Fag Hag (Robert Rodi Essentials) (27 page)

Natalie felt warm and relaxed, as if having Jennifer take care of her were the most natural and desirable thing in the world. But she still had her agenda; she still had her last-ditch attempt at forcing Peter apart from Lloyd.

“That’s so sweet,” she said, “and I do appreciate it. But I think the thing for me, right now, is to get back to normal. I want to do my job and get my health back, period. Maybe I’ll take a trip someday, but not at the moment. I hope you understand.”

Jennifer sighed. “Why does everyone I try to help have to be so goddamn sensible about it?” She uncrossed her legs. “Of course I understand. What time is it, do you know?”

Natalie checked her watch. “Ten after two.”

“Kyle’s meeting me here any second. We’re going to a friend’s opening in Milwaukee tonight. You mind if I wait for him here? He has your name, he’ll find me.”

“I don’t mind. Who’s Kyle?”

“My husband. Surely you knew that.”

“I didn’t even know you were married.”

She raised both eyebrows. “I thought that gossipy little kaffeeklatsch would’ve given you my whole life story by now.”

“You mean Bettina and Sally?” She shook her head. “They haven’t really accepted me yet.”

“Your fault, dear. But at least, now, you have them intrigued. They couldn’t stop gabbling about your accident on the stairs—you’d have thought it was a major new twist in Middle East policy or something.”

Natalie dropped her head back into her pillow. “I
hate
that. I
hate
being gossiped about.”

“Then move to the Faeroe Islands or a cave in Tibet, sweetheart. Your only option.”

“What were they saying?”

Jennifer lit another cigarette. Really, it was a miracle no one had come in and turned a fire hose on her. “Just speculation. They have you down as either a paranoid schizophrenic, a heroin junkie, or a sufferer of anorexia nervosa. And they were positively giddy about the young man.”

“What young man?”

“The one who swept in like Sir Galahad and carried you up the stairs. And got your blood all over his polo shirt. Apparently he was gorgeous. You know how to bring my little office of snoops to the boiling point, honey.”

She grimaced. “Oh, God, I just
hate
this.”

Jennifer cocked her head. “Don’t tell me that was actually
him.”

“Okay, I won’t tell you that.”

Jennifer’s jaw dropped; she slapped her forehead, and in so doing knocked over the can of Coke; it clattered to the floor and started gushing its syrupy contents. “Natalie, you’re something,” she said as she leaned over and picked up the can. “Did you deliberately stage that accident, for his benefit? God, I can’t believe I asked that—of course you didn’t.” She yanked some more tissues from the box and commenced mopping up the spill. “You don’t watch out, you’re going to have
me
sitting around whispering about you with Bettina and Sally.”

“You do, and I quit.”

A nurse came in to check the I.V. and threw a very efficient fit at the sight of Jennifer’s lit cigarette, which was now dangling precariously from her lower lip. She hissed and flapped her hands wildly at the smoke, as though cursing Jennifer to perdition in semaphore, then threw open a window with the exact gesture Natalie had seen Moses use to part the Red Sea in a movie once. Jennifer got up and put out her cigarette in the sink.

Just then a shockingly handsome, fortyish man in a blazer and black T-shirt peered in and said, “Excuse me.”

“Excused,” chirped Natalie, suddenly on girlish alert.

“Oh, Kyle,” said Jennifer from the sink. She picked up her hat and waved it at Natalie. “This is Natalie. Natalie, this is Kyle.”

“Hi,” said Kyle. “Sorry about your…whatever.”

“Thanks,” said Natalie, who appraised him up and down and concluded,
Gay as a goose.

“No respect for orders,” the nurse said, still fuming. “Have to watch you people like you’re filthy children.” She took the potted plant from Natalie’s bed stand and put it on the windowsill, for which Natalie was instantly grateful.

“Well, we’re off,” Jennifer said, fixing her hat on her head at a fashionably rakish angle. “I’ll see you—well, whenever we agreed.”

“Have a good time in Wisconsin.”

“Oh, honey, you
are
an optimist.” She took Kyle’s arm and dragged him out the door, and Natalie thought,
She probably has to drag him past all the orderlies, too.

The nurse was energetically tucking in the corners of Natalie’s sheets now. “You should tell your mother there are reasons for our rules. And NO SMOKING means no smoking!”

Natalie half-smiled. She was willing to bet the nurse didn’t think Kyle was her father.

The scene had given her newfound resolve.
If Jennifer Jerrold can do it,
she thought,
so can I.

Although Jennifer Jerrold had almost certainly never had to do what Natalie was planning.

J
ENNIFER ERUPTED INTO
the office and stormed over to Natalie’s desk. Natalie looked up in alarm.

“Morning, Jennifer,” she said cautiously.

“I could kill you,” the talent agent snarled, “with my teeth
alone.”
She lobbed a copy of the new
Illinois Entertainer
at her.

Natalie caught it and gave it a look. Quentin was on the cover; he was practically fellating a microphone and had his arm outstretched, finger pointed accusingly at the camera. He was drenched in sweat and illuminated by spotlights. Two backup singers crouched menacingly behind him. All wore sunglasses and big, knobby sneakers.

It was a photo from his recent performance at Cabaret Metro. The cover headline was, AYN RAP 2000: FORMER GANGBANGERS TURN LIBERTARIAN HIP-HOP STARS.

“Didn’t you tell me you knew him?” Jennifer demanded.

“I used to, but—”

“No buts. I asked you months ago to arrange a meeting with him. He’s getting more and more buzz, Natalie, and I
want
him. I’m tired of handling a bunch of voice talents and movie extras. I want a
big
act on my roster.”

Natalie flipped through the magazine, trying to locate the article. “But I told you, Jennifer—he insists on black management.”

“I never wear anything
but
black.”

“I’m talking race, and you know it.”

“Black Irish!” she shot back.

Natalie smiled and shook her head, then found the article. She only skimmed it, as she had read the same basic story several times over the past few months. It told how former Rama Z member Quentin Butler had left the gang at the urging of his fiancée, then discovered the novels of Ayn Rand. Unable to find lasting employment, he founded the hip-hop group Ayn Rap 2000 and translated the late author’s polemical writings into the cadences of the masses. One representational lyric went,
“They take the best of us and steal our power to be free/The sanction of the victim is the only tool they need.”
Music critics didn’t know what to make of him, but audiences were eating him up.

Well, good for Quentin, was all she had to say. He’d started making money, bought himself a new IROC-Z, and moved Lawanda and Darnita out of the project. He was looking for a house, but in the meantime was living in a high-rise at Chestnut and Michigan, at the southern tip of the Gold Coast.

She closed the magazine and looked up. Jennifer still loomed over her. “Get me some face time with that boy, and if I sign him, I’ll make you a partner in this place.”

Natalie shrugged. “I’ll see what I can do, but I honestly—”

“That’s all I wanted to hear,” Jennifer said, standing bolt upright. “Just let me know when and where.” She went into her office and shut the door.

Natalie sighed. It was hopeless. Quentin hated her guts, and besides, the only way she could possibly get to him was through her mother, as apparently he and Lawanda had grown quite close to Sandy. But the last time Natalie had phoned home, Sandy had been in the middle of an Accessorizers Anonymous meeting and couldn’t talk—“It’s a crisis situation,” she’d said in hushed but urgent tones; “Carolyn says Nathan found her cache of shoes and is threatening to turn them into landfill, with a possible airport built on top. All we can do now is damage control.” But she’d never rung Natalie back. It was almost as though she’d been able to sense that her daughter was only calling because she wanted something.

She put it out of her mind. There was something else she had to think about. It was Calvin and Vera’s first anniversary today, and although she still wasn’t speaking to them, she considered the event noteworthy for another reason: it marked a full year since Peter and Lloyd’s first meeting.

She’d spent months preparing for the next, and ultimate, step in her campaign to set right the great wrong that had been done to her when Lloyd had come into Peter’s life. She’d been ready now for the past few weeks, but hadn’t had the resolve to actually put the plan into action. But this seemed like the ideal day to begin; there was something almost poetic about laying the groundwork for Peter’s permanent separation from Lloyd exactly a year to the day after they first came together.

She knew where to start, too. She opened her desk drawer and pulled out a pink WHILE YOU WERE OUT slip, dated a month earlier. It informed her that a Mr. Lloyd Hood had phoned, and requested that he call her back. His number was scrawled at the top.

It was high time she found out what that was all about.

“W
HAT A SURPRISE
,” said Lloyd. “When you didn’t return my call, I thought you were angry with us or something.”

“Oh, don’t be silly; I’ve just been busy.”

“You’re doing well at the agency, then?”

“Well enough. I’ve brought in a dozen or so new voices so I’m making a decent commission.”

“That many? Where’d you find them?”

“Gay bars, of course. Where else would you go to recruit a bunch of unknown actors?”

He laughed. “Listen, the reason I called was to thank you.”

She furrowed her brow. “Thank
me?
For what?”

“Well, after I sold the shop I was kind of at a loose end, but in the back of my mind I had this idea that you put there. Remember that dinner, a long time back, when you said I should do something for the homeless in my neighborhood, since I didn’t feel it was the government’s job? And I started thinking about a survivalism center?”

Oh, for Christ’s sake,
she thought. “I
sort
of recall that.”

“Well, it’s been up and running for about two months now, and I figure, it was your inspiration, so maybe you’d like to come and see it.”

“N
OW
, I
DON
’
T
want you to get your hopes up,” Lloyd said as he escorted her through the rubble of the Uptown neighborhood’s seediest stretch. “This may not be what you expect. It’s turned out to be completely different from anything
I’d
expected.”

“How so?” she asked, while a bum with dried vomit on his shirt watched them pass.

“Well, I learned pretty quickly that training homeless people to anticipate a breakdown of society is pointless, because for them society doesn’t work anyway. Most of them are incapable of looking beyond the next three or four hours; they’re fixated on their next meal, or where they’ll spend the night. A lot of them are to some degree mentally ill, too, and that poses its own problems. Sometimes I wonder—if I’d known what I was getting into, would I have started this? But it’s too late; I’m committed now.”

They passed a corner grocery that was boarded over with plywood and cardboard but apparently open for business all the same. Natalie looked through the door as they passed, and saw a group of sweat-stained, ratty-bearded men standing in the aisles, not buying anything. One of them met her eyes, and she felt herself shrink without knowing why.

She and Lloyd continued down the broken, sun-bleached street, and Lloyd kept up his patter. “The whole city is watching me, now,” he said, shaking his head. “If I give up, it’ll be called a failure for survivalism. But what kills me is, if I succeed, it may end up being called a triumph for liberalism. The press has got hold of me, did you know that?”

“I didn’t,” she lied. She’d seen the front-page article in
The Chicago Reader
two months before, with the headline, REDEMPTION OF A RIGHT-WINGER.

“I nearly keeled over when I saw what they’d done to me,” he said as they passed a vacant lot that looked like the surface of Mars, if Mars were littered with old bottles, shoes and newspapers. “This freelance writer comes to see me, bats her eyes a lot, and makes me think she’s impressed by what I’m saying, then goes off and writes and article that distorts every single word I uttered. I told her, explicitly, that owning a gun shop and establishing a survivalist project for indigents are two sides of the same ideological coin, but she ended up painting me as a reformed conservative wing-nut who’s now embraced good, leftist values like ‘helping people.’ I
told
her this isn’t altruism, I
told
her it’s a calculated investment in my own community, and that I expect a significant return—and what does she do? Makes me out to be the biggest altruist this side of Mother Teresa. I came close to popping a blood vessel. Peter had to physically calm me down. Now I get all sorts of chummy phone calls and visits from the kind of liberal whiners and do-gooders I used to hate the sight of, who address me in that unctuous, self-congratulatory way that makes me wish I could pull a lever and open a trap-door beneath them. And of
course
the article mentions I’m in a gay relationship as if that happened
after
I sold the shop—as if I’d somehow been massively blocking my homosexuality by playing with explosive phallic symbols, which I don’t need anymore because I’ve suddenly found my inner self and true love in one package. If I ever see that reporter again, I’ll—I’ll—” He searched for an appropriate punishment. “—I’ll give her a chiding she’ll never forget,” he concluded savagely.