Fag Hag (Robert Rodi Essentials)

Originally Published 1992 by Dutton
Kindle Edition Published 5/9/2011 by Robert Rodi
ISBN: 978-0-9834844-2-4

Copyright ©1992 Robert Rodi

N
ATALIE
S
TATHIS MOUSSED
her hair until it stood straight up like a henna-rinsed mushroom cloud. She applied more makeup than a vision-impaired Las Vegas showgirl, and put on the new smock-like Claude Montana frock that Peter said made her look like a hand puppet, forcing her to say “Fuck you” and hit him in the arm and pretend not to mind. Her wrists jangled with bracelets, all of them cheap and gaudy, although her ears were studded with real diamonds—nine of them. And as she tagged along while Peter made his usual Saturday-night rounds of Chicago’s gay bars and discos, she beamed a smile that pleaded, “Notice me!” She pressed herself, all hundred and ninety-odd pounds, through crowds of taut, muscular young men and, through sheer flamboyance, attracted the attention of more than a few of them. And as she talked to them, using every ounce of feminine wile and wit at her disposal, they laughed in delight and flattered her and sometimes even kissed her, but never, never once, not even for a moment, did they stop looking over her shoulder for something better.

Now she sat with Peter—dear, loyal Peter—on the street in front of one of the gay ghetto’s many thrift shops, “airing herself out” as she liked to call it, shaking her hair and flapping her clothes to get the smoke out of them. She insisted on a five-minute airing after every night at the bars. And the reason she enjoyed it so much, kept insisting on it, was that Peter sat with her and proved that he was hers. She would humor him; she would follow him to every gay watering hole in town and watch him search in vain for a man he could love, as long as they could sit afterwards on the curb, under the open sky, together like a couple for everyone to see. The pavement ran with spilled liquor and garbage, but Natalie felt like she was planted on the throne of England.

She leaned back and shook her mushroom cloud. “Nice night,” she said, luxuriating in the cool breeze.

“Mm-hmm,” said Peter, staring at his shoes. He looked up at the moon, and as he craned his neck his Adam’s apple was deliciously pronounced, the sexiest Adam’s apple since Adam. His hair tumbled back over his shoulders—she had persuaded him not to cut it—and he sighed gorgeously. He was Lord Byron, he was Saint Sebastian, he was Apollo—an object of worship, almost tubercular in the transcendent beauty of his suffering. Natalie was head-over-heels in love with him. Had she made him jealous tonight?

“That Brian guy’s a doll,” she said, watching him for a reaction. “You see me with him? Guy with the Rolex?”

“Hmm? Oh. No.” He ground some pebbles into the street with the heel of his Kenneth Coles.

“Invited me to his winter place in the Dominican Republic. Said I’d be a gas there, I could be his hostess. Think I should go?”

“If you want.”

At times like this he nearly drove her mad. She sat up and wrapped her arms around her knees, something she was just barely able to do. “You’re upset? I spend too much time talking to him?”

“No, no.”

“What, then?” She reached out and curled a lock of his hair around her finger.

“I’m bored, I guess.” He shook his head to get her fingers away from it, then looked her square in the eye. “I’m thirty years old, Natalie. I’ve been doing this bar thing since, Christ, twenty-two—one? Whatever. I’m tired of it. Every spring, first thaw, I’m out here looking, looking, looking, looking, then bam!—it’s winter and I hole up feeling sorry for myself again. I mean, is this any kind of life? Sitting here on a grimy street with cocaine drying out my nose and liquor numbing my head and my ears all cottony from music that’s too loud, and my head hurting from constantly wondering if
that’s
the one or
that’s
the one or—”

“Jesus,”
she blurted, interrupting him; “of
course
it’s any kind of life! Honey, I’ve
never
had as much fun as I’ve had with you. You’re dazzling and sophisticated and brilliant, and—and—this is just your natural
environment,
that’s all there is to it! The music and the lights and the—everything!”

He looked at her as though she had antlers growing out of her forehead. “Natalie, sometimes I think you don’t know me at all.”

“Sometimes I think you don’t know yourself.” She decided to try a different tactic; he was a hard case tonight. “Okay, so you’re bored with it all. Maybe you
should
do something different for a while, then. Just to see. Take a few months off from all of this. You could read all the great books nobody ever has time for anymore. Like
Lolita
and
Moll Flanders
and
Remembrance of Things Past.”
She was uncanny; she had memorized his bookshelf. “You could spend more time with your family. How old are your niece and nephew now? You could get a pet. You could start a hobby—stamp collecting, or maybe something more active, like metalwork. You could be a sculptor. You could get into local history, travel around taking photographs of old tombstones or something. There are lots of things you could do. Just to see if it’s more rewarding. If you’re really feeling stifled, you kind of owe it to yourself.” She sat back and sighed happily; a masterful performance, without even a hint of sarcasm.

As she looked now at Peter’s fogged eyes she could see the gears turning slowly behind them; she’d given him so much to think about that he couldn’t possibly take it all in, not in his present state. He’d fall asleep with his mind a hazy jumble of hope, and wake up not remembering a thing. He was like a fine violin, and Natalie knew exactly which string to pluck to get the sound she desired from him.

“Vicki’s seven,” he said, slurring a little. “Alex is four.” The niece and nephew.

“Do you have any recent pictures at home?”

He nodded and she smiled. They would go and see them later. Then it would be almost five in the morning; he would drop into bed for a dreamless sleep, and she would crawl in after him and hold him like she always did. And when he awakened a few hours later he would turn and see her and say, “Natalie Stathis, you are such a slut,” and they would laugh as usual and then go for breakfast at The Melrose to see who had hooked up with whom the night before, and Natalie would order French toast and a side of bacon in a state of perfect bliss because in the sunlight she and Peter could be seen together so much more clearly.

“M
ET SOMEONE
WONDERFUL
,” Peter sang into the phone, and at the other end Natalie made a grimace into the hallway mirror that might almost have cracked it.

“Great, honey,” she said brilliantly, her face like death. “Where?”

“Hardware store this morning. We both wanted the last three-quarter-inch faucet aerator, and we got into a fight over it. By the time we were finished we were each insisting that the other take it. He finally did, but I got his phone number instead, which, guess what, I’d rather have about a million times over.”

Natalie steeled herself. It was about to begin anew: the siege of Eros, the attack of Cupid, the full-frontal assault of Romantic Love. She had fought this battle many times and won; when, she wondered in anguish, might she expect to win the war?

There was no time for self-pity. She had a strategy to implement. “Oh, honey, I’m so happy for you,” she said. “Hope he’s as good as he sounds.”

“What do you mean? Course he is!”

“Sorry, baby, I didn’t mean to—well, you know how protective I am of you. And every time you meet someone I hope for you so much, I cross my fingers and just
pray
—but at the same time I dread seeing you hurt again, and maybe that makes me a little psychotic. Like, I can’t help noticing that this guy got the faucet thingie you wanted, and that it’s up to
you
to call
him,
not vice-versa—he’s getting all the privileges so far. I know that doesn’t mean anything, I’m just insane for worrying based on only that much information about him—”

“Yes, you are.” He was irritated.

“Tell you what. I’m going to shut up now and you can tell me what a hunk he is.” Peter started waxing eloquent about his new love, and Natalie took a letter opener from her coffee table, lowered herself onto her sofa, and held the portable phone to her ear while she repeatedly stabbed one of her throw pillows until its was disemboweled of its fiber-fill.

“His name is Maurice,” Peter gushed. “Like the Forster book, isn’t that a riot? He’s got these incredible blue eyes and just shocks of blond hair. He was out jogging so he had on these shorts that left
nothing
to the imagination, my eyes were jumping out of their sockets. He’s built like a fucking Greek sculpture or something. And he only lives about four blocks from me! And he takes the same bus every day, but I’ve never seen him on it—trust me, I’d remember. Our whole conversation was just this chain of coincidences. He works a couple of blocks from me, too—we can have lunch during the week!”

He went on in this manner while Natalie listened with her teeth bared. Once the pillow was completely gutted, she sliced its cover into threads, then flung the mess she’d made around the room, not caring. She rolled off the couch and onto the carpeting, kicked her heels madly, and arched her back; and yet even as she writhed in jealousy, she still held the portable phone to her ear and occasionally interjected a “Terrific!” or a “Lovely!” to make Peter think she was euphoric for him.

After he finally hung up, she lay on the floor, utterly debilitated by frustration. She counted in her head the number of times she’d had similar phone calls from him. There’d been one for David, for Kyle, for Vince, Larry, Scott—too many to remember. And each time her reaction had gotten more quietly, frighteningly violent. She’d never thought she’d have to work this hard, never thought she’d have to ruin Peter’s romances with so many men before winning him for herself. The faces of her victims all blended together now, their names, the details of their lives—in her delirium, she found she couldn’t even remember the name of the new one. Something unusual beginning with M. Mortimer? Montgomery?

The phone rang again. She hit the Talk button and pulled it over to her ear. “Hello,” she said emptily.

“Me again,” said Peter. “Guess what? I was so excited I couldn’t wait. I called him. Maurice, I mean.”
Maurice.
That was it. “I asked him out for tonight. He said yes! Isn’t that goddamn
great?
We’re going to meet for drinks at Roscoe’s. And from there, who knows…?” His voice was merry with possibility.

“Honey, that’s wonderful,” Natalie enthused. “I’m so happy for y—” She turned off the phone in mid-sentence. It was a trick she’d learned, to get off undesirable calls without offending the caller. Who would ever dream that someone would hang up while she herself was still talking? Peter would simply assume they’d been disconnected. She hurriedly turned the phone back on and called the number for the correct time, then put it down and let the stilted voice at the other end continue to announce that at the tone it would be such-and-such and so-many-seconds. When Peter tried her number again, he’d get a busy signal.

N
ATALIE HATED
M
AURICE
without even having met him. She imagined that he was slim and superior and wore clothes with creases that could cut your fingers, which was how the men Peter fell for always looked. And what kind of fucking name was Maurice, anyway?

Peter couldn’t wait for her to meet him. Their first date went so well that Peter called her in the middle of it to tell her so, and to tell her that they’d already made plans for dinner the next night, at a French restaurant Natalie had been dying to go to for years. She winced at the mention of it. “Then we’ll come to Roscoe’s and meet you there, if you want,” he said over the noise of the bar. She agreed, even though the idea of jackets and ties at Roscoe’s seemed to her a disgusting affectation; she knew it must be the idea of that creature
Maurice.

Saturday morning she could do nothing but wonder, “What are they doing now?,” so she decided to bite the bullet and see her mother. The messages Sandy Stathis had been leaving on her daughter’s answering machine had been getting progressively more threatening, from “Please call” to “You’d better call soon” to “I’m changing my will” to “The dog gets everything, good-bye forever.” It had been more than a month since Natalie had visited the ancestral homestead, so she hired a cab and took it to Oak Park; the driver was visibly gleeful at the prospect of such a large fare.

Sandy Stathis lived in an old three-story colonial house that she couldn’t keep up anymore because she’d spent almost all her money on causes. Her latest was Accessorizers Anonymous, which was for compulsive shoppers. “I can really relate to this one,” she’d told Natalie over the phone a few weeks before. “You find a nice peach skirt and it only costs a hundred and fifty dollars so you think you can afford it, then all of a sudden you need a hundred-dollar belt to go with it, and a two-hundred-dollar scarf, and three-hundred-dollar shoes, and a four-hundred-dollar handbag, and then at the end of the month you spill marinara sauce on the skirt and it’s ruined anyway. It’s a compulsion; these women have got to learn to help themselves, the way I did.” The way Sandy Stathis had helped herself beat this habit was to spend all the money she needed to maintain it, which Natalie didn’t think was the ideal approach. The only thing Sandy had left was the house, which was a significant asset; and the only thing that kept her from selling it was the idea that she would then have to move to Bellwood or Cicero or someplace equally inexpensive and horrible.