Closet Case (Robert Rodi Essentials) (20 page)

Summer was on the wane, and Lionel was on the prowl.

It had taken some time for him to descend to this. Terrible anxieties had gripped him for weeks after the Trippy Awards, anxieties that had shuttered up his penis like a telescope. After Tracy had spread what must have been her scorching account of his rejection of her, he was certain that the secretaries were just a thought shy of figuring him out, and if they did figure him out, there’d be no keeping it from his bosses. And then Lionel’s days as the All-Pro Power Tools wonder boy would be over.

Fortunately, Donna was the only member of the staff who could supply the vital information the women needed to fill out their theories of Lionel’s depravity, and as yet there were no exchanges of confidence between the clerical staff and the intimidating dyke art director. (God forbid! Lionel shuddered to imagine the damage that would result from just a five-minute chat between Donna and Chelsea Motormouth.) And before any such exchange could be initiated, two things occurred which rescued Lionel from discovery.

The first was that Guy, devastated by Tracy’s abandonment of him, came crawling back to her, begging forgiveness and brandishing a diamond ring. Tracy, newly affianced, would certainly be less inclined to spend her time heaping infamy on a single bad date. And the secretaries, cooing over her ring like pigeons over their reflections, began to consider Lionel’s cruel treatment of her as ancient history, an anomaly in the happy narrative of her life.

And if, by chance, there existed any lingering curiosity about the motive behind that cruelty, it was drowned forever by the second event: the revelation, just days after the Trippy Awards, that Carlton Wenck had been having a torrid office romance with Gloria Gimbek, who also happened to have a husband at home. (As she hadn’t yet been married quite a year, it had been the habit of the clerical staff to consider her still a newlywed, which made the scandal all the greater.)

This electrifying news came to the office’s attention one unforgettable day when Gloria’s husband called and asked for Carlton. Alice the receptionist, already suspicious at this, put him through, but it was Carlton’s intern, Tim, who picked up the phone, Carlton himself being in a client meeting.

Gloria’s husband, not knowing that the man on the other end of the line was not the one who was cuckolding him, launched into a series of threats, culminating in the promise to “rearrange your face with a razor if you ever fucking touch my wife again.” Tim, thoroughly confused and even more thoroughly upset, rushed out to the secretarial pool to tell them that a lunatic was after him and to seek their advice and protection. The fragment of time it took Chelsea Motormouth to determine what had actually happened cannot be measured by any instrument manufactured by man. The time it took her to
relate
her conclusion was something else again; suffice it to say that within an hour (or two), the entire office, from the top of the hierarchy on down, knew all about Carlton and Gloria’s affair.

When he heard the news, Lionel had three initial reactions. The first was relief that his own bad behavior would no longer be subject to dangerous speculation. An office scandal of immediate presence and far greater magnitude now cast his peccadillo into deepest shadow. His second reaction was to realize why Carlton had not, as he’d said he would, cornered him for details about Tracy’s sexual habits the day after the Trippys; by that time, he was no doubt distracted by the unraveling of his own sexual adventurism. And his third reaction was simply joy that Carlton had undone himself in this way. Carrying on in secret with another member of the staff would merit heavy punishment, he was sure; and in the glare of Carlton’s disgrace, Lionel would look more golden than ever.

Unfortunately, this proved not to be the case. While officially taking a stern view of the affair and of the wild disruption its discovery had caused in the daily workings of the office, Julius Deming was clearly tickled by Carlton’s randy irresponsibility and couldn’t seem to refer to it without a sly grin creeping onto his face. The same was true of the other male members of the staff, who could be heard whispering things like “You old
dog
” to Carlton whenever they thought no women were listening.

Gloria Gimbek was fired.

The scandal was so overwhelming that it drew almost the entire office into something resembling a feeding frenzy. Every day, up and down the corridors, coworkers exchanged bits of minutiae about the affair and its fallout with the speed of electrical impulses traveling along brain synapses. Lionel found himself completely forgiven by the secretaries, if only because he would agree to stand still and listen to their passionate recitals of the latest Carlton-and-Gloria gossip. At the height of the excitement, even Tracy was so overcome by a piece of news involving Gloria’s husband and a discharge of firearms that she stopped by Lionel’s office and personally delivered it to him with crazed, excited eyes. But once the scandal had died down, she made no further attempt to renew his friendship.

Feeling utterly safe now — as if the black smudge on his reputation had been eradicated by a searing blast of radiation — Lionel began to succumb the urge toward carnality again. It was an urge he had successfully quelled during the period when he feared himself under suspicion, but he had now reached the point at which sex with men was just about all he could think about.

Yet for all the time he spent standing against the walls of ever seedier bars along the Halsted Street strip, working up the courage to make smoldering eye contact with other men along other walls wanting equally strongly from him what he wanted from them, he found himself unable to follow through. In his early twenties, he’d managed this mating ritual without undue anxiety, but that was a long time ago. In the interim, he’d suffered a failed love affair, flung himself into a career, and virtually sublimated not only his sex drive but his social skills — until they worked about as well for him as a bicycle he’d left to rust in a garage.

And each failure of nerve only made him hornier and crazier, so that each time he went out, much more seemed at stake in every wanton exchange of glances. The enormity of it inevitably frightened him into a retreat. And so the cycle continued, until he found himself wound up like a spring, suffering agonies of desire over the most improbable objects.

Even Bob Smartt started to look good to him, which was possibly the most alarming symptom of all. But it wasn’t just Lionel’s long-neglected desires that were to blame; Bob had in fact returned from his “manly-man’s” retreat looking — well, just a little bit
wild
. The spear that he had insisted on carrying everywhere when he first returned was, as Yolanda predicted, jettisoned after only a few days (after an unfortunate incident in a rather snug taxicab on a particularly bumpy road; Yolanda was still angry about her dress, and the driver needed eleven stitches behind his ear). And without the spear providing a focus for his ridicule, Lionel had taken his first hard look at the new Bob Smartt over drinks at Yolanda’s one night, and thought,
Oh my God —
hot
.

Bob was still Bob, of course — on this occasion, reclining on one of Yolanda’s beanbag chairs attired in a muslin chemise, Beltrami trousers, and a pair of buff-colored Italian shoes that he boasted had cost just a tad less than his rent — but there was something subtly different about him. His face, for one thing, didn’t look quite so pinched. And his hair had been breezily blown dry, then left to fend for itself — no gel, no mousse, no dizzying feats of gymnastic combing. A few strands fell into his face, and he was entirely content to let them stay there, as if he didn’t even
care
. What’s more, he actually
rolled up the sleeves
of the muslin chemise, revealing an attractive spiral of strawberry blond hairs encircling his forearms and collecting at his wrists. They might’ve been a lumberjack’s arms. Amazingly, Lionel realized he had never seen Bob’s naked limbs before.

He looked leaner beneath his clothes as well, wirier. His garments had used to drape him like a drop-cloth over a Thanksgiving turkey, but he’d lost his milk-fed, pampered roundness during the retreat and hadn’t yet got it back. Now his clothes draped him provocatively, like silk over marble.

His attitude, too, was altered, if just barely. He still tended to chirp and bray, but the florid adjectives and overwrought adverbs had fallen out of his speech, as completely as if they’d been surgically removed. After a recent restaurant jaunt, he’d finished with a tiramisu that he had not gone on to describe, as the old Bob would have, as “too
strikingly
decadent for words; it gives new meaning to the word
evil
.” Instead, he’d simply rolled his eyes suggestively and growled,
“More.”
Lionel had felt his legs twitch.

Faced with the full horror of being attracted to Bob Smartt, he scaled back his friendship with Yolanda in favor of a renewed focus on his job. But there as well he found himself beleaguered by his libido. Even Carlton Wenck, for God’s sake, was looking good to him these days, and as if that weren’t enough, there was the devastating news Carlton delivered one night, in his infuriating, off-handed manner.

He and Lionel were sharing an elevator at the end of the day, descending to the building’s lobby, when Carlton, still audaciously unrepentant of his role in Gloria’s just-announced termination, turned and said, “Guess I’m free now.”

Lionel couldn’t believe his insensitivity. He straightened his back and, looking straight ahead, icily said, “I guess you are.”

“No more eyes watching every move I make.”

Lionel felt like puking. “I suppose not.” He stared hard at the row of numbers, following the illumination of each descending button: 21, 20, 19 …

“Still, good enough kid, I guess,” Carlton continued, leaning back against the far wall of the elevator and yawning.

Good enough
kid
? ... This was unbelievable. Lionel took a step away from him. Carlton had ruined poor Gloria’s life, and now he had the gall to dismiss her in such insulting terms?

“Kind of made me a little uneasy, though,” Carlton said out of the corner of his mouth, as though this were a dirty secret. “Wanted to get in my pants, if you ask me.” He snickered.

Lionel turned and looked at him with narrowed eyes. “Are you actually trying to make me believe she
didn’t
?”

Carlton knitted his brow.
“She?”
he said. “Whoa. Crossed signals, buddy. Who you talkin’ about?”

“Who are
you
talking about?” Lionel responded, suddenly wary. If Carlton
hadn’t
been referring to Gloria,
he
sure as hell wasn’t going to bring up her name.

Carlton grimaced.
“Tim,”
he said. “Christ’s sake, who else?” He crossed his arms and leaned against the cabin wall. “This was the last day of his internship; heads back to school tomorrow.” He looked at Lionel’s flabbergasted face and said, “Well, you
knew
he was a fruit, right?”

“I — I —”

Carlton laughed. “Lionel, buddy, you
gotta
get out of your office more. Whole
agency
was hip to the kid being a pillow biter. Jesus, gave me the
creeps
the way he’d bend over my shoulder, pretending it was ‘cause he wanted to look at my budgets.” He shuddered. “Anyway. Gone now. And what the hell, good luck to him.”

The elevator doors slid open. Carlton winked at Lionel, strode out into the lobby, and headed for the exit.

Lionel somehow found the presence of mind to follow before the doors shut on him again. But he was deeply and profoundly shaken; he felt like a starving man who’d been invited to a twelve-course feast but hadn’t read the invitation till it was all over.

On his drive home, he gripped the steering wheel hard, as if trying to strangle it. It would certainly have felt good to strangle
something
. Intellectually, he realized that even if he’d known Tim was gay, he wouldn’t have dared approach him. Having a sexual relationship with someone in the office … well, if it had been a scandal for Carlton with a woman, imagine how much worse for Lionel with a man! No, he’d never have risked it.

And yet … the idea of that gorgeous blond youth sauntering down the corridors, of all the eye contact Lionel had resisted all these weeks, all the
observing
he could’ve done — it was enough to push him to the brink of madness.

While ascending the stairs to his apartment, he found himself, for some reason, thinking of Emil, and he wondered what had triggered it. For all Emil’s charms, he was older, heavier, and less smolderingly sexual than the lithe young intern who had disturbed Lionel’s thoughts for the past hour. Before he could wonder at it further, he rounded a landing and heard music, an energetic, driving salsa number, and the farther he climbed the more certain he was that it issued from Yolanda’s … a place where nothing of greater urgency than a Chopin etude had ever wafted.

He stopped before her apartment and listened as the thunderous bass rattled the door on its hinges. He contemplated knocking, on the pretext of a neighborly visit, but hesitated, aware he’d been neglecting her in his quest to avoid Bob, and aware also that Yolanda must know this. But hell, she wasn’t one to nurse a grudge. He knocked.

No answer. The music was clearly
very
loud in there.

He knocked again — pounded, really.

A few moments later Yolanda flung open the door and stood before him, her hair teased into its tentacled state, her trim little body wrapped in a cherry cocktail dress so tight he could almost count her ribs through it.

“I’M SORRY,” she shouted, “IS IT DISTURBING YOU? I WILL TURN IT DOWN.”

“NO, NO,” he said. “JUST GETTING HOME. I THOUGHT MAYBE YOU WERE HAVING A PARTY.”

She turned and, leaving the door open, tak-tak-takked over to her stereo and gave the volume knob a swift turn. The level of the music dropped like a shoe. “No party,” she said, “just high spirits.”