Closet Case (Robert Rodi Essentials) (3 page)

Accordingly, he’d distanced himself from Donna, and had felt safe in doing so; after all, there was little enough chance of ever running into her on gay turf, since Lionel seldom ventured there; and even when he did, well, lesbians had their own stomping grounds from which they seldom strayed. But Lionel hadn’t considered The Hague.
Everybody
came to The Hague.

Donna was still waving at him, her eyes wide and excited. He managed a trembling half-smile, then mouthed the words
See you tomorrow
and bolted from the bar.

In the cool night air, away form the press of bodies and the smell of sweat and the stinging aura of cigarette smoke, he felt as if he’d just awakened from a bad dream.
I shouldn’t be so silly about this,
he scolded himself;
Donna isn’t going to say anything. It’s ridiculous to worry about her tattling on me, like some snotty second-grader.

Even so, as he walked to his car, he couldn’t help dreaming up increasingly outlandish attempts to
ensure
her silence. He could, for instance, try to get her fired; he could steal art supplies from the storeroom, then say he’d seen her take them. He could even hide them in her office, to be discovered by Elsa, the office manager (who was certainly the type to go and look). But didn’t all art directors steal supplies all the time?

Then he considered that he might plant cocaine in her desk. But hell, half of the management team would just offer to buy it from her.

Or, he could spread a rumor that she was mentally unstable and had been fired from her last job for irrational behavior; but that came pretty close to describing the work history of about half the creatives in the advertising business.

By the time he caught himself considering ways he might slip cyanide into her morning Diet Coke, he decided he’d better stop this deranged panicking and just face the problem like a man. If he couldn’t bring himself to trust Donna, he’d just have to talk to her, tell her flat out that he’d appreciate her keeping mum about his unorthodox sexuality. It was his private business, after all. Wasn’t it?

Well,
wasn’t
it?

Lionel pulled up in front of the Victorian six-flat he called home. It was only nine-thirty but it felt like four in the morning. As he let himself in the front door and began his lonely trek up the stairs, he tried not to think about Tracy anymore, and certainly not about Donna. All he wanted was to settle into bed, dial a 1-900 number, and ask if they had any hot priests he could talk to. Would they think he was kinky? Might they laugh at him? Well, he’d risk it. As disturbed as he was about having been caught at The Hague by Donna, he didn’t actually regret having been there, not with Father Todd still gyrating seductively in his head.

“Forgive me, Father, for I haven’t sinned,” he muttered to himself as he rounded the second-floor landing and continued the ascent to his apartment. “At least, not nearly enough for someone my age.”

He sighed mournfully as he put his key in the lock. To his surprise, the door swung open without his having raised the latch. He furrowed his brow, took a step inside, and set his briefcase on the floor of the hallway. The lights in the apartment were already lit. “Hello?” he called out, shutting the door behind him.

“Oh, Lionel, hello,” came a voice from the far end of the railroad apartment. Then Yolanda Reynoso darted out of the kitchen, dressed to kill. “I am sorry for being here so late,” she said breathily, her stiletto heels clacking against the hardwood floors as she scurried down the hall to greet him. “I heard Spencer just screaming and screaming, so I came up to see if something was the matter with him.” Spencer was Lionel’s pet cockatoo; since Yolanda lived in the apartment directly below his, she couldn’t help hearing the bird’s blood-curdling shrieks.

Lionel undid his Dan Quayle tie and let it hang like a stole around his neck. “You don’t have to apologize,” he said. “I appreciate you coming up to look after him.” Yolanda worked most nights as a cashier in a science-fiction bookstore, so Lionel had given her a set of keys to his apartment and invited her to come up during the day and visit his bird. “I mean, if it weren’t for you, he’d get no companionship at all.”

She smiled brilliantly, then leaned over, kissed him on the cheek, and headed back to the kitchen. Lionel followed her, appreciating — in a purely aesthetic way — the gorgeous roundness of what Toné would call her
derriére,
which tonight was being hugged by an exquisitely clingy rose cocktail dress. She had also donned dangly-jangly earrings and teased her hair into the kind of wild, Medusa-tendril state that drove straight men into a condition of sexual frenzy.
I wish someone from the office could’ve been here,
he thought,
to see me greeted with a kiss by a woman who looks like this!

“You look sensational,” he said, doffing his jacket and slipping it over the back of one of the cane chairs in his sparsely furnished kitchen. “Going out?”

“Yes, I am having a late dinner with Bob.” She picked up Spencer from the floor, where she’d spread out Lionel’s pots and pans for the bird to play with (he was entranced by his reflection and loved the sound he made when he banged his beak against the lids). “I am not used to eating so late; I may die of hunger before he gets here.” She ran her hand over the cockatoo’s back; the bird responded by making his pigeon-toed way up her arm and perching on her shoulder, where he snuggled against her ear and clucked contentedly. “What a good boy,” she cooed at him. Then she turned to Lionel and said, “I think a firecracker must have gone off in the alley and frightened him, but he is feeling better now.”

“I should just give him to you,” he said, kicking off his loafers and peeling off his socks. “He’s crazy about you, and he can’t stand me.” He leaned against a wall and cracked one of his big toes with a little grunt of pleasure.

“Nonsense! He loves you in a different way, that is all.” He opened her mouth and the bird stuck his tongue out, touching hers.

“Well, you better hand him over or he’s going to crap on your dress.” He padded over to her, arm outstretched, but as soon as he was within reach Spencer raised his crest in alarm, extended his wings, and hissed at him.

“Oh! Oh! Spencer!” cried Yolanda, holding his razor-sharp beak shut with her thumb and forefinger.
(Jesus!
thought Lionel.
How does she
do
that?)
“Bad boy! That is your daddy!” She let go of his beak and shook her finger at him heedlessly, as though possessing nine others made this one expendable, then turned to face Lionel, an embarrassed grin on her face. “He is still a little scared, I think. I will put him in his cage, okay?”

“Okay,” said Lionel with a sigh. He hurled one last glowering look at Spencer, then turned his attention to his mail. He rifled through the envelopes — bill, bill, sweepstakes entry, bill — then tossed them onto his butcher-block table. He turned back in time to see that once again Yolanda’s
derriére
was protruding in his direction, as she balanced precariously on the footstool she needed to reach Spencer’s cage (she was only five-feet-five). Lionel thought,
If only I could feel something for that sight, something beyond a kind of abstract delight in the symmetry of it.

Yolanda made her wobbly backward descent from the stool, while Spencer screamed in protest at being locked up again. She pitched a little to the left when she reached the floor — balancing in those heels had to be like walking on stilts — then righted herself and, smiling at Lionel, adjusted one of her earrings. “Spencer likes to try to pull the backs off these while he is on my shoulder,” she explained. “He is a very talented cockatoo.”

Oblivious to the compliment, the bird kept screaming, and Lionel said, “Let’s go to the front room. I can’t stand this caterwauling.” He started down the long corridor, Yolanda following him. “Get you a drink?” he offered.

“Oh, no, thank you. Bob will be here at any moment.” At the darkest stretch of the hallway, a few feet beyond the point where Lionel’s track lighting ended, she suddenly stopped and said, “Oh, blessed mother. Now I have done it.”

Lionel turned. “What?”

“The backing: I have dropped the backing. Oh, Lionel, the earring will not stay on without it.” She fell to all fours and began running her hand across the floor. “I heard it land somewhere around here — a little
ping.
Help me find it, I do not want to keep Bob waiting!”

“Jesus, calm down,” he said, getting on his hands and knees and joining her in the search. He skimmed his fingers across the barely illuminated floorboards. “I’ll never understand this big terror thing you have when it comes to Little Lord Fauntleroy.”

“Not now,
please,
Lionel. Can you not make it any brighter in here?”

“Hold on.” He got up and trotted into the bedroom, which was just a few step away, and retrieved a flashlight from his nightstand drawer. He switched it on to make sure it was working, then brought it back to the hallway.

“Here,” he said, passing it to Yolanda.

She snatched it from him — clearly too anxious to be polite — and dragged its syrupy yellow beam across the floor, inch by inch. “You do not understand Bob,” she said as she scoured the hallway. “His scorn can be very wounding. He tries to teach me so much, but I am a slow learner and have far to go. I am so grateful for his patience, Lionel.”

“His
patience? What about
yours?”
He crouched down beside her again and resumed the search. “I’ve watched you sit there, not saying a word, while he spends forty minutes telling you about a pair of shoes he almost bought.”

She shook her head, and a snaky tentacle of hair fell into her face; she stuck out her lower lip and blew it away. She was, he recognized without feeling it, intoxicatingly sexual. “Lionel, please. Do not talk so about Bob. It makes me feel disloyal even to listen.”

“Sorry, Yolanda. Really I am.” And he was. Once, while totally plowed, sitting with her between the cars in a restaurant parking lot during a tedious Mardi Gras celebration they’d slipped away from, he’d been foolish enough to pour out his disdain for Bob in one vehement gush, knowing even as he did so that it was the kind of contempt only a desperately closeted gay man can have for a brazenly effeminate straight one. “For God’s sake, Yolanda,” he’d said, “how can you waste your time on that trivial, shallow, self-obsessed piece of work? Can’t you see he’s just
using
you? I mean, the guy just got divorced from a
debutante,
for Christ’s sake — he’s
slumming.
He probably read in
Details
or
Interview
that it’s hip to have an ethnic girlfriend. You’re the equivalent to a holiday in Rio for him. I’m warning you, when push comes to shove, he’s not going to be able to forgive you for not being a strawberry-blond trust-fund goddess named Phoebe. All this guy wants out of a relationship is photo ops. When those run out, he’ll be gone.”

Yolanda had stared at him, her eyes brimming with tears and her face the exact shade of crimson it would’ve been had he just hauled off and slapped her. Had she then told him that he was full of sour grapes, that he was jealous because Bob Smartt had the confidence to do all the things Lionel Frank was afraid to, like get adventurous haircuts and wear flouncy clothes from Ultimo and gush fulsomely over Mabel Mercer records — he’d have had to admit defeat. But she wasn’t sober enough to see that; she knew only that she had to choose between her lover and her friend, and accordingly fled the parking lot in tears, leaving Lionel with a forty-dollar bar tab that he couldn’t move his legs to go and pay. (He eventually fell asleep with his face pressed against the tire of a Chevy Nova, whose owner was considerate enough not to awaken him before driving the car away. Lionel told his co-workers that the rubbery smudge across his forehead had been left there by scuba gear; no one bothered to ask where he’d gone diving in Chicago in February.) Days later, he forced himself to apologize, and had made a point of being kind to Yolanda ever since. Everything about her — her barrio accent, the curious formality of her speech, the little-girl-in-a-woman’s-body vulnerability she exuded so unconsciously — invited his kindness, made it almost imperative.

She let the flashlight lie limp in her hand for a moment and turned to meet his eyes. “Things would perhaps be different if you were a different kind of man, Lionel,” she said in a soft voice. “But you are not, so I am with Bob.”

He smiled. She had her ways of being kind to him, as well. He certainly didn’t think she
meant
what she’d just said. She’d never shown any romantic interest in him before. But then, she’d been long settled in her apartment by the time he moved in upstairs, so from Day One she would’ve been able to hear, through her ceiling, the all-out, all-male goings-on in his bedroom. If she ever had any illusions about him, they couldn’t have been of more than a few days’ duration.

That all seemed so long ago now, before his career in advertising took off, forcing him — or so he saw it — to abandon his risky love life for the liability it was. Yolanda had reproached for that once, upsetting him badly; she, too, apologized later. Ever since, as long as he forbore to deride her relationship, she forbore to scold him for his cowardice.

Their moment of tenderness passed, and she started a new sweep with the flashlight. But half a minute later they heard the doorbell to her apartment buzz loudly. “Oh, Lionel,” she cried, “that will be Bob! Will you help me? Go and let him in, and tell him I will be there shortly!”

Taking his cue from the urgency in her voice, he buzzed open the front door of the building, then dashed down to the landing outside her apartment and waited for Bob to make his light-footed way up to him.

He appeared, all six-feet-three of him, in a daringly cut double-breasted wheat suit and burgundy calfskin slippers. His tie was a simple ribbon of royal purple with a jet-black outline around its edges. The moment he rounded the landing and saw Lionel, he untucked the tie from his suitcoat and flapped it at him, a look of rapturous anticipation on his face. In his other hand, he carried a bouquet of pristine white tulips.

Lionel felt an explosion of hatred that nearly rattled his teeth from his gums.

Never one to waste time on pleasantries, Bob hopped up the remaining steps and got right down to business. “Isn’t this tie the
best?”
he said. He extended his hand so that the item in question stretched to its full length for Lionel to admire. “Cost a pretty penny, but have you ever seen anything like it? Really makes a
statement.
I just
had
to have it,
especially
for this suit.” His voice, which sounded helium-drenched at the best of times, was now so shrill with excitement that it made the short hairs on Lionel’s nape stand at attention.

I’m gay and he’s straight,
thought Lionel in amazement and frustration, as he always did when face to face with Bob. In his most sarcastic voice he said, “I’m fine, Bob, thanks for asking. And you?”

Bob looked up obliviously, his little black eyes revealing no depth of comprehension whatsoever. “Hmm?” he said brightly. Then, a glimmer of realization. “Hey, where’s Yolanda? Isn’t she ready yet?”

Nice of him to finally think of his girlfriend,
thought Lionel. “She’s up at my place. She was looking after my bird and she lost the back of one of her earrings on my floor. She’s trying to find it now.”

“Not the Paloma Picassos!” cried Bob, aghast.

He’s straight and I’m gay,
thought Lionel. “I don’t know. Big, dangly things?”

“Oh, no. I didn’t give her those.” He looked relieved, as if the earrings must then be of no consequence. He swept a silky blond forelocked from his face, weaving it with his fingers into the body of his rich, pampered head of hair.

Lionel glared at this unlikely Romeo. He wondered if Bob had ever been beaten up on his fifth-grade playground, as he had. He wondered whether Bob had ever had the word QUEER spray-painted on his high-school locker, as he had. He wondered if Bob had ever been denied jobs he was qualified for because he wasn’t able to reel off football scores in casual post-interview conversation, as he had. He wondered if Bob ever suffered for his effeminacy, or whether he was absolved from such suffering by having demonstrated his manhood not only beyond question but beyond anyone’s capacity to ignore — by marrying a third cousin of the Duchess of York, bringing her and her King’s Road wardrobe to America, and siring two gorgeous children (names: Denzil and Felicity) through her before she left him for a middle-aged Zionist poet who converted her to Judaism and took her and the children to live on a West Bank kibbutz.