping to wonder what he had left behind in Mark's house. A pair of jeans, a couple of CD's, nothing that couldn't be replaced. “Yeah, sure,” he said evenly. “Take care, huh? I'll see you around.”

That was how easily it was done, as economical as a telegram. Mark's pace seemed to quicken now as he swung the door open again, his private deal done with. He tossed the briefcase onto the sofa. Connie called out the executive's name at Paramount, and he flicked off the box and grabbed the receiver, flinging down the new offer like a gauntlet. Before Paramount could catch its breath, Mark was on with Lou's publicist, leaking the counteroffer. A call to the network, one to the agent, then touching base again with Sid. For the space of five minutes Mark seemed fully reconnected, but as soon as the circle of calls was done it all dissipated. Sitting down at last, he felt bloated and queasy, as if he'd just wolfed down a dozen doughnuts.