Fag Hag (Robert Rodi Essentials) (26 page)

She sat absolutely still for another forty minutes, feeling, first, a wave of guilt; then a sputtering of rage; then guilt again—and so on, pinging back and forth like a tennis ball. A doctor came in and felt her forehead, looked at her chart, and lectured her on taking better care of herself, and she registered maybe one word in ten. After he left, she sat staring at nothing until the sun set and she was alone in the half-light.

Someone knocked on the door. “Hello? Natalie? You awake?”

She switched on the overhead lamp. The sudden incandescence hurt her eyes. “Who is it?” she asked, blinking.

“It’s Lloyd. Can I come in?”

She felt a jolt of alarm. How long had it been since she’d faced her enemy?...Could it be as long ago as Christmas? She began to perspire in anxiety, and thought for a moment about pretending to have been soundly sleeping, so that he would apologize and slink away—but at this point, she would’ve welcomed the devil himself; anyone to erase the still vivid image of her mother’s abandonment of her.

Her eyes adjusted now. She watched Lloyd as he entered; he had a red rose in his hands. “Bought this from a Korean kid who was selling them at an intersection,” he said, handing it to her. “Impulse purchase—not something I’m known for.” She felt obliged to sniff it, and did so.

He sat down. He was wearing a leather jacket and khakis—Peter’s old uniform. As a matter of fact, she noticed now that they were Peter’s old clothes. Apparently he’d just adopted his lover’s wardrobe, lacking any significant style of his own.

“How are you?” he asked.

She was in a mood to be abusive. “I’ve been better, Lloyd. What did you expect?”

He was immediately chastened. “Sorry. Stupid thing to say. I guess I don’t know
what
to say.”

“They why did you come?” She was being merciless.

He raised an eyebrow. “Good question. I guess I’ve been at a loose end for a while. Peter says you’re good to talk to.”
Me?
she wanted to say.
Me, the subhuman who can’t think in abstract terms?
But she merely said, “Oh?”

“I don’t know if he told you about the robbery attempt.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Yes, he did.”

“We’ve been having some difficulties, in the aftermath.”

Her heart almost stopped. “Difficulties?”

“Apparently, the gun the thug was carrying—the one he had trained on Peter the whole time—was bought at my shop.”

She pretended to have to let that sink in.
“Oh,”
she said.

“I have a young kid working for me now, an ex-gang member—not too bright, but his head’s in the right place. I left him alone for an hour and he sold a gun to someone who came in and pretended to be a friend of mine. Someone with a fake I.D. and registration. He strong-armed my kid into going against his better instincts. It’s a bad business all around.”

“And this turned out to be the same guy who broke into your house and threatened Peter?”

“Seems to be. Same gun, anyway.”

“Well, don’t beat yourself up about it. It’s not your fault.”

“Isn’t it? Peter would disagree.”

She lowered her head. “I see.”

“He says that for me to sell a gun to someone who uses it against someone else, is tantamount to being an accessory to the crime. He says that when so many deaths occur each year because of shootings, even
advocating
selling guns is wrong. He says you can’t weigh a principle against a human life. And of course I have a dozen—two, three dozen—arguments to make against all of that, but each time I start in, Peter shuts me right down with the same response.”

“Which is?”

He glanced away from her, at the I.V. monitor, and ran his fingers up the side of it, as though measuring it. “That I’ve never looked down the barrel of a loaded gun, and he has. That I’ve never had to face the possibility that at any moment a bullet might explode into my skull, and he has. That I’ve never been threatened by a lethal weapon in the confines of my own home, and he has. And I don’t know how to answer that. I have rational arguments at my fingertips, but no emotional ones.”

“I see.”

“And even worse—Natalie—I don’t—I don’t know if I want to.” His voice was thickening with emotion now. He turned back to her and met her eyes. “This has really rocked me. When I think of how close I came to losing him—! He’s the center of my world, do you understand? I’ve always said that free trade in guns helped make America great, and I still believe that, but you know what? I don’t care about America anymore. Not compared to Peter.
He’s
my country now,
he’s
my ideology. He’s my ethics and my politics and my economics. He’s always said that love is a totality. And finally, finally I’m seeing he’s right.” A tear hovered at the corner of his eye. “Do you understand the enormity of what it means for me to say, I’m willing to be wrong for him?”

With her free hand, Natalie clutched her throat. This wasn’t what she had expected.

“So he’s asked me to sell the store, and I’m going to. I’m keeping my arsenal in the basement, but I’m getting out of the actual gun business. I can’t stay in it, not now. Peter’s given me doubt. I can’t function with doubt. I need certainty.” He ran his hand over his scalp. “Besides, I’m tired of fighting. There are a couple of aldermen who’ve built entire careers around trying to get me rezoned out of their wards’ vicinity. I’ll give them a little early Christmas present this year.” He suddenly looked up and said, “This is more than I intended to say. Sorry for bending your ear on this. It’s unfair of me, isn’t it?”

“Not at all. I just…can’t believe you’re really selling up.”

He shrugged. “Peter asked me to, and I can’t say no. I’ve never looked down the barrel of a loaded gun, and he has. And it was a gun I sold. It just goes round and round, until I think I may go nuts. I’ve got to stop it, and selling the store will stop it.”

“But what will you do?”

He shrugged, and examined his thumbs. “I’ll think of something. As a matter of fact, you yourself gave me an idea that I—”

“Knock, knock,” sang a female voice from the door. They looked up and saw a nurse leaning in. “Visiting hours are over. Afraid you’ll have to leave, sir.”

“Sure,” he said, smiling wanly. He got to his feet and pecked Natalie on the cheek. “Thanks for listening. Hey, you shouldn’t be such a stranger. Peter misses you terribly. Will you come out to the house if we ask you?”

Already been, thanks, and didn’t wait for an invitation,
she thought, but she said, “If I’m free,” and then watched him go with an engulfing sense of relief.

As soon as he was gone, it occurred to her that he was the only person she’d seen in the past few weeks who hadn’t commented on her weight loss. Maybe he was too pie-in-the-sky to notice.

Yet the more she replayed his visit in her head, the more something else bothered her—something beyond the obvious fact that he’d told her, in effect, that she’d failed; she hadn’t ruined Peter and Lloyd’s life together, she’d merely soured it a little. But there was something just past that, something that made her uneasy, something that upset her…

She finally put her finger on it. The whole time he’d been here, Lloyd had kept repeating, “Peter says, Peter says, Peter says,” in the same way that Peter had once incessantly chanted, “Lloyd says, Lloyd says, Lloyd says.”

That
was why they’d survived. They deferred to one another. They made room. They listened to each other, allowed each other to be strong, to be
right
—they
protected
each other.

They really were married, weren’t they? They complemented each other, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that interlocked exactly.

She realized now, for the first time, that she could never bust them up. Let her raze their house to the ground, destroy their careers, cut off their limbs and ship them off to opposite sides of the globe, and they’d still manage to find a way to grow old together.

She put her fingers around the bud of the rose Lloyd had given her, then crushed its petals to pulp and flung them across the room.

She wasn’t giving up. There was one thing she had left to try. The thing she hadn’t let herself consider seriously, before now. The thing that, if she did it, could never be undone. The step that, once taken, could never be retracted.

But it would take a lot of planning and a lot of money. And she needed to be physically strong, too. How had she let herself get so weak?

An orderly brought in her dinner. “Here we are,” he said, setting it before her. “Try to eat as much as you ca—”

Before he could even get the words out, she was gobbling enthusiastically from her tray.

T
HE NEXT DAY
, Natalie had only one visitor, and an unexpected one at that: her employer.

Jennifer Jerrold came through the door like a queen into a throne room. She acted as though she’d been in that exact hospital room a thousand times before—as though she in fact owned it. She removed her black slouch hat and tossed it onto the counter by the sink, without even looking to see that the counter was there.

Her long, salt-and-pepper hair was tied in a braid that fell down her back, and she wore a black jumpsuit and black boots. She was also holding the ugliest potted plant that Natalie had ever seen. It looked as though acid rain had got to it and mutated it.

“Well, you might have called,” she said. She put the plant on the stand next to Natalie’s bed. “Here. This is for you.”

Natalie cringed away from it, as though she feared it might arch over and suck her blood.

Jennifer sat down, crossed her legs, and immediately lit up a cigarette, in violation of the hospital’s—in fact, of western civilization’s—rules.

“Sorry,” said Natalie. “How’d you know I was here?”

“Bettina and Sally said they saw you fall down the stairs yesterday at lunch,” she said, exhaling a puff of smoke that expanded in the air and obscured her face. “So I didn’t expect you back that afternoon. But when I still hadn’t heard from you this morning, I started calling around.”

Natalie unobtrusively tried to move the stand with the plant away from her. “I’m really sorry, Jennifer. For what it’s worth, I think this is the turning point for me.”

“Meaning what?”

“No more craziness. I’m coming back to work a whole person. If you’ll have me, that is.”

“Course I’ll have you. You’re the only girl I’ve ever found who doesn’t bitch about having to wade through all those AFTRA forms. When may we expect your return?”

“Not tomorrow. Day after, I guess. They’re releasing me this morning, but the doctor says to take it easy for a day or two, just hang out at home.”

“What happened, anyway?”

“I got a concussion when I fell down those stairs. But also, they say I’m malnourished a little bit. And dehydrated.”

“Sounds like you’ve just spent a year in the Peace Corps.” She took another drag off her cigarette, moved her mouth as if she were chewing on the smoke, then spat it out all at once. “Natalie, Natalie, whatever is the matter with you?”

“I could tell you, but you’d think I was nuts.”

“Bet I wouldn’t. Got to be a man. What, you think you’re the first to go through this?”

She let her face betray her. “You think you know everything.”

“You mean you think I don’t?” They both laughed at this, then fell silent for a moment.

“Is that okay?” Natalie said at last. “I mean, if I come back to work the day after tomorrow?”

“Yes. Fine. I don’t care. We’re slow at the moment, anyway.” She looked around the room for the first time. “Lucky you. No roomie.”

“I’m just in for observation, so they stuck me in one of the private suites.”

Jennifer espied an unopened can of Coca-Cola on Natalie’s stand. “You going to drink that?”

“No—all that sugar.”

“Mind if I have at it?”

“Not at all.” She passed it to her boss, who popped the top and sipped at it noisily.

They stared at each other for another moment, until Natalie said, “It’s funny, seeing you like this. Out of the office, I mean.”

“It’s funnier seeing
you
like
this,”
she said, nodding at Natalie’s bed. She put the can on the chair’s wooden armrest.

“No, what I mean is, I haven’t had a real job before—I used to just temp, so my bosses were just these faces. Here today, gone tomorrow. It’s kind of weird to have a boss who shows up in your life like a real human being.”

“Oh, I’m
often
mistaken for a real human being.”

“You know what I mean. It’s just nice to know someone cares. Someone who doesn’t have to, I mean.”

“Natalie, I want you to stop it right this instant. You are trying to flatter and embarrass me and I won’t have it.” She stubbed out her cigarette in a plastic drinking cup. “I’m not Mary Poppins. I am not Florence Nightingale, and I am not Barbara Bush.”

“Well, no, but—”

“I’m also smart enough to know what you’re up to, even if you don’t know it yourself. You talk about me so we can’t talk about you. Fine, if that’s how you want it. But I’ll give you a piece of advice, anyway: Forget about him.”

“Forget about who?”

“Whoever he is. Forget about him. If he drove you to this and still doesn’t care, he never will.”

She colored again, but this time with anger. “You don’t know that.”

“Hell I don’t. I know everything, remember?” She looked around for the box of tissues; she found it, reached over, and yanked one out. “You need some perspective, that’s all. You can’t see anything but this man right now. You should take a trip, go someplace where the whole world doesn’t revolve around anything you even recognize. Oman, or Honduras, or mainland China.” She blew her nose, and it sounded like a fanfare of trumpets.

“I can’t afford to get away,” Natalie lied.

“I’ll lend you the money.” She balled up the tissue and casually tossed it to the floor.

“Why? Why are you taking such an interest in me?”

She shrugged. “It’s my hobby. Some people collect stamps, I collect lives. Got a whole network of them. Yours could be one. Not your whole life, of course; just the crises. I like the crises. They make me feel alive; that’s why I try to be part of them. Then, when life gets dull and dreary and I feel listless and useless, I relive them. I sit and remember Nancy’s divorce, or Barry’s throat cancer, or Cassandra’s trouble with her hoodlum son, and how I was there to see them through it. It’s kind of like being a character on a soap opera, only it’s my soap opera. I’m too impatient for the regular kind; I want to jump into the TV and tell everyone what to do.”