Closet Case (Robert Rodi Essentials) (21 page)

He stepped inside and stood in her entryway. “Glad to hear it,” he said, not putting his briefcase down, aware that there was a stiffness between them that had to be managed carefully. “I guess I haven’t — well, seen you in a while, and —”

“Because of Bob,” she said, surprising him. “I understand.”

“Well, I hate to say it, but yes.”

“I am not unaware of your loathing for Bob,” she said. “But you know, I am also not attached to his hip. You can come and see me on my own, if you like.” She smiled. There wasn’t a trace of recrimination in her look. He felt a flash of relief — then a sting of rejection; he’d thought she’d be at least a
little
miffed by his neglect of her. This lightness — as if she hadn’t cared — hell, hadn’t she
missed
him?

“Well,” he said, scuffing his toe back and forth on the floor. “I guess that’s what I’m doing now.” He peered up at her. “That okay?”

“Of course it is okay,” she said, and she tak-tak-takked over to him. “In fact, you are just in time to zip me up.” She turned her back to him and lifted up her tangle of hair. He lowered his briefcase to the floor, then surprised himself by being a little embarrassed at this physical intimacy (she wasn’t, as he could plainly see, wearing a bra). He fumbled with the tiny zipper until he got it up between her shoulder blades, then released it and said, “You’re set.”

She dropped her hair and shook it in his face, then turned and said, “Thanks, Lionel, you are a honey.”

She started down the corridor toward her bedroom and, unwilling to follow her, he stayed rooted to the spot and called after her, “GOING OUT TONIGHT?”

“NO, I AM STAYING IN AND GIVING THE PLACE A GOOD CLEANING.”

Sarcasm? From
Yolanda
? What was going on here?

Then he heard her erupt into gales of silvery laughter. She sounded like a Vegas slot machine giving forth a jackpot of nickels. He was suddenly aware of how long it had been since he’d heard her laugh at all. “YOU ARE VERY SILLY, LIONEL,” she called out; then she appeared in the corridor again, fastening a big, gold-link belt around her waist. “Of
course
I am going out. How does this look?”

“Like hell,” he said, shaking his head. “Absolutely
not
, Yolanda.”

She grimaced and removed it. “Come and help me pick one out, then. I hate having to yell at you out here in the hall.” She disappeared back into her bedroom.

He shrugged and followed her.

The room looked like it had been hit by a cyclone. Clothes were strewn everywhere — hanging over the radiator, laid out on the bed, draped over the back of chairs.

“Jesus,” he said. “Do you go through this every time you go out?”

“No,” she said, picking up a white vinyl belt and holding it up to her waist. “Bob usually chooses my outfits for me. This one?”

He shook his head and she flung it back onto the bed. “So, does the New Bob not do that anymore, or what?”

“Oh, he still does,” she said, taking an Hermès scarf from the window sill and tying it around her waist. “But I am going out with some girlfriends tonight.” She thrust her hip in his direction, showing off the scarf. He made a grimace of distaste. She pouted and removed it.

“Do you always dress to kill when you’re going out with girlfriends?”

“Oh, most of
all
for girlfriends,” she said, avoiding his eyes. “Women can be very competitive.”

“Competitive for what? Men?”

She blushed. “No. I do not know.” She handed him the scarf. “Here.”

“What am I supposed to do with it?”

She made a little why-are-you-asking-me gesture. “Hang it on the lampshade, I suppose.”

As he made his way through the sartorial debris to the side of the bed, he said, “Honestly, Yolanda, you don’t
need
a belt or sash with that dress. Just go without one.”

She looked down at it, surprised. “Does it not need something to break up the lines?”

“Most women would
kill
to have your lines.” He floated the scarf over the lampshade. “There, like that?”

She muttered in a “whatever” kind of way.

He was just turning back to her when he noticed a book on her nightstand. “Hey!”

“What?” she said, kicking a skirt under the bed.

He picked up the book and held it out to her.
“Anarchism and Other Essays.
I didn’t know you were reading this.”

“I just started it,” she said flatly, and turned away to rummage busily through a drawer.

“It’s just, you’ll never believe who else has read this, and recommends it.”

She slammed shut the drawer and plunged into the one below it.

“I said, you’ll never guess,” he repeated. “Yolanda …
hey
!”

She slammed the second drawer shut and pulled on the knob of the third with such force that the entire drawer flew out of the dresser and landed on the bed with a muffled
plop
.

Lionel guffawed. “I bet you couldn’t do that again if you tried.”

She seemed suddenly snarky with him. “Lionel, I am so sorry, but I am running a little late. Thank you for your help, but can you leave me now? Come again some other day.”

He was slightly taken aback by this, but was of course obliged to comply. He put the book back on the nightstand, pecked her on the cheek, and wished her a good time, then retrieved his briefcase at the door and started up the stairs to his own place. The salsa music was still on, though at a lower volume, and he did a little dance into his living room, slid his briefcase down the length of the corridor’s hardwood floor (startling Spencer into a shrieking fit), then whirled and shut the door with a kick.

As it flew into its frame, the door squeezed a little current of air from the hallway into his face. And within that brief gust was a concentrated dose of a scent that had been barely perceptible before.

He couldn’t place it at first, so he opened the door again and flapped it back and forth, sending a few more bursts of concentrated aroma into his nose — lingering traces of floor wax, boiled cabbage, Mrs. Grasky’s cats from two floors up — until he finally isolated the new scent and remembered where he’d smelled it before.

And then he knew why he’d thought of Emil tonight, as he was climbing up the staircase.

It was the scent of Emil’s peppery aftershave.

“Weird,” he muttered. Then he shrugged, shut the door, and scooted off to the bathroom to have a long-delayed piss.

The next day Lionel received two eleventh-hour invitations.

The first came at an inopportune time. He’d been busy all morning trying to pick up on any office gossip about Tim the intern, who was now gone and so could be dished freely. Since the Carlton-and-Gloria imbroglio had finally run its course, he thought Tim was a likely next subject for the clerical vultures. And sure enough, on his fourth trip to the coffee machine (on an average day he made two at most), he caught Chelsea Motormouth and Rosa the bookkeeper loitering in the kitchen, doing some serious trash-talking.

“Well,” said Chelsea, “it’s such a waste of a man, isn’t it? — And such an
adorable
little hunkoid, too. Because, if you ask me — what could he be, nineteen? Twenty? — twenty is no age to decide whether you like boys or girls. He should give himself at
least
till thirty.”

“He can’t help it,” Rosa said, dumping a fifth packet of Equal into her cup. “It’s in his genes. I read an article in a science magazine that said some men have an extra X chromosome that makes them gay, and some have an extra Y chromosome that makes them criminals.”

“What about gay criminals?” Lionel blurted out, forgetting he was supposed to be pretending not to eavesdrop.

Rosa and Chelsea glared at him briefly, then ignored him. Chelsea took a sip of coffee and continued her previous train of thought. “It’s like when
I
was twenty, I got engaged to this guy, Barry, who lived in Libertyville, and I thought he was the total end of the world because he had a black Trans Am with Bose speakers and every Lou Reed album ever recorded on eight-track. But I was too young to know who I wanted to marry, because, you know, I’d hadn’t even been to Chicago yet, so I’d never had a good look at the guys here, who make Barry look like a career rest-room attendant.” She paused for another sip. “I mean, to begin with,
no one
in Chicago has eight-track anymore, you can’t even buy them here, and why would you want to? I hated the way they fade out in the middle of a song and then you get this big
ka-chunk
as it changes tracks, and then the song fades up again. What were they thinking, when they decided that was okay? And also, after you play a tape a lot, the tracks sort of blend in together, so no matter what track you’re on you basically hear everything, all at the same time …”

She was spiraling farther and farther away from Tim, but Lionel was determined to wait until she spiraled back. He’d slowly and laboriously changed the coffee machine’s filter and refilled it with water, and just as Chelsea had gotten onto the subject of her mother’s recent engagement to a truly cretinous bigot who had a hook in place of his left hand, which Lionel thought might conceivably lead back to Tim, he was notified over the intercom speaker that he had a call.

He returned to his office in a snit over having been interrupted. But his mood changed instantly to one of consternation when he picked up the phone and was greeted by Greta, who hadn’t called him since the day Killer had died, a year before.

“We’ve got a gig
tonight
in
Chicago,”
she said breathlessly. “You have to come and bring all your influential friends.” There was some kind of commotion in the background of the call.

“Congratulations,” he said. “What’s that noise?”

“Just Pop. A chinchilla got loose.”

Lionel could now hear his father bellowing, “GET BACK HERE, SCHWARZKOPF, YOU SUBVERSIVE LITTLE RODENT!”

“So you’re coming?”

“Well, uhhh, I don’t know. Where? What time? This is pretty short notice.”

“It just happened! Wanda? — our lead singer? — has this friend Robin who’s in a band called Cakes Men Like, and they’re playing tonight at the Metro on Clark Street? Well, they had this opening band coming in from Atlanta called House of Boris? And their van, like, totally broke down in Louisville and there’s no way they’re gonna make it, so Robin said hey I know this band called Terrible Swift Sword and they were like,
call them
.”

“
GOT
YOU!” howled the colonel in the background. “GOT YOU, SCHWARZKOPF! HAHAHAHA!”

“So this is basically a really great opportunity for us to bring the world of the Lord to a bunch of downtown headbangers, and we are
stoked
. You
have
to come Lionel. I’m your
sister
.”

Lionel raised his eyebrows. Who’d ever have thought family meant so much to Greta? Her filial appeal rather touched him. He sighed and said, “Sure, sure, I’ll be there. What time?”

“Eight. We’re first on the roster. Thanks, Lionel, Jesus loves you! Jesus and me
both
! Bye!”

Just before she hung up, Lionel heard his father shriek, “
OWW!
GOD
DAMN
YOU, SCHWARZKOPF! YOU’RE DEAD, YOU FILTHY LITTLE RODENT,
DEAD
, YOU HEAR ME …?”

The second invitation came not half an hour later. Julius Deming squeezed through the door of Lionel’s office, his face flushed and his expression happy. “What’ve you got going on next week?” he asked.

“I don’t know offhand,” he said, flipping open his Filofax and checking his calendar.

“Nothing too urgent?”

“Nnnnno,” he said, running his finger down the page. “Doesn’t look like it. Special project you want me to take on?”

“In a way. Magellan just called. Just seen his latest sales figures.”

“Good, I hope?” He leaned back in his chair, knowing the answer.

“
Sensational.
And he credits us with a large part of the success. So as thanks, he’s invited us up to his cabin in Wisconsin. You, me, Perlman. And wives and girlfriends, of course.”

Lionel panicked. “An entire
week
?” He sat bolt upright. “But … who’ll handle things here while we’re away?”

“He’s got a phone and a fax,” Deming said, beaming. “And you just said yourself, you don’t have anything urgent.”

“But — what if something
does
come up, and we’re all the way up there?”

“Then it’s only a four-hour drive back.” He winked and said, “You gotta learn to relax, son. This is one of the perks of being in advertising. Hobnobbing with the rich and powerful on their chosen playgrounds. Enjoy it.” He started to waddle away. “I’ve got Tracy making photocopies of the map to the cabin. She’ll get it to you later. You’re due on Sunday night for dinner.” Just before he squeezed back out the door, he turned and said, “Oh, yeah —
do
bring a date. Magellan’s girlfriend hates having an odd number at the table.”

“His
girlfriend
?”

“Yeah. Didn’t think he’d bring that lush of a wife, do you?”

And then he was gone, leaving Lionel to sizzle with dread, not only at having to find a woman to spend a week with him at a cabin in the Wisconsin woods, but at having to spend that week with two of his bosses and his client. He loved his job, but not
that
much. He needed a space of time at the end of each day, when he could lower his guard, take off his mask. There’d be none of that with those three right there on top of him.

By the time he returned from lunch the entire office was abuzz with the news of the tremendous favor Magellan had conferred on him. Only three of his coworkers didn’t congratulate him, or teasingly express their envy: Carlton, who was visibly jealous and feigned not to think much of the offer; Donna, who either hadn’t heard the news or was too disdainful of Lionel’s sexual hypocrisy to speak to him; and Tracy, who left the photocopied map on his desk while he was at lunch, with no note.

“I haven’t been to Wisconsin since I was six,” said Chelsea as she scooted into the elevator with him at the end of the day. (She appeared oblivious to the fact that her smiling friendliness was in direct contrast to the blatant snub she’d handed him in the office kitchen just hours earlier.) “But we didn’t stay at a cabin; it was a campground. Well, not a campground, a parking lot for trailers. But we didn’t have a trailer, just a station wagon and some mosquito netting. Beautiful country up there, isn’t it?” She grinned at him with great intensity. “I had to sleep in the back next to my older brother who had major acne that kept bursting at night and sliming up the vinyl of our sleeping bag.”

By the time they reached the lobby, Lionel knew more about Chelsea’s 1971 campground experiences than any Chelsea biographer would ever care to. And as he tore himself away from her and fled to his car, it occurred to him what must have been going through her mind: She knew he was a workaholic, she knew he had no real social life, and she’d seen that when he was forced to attend a work-related social event he was willing to ask one of the women in the office.

Chelsea was plainly angling for an invitation to accompany him as his date.

He clutched his shoulders and took a sharp breath, riding the terror until it had passed. Then he ducked into his car and drove home very, very fast.

A week in the wilds of Wisconsin with Babcock Magellan and his mistress! Plus Hackett Perlman and his evil wife, and Julius Deming and his control-freak one. It was just too horrible — like a level of hell Dante had decided no one had been vile enough to deserve. He did his best to put it out of his mind; after all, it was still four days away. Anything could happen in four days. A major earthquake. Civil collapse. Nuclear war. It wasn’t worth worrying about Wisconsin just
yet.

He met Yolanda on the stairs. She was on her way up from the laundry room, carrying a basket of clothes that still radiated aromatic warmth. Her hair was pulled back into a careless ponytail and she wore threadbare gray sweats, but her beauty bled through; she resembled some Hollywood starlet making a bid for serious critical acclaim by taking a role as an Appalachian drudge.

“Hello, Lionel,” she said dismally. He recalled how deeply she loathed doing the wash. This was due only in part to the drudgery of the task itself; far greater was her distaste for the dank, ill-lit basement laundry room, which resembled a place Torquemada might had have designed for torturing heretics.

He fell into step with her. “Yolanda, can you do me a favor?”

“That depends,” she said, resting the basket on her hip to free up a hand to unlock her door. “What is it?”

“Can you look after Spencer next week? Looks like I’m going away.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Of course, Lionel. I would do
anything
to make it easier for you to get away and have some fun.” She banged open the door with her thigh and hefted the basket inside. “You have so little.”

He stuck his head in after her. “Thanks. I probably won’t be having
fun
, exactly, but that’s beside the point.” His eyes adjusted to the dimness of her place, and he could make out two more heaping loads of laundry awaiting their turn in the Kenmore. He whistled in awe and said, “When was the last time you did this?”

“I do not recall,” she said, dropping the basket outside her bedroom. “It has been a while. I keep thinking, if I just continue to buy more new clothes, I will never have to do it again at all.”

This struck him speechless, till she looked at him and crossed her eyes, and he realized she’d been kidding.

She crouched down and started indiscriminately flinging the just-cleaned clothes out of the basket with one hand, while with the other replacing them with soiled clothes to be cleaned. “What are
you
doing tonight?” she asked. “Would you like to help me iron?”

“Gosh, that
would
be a treat. Unfortunately, I’m sure I’ve got a prior commitment, to read Wittgenstein or trim my chest hair or something.” Suddenly, he realized he did in fact have an engagement. “Oh, shit, Yolanda — I’m glad you reminded me. I
do
have somewhere to be tonight.” He checked his watch. “I’d better go up right now and boil a bag of dinner.”

“Where are you going?” she asked, looking at him enviously.

“My sister’s Christian rock band is playing at Cabaret Metro,” he said, fumbling through his pocket for his keys. “She basically begged me to come.”

She put her chin in her hands and looked at him with dreamy eyes. “I have not been to Metro in five years. Bob is afraid the beer on the floor will stain his calfskin shoes.”

He knew her well enough to know what she was hinting at. “How soon can you be ready?” he asked.

“Just four hours. Maybe less.”

“Can you make it twenty minutes?”

“Possibly. I cannot guarantee results.”

“That’s okay. I only like guys, remember?”

“I remember,” she said, immediately stripping off her sweatsocks. “You should remind
yourself
now and then.”

He bounded upstairs, burst into his apartment, let Spencer out of the cage and actually gave him the Alessi teapot to keep him quiet, then began alternately flinging off his clothes and heating a pot of which in which to cook his Bag O’ Ratatouille.

While putting on a clean polo shirt, he extended his arm through a sleeve too quickly and knocked the kitchen telephone off its wall mount. As he bent down to retrieve it, it occurred to him how much fun it would be to invite Emil along as well. He and Yolanda hadn’t hit it off the first time around, but now that Lionel knew they had Emma Goldman and anarchism in common, he was sure they’d find something to talk about. And he had to admit it: he longed to see Emil’s neon blue eyes and hairy knuckles. He dialed the phone.

“Jones residence, Nancy Jones speaking,” was the very proper greeting he received. It jarred with the generic disco music in the background.

“Hello, Mrs. Jo— Nancy. It’s Lionel Frank.”

“Lionel! Excuse me for a moment, I’ll turn off my exercise tape.” He was about to protest, but the clunk of her receiver told him she’d already dropped the phone; so he waited till the music was stilled. “I suppose you’d like to speak to Emil,” she said when she returned.

“Yes, thanks, if he’s around.”

A brief pause. “Pardon me, I was just lighting up,” she said, and then she loudly exhaled. Lionel could almost smell the smoke. “I’ll get him for you, sweetheart, but only if you promise to come and see us again soon.”