Closet Case (Robert Rodi Essentials) (29 page)

At eleven o’clock, the door to David’s room was still shut. Lionel kept inventing reasons to walk through the house — to get a beer, to go to the bathroom, to make a phone call — so that he could check on that door. It wasn’t clear why he felt a compulsion to do this — he wasn’t certain he even wanted to
see
David — but the need to know exactly where he was and what he was doing, was overwhelming.

When he wasn’t checking David’s door, he was sitting on the dock with Magellan, Perlman, and Deming, fishing. The talk was all of baseball playoffs, the upcoming football season, whether mortgage rates would rise or fall, and if they rose how many great properties must be available in a place like this.

Lionel, having nothing to contribute to any of this, sat silently with his pole, watching the lure bob endlessly in the water. He was bored out of his mind. Occasionally he allowed his thoughts to drift to what Yolanda had said the night before; that had really shaken him. Was it true? Had he never even
tried
to reconcile his true identity to his career, or had he just accepted that they were mutually exclusive? And if they were, who was to say he hadn’t chosen the wrong one? Here he was, fishing with the men he would soon call his partners, ennui lapping at his brain like waves on a beach — when the potent, irrepressible image of David tangled up in his sheets just a few yards away, kept stabbing into consciousness.

There was a lull in the conversation; he snapped to attention. They were all looking at him.

“So, Lionel,” said Deming, “your girlfriend’s moaning woke me up last night.”

The other two men leered at him. They leaned forward, their fishing poles slack and forgotten, awaiting details.

“Yeah, well, she does that,” he said, giving his own pole a little jiggle.

“No screams, though,” Deming continued. “Funny thing. Struck me as a screamer.”

Lionel rolled his eyes and laughed in exasperation. “You guys are
animals
.”

“So what were you going at her with? You can tell us. Finger? Tongue? Cock?”

“Nose,” he said, and they all laughed.

“Your puny beak isn’t big enough,” said Magellan, whose own proboscis was something to behold.

“It is if I tell a couple of lies first.” More muted laughter; it was obviously a reference they didn’t get.

“There’s a proven correlation between nose size and cock size,” said Magellan, stroking his monster sniffer.

Perlman leaned toward him threateningly. “What kind of tan lines she got?” he asked, a positively carnivorous look on his face. He’d already expressed open disappointment that Yolanda hadn’t yet chosen to don her swimsuit and bask in the sun. “She wax at all?”

Lionel shook his head. “I’m not gonna tell you that. For God’s sake.”

“Come on, Lionel. We just want to live vicariously through you. For a minute or two, anyway.”

He jiggled his pole so much that the line twanged like a violin string. “Sorry. Not gonna talk about her like she’s some kind of whore.”

Perlman’s brow knit, and Lionel knew he’d made a mistake. That reference couldn’t fail to jog loose some kind of telling image in the man’s rat-trap memory.

When it became clear that Lionel wasn’t going to divulge any of Yolanda’s sexual secrets, Magellan declared himself disgusted that they’d caught nothing all morning, and suggested they take one of the canoes out to the center of the lake and try their luck there.

It was high noon now and Lionel had reached the end of his rope. It was one thing to have to waste his time fishing on the dock; quite another to have to do so in a tiny, cramped canoe, cut off from the refrigerator and the bathroom and, not the least, David’s door.

“You guys go on ahead,” he said, reeling in his line. “Don’t think I can handle any more sun; my skin’s smarting already.”

“Yeah, but that’s from
friction
,” said Deming, and the others guffawed.

They headed to the boathouse; but before they reached it, Magellan stopped Lionel and put his hand on his shoulder. “Do me a favor,” he said conspiratorially. “Long as you’re staying behind, keep an eye on my son, will you?”

“Sure,” he said. As if he needed to be asked.

“Last time I checked he was still asleep. That’s a sign of depression, right there. Something big is bugging him, something that drove him out of the priesthood. Can’t imagine what could’ve done that. He was such a religious kid! All the holy cards and medals and shit, that was him. Anyway, see if you can befriend him. Get him to confide in you. He won’t say a word to me … I think because of Wilma.”

Lionel nodded. “I’ll do what I can.” His pulse was racing. He didn’t know what to think. He only knew that his million-dollar client had asked a favor of him, and he must comply.

Deming and Perlman shouted for Magellan’s help in getting the canoe to the water, so he dismissed Lionel with a clap on the back and went to their aid. Lionel practically vaulted the entire distance to the house.

When he entered, he was startled to find David’s door wide open.

He went over and peered in. The daybed that took up an entire wall of the tiny room was empty, its sheets cast into a heap. David’s suitcase lay open on the floor, and several bottles and jars sat on the small dressing table above it.

He took a tentative step inside — just for a quick look around, to see if he could spot any clues to David’s intriguing character. But there was nothing; only the clerical bareness he assumed all priests were trained to adopt.

Someone tapped him on the shoulder.

He whirled, and there was David, standing before him dripping wet and naked but for a towel around his waist. His broad, white chest gleamed like the holy grail.

“Your dad asked me to check on you,” Lionel blurted. “He thought your sleeping late could be a sign of depression.”
Don’t tell him that!
he admonished himself, too late.

David rolled his eyes in exasperation. “Wonder what talk show he got
that
from?” he said, slipping past Lionel. He carried a bottle of honey-colored shampoo, which he placed next to the other bottles on the dressing table. “Well, you can assure him my sleeping late is only a symptom of sleeping late.”

Lionel backed out of the room and could see through the dining room window that the canoe was on its way to the center of the lake — slowly, though, as Deming was somehow contriving to send each of his oars in a different direction.

“Your dad’s out on the lake now,” he said to David, who held his towel around his waist as though only waiting for Lionel to depart before dropping it. “Listen,” he said, his heart pounding so loudly that he could hear it reverberate in his skull, “I just have to say, I admire your integrity.”

“My
integrity
?” David said, cocking his head. Water dripped from his hair onto his ivory shoulders.

“Yes, for what you — well, it can’t be easy, leaving your calling like you’ve done.”

“Unless you have good reason. Which I do.”

“I know.”

“You
know
?”

“Well … I can guess.” Who
was
this talking? Yolanda’s Frankenstein monster? He knew he was risking everything; but the opportunity — the seclusion — the uncanny excuse of Magellan’s entreaty to him — they were too great a combination to resist.

David smiled. “Oh, you can
guess
, can you?”

“Well, yeah. I mean, uh …” He leaned against the door jamb and dragged one of his toes across the floor. “Well, I know you probably picked up on the vibe between Kevin and me … and I mean, because of that, I’m kind of in
tune
with — uh — you know, with certain … uh …”

David smiled even more widely, but his eyes betrayed no merriment. “You mean, because
you’re
gay, you think you can suss that out in anyone else, is that it?”

Lionel felt his brain push against his eyeballs. His knees threatened to buckle. “Yeah, I guess.”

“And it’s got nothing to do with the fact that you were eavesdropping on my conversation with Paul last night.”

Lionel’s blood went cold in his veins.
Busted!

But even now, he’d come too far to let that frighten him off. Better to forge ahead, to be even bolder — to resort to
no
lies, not even any
half-
truths. Total honesty, now. For just this once — just to see how it
felt
…

“Yeah, that helped,” he said in a small voice.

David’s chest shook. A moment later he let out a bubbly, infectious laugh. “
I
saw you, but I don’t think Paul did. He was too pissed off to see
anything
.”

Lionel wasn’t certain whether he was being invited to laugh along, or was being laughed
at
. In any case, he didn’t feel very merry. “I mean it, though,” he said gravely, his voice raw and unsteady. “What I said about your integrity. And your — courage. It took
courage
to leave like that. Kind I haven’t got.”

They faced each other now, the small space between them rapidly filling up with enough magnetic energy to stop every clock in the house.

“Courage is only part of it,” said David, his own voice trembling now.

“What else?”

“Fear.”

Lionel nodded. “I know all about that.”

“Loneliness.”

Lionel nodded again.

David took a step toward him.

He backed away instinctively. David stopped.

“I’m sorry, Lionel,” he said. “I don’t usually behave like this. It’s just that I’m on such a goddamn precipice these days. Every single thing I do has so many enormous consequences that, paradoxically, none of the consequences seems to
count
.” He laughed nervously, and his eyes brimmed with wild, angry, frustrated tears. “Does that make any sense at all to you?”

Lionel lunged in and kissed him, then took away his towel and buried his face in what he found there.

The distorted square of sunlight David’s window allowed into the room had now moved down the wall by almost eight inches. Lying on the daybed, with David spooning him and curling his hair between his fingers, Lionel tried to determine how much time had passed. At least a half-hour. Maybe more. Maybe a month, if how he felt was any clue. He’d never had such an explosive orgasm, and if David’s reaction was any indication, neither had he.

He sighed deeply and contentedly, then took David’s hand in his and gently pulled it away from his head. He rolled over to kiss him and found himself facing an altogether different man: someone whose eyes sparkled, whose teeth burst through his lips with the irrepressible, unselfconscious smile of pure joy. The sullen, fidgety, feisty David he’d met only a day earlier had completely evaporated.

“We’d better get up,” he said, and just as he said it he heard shouts from the lake.

He leapt to his feet and pulled on his boxers, then peeked out the bedroom window. He could clearly see Magellan, Perlman, and Deming making their way towards shore; Magellan was screaming at Deming, “THE SAME DIRECTION, YOU IDIOT! STROKE BOTH IN THE SAME DIRECTION!”

His pulse quickened. He turned and saw David getting dressed, slipping into his shapeless khakis and pale blue T-shirt, hiding everything that Lionel now knew so intimately.

But David didn’t don his old face along with his old clothes. He continued to beam, and every time he looked at Lionel he broke into a toothy grin.

This wouldn’t do at all. Anyone who looked at him would know at once that something material had changed for him. They’d start guessing. They’d maybe even start
asking
. And what would David do?
Tell
them? Oh, he had Yolanda to blame for this! Yolanda and her insidious, subversive encouragement. Passion spent, pleasure dissipated, he could only think now of the danger.

“THE
OTHER
WAY, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE! YOU’RE PULLING US BACK OUT TO THE CENTER!”

Lionel tucked in his shirt and went out to the kitchen. He was positively parched. He opened the refrigerator to find something cold to drink, and David came up behind him and put his arms around his waist. “You’re amazing, Lionel,” he said. “Just what I needed.” He kissed his neck.

Magellan’s voice kept getting louder and louder. Lionel quelled the panic in his breast. The thing to do now was get David out of the house until the puppy-dog look left his face.

“You know what I could go for?” he said, turning to face him. “A nice, thick milkshake. Filled with artery-clogging cholesterol and about a gallon of butterfat.”

“Sounds great. Want to go into town and track one down?”

Bulls-eye!
“A fine idea.”

“Good,” said David, and he cocked his head and looked at Lionel from beneath raised eyebrows. “Not exactly in the mood to deal with my dad right now, if you know what I mean.”

Lionel almost fainted from relief. “That makes two of us.”

They headed out the door, but Lionel took one look at the driveway and stopped short. “Shit! I forgot, Yolanda took my car for her all-girl shopping expedition.”

“I was wondering where everyone was,” said David. “No problem. We’ll take Dad’s wheels.”

“What?”
Lionel was genuinely stunned. “Are you
crazy
?”

He laughed. “He may be your client, but he’s my old man. Yesterday he offered me use of the car whenever I like. Wait here. I’ll go grab the keys from his dresser and leave him a note.”

Lionel, wondering what David might write in his present state of mind, called after him,
“Keep it short!”

A few minutes later they were sailing down the bumpy rural roads in Babcock Magellan’s flashy gold Jaguar, the windows rolled down and the stereo dialed up full blast. Lyle Lovett was wailing,
“Man, she’s no lady, she’s my wife,”
which seemed somehow appropriate, although Lionel couldn’t have begun to say why.

David took a sharp turn at about fifty miles an hour, sending a thin hail of gravel up onto the hood and windshield. Ping! Ping! Ping! Each pebble caused Lionel a minor heart seizure. “Slow down,” he entreated David.

One side of David’s mouth crept up into a half-smile, and he placed his hand on Lionel’s thigh. “Don’t
feel
like slowing down, babe,” he said. “Life —
real
life — began again for me today.” He squeezed Lionel’s knee. “No pressure, now. I know you may not want anything long-term. But I’ve got to tell you, what you did for me today, it’s — well, I’ll never forget it.” He shook his head in amazement. “Sex without
guilt
, Lionel. No hypocrisy, no hiding, no worrying about breaking vows … it felt so
clean.
It felt like — like —” He turned to look at Lionel. “It felt like making love.”

“Whoa, watch
out
,” Lionel said, pointing to a large tree limb in the road. The danger it posed wasn’t nearly significant enough to warrant his outburst, but David was steering into dangerous waters, and it was the only way he could think to steer back out.

David, however, must have guessed that he’d been deliberately put off. After yanking his hand from Lionel’s knee to grapple with the steering wheel, he didn’t replace it, and when Lionel looked at him, the sparkle had gone out of his eyes. He’d lost his smile, too.

What am I doing?
Lionel thought. Up at the house, in David’s room, he hadn’t cared about anything. He’d wanted to join him on the edge, wanted to be with him, risking everything. And now … all it had taken was one quick splurt, was that it? He was, in the end, a typical male, just a sex pig, there for the ride and then emotionally out the door.

And yet, this man, this
man
…

He looked at David, who didn’t look back, and he felt something like an illness grip him, a haze of nuclear radiation searing through his body, spreading through his bloodstream like an acid. He felt his stomach constrict at the slightest remembrance of where they had touched, and of the little sigh David had given repeatedly, and how it excited him so much because it said so much about his
character
— about his willingness to reveal himself, his bravery in showing himself totally to Lionel, his fundamental honesty. He felt his throat close up and his ears start to ring and the skin on his arms and legs prickle with a cold, nasty pox.

Something this deliriously, wonderfully unpleasant could only be love.

He reached over and put his own hand on David’s thigh. David turned and gave him a smile that could have lit up the universe’s largest black hole.

They reached town and pulled up in front of a small ice-cream shop, then rolled down the windows and got out.

David, whose daring was something Lionel suspected he would never get used to, patted him on the tush and said, “You want to go in and order for me? Caramel, if they have it. I just need to run down the street and get a book of stamps.”

“Sure,” said Lionel, his face still flushed from the tush-patting. He looked furtively around to see if anyone had witnessed it.

David started down the street, then turned and called,
“Don’t ditch me, or anything!”
He laughed, as though it were a joke; but there was a touch of anxiety in his voice that told Lionel he was still a
little
insecure about him.

I won’t ditch you,
thought Lionel;
I would never ditch you, I will never ditch you.

He watched until David had gone two blocks and turned a corner; then, hating himself for doing this, he doubled back to the car and examined it for pebble damage. He knew that if there was any, Magellan would hold
him
responsible.

Then he wondered why he was bothering. Because if Magellan discovered what he’d just done with his son, the state of his Jaguar would be the least of the strikes against him.

As it turned out, the car was covered with an unappealing coat of dust but seemed otherwise unscathed. Lionel straightened up and checked his reflection in the window of the drivers’ door — then noticed another reflection just beyond him, a reflection he couldn’t possibly be seeing; a ghost of a past infatuation, come to mock this new, true thing he had found. It was coming up the sidewalk at him. He turned and confronted it.

“No
way
,” he said shaking his head. “You cannot
possibly
be here.”

Emil stopped cold. “Lionel!”
he cried. He looked like a kid who’d been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “Oh, God. You weren’t meant to know I’m here.”

Suddenly all the pieces fell into place. His face began to itch with anger. “Don’t you and Yolanda have anything better to do with your lives than invent new secrets to keep from me?”

His massive eyebrows shot up. “You
know
about us?”

“Yes. I’m the official Last Person In the World to get the news, but I’m finally clued in.”

He sighed. “Well, that’s a relief, anyway.” He stuck his hands in his pockets. “Want to talk about it?”

“
Love
to.” He looked down the street to where David had gone, and said, “Let’s make it short, though.”

“Of course.” They started strolling in the opposite direction. “There isn’t much to tell. Just enough for you to see me back to my car. I’m staying at a motel not far from here.”

Emil hadn’t gotten the hang of American fashion yet. The shorts he was wearing were jet black and about three inches too short, making for a rather startling expanse of thigh and leg broken only by the black stretch socks he wore beneath his sandals. A more radical departure from Bob Smartt could not possibly be imagined. Yolanda would really have to take him in hand.

But even more shocking was the smell of alcohol on his breath. Lionel couldn’t believe it at first, and was convinced it was coming from another source; but as Emil talked the aroma traveled with them and grew stronger.

“Is everything okay?” Lionel asked.

“Actually … no. Yolanda was meant to join me at my motel this morning, but she never appeared.”

“Ohhh,”
said Lionel, suddenly realizing what he’d done. “Sorry, buddy — my fault. She made an excuse to leave the cabin, but before she could get away I saddled her with a bunch of other passengers. And it was a situation where she couldn’t say no. I was wondering why she looked like she wanted to kill me.”

Emil shut his eyes and heaved an enormous sigh of relief. “Well, I’m glad to hear that much. I thought perhaps she was having too much fun, and had decided to cancel our meeting without even calling.”

“I’m sure she
tried
to call. But it was probably a long time before she could get to a phone. The mall she was headed to is about an hour away.”

“Oh, I had grown upset and left the motel by then.” He shrugged; he was breathing easier. “No matter. We’ll all laugh about it someday.”

They stopped to let a stream of school-age kids dart past. Some rode skateboards, all screamed noisily. Emil’s skin looked ashen; he must have been devastated by Yolanda’s apparent desertion of him.

When they were able to proceed again, Lionel asked, “What are you
doing
here, though? Don’t you have an exam this week?”

“Yes, but not until Thursday. I confess, after I told Yolanda I couldn’t see her for a while, I panicked. I was sure I would be spending every spare minute studying, but instead I found myself thinking obsessively about her. I underestimated my need for her. Just as I can’t give up food or drink while studying, I cannot give up Yolanda. So I called her and begged her to see me. And that’s when she told me she’d already agreed to be your ‘date’ up here in Wisconsin.”

“So why didn’t she just back out? I wouldn’t have asked for a reason. She wouldn’t have had to tell me it was because of her thing with you. She knows that.”

“Oh, she would never
think
of backing out. She loves you, Lionel, and wanted to help you.” They reached Emil’s rented Buick Skylark. He folded his arms over the roof, apparently in no hurry to drive away. “Plus,” he continued, “she still needed to get out of the way of that unhinged ex-boyfriend of hers, with his linen blazers and his spear. So we thought the best solution all around was for me to follow and get a room someplace. I can study as effectively here as anywhere else, and the idea was that Yolanda would come whenever she could get away. This morning was to have been our first rendezvous.”

“Which I spoiled for you.” He shook his head. “I really owe you one, Emil. Me and my big mouth.”

“It’s not your fault,” he said, resting his chin on his arms. “If only we could have told you I’d be here, it wouldn’t have happened. But Yolanda insisted that you not know because she thought you might still have feelings for me.”

Lionel’s jaw dropped. “She
told
you about that? The big-mouthed, traitorous —”

“Lionel, Lionel! I knew already. I’m not stupid.” He pushed away from the car and started fishing for the keys in his too-tight pockets. “And even if I hadn’t known before, you must expect that what she knows, I will know. Don’t lovers tell each other everything?”

“How the hell would I know?”

He produced the keys, then held them limp in his hand and looked at Lionel sideways. “I hope you feel nothing for me now … do you?”

“No, no,” he said, relieved to be able to say it truthfully. “I mean, yes, I feel nothing. In fact … there’s someone else now. Someone new.”

“A homosexual, this time?”

“Yes,” he said, laughing. “I managed to get it right.”

Emil smiled and grabbed Lionel’s neck in an affectionate stranglehold. He shook him a little, then let him go and said, “I’m very happy for you, my friend. Happy for both of us. For all
four
of us, even this man I don’t yet know.”

At this conjuration of David, Lionel checked his watch. He could very well be back at the ice-cream shop now, wondering what had happened to him. He had to double back there. The thought of David doubting him for even a moment was agonizing. Was this what it was like to be in love?