Closet Case (Robert Rodi Essentials) (8 page)

“Illinois Center?” Lionel blurted. “Thanks, I’ll look for her there.” And he dashed down the hall, past Alice at the reception desk, and into a fortuitously waiting elevator. Much as he wanted to hear what Chelsea had to say about Donna’s scandalous activity, he knew he could be witnessing it first-hand in the time it took her to spit it out.

The Illinois Center Plaza was filled with office workers seated on benches and the rims of cement planters, eating hamburgers and fries out of bags on their laps, their heads together, talking with great animation about whatever it was such people talked about. Lionel couldn’t imagine falling into such easy intimacy with anyone he worked with. Some of the people he saw here — women, especially, in pressed woolen suits, high-collared blouses, and Reeboks — were speaking in such hushed, frantic tones (you could hear one of them now, saying, “You’re
kidding
!”) that he was sure they could only be gossiping, more likely than not about their coworkers. Lionel had noticed that about office drones: they seemed to have an insatiable curiosity about the most insignificant minutiae of each other’s private lives. It was one of the things that most terrified him about them.

They looked today, however, a rather benign bunch, probably because of that beatifying sunlight, which was still at full force, beaming down on their heads and shoulders and giving each of them a kind of incandescent aura — a halo, if you will. He moved among them, his eyes peeled for Donna, who shouldn’t, all things considered, be very difficult to pick out in this crowd; there probably weren’t many other women here wearing tank-tops that read PHOREVER PHRANC.

He became aware of some kind of activity at the far north end of the plaza, barely visible behind a huge, typically hideous installation of scrap metal posing as “public art” (and succeeding as neither, as far as he was concerned). He moved around the monstrosity and found that the source of the movement he’d detected through the gaps in the metal was Donna and four other women, two of them fairly respectably dressed. They’d occupied a small clearing of the plaza and were now engaged in a series of balletic movements, each woman perfectly in sync with all the others. First they extended their left arms to the side with great precision and elegance, then fanned them almost two-hundred and forty degrees, rotating at their hips as they did so; then they lifted their right legs, stepping forward carefully, bringing their torsos back into alignment with their pelvises as they straightened their knees.

It was mesmerizing to watch, partially because of the fluidity of their movements, partially because of the glacial slowness of them, and partially because of their eerie synchronization. As Lionel took it all in, he noticed a number of other people doing the same, staring at them with a kind of bemused detachment — he imagined they were looking in vain for something to make fun of — before moving on and resuming their conversations.

He hesitated to interrupt this surreal performance by speaking to Donna, and wondered if he should just slip away and catch her some other time. But before he could make up his mind, she stretched her right arm in his direction, then turned her head to follow it, and in the process caught his eye — caught it and held it. Lionel grinned nervously and gave her a little wave, but no flicker of recognition crossed her face. Then she withdrew her gaze — and her arm — and faced the opposite way again.

He was quite aware that dozens of lunchers had seen him attempt to communicate with one of these bizarre women, only to be rebuffed. It made him angry; he hated looking foolish, and the only thing that would make it worse would be slinking away in shame. He drew a deep breath, clenched his fists, and entered the little clearing the women had marked out.

He tapped Donna on the shoulder; she jumped at his touch, and when she saw who had interrupted her, her eyes flashed with irritation. “Lionel,” she said; “what is it?”

He winced at her abruptness but refused to give up. “I need to talk to you.”

“I’m exercising right now,” she replied flatly. She turned away from him and tried to catch up to where the other women had got to.

“What kind of exercise do you call this?” he asked, scooting around her to stay in her line of sight. But despite his efforts, she watched her friends, not his face. It was going to be difficult, talking to a lip-reader who wouldn’t look at his lips. He tapped her on the shoulder again and repeated, “What kind of exercise do you call this?”

She shook her head, astonished by his gall.
“T’ai chi,”
she said. “It’s Chinese.”

Well, that figures, thought Lionel; it’d have to have some kind of socialist connection for Donna to espouse it. She was poised to continue now, but was watching him to make sure he’d finished with her and was going to go away.

The wind tossed his hair into his eyes, and he took a moment to brush I back over his head. Donna was waiting. It was now or never. She’d turn away in a second. Either bring it up now or just learn to live with the consequences.

“I want to talk to you about that night at The Hague,” he said.

She heaved a sigh and dropped her arms, and her entire body slumped a little. All around her, the other women continued their course of movement. “What about it, Lionel? You want to apologize for being so rude to me? Fine, I understand. It was a shock for you. No big deal.”

“No, no,” he said. “I want you to know — well,
why
I was there. I think you may have gotten the wrong impression.”

She squinted at him and cocked her head. “What do you care what ‘impression’ I got?”

“Well,” he said, his voice colored by a tremor of nervous laughter that he was glad she couldn’t hear, “I wouldn’t want you to think I was
gay
or anything.” There. It was out. His heart pounded. “Not that there’s anything
wrong
with being gay. I mean, you — you’re — you know — you’re
fine
.” He was beginning to babble. He commanded himself to get a grip. “I just —
you
know. I want to set it straight. The record, I mean. I want to set the record straight. You should excuse the expression.” He bleated a truly pathetic little laugh. He was
really
messing this up.

She stared at his lips with a look of what he thought was increasing puzzlement. “Lionel, are you saying you’re
not
gay?” She said it much louder than he would’ve liked.

“No,” he said. “I mean, yes.” He shook his head. “
No
, I’m not gay,
yes
, that’s what I’m saying.”

“But I saw you
kiss
a guy.”

Color seeped from his face like sand from an hourglass. He
knew
she’d seen that, he just knew it. Fortunately, as a result he had his defense ready: “I didn’t kiss
him
, Donna, he kissed
me
. What was I supposed to do, recoil from him? He’s an old friend. My hairdresser, actually. He was having some personal issues and wanted to talk about them. I met him at The Hague because he’s comfortable there. I was just being a friend.” His palms were perspiring now.

The four women behind Donna stretched their arms over their heads, flexing their triceps as they reached skyward. Donna said, “You were watching a stripper with your mouth open, Lionel. I saw you staring at his enormous schlong like my dog Artemis stares at a hambone.”

He flinched. He didn’t mind her being either crude or loud — but
both
? He’d better end this quickly. “I was stupefied, that’s all. I’d never seen anything like that before and I couldn’t believe my eyes.” He paused for a quick breath, then barreled on. “That’s why I got so embarrassed when I saw you. I
knew
what you’d think.” A little bead of sweat slid down his nose like a skier off a slope, and landed on his tie with a splat. He felt like was being grilled by a CIA operative under a four-thousand-watt heat lamp.

Donna turned for a moment and looked towards her friends, who were now likewise darting increasingly curious glances at her, wondering what had taken her out of the circuit and for how long. Lionel knew he was being unforgivably disruptive, but couldn’t help it; he was in waist-deep, now.

Donna looked him square in the eye. “So what if that’s what I’d think, Lionel? I still don’t see why you give a shit.”

“Because I’m beginning a new relationship — with Tracy,” he forced himself to say. He’d straighten out
that
end of the problem later, but right now he needed to use it to his benefit. “I don’t want any weird rumors screwing that up.”

She shook her head gently, almost imperceptibly, and puffed a little exasperated jet of air at him. “Fine. You’re not gay. Whatever you say.” She turned back to her friends, nodding as if to reassure them that everything was okay, then stuck her right foot into the air and twisted it, pivoting on her hip away from him. He had been dismissed.

He was profoundly disturbed by the outcome of the confrontation. Donna had said, “You’re not gay,” but with the aspect of someone merely humoring him, who couldn’t be bothered to argue the point. Well, there was nothing he could do about it now. At least he felt reasonably certain she wouldn’t bring it up to anyone else. She’d shown a sliver of contempt for him, but that contempt would probably keep her from dishing him; no doubt she considered him beneath her notice.

He backed away, trying hard not to look at anyone who’d been seated nearby, and who might have heard Donna’s blaring accusations. But this entailed focusing his gaze principally on his shoes instead of at where he was going, and within a few yards of the
t’ai chi
circle he crashed into someone.

He was preparing his apology even as he looked up to meet his victim’s face. The apology died on his lips. “Tracy!” he said. “Jesus! You startled me.”

“You should watch where you’re going,” she said with a Mae West inflection, as though it were a double entendre, though Lionel couldn’t imagine how it could be. “I was just coming over to say hi, not to slam-dance with you.”

He stole a glance over his shoulder and saw that Donna was now facing him, one arm extended his way as though she were a Parisian revolutionary preparing to denounce him to the crowd. So he turned back to Tracy, slipped his arm around her waist, and led her away.

She looked surprised by this unprecedented and proprietary gesture, but he could see that she was also pleased and flattered. As they strolled away, he fought the urge to take one last gander at Donna, to make sure she was seeing this; he didn’t need to — there was no way she could have missed it.

Mission accomplished,
he thought. But as he looked at Tracy, who wore one of her most dazzling smiles and whose eyes had turned into little constellations of stars, he realized that this victory might be a case of out of the frying pan, into the blast furnace.

He cleared his throat and tried to steer them into shallower waters. “I was just watching Donna do this Chinese exercise thing. Pretty comical stuff.”

“You think so?” she said, not a hint of reproach in her voice. “I think it looks kind of beautiful. And it’s impressive she does it so well. A lot of deaf people, you know, have trouble with balance, because their inner ear’s all screwed up. That’s probably why she took it up; to learn to compensate. It’s a real achievement that she does it so well.”

He lowered his head; as long as he’d known Tracy, she’d never mocked anyone. In fact, she’d always gone the other route, finding something to admire instead. It made him feel a little uneasy when she showed him up like that, especially since he knew it was never her intention to do anything of the kind.

“How was your morning?” he asked. They passed a middle-aged woman laden with shopping bags from various Magnificent Mile shops; the bags banged into Lionel’s hip and thigh, and gave him an excuse to take his hand away from Tracy’s back, drop behind a bit, then rejoin her when the woman had passed, but with a significant gap between them now.

“Okay, I guess,” she answered, and he noticed for the first time that her nose was pink, as if she’d been crying. “I just had some stuff to move out of Guy’s place.” She was taking it for granted that he’d know what had happened to her the night before.

“Well, what’s done is done,” he said with ludicrous pomposity, as though he’d just imparted to her the wisdom of the ages. “Lots of life still ahead, you know.”

“Oh, I know,” she said, and she gave him a sly smile.

He swallowed hard, realizing he’d started a mechanism that was now running without him. The fiction of his long simmering, now stewing romance with Tracy had been taken out of his hands by an entire society of heterosexual handlers — his family, his coworkers, even his bosses.

Maybe it was time for him to remove himself from intrusive outside influences, to re-take control and clear the air. Maybe it was time for him simply to say, Tracy, I know we like each other, and I know we have a good time together, but let’s just take it slow, okay? And by slow he would mean, increasingly slow, a grinding slowness that would finally, down the road, end in a halt; but she wouldn’t know that.

If he said this to her now, it might hurt her a little; but how much less so than later, after the Trippy Awards banquet, after the continued buildup of romantic expectations and exhortations that were being thrust on them almost hourly. It would practically be a
kindness
to speak now, to spare her that.

And so he turned and looked into her eyes, right there at a stoplight on Michigan Avenue, just across the street from the building in which they both worked, directly across the intersection from the parade of noisy Transylvanian demonstrators, smack up against a trash can, and mere steps away from a loudly muttering bum wearing a sandwich board filled with scrawled handwriting purporting to tell how THE POPE RUNS ABC, NBC, CBS AND CNN.

“Tracy,” he said, and his voice sounded like a death rattle.

She looked up at him (which, considering that she was a half-inch taller than he, was something of an achievement), and said, “Yes, Lionel?”

The traffic light changed from DON’T WALK to WALK and a stream of pedestrians filled the street and headed for the other side, but neither of them moved. “Tracy, I know we like each other,” he said — and here his voice actually cracked, so that he had to drop it half an octave before continuing — “and I know we have a good time togeth—” He stopped short.