Fag Hag (Robert Rodi Essentials) (9 page)

Incredibly, the entire breakfast passed without even a hint of gossip. On the way out they passed a gay couple who, three weeks before, had caused a sensation when they’d gotten into a slapping match at Sidetrack. Peter had relished all the gory details, but now he merely waved hello, then turned back to Natalie without even making a single crack about them.

She decided to remain completely oblivious to his newfound obsession with Lloyd and Lloyd’s judgments on the world, so once they entered the bookstore she left him to do his searching, determined not to show the slightest curiosity in anything he bought. She hovered by the magazine rack, reading a cryptic short story in
The New Yorker,
until he called her from the counter and said he was ready to go.

L
LOYD
COULDN
’
T
BE
a threat, she kept telling herself. It wasn’t
possible.
This was a phase Peter was going through. Perhaps she had allowed him to be too frivolous with his life, too carefree and footloose, and as a result he’d fallen under the spell of the first serious man who came along.

And yet Lloyd was so
very
serious. That, surely, would be his downfall. How much of his insistent blather about ideology and morality could someone of Peter’s sublime and joyful nature take? It was only a matter of time.

She repeated this to herself over and over during the morning she and Peter spent together, repeated it in the face of every Lloyd-says-this and Lloyd-says-that, repeated it in defiance of the presence, invisible but inextinguishable, that hung over her day like a swollen rain cloud. And when Peter finally left her, laden with books and flushed from so much talking, he kissed her goodbye and told her he loved her and that he and Lloyd were seeing a Japanese film that night, he’d call her tomorrow. So she even got Lloyd wedged into the same sentence as Peter’s declaration of love for her. That awful man was worming his way into the core of their relationship, and she hated it.

In a funk, she bought a pint of Ben & Jerry’s chocolate-fudge ice cream and ate the whole thing on her way home. Then she sat in her dim apartment and watched videocassettes of old movies all afternoon, and when they ended she felt lethargic and depressed.

The last movie she’d watched was
An Officer and a Gentleman,
which ended with a full-dress-uniform Richard Gere lifting a grimy Deborah Winger into his arms and carrying her away from her factory job and into the sunset. The television was dark now, but every time she looked at it she saw that scene replaying itself. It had given her a little shudder of ecstasy, and now she couldn’t dislodge it from her mind. She tried to replay it with Peter and herself in the starring roles, but gave that up at once; it was silly and embarrassing. Such flourishing, grand passion would certainly never be part of their relationship.

Once she realized this, she asked herself why, then, she bothered pursuing him. Was it because a beautiful, exciting, funny gay man who doesn’t want to sleep with you is better than a dull, plain, predictable straight guy who does?

As far as Natalie was concerned, that was more or less the case. Ever since her first encounter with them, she’d found gay men the liveliest, most fun-loving people she knew. They laughed the most, gossiped the most, danced the most; they were the most guilt-free of any people she’d met, the least inclined to depression, the least likely to be haunted. Of course, as she got to know them, she learned that this wasn’t really the case—especially in the wake of Battleship AIDS—but they continued to put on one hell of a show. Whereas virtually all the slow, inconsiderate heterosexual men she ever met had paunches and bad table manners and loved to wear disfiguring clothing bearing the hideous logos of inane sports franchises. It was only in the gay community that you could find the kind of man who made a dashing, dazzling, hetero icon like Richard Gere look dime-a-dozen.

Peter, for one.

She first met him when he was dating a friend of hers, Will Hammond. Will was extremely theatrical—a stockbroker by day, he threw off the shackles of respectability at night and gloried in the kind of effeminate behavior her gay friends referred to as “nelly.” He was devastatingly handsome, however, and Natalie loved being seen with him; and even though he ruined the ruggedness of his cigarette-ad looks whenever he opened his mouth, she put up with him because he was such a nonstop riot. He was like Oscar Wilde crossed with Margo Channing; his tongue should’ve been registered as a deadly weapon.

When he waltzed into Roscoe’s one night, displaying Peter like a hunting trophy, she knew right away it was a mismatch. Peter was boyish, quiet, and just the tiniest bit vulgar; Will was loud, jaded, and excessively refined. She watched as Peter recoiled from the sarcastic jibes Will tossed at his intimates, to their shrill delight. Feeling pity, she took him aside, leaving Will and his cronies to their bitchiness and
grande dame
mannerisms. Peter was transparently grateful; they retired to the alley to do a couple of lines of coke, and when Peter finally smiled—for the first time that night—the full glory of his beauty hit her, and hit her hard. As of that night, Will and Peter were history, and Natalie and Peter started a history of their own, one that had survived nearly a dozen of Peter’s subsequent romances.

She knew Peter’s family and he knew hers; she’d celebrated two successive birthdays with him, and two Christmases, and two New Year’s Eves, and last year they’d taken a week-long holiday to the Michigan resort town of Saugatuck. Once, when their respective finances were at their worst, they’d even considered moving in together; she was, alas, unable to subvert the sudden flow of freelance work that restored him to solvency and kept him firmly in his own digs.

Now, however, he seemed farther away than ever. Now he was involved with a man who had derailed him, put him on another philosophical track. He’d gone from being a practicing bacchant to an aspiring Promethean; from an epicurean to a stoic; from a hedonist to a Platonist. He’d given up frivolity for discourse, and pleasure for learning. She couldn’t reach him anymore. She’d tried gossiping, she’d tried flattery, she’d tried regaling him with jokes and stories, all to no avail. He had his head in the clouds, and lofty clouds they were.

Well, he’d soon come down to earth again. As she made herself a dinner of curried tofu—in atonement for the Ben & Jerry’s—she made a vow to stop Lloyd as she had stopped all the others who had presumed to take Peter from her. But she felt no anguish now, no violent anger at having to act; she couldn’t take that bald little fascist seriously enough. And until she could tap the well of fury within her, she knew her actions would mean little.

P
ETER SURPRISED HER
with a phone call at nine in the morning. He was clearly distraught; his voice gave him away. She could barely hear him, he was so hushed—“quailed” was the term that came to mind.

“Well, this was the quickest on record,” he said, and he attempted a laugh. “Guess I wasn’t cut out to be on the ideological front lines.”

“You mean it’s over with Lloyd?” she asked, not even caring that delight colored her voice.

“It’s over with Lloyd,” he said. “We had a
huge
fight last night.”

Her head dropped back into her pillow and her eyes fell shut; she’d been right all along. He’d never been a threat. Too different, too odd—too far from Peter’s usual realm. She was inexpressibly relieved.

“What happened, honey?” she said, full of genuine pity.

“This movie we went to see last night—I picked it out, ‘cause I’d heard it was such a big hit in Japan. And, well, it was sort of a comedy about this lady tax collector who gets to the top of the department because she’s so ruthless. Sort of a satire on the whole Japanese macho thing, y’know? With this little freckled lady outwitting all the guys. You really end up rooting for her. I really liked the movie and I said so afterward, and Lloyd—well, he just got visibly angry. He said that income tax was a crime that governments commit against their people, and that any film like this that glorified tax collecting and tax collectors was just statist propaganda and should be condemned as such. It just seemed like such a violent reaction against a—well, a kind of charming little film. I said, Oh, come on; y’know—relax, it’s only a movie. Well, then he just exploded. Kept saying it’s
not
only a movie, that art is important, and that immoral art does its part in maintaining an immortal social order—Christ, I can’t even
remember
all the things he was spouting. People on the street were looking at him. And Natalie, I don’t know, I just felt he was being silly—I tell you, I liked that movie. I don’t care if it was moral, I liked it.”

“Of course you did,” she said. She was leaping around the room, portable in hand.

“He wouldn’t even share a taxi home with me. He just hailed his own cab and left me standing on the street corner. I kept calling after him, saying, y’know, Come on, don’t act so stupid, but he just kept going. I thought he might call during the night or something, or first thing this morning, once he’d calmed down. But he didn’t. And, y’know what, I’m pissed off. I don’t want to hear from him now. I just want to forget this whole weird episode. Natalie, let’s go somewhere today, somewhere far away. Let’s take a day trip, just get lost. Okay?”

“Okay,” she said, radiantly happy. “I would absolutely love to.”

A
FEW HOURS
later they were strolling down Oak Park Avenue eating ice cream cones. Peter couldn’t get over the colors of the trees—“Autumn is such a wild season,” he said—or the sheer number of them. He rarely got away from the city, and Oak Park’s cleanliness, crispness, and strange homogeneity both attracted and repelled him. “Isn’t this where the Stepford Wives live?” he asked.

The trip hadn’t completely distracted him from his failed affair with Lloyd. Every once in a while he’d see something that would inspire him to begin, “Lloyd says,” but he’d always catch himself. Natalie noticed the dullness in his eyes, and even though he gave every appearance of having a good time, she knew better.

They stopped at a precocious little tavern and had a beer. “I don’t understand you,” she told him. “You’ve been on exactly two dates with this guy. You never even slept with him, for God’s sake. How does he rate this kind of mourning?”

He shrugged and drew a line with his finger on the frosted beer mug. “I guess it just seemed like a dirty way to end something that had seemed so clean before. I feel bad about that. It was a bad ending. Lloyd always went on and on about the primacy of reason in human affairs. But I don’t think he was very rational about the way he ended things. It kind of spoils everything that went before.”

He’s play-acting,
she thought,
just going through the motions. He just needs a jolt to get him back to his old self.
And she knew what kind of jolt would do the trick.

“After you finish your beer,” she said, “we’ll visit my mom.”

S
ANDY WAS DELIGHTED
to see them and swept them in from the front step as though afraid they might change their minds and bolt. “Come in and get warm,” she said. They weren’t cold, but they complied. As they doffed their jackets, Carmen DeFleur sniffed Peter’s leg, finding his scent unique and fascinating.

They followed Sandy into the house, and Natalie was amazed at the change in it. “Mom, everything looks
great.
You hire a maid or something?”

“Only for a day,” she said, taking a chair in the sitting room and inviting her guests to follow suit. “She really did the place proud, didn’t she? I had to have it look nice, since there was a social worker coming by.”

“A social worker? Oh, my God! What for? Were you caught shoplifting or something?”

Sandy made a face, but otherwise ignored the question. “You know how upset I’ve been about the grandchildren issue,” she said. Natalie rolled her eyes. Sandy turned to Peter and explained, “Calvin and Vera won’t be getting pregnant. They’re afraid a nuclear holocaust would make a mess of their baby’s formative years.” Then she turned back to Natalie and continued, “I guess I was feeling sorry for myself, and then I thought, by God, I’m moping when I should be coping! I decided to do something positive, but I didn’t know what. Then later I read in the paper about one of the women’s groups in town that’s started a program where you, well,
adopt
an inner-city child on weekends, and show them life isn’t all gang wars and crack dealers.”

“It’s not?” muttered Peter, and Natalie surreptitiously punched his arm.

“So I joined the group and signed up for the program, and a social worker from some Chicago department of child welfare or something stopped by to vet me—you know, to make sure I’d be a good influence. And I got approved. So started next weekend I’m going to have a little black granddaughter from the projects running around.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Mom,” Natalie said. “You don’t know what you’re getting into. How old is this girl?”

“Eight,” she said, picking up a folder from the coffee table. She opened it and showed them a photo of a fairly adorable young child with a reluctant smile and distrusting eyes, and about seven pigtails of varying lengths. “Her name is Darnita Reynolds. Her parents are both dead and she lives with her older sister, but the sister is only seventeen herself and has a baby besides, and so would love to get Darnita out of the house on weekends. Isn’t it exciting?”

Natalie had grave misgivings about this plan. “Mom,” she said, lowering her voice to convey how serious she was, “I know you watch a lot of TV and think you know what goes on in the inner city, but I can assure you, you don’t. I mean, this kid could be an addict herself, or a thief, or a—God, I don’t even know what! You can’t tell what anyone brought up in that environment is capable of. At eight she could be a pretty big girl. She could overpower you, did you ever think of that? She could get up in the middle of the night and sneak into your room, and—”