Closet Case (Robert Rodi Essentials) (28 page)

There were four canoes in the boathouse, and just before dusk Lionel and the other men pulled them out and plopped them into the lake, then stood ankle-deep and extended their hands to help the women get on board. With each canoe brandishing a pair of champagne flutes and an ice-cold bottle of Veuve Clicquot, they paddled to the center of Lake Gilbert to watch the sun set and toast the arrival of night.

It had been Wilma’s idea: “So
romantic
, don’t you think?” she’d said in a tone of voice that made it clear she wasn’t interested in anyone else’s opinion. Still, Yolanda, for her part, agreed, and told Lionel she only wished she didn’t have to sit on the lake in the gloaming with
him
. Becca and Peg, however, appeared to have no enthusiasm for the project at all.

When the four canoes reached the middle of the lake (the Demings arriving far behind the rest; Julie was having no end of trouble paddling), the men popped the corks amidst bursts of shrieks and laughter, and filled all the flutes so that the foam spilled over the rim. When they were subsequently raised high, the crystal caught different distorted refractions of the salmon-colored setting sun. “To a breathtaking evening,” Magellan said, and after he’d been echoed, everyone took a swallow and settled in to watch the sun’s descent.

As the world grew progressively more amber, the canoes drifted farther and farther apart, and the champagne assumed a more ceremonial aspect. Lionel leaned back and sighed, feeling almost primeval. Yolanda crossed her legs and smiled at him. Words were unnecessary. For a moment, they were suspended in time, safe from the uncertainties of the future. For a moment, they were together in a private world where no one else could intrude.

Or
nearly
no one. From across the expanse of the lake, he heard Wilma say, in what she must have thought a murmur but what amounted to a stage whisper, “I don’t care. He’s your
son
. You’ve got to say something. I don’t ask that he love me, but he needs to be
civil
.”

“You’re both adults, work it out between yourselves,” Magellan replied in his usual booming baritone.

“Quiet!” she said urgently. “He’ll
hear
you.”

“We’re in the middle of the lake, for God’s sake. How’s he gonna hear us all the way up at the house?”

Then, from the other direction, Becca’s voice crept spider-like across the surface of the water: “Of course
she’s
wearing a sweater.
She
stays here every summer, so she
knows
how cold it gets on the lake at night. But does she bother to tell
us
? Oh,
no
. So we end up out here with our bare arms, freezing while
she
tugs her four-hundred-dollar angora up around her chin and everything’s just
grand
.”

Well,
Lionel thought,
Wilma might be miserable, but Becca is clearly having the time of her life.
He snorted a laugh, and Yolanda, who had also overheard, rolled her eyes.

When the sun had disappeared completely behind the trees that bordered the lake, he took a deep breath, held it for a moment, and then let it seep out like the air from a punctured tire. Under a canopy of blinking stars, he and Yolanda looked at each other and grinned.

“Oh, how I
wish
you were Emil,” she said wistfully. Then she hastily added, “I do not mean to offend you.”

“It’s all right,” he said. “I understand completely. I wish you were Emil, too.”

At this, she gave such a hoot of laughter that from far across the lake, Magellan called out, “HEY, WAS THAT YOLANDA?”

“WELL, WE KNOW IT WASN’T
BECCA
,” cried Deming.

“LIONEL, WHAT ARE YOU
DOING
TO THAT GIRL?” Magellan continued, his words slurring a bit from too much champagne. “WHATEVER IT IS, YOU STOP IT RIGHT NOW. AT LEAST UNTIL WE GET OVER THERE TO WATCH!”

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN, ‘WE KNOW IT WASN’T BECCA’?” yelled Becca, with an edge to her voice that could’ve sliced the night sky into ribbons.

Laughter bubbled up from all around the lake.

“I’M NOT KIDDING,” she insisted. “WHAT DID YOU
MEAN
?”

Sensing that the excursion had ended, Lionel took up his oars and started rowing towards shore. He could barely make out the boathouse in the sudden inky darkness.

“HEY, I KNOW WHAT,” hollered Magellan. “LET’S RACE BACK! LOSER HAS TO WASH THE DISHES.”

“YOU’RE ON!” cried Perlman.

And suddenly the night was alive with the slapping of oars against the water, and the high-pitched protests of the wives. Lionel, who by the merest chance had given himself a head start, could tell from the direction of the sounds that he was well in the lead.

“
Go, Lionel, go,”
Yolanda urged him, clinging happily to the side of the canoe.

He could now discern the outline of the boathouse against the velvet glow of the night sky. He bore down, working the oars like pistons. The wind ripped through his hair, the spray of the water flecked his cheeks and lips, and everything was movement, action, energy — it was so exciting to be alive, so exhilarating to be
winning
.

The black mass of the boathouse soon blotted out the night sky, and moments later the canoe plowed into the sandy slope at its base.

“WE WIN!”
he and Yolanda screamed. They jumped onto the shore, and then … continued jumping.
“WE WIN! WE WIN! WE WIN!”

“
Stop
this,” came the harsh, reedy voice of Wilma, closing in fast behind them. “We’re going to disturb the neighbors! And someone is going to get hur—”

Magellan’s canoe rammed into Lionel’s, resulting in a deafening thud followed by a deep, resounding splash. Lionel could make out two figures in the water. He knelt down and helped one of them get upright again. By its silhouette he could see that it was Magellan, who laughed so loud water sprayed from his lips onto Lionel’s face.

Then, as the other canoes approached more cautiously, he waded in to assist Wilma, who was crawling up to the embankment on all fours. He put a hand on her shoulder; the angora sweater was soaked and cold. It felt like a dead cat.

Wilma grasped his hand and allowed him to help her to her feet, then snapped her arm away from him and said, “I’m all right, I don’t need anybody’s —
oh
!” She twisted her ankle and fell backward, landing rump-first in the water again.

Magellan positively roared, and his laughter bounced across the lake and came barreling back even stronger, like the echo had hit a trampoline.

No one else was quite so stupid as to join in.

Wilma said nothing — not as much as a syllable — but got to her feet with tremendous dignity and started her long, drippy trek back up to the house. Lionel was glad it was too dark to see her face. The others started after her, with Lionel and Yolanda bringing up the rear. Magellan — still quivering with laughter — stayed behind to lock up the boathouse for the night.

By the time Lionel and Yolanda reached the house, the others had gone in. Through the back windows, he could see that Peg and the drenched, scowling Wilma were now slipping into the house’s two bathrooms. He tapped Yolanda on the shoulder and said, “You go on in. All that champagne, then the exertion of the race — no
way
can I wait for those two to get out. I’ve got to piss like sixty.”

She nodded, then whispered, “Can we laugh about Wilma yet?”

He shook his head. “Maybe in a year or two.”

She giggled, then darted into the house.

Lionel grabbed his crotch to prevent it from jiggling too much as he loped halfway back to the boathouse. Then he remembered Magellan was still down there, and took a sharp right, into the growth of trees that surrounded the property. He had just unzipped his fly and yanked out his penis when he heard Magellan coming up the path behind him.

Shy about being seen urinating, he crept a few yards further, then got to his knees and, as noiselessly as possible, let his stream of pee flow against the trunk of a tree. He felt an inestimable relief. His head cleared, his ears came unstopped. Everything in him relaxed.

And then he heard voices.

Two of them, at least. He couldn’t yet tell if there were more. They were coming from somewhere a little farther in. He zipped himself up, got to his feet, and ignoring the mosquitoes and horseflies that were now beginning to prey on him, carefully made his way toward the area from which he thought the voices were originating. The floodlights from the house gave him some limited visibility — just enough to allow him to move quietly, without snapping too many branches or twigs.

“—ill wish you hadn’t come here,” said a voice he now recognized as David’s. “I asked you not to. I asked you to respect my decision.”

“You asked it in a
letter
,” said the other voice — another man’s, but more shrill, more precise. “All this time you’ve been planning this little adventure and you never had the guts to tell your friends.”

“This is exactly
why
I didn’t tell you,” David said. “It’s
not
an adventure. This is a moral, ethical, and
personal
decision.”

Lionel could see them now. David was seated on a rock, plucking the petals off some kind of wildflower. The other man paced back and forth, to the extent the small clearing allowed. He was considerably older, wearing grey slacks and a windbreaker. From what he had said, Lionel guessed him to be a fellow priest. His pulse quickened at the hint of real intrigue.

“Well,
well,
” said the older man. He turned, and a tiny, intense red glow burned through the darkness for a moment; he’d apparently just taken a drag off a cigarette. “Listen to Mother Superior!” he continued. “Better than the rest of us, is that it?”

David released a deep sigh. “All I said was, I can’t reconcile living an actively gay life with acting as an agent of an institution that condemns homosexuality.”

Lionel’s knees gave way; he tried to grab onto a low branch of a birch tree, but it snapped off in his hand.

David and the priest both looked in his direction, but apparently saw nothing. The priest turned back, took another puff on his cigarette, and said, “None of the
rest
of us has any trouble reconciling it.”

“That’s fine for you, then,” said David. “I’m different. I can’t.”

His heart pounding, Lionel pushed himself back up and rubbed his nose where it had scraped against the ground. There was going to be a
hell
of a lot to tell Yolanda tonight. He still hadn’t even filled her in on his attraction to David, or about running into Kevin in town
with
David. Now, what a different emphasis he’d be able to give those stories!

“So you just run out on us,” the priest said, taking another quick drag. “Your best and dearest friends in the world. One day you’re right there among us, the next day your room is empty and everyone is talking about this little correspondence you’ve been having with the archdiocese about how unfit you are for the job.”

“I
am
unfit.”

“That’s what you
say,
and oh, so humbly, might I add. But you don’t fool me. What you’re
really
playing is Sister Mary Holier-Than-Thou.” He dropped his cigarette and ground it into the dirt with his shoe. “I drove four-and-a-half hours to get here because I wouldn’t believe it till I heard it from your own lips. But the others were right: you’ve passed judgment on us.”

“I haven’t done any such th—”

“My
God
, David, we’re a minority as it
is
! How are we going to change the church’s stand if not from
within
?”

There was a long silence. “Paul, when have you ever lifted a finger to ‘change the church’s stand’?” He laughed bitterly. “How stupid do you think I am? This life is a pretty convenient mask for you, that’s all. You get to sleep around as much as you want and still enjoy being revered by the community as a paragon of virtue. You wouldn’t
dream
of trying to alter the church’s stand on homosexuality. Your own little set-up is far too cozy to risk it.”

Paul had stopped pacing. “So you
have
passed judgment. I needed to hear it from you face-to-face, and I have. That’s it, then. I’ve got what I came for.” He started making his way back, swatting aside branches and bushes. “Just keep this in mind, honey: it doesn’t pay to divorce Jesus. He’s got all the best lawyers.”

“What on earth does that even mean?” asked David, following him.

“Oh — I don’t even know. Just go to hell, will you?”

And then they were gone from Lionel’s sight.

“Don’t you ever get tired of me?” Lionel whispered. It was past one in the morning, and he and Yolanda were seated facing each other, cross-legged on the bed, sharing a bag of corn chips and talking in low voices to prevent anyone else hearing them through the thin cabin walls. He’d just finished telling her everything that had happened to him during the day, and a spasm of self-consciousness gripped him as he realized he’d been talking nonstop for almost an hour.

“Tired of you?” she said, scraping together the last few broken chips from the bottom of the bag and popping them into her mouth. “What do you mean?”

“Just the surplus of drama in my life,” he said. “All the earth-shaking news I’m always running to tell you, when we both know in the long run it never amounts to anything.”

She crumpled up the bag and tossed it into the wicker wastebasket by the nightstand. “But you never stop
thinking
it will amount to something,” she said, reassuring him. “So maybe someday it will.”

“No, no,” he said, wiping his chip-greasy hands on his jeans. “You’re wrong. I never stop
fearing
it will amount to something. Deep down, I honestly don’t want it to.” He stretched out his legs. “David Magellan, for instance. I get all excited about him, but I’d never actually
do
anything about it. He’s my client’s son. It’d ruin my career.”

“It might,” she said, leaning back and reclining her head on the pillow. “You cannot know for sure.”

He chuckled cynically. “Oh, yes I can.”

“Oh, no you
cannot
. And it is a fair bet that if you know about David, David knows about you. If he is gay, as he certainly seems to be, then he must surely have figured out your history with Kevin.”

“God, I
hope
not.” He peeled off his socks and tossed them in a corner. “Though it was all but written out for him, I gotta admit.”

“How did you feel, anyway? Meeting Kevin again, I mean.” She bent her arm and propped her head on her hand.

He took a deep, contemplative breath. “Strange, really. I hadn’t seen him in more than a year. He looks good.
Great
, in fact.”

“No stirrings, though? No regrets, or jealousy of his new man?”

He shook his head insistently. “Not at all. I guess I never felt very deeply for him. I was so closeted when I met him, and so was he. It was just so
convenient
. I thought, ‘This has to be it, because neither one of us will ever meet anyone else.’ I never
wanted
to meet anyone else. At that point in my life, one man seemed as good as the next.”

“Well, you have at least come a long way since then!”

“I don’t even feel especially
friendly
toward him. I’ve always thought, what a shame it was that our neuroses drove us apart, because we cared so much for each other, but seeing him today … he left me totally neutral. No feelings.”

“That is not natural.”

This wounded him a little. She was striking rather close to what he suspected about himself: his inability to love. He decided to deflect it by making a joke of it. “Well, what do you expect? I
am
unnatural. Don’t you listen to the TV preachers?”

She didn’t laugh. “You think it has to be a choice, Lionel. You think you must decide to become a partner in this agency, or to have a man in your life. Either-or.”

“Right. Vastly preferably to neither-nor.”

“That is not the only alternative,” she said, running her fingers through her hair. “You can see
no
way to have both?” A pause. “Or have you never bothered trying?”

The look that crossed his face gave her the answer. She dropped her head into her pillow and moaned in exasperation.

They heard Julius Deming’s voice through the wall. It was muffled and indistinct, but it alarmed them. When Peg’s voice followed, clearly saying, “One-fifteen, go back to sleep,” Lionel and Yolanda were too spooked to continue their discussion. They crept out and brushed their teeth, then slipped into bed (or, rather,
Yolanda
slipped into bed; Lionel curled up on a blanket on the floor, like a Labrador) and doused the lights.

The next morning he awakened to find the bed empty and, in fact, already made. He got up, struggled into a sweatshirt and a pair of shorts, and staggered out to the kitchen. Yolanda, Perlman, and Magellan were crammed into the tiny space, busily frying and pouring and stirring things. Yolanda smiled brightly when she saw him. She held up two plates, each laden with scrambled eggs and toast, and said, “I have fixed you breakfast. Get a cup of coffee and come sit on the deck.”

“Okay,” he said sleepily.

She padded over to the glass door, slid it open with her foot, then shut it behind her with a bump of her fanny; Magellan and Perlman watched with their implements in mid-air, as though they’d been caught in suspended animation.

When she was safely gone, Magellan said, “Lionel, we have to talk.” Perlman came and stood beside him. Out of nowhere Deming appeared with a bottle of buttermilk, and took his place next to them.

Lionel’s heart was pounding. What had they found out? “I’m listening.”

“Yolanda tells us you’re letting her take the car to go shopping today,” he said sternly.

He nodded. “She wants to see that outlet mall we passed on the way in. It’s about an hour’s drive and
I
sure as hell don’t want to go.” He raised an eyebrow. “What about it?”

“Didn’t you know that we’d agreed
not
to lend our cars to the women this week?”

“No. How could I possibly know that?”

Magellan looked at Deming. “You didn’t tell him?”

Deming flushed a deep red and shook his head. “Didn’t think I had to. What kind of guy entrusts his car to his
girlfriend
?”

Magellan’s nostrils flared. He turned back to Lionel. “The roads around here are lousy. It’s easy to get lost, and the women are
terrible
drivers. Well, Wilma is.”

“Becca’s an accident waiting to happen,” said Perlman.

“Actually, Peg’s pretty good,” said Deming a little defensively, “Never even been pulled over once.”

Magellan whirled on him. “But you agreed: solidarity with us on this. Didn’t you, Julie? Because if
one
of us lets his woman take the car, the
others
will want to, and then the entire week they’ll be zipping off every half-hour, and God only knows what condition they’ll come back in. Dents and scratches would be the best-case scenario. Wilma could rip out the entire undercarriage and not even realize it. She’d just turn up the radio to mask the noise.”

“You’re going to make us look bad if you let Yolanda have your car,” Perlman said menacingly.

Magellan nodded, and shook a finger at him. “You’ve got to put your foot down. Drive her to the outlet mall if you have to, but don’t let her go on her own. And for God’s sake go and tell her that before she blabs it to the oth—”

“Baba!”
It was Wilma, storming in from the deck. She walked right up to him, her napkin still tucked into her waistband, and poked him in the chest. “How come Lionel lets Yolanda have his car, but
you
won’t let me have
yours
?”

Magellan went white with fury. Peg and Becca marched in, too, and stood behind Wilma, awaiting his answer.

“Lionel’s car is a piece of shit,” he said. He turned quickly to Lionel and added, “Sorry. But …
hell
.”

“Well, why did you
bring
your precious Jaguar if you’re afraid to let someone else take it out on these roads?” Wilma snarled. “Every other time we’ve come up here, you’ve been perfectly content to take
my
car. But I suppose you had to show off to your friends here with your shiny ballistic import. A fine impression it makes, sitting there in the driveway doing
nothing
.”

Magellan looked like he might hit her. She was certainly getting back at him for laughing at her pratfall the night before.

“And in the meantime,” she continued shrilly, “we’re trapped here while Yolanda can come and go as she pleases.”

Magellan sputtered for a moment, then turned his fiery gaze on Lionel.

Just when Lionel was feeling the pressure reach its limit, Yolanda came in from the deck. “Did I say something wrong?” he asked timidly. “Everyone got up and left so suddenly …”

“Yolanda!” Lionel exclaimed. He went and took her by the arm, giving her little squeeze to tell her to play along. “I was just saying how delighted you’d be to take the other girls to the mall with you.”

Yolanda looked stricken. “They want to come
with
me?”

“Oh,
would
you mind, dear?” Wilma said, obviously realizing that this compromise was probably the best she was going to manage without actual bloodshed. “I assure you, we’ll be as quiet as church mice, and we’ll even treat you to lunch!”

“But,” Yolanda said, panicking, “I — I was going to make another stop or two —” Lionel squeezed her arm again, to no avail. “— before I set out for the mall, and —”

“Oh, we don’t mind!” Wilma insisted. “Honestly, we’ll sit in the car and wait! Won’t we, girls?”

Peg and Becca added their reassurances and entreaties, and Yolanda had to give in.

Lionel was proud of the way he’d defused the situation. The men were now happy because their cars were safe from the women, and furthermore, the women were getting out of their hair. And the women were happy to be escaping the rusticity of the cabin. And Lionel hadn’t had to make a show of caveman authority over Yolanda to placate his bosses (which she would almost certainly have reacted to defiantly, in any case).

Only Yolanda seemed upset. She shot Lionel a murderous glance, one which made his teeth go chill. She surely couldn’t be
that
angry about being saddled with the three “gorgons,” as she called them. And they were bound to be nicer to her now that they were in her debt. In fact, they were already treating her like a kindred spirit; she was, after all, whisking them away to that most feminine of sanctuaries, the outlet mall.

After breakfast, which she ate with swollen and downcast eyes, he caught up with her when she went to fetch her purse from the bedroom. “For God’s sake,” he said, “stop overreacting. What’s the big deal about spending a few hours with them?”

She was actually crying. “Nothing,” she said, swinging the purse over her arm. “Never mind.”

“They’re not
that
bad,” he said, following her into the front room.

“I said
never
mind
,” she snarled, and then she banged open the screen door and flew out to his car. She was halfway there when she had to stop, ball her fists, and turn back to him.

He opened the screen door and let the ignition key dangle from his thumb and forefinger. She stormed up, snatched it away, and said
“Thank you”
between clenched teeth, then whirled on her heel and marched back to the car.

The other women now filed out past Lionel, chattering like parrots, and crowded themselves tidily in the Celica, like socks into a drawer. Yolanda started the engine, lurched into gear, and tore down the gravel driveway like she was trying to break out of Earth’s orbit.

Something
was going on with her. He’d get to the bottom of it later.