Closet Case (Robert Rodi Essentials) (7 page)

The next day the world dared him to be frightened or unhappy. The chorus of car alarms that commenced at six o’clock each morning today seemed almost musical as they roused him from his sleep, the delirious
whoop-whoop-whoop
of one twining like a braid with the staccato
ri-ri-ri-ri-ri
of another — and the steady honk of yet a third providing an eerily comforting bass line. It sounded to Lionel like an LP record of bagpipes with a bad skip in it. And when he rose and threw open the curtains to see if one of the cars responsible for this glorious noise was his, the sun hit him smack in the face like a custard pie hurled by some heavenly devotee of Mack Sennett. He was so startled by the appearance of all this brightness that he stood for a moment, gazing in dopey delight at the world outside his window, all garish and yellow and wonderful. And then his clock radio blared to life, right in the middle of an Elvis Costello tune. It was all too perfect to be coincidence.
God
was behind this.

He scrubbed himself clean, put on his best suit — daringly double-breasted — and drove down Lake Shore Drive with the radio cranked up high, loudly singing along with Todd Rundgren’s “We Gotta Get You a Woman” even though he had the windows down. And as he glided into the Michigan Avenue exit lanes, he felt confidence and happiness bubble inside him as though he were a glass of Alka-Seltzer, and he said aloud, “I defy anything or anyone to spoil my mood today!” And just as he said it, the old Playboy Building reared its polished head and blotted out the sun, and the interior of Lionel’s car fell into chilly shadow. He looked at that unapologetically phallic structure as it loomed above him, and wondered whether he’d made a mistake by daring fate.

But he was a modern man, not given to taking signs and omens seriously. Within minutes he was striding into the agency and giving the receptionist his most dazzling smile. “Top o’ the morning, Alice,” he said, sailing up to her.
“Great
color on you.”

She looked down at the drab reddish-brown blouse she was wearing. “Is
not,”
she said incredulously.

“Is
so,”
he insisted, tossing his briefcase into the air and catching it as he passed her desk. “Brings out your cinnamon undertones.”

Alice knitted her brow in bewilderment and opened her mouth to say something, but before she could do so, the phone buzzed. She grabbed the receiver and intoned, “Good
morning,
Deming, Stark and
Will
iams.” Lionel turned into the corridor behind her. He was almost beyond her range of sight when he heard her say, “Oh, hi, Tracy.”

His next step faltered, and then he stopped altogether. Alice had swung around in her chair and seen it, had watched him grind to a halt at the mention of Tracy’s name.
God damn it,
he thought;
why the hell did I do that?

She was mouthing Tracy’s name to him now and pointing one of her manicured nails at the phone. He wanted to say,
I know it’s Tracy, you stupid mall vulture, and I don’t care.
But he couldn’t interrupt her to say that, nor could he simply resume walking; he’d already rooted himself to the spot. His indecision had decided for him.

“Uh-
huh,”
Alice was saying, nodding her head. “Uh-
huh.
He
what?
... Oh, my
God.
You’re
kidding
… You’re
sure
about it? But wouldn’t he —” She spun her chair around again, showing Lionel her back. What was going on? “Okay, okay, hon,” she cooed maternally. “You take it easy. I’ll tell Julie you won’t be in.”

Then she hung up the phone, swung around to face Lionel yet again, crossed her legs elegantly, and gripped her exposed knees with her hands. She arched her back and gave him a luxurious smile; there was an almost feline kind of glee about her. Lionel began to sweat.

“That was Tracy,” she said.

“So I gathered,” he replied witheringly, suddenly wanting to tell her what he really thought of that color on her. “She out today?” he added, jiggling his briefcase as if anxious to be on his way and not caring to spend much more time on so trivial a matter.

“Not
all
day,” Alice said teasingly, her voice full of childlike merriment. “Just this morning, because she had such an upsetting night. She broke up with Guy. This time for good. Poor thing.” She grinned at Lionel and rocked her chair back and forth. “Still, I bet I know
sommme
one who’s not entirely unhappy to hear that bit of news,” she trilled in an infuriating singsong. Then she had the audacity to wink at him! He had to turn quickly and leave before he lost control of himself and pulled her hair.

He mumbled inarticulate hellos to everyone he passed in the hall, and when he arrived at his office he found sunlight streaming into it, the same sunlight he’d so exalted only an hour before, but now it was a depressing thing. It flooded the room, throwing into high relief all the millions of flecks of dust that covered his desktop like fuzz on a peach, and made the residue between the buttons on his telephone look deep and disgusting, like something might take root and grow there. It rendered his leather chair a mass of crisp, cracked platelets, pulling away from each other as in a textbook drawing of continental drift.

Cheap little office,
thought, resenting the sun for showing it to him;
cheap little office, fit for a cheap little man which cheap little problems.

He set his briefcase on the desk, then went and drew the blinds. The offending sunlight was cut off at once, and darkness eddied around him like a pool of cool, murky water. He went back to the doorway and flicked on the overhead light; a bluish phosphorescence immediately filled every corner evenly and neatly, giving it an impersonal, robotic feel, which was exactly what he wanted. “Just let me do my job today,” he muttered, knowing even as he said it that his job required more from him than a set of objectively defined actions in which he might comfortably lose himself. He was an account executive; he had to schmooze with clients, cajole artists and writers, haggle with media sales people. But human interaction was beyond him right now; he wanted to spend the morning crunching numbers and forgetting about the mess his life was in, with his family and coworkers pushing him into a romance with Tracy that even Tracy’s boyfriend was now agreeable enough to promote by allowing himself to become Tracy’s
ex
-boyfriend.

For nearly an hour, nothing stirred in Lionel’s office but the keypad of his calculator and the tail end of his ballpoint pen. He restructured Gloria Gimbek’s proposed radio buy in a way that used All-Pro’s diminished budget for the month to buy a level of exposure almost on par with one of their major holiday promotions, a feat he accomplished by cutting back on the usual stations and instead buying more drive-time on two smaller stations that had changed formats since the last ratings book. Gloria relied entirely too much on that damned ratings book. What, he wondered, would happen to this account if he left the radio buys entirely up to her? He shuddered at the thought, then sat back and examined his handiwork. It was a masterpiece of efficiency, economy, and psychology. He reflected with grim satisfaction that most artists create their masterworks while suffering.

He booted up his Macintosh and was getting ready to type an admonitory note to Gloria when Carlton Wenck stuck his head in the door and said, “Knock knock.” (Carlton never actually knocked, he just spoke the words, which was another thing about him that Lionel really, really hated.)

Lionel turned his head but pointedly did not turn his chair, and kept his hands poised over the keyboard; Carlton must be shown that he was interrupting him. “Hey, Carlton,” he said in a flat voice. “Something I can do for you?”

Carlton took a few steps into the office. “Looks like you’re burning the midnight oil in here! You oughtta open the blinds. Beautiful day outside.”

“I know it is. Need me for something?”

Carlton raised his eyebrows and cocked his head a little, as if taken aback by Lionel’s abruptness. “Bad day, bud?”

“No, no,” Lionel said, giving up and letting his hands drop into his lap. “Just busy, that’s all.” He still refused to turn his chair away from the Mac.

“Tracy’s not in this morning,” Carlton said, a little smirk sneaking onto his face. “Wouldn’t have anything to do with your mood, would it?”

Lionel sighed, but decided to offer no other response.

Carlton grimaced and shrugged his shoulders, then said, “Okay. Listen. I’m putting together the company football pool, and —”

“Thanks, Carlton,” he said, shaking his head. “Not this year.”

“That’s what you said
last
year.”

“Well, now I’m saying it again.” He could hear how harsh he sounded, and made an effort to soften his tone. “Thing is, I don’t gamble.”

“Well, it’s hardly gambli—”

“No exceptions,”
Lionel said, interrupting him. “Honest, Carlton. I …” He grimaced. “I used to have a problem, see. Just a small one. So now I —”

“You?”
Carlton blurted. His jaw dropped.

Lionel finally swung his chair around to face him. He was a little stung by the incredulity implied by that
you.
“Yes, me,” he said heatedly. “In college. I lost a lot of money at poker. My dad had to bail me out. Not that it’s any of your business.” A total lie, but not, he thought, a bad one; anything to get him out of having to discuss football every morning.

Carlton looked at him a long time, as if reassessing him. Finally, he sighed. “Well, if you change your mind.”

“Right, sure,” Lionel agreed, and turned back to his Mac.

Without another word, Carlton slipped out of Lionel’s office. Just seconds later he could be heard saying, “Hey Donna, you up for the office football poo— Donna, wait a min—
Donna!
Hey,
DONNA!”
Then Lionel heard Titus, a production assistant lodged across the hall, yell, “She
deaf,
fool!” followed by the sound of Carlton heavily clomping down the hall after her.

His first impulse was to smile, but then he imagined what might happen when Carlton caught up with her. He’d invite her to participate in the pool, and she’d probably accept. (She had a poster of Mike Ditka on her office wall.) And then, in the course of discussing who else had signed up, Carlton would mention that Lionel was one of the few holdouts, and Donna would say, Well, what do you expect? And Carlton would say, What do you mean, what do I expect? And Donna would say, How many gay guys do you know who are into football?

Lionel shuddered and rolled his chair up to his desk, where he propped his elbows on his blotter and put his head in his hands. His pulse started thrumming. Donna wouldn’t really say that, would she? She wouldn’t give him away. She’d already shown that. Hadn’t she?

Ah, but what if Carlton happened to mention Lionel’s spanking new romance with Tracy? It
was
a subject he couldn’t seem to bring up often enough. Lionel could envision the scene that would follow. Donna would say, Not possible, Carlton; Lionel couldn’t possibly have any interest in Tracy. After all, he’s a …

He trembled again, and shot to his feet. This couldn’t go on, this uncertainty, not knowing whether at any moment Donna might blow the cover behind which he’d spent so many years safely hiding. He
had
to talk with her.

He lingered by his desk for a while, trying to figure out how best to approach her. He couldn’t
forbid
her to say anything, and it probably wasn’t wise to play on her sympathy; she might not have any. The best approach was probably simply to point out the sanctity of privacy, the right of the individual to determine his or her own destiny. She’d probably respond to lofty ideological talk like that.

He steeled himself, then left his office and started down the corridor to the art department. While en route, he ran into Perlman’s secretary, Chelsea Monmouth, nicknamed Chelsea Motormouth by the staff due to her habit of relating urgent, excruciatingly detailed accounts of what happened to her the night before last, with the emphasis on how great she looked in what she was wearing and how she’d certainly put so-and-so in
her
place and wouldn’t she think twice before being such a bitch again. Lionel noticed the look of expectation radiating from her face, and he quickened his pace.

But she grabbed his arm as soon as he was within reach. “Lionel! I didn’t even know you were here today! Been hiding out all morning?”

“Just busy, Chelsea,” he said with a little laugh, as he gently extricated his arm.

“God, I know how
that
is,” she said. “Last night? … I had to stay till seven-thirty printing out some ridiculous document form Perlman that ended up having about four more changes when I got in this morning, so I had to redo the whole thing.
Plus,
you know that one command on the computer that’s supposed to underscore a word? F-Seven, I think. Or F-Eight. One of those. Anyway, mine was broken and every time I tried it I ended up deleting a whole
line.
So I’m trying to figure out a way to do it manually, and meanwhile Perlman keeps hounding me, like, ‘Chelsea, we would appreciate those printouts sometime this millennium,’ so I have to eventually turn to the little strutting Mussolini and go,
‘Fine,
if you need them so bad,
you
can sit here and fix thi—”

Lionel held up his hand, silencing her. “Sorry, Chelsea, I’d love to hear the rest of this, but I’m just on my way to see Donna. I’ve got to tell her something, like,
pronto
.”

“Well, I hope it’s not
that
urgent, ‘cause she left for lunch five minutes ago.”

Lionel blanched. “No way.” He checked his watch. “It’s ten to noon! Why does she leave so early?”

Chelsea got her luminous look again, which could only mean more gossip. “Lionel, you wouldn’t
believe
what that she-hulk gets up to in the plaza outside Illinois Center every day. She and a bunch of other dykes get together and make a complete
spectacle
of themselves. I didn’t find out about it till last week, when Sandy and I went to lunch at this Mexican joint on State Street, what’s the name of it, that one, you know, where the guy propositioned me around Christmas and I had to turn around and go, ‘Buddy, if I were you I’d take a
long
walk off a short
—”