Closet Case (Robert Rodi Essentials) (27 page)

“Typical Lionel, always in a hurry,” said this man from his past, this former lover. Kevin had grown leaner, more muscular; his body rippled out of a tank top, Madras shorts, and royal-blue boat shoes. He licked at the strawberry scoop and said, “Hell are
you
doing here?”

For a moment Lionel was too stunned to speak, but the intensity of David’s questioning eyes on him prompted him to dribble out an answer. “I — I — I’m here on business.”

“In Wild Rose, Wisconsin?” Kevin laughed, and his tongue darted out and flicked the ice-cream residue off his unshaven upper lip. “What are you, a mule driver now, or something?”

“No, of course not, of
course
not,” he said, achingly aware that he was sounding increasingly like Aunt Ramona. “Still advertising. Some of my firm are up here as guests of my client, who’s hosting us for the week. Rewarding us for a job well done.”

Kevin chuckled derisively. “Mighty white of him.” A blob of chalky pink ice cream fell on his forearm; he swabbed it up with his thumb and then stuck his thumb in his mouth.

“This, this,
this
is my client’s son,” said Lionel, trying to block out how the entire world was whirling around him. “Kevin Glasser, this is David Magellan, son of Babcock Magellan, president of All-Pro Power Tools.”

David set down his suitcase and shook Kevin’s hand. “Bet you’re impressed as
hell
by that,” he said with a smirk.

“Do I bow down, or what?” said Kevin, and they both laughed. Lionel felt a surge of panic. Not quite a minute together, and they were already in league against him. How had reality managed to derail so completely in the last half-hour? It was stupefying.

An older man in a Forbidden Broadway t-shirt and paisley shorts joined them, carrying his own ice-cream cone, pistachio by the look of it. Lionel was only dimly aware of him as he asked Kevin, “So why are
you
here?”

Kevin nodded toward the older man. “Stephen has a summer place in the ‘hood,” he said. “Stephen, Ailies, this is Lionel Frank, one of my old — or should I say one of my
ex
—”

“One of your cast of thousands, eh?” Stephen mercifully interjected. He shook Lionel’s quivering hand. “Pleasure.”

“And this is David — sorry, what was your name again?”

“Magellan, David Magellan.”

“David Magellan,” Kevin repeated, “heir to the throne of Great Britain and something-something Power Tools.”

They laughed again —
three
against one now — then Kevin explained, “Stephen’s my spouse,” just before lapping up a wide slick of ice-cream that was threatening to spill off his cone.

The four men stood smiling for a moment until Lionel felt the ground start to give way and knew he’d better get moving before Kevin said anything else in front of David. “Listen, great to see you,” he said — and his voice actually
broke
 — “and good to meet
you
, Stephen. But we’re running late. People waiting for us at a restaurant.”

Kevin and Stephen both had smears of ice cream on their upper lips now — one pink, one green. They looked like a matched set: trim, handsome, scruffy salt-and-pepper shakers. No one could look at them and not know they were a couple. Kevin and Lionel had never looked like that when they were together. But then, they’d never really been a couple. Lionel, fearful, hadn’t let them be.

David bade them good-bye, and they’d gone about six yards when Kevin called back, “HEY, HOW’S SPENCER?”

Lionel turned and called back, “FINE, FINE,” then waved again to signal that he was moving on.

“STILL INTERESTED IN BUYING HIM FROM YOU,” Kevin called.

Lionel just shook his head and smiled, and quickened his pace. “Old roommate,” he said to David the second they were out of earshot.

David grinned slyly and said, “I gathered.” Lionel didn’t at all like the way he said it.

When they reached the restaurant they found the women waiting out front. Becca appeared to have cornered Wilma and Peg, and was relating in great detail how the waitress had cheated them on the bill. Yolanda was off to the side, in a world of her own.

When the two men reached them, Wilma gave them a pained smile and said, “Hello, David. Been a few years.”

“A few,” he replied atonally. There was no kiss, not even a handshake. The tension in the air could’ve choked a small dog.

David was introduced to the others, and as soon as this was accomplished Becca scowled and said, “How are supposed to fit his suitcase in the trunk if Wilma’s frame is already in there? I’m not having that thing sitting on
my
lap, I’m sorry. Not with my bad knees.”

Lionel’s eyes fell shut in dismay. He’d forgotten all about Wilma’s fucking frame.

To his astonishment, Wilma herself piped up with a suggestion. “Let’s tie my frame to the roof,” she said. “I’m sure we can buy a length of twine somewhere.” She peered down the street for a possible vendor.

“That’s
okay
with you?” Lionel asked, with perhaps too much incredulity.

“It’s only a
frame
, Lionel,” she said snappishly. “I don’t demand that you treat it as though it were
precious
just because it’s
mine
. I’m not a
monster
, you know.” Lionel couldn’t help recalling Richard Nixon saying,
I am not a crook
.

She set off in search of some twine. All at once he understood: she didn’t dare be rude to David, or inconvenience or disregard him. He was, after all, her lover’s son. If push came to shove, and Magellan had to choose between them — well, Wilma wasn’t going to
let
push come to shove.

Yolanda touched Lionel’s shoulder, then withdrew her hand as though she’d had an electric shock. “Lionel, what is the
matter
?” she whispered. “You are white as a sheet, and your clothes are
drenched
in sweat.”

He looked at her, at her beautiful, wide, wet eyes, and his throat closed up with exhausted emotion. All he could manage to croak was, “Later.”

David’s presence unsettled the air in the cabin. The way his father greeted him at the door was loud and glad and phony, with Wilma at his side, her smile at its ghastliest. It left everyone feeling uncomfortable, so while David unpacked his bags, the guests took their opportunity to slip out the door. Better to leave father, son, and mistress to complete their union in private.

Lionel and Yolanda found their way to the boathouse, where they sat dangling their feet in the lake and drinking Diet Coke straight from the cans. Lionel was trying to figure out how to begin to tell her of his powerful attraction to David and his run-in with Kevin, and about the peril both these developments posed him, when she beat him to the punch by saying, “Lionel, I must tell you something I know will disturb you.”

His heart stuttered.
Now
what? “I’m listening,” he said as calmly as possible.

“You may have noticed the way Hackett Perlman has been staring at me.”

“Yes,” he said, suddenly alert to the possibility of a new and provocative danger. “Last night at dinner, and again just now. It’s pretty goddamn creepy.”

She moved her foot in a circle and caused a rippling in the water. “Well, it is very possible that he will remember where he has seen me before.”

He shut his eyes and steeled himself. “Which is where?”

The answer was worse than he could’ve imagined. “He used to be a regular customer at a place where I worked.” She paused. “As an escort.”

His fingers involuntarily loosened. His Diet Coke slipped out of his hand and fell into the lake, where its murky contents gushed out and clouded the water. “Jesus
Christ
,” he said. “You never told me.”

“Well, no.” She took an emboldening swig out of her own can. “I suppose I was trying to put it behind me. Certainly I had no wish to
share
it.”

“So Perlman was one of your — what’s the word —
johns
?”

“I prefer ‘clients,’ thank you,” she said, and her foot stirred the water more rapidly, causing it to look like it was coming to a boil. “But no, he was a regular of one of the other girls. Still, I was usually in the lounge when he came in. He saw me there many times, Lionel. I think it is likely he will soon remember that.”

“So, let me get this straight,” he said, feeling hope spill out of him the way the soda had spilled out of his can. “The guy who has just offered to make me a partner in his advertising agency because of my exemplary professional conduct, is close to discovering that I’ve brought a hooker to our client’s summer house.”

She looked pale, almost bloodless, but she met his withering stare. “This is exactly what I was afraid of,” she said in a low voice. “This is why I never told you. Why I never told Bob. Especially after your crack about me not exactly being a blonde debutante named Phoebe.”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry, hon. It’s not that
I
think any less of you — I mean, who the hell am I to be judgmental? But
those
guys,” he said, tossing his head in the direction of the cabin. “I mean …
fuck
.”

She finished off her own can and tossed it behind her, into the boathouse. “Well, at least
you
do not think less of me,” and it was a full seven seconds before he realized she’d meant to be sarcastic.

“Oh, come on, now,” he said. “Don’t accuse me of that! I’m not a hypocrite.” She gave him a heavy-lidded look and he threw his hands in the air. “I’m
not
. Not any more than
you
, certainly.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Well — have you told Emil about this?” he said triumphantly, thinking,
I’ve got her now.

“Not exactly,” she said.

“Well, then.” He grunted in satisfaction.

“I did not
tell
him. He
asked
me.”

“What?”

“He
asked
if I had ever been a sex worker. The second time we met, when he pretended to have come to see you, and ended up in my apartment.”

He clasped his hands to his head. “I don’t believe any of this.”

“He told me I was beautiful and arousing, and that I would be good at it, if I was not one already. At first I was so offended, but then I looked into his eyes and saw he meant no disrespect, that from him it was a
tribute
. So I told him that I had once been in that line, but no longer. And he smiled grandly. He said he knew, because I was the perfect woman, and for him the perfect woman is a prostitute. He calls them ‘high priestesses of anarchism.’”

“Wow. What a smooth talker.”

“I honestly think if I did not have this in my past, he would be less interested in me. He would consider that I had … I do not know. Wasted a commodity, or some such thing.”

He snorted. “Well, so much for his interest in your
mind
.”

“No,” she said angrily, “that, too. He is interested in me as a whole. Lionel, you are being
awful
.” Her voice had a hairline fracture in it that threatened to break completely if he weren’t careful. “He helped me to see that there was no shame in what I have done, that it was in fact a testament to my integrity that I did not let false standards stop me from practicing a trade for which I was innately skilled.”

He cocked his head in bewilderment. “False standards?”

“Oh, the way people go on,” she said furiously, “proclaiming that a woman has a right to do what she wants with her body — when they are speaking of birth control and pregnancy.
Then
all right-thinking people line up in support. But if that same woman wants to sell
access
to her body, suddenly the principle no longer applies. They shake their heads and call her a ‘victim.’
That
is hypocrisy, Lionel.”

He couldn’t think of an answer for that, so he thought he’d better change the subject. “How did you get into —
that
, anyway?”

She leaned back and propped herself on her elbows. “I suppose it is my mother’s fault.”

“Isn’t it always?” He was feeling a little sarcastic himself.

She ignored him. “I told you how she was always telling me of my future in a convent. She nearly brainwashed me into becoming a nun. So even after I rebelled and left home, I was so accustomed to thinking of myself that way, that it seemed only natural that I ended up living in a house filled with other women.” She shrugged. “The differences did not seem so profound, back then. The major one, was that in a convent, all the women are married to a man who is not there. While in Mrs. Craven’s house, the women were married to
any
man who was there.”

He had to think about that for a few seconds. “And you got out … when?”

She lifted her foot from the water and scraped a soggy, fallen leaf from where it had settled on her calf. “Well, I was still fascinated by the life I had chosen
not
to live — the life of the convent,” she said, dipping her foot back in. “I used to read about nuns all the time. I had books and pictures all around my room. Mrs. Craven encouraged it, because so many of the men found that arousing. She even bought me a nun’s habit, but only one of my clients ever asked me to wear it, and in truth I did not like to; it seemed disrespectful. Also, it was stiff and scratchy. But
another
client was a science fiction reader, and one day he gave me some battered copies of Frank Herbert’s
Dune
books, and he said, ‘You will like these, there are outer-space nuns in them.’ And so I read them. And almost at once I cared less about the nuns than I did about the
ideas
 — environmentalism, messianism, the manipulation of gene pools, all of that. And that started me off on my love of S.F. Before long I began to feel dissatisfied with the narrowness of my life. So I left Mrs. Craven and got the job at Live Long and Prosper, and ever since I have been happily spending my days behind the counter reading every novel that comes through the door.” She smiled beatifically. “I
told
you that S.F. is my inner life, Lionel. It is the only one that is important to me now. That old life … it seems like a million years ago. Like an existence in a parallel reality.”

“So you have no plans to go back to it?”

She thwacked him in the arm. “Lionel!” But then she folded her hands in her lap and kicked gently at the water. “Although Emil
did
cajole me into getting out my old case of — well, the tools of the trade. And we have been putting them to good use ever since.”

This was quite a bit more than he cared to know, so he held up one hand and said, “Okay, I get the picture.”

They sat in silence for a moment. Lionel’s mind was reeling. How had all this happened? Where on the drive to Wild Rose had he taken a wrong turn and ended up in the Twilight Zone?

Yolanda broke the silence by saying, “Now it is your turn. Tell me what happened in town that has upset you so much.”

He shook his head. “Sorry. Telling my story
now
would be like showing the cartoon
after
the feature film.”