Fag Hag (Robert Rodi Essentials) (12 page)

“Already on it,” said Peter, wielding a corkscrew he seemed to have produced from thin air. He pried the cork from the neck and poured out three glasses, keeping up a mindless stream of chatter just to fill the silence. He handed a glass to Lloyd and another to Natalie, then held up his own and said, “To friendship.”

“To friendship,” said Lloyd.

Natalie said, “Can I have some ice for mine?”

His toast spoiled, Peter seemed lost and embarrassed for a moment, then he went to the freezer and got Natalie an ice cube. Once she’d plunked it in her wine, Peter said, “Come on, I’ll give you the tour.”

She’d already seen most of the ground floor, so they went upstairs. The bathroom was large and old-fashioned, with enormous faucet knobs and sea-foam green tiling. The guest room was furnished with a futon and a battered old dresser. The master bedroom contained an antique wardrobe and a king-size platform bed. She stared at that bed as though, through force of will, she might set it on fire.

Downstairs again, she noticed all the books in the house. In every room, even the kitchen, they were present—on shelves and piled in corners and sitting on windowsills and resting on tables. She glanced at the spines:
Wealth of Nations,
Adam Smith.
Democracy In America,
Alexis de Tocqueville.
Two Treatises On Government,
John Locke. Dozens of titles, and none boasting the words
Princess
or
Diana.

“Lloyd likes his books,” she said in the sarcastically understated way she and Peter always employed when discussing fanatics.

“Yeah,” Peter agreed, completely missing it, “he’s a constant reader. He reads everything and everywhere. He reads at breakfast, he reads in the john, he reads in the car, at stoplights. Probably why he’s so brilliant. Come on, I’ll show you the basement.”

He took her down a rickety wooden staircase into a small enclosure, which despite its size was the most remarkable part of the house. Half of it was taken up by an enormous gun rack with what Natalie was sure must be every conceivable kind of vicious looking firearm; the other half was filled with shelves of bottled water, canned foods, medical kits and the like.

“Lloyd’s a survivalist,” said Peter in the exact same tone he might have said, Lloyd’s a Capricorn.

Natalie’s roving, incoherent anger suddenly rallied and descended on this single point. This would be it; this would be Lloyd’s undoing, or nothing would.

“A survivalist?” she said, as Peter headed back upstairs. “Peter—wait! Get down here. A
survivalist?”

He turned on the stairs and she looked at him—it was just his silhouette, the light behind him half-blinding her. “Yeah,” he said. “You know, someone who believes he’s responsible for his own safety in a disaster.”

“I’ve read about survivalists,” she said. “They’re nut jobs, Peter! Haven’t you heard this? They’re just waiting for the bomb to drop so they can take over!”

He laughed. “Natalie, there are as many smear campaigns against survivalists as there are against gays. Lloyd can explain it all better than I can. Come on back up.”

She followed him, panting with excitement.
I’ve got him,
she exulted;
this has just got to be the thing that puts him under! A survivalist! Oh, thank you, God! Thank you, baby Jesus!

But over dinner, seated at the rosewood table with candles burning and the catfish giving off a light and appetizing aroma, Lloyd launched into an eloquent defense that left Natalie baffled as to how to reply.

“There’s no end to the variety of disasters that can befall a civilized society,” he said, gesturing expansively with his fork. “A natural calamity, like a fire or a hurricane, could destroy half the city, disrupting trade and communications. A social upheaval, like a riot, could cut off entire communities from goods and services. An economic depression can suddenly skyrocket the price of food above the average man’s budget. Even something as mundane as a heavy snowfall can isolate a neighborhood for days. Forget nuclear war, Natalie; that doesn’t concern me. If the Russians ever decide to launch their missiles at us, one of them’s going to have Chicago’s name on it—we’ll probably be disintegrated in the first flash. What concerns me is my survival in cases like the ones I’ve just mentioned—examples of which are already on the books. I’m prepared for them to happen again. Are you?”

She smiled, as though amused by his weirdness. “Kind of a gloomy way to go through life, isn’t it? Expecting the worst? Seems to me kind of paranoid.”

“Not
expecting
the worst,” he said, again gesturing with the fork, “
preparing
for it. There’s a difference. It’s just another kind of insurance, really. If I crack up my car, I’ve got a policy to get me through that. Doesn’t mean I’m expecting it to happen. And if I become disabled, I’ve got insurance that’ll pay my mortgage. Doesn’t mean I want it to come to that. If I get cancer and need expensive surgery and treatment…well, you get the idea. Same principle here. If something—anything—happens that deprives me of the basic benefits of civilization, I’ll be able to survive a few weeks until order is, ideally, restored. And I’ll be able to protect myself as well against bandits, thieves, killers, whatever. And if time passes and the situation only gets worse, I can go out and hunt my own food. Now, I don’t
want
to see any of this happen. I like civilization. I like popcorn and listening to the radio and getting pills to cure me when I’m sick. But the worst has happened before—history is full of examples. I think it’s foolish not to prepare.”

“That’s what we’ve got a government for,” Natalie said, desperate to pin him to the ground. “They’ve got procedures in place for when something bad happens. We’re not a tribe of savages, you know. We’ve got a central authority to take care of these things.”

He looked at her with benign condescension; it made her want to strike him. “You can trust the government if you want. But I look at it, and I see a corrupt, top-heavy, inefficient dinosaur, mired in politics and drowning in waste. It can’t balance a budget or stop gangs from ripping the city apart, or keep people from starving to death on the mayor’s doorstep. That’s not an institution I’m going to depend on for my safety in the event of a municipal or national emergency. I’m a man, Natalie; I’m capable, I’m intelligent, I’m strong. I’ve got my wits. There’s no reason I should
want
to depend on anyone but myself.”

Peter stared at Lloyd with unabashed adoration all through this declaration.

“Well, what about the people who
can’t
take care of themselves in a disaster?” Natalie snarled. “What are they supposed to do? You’re pretty heartless on their account, if you ask me.”

“Natalie, I can’t buy medical insurance for everyone in case they get cancer. I can’t buy car insurance for everyone in case they have an accident. And I can’t buy supplies and guns for the entire city in case there’s a crisis situation someday. And what are you implying by that question—that I should make myself helpless and vulnerable, just because some people are always going to be? Are you saying that the right thing to do is suffer and starve with everyone else, if it comes to that?”

“No, I—I—” God damn him, he was slippery! “I just want to know—what
about
those people? If you ran the world, how would you save them?”

“I don’t want to run the world, Natalie—precisely because I
don’t
have an answer for that. Power doesn’t interest me. But, in the interest of discussion, let me try to answer your question. I suppose, since government has proven itself so inept, it’s up to private, philanthropic organizations to take care of society’s disadvantaged and disenfranchised.”

“And what are you doing to help
them?
Being capable and intelligent and strong and having your wits, and all.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Well.
Touché.
I guess I don’t do a lot.” He turned to Peter. “She’s very incisive.” He turned back to her. “I’ve always said we should all look out for our own backyards, but by that I mean our extended backyards—our communities. It’s in our own interest to do so. You’re absolutely right, I should get more involved in community projects to help the down-and-out. Maybe I could set up a crisis shelter or something, so in a disaster they’d have someplace to go where there was food and water and medical supplies. A kind of survivalist refuge for the homeless. What do you think of that, Peter?”

“I think it sounds great!”

“How’d you get into all this stuff, anyway?” she asked him, her head aching.
Find something!
She told herself in a panic.
And find it fast! You’re losing!

He sat back in his chair. “Same as everybody else, I guess. I read Ayn Rand as a boy. That pretty much launched me into individualism and atheism and antistatism. From there I discovered libertarian politics, which kind of used some of her ideas as a springboard. And from libertarianism I got into survivalism. My life’s been a chain of ‘isms,’ I guess, but I think they’re good ‘isms’.” He laughed at that.

She stared at him, utterly befuddled. “How did reading Ayn Rand ever get you into all that political stuff? What’s she got to do with government and individualism? Isn’t she just, y’know—a pornographer?” She was pretending moral outrage now.
I’ve got him!
She thought.
It’s not much, but it’s a flaw in his I’m-so-above-it-all posturing! I’ve got the fatuous, preening pig!

There was a long pause. “I’ve heard Ayn Rand accused of being many, many things, but never a pornographer.”

She turned to Peter in triumph. “Remember when we flipped through one of her books in B. Dalton’s that day? Just for kicks? And it was all this pie-in-the-sky language for fucking? And we couldn’t stop laughing?”

“No,” said Peter, bewildered.

“Oh, for
Christ’s
sake, come
on,
we
did,”
she said, growing desperate.

Lloyd said, “I haven’t read her in years, but I honestly don’t recall anyth—”

“Wait!” Peter cried. “I know what she means! She’s thinking of Anaïs Nin! She’s getting Ayn Rand mixed up with Anaïs Nin!”

Lloyd smiled and put his hand to his mouth, and Peter tried to keep down a chuckle; but a moment later they both burst into gales of laughter. Peter’s eyes brimmed with tears, and Lloyd slid his chair back and dropped his head between his legs; his back quaked with the force of his laughter.

And Natalie, her literary philistinism now the object of high hilarity, sat enveloped in her defeat, without a clue as to how to act; and there was only one thing on her mind. It was a new concept for her, something she had never before embraced, not in two years of reducing herself to petty manipulations to end Peter’s romances. It was a concept of much higher caste, and of deeper circumstance; and as she sat, mortified, buffeted by the laughter of the man she loved and the man he loved in turn, it swelled in size, growing from a concept to a motivation. And she was able, then, to give it a name, and to say that name to herself, and to relish that name:

Revenge.

N
ATALIE
’
S PHONE RANG
the next morning, but she was afraid it would be Peter calling to get her impression of Lloyd the Wonderful, so she let her machine take it. When she got out of bed an hour later, she played the message.

“Natalie, it’s your mother,” it said. “Get over here as soon as possible. I need help with Darnita or I’ll lose my mind.”

She felt her heart lurch. Did this girl have Sandy at gunpoint or something? She threw on some clothes, raced outside, and hopped a cab.

Twenty-five minutes later she was banging on her mother’s door. In her haste to leave, she’d forgotten her key.

Sandy let her in, looking like she was at her wit’s end. “Oh, dear God, Natalie—thank you for coming!” she hugged her.

“Mom, what is it? Where’s the kid?” She stepped inside and removed her jacket.

“She’s in the next room playing with Carmen DeFleur.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

Sandy put her hand to her forehead. “She’s a little angel, is what’s wrong with her. Speaks when she’s spoken to. Read books. Looked at my crystal cabinet and recognized Waterford when she saw it. Wants to see all my good china. Honey, this girl is from the projects! I thought she was going to be a disaster! I thought I could spend my autumn giving her ‘tough love’ like on TV, then go on the Oprah show with her and everyone would think I was a saint. And what happens? They send me a tiny, black Tricia Nixon. I try to get her to tell me what it’s like living in the midst of death and terror, and she just
stares
at me like I’m from Mars. Honey, I don’t have the slightest idea what to do with her! I’ve been watching her play styling salon with the dog’s fur for an hour now, totally stumped. And I’ve invited Greta Ledbetter over for tea this afternoon to see how I’m playing Henry Higgins; I told her I had a girl from slums in to learn to be lady. I know I shouldn’t have lied, but I told her I’d met Darnita already and I had my work cut out for me. There’s no way she’s going to believe I’ve made this much progress in two days.” She clutched Natalie’s shoulder. “Honey, you have to help me teach her some bad manners by teatime.”

Natalie sighed. “You thought of
me
for that, did you? ‘Bad manners, call Natalie’?”

“Don’t attack me now, I’ll shatter to pieces,” she said, pushing her into the TV lounge where the tiny girl, in a yellow
faux
chiffon dress and ankle socks, was seated on the floor adorning Carmen DeFleur with red colored ribbons. The dog looked absolutely miserable. “Hi, there,” said Natalie.

“Hi. I’m Darnita.”

“I’m Natalie.” She squatted down. “Want to play Candyland?”

“What’s that?” Her eyes were big and alert; she was beautiful and innocent. All of Natalie’s absurd fears evaporated.

“It’s a game. I’ve got it in my old closet somewhere. I’ll go and get it, okay?”

“Okay.”