Afterlife (16 page)

With a weary moan, the co-pilot came up on one elbow, the coverlet falling away to his chest. It didn't make sense how thin and frail his torso seemed. Sonny had worked out any number of times with him, had seen the fine broad barrel of that chest hardly a week ago. Dirk took the two white pills and popped them in his mouth. As he tilted back his head to drink, Sonny could see a patch of white fur along the inner side of the lower lip. Sonny's chest began to pound.

“Did you call the doctor?” he demanded as Dirk sank back on the pillow, shaking his head no. “Well, don't you think you better call him?”

“It's just a bug,” murmured Dirk.

Sonny practically lurched from the room, hurrying out of the apartment as if he was late. He trotted down to the garage and pulled the Mercedes out, though it was only a few blocks to the bar and parking was always a hassle. There was such a wall up between him and Ellsworth's illness that he didn't let the memories flood back in, refused to see again the white patches that foamed over Ellsworth's tongue, or hear the amulet phrase they had repeated over and over: “Just the flu.”

Sonny didn't know Dirk very well, but they'd traded sufficient sexual banter, the high points and fine points of their respective voyages, for Sonny to know the bottom line—or perhaps it was the top line. Dirk Ainley didn't get fucked. This wasn't especially a matter of pride or superiority. Actually Dirk felt guilty about it, to find himself hung up on such an unliberated posture. Nonetheless his ass was never in the air, so there wasn't any way he could have picked up the virus. For all the shifting definitions of what constituted safe, one article of faith still held in the bombed-out world they moved in: if you'd never been a bottom, you were home free.

Sonny had put it out of his mind entirely by the time he parked on Hilldale. He walked quickly to the boulevard and ducked into Rage, nodding at the bouncer, who passed him through without the five-dollar cover. It was mildly crowded, maybe two deep around the bar. Sonny stepped up and waited to order, casting his eyes around. In the first sweep he picked up six men cruising him—precruising actually, not at all sure they were worthy of him. At the end of the bar was an ordinary man, forty-five easy and clearly not a devotee of Prime Time. Mournfully smoking a cigarette, he looked at Sonny with a certain hunger in which there was no hope.

Sonny took his beer and walked around, passing four other men who were much more suitable and much more ready. “Howdy,” he said, extending a neighborly hand to the smoking man, “I'm Sonny.”

The guy was from Oklahoma City, for God's sake. He could barely keep from gaping, he was so flabbergasted that Sonny had approached him. He answered every question earnestly, as if he were being interviewed for a job. He was too overwhelmed to ask anything back, but Sonny was marvelously open, spinning his own Sinbad tale from Fresno to Rage, including his metaphysical detour as Pharaoh's cousin.

Within five minutes he made Charlie Bekins of Oklahoma City feel irresistible and witty. When Sonny leaned over to laugh, he grazed his knee against Charlie's, bumped his shoulder for emphasis. Even as he drained his first beer, Sonny declared with insolent good humor, “So why don't we go back to your place?”

Charlie nodded in a dumbstruck way, not even sure it wouldn't cost him. He had a literal closet back home full of Matt Sterling and his ilk, and no amount of autoerotic swooning had ever made him believe he would have one in the flesh. But yes, even if he had to sign away all the traveler's checks hidden in his boot, they would go back to his place.

Which turned out to be the Beverly Hills Hotel, Bungalow 14. Sonny had to laugh at the synchronicity of that, as he followed Charlie down Sunset in the 380. He was going to spend the night first-class, he who would have happily curled up on a couch somewhere so long as he didn't have to go home.

The immortal part was over very fast, a double jerkoff in which they barely nodded to each other, let alone touched. But they were very nice, even gentlemanly, and the Oklahoman was quickly sound asleep, leaving Sonny to order a midnight breakfast from room service. He shut the bedroom door and sat in the bungalow living room in the white terry robe with the BH logo. When the food was wheeled in twenty minutes later, the night waiter turned out to be a face from across The Body Works.

An actor/model/waiter named Bud, as beautiful as Sonny, who competed for the same rich forty-year-olds in the dating pool. They both knew the situation could just as easily have been reversed, with Sonny in the green bolero jacket and black pants. They laughed as if they were playing prince and pauper, Bud whisking the covers from the eggs Benedict and shrimp cocktail. Sonny signed the bill with a flourish and added a ten-dollar tip, then locked eyes with Bud.

“There's an awful lot of food here. Why don't you pull up a chair?”

“Can't, I got orders.”

“What about later?” persisted Sonny, the white robe yawning open.

“Yeah, well,” replied the other, rolling his shoulders in the monkey jacket, “I go on my break at one.”

One was fine. It gave Sonny the chance to take a shower and wash his hair with a spate of complimentary BH products. He toweled dry in front of a full-length mirror for the second time that night, this time examining himself inch by inch to make sure there were no bruises, sticking his tongue out. Everything checked out fine, and even the aching muscle under his arm had started to mend. He was brimming with health.

By the time the waiter returned, Sonny was dozing on the hearth before a crackling fire. Bud woke him coming in, and Sonny stretched and groaned, shinnying out of the robe. Nothing required negotiation. Sonny watched the other strip out of his waiter's mufti, dispassionate as the locker room. They didn't even say hello. All the feeling was in their dicks as Bud came down on top of him, head to crotch. They fed on each other, enjoying it precisely the way they enjoyed a workout. It was Charlie Bekins who would have enjoyed it hugely, but he was sleeping serene as a deacon in the bedroom, missing the chance to see Jeff Stryker come to life. He surely would've gotten more out of it than they did.

Not that they weren't good at it: they came at the same time, their sixth sense for muscular contraction pulling their mouths away at the last possible moment so they shot free and clear, not a drop ingested. Thus on their deathbeds neither one would blame the other. They cleaned it up within ten seconds, using the pink BH napkin. Three minutes later Bud was dressed and gone, leaving Sonny with the ancient pledge of their common faith: “See you at the gym.”

Actually Sonny was horny again before the creak of the room service cart had faded down the pathway from Bungalow 14. But that would've been true even if he'd had another and then another encounter—the desk clerk or the car valet, whoever still might be available in the night's dead center. Sonny was being very disciplined, for him, to get himself dressed and out of there, without even a black swim in the pool of stars. And without a backward glance at Charlie, who wasn't so Oklahoma City as to dream they would wake in each other's arms. It was in the nature of a tumble with Sonny to wake up wondering if it happened at all.

He drove back into West Hollywood, knowing now how the next part would unfold. He hadn't decided any of it consciously. As usual, sex was the way he made the decision. Passing Rage, he felt a tug of raw intensity, watching the guys emerge in pairs as the 2
A.M.
curfew fell. He left the Mercedes in the loading zone outside the apartment house, top down, trotted up the stairs, and soundlessly let himself in.

Dirk's light was off. He listened in the bedroom doorway, the copilot's breathing heavy as a winter tide. He actually thought of going and getting the Tylenol, since it was close to time for the next dose, but then they would have to talk. It was Dirk who had chosen to be here, wherever the journey was going. Sonny had nothing to do with it. If a man who couldn't possibly have the virus had it anyway, then he got what he wanted.

He was able to do it all in two trips. The laundry basket, the orange crate full of books, an armload of clothes on hangers, and one frayed suitcase. This was twice as much as he really needed, but his life was already edited down enough to fill only half the 380's trunk. He left the apartment keys on the board in the kitchen. No need to leave a forwarding address, since he never got any mail, and as for phone calls, the only one that mattered was Sean Pfeiffer's, and he wouldn't be back for ten days.

By quarter to three he was driving up into the hills above Sunset, turning in at a cul-de-sac, passing a line of ranch houses that hung out over the mountain on stilts. At the end was a vacant lot where a bungalow had been accordioned by a mudslide. Sonny had parked here on several occasions, at the lip of the view, to make out with certain men from The Body Works, certain men he didn't want to go home with.

He balled up a cashmere sweater of Ellsworth's to make a pillow, then eased the car seat backward till he was nearly prone. He stroked the amethyst crystal that swung from the rearview mirror, then looked up at the starlit night serenely, almost philosophically, as if he was camping out in the wilderness. As he unhitched the buttons of his jeans and drew them down over his flanks, the memory of passion aroused him—the man from Oklahoma chomping his nipples, Bud hunkered above him. Though no one could bring Sonny off like he could himself, he needed all his men to do it—dozens and dozens, trailing back into the deep past, each of them brief and glancing but in the mass like a force of nature.

He stroked and stroked. No man who had ever touched him was left out, for here all his lives were intact—the confederate soldier, the knight, the monk, the oracle, all his dreams in time. Every civilization had him, high on a mountain moaning in the night. He was the crux in which desire became pure spirit. He ran his other hand across the beautiful ripples of his belly, very nearly grasping what it all was for. He came with his eyes locked on the gibbous moon, viscous and thick and white.

Then he lay there free of encumbrance, smiling softly, the zap sign glowing on his chest, the sap cooling on his abdomen. Once more he had proven to himself that he wouldn't be sick. He was too much a moving target. No wonder he needed no permanent home and no baggage, even now, ten years after he'd run from Fresno. Saving himself for the big score, in the person of Sean Pfeiffer. All he needed was an interim arrangement, and it came to him now like everything else, in a burst of understanding.

The next oasis was Steven Shaw.

6

Steven was very good about bringing in the mail. He would hear the van at three or three-thirty and hurry on down to the box, sometimes even chatting giddily with the postperson, a black woman with hair as big as Oprah's. As he trotted back up the steps, he would rifle through the pile, sorting it into bills and letters and junk. Then he'd head straight for the alcove off the kitchen, which Victor had used as a kind of menu central
cum
potting shed, where he'd plan parties and arrange flowers. It had a big greenhouse window above a butcher-block counter, the window full of cymbidiums, the counter stacked with exotic cookbooks.

Briskly and efficiently, Steven would toss the bills into a cardboard carton, where they would wait till Margaret flustered in and paid them. This did not keep things from being turned off sometimes—the gas, the cable, the phone. But that was all right, since Steven didn't expect connections to be made anymore, and besides, it was an adventure to see what one could go without.

The junk mail went in the trash, of course, but not before Steven had rifled through it, bracing himself for the sight of Victor's name. For still the realty circulars and brokerage come-ons would arrive, the computer lists incapable of accepting death. Today a flier from a wine shop, promising a special gift for Mr. and Mrs. Victor Diamond, the Mrs. being Steven. Actually he liked this part, the persistence of Victor's name, even as he flung it into the barrel.

Two letters today, one from Montana and one from New York. The Billings address he couldn't place, a woman's hand, some cousin of Victor's or a high-school pal, two sides of a flower-bordered page full of stiff and formal sentiments. Not that Steven opened it to see. He tossed it into a shoebox where half a hundred other well-meaning thoughts lay sealed. The New York letter, Tiffany-crisp, was from an old friend of Steven's, an opera queen who'd had a crush on him fifteen years ago. Into the shoebox.

As he came around into the kitchen proper, he found Sonny Cevathas leaning into the fridge, in white sweatpants and nothing else. He turned around holding a carton of milk and poured it over a bowl of cereal. He grunted pleasantly to acknowledge Steven's presence, but no more than that, so skillful was he at not intruding. Steven watched him balance the bowl, a glass of milk, and two sweet rolls on his arm, his waiter's skills acute as he headed out the back door.

He'd been there four days now. The guest room beyond the garage had its own door, so they only met by chance, passing like ships. Steven had taken Sonny's plea at face value—“I need a place for a while”—and he didn't feel used. If people had asked him any number of things, he probably would have said yes. He was accustomed by Victor's illness to being overrun and invaded. In those last months the guest room had been filled with a stream of friends and family, coming to say good-bye. Compared to that, Sonny's being there hardly registered at all.

In addition to which, however charged his presence was to the men of The Body Works, Sonny didn't do anything for Steven. Steven watched him through the kitchen window, laying out his breakfast on the wooden bench under the bougainvillea, squinting up into the late-October sun to make sure he was getting its optimum light. No tanning rays available mid-autumn at four o'clock, but the burnish of the sun was perhaps its own reward. He scooped up a spoonful of Wheaties and thrust it in his mouth, eyes closed as he rhythmically stretched his neck.