Afterlife (7 page)

Nobody knew anything. Mark talked to his Studio City doctor like a bachelor, the way he talked to the excitable women he took to black-tie functions. They knew and they didn't know; they didn't want to know. Eighteen months before, he had taken the antibody test anonymously at a gay clinic, sitting for twenty minutes' counseling with a man who knew only his first name.

Ted's five weeks was short by the usual standard. Typically they lasted about three months. Even Ted would have lasted the full nine innings, except for the call from Brad's father in San Bernardino. Until that night, Mark had succeeded in plotting his course on the good side of the percentages. There were guys who were going to squeak through and survive this thing, and he meant to make the cut. Otherwise he kept his fluids to himself, or shot them harmlessly into the air, like a gun on New Year's Eve.

Connie lobbed him a bunch of sucker calls, the kind he could put away with his eyes closed. The main piece of business right now was trying to find Lou Ciotta himself, whose chestnut stallion stamped the ground impatiently, longing to be in his retinue. Every few minutes, like a tongue on a sore tooth, Mark would glance at his call list, dissatisfied and impatient, trying to find someone he felt like calling. Mostly it was the standard cast of those who lunched too much. Some were gay and wanted checks. Some were friends who never missed a screening, but even they didn't know he was dying.

It wasn't till his eye swept the third page for the fourth time that he registered his own name:
Rob Inman
. Sometimes Connie typed
Your Dad
instead, and among the list of agents' names it sounded as if an Indian mystic had called. The number beside the name, beginning with 305, was indelible as a tattoo.

The static on the line was heavy when Rob Inman picked up the phone in Fort Lauderdale. “Hello,” they called to each other, sailors on a stormy deck. “I said I was in London,” Mark repeated slowly. It was considered too much of a fuss by the elder Inman to call back and try for a better connection.

“The show last night was a dog,” complained Rob Inman, ignoring London pointedly, unless it was a short in his hearing aid. “Where did you dig up that landlady? She don't know how to play off Lou, and she don't look Italian either. You need a
guy
.”

“Thanks, Dad. I'll have the casting people call you. How you doing?”

“
I
should be a Nielsen home,” announced the old man. “Roz Schwartz is a Nielsen home, and she don't watch nothin' but soaps and Oprah.”

Mark laughed and asked how Roz was doing, but the question got drowned in the static. The bristle of one-upmanship between Rob and Roz was the one safe topic, much to be preferred to what followed now, the recitation of the mortal ills of the father. Cholesterol 280, triglycerides up, suspicious swelling in the prostate. Mark never paid much attention, considering it a form of white noise, but lately there was anger too. Mark had blood counts of his own, as well as a chain of swollen lymph nodes in his neck.

Yet even the list of ills was to be preferred, compared to what came next. “It's her birthday next Wednesday,” declared Rob gravely. Mark said he knew. “She'd be seventy-one,” his father went on, the catch in his voice sharp enough to override the static.

Mark didn't think about his mother unless he had to. When she died eleven years ago, after three sudden months of cancer, people told him it was a blessing. Mark agreed with everyone who said it—agreed with everything anyone said, however vacuous. At the time he was still an actor; still straight. No end to the ways he could duck.

“What are you planning for Wednesday?” he interjected when the old man paused between memories of the house in Manhasset, sold so Rob could flee to the waiting room of Lauderdale.

“Nothing special. Roz and me'll go to the track, maybe get a bite. I try to keep busy.”

He had never yet said he and Roz were an item, however an item worked in south Florida. They had separate condos across the pool. They each had children in California—once, Mark endured an appalling call at the office from Nelson, son of Roz, inviting him to a barbecue. Sometimes Mark thought his father wanted to say more about Roz, but he never seemed to give the right cue.

“So who's your date for the Emmys?”

Mark chuckled a bit louder this time. “I haven't got that far yet,” he said.

“You mean you got Friday and Saturday first. Hell, you can go three for three.”

Mark never picked up on the playboy talk, but that didn't stop it. A fantasy of the old man's, from a youth cut short by marriage. Yet it was only after Eileen died that Rob started thinking about what he'd missed. The blondes he saw at the Emmys mocked him. It was a most ambiguous consolation that one of these walked in on the arm of his only son.

“When you coming down to see us?”

“Oh, I'll get there,” Mark replied, the answer as rote as the question, their way of saying good-bye. Thus it was uncharted territory—Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff—when Mark added haltingly, “We need to sit down and talk.”

Even as it tumbled out, he loathed the banality of it. There was a startled silence at the other end. Mark saw the two of them sitting on the condo's narrow balcony, overlooking a Pitch ‘n' Putt, but he wasn't sure which he wanted to say: gay or dying. Probably both, but he hadn't got that far either.

“Well, you come on down whenever you like,” replied his father briskly. It wasn't clear why they couldn't do this talking on the phone. “Least we can help you blow your savings on the ponies. We'll be watchin' for you Sunday night. Good luck.”

“Thanks, Dad, but I haven't even been nominated.”

“You're a winner in our book, son.” The sincerity in his voice was real, even if the clichés were slightly askew. All Rob Inman could do with his heart was wear it on his sleeve. Their actual good-byes were clumsy and glancing as ever, the work of two men who avoided embracing. They hung up at exactly the same moment so nobody had to do it first.

Connie buzzed in with lightning speed: “We found him. They're transferring now. On two.”

Mark waited for the prince of the Wednesday lineup, his eyes moving without thinking to the graven image of same across the room. Lou Ciotta, the current national mascot, radiated health. Untold thousands of hopeful actors looked as good, the beautifully unemployed with their bad glossies and puffed résumés, but this one happened to have won the lottery. Happily he was also a moron, so he never lost sleep wondering if he deserved it.

Two flashed, and Mark picked up: “Hey, Tiger.”

“Okay, what's the problem? If I want a fuckin' horse, it's
my
business.”

“I don't know about the problem,” Mark responded smoothly, poising pen over paper.

“Eric's doin' this trip on Angela—like we can't afford it. I don't want to hear that shit. It's all I ever heard growin' up.”

“Eric's just being protective,” said Mark. On the memo pad he wrote
horse
.

“Call the bank and get 'em to wire the money. Today.” End of discussion. Mark wrote
1.2
under
horse
. “Now, about this picture. Angela says the other guy's got all the laughs.
I
want the laughs.”

“Lou, you've got just as many laughs. It's a buddy picture. You're both hysterical.”

“Yeah, well, either they change it or they can sit on it.”

Underneath
1.2
Mark wrote
laughs
. “I think it's a little premature. Counteroffer's two and a half mill. They may tell
us
to sit on it.”

“Whatever,” Lou retorted dismissively, as if the deal-making procedure were beneath his notice. The full tantrum would wait till the deal was done. “Angela needs a new psychic. Make sure he does house calls.”

“What's wrong with the one she has?”

“He don't do channeling.” Under
laughs
Mark wrote
channeler
. “Listen, what am I gonna get her for her birthday? I was thinkin' a boat. What do you think?”

“Why don't you get her a feed bag?”

“What?”

Mark set down the pen beside the memo. “Well, it's like this, Lou. I don't really give a fuck.”

There was an odd aphasic pause at the other end, longer than Ted Kneeland, longer than Rob Inman. Mark glanced across at the poster again, to savor the shit-eating grin that had vanished just now in Chicago. Lou said: “This is a joke, right?”

“I don't think so, Lou.
You
get all the laughs, remember?”

Mark could hear him breathing heavy, as if he'd just worked out, a photogenic film of sweat gleaming on his charmed torso. “Listen, if this is some kind of fag shit, I don't got the time. Talk straight to me, man. What's the deal?”

“No deal, Lou. I was just thinking, maybe Angela can get it on with the horse. That ought to channel her pretty good.”

There was a noise like a bull elephant's trumpet as Mark replaced the receiver quietly in the cradle. He stood up. Nothing sentimental cluttered his desk—no picture frame, no monogram, no paper-weight. He came around and made an automatic move toward the sofa for his briefcase, then stopped himself. He took a last look around, amazed to think there was no mark of himself here to erase. He gazed at the black Italian leather chair behind the desk. It only seemed to dawn on him now that he'd killed the man who sat there. Bloodlessly: the next keeper of Lou Ciotta's flame could move in tomorrow.

Mark turned and left the office. So silent was his crime that when he strolled out of the bungalow, Connie assumed he was going across the way for a meeting with an executive. They still had a hundred and nine calls to go, but she was convinced they could do it before the day was done.

Scot-free, Mark walked away down the eucalyptus alley, the trees creaking overhead in the furnace breeze of September. A tumbleweed skittered down the New York street. Ghosts of cavalry and Indians waited for “Taps” in the dry wash. The list of names on Mark Inman's desk would never be cleared, but for once he was unencumbered by all his previous lives. For a dying man, in fact, he moved with a marvelous stride.

3

Dell pulled his mustard-yellow truck into a Pioneer Chicken stand on Alvarado. The noon heat was rotten as the dumpster in the parking lot, drizzled with flies. He had two men working in trees in Hancock Park, and he'd promised to bring them lunch. Already late, he drove past the takeout window and nosed in between the dumpster and a bank of three pay phones.

A couple of Bloods were dealing crack, using one of the phones as an office. They fastened their glittering eyes on Dell as he stepped to the right-hand phone, but saw right off he was too normal, not on the edge at all. If it had been past midnight, they might have killed him on principle, but now he was just another greaseball, meek as a burro, his truck full of tooth-shy rakes and caked shovels.

Dell drew a square of paper from his work shirt pocket, though he'd already memorized the number. When they answered at the Department of Water and Power, he asked to speak to the commissioner. He didn't exactly disguise his voice, though he did try for a resolutely American twang, so as not to implicate his people. “Yeah,” he said to the bimbo who answered the commissioner's phone, “you got a reservoir up by Castaic, right? Well, you got a problem.”

“I think you want the engineering department, sir.”

“Oh no, honey, I want you. See, I just dumped a gallon of blood in there.”

“Let me transfer you to Violations.”

“It's AIDS blood.” Finally there was a pause, a break in her bimbo stride. “See what I mean? You got a problem.”

He hung up. As he strolled over to the takeout window, the Bloods were selling a gram vial to a scrawny girl about sixteen, indifferently pregnant. The glazed boy who took Dell's order was serenely abstracted from the crimes of the Pioneer parking lot. There was a bucket of chicken for everyone, pimps and dealers and terrorists all. Dell went away with two bags brimful of junk, and not another thought about his threat to the public safety.

He checked on the men in Hancock Park, who had stripped four trees of their summer growth. He listened, straw hat in hand, while the matron of the house berated him for cutting her elm too close to the bone. Then he raced to the Westside to give bids on two big landscape jobs. Then he made his maintenance rounds, leaf-blowing and watering in the hills above Franklin. These were his oldest clients, who still paid him only fifty a month.

He knew every green thing in their yards and liked the quiet, for no one was ever home. The autumn blast of heat had killed off all the annuals, but under the trees the flowers would not quit—beds of impatiens, baskets heavy with fuchsia. His grief was at its lowest ebb in the old hill gardens, as he hummed and showered the ferns with spray. Expertly his thumb controlled the flow of water from the hose, as if using a nozzle would be cheating.

He didn't even listen to the radio in the truck as he made his rounds. A proper terrorist would've been glued to the news, waiting for a bulletin. He picked up his crew in Hancock Park and left them off at a corner on Olympic, where crowds of brown men waited every morning for day-work. He got home around five and dozed in front of the tube. He didn't seem to pay much heed to the local news, hardly rousing himself when Linda came in to cook up some rice and chicken.

But there was no report of the incident, though the news stayed on till seven, through four different segments on the National League playoffs. Every half-hour saw an update on a plastics fire in Reseda and a baby born in a hammock. Dell was silent as he ate his supper, Channel 2 droning irrelevantly, while Linda read him a long rambling letter from one of their sisters—a christening and a funeral, all in one week, the seamless web of celebration in the dusty squares of Morelia.