Closet Case (Robert Rodi Essentials) (12 page)

Aunt Ramona lowered her head to fetch her canvas portfolio from the seat next to her (accidentally dipping the brim of her hat in peanut sauce, which Lionel decided not to mention) and placed it on the table. “Here, let me show you, let me
show
you my new samples, and you can tell me what you think.”

“Well, if you value my opinion that much,” he said, trusting that there was no special reason she was asking him above anyone else.

As if reading his mind, she said, “Well, you’re the only, you’re the
only
one in the family who will even look at them. Your father’s forbidden, your father’s
forbidden
me to stock them in the house, and your sister says I’m trading with the devil. You’ve always been such a rational boy. I’d just like, I
just
like your input.”

He smiled at the idea of Aunt Ramona using a word like “input.” She swiveled the portfolio around to face him (he had by this time shoved the peanut sauce out of harm’s way) and opened it. The first card, tucked into a plastic sleeve on the opening page, bore a watercolor drawing of a black leather boot with a single red rose stuck through its silver buckle. The type read
Happy Valentine’s Day to my favorite slave.

Lionel cocked an eyebrow and looked at her.

“You see, I did some research into, I did some
research
into gay relationships,” she said, “and some of them are master-and-slave affairs. I understand it’s fairly common.”

No, it’s not,
he wanted to say, but she was so nonjudgmental anyway he couldn’t see the point of risking his cover by explaining this to her.

He turned to the next page, whose card bore a picture of a handsome, silver-haired man with his arms around a lithe younger man.
Oh! Daddy, Oh! Daddy, how you can love!
ran across the bottom of card, with an attribution to the Andrews Sisters; and on the interior, a simple
Happy Anniversary
.

“The thing about, the
thing
about gays,” she explained, “is that they love old show tunes and songs from the nineteen-forties. Also, when a younger man has an older one for a boyfriend, he calls him ‘Daddy,’ just like girls did back in those days. So I was really pleased how this one came together.”

Lionel nodded, a weak smile on his face. Where was Aunt Ramona getting her intel? It was like she’d done her “research” by watching TV talk shows or reading a special issue of
Redbook
.

The next card was equally weird. Its cover showed a foil condom package, and the card itself unfolded accordion style, with more and more multicolored condom wrappers filling the revealed panels, until the final one, which capped it all with
I care for you more and more each day.

“What with AIDS and all,” she said enthusiastically, “condoms are the one, condoms are the
one
sure way gay men can show they really care about each other. I thought this was, I thought
this
was a good way to show that, visually.”

He looked up at her face, which shone with expectancy and pride. He felt a little ashamed of himself. He knew he could have been a tremendous help to her in getting this line of cards launched; he could
still
be of tremendous help to her — there was nothing actually
wrong
with these cards, beyond an utter tone-deafness to the jagged, subversive, high-camp gay sensibility — but he had absolutely no intention of doing so. Ramona was therefore condemned to spend her afternoon peddling her wares to gay proprietors who couldn’t help recognizing at once that they were created by someone several steps outside the loop. She would hear nothing but polite refusals (if she were lucky; if she weren’t, there’d also be a few acid comments about her hat).

He sighed and said, “Aunt Ramona, these are really good,” and as he said it he felt such a welling of shame as he had never felt before; for not only was he yet again hiding his true nature from the woman who’d brought him up, he was hiding as well the richness, the
bounty
of his experience in that identity, at a time when that bounty was exactly what she so badly needed.

Lionel had it all figured out. He would go to dinner at the home of Emil’s uncle and aunt, and these simple immigrant folk would be overcome with gratitude at his having lent Emil the money required to post bail. They would welcome him with open arms, serve him hearty, basic Romanian food, and when he left they would confer on him some ancient, potent blessing, after which they would tell him they considered him part of the family. He would come back often, and establish a bond of affection with Emil that might someday — perhaps very soon — become sexual. And then the old peasant couple would fade away; they wouldn’t exactly
die
 — he couldn’t wish that on them — but their bodies would shrivel and waste away while their spirits grew more radiant and expansive, until the former would be gone and only the latter remained. And then Lionel and Emil would be free to live as a couple, without ever having offended their good uncle and aunt’s primitive notions of Christianity with a love that they could never have understood.

Such was the fantasy that sustained Lionel through all of Friday and the better part of Saturday, until Saturday night, when he found himself standing at the front door of the address Emil had given him, ringing the bell and noting with increasing apprehension that while this far-north neighborhood wasn’t exactly fashionable, this big A-frame house didn’t exactly scream “immigrant,” either.

Emil had told him very little about his relatives — not even their names — just that he was staying with the family of his mother’s brother, who had fled Romania years before. Lionel had taken the liberty of filling in the blanks of Emil’s sketchy account, and now he had a sinking feeling that maybe his conclusions were going to turn out to be somewhat shy of the mark. He tried to salvage them by coming up with possible explanations for the grander-than-expected condition of the house, but before he could do so, a woman answered the door, and his fantasy crashed and shattered at her feet. For while her face was as lined and weathered as that of the sainted aunt of Lionel’s imagining, it was also deeply suntanned, and sat beneath a cotton-candy hairdo that had been dyed a deep, almost cherry red. Her lips were even redder, and shiny beyond belief; it looked as though she’d been drinking melted candle wax when Lionel rang.

She flicked a cigarette butt onto the stoop, then reached out and gave him a hug. “You must be Lionel,” she said in an accent about as Romanian as Mary Tyler Moore’s. He noticed she was wearing a black off-the-shoulder top, Guess jeans, and high heels. “I’m Emil’s Aunt Nancy. Just plain Nancy to you. Come on in, make yourself at home.”

Inside, she lit a new cigarette, then waved it around as though directing planes down a runway. “This is our humble home,” she said, gesturing past a glass cabinet filled with more Precious Moments figurines than Lionel had ever dreamed existed. “Mr. Jones — John to you, of course — and I have lived here since eighty-one, so you have to excuse the mess. You know how it is, things accumulate if you stay in one place too long.” She took a drag off her cigarette and ejected the smoke in a long, wide stream; Lionel thought she looked like she was spraying for bugs.

He turned and surveyed the house, which was decorated with such an excess of faux Second Empire furnishings and objets de’ not-quite art, that its rampant kitchiness was actually sort of endearing; it gave him the distinct impression of ambition that outstripped education. Very American, he would’ve called it, had he not known differently.

Likewise the name of the couple who resided here, which he had just now put together: John and Nancy Jones. Not quite the polysyllabic, church bell-echoing appellations he’d expected to have to twist his tongue around. And sure enough, after Nancy led Lionel to the basement “rec” room, where a wet bar was spread with chips and dip, and where Emil greeted him with a bear hug (his enormous nipples, Lionel couldn’t help noticing, clearly outlined by his two-sizes-too-small Freddy Krueger T-shirt), Lionel met the master of the house, a diminutive man in a Chicago Bears sweatshirt, pressed acid-washed jeans, and black patent-leather shoes with tassels. He shook Lionel’s hand heartily and said, “You must be Lionel! John Jones at your service. Funny name for a Romanian refugee, huh?”

Lionel laughed because he didn’t know how to answer.

“Pleased to meet you, anyway, son,” he said, releasing Lionel’s hand and turning toward the bar. “Let me get you a drink to thank you proper for your kindness to Emil. What’ll it be, a whisky?” His accent, like Emil’s and unlike his wife’s, had the vaguely Latinate cadences that Lionel now associated with ethnic Romanians.

Lionel started to ask for a beer but his tongue caught on his teeth. “Whisky it is,” said John, opening a bottle of Southern Comfort and pouring Lionel a tumbler. “Emil says he hasn’t told you yet, but John Jones isn’t the name I was born with. No sir, that was
Ion Ionescu.
Boy, what a mouthful, huh?
I-on Io-nes-cu.
Seems like a million years ago.” He handed the tumbler to Lionel, who regarded it with abject horror. He hadn’t had whisky since college, and hadn’t been able to handle it then.

John then motioned for Lionel and Emil to hop up on the barstools while he continued his story. Emil sucked contentedly on a long-necked bottle of Budweiser, at which Lionel stared in real envy. Nancy Jones excused herself and slipped back upstairs.

“When I came to America in sixty-four,” John said, resuming a narrative Lionel was sure he had related many times, “I wasn’t gonna go around with a name like
I-on Io-nes-cu,
no thank you, not on your life. So first thing I did once I got my citizen papers, I went to a judge and said, ‘Charlie, I’m an American now, I want me an American name.’ And he said, ‘What name you want?’ And I said, ‘I dunno, what names you got?’ And he looked at my name and said, ‘This here’s pretty danged close to John Jones, and that’s as American a monicker as anyone born under the stars and stripes ever carried on his driver’s license.’ And I said, ‘Okay, judge, John Jones it is.’” He grinned in real pleasure.

Lionel took a sip of his whisky and shuddered — it was, to him, like drinking embalming fluid — and looked out of the corner of his eye at Emil, who was, of course, perfectly, unconsciously gorgeous, with both elbows on the bar, tipping the neck of the beer bottle into his mouth as though he were going to fellate it.

“So here I am twenty-whatever years later,” John continued, standing back and raising his arms at the sheer wonder of it all. “John Jones, the Shoelace King of Chicago, and if that ain’t an American success story, you can kiss my keister.”

Lionel put his tumbler on the bar, determined to have no more of it. “The Shoelace King of Chicago?” he asked, wondering if this was some kind of inscrutable code.

John Jones looked at him with undiluted delight. “You’ve heard of me?” he asked, prompting Lionel to wonder how big an ego it took to allow this kind of misinterpretation. “You deserve another drink for that!” And before Lionel could protest, John had uncapped the Southern Comfort and added another couple of splashes to the still lethally supplied tumbler.

“That’s what I love about America,” John said, addressing Emil, “what I keep telling you about it! Here is where you can make a real
name
for yourself. You might think it’s embarrassing I’m the Shoelace King of Chicago, but look here — your boyfriend has heard of me!”

Lionel was in the midst of taking another sip, just to be polite; and at the mention of the word
boyfriend
he spat across the bar, splattering John’s sweatshirt with a messy, rye-smelling spew.

The Shoelace King, however, was serenely unfazed by this. He winked at Lionel and said, “Good stuff, huh?”, then grabbed a bar towel and mopped his shirtfront, as though this sort of thing happened to him every day.

Lionel sat back, dumbfounded, and only after a few minutes of careful consideration did he conclude that John Jones had used the old colloquial meaning of
boyfriend
 — the way it was still acceptable to talk of a woman, even of advanced age, as having girlfriends. He began to relax.

“Are you okay?” Emil asked, putting his hand on Lionel’s shoulder.

Lionel felt the heat from that hand as though it were a sun lamp; he feared he might burst into flame. “Yeah,” he said, nodding, hoping Emil would remove his great sweltering paw, and at the same time hoping he wouldn’t.

“So, as I was saying,” John Jones said, apparently miffed that Emil had interrupted him, “what do you think brought me to America in the first place? You’ll never guess.”

Emil grimaced, apparently having heard this story far too often. He slid off his stool and headed for a door that bore a varnished wooden sign reading HEAD.

Lionel watched him disappear behind that door; then he turned to John and shrugged. “I don’t know. Freedom?”

He shook his head, smiling in satisfaction. “I knew you’d say that. Everybody says that. But freedom you could have in Romania, if you knew how, not that everybody or even most people did, but I was a whiz at it. How to slip around corners, unnoticed, you know what I mean,” he said with a wink. “No, what brought me to America was the sixty-four World’s Fair. And what made me
stay
was Miss Edie Adams.”

“Who’s that?” Lionel asked while daring another sip of whisky.

John shook his head sadly. “I’m sorry to hear that you don’t know, son, because you see, Edie Adams was one of the great show-biz talents of her day. I was a cobbler in Romania back in the Sixties —”

“Transylvania,”
Emil shouted from behind the closed door of the head; “say
Transylvania,
Uncle John.”

John shrugged. “Kids today and their radical ideas … whoops! Forgot you’re one of ‘em. Forgive an old man, okay? ... Anyway, I was a cobbler outside of Cluj. How’s that?” he yelled at the head.

“Better,” came the reply.

“And I got sent to New York City to represent Romanian industry at the World’s Fair, if you can believe that. Of course this was back before Ceasescu went
really
nuts and wouldn’t let hardly anyone out of the country for anything. And the World’s Fair showed me what he was afraid of: a whole new world of excitement and opportunity, but kind of scary, so much so that part of me wanted to get back to Ro— to Cluj, where I could be safe and familiar. But then one night in my quarters I happened to be watching an episode of
The Lucy Show
guest-starring Edie Adams. Well, what that girl could do — sing, dance, be funny and sexy at the same time, and she was all blonde and saucy and had on a short skirt. Lionel, I tell you, nobody in Roma— nobody back home could even
imagine
anything like Edie Adams. She just all of a sudden became the whole country of America for me, singing those great songs and cracking jokes and showing a little leg and having a good time, all glamorous and young and happy. I knew I couldn’t go back, ever, not to that old gray world I came from.” Suddenly his face brightened; he held up a finger and scooted over to the other side of the room, where he opened a cabinet set in the wall. Taped to the inside of its door was a large, yellowed photo of a sultry blonde in a slinky evening gown and pearls. Incongruously, she clutched a big stogie between her bright, white teeth.

“From one of her Muriel Cigar promotions,” he said. “I stole it from a drug store. You’re probably too young to remember the commercial.
‘Hey, big spender,’
” he sang, trying to lighten his voice into the feminine range,
“‘spennnnd a little dime with me.’”

“That’s Edie Adams?” Lionel asked, nodding at the photo while discreetly shoving his whisky farther away from him.

“The one and only,” John nodded, an almost youthful leer on his face. “I defected for Edie Adams. And I’ve never had a regret, let me tell you. It was my dream to meet her,” he said, shutting the cabinet and returning to the bar. He hopped up on the stool Emil had vacated. “And eventually I did, I
did,
Lionel, I waited outside a nightclub in Manhattan one night to see her. And when she came out I talked to her and she gave me a big kiss right on my foreh—”

“Is he talking about Edie Adams again?” said Nancy Jones as she alighted at the bottom of the steps. She came to the bar and collected the soiled glasses, including Lionel’s far-from-finished one and Emil’s still ice-cold beer. Lionel sighed in relief.

“He
is,
Aunt Nancy,” Emil called from the head. “Make him stop!” The sound of a flushing toilet drowned out one final injunction.

Nancy started for the stairs again — a little precariously given the altitude of her heels — and as she negotiated the first step she said, “Honestly, honey, no one these days even knows who Edie Adams is
.
”

He turned scarlet, stuck his neck out like a snapping turtle, and said,
“Star of stage and screen!”

Emil emerged, tucking in his T-shirt; he rolled his eyes at Lionel, took the stool next to John’s, and proceeded to appear utterly perplexed by the disappearance of his Budweiser.

John shook his head. “No one forgets Marilyn Monroe. No one forgets Judy Garland. What’s wrong with people that they don’t know Edie Adams? I tell you, Lionel, it won’t last. I look at this girl, Madonna, and everyone keeps saying, she steals from Marilyn Monroe. Well, Marilyn Monroe was never a dancer like this Madonna is! Marilyn Monroe didn’t have a stage act like this Madonna does! It’s obvious to me she steals everything direct from Edie Adams, and someday she’s going to admit it. She
has
to. And
then
won’t there be a change of tune in this house!”

Nancy descended the stairs again in time to hear this. She gave Lionel a compassionate look and said, “One of his friends from the old country is exactly the same way about Mitzi Gaynor. They only ever had one discussion about it. That was six years ago. They haven’t spoken since.”

John actually stamped his foot. “
Darn
it, Nancy! I told you
never
to go comparing Edie Adams to Mitzi Gaynor!”