Afterlife (15 page)

His student film was a docu-portrait of Signora Guardi, a psychic from Somerville with a sign in her dining-room window:
PAST AND FUTURE READINGS
. Aaron would come home and play back his Super 8's on the walls of the apartment, laughing delightedly at the cracked ideas of his seeress. Sonny watched, casually tagging along for the next shoot. They stepped into an apartment whose curtains were drawn for good, the atmosphere redolent of sausages and marinara sauce. She was garbed in a flowered housedress, the bags under her eyes like black crepe. She didn't require a crystal or a trance. Aaron asked her questions, and she chatted about the future, very matter-of-fact, the triumphs and pitfalls that lay ahead for Michael Jackson and Cher.

Modestly, even reluctantly, she would speak of things predicted in the past. She had a near-perfect record on the Oscars and the Triple Crown. Sonny hung back and tried not to lock eyes with her son Carmine, who took time off work to oversee every interview, to make sure the Signora was not ripped off. He stood by the sofa in his blue delivery uniform and stared at Sonny. The Signora confined her predictions to
National Enquirer
matters—earthquakes, serial killers, cancer cures. A crackball, just as Aaron had said. The movie was only a comedy after all.

When the film ran out, it was time to leave. Carmine walked Aaron to the car, wanting to ask in private about the foreign rights. Signora Guardi offered Sonny a sweet from a dusty bowl of hard candy by the door. He took a green one. She said: “So how come you never been in love?”

He sucked the lime for a moment. “No reason,” he replied with careful indifference.

“Well, it's time.” Sonny looked at her. She shrugged her lower lip in a very Sicilian way. “How long you supposed to wait? A thousand more years?”

She made a scoffing sound at the stubbornness of time and sent him on his way. He walked to Aaron's car without so much as a nod good-bye to Carmine; they hadn't even been introduced. Nevertheless, Sonny got the number off the panel truck in the driveway:
GUARDI MOVING AND STORAGE
. He met Carmine the following night at the Guardi warehouse in the South End. Married with twin girls. The next weekend Carmine drove a shipment of country furniture to New York, and Sonny sucked him off twice in the back of the truck on the way down.

He didn't even pack a change of clothes. They unloaded sturdy fat-legged tables and chests of drawers into the rear of a store on Amsterdam Avenue. The antique dealer, exhausted with connoisseurship, haggled halfheartedly with Carmine. It didn't much matter what it cost, since the markup was so precipitous. Jonathan Clare, the dealer—older than he looked, younger than he talked—paid over a check to Carmine for the truckload, then asked Sonny if he'd like to have dinner. Carmine eyed them briskly back and forth, shrugged and left. He wasn't a sentimental man.

Sonny barely registered this phase, except to notice that Jonathan's apartment was the mirror image of the lighting designer's on Sutter Street. It was all transition now, a sort of free-fall that had begun the moment the psychic opened the window. Sonny plummeted toward love. All through August Jonathan had a marvelous time, driving Sonny back and forth to the Hamptons to show him off to clients. Sonny stood in a green Speedo on innumerable bleached decks, staring out over the rippling dune grass.

He was unfailingly polite to all the summer millionaires, never locking eyes. Jonathan wasn't deluded and didn't pretend they were going anywhere. The sex was perfunctory, though here too they were courteous to a fault: quick spurts and hand towels. Jonathan was avoiding the real summer, having opted out of his share in the Pines for the first time in a decade. Too many housemates sick. In the Hamptons at least, his clients never discussed night sweats and purple bruises.

Nevertheless, Sonny woke up beside him in moonlit guest rooms, and Jonathan's pillow was drenched, the sweat streaming off him. It didn't mean anything to Sonny. Discreetly he moved to the other side of the bed, beyond the circle of damp. He had no idea what sort of man he was meant to fall in love with, but this excited rather than troubled him. He imagined a figure moving toward him, nudged perhaps by a seer of his own, heading for a crossroads. Sonny could feel the imminence. His past was about to slough like a snakeskin.

By September he had visited with Jonathan all of New York's summer camps, but no man touched him. Seized with bouts of colitis, Jonathan grew irascible and insisted Sonny stay in a separate room. When the ailanthus trees turned yellow in the alley behind the store, they went together to an auction in Tribeca. Jonathan sat with his bidding paddle, eyes keen for a bargain despite the wilted look on his face. One after another, ungainly blotched paintings were knocked down in the high fives. Sonny fidgeted.

Then a big painting with a ladder and a chair nailed to it crept toward two hundred thousand, and the room began to murmur. It wasn't the money that made Sonny turn, it was more like a surge of power. He saw the paddles waving as the action narrowed to two bidders. Two-eighty, then three hundred. Jonathan coughed dryly beside him. Sonny could see that one of the green paddles was numbered 66. He lifted slightly off his chair to look.

Number 66 was a man about thirty in a rumpled suit, matinee-idol good looks and the wary smile of a fallen aristocrat. His face was slightly puffy, as if he'd just woken up from a nap. Three-forty. Three-fifty. His eyes flicked away from the auctioneer and locked on Sonny. The planets shifted. Sonny, pounding with joy, lifted a tentative hand. He was either waving at 66 or telling him to wait. The gavel came down.

“Four hundred ten thousand, to you, sir,” announced the house to general applause. For an awful moment Sonny thought he'd bought it. Two or three people around 66 beamed with exhilaration and hugged him, pulling his gaze from Sonny, who left his seat abruptly as the next lot went up. Jonathan glanced sideways to see him go, never sure if Sonny was leaving a room for good.

Sonny staggered into the vestibule, his heart throbbing. He hugged his arms, squeezing the useless strength of his biceps. Huddled in the hollow shell of his body, he tried to think who to be. An armed guard at the door could see he was deranged, but clearly no harm to anyone but himself. Sonny could not recall the family he always said he was from, or the country town or the college. In the space of ten seconds he went through an entire adolescence of uncertainty. Having tumbled easily into a hundred beds, armed with one night's story, suddenly he had forgotten how to dance.

“That was a very expensive look,” said a voice behind him, sultry and ironic. “Lucky for you, I wanted the picture.” Sonny turned, a mask of confusion on his face. 66 grinned. His eyes were the color of black jade. “Don't worry, it wasn't my money. It never is. I'm Ellsworth.”

“Sonny.” He looked away shyly and didn't shake hands, for fear he would tremble. “Congratulations,” he said lamely, then laughed to think how earnest he sounded. “I don't think I get modern art.”

“Neither does my father. Modern money is what he collects.” The voice was smooth as bourbon. Stupidly Sonny stared at the open throat of Ellsworth's shirt. He didn't know where to rest his eyes, so skilled at looking at nothing when other men looked at him. “Are you bidding?” asked Ellsworth. “Or can we get out of here?”

“Could we just have coffee first?”

“He wants to know my intentions.” Ellsworth folded his arms, brimming with amusement. “Dishonorable,” he admitted with a small shrug. “But fate is fate, right?”

Indeed it was. Sonny grinned slyly, his sudden adolescence falling away like scales. The bond of destiny established, they walked out together into the rainy night, leaving the gang of art consultants to settle the details of Lot 31. They zigzagged through the city, stopping for coffee twice, buying a pair of umbrellas at an all-night Walgreen's. Sonny could not recall ever laughing so much with anyone, as Ellsworth spilled the tale of his checkered dynasty.

The father was a Florida toy magnate, the mother addicted to plastic surgery. Ellsworth had been disowned three separate times for being an invert, but the old man always took him back, needing an invert's eye to build his art holdings. Ellsworth was pensioned off in L.A., a continent away from the Aryan supremacist barbecues of his parents. He came East only to buy immortal objects.

Sonny invented nothing, laying out his dim youth in the hot flats of Fresno. Then all the glancing men he could remember, though his first rule had always been that no man in his life should know another. It took them nearly three hours to reach the East Fifties, pants drenched to their knees, shoes ruined. By the time they got to River House—the Second Cataract at last—Sonny felt what he always knew he would feel. That the married men at the Safeway, and all their kindred who fell in love with him for a night, were part of somebody else's life, a man who wasn't a prince.

They cavorted among the baronial trappings like a couple of orphans loose in a castle. They ate peanut butter and banana sandwiches. They necked in the library and rollicked in the old man's bed as if the elder Downs were squinting through a peephole. Two nights they curled in each other's arms, never restless.

“You realize what I'm giving up for you?” asked Sonny in mock dismay, standing naked in a window arch, flinging out a hand at the hive of the city below.

“All your sons,” said Ellsworth, “unto a hundred generations.” In a tent-like Sulka robe of his father's, he backed Sonny onto the window seat, grappled into his arms, and bit his neck softly. “Are you lost yet?”

“Uh-uh,” Sonny retorted, tickling him to break the clinch, then pinning him in turn beside the open casement. A summer breeze drowsed in off the river. They hadn't shaved in two days. Sonny whispered: “It's all happened before, you know.”

And at last he repeated the ballad Romy used to croon to him in the old kingdom off the Embarkadero, waiting all these years for a bloodbrother. He told it now playfully, interspersed with kisses, the first time he'd ever met a man's hunger with an equal measure of his own. Always before he had let them want him. More than their wives and children, more than their land and chattels. He could make them give over everything for the hour they played with him.

“Who does that make me? Pharaoh?”

“I'm not sure yet.” Sonny licked at the head of Ellsworth's dick and tasted pre-cum. “Clearly royal. Maybe not immortal.”

“Just as long as you understand, darling, I don't believe any of that shit.”

“You don't have to. I'm the channel.”

He dove down and swallowed the other, his throat slack with passion. Ellsworth gripped the gold in his hair and heaved over and over, gritting his teeth with love. It hurt to come, and they cried out in protest, then collapsed in a heap on the window seat. As they groaned and laughed, Ellsworth spoke with a certain awe. “Egypt, I have to tell you,” he drawled, “you were born to live in the Eighties.”

He must have bruised a muscle because he could feel it throb in his armpit as he walked home Sunday night from the gym. But then, he'd been tense all week, ever since Sean took off for Sydney. The dinner they'd planned had been put off three different times, on account of some business crisis. Sean apologized ripely, swearing to make it up, but all they had time for was a quick drink the night before he left, no chance to turn up the heat. The full overnighter would have to wait till Sean's return—what Sonny considered his real audition. Meanwhile, he had discovered how very rich Sean was. It wasn't banking but cable franchise, and the money was all his own, no checks doled out by a patriarch. A situation, in other words, that was starting to look quite princely.

When he walked into the apartment, he wasn't really surprised to hear the television in Dirk's room, loud with the door half-shut. He was used to Dirk's abrupt arrivals and departures. They weren't exactly friends in any case, so Sonny didn't feel impelled to duck his head in. They had made it work as roommates by keeping on separate flight paths.

So he made himself a couple of bologna sandwiches and went in his own room. After he ate he fell asleep. When he woke at ten he was utterly refreshed, and decided to drop by Rage for a beer, since it wasn't a zoo on a weeknight. He pulled off the dun-gray sweatshirt and bent to his laundry basket, shaking out a black T-shirt with a zap sign across the front. As he slipped it over his head, tight and sleek along his torso, making his nipples hard, he heard the TV again from Dirk's room.

It had been playing all along, all through his nap, but only now did it strike him as queer. Still very loud, blaring a sitcom, as if the station hadn't been changed or the volume, ever since Sonny came in. He crossed the living room and pushed open the door. He saw Dirk's uniform laid out neatly on a chair, blue and heroic. Dirk was in bed with the covers pulled up to his chin, maybe asleep. It wouldn't have seemed weird at all if it hadn't been for the television, so loud in the room that it hurt Sonny's ears.

“Hey, Captain, you think we could break the sound barrier some other time?”

Dirk tossed his head on the pillow and grunted. Taking this for yes, Sonny moved to the set and hit the dial just as the canned audience erupted in laughter. On the screen was Lou Ciotta, bellowing at his brainy wife, the prizefighter and the professor. Suddenly mute.

“You want to go grab a beer?” asked Sonny, just to fill up the silence, since he knew there was something wrong.

“I can't get warm,” said Dirk in an oddly muffled voice, peering now over the blankets. It was strange that someone so tan could be so pasty-faced. His eyes were hollow with exhaustion, and this in a man with the cushiest run in the business. Sonny walked over and laid a hand on his forehead. Like fire.

“You got a fever,” he said, almost accusingly. “I'll get you an aspirin.”

He walked into Dirk's bathroom and opened the cabinet above the sink, avoiding his own face in the mirror. The shelves were cluttered with the gray tubes and jars of Clinique, cheek by jowl with a box of Four-X rubbers. Sonny grabbed a bottle of Tylenol, filled a glass with water, and went back to Dirk. “Here,” he said impatiently when Dirk made no immediate move to sit up.