Afterlife Read Free Page B

woo me now.” She laughed with wonderful carelessness. “Really, it’s not necessary. I actually sort of like you the other way. Now go play.”
    She made a shooing gesture with one hand as she reached for a pot holder with the other. Dell beamed at her, blew another kiss at Steven, and headed back into the living room. The swing door swung like a saloon’s, but Steven didn’t follow. He stared at Margaret’s back as she lifted the lasagna to the counter. He tried to block the thought of Victor, easy as a gymnast, charging around the kitchen cooking three things at once for a Monday-night supper, and tried not to hate Margaret for bringing it up.
    He looked down at the floor and saw drops of red splashing like a bad Catholic joke. He held up the bleeding thumb and choked Margaret’s name. She turned with a frown between her eyes to see her boss cocking his thumb in the air, forlorn as a hitchhiker. “Help,” gasped Steven, for the thousandth time. And she moved swiftly to cradle him in her arms, he who was so lost and far from home, unanchored and alone, who would never again want a ticket anywhere.
    Mark Inman, former boy and TV star, thought they were all assholes, but he wasn’t proud of the thought. Though he had enough perks to choke a horse—car phone, half-acre granite desk, personal trainer—he’d just had a whole day of being abandoned and unloved. This despite two dozen calls from people who fawned and kissed the hem of his garment, even despite the fact that the glittering Ted Kneeland was crazy in love with him.
    Mark himself was good-looking in an offbeat way, with nothing studied about him unless that was the studied part. Ted Kneeland called him a Jewish jock by way of body type, but at thirty-eight Mark had lost a certain edge, so you couldn’t tell anymore what sport it was he’d played. Not out-of-shape exactly, he had a sort of arrogant indifference to the Renaissance bronze his body used to be. He had been a boy so long—decades—that when he grew up at last it was with a vengeance. In any case Mark did not require himself to be beautiful at all, as long as he got his share from men like Ted.
    Mark didn’t simply work in television. He was much higher up than that: chief executive officer of a company whose sole product and brand name was one Lou Ciotta. Lou was the crown jewel of the NBC Wednesday lineup—34 share—and no magazine went to bed without an update on him. He couldn’t even divide his coke into lines without the input of manager, lawyer, publicist, but all of these were so many phone calls stacked in the airspace over Bungalow 19 on the Burbank lot. The bungalow was Mark Inman’s starship. Input was one thing; the decisions were Mark’s.
    On Saturday the ninth of September, Mark was invited to a screening at the Academy, two black-tie affairs in Beverly Hills, and a power dinner at the crenelated house of a great white shark. He had canceled all of them at four o’clock, so he was batting 0 for 20 on the week’s invitations. Ted, of course, had not expected to attend a single one, since Mark was not permitted to be so openly gay. No couples in double tuxes. Ted was accustomed to seeing Mark only late at night, when love was all the business left to attend to. Yet Mark had canceled none of it tonight to be with Ted. On the contrary, Ted would have been on his way out even if this awful week had never happened. Regrettably Ted didn’t understand the finer points: he still thought they were made for each other.
    Over a beer Mark listened sullenly to the china doll swathed in Armani. “The mall people have discovered Rodeo Drive,” observed Ray Lee ominously, bravely filling the gap with Margaret and Steven away in the kitchen. Understandably Ray overcompensated, since the four other men in the room stuck to monosyllables, stalking one another with their eyes, and somebody had to talk