Closet Case (Robert Rodi Essentials) (5 page)

Was it fair? No. Did it make him angry? Yes. If he and Kevin had received one one-hundredth of the encouragement and approval he’d gotten this morning alone, just for asking a woman to dinner, they might still be together. And that was a possibility to make even his beloved advertising career pale.

Well, spilled mike and the road not taken and all that. He couldn’t change the world, he knew that well enough, but he
could
play by the world’s rules. And that’s what he was doing. He had a great job, made a good salary, and had a decent home, and that was more than a lot of people could say. He’d keep it all, too; he’d get through this ordeal with Tracy somehow, and go on as before.

The only question was —
how?

On his way back to the office, Lionel crossed the street and found himself within a few yards of the Transylvanian demonstrators. He paused to take a closer look at them. Being fairly apolitical himself, he was always curious about overtly political behavior in others. And as these people also possessed that almost mystical Eastern European aura, so revered since the miraculous revolutions of 1989, he found them doubly fascinating — these creatures who, although many had undoubtedly lived in Chicago for years, had such close ties, of both blood and history, to a nation only now emerging from a latter-day dark age. They looked it, too; in spite of the occasional pair of Air Jordans or acid-washed jeans — or maybe because of them — there was a peasant air about them, an earthiness.

Lionel struggled to dredge up what he knew about Transylvania, and all that came to mind was that it was where Dracula movies were set. For all he knew, then, it might be a mere storybook realm, not a real one. But judging by the placards being hoisted aloft by these demonstrators, Transylvania was indeed a real place, and just as the Baltic republics had won their freedom from the Soviet Union, apparently Transylvania now wanted its freedom from Romania. But why? What was their complaint against that country? He strove to remember all he could about Romania, which was little enough. It had suffered a bloody revolution not long ago, hadn’t it? All those shocking, full-color photo spreads in the newsweeklies. He seemed to recall a shamelessly self-aggrandizing dictator with a name almost every American pronounced haltingly, and an insane wife who got quite a lot of press (how the media did
love
the insane wives of dictators). Then there was a post-coup kangaroo court, a hasty execution by firing squad — and that’s all he could recall. He felt a little flush of shame, just as he had felt at the time, watching people crow over the fall of Romania’s tyrant even though they’d never even heard of him six months before. He’d had an insight then: Americans are a people who only like to read the last chapter of a book, and only if it has a happy ending. And now, three years after the earth had rocked on its axis, it was all no more than a Trivial Pursuit question — a Trivial Pursuit question he himself couldn’t answer.

Instead of being so wrapped up in my own problems,
he thought now,
instead of gazing at my navel from dawn to dusk, maybe I ought to read more. Maybe I ought to start following these movements, chart the ebb and flow of history, look at the broad canvas of mankind’s struggle on earth, study th—

He was halted in mid-thought by the sight of a broad-backed protestor with a mane of raven-black hair and a bushy black mustache. His heart quickened.
Babe-o-rama,
he thought appreciatively as he watched this new discovery — clad in a Bart Simpson T-shirt that read, ironically given the situation, DON’T HAVE A COW, MAN! — pass before him, raising his fist and crying “Freedom!” at the top of his no doubt massive lungs. Lionel pretended to fumble for something in his pocket, the better to stay rooted to the spot and wait for the circle of marchers to bring this sizzling-hot number around for another close-up inspection.

And then another, and another, and another, until the hunk, on his fourth go-round, met Lionel’s eyes and, boring into them for one heart-stopping moment, shouted,
“Freedom! Freedom for the people of Transylvania!”
before marching angrily on.

Lionel, startled and disoriented by the unexpectedness of the confrontation, whirled around to escape and caught his foot on the leg of a mailbox. He flailed to keep himself from stumbling, and his arm knocked a carton of Chicken McNuggets out of a young girl’s hand, sending it into an almost perfectly described aerial arc. By some miracle it landed square in the middle of a trash can, where a hungry bum who had been sifting through the garbage stared at it in delighted awe, as though it had been dropped there for his benefit by a suddenly benevolent God.

Lionel blurted a “Sorry” to the girl whom he had so carelessly deprived of lunch, then brushed himself off and zoomed back to the office.

Back at his desk, he doffed his jacket and dropped himself into his chair. Safe at last! And what a disturbing encounter
that
had been. He wasn’t accustomed to having the objects of his lustful scrutiny turn their scrutiny on
him
, much less fire a fiery political demand his way (as though he had any power to
do
anything about it, for God’s sake).

Well,
he thought,
big, bad Ivan sure embarrassed the piss out of me.
Almost without realizing it, he pulled a pair of binoculars from his desk drawer, and now rose and went to the window. He scanned the street fourteen floors down and a half-block north, until he zeroed in on the demonstrators. He deftly adjusted the focus, and within moments he’d found him again, still angry, still marching, still hairy. “Oh, Ivan, Ivan,” he muttered. “You goddamn beautiful
tease,
you.”

“What’cha lookin’ at?” asked someone directly behind him.

Startled, he dropped the binoculars, then made a fumbling attempt to catch them; but they hit the window and glanced off it, slipping through his hands to the window ledge, where they knocked over the Bronze City Award the agency had won for the All-Pro E-Z Tire Pump spot that starred the weird celebrity ventriloquist and his even more celebrated dummy (who, in a highly theatrical flourish that had made the spot such a favorite, was the one who actually operated the pump). Both binoculars and award hit the carpet with a thud.

He whirled to face the intruder; it was Donna.
Thank God,
he thought;
she can’t have heard what I was mumbling!

“Donna,” he said, “I was just — there’s this billboard for rent on Grand and I wanted to see if I could spot it from here, or —”

Before he could finish, Hackett Perlman leaned into his office and tapped Donna’s shoulder. Donna turned to face him.

“I — need — to — see — you,” he said, enunciating every syllable with annoying precision, as if Donna had only just learned to read lips that morning. Then he continued down the hall, having barely broken his stride.

Donna turned and winked at Lionel, then trotted after him.

As a reflex, Lionel called after her: “Donna! Wait!” But of course she didn’t hear him.

He dropped into a crouch, returned the City Award to the window ledge, then retrieved the binoculars and stood upright again. He went out into the hallway and looked after Donna, managing to catch her eye just as she slipped into Perlman’s office. She winked at him again.

His heart stuttered. That wink —
twice
now. What did it mean? He felt sure it was some kind of recognition of a bond between them. And what bond could that be, except the big
H?

Still, she’d demonstrated her gracious acceptance of his privacy — she hadn’t gone and blabbed about his proclivities to anyone, and even face-to-face with him she conveyed her tacit understanding of that privacy with a wink. That’s what it meant; all it could possibly mean. She would tell no one; he felt confident of that.

But even though she respected his privacy, would she respect his
hypocrisy?
Would she keep her mouth shut once she got wind of the office gossip about the sudden flowering of his apparently long-budding romance with Tracy? He couldn’t be sure. If she were enough of an activist, this might just be where she’d draw the line. Everyone was “outing” everyone else these days, and Lionel could easily envision it happening to him. Donna would do it for his own good; that’s how she’d see it.

He went back to his desk and put his hand over his forehead. His brain had started to hurt. It was just massively irritating to have to consider all these possibilities and counter-possibilities, all because of a few
tiny
slip-ups he’d allowed to pass unchecked. Well, he wasn’t going to allow them to ruin his life; but for the moment, he was just plain stumped as to what to do about them.

Finally Gloria Gimbek from the media department buzzed his office intercom to ask if he was free to go over an All-Pro radio buy, and he was forced to abandon the dilemma before he had resolved it. He was relieved to do so, because after manipulating cold, hard numbers with Gloria, he could approach the murkier matter of manipulating his fellow human beings, armed with a fresher perspective.

At least that’s what he hoped.

That night, Lionel drove to the suburb of Western Springs to dine with his family. He’d received the invitation — command, really — late in the day, when his father, Lieutenant Colonel Samson X. Frank (United States Army, retired) phoned him at the office.

“Lionel,” he’d said, his voice so crisp and authoritative that it forestalled any opposition, “dinner will be served here at seven, and your presence is expected. I will tell you why. Your aunt has, predictably, made far too much lobster bisque for just the three of us in residence, and, as you know, I refuse to eat leftover seafood because the dangers outweigh any possible economic advantage. Therefore, we are forced to recruit additional diners from outside the house. I tell you this so that you know you may bring a date if you wish. You may bring the population of Uruguay if you wish. Your aunt has single-handedly placed Maine lobster on the World Wildlife Fund endangered species list.”

Lionel sighed and said, “Okay, Pop.” He had never refused one of his father’s invitations. His older brother, Eugene, had done that once. Eugene now lived in Minnesota. Lionel kept hoping one day he’d sneak back into Illinois for a weekend or something.

Rush-hour traffic on the Eisenhower Expressway was appalling — “gas-valves to grille-holes,” as one radio announcer put it. Lionel jumped around the dial, alighting on a succession of fudge-voiced classical music announcers reading overwritten advertisements for suburban restaurants, colorless news broadcasters reciting the litany of S&L bailout effluvia, and wearyingly smug disc jockeys chortling over their own sophomoric witticisms. Music, when he could find it, was no improvement, consisting largely of treacly piano concertos he couldn’t hear over the white noise of traffic, bass-heavy rap numbers exalting the punishment of women, and gooey rock songs about the hardships of a musician’s life on the road (performed, inevitably, by twenty-four-year-old millionaires).

Eventually he gave up, switching off the radio entirely and concentrating instead on changing lanes to get ahead of traffic. This was only possible to a limited extent, and after swerving dangerously into and out of the congested lanes on either side of him for close to fifteen minutes, he found himself still roughly neck-and-neck and with bright orange Tastee Hen truck that had been right alongside him at the start.

Abandoning the effort, he curled his left leg under the seat and leaned his left shoulder against the car door. He could keep up with the stop-and-go, snail’s-paced flow of traffic by alternating his right foot between the brake and the accelerator — a tiny tap here, a short rest there, and so on. He sighed dejectedly, put his mind on hold, and settled in for a long drive.

And inevitably he found himself dwelling on the problem of his family. There was his father, first of all, who had retired from the army at the insistence of a young bride who had not liked the goings-on in Vietnam, not one bit (well, Lionel reflected, opposites do attract), and who then, only four years later, and just a few months after his wife had discovered a curious lump on her breast, had found himself a widower. Having lost his commission
and
his spouse, he’d spent a brief spell brooding and wallowing in bitterness until his sister came to help care for his three young children. Aunt Ramona was two years older than her brother, and even though he had been a Chinese prisoner of war during the Korean “conflict” (as he still insisted on calling it) and had a chest full of medals as mementos (or, more accurately, proof) of his valor under fire, she treated him like the most tiresome of adolescents and dismissed virtually every one of his opinions with a disappointed shake of her head and an, “Oh, Sonny,
please.”
Of course she drove him mad. He responded to her looseness and irreverence by adopting the kind of manner he might have had had he never left the military at all — had he, in fact, gone on to make general.

And this was the mood of the house in which Lionel and Eugene and their sister, Greta, had grown up — and in which Greta in fact still lived (she was a twenty-seven-year-old guitarist in an all-girl Christian heavy-metal rock band called Terrible Swift Sword; in other words, unemployable and broke). Lionel, who had the added incentive of discovering himself gay, had fled the house at eighteen for college and never gone back for more than a visit. But each occurrence was as trying as a year in a Soviet gulag. His father and Aunt Ramona seemed to exist now only to bedevil each other, and whenever Lionel went to see them, each clutched at his presence as if at a new weapon to wield against the other. He would often end up feeling utterly battered about by the time he staggered out the front door for his car. And with his sister ever more pious and painted-faced, he found he had less and less to say to her, too. Even the family spaniel, Killer, whom Lionel had loved, had died the year before of extreme old age (despite which the Colonel still viewed him as being AWOL, and could not speak his name without the bitterness of the betrayed).

So it was an exercise in pain and futility, revealing the ultimate absurdity of the universe, that Lionel should go so far out of his way, undergo such agony as this traffic jam, to suffer a visit which he was certain would effectively crush his will to live.

The sudden flash of brake lights just a yard ahead of his front bumper startled him out of his dim reverie. He slammed on his own brake and shouted a curse at the car ahead (a much more vile curse than he would’ve dared utter face to face). He looked around to get his bearings; the blocks of gray, grime-packed buildings on each side of the highway had given way to tree-dotted neighborhoods. While lost in thought, he’d inched his way into the suburbs — and it had been relatively painless after all.

Still, this reminder that his fellow drivers were an unpredictable and dangerous lot left him less willing to let his mind wander again, so he nosed his way into the right-hand lane, slipped down the next exit ramp, and drove the rest of the way to Western Springs on ordinary, sweet-smelling suburban thoroughfares.

By the time he reached his father’s house — an undistinguished two-story colonial encircled by evergreen bushes that no one bothered to keep up (some were even dead, sitting brown amidst the green ones like rotting teeth) — the skies, which had been cloudy for days, had finally broken, and a dull, drizzling rain had begun. Lionel parked on the street and hopped out of the car, then hunched his shoulders against the rain and trotted up the front walk. It was seven-sixteen.

Before he could ring the bell, his father opened the door for him, wearing a white shirt and tie, as he always did. “You’re twenty minutes late,” he said flatly.

“Only sixteen,” Lionel mumbled apologetically as he reached out and grasped his father’s hand for a perfunctory shake.

“Still, I did say seven o’clock,” the colonel insisted, accepting the greeting coldly, then withdrawing his hand to shut the door behind his son.

“Sorry, Pop,” Lionel offered, doffing his jacket and hanging it on the rack in the vestibule. “Traffic.” He tried to change the subject. “How are the rodents?”

“Brave, as always.” Two years back, the colonel had attempted to become an entrepreneur by raising chinchillas in the basement, whose pelts he had intended to sell at great profit. But once he realized he’d need a farm approximately twelve times the size of his cellar to accommodate enough livestock to win the custom of even the smallest fur manufacturer, he’d given up and kept the beast as pets, naming them all after famous generals and doting on them in his private moments.

Now he clasped his hands behind him, cradling them in the small of his back and standing with his legs wide apart, like a comic-book superhero. He didn’t look remotely comfortable, but it gave him the desired aspect of military authority. “You didn’t choose to bring a date, I see.”

Lionel ambled into the house, hoping to entice his father to follow him. “I came straight from the office, Pop.”

The colonel stepped after his son briskly, hands still at his back. “Why didn’t you call Lori?” This was a claims adjustor at Lionel’s auto insurer. He’d met her when he cracked up his Celica the summer before, and had somehow found the nerve to ask her to go with him to his cousin Hannah’s wedding (he’d felt, at the time, that he required a “beard”). He hadn’t seen her since, but the colonel had liked her on sight and, having seen his son with no other woman in the interim, had fixed on her as Lionel’s “steady,” despite Lionel’s constant protests to the contrary.

“Pop,” Lionel said as he headed for the bathroom to wash his hands, “I haven’t seen Lori in
ages.”

“Would’ve been a good time to renew the acquaintance, then,” Colonel Frank insisted. “I’m sure she wouldn’t mind seeing your family again. We all got on, you know.” He paused. “She did say she’d enjoy seeing the chinchillas. I recall her saying that. No prompting from me.”

Lionel sighed and shut the door, as though requiring privacy for a more personal function than hand-washing. The gambit worked; he could hear his father’s footsteps in apparent retreat.

He lathered up his hands. The lavender-scented soap Aunt Ramona always bought called up a flood of memories (chiefly of his father’s protests that it was “no soap for a man,” which only ensured Ramona’s loyalty to it till the crack of doom). He ran his filmy hands over his face, then splashed himself clean and toweled down. He felt refreshed, almost invigorated.

He took a gulp of air, straightened his spine, then opened the door and headed for the kitchen, where the family ate on most nights (the dining room being reserved for holidays). Aunt Ramona, tall and unwieldy and with a wall of irregular, multi-hued teeth that looked like the Chicago skyline at dusk, hopped up from her chair and gave him a big kiss.
“Honey,”
she cooed, “how wonderful of, how
wonderful
of you to come.” Aunt Ramona had an annoying habit of starting a sentence over after only having gotten a few words into it; she’d always done so, but Lionel suspected she actually began cultivating it once she figured out how much it grated on the colonel.

“Wouldn’t have missed it, Aunt Ramona,” he said, slipping into the chair that had been designated his since his boyhood. Enveloped in this close, untidy, enervating environment again, he felt his old adolescent anxieties stir anew. He shook his head to quiet them, then reached for the soup tureen. “Lobster bisque … that’s new for you, isn’t it?”

“Uh-huh, uh-
huh,”
Ramona said brightly, lowering her big-hipped frame back into her own chair again. “Didn’t do badly, if I do say so myself.”

“It does have a taste to it,” said Colonel Frank, looking into his spoon perplexedly as he lifted it again to his lips. He let a cooling puff of air issue from his lips, then tipped the spoon into his mouth and grimaced. “Nothing like the taste of
lobster,
unfortunately. Don’t know how you managed to mask it, Ramona, given the sheer number of the poor beasts you spent the day flinging into the pot.”

Lionel turned to his sister Greta and gave her a quick, private look, which she returned; it was their way of acknowledging that their father and aunt were back at it again.

Greta herself was looking more like a Big Top attraction than usual. Her hair was wildly teased and was of a strangely unnatural hue — the kind of impossible blue-black Lionel had only ever seen fifteen years earlier, on the head of a Cher doll. He would’ve wondered if it were a wig, had he not been able to catch disturbing glimpses of scalp between the wildly spiraling fibers. Greta’s dark purple makeup encircled her eyes to Lone Ranger-ish effect, then stretched out to her temples, where it curled into little drawings of stars. From afar, it looked like she’d been smacked in each eye with a live cattle prod. And she wore a ratty old sweatshirt with the arms and most of the neck ripped away (the shirt’s emblem, a crucifix made of flesh and dripping blood, was unfortunately still intact), with neon lime Lycra shorts and black Reebok high-tops with neon orange laces. She reached for her glass of milk (she still drank the stuff with the fervor and frequency of a nine-year-old) and Lionel noticed a Cleopatra-like armband biting into her biceps.

He choked back any comment on Greta’s haute couture, and instead flickered a smile at her and said, “Not the same without Killer.”

Greta shook her head and licked away her milk mustache. “Poor old Killer,” she said with real emotion. It was the only point on which she and Lionel were still in complete accord, and it was about the only thing they had left to talk about: the good old days with good old Killer.

Before Lionel could continue in this vein, his father jumped in. “How’s business, son?”

“Good, good,” said Lionel. He didn’t know what else he could say; he knew that his father had only the faintest understanding of what his job entailed. Almost everything that Samson X. Frank knew about advertising agencies had come from watching old episodes of
Bewitched.
He still occasionally made the mistake of presuming that Lionel came up with all the ideas for his clients’ ads, and then wrote and drew them himself. That Lionel did none of this puzzled him to no end. What, then,
did
he do? Lionel hadn’t yet managed a satisfactory reply.

“I saw an, I
saw
an All-Pro Power Tools commercial yesterday on
The Joan Rivers Show,”
said Aunt Ramona as she swirled the ice cubes in her glass of tea (another of her annoying habits). “I forgot what it was about — well, there was such a, there was
such
a good-looking young man on it, I remember that much, he —”

“Chainsaw?” said Lionel at once, his spoon poised to enter his mouth.

“Yes, chainsaws,
that’s
the one,” she said brightly. “Clever of you,
clever
of you to remember. That one had some funny lines in it …” She stopped swirling the cubes and stared into space for a few seconds. “Can’t remember any of them now …”

“Well, you’re not the only one who got a kick out of it,” said Lionel between gulps of bisque (which, contrary to his father’s opinion, tasted quite wonderfully lobstery). “It just won an award. Matter of fact, we get to go to the awards banquet in a few weeks and go up to the podium and accept it and everything.”