Fag Hag (Robert Rodi Essentials) (16 page)
Read Fag Hag (Robert Rodi Essentials) Online
Authors: Robert Rodi
Ah, yes. The morning of December 28.
LLOYD:
Are you
sure
you don’t want to invite Natalie?
PETER:
We haven’t been close in months.
LLOYD:
Thought that might just be a tiff. (unidentifiable noise) Cut that out!
PETER:
(laughing) You love it.
LLOYD:
I’m trying to dress! Stop evading the issue.
PETER:
What issue? (unidentifiable noise)
LLOYD:
(laughing) God
damn
it Peter.
PETER:
There is no God, remember?
LLOYD:
You said you’ve spent the last two New Year’s Eves with her, and it was kind of a tradition.
PETER:
So? She ended it, not me. She kicked my ass down the stairs, not vice-versa.
LLOYD:
She gave us that fruit-and-cheese basket.
PETER:
But she didn’t apologize. Honey, just drop it. It’s going to be just couples anyway. Like we decided. Plus, you invited her brother and his wife, and apparently they’re feuding, God knows what about.
LLOYD:
There is no God, remember?
It was the most they had ever deigned to discuss her. That, in itself, hurt more than the dismissive tone Peter had taken when they did—or the knowledge that he was now keeping Calvin’s company, not hers.
She flipped to another page. Another favorite of hers: January 12—a Saturday night roll in the hay.
LLOYD (moans):
Oh—that’s good, Peter…lower…Listen, I’ve had some time to do some thinking…about the whole national health issue…we never got back to that…Oh,
baby
…yes, just like that…And a national health service would just indicate to every citizen that he or she can drink or smoke or shoot up or overeat to their heart’s content, and if their bodies break down the government will step in and fix them up again…You feel great, honey, now do the other one…Now, you and I strive to stay healthy; we eat right, we work out, we g—
oh, Peter
—just keep that up for a while…Anyway, why should we have to foot the bill for everyone else’s bad habits? Why should we have to pay to maintain the health of people who refuse to take care of themselves? That’s what insurance is for. It’s up to the individual to fund those kind of contingencies, those kinds of catastrophic…catastrophic...
permission
to ruin their health…I’ve said it before, private property is the great civilizer of the individual, and the body is the most private property of all, and if you hand over control of its care to the state, you become—you become—oh, God, baby, here I come… (untranscribable noises)
S
HE CHUCKLED AGAIN
. The temptation to show that page to someone else was almost overpowering. The trouble was, she had no one left in her life to share it with.
The shower sounds had ceased now; she knew from experience that it would be about five minutes more before Lloyd completed his morning regimen and re-entered the bedroom to awaken Peter. She could still see her breath, so she turned up the gas jet on the heater. Then she flipped to another page—one she’d marked with a red exclamation point on the Post-It sticker, because it was the most promising exchange she’d recorded thus far, in terms of setting the stage for her eventual revenge:
PETER:
You think about what I said yesterday?
LLOYD:
Not yet.
PETER:
Why not? You’ve had plenty of time.
LLOYD:
I know. Your tie’s hooked on your collar in back.
PETER:
Fix it for me? (pause) It’s such an unsavory business, is all.
LLOYD:
You don’t know beans about it.
PETER:
By choice. I’d just like to see you out of that store, out of that environment—
LLOYD:
Fixed.
PETER:
Thanks. Listen, honey, I just—
LLOYD:
Wipe your feet before you step on the Bill of Rights, Peter.
PETER:
I’m not saying no one should sell guns, just not you.
LLOYD:
Why not?
PETER:
I told you. I just don’t like it. And I do have some say in it. If I’m your husband, I have some say.
LLOYD:
What about it bothers you, exactly?
PETER:
The kind of creeps who buy guns. Criminals, that kind of—
LLOYD:
A small percentage. Minuscule. And my not selling them guns doesn’t mean they’re not going to—
PETER:
I know, I know, I’m not talking about cause and effect, I’m talking about
you.
I don’t want you in that chain of events, even if it’s okay in principle for you to be there. If you ever sold a gun to somebody who used it to hurt someone, or something, I’d feel—I don’t know what I’d feel.
LLOYD:
(sighs) I’ll take it under consideration.
PETER:
I know you think I’m ridiculous.
LLOYD:
Come here, you.
PETER:
Watch the jacket—watch the— (laughter)
Lloyd was back in the bedroom now. “Wake up, your majesty,” he said. Natalie could hear the rustle of sheets; he was obviously trying to jostle Peter away.
She stole a glance at the tape to make sure it was still recording.
“Mmlgrph,” said Peter. He yawned loudly. “Time is it?”
“Five-forty-one,” said Lloyd. His footsteps receded a bit; then there was the sound of venetian blinds being ripped open.
“Funny thing,” he said “That van again.”
Natalie’s heart stopped.
“What van?” Peter said in the middle of another yawn.
“White one, across the street. It’s there every morning and every night, but I know for a fact no one on the street owns it. Last neighborhood meeting I complimented the Wittkowskis on it, and they said it’s not theirs, they thought it was ours. And I know it’s not the Smiths’ because they’ve been away for two weeks, and the van is in a different spot every day.”
So much for being as inconspicuous as possible,
thought Natalie.
Goddamn Lloyd and his fucking computer-scanner brain.
“Might be someone casing the homes here,” he said, his voice becoming more remote. He must be leaving the bedroom. “Think I’ll just run across the street and have a peek inside. Got to get the paper from the lawn, anyway.”
Natalie ripped off the headphones, lunged to the front of the van, and twisted the key. The engine didn’t ignite, and her hands, numbed by cold now, banged clumsily against the keys. She tried again and almost snapped her thumb off.
The engine roared, startling her; her foot was already pressed against the accelerator. She withdrew it and cautioned herself not to panic. Then she took a short breath, shifted into drive, and lurched into the street with a screech—just missing Lloyd, who had chosen this moment to step incautiously off the curb. He had to leap out of the way so suddenly, that she was certain he hadn’t seen her face.
Her heart beating wildly, she continued down Wilson Avenue until she deemed herself safe, then started gasping for breath. Jesus Christ, that had been close!
She drove on a little farther, listening to her heartbeat as it thudded in her ears. She wouldn’t rest until she got far, far away.
Then she noticed a thick, burning smell. She thought at first it must be coming from outside, but as she drove on it got progressively more overpowering, until she remembered, to her horror, that she hadn’t turned off the gas heater before sending the van into orbit.
She swung the wheel to the right and parked along the side of the road. Then she peered behind her and saw that the heater had toppled over and that a large section of the carpeting beneath it was smoldering.
She screamed and jumped out of the van, ran to the back, and tried to open the doors, but they were locked. She ran back to the driver’s side to get the keys from the ignition, but she’d slammed the door so hard that it had automatically locked.
So there she was, on a lonely stretch of Wilson Avenue at a quarter to six in the morning, not half a mile from Lloyd and Peter’s house, locked out of her new Chevy van, with its engine running and a fire started in the back.
She screamed. She screamed again.
Never mind the loss of the van—she could always buy another—but if the borrowed equipment were somehow damaged, think of the trouble those corrupt cops could bring down on her head!
She ran around like a decapitated hen, screaming, “Oh! Oh! Oh!” She was utterly at a loss. At this hour, few cars were likely to pass, and none likely to stop and help.
She tripped over a chunk of loose cement a few yards from the van.
That’s it,
she decided, lying in the street with her knee throbbing;
I’ve crippled myself, and I’ll have to lie here and watch my van explode. And with my luck, this is the route Peter and Lloyd take to work, so they’ll be the ones who find me lying here unconscious among the wreckage, with pages of their private conversations scattered all around me.
But she wasn’t seriously hurt, and after she got back to her feet she conceived the brilliant idea of using the cement block to break her rear door window.
At first she was barely able to lift it, but adrenaline gave her a rush of strength, and she charged the van wielding the cement high above her head.
“Eeyaaargh!”
she cried, barbarianlike.
Her first attempt at shattering the window only resulted in a good four-inch dent in the door itself, about an inch below the glass. She shrieked, then stepped back a few feet and tried again, hurling herself at her target.
This time the window cracked.
She went at it again, a guttural, animal roar accompanying her attack.
Soon the window gave way with a disappointing thud; the glass fell into the van, nearly whole—a latticework of cracks and splinterings that had still managed to hold most of its shape.
Now
what?
Smoke billowed from the window she’d just bashed open. Panicking, she ran around the grassy stretches on each side of the nearby sidewalk, gathering up an armful of snow.
Then she clambered up onto the van’s back bumper, stuck her torso through the gaping window frame, and with smoke stinging her eyes and singeing her hair, started flinging clumps of snow onto where she’d remembered the smoldering to have been.
Out of the corner of her eye—a miracle!—she saw a car drive by. She hopped down and rushed toward it; an elderly couple sat in the front seat, their mouths open. She waved to them frantically, but they sped away. At first she was astonished that they would abandon someone so clearly in distress—but after a moment’s reflection she realized she must look highly alarming, with her corduroys soiled by slush and snow, her manner spastic and deranged, and her wild hair sticking into her mouth because she didn’t even have time to pause and yank it out.
She dashed back to the van with a new armful of snow. The smoke nearly choked her, but she persisted in dumping more and more snow until she managed to smother the flames and kill the heater.
Now she hung off the back of the van—still running—listening to the hiss of the doused fire within, smelling the gas and the smoke and the sodden carpet all at once, and wondering how she had ever come to this. Surely no revenge was worth such trouble.
She awkwardly reached through the window gap and lifted the latch that released the back door. Then she hopped down and lifted it open.
The sooty mess was all on the left side of the van; the right side, with its precious cargo of electronics, was untouched.
Peter and Lloyd are wrong,
she thought;
there
is
a God.
O
N THE MORNING
following her near-disaster in the van, she awakened with a start at the sound of the telephone ringing. Scarcely anyone still called her.
She no longer bothered to keep the phone by her bed at night, and so had to get up, numb-faced, and track it down through the chaos of her apartment.
She followed its insistent ringing to the coffee table, beneath which she’d stuffed it a few days earlier while watching a bad movie on television. She retrieved it with a grunt of effort, and found its earpiece smeared with congealed tomato paste. She hissed in disgust, took a quick glance under the couch, and discovered a half-eaten pizza lying there—of what vintage, she could only guess.
Well,
she thought,
that’s what I get for not cleaning house for three months.
She took the still-ringing phone to the kitchen—there was no danger of her answering machine clicking in, because the tape had run out and she’d never taken the time to replace it—and gave it a swipe with a moist paper towel, then dropped the soiled towel onto a mound of Chinese take-out boxes that towered precariously above the rim of her wastebasket. When the paper towel landed on the topmost container with a splat, the entire heap wobbled perilously, then slid wetly onto the tiled floor, spilling cold, gummy chop suey remnants in the process.
She turned away from the mess—out of sight, out of mind—and, rubbing her eyes to get the sand out, answered the phone. “Hello?”
“Natalie, I beg of you.” It was her mother.
“Mom, for Christ’s sake.”
“Don’t hang up, please! This is important. It’s Carmen De Fleur.”
Natalie felt as though the whole apartment had just done a flip-flop, floor to ceiling and back again. “No,” she said softly.
“I know how much you hate us all, but you can’t possibly have any ill feeling for that poor, dear creature. You offered to buy her from me once. Well, now it’s time to come and say goodbye.”