Closet Case (Robert Rodi Essentials) (25 page)

Five minutes later they were back on the road to Wild Rose, with Yolanda in the passenger seat, unraveling the hem of her right pants leg as she filled in the blanks for him.

“I always felt flattered by Bob’s attention,” she said. “He seemed to care about how I looked and what I wore and what other people thought about me. But that also made me feel so dependent on him and so terribly afraid of his scorn. Still, I thought it was so wonderful the way he put me on a pedestal.”

“Department-store mannequins get put on pedestals too,” said Lionel, swiveling the overhead visor until it was actually grazing his temple. The sun was more unbearably red than ever. It hung just above the horizon, like a coin about to drop in a jukebox.

“I know, I know,” she said mournfully. “I did not understand how little Bob actually cared to know me until I first met Emil, on the landing outside my door … you were there, remember? At first I thought he was so inconsiderate, the way he spoke to me. It was only later that I realized he had spoken to me as an equal. That he may have said rude things, but he could not have said them except in response to things
I
said
first.
Lionel, it was such a shock to realize that a man had actually
listened
to me.”

He drove into the shade of a high hill, and peered over the top of his Vuarnets at the suddenly darkened road. “Yolanda, I think you must be some kind of pre-feminist throwback,” he said in amazement.

“Why?” She stopped toying with her frayed hem and looked at him. “Oh … because I am flattered by a man’s attention?” She crossed her arms and thought for a moment. “No, Lionel; I would be just as flattered if a woman listened to me. If
anybody
listened to me. So few people ever bother to pay any mind to what anyone else says these days.”

“
I
listen to you,” he protested.

She patted his thigh. “I know. And that is why I love you.”

They passed the hill and burst back into the realm of the merciless sun. The blazing disk had slipped partly past the horizon, but was still playing a blinding game of peek-a-boo with Lionel.

“What impressed me most about Emil was that he spoke so passionately about science fiction. Bob often made fun of me for reading it, and because he was so sophisticated and successful I let myself think that maybe he was right, maybe it was an embarrassing, juvenile habit, and I should be grateful that he could overlook it. But Emil — who is even more confident and self-assured than Bob — Emil is like me!” She paused. “S.F. is my inner life, Lionel. I try not to talk about it too much, because so few people understand, and so many are hostile.”

“I know
that
feeling,” he said with a sigh.

“But what Emil said, about S.F. being the literature of hope, about how it should serve as our culture’s self-fulfilling prophecy — that is what
I
have always felt, but not been able to put into words.” She hunched her shoulders and hugged herself, as though still back in the chilly shadow of the hill. “Lionel, Emil
stirs
me.”

He felt a peculiar catch in his throat, as though an angel and a devil were seated on either shoulder, playing a tug of war with his ears, one advising, Be happy for sweet Yolanda, the other, Hate the cow for stealing your man.

Ultimately the seraphic side won. He puckered his lips and said, “Well, fine. But if the two of you head for one of those silly conventions dressed as Darth Vader and Lieutenant Uhura, don’t ask
me
to take your picture.”

She punched his arm. “Lionel! I am baring my
soul
to you.”

“Which is the very least you can do, all things considered. So what happened next?” He spotted a police car lurking on the side of the road ahead, and coasted to a lower speed. He’d been edging up towards seventy.

She shrugged. “Emil came by a day or so later, pretending that he wanted to see you, but of course he must have known you were at work. And when I told him I would give you a message, he had no message to give. Do you remember me telling you this …? I suspected then that he had actually come to see me. He tried to talk to me some more about S.F. and anarchism and how they relate, but I was too upset at the time because I had just watched the Nathan Beatty tape.”

Lionel did indeed recall that afternoon. He must have been blind not to notice Yolanda’s revealing body language — coy, shielded — when she told him about Emil’s visit. He shook his head, and as he did so he glided past the squad car at exactly fifty-four miles an hour. He felt a little thrill of relief.

“Well,” she continued, “I was so upset that I called Emil later. He had left his number with me, in case you didn’t have it, he said, but I knew it was just that he wanted
me
to have it. I told myself that I was calling him because he was so insightful and he could help me figure out what I should feel about Nathan Beatty. But his aunt answered the phone and when I asked to speak to Emil, she said, ‘Are you that Spanish girl he cannot stop talking about?’ And she was just inviting me to dinner when Emil must have grabbed the phone from her, because suddenly it was him on the line, and all at once it was very awkward. So I started jabbering about Nathan Beatty and he jabbered back that Nathan Beatty is a primitivist and a nativist and so on, and in the background his aunt kept saying, ‘Invite her to dinner. Invite her to dinner.’ So he invited me to dinner.”

The sun had finally fully descended, in an epic, smoldering sulk. Suddenly the sky looked like it had been rubbed with wet charcoal. Lionel turned on his headlights. “So,” he said, “your first date was at Uncle John and Aunt Nancy’s house, with you and Emil taking sideways glances at each other while Uncle John told you all about Edie Adams and Aunt Nancy heaped your plate with moo shoo pork.”

“We had calzoni,” she said, rolling up her window against the suddenly cool evening air. “But otherwise, yes, exactly.”

He laughed. “Yolanda, you have to marry Emil now. That story’s just too goddamn cute to waste on a temporary affair. You can tell it at your fiftieth wedding anniversary.”

She curled her bare feet beneath her. “It may certainly come to that. I have seen him nearly every night since — up to exam time, of course. He calls me his
guivaer frumos
, which means ‘beautiful jewel.’” Suddenly she became self-conscious and placed a hand on Lionel’s arm. “I am so sorry I did not tell you all of this before. I was so afraid you would be hurt that I was seeing the man you loved.” She cocked her head. “I am very relieved you are taking it so well. But even so, I must say I am surprised.”

“Why?” he asked. The road ahead of him was empty for as far as his eyes could make out; he switched on high high-beams, and the visible landscape shuttled out like an accordion. “I’m not a child, you know. I can take disappointment. I know how to roll with the punches.”

“But you loved him, Lionel. You
loved
him.”

And when she said this he felt a spectacular emptiness inside him, next to which the emptiness of the road was nothing. He didn’t speak for a long time. The roar of the motor and the hiss of the cold wind filled up the silence until he found his voice again.

“Maybe I didn’t love him,” he said in a low voice, as though afraid someone else might overhear. “I thought I did, but … well, if you’re so amazed by how quickly I got over it … I don’t know. Maybe the truth is that I just don’t know what love is.” And before he could stop himself, he thought,
And maybe I never will.

They reached Wild Rose without realizing it. Yolanda, who was scrutinizing the map by starlight (occasionally plunging her nose into Madison or Milwaukee), looked up suddenly after Lionel announced their arrival at a certain rural intersection, and cried, “We are here!” Lionel was too tired to make an existential joke about that.

Even in the darkness, the town charmed them. Despite the accelerating race to find ever more unspoiled and remote places to hide out, Wild Rose had as yet escaped the notice of too many city dwellers. The commercial part of town, such as it was, hadn’t yet been paved or prettified or invaded by shops selling stationery, notions, handicrafts, or aerobic attire. Boards warped, paint peeled, shop windows were decorated with construction paper cut-outs and Scotch tape, and Lionel found it all completely enchanting. He couldn’t wait to come back in broad daylight.

They passed a dinky airport, several Quonset huts, and then managed to lose themselves for a good twenty-five minutes on increasingly narrow roadways hemmed in by increasingly menacing trees. “We’re going to be late for dinner at this rate,” Lionel fretted, while checking his watch every twenty-three seconds. But just as he was getting ready to panic in earnest, they stumbled onto the very road they sought, and so turned and made their way up a pebbly incline, past rows of knobby, eccentric-looking cabins on either side.

They located Magellan’s cabin by its address — possible only because the entire place was lit up like a football stadium. They pulled into the driveway next to Deming’s Saab and Perlman’s Beemer. Lionel stilled the engine, and they got out and stretched their limbs. Music wafted from the cabin’s open windows — Mel Tormé singing “Straighten Up and Fly Right.”

They raised their eyebrows at each other and smiled. Yolanda stifled a yawn. Lionel popped open the trunk and grabbed their bags. When he slammed it shut, someone from within the cabin hollered, “THAT YOU, LIONEL?”

“YEAH,” he called back, and a moment later Magellan greeted them at the door. It was the first time Lionel had ever seen him in anything but a suit; he wore a red polo shirt, plaid shorts, and red deck shoes. “I can’t shake, I’m a mess,” he said when introduced to Yolanda, and he displayed his dripping-wet hands as proof. He smiled and gestured them in, saying, “You’re just in time — we’ve only just started prepping dinner. Chaos in here. I forgot how tiny the kitchen is. You two can go out back and shuck corn. You know how to shuck corn?”

“It’s hardly rocket science,” said Lionel, dropping his bag now that he was inside. Yolanda followed suit.

“Well, we got plenty of it,” Magellan said, and he slammed the door shut with his rump. “Bought it on the way up, place selling it for a buck a bushel!”

From around the corner there appeared a trim, perfectly coiffed woman wearing acid-washed jeans, pink Reebok sneakers, a plastic headband, and an apron boasting a cartoon of an anguished woman (the balloon read OH NO! I FORGOT TO HAVE CHILDREN!). She smiled, showing a smattering of crow’s feet, and said, “Maybe you should show them their room first, let them freshen up,” and each syllable was as crisp as a newly minted dollar bill. She extended her hand and said, “Hi, I’m Wilma Tripp. Like the Trippy Awards, only not as prestigious.”

“Your hostess for the week,” Magellan said while giving her a one-armed hug — as though he didn’t trust Lionel to infer the nature of their relationship from the mere fact of her presence here. (Did he think his bosses
hadn’t
told him about her?)

Wilma frowned at the wet spot he had left on her shoulder, then quickly smiled as Lionel and Yolanda shook her hand. It was small and cold, like a corpse’s.

“Your room’s this way,” she said, leading them with a crooked finger. While Mel Tormé launched into “Lullabye of Birdland,” she took them halfway across a large sitting room with a low, oak-beamed ceiling and a fireplace, then paused long enough to turn and say, “Baba, back to work! There are still potatoes to peel.”

Baba!
thought Lionel, astonished and alarmed.
She calls Babcock Magellan, president of All-Pro Power Tools, ‘Baba’!
He wondered how she managed to do this and yet live.

“This is your inner sanctum for the next several days,” Wilma said, and she flicked on the light in a tiny, cramped little closet of a room with a dinky twin bed shoved against the wall and a rickety nightstand propped at its side. “No one would
dream
of bothering you here,” she added meaningfully. Yolanda and Lionel pointedly ignored this as they set down their bags. “Sorry you can’t have a bigger bed,” Wilma continued with an almost rehearsed bonhomie; “Baba says you’re the junior exec of the bunch, so you get last dibs.”

“It’s okay,” Lionel said, trying not to appear mortified. He turned to Yolanda and mouthed the words,
I’ll take the floor
. Then he zipped open his bag; a pair of patterned boxer shorts popped out like a jack-in-the-box. Embarrassed, he stuffed them back and re-zipped it shut.

“Take as much time as you like,” Wilma said. She’d backed away from the doorway, as if wanting to show her awareness that she was now trespassing on newly private turf. “But the sooner you join us, the sooner we get the corn shucked, and the sooner we all eat.” She smiled to punctuate this happy thought, and left them to scurry about, splashing water on their faces and making themselves presentable as fast as they possibly could.

“Lionel?” Yolanda said as she ran a brush through her hair.

“What?” he replied, toweling dry his forehead.

“I do not think I am going to like Wilma Tripp.”

Lionel detected the first hint of trouble in the making. And he didn’t have long to wait for the second, for when he and Yolanda found their way to the kitchen, they were met by Deming and Perlman, each of whom was wearing the same dopey, schoolboy smile that still stretched across Magellan’s face. Behind them, Lionel spotted Peg Deming pursing her lips, Becca Perlman whispering something acid, and Wilma wearing a smile that could’ve refrozen the polar ice cap.

Instinctively, he knew what had happened. Magellan had rushed to the kitchen and told everyone about Lionel’s hot Latina girlfriend, causing the other men to get giddy with excitement to meet her, which in turn made her an object of instant detestation among the wives.

Sure enough, Deming and Perlman practically knocked each other over in their efforts to be first to greet her. Beneath their Bermuda shorts, their lumpy red knees got hooked together and threatened to trip them up before they disentangled themselves and lurched forward. Yolanda made the mistake of giggling at this, causing Becca to hiss something into Peg’s ear.

Perlman reached Yolanda first. “Hi there — Hackett Perlman,” she said, shaking her hand with both of his. “Hacky to my friends. Which I hope you’re gonna be. Isn’t this a helluva house? Big lake out back. Lake Gilbert. You bring a swimsuit?”

Deming edged him out of the way and took her hand for himself. “Julius Deming — just Julie to you,” he said, shaking her entire forearm as though trying gently to dislodge it from her shoulder. “Lionel’s supervisor at the agency, so you better be nice to me or I’ll take my disappointment out on
him
.” He laughed — a little too loudly — and Lionel found himself wishing for a sudden infestation of locusts, or a flash fire. Yolanda, however, had gone all girlish from the flattery.

She was then introduced to the two wives, who each grazed her fingertips with their own as though unwilling to risk any less fleeting contact, and said, “How do you do?” in the sort of tones the Queen of England might use on a foreign dignitary who smelled bad. Then they all turned back to their work — Becca hacking apart lettuce as though it had personally offended her, Peg slicing vegetables with near-surgical precision, Wilma preparing a vinaigrette dressing in a bowl, Magellan peeling russet potatoes, and Deming and Perlman teaming up to dismember a family of chicken carcasses, a pair of beer bottles at their sides.

“Lionel, dear,” said Becca with a sweetness he had never dreamed she had in her repertoire, “the bag of sweet corn is out on the back deck. Would you be a sweetheart and shuck it for us, please?”

“Sure,” he said, edging off in the direction Becca indicated with her forefinger. “Yolanda can help.”

“Unless,” Yolanda said, as though suddenly aware of the need to win over her fellow females, “there is something I can do here instead?”

“Oh, no,
no
, dear,” said Wilma as she dropped a dollop of Dijon mustard into a bowl of oil and started stirring. “We wouldn’t
think
of asking you to risk those beautiful nails of yours. What a shame if you
broke
one!”

“I do not mind,” Yolanda said, looking at her hands as if they’d somehow betrayed her. “It would only grow back.”

“Be that as it may, we have everything
completely
covered here,” said Wilma, still continuing to use italics as a kind of bullwhip. “So by all means do go out back and shuck with Lionel.”

“Lucky
Lionel
,” Perlman muttered, and Deming almost spat out a mouthful of beer. Wilma regarded them with a face as red as a Bing cherry. The edges of her mouth wilted, but still she attempted to smile — so that she looked like she was holding an invisible knife between her teeth. The men, chastened by this but not entirely so, lowered their heads and giggled.

Lionel and Yolanda went out to the deck, and just as he was sliding shut the glass door behind him, Perlman caught his eye and gave him an enthusiastic thumb’s-up.

Lionel half-smiled in response, then turned to join Yolanda, who was already seated on the wooden steps, stripping the canvas-like leaves off the sweet corn. The cornsilk fibers stuck to her fingers and she looked perfectly miserable.

He sat beside her and took up an ear. It was eerily quiet out here; all they could hear were crickets, and the occasional lapping of Lake Gilbert against the shore. The darkness was near absolute; the deck was floodlit, but the lake — which, by the sound of it, was just a dozen or so yards away — was completely swallowed up in the blackness beyond.

“What have I gotten you into?” Lionel said as he peeled away his first husk.

“Oh, we will be fine,” she said with a laugh. “We will go off by ourselves a lot.”

“I’m sorry. I couldn’t know everyone was going to get so
weird
about you.”

“Never mind.” She wiped some fibers onto her denim shorts.

“Maybe they’ll get nicer as they get to know you.”

“Maybe,” she said in tones that implied Not a chance. Then she smiled and said, “I am out of Bob’s way, and you have a girlfriend to impress your bosses, so everything is as it should be. That is all that matters.”

“But those women …”

“
They
do not hire or fire you, Lionel. And their men like me. So you should be happy. You brought me here for that reason.”

“But I nev—”

“Keep shucking, please,” she said, interrupting him in a mock-scolding tone. “I have already finished four ears, you are still on your first.”

He rolled his eyes and sighed, but in relief, and the two of them worked in silence for a few minutes. Then Babcock Magellan surprised them by sliding open the glass door and sticking his head out. “Gonna get eaten alive out here without this,” he said, and he tossed them a can of bug repellent. Lionel fumbled in the air a bit, but fortunately managed to catch it. “Spray it all over yourself. I’m not kidding —
all
over. This place is like insect Disneyland.”

“Thanks,” said Lionel, offering the can to Yolanda to use first.

“Oh, and Yolanda,” he said, “don’t mind the she-devils in the kitchen. They’re just jealous, is all. And if they don’t warm up to you, I promise the guys and I will beat them till the scream.”

She turned her head coquettishly. “I do not know what you mean,” she said with convincing ingenuousness. “They have been very nice so far.”

“Like hell they have. Anyway, my son David’s coming up tomorrow, too, so if the Bitch Patrol is still giving you grief, you two can at least hang out with him. He’s around your age.”

“I didn’t know you had a son,” said Lionel. He swatted away a mosquito just as it landed on his arm. “You never mentioned him.”

“Well, he leads — he
led
a kind of reclusive life,” Magellan said haltingly. “We didn’t see him very — uh — hell, it’s no secret. He used to be a priest. Now he’s left the order and he’s all torn up about that. Wants to come to the cabin to be by himself and think things through. I told him I’d have Wilma here, and he didn’t seem to care. Here’s a kid who refused even to speak Wilma’s
name
before. Go figure. Anyway, he’ll be here tomorrow, like I said … in fact, I was kind of hoping you two
would
try to cheer him up a little.” His eyes brightened and he winked at Yolanda. “Figure the sight of
you
oughtta brighten up just about anybody’s day.”

She smiled. “How sweet. Thank you.”

He grinned ridiculously at her; he appeared to be absolutely smitten. When he withdrew and slid the door shut, he actually caught it on his heel, then looked up to see if she had noticed, and when he saw that she had, he made a dopey face and laughed.

When he’d gone, they turned back to their shucking. “That’s all we need now, a holy roller in spiritual distress,” Lionel said. “But he’s my million-dollar client’s son, so I’d guess I’d better man up and play nice.”

“Do not jump to conclusions about someone you have yet to meet,” Yolanda cautioned him. “He may be very different from what you expect.”