Closet Case (Robert Rodi Essentials) (30 page)

Yet Emil rambled on, in terms Lionel could only barely comprehend. “Lionel, I have always believed strongly in anarchism, in the beauty of Emma Goldman’s definition, ‘a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law.’ Yet she goes on to add that anarchism is also ‘the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary.’ Now Sade has made me think, what
is
her equation of ‘violence’ with ‘wrong’ if not a man-made law in itself? Violence, after all, exists in nature, outside the realm of morality. And besides, many anarchists have used violence in the furtherance of our cause. And most damning of all, if Sade is correct — and I haven’t been able to fault his logic — then violence is not only necessary to the establishment of an anarchist social order, but also its
perpetuation
.’”

Lionel was growing impatient to be gone. “And the point is?” he asked, providing a segue for Emil, who he feared would never get to one on his own.

“The point is, I have lost faith. Or if not lost it, had it so profoundly shaken that I cannot say whether it has survived. Lionel, for the first time in my life, I have had to say,
There must be a line.
One that cannot be crossed. Where is it? I don’t know. I think I will be many years finding it. For now, though, I am drawing it very close around me, in a tight circle. I am starting with the most basic of certainties: that each of us must share his life with that person whom he best loves. And that’s why I’ve decided not to return to Transylvania, but to stay in America and beg Yolanda to be my wife.” He took a deep breath, as if a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders. “I’d come to that conclusion last night. That’s why I was so dismayed when she failed to show up this morning. Yesterday, I believed fully in two things: anarchism, and Yolanda. This morning, both seemed to have evaporated. I don’t mind telling you, I resorted to drink.”

Lionel was feeling the weight that Emil had shrugged off. David was
waiting.
Yet he couldn’t just leave Emil, not after a confession like that. He put a hand on his friend’s shoulder and said, “I’m glad about Yolanda. You’ll be good together. And I know she’ll say yes. What about the fight against AIDS?”

“More barriers are being broken here than in Europe. I will fight here, and do my best to make certain that Transylvania — that
all
of Romania — isn’t overlooked when new treatments are approved. I owe that much to Mircea’s memory.”

Lionel shook his head. “Emil, I really have to go. Someone’s waiting for me. I think you’re okay now. Am I right?”

“Of course! Go on, then. Tell Yolanda to call me when she can.” He slipped his key into the car door and swung it open. Lionel hesitated to leave, so he waved him away and said, “Go
on
! Go on, my friend, and thank you for listening.” He smiled sheepishly. “I love you very much.”

Lionel felt his eyes itch — a presage to tears — so he beamed a quick smile at Emil, then turned and began race-walking back to the ice-cream shop. He wouldn’t blame David if he were angry, but he was certain he could explain. He only hoped he wasn’t at this very moment thinking Lionel
had
ditched him.

He stopped at a street corner to let a station wagon pass; kids and dogs were all but spilling out the back. He smiled at the sight, and when they were beyond him, he jogged to the other side. One more corner, and the ice-cream shop would be in full view.

Imagine Emil turning up in Wild Rose! Of course he had a perfectly logical explanation for it, but after the shock of running into Kevin again, it had almost been enough to do Lionel in. If he came across one more familiar face in this middle-of-nowhere town, he might just keel right over.

Half a block from the corner he needed to turn, Bob Smartt stepped out of an alley and into his path.

And as a matter of fact, Lionel
did
keel right over.

Because Bob balled his fist and struck him square in the face.

For a moment, Lionel was too stunned to think. His fall had knocked the wind out of him, and the gravel on the street bit sharply into his face and hip. Before he could get his bearings, Bob lifted him by his armpits and dragged him down the alley, like an oversized doll.

He shook his head to clear it, then started struggling, but Bob’s stringy arms were surprisingly strong, as though they were made entirely of copper.

People in the street had stopped to watch. “HEY!” Lionel shouted as they peered after him curiously. “FOR CHRIST’S SAKE,
HELP
ME! WHAT IS THIS, NEW YORK CITY?”

Bob shoved him up against the back wall of a low-slung building, face first, then pulled his arms behind his back and slipped something cold and sharp over his wrists.

“Wha— what th—
handcuffs
?” he exclaimed, now fully alert again. “Oh,
man,
Smartt, you’ve gone
way
over the edge now. You’re gonna pay
big
time if even
one
of my teeth needs capping because of thi—”

“Shut up!”
Bob hissed, leaning into him and pressing him deep into the wall. “You’ve got
some
nerve talking like that after what you’ve done!” He grabbed the link between the cuffs and yanked it around to Lionel’s flank, almost dislocating one of his arms. “See these?” he said with a sneer of contempt. “
Yolanda’s.
I found them under her bed —”

“Right, breaking and entering, too,” muttered Lionel.

“— in a suitcase full of — well, I don’t have to tell you, do I?”

“You are a raving rat bastard, you know that?”

“Well, you’d know, wouldn’t you, you — you —
cad
.” His breath was coming fast and hard, but there was even now something effete about him. He reminded Lionel of nothing so much as an adolescent girl betrayed by her compatriots at jump rope. Despite the stinging pain in his wrists, he couldn’t take Bob the Avenger seriously.

Especially since he didn’t even know
what
he was avenging.

Bob dragged him over to a car parked at the opposite end of the alley, its back half edging into the sidewalk. Lionel recognized it as Bob’s Eclipse. Bob pushed him toward it, and he stumbled out of the alley and into full view of the town again.

And there was the ice-cream shop, just across the street and three doors down. He felt a rush of optimism; sanctuary was in sight!

Bob grabbed him by the elbow and held him while he fumbled his key into the lock, and Lionel thought,
All I have to do is wrench myself out of his grip and haul ass over to the shop, and David will be there, and that’ll be the end of this whole bizarre episode.
And just as he ginned up his courage to execute this plan, David appeared at the window of the shop and scanned the street, presumably for him.

He froze, waiting for David’s eyes to reach him.

And when they did, Lionel smiled, half out of relief that this nonsense would soon be over, half because he now knew that David couldn’t doubt him any longer, not now, because here he
was
, he was right —

The door to the Eclipse swung open and Bob shoved him into the car.

He stumbled onto the passenger set, instinctively bringing his feet in after him just seconds before the door slammed shut behind him. Because of the cuffs, it took him a moment to sit upright, and by that time Bob had slid into the driver’s seat and buckled himself in.

Lionel looked out at the street, certain he would find David there, racing to his rescue. But instead he saw him still in the window of the shop, a look of almost horrified hurt on his face. And a cold epiphany settled over him: he’d been on the
far
side of the car. David hadn’t been able to see the handcuffs, hadn’t seen the way Bob had shoved him. From his point of view, all he saw was Lionel getting into a car with another man — and now, he and that man were driving fast away.

He craned his neck to try for one last moment of eye contact with David, as if in that moment he might telepathically explain everything to him; but the ice-cream shop was a rapidly diminishing blur. All Lionel could see with any clarity was Bob’s famous spear, nestled on the back seat. The sight of it chilled him; this might be a worse predicament than he thought.

Bob sped out of the town center, his knuckles white over the steering wheel, his nostrils flaring with each furious breath. He wore a pair of pleated white trousers, avocado sneakers, and a collarless, pale-green striped sailor shirt, making him probably the most absurd avatar of abduction western civilization had ever known.

Lionel was really anxious now. Yet part of him was exhilarated, too, because he knew now that whatever lingering feelings Yolanda might have for Bob would be atomized when she learned of this psychopathic stunt.

He furrowed his brow and wriggled his shoulder blades up the back of the seat till he was sitting upright, then tried to sound authoritative and threatening. “You’re in
deep
shit, Smartt — and
don’t
tell me to shut up. I don’t take orders from any asinine clotheshorse playing yahoo-for-a-day.”

No, no, this was wrong. He tried to calm himself. It wouldn’t do to
insult
Bob. The idea was somehow to get him to listen to reason. And soon. Nothing was more important to Lionel than getting back to David and explaining what had happened. The idea that he might be in some kind of distress because of this was more than Lionel could bear.

Bob was so angry he was visibly trembling. Still, he wouldn’t take his eyes off the road. “You’ll pay,” he said, shaking his head. “
Oh,
you’ll pay. Did you think I wouldn’t find
out
? Did you think when it became clear Yolanda had run off that I wouldn’t call
you
for advice? You were my brother, Lionel. We drummed together.” He turned and gave him such a look of anguished betrayal that Lionel’s heart almost stopped. “We
drummed
together, dammit!” His voice actually broke.

“That doesn’t oblige me to get involved with you in conspiracies against your girlfriend,” Lionel said, more softly. He was, against all odds, feeling a smidgen of guilt.

“No,” Bob scoffed, “just with
her
against
me
.” He swerved off the road and sent the Eclipse barreling across a bumpy, un-landscaped field, finally bringing it to a halt within the cover of a small copse of maple trees.

He stilled the engine and turned to Lionel. “Like I said, I called you for advice. But your office said you were away for a week.” He reached into his pants pocket and took out a tiny bottle of eye drops. “That’s when it hit me,” he said while squeezing a few droplets into one eye. “Yolanda was away …
you
were away … it was too much of a coincidence.” He blinked, then repeated the process in his right eye. “Sorry, I’m all bleary today. Haven’t slept. Anyway, then I remembered all those nights Yolanda made excuses for not being able to see me, the nights I couldn’t reach her, the nights I was
sure
she was out with another man. And I remembered how when I told
you
about those nights, you said you could vouch for her whereabouts on every one of them.” He screwed the cap back on the vial and slipped it back into his pocket, then turned his watery, but unbearably intense, gaze back on Lionel. “And like a fool, I was actually comforted by that, because I didn’t realize it was only
half
the truth. Of
course
you could vouch for her whereabouts! It was
you
all along!”

Lionel heard the wild shriek of blackbirds in the branches above him, felt the prickling heat of the sun on his neck as though it were a hot compress, and he thought for a moment how funny it was, that his senses should be so heightened to these things, just at the moment he realized he might in fact be in real trouble. Bob, it seemed, had come completely unhinged. In his derangement, he’d conceived a conspiracy theory worthy of a Kennedy-assassination buff, and nothing Lionel said would convince him he was wrong.

Well, wait a minute: there was
one
thing. He could always just tell Bob he was gay.

But no, no, no — he shouldn’t
have
to do that,
wouldn’t
do that. He wasn’t going to allow an embarrassing, theatrical fit of
Bob Smartt
’s to force him into compromising his secret.

“Bob,” he said with quiet deliberation, “you’ve taken this ‘to-be-male-is-to-feel-pain’ thing
way
too far. Just because your feelings are hurt doesn’t mean everyone else is to blame for it. In the first place, I’m
not
involved with Yolanda. In the second place, if I
were
 — well, hell, if Yolanda doesn’t want to be with you, if she wants to be with someone else, that’s her decision, and none of
your
fucking business.”

That “fucking” may have been too pointed a punctuation for this particular argument. It sounded derisive, and up till he said it, Lionel thought he might actually be getting through. But now Bob’s eyes clouded over again, and he restarted the car. “You’re going to take me to her now,” he said.

“Like hell I am,” Lionel said, almost laughing.

He pulled onto the road again and headed back towards town. “Your office would only tell me you’d gone to a place called Wild Rose in Wisconsin. They wouldn’t give me an address.” Suddenly he whipped into the opposite, oncoming lane and started accelerating. “I searched Yolanda’s place and couldn’t find a hint of where she was staying, so I just drove up here last night, to the center of the town, and waited, and waited, and waited. I figured
one
of you would eventually show up.”

“You’re in the wrong lane,” Lionel said with no small urgency.

“And my waiting paid off,” he continued, ignoring him. “I’ve got you under my thumb. And you
are
going to take me to her. Aren’t you?”

A car was coming at them now. “For God’s sake,” Lionel yelled, “do you want to get us both killed?” He doubled over and tried to lift his cuffed hands to the steering wheel, but his elbows locked and he couldn’t get within six inches of it.

He sat up again, gasping. Bob kept barreling towards the oncoming car. Its horn blared at him, but he had obviously tuned it out — he stared straight ahead as if into the jaws of death, with his own jaw set and his teeth clenched.

“I won’t hurt her,” he said. “I’d never hurt her. But I want her to make me understand. I want a
reason
. You’ll take me to her, Lionel, right? Won’t you?”

Lionel could now make out that the other car was a Jaguar. Its driver was laying on the horn without let-up. Another quarter-second and Lionel could see that the driver was David.

David — pissed-off and cursing, driving through a haze of hurt, having been played for a fool and abandoned — on the road now and determined
not
to get out of anyone’s way and maybe not caring what would happen if he
didn’t
. Maybe he was even
determined
to meet Bob head-on. Maybe he
wanted
a collision.

Lionel felt adrenaline flood his body; a major disaster was a breath away. He took one swift glance at Bob for some indication that he was preparing to relent — but his knuckles were white, his lips whiter, and his foot still heavy on the gas pedal.

Lionel could almost hear the deafening crunch of metal and glass, the way an echo of the first chord of a song sometimes prefaces the real thing on a cassette tape.

“I’LL TAKE YOU! I’LL TAKE YOU TO HER!”
he screamed, at what he thought was surely a beat too late.

Bob whipped the wheel around the steering column, sending the Eclipse spinning away at a seventy-five degree angle. It skidded off the road entirely, while the Jaguar roared by, its horn still blaring. And it was only when that blare Doppler-shifted into a lower register and began to recede that Lionel, who’d been too afraid to look, realized he’d somehow survived. He cracked open his eyes and saw Bob wrestling with the wheel to get the car back on the road, and suddenly he understood that he’d saved not only his own life but David’s too.

But at Yolanda’s expense.

They continued as though nothing had happened. The road ahead was clear. Bob was safely in the right-hand lane. Lionel could still hear the blackbirds.

And the blood left his face in a sudden gush as he contemplated what he’d just been through. He wished his hands weren’t bound behind him; he felt a desperate need to clutch them over his heart.

“All righty,” said Bob. “That address, if you’d be so kind …?”