Closet Case (Robert Rodi Essentials) (2 page)

“Yeah, there’s that,” he said, nodding. There was a brief, rather unwieldy pause.

“Listen,” he said, looking down at his shoe, which he ground into the floor as though there were a palmetto bug beneath his heel. “I’ve been working like a sonofabitch, and —”

“I know, I know, I see your light on every night when I leave.” She turned away from the typewriter and folded her arms over her blotter. Her attention was completely his.

“I have no life, Tracy. I admit this.” He ripped a page from her
Far Side
desk calendar and started to fold it into a tiny accordion. “I have a parrot at home who doesn’t recognize me. He’s bonded with the mice in my absence.”

She didn’t laugh; she wore a look of almost luminous expectation.

He cleared his throat and said, “Seriously, I have to go to the Trippy banquet and if I don’t bring a date Magellan’s going to start thinking I’m queer.” He occasionally said things like this, to present the idea of him being gay as so utterly ridiculous as to be funny. “And, well, I know you’re still seeing Guy, but if he —”

“Guy’s a pig,” she said.
Pig
was her all-purpose slur.

“Well, if the pig can let you go for a night, maybe you’d like to come with me … to the Trippys, I mean. It’d be a blast.”

Her eyes actually flashed. Lionel had always thought that a mere figure of speech.

And suddenly she looked incomparably lovelier than she had only a moment before. “Be your sympathy date to the Trippy Awards?” she said, smiling brilliantly. “I assume there is a large fee involved.”

He laughed, delighted and terrified by her acceptance, but mainly terrified.

The dance bar called The Hague was a safe place for Lionel to frequent, because its clientele wasn’t exclusively gay — just predominantly. Male strippers might strut across its strategically placed platforms in G-strings and snakeskin boots, but on the dance floor itself, yuppies, dinks, japs, and other acronymed members of mainstream Chicago rubbed elbows with drag queens, hustlers, and lipstick lesbians. The music was the attraction: gay clubs were known for playing better dance tracks than their straight counterparts, and The Hague was arguably the best gay dance club in town.

Having successfully arranged a heterosexual, if platonic, liaison during office hours, Lionel felt he could allow himself a little side trip into the gay nightlife on his way home from work. He hadn’t left the office till seven-thirty, so by the time he arrived at the club, it was just past eight. For a weeknight, that wasn’t too early to see some excitement.

He walked in the door and loosened his tie. He liked appearing here in his workday garb; it was off-putting. It made him look, not gay and available, but hip enough to be in a gay club even though evidently straight.

Heads turned briefly at his entrance — young heads, long and angular, with manes of wavy hair and swooping sideburns — before turning away, unimpressed. Lionel knew he was good looking enough, but he deliberately made himself bland; he didn’t want to appear too conscious of his appearance, lest someone at the office find it suspect. Still, he’d spent so many years playing down his attractiveness that now he wasn’t sure he could remember how to play it up again, and the absence of the kind of lingering glances he’d hoped for caused him a little pang of regret.

But then, from the far side of the bar, he felt the unmistakable pressure of eyes on him, and his spirits lifted; he
was
being cruised. Careful not to meet the gaze of his admirer, he went to the bar and ordered an Amstel Light. (In non-gay bars, he always ordered a Rolling Rock instead of a light beer; wouldn’t do to have anyone think he was watching his weight, like some prissy queen.)

He slid a trio of dollar bills across the counter, then turned away quickly, still acutely aware of the pair of eyes across the bar that were boring into him like All-Pro power drills. Growing a little uncomfortable with the attention, he lifted the bottle to his lips and took a long, cold swallow, then sauntered over to the dance floor, where colored lights flashed in counterpoint to the heavy thump-thumpa-thump of the music video being played on the various monitors around the room’s perimeter. Men were dancing with men by the dozens. It was
really
gay in here tonight; there were almost no breeders to be seen. Which of course increased the homoerotic charge in the air, and made his predicament even worse. He kept thinking,
I’m being watched, I have to look hot, I have to look available. But who’s cruising me? And why can’t I bring myself to cruise back?

He started sweating at the idea of meeting someone in a bar; someone he might even take home to bed. It had been — God — more than a year since he’d done anything like that. He’d never be able to go through with it tonight; he’d lost the knack … he was terrified. He kept hoping that the eyes would just leave him, melt away, or at least move on to some other, more responsive target. They’d followed him more than long enough to gratify his ego; now it was just plain awkward to be visually stalked this way.

Finally, he could bear it no longer. He had to confront his admirer. Taking a big, straight-guy chug from his Amstel, he casually turned his head and let his glance fall, as if accidentally, on the man who had been ravishing him so insistently.

Jesus H. Christ on a moped.

It was
Toné.

The hairdresser lifted his glass — it looked like he was having his usual brandy Alexander — and nodded his head in salutation.

Lionel stormed over to him. “For Christ’s sake, Toné, why were you
staring
at me like that? Almost gave me a fucking
heart
attack.”

Toné swept back his jet-black, shoulder-length hair in indignation.
“Excusez-moi, mon brave,”
he trilled. “One didn’t mean to cause discomfort. One simply recognized one of one’s
intimes,
that is all.”

“Then why didn’t you just yell out a hello, for God’s sake?”

Toné put one of his spectacularly manicured hands over his heart, as if appalled at the suggestion. “Because,
mon brave,
one does not
yell out
in polite society. Aside from which, one suspected you might be, ahem, on the
prowl,
as it were. And one enjoyed the idea of watching you make a connection with some
garçon
of great beauty and loose morals.”

Lionel blushed crimson. “I didn’t come in here for
that.”

“Well, that makes one of us.” He took another sip of his drink, apparently ready to dismiss the subject.

Lionel, however, wasn’t quite so ready. True, he didn’t want to have a sexual encounter with anyone tonight, but the possibility that he
could
excited him, and he wanted to hear Toné conjecture about it at greater length. “Anyway,” he said, prompting him, “who would I even pick up here? No one’s my type.”

Toné looked around the bar; Lionel hoped he would select a possible hook-up for him just so he could protest that whoever it was would never accept him, causing Toné to reassure him that this wasn’t the case, and so on — all material Lionel could use to build a whale of a fantasy during his next jerk-off session.

But after a moment more, the hairdresser disappointed him by sighing and saying, “You’re right,
il n’y a personne
for you here tonight. But then, one is less inclined to place blame on them than on
you.”
He looked Lionel up and down, appraising him as if he were a prize heifer at a 4-H convention. “When one dresses in a blue suit from Capper and Capper,
cheri,
accented by a tie spangled with mallard ducks that one is certain has a twin in Dan Quayle’s closet — well, one mustn’t expect to be the cause of much swooning at The Hague, any more than one would wear a red silk teddy and fishnet stockings to apply for membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution.”

Lionel frowned. “I look fine.” He angrily tried to salve his pride with a swallow of beer, but the bottle hit his tooth like a sledgehammer. He spat out the beer and clutched his mouth in agony.

“One might say that your
hair
looks fine,” said Toné, who, being half Japanese and therefore well-versed in the sophisticated art of saving face for others, pretended not to have seen the mishap. “One
might
say that, but one’s modesty prevents one.” He finished off his brandy Alexander and handed the empty glass to a passing busboy, smiling coyly.

Lionel leaned against a post, holding his mouth. “I fing I broag my fugging toof,” he moaned.

Toné, not about to let Lionel embarrass himself by admitting to self-inflicted pain, continued to ignore the incident. He rolled up the sleeves of his linen jacket and said, “So, tell one, how is the
jeune fille
who slaves away in the salt mines with you? You know, the one whose heart you have so treacherously ensnared?”

“Oh, shud ub,” said Lionel, testing his tooth with his thumb and forefinger. It felt whole, and seemed relatively sound. Fear and pain subsiding, he removed his hand and said, “How many times do we have to go through this? She’s got a steady boyfriend.”

Toné rolled his eyes. “Of course she does. Stupid of one to forget.”

“Look, we’re just
friends.
For God’s
sake.”
He took another swig of beer, more carefully this time.

At that moment, the video screens went blank, and the crowd on the dance floor gathered around a platform. It must be time for the first of the strippers to come on. Lionel shrank back into a shadow, not wanting to be seen ogling any nearly naked men. But his pulse thrummed with excitement; even from his irregular visits to The Hague, he’d become familiar with some of its regular strippers, and he had his favorites. Would it be Jerry the cowboy tonight? García the construction worker? Bill the fireman?

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said a voice over the speaker system, “The Hague is proud to present, for the very first time on our stage, ‘Father’ Todd!”

A new disco number started up, and after several tantalizing beats, a tall, bearded man in priest drag gyrated onto the stage.

Lionel, who had spent his formative years sitting quietly at Sunday mass imagining that his parish’s handsome young assistant pastor was wearing nothing at all under his cassock, felt something lurch forward and drop in his stomach. This was an irresistible, powerful fantasy figure for him; the horny, hairy, hot-tamale pastor; the priest who puts out; the father confessor with bikini tan lines. His throat went dry and his palms started to sweat. He really had to get out of here; and yet he was equally compelled to stay and watch. The warring imperatives clashed in his head and in his loins, and made him itchy and fidgety and nervous.

When “Father” Todd teasingly began unbuttoning his cassock, revealing a blood-red rosary nestled in the crevice of an extraordinarily woolly chest, Lionel had to fight back faintness. Since he couldn’t bear to watch, but couldn’t bear to leave either, he decided to try to distract himself by continuing his conversation with Toné, whose own taste in men tended towards the slim, hairless, and almost illegally young, and who was tapping his toes to the music rather dreamily, paying only the most obligatory attention to the show.

“As a matter of fact,” Lionel said to him now, in as confidential a tone as the booming bass track would allow, “I
do
have a sort of platonic date coming up with her. The
jeune fille,
I mean.”

Toné turned his head slowly, like a crocodile. He raised an eyebrow and said,
“Oh?”

“It’s for a business function,” he explained, trying not to stare at Father Todd’s cassock, which was now gathered around his waist, catching the beads of sweat that fell from his naked torso as he writhed to the music. “The Trippy Awards,” Lionel continued, his speech becoming both faster and more halting. “We’ve won an award — for — a commercial we did — for one of our clients — we —” He finally had to turn away from the strip show entirely. He set his back against Father Todd, fixed his eyes on Toné, and said, “It’s just platonic. She’s from the office. It’s a work function. She works there. So …” His voice trailed off in defeat. Even he could hear how flimsy his argument sounded.

Toné raised his other eyebrow, and Lionel thought,
Why the hell did I even bring this up? If I didn’t get so goddamn disoriented at the sight of a half-naked man …

The hairdresser put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Lionel, you
must
tell this
pauvre petite
that you’re gay before she accompanies you to this event.”

Lionel’s jaw dropped. “Are you
crazy?”

“Pas du tout.
Trust one on this,
mon brave.
She has entirely different expectations from this
soirée
than you do. Business affair or not.”

“You don’t even know her.”

“One doesn’t need to know her. One has heard all the stories you’ve told one. That girl is in love with you.”

Lionel shook his head in earnest. “She’s not, Toné. She’s not, she’s not, she’s not.”

“She is, she is, she is.” He smiled and took back his hand. “Oh, dear, this
is
regressing into nonsense,
n’est-ce pas?”
He took an appraising look at the back of Lionel’s head. “You’ll be needing a trim before the evening in question, of course.”

Lionel shrugged. “Guess so.”

“Then by all means, call one
à demain
and make an appointment. And in the meantime, consider what one has just told you.” His eyes darted across the bar. “And now, if you’ll excuse one, one thinks one might be about to meet the love of one’s life.” He leaned over and gave Lionel a swift peck on the lips, then trotted away.

Unsettled by the conversation, Lionel turned around in time to catch Father Todd tearing away his leather panties, revealing a purple satin G-string with a crucifix on the pouch. A dirty-blond treasure trail crept up his taut abdomen, collecting in a little furry circle around his navel.

Transfixed by the sight, Lionel stared in helpless lust as the stripper put his hands behind his head and commenced bumping and grinding, bumping and grinding, until his pelvis seemed to generate enough kinetic energy to fill the electrical needs of the better part of Chicago’s lakefront. Lionel’s jaw hung open, like a trailer hitch.

A medium-size eternity later, he noticed someone waving at him. He managed to tear his gaze away from Father Todd and looked to see who it was.

There were two women, arm in arm, like lovers. And the one waving at him was Donna, the art director at the agency.

All color seeped out of his face; his blood seemed to stand still in his veins. How long had she been watching him? How much had she seen of him staring, mesmerized, at the crotch of a male stripper? Had she witnessed the feline, effeminate Toné leaning in and kissing him?

An even worse possibility occurred to him: Donna, who was deaf, was an accomplished lip reader. Lionel had once heard her brag that if there was enough light, she could “eavesdrop” on private conversations across the full length of a crowded restaurant. Had she been privy to every word to pass his lips the entire time he’d been talking to Toné?

It was his worst nightmare come true: being busted by someone from the office. For years, he’d been so careful, not letting any hint of his sexuality leak out to even the farthest removed acquaintances of his colleagues and clients, only to blow it now with someone who worked just down the hall from him!

He should’ve been more careful of her. He’d known Donna was gay from the day she started —
everyone
knew it. To
look
at her was to know it. (She wore a crew cut and had shoulders like a linebacker! She wore Doc Marten boots! She chewed tobacco!) And the relentless, increasingly filthy dyke jokes that had subsequently been told behind her back (sometimes
literally
behind her back, as there was no danger of her overhearing them) had the effect of pushing Lionel even farther into his metaphorical closet, until he was trapped behind metaphorical tennis rackets and ski boots and piles of old, metaphorical magazines.