Fag Hag (Robert Rodi Essentials) (24 page)

Calvin would probably know all about the fallout from the robbery attempt, since he and Vera had apparently gotten so cozy with Peter and Lloyd, but Natalie was still estranged from him as well, and wouldn’t demean herself by calling him.

On Friday night she pulled herself together, put on some makeup, and went out to the Halsted Street bars, but the few acquaintances she met said they hadn’t seen or heard from Peter and Lloyd in ages, and had Natalie lost weight, and didn’t she look terrific? And Natalie, fearing that she might become the object of gossip herself, and that such gossip might get back to Peter (“I saw Natalie this week, she’s lost about forty pounds and she was asking what’s new with you”), decided that she’d better just slink back home and henceforth avoid the glare of the spotlight.

Not knowing how her revenge had played out was driving her increasingly crazy. On Tuesday she had a temper tantrum and a fit of tears over a snapped shoelace, and on Wednesday and Thursday she lost her afternoons to long, narcoleptic seizures—and not once during any of this time did she leave her apartment or speak to another living soul.

On the second Sunday following the “robbery,” Natalie woke up in a panic, unable to catch her breath. She was still lying on the couch, a jar of Nutella with a spoon in it by her side. The TV was still on, giving off that lonely, phosphorescent blue it exudes solely in the wee small hours, when it’s the only light anyone dares use.

Natalie lay there gasping for what seemed a smallish eon, and when she regained her breath she sat up and put her hand on her heart, waiting for her fear to subside. A man dressed as some kind of animal was cavorting about the TV screen, inciting viewers to buy new carpeting
immediately.
If they waited even an hour, it would be too late and their lives ruined utterly. He had one of the most grating Chicago accents Natalie had ever heard. “Carpits, carpits,
carpits!”
he shouted at the viewers, waving his paws. A big title flashed across the screen as he said this, and Natalie supposed this was for the benefit of out-of-towners who had never heard a native Chicagoan speak before.

Eventually she took a deep breath and relaxed. She wasn’t dying; her throat had closed up, that’s all. It seemed to be fine now. “Carpits, carpits,
carpits,”
she said, giving it a try.

The spate of commercials ended and the screen was suddenly illuminated by a superimposed logo spinning vertiginously; it made Natalie want to retch. When it came to a halt, it could be seen to read THIS IS CHICAGO, and a bunch of horns played a dissonant, atonal jazz riff that was particularly jarring at this hour of the morning.

The riff was cut short by the appearance of a blond, stiff-haired, wide-smiling showbiz type in a suit and tie. He was seated behind a desk on a low-budget soundstage. “Welcome back to
This Is Chicago,”
he said, grinning insincerely and revealing rows of impossibly white teeth. “We’re talking to Alice Bremner, author of
Women Who Love Men Who Love Men.
Alice, the book is based on personal history, isn’t it?”

The camera cut to a close-up of a hefty young woman who had three enormous ponytails emerging from her head at various points, and who was wearing what looked like a large purple parachute vest. She smiled and said, “Well, Frank, the book is based on a lot of research and interviews, but it has its
origins
in my personal history.”

“So you yourself were one of these women who, uh—who—”

“Love men who love men,” she finished for him, blithely riding over his discomfort. “The term on the street, by the way, is ‘fag hag.’”

Natalie clicked her tongue. “I need this. This I need,” she said, and she started sifting through the debris on her coffee table, looking for the remote.

“Well, okay,” said Frank the host, nodding at the camera to show how cool he was going to be about this. “We’ve talked about how these women attach themselves to, uh, gay men and, uh, sort of become romantically obsessed with them in spite of, in spite of…” He ground to a halt. He wasn’t managing to be quite as cool as he’d have liked.

“In spite of the humiliation,” Alice Bremner finished for him.

He nodded. “But let’s talk now—and you should know this, having been there—what
makes
a woman a—a ‘fag hag,’ is it?”

Alice nodded her head. “Yes. Right. Fag hag.”

Natalie emitted a shriek. “Shut up! Who let you in here?” She knocked over last month’s
People
magazine, a pair of soiled chopsticks, and the paper bag her last order of chow mein had come in. Where the fuck was the channel changer?

Alice Bremner paused and looked contemplative for a moment, then said, “Well, Frank, there are a number of reasons. I think, first of all, most women who put themselves in this position aren’t very attractive to men.”

Natalie shrieked again. She dropped to the floor, stuck her hand under the couch, and felt around beneath the springs.

“Oh, now, hey,” said Frank, “you’re a perfectly lovely woman, in my opi—”

“Thank you,” Alice Bremner said, interrupting him, “but a woman’s perceptions of
herself
are the only important thing. And most ‘fag hags’ have very low self-esteem.” She tossed her hair behind her head. “They aren’t, or don’t consider themselves, attractive to heterosexual men, so they cultivate friendships with gay men, because gay men aren’t threatening to them. If there’s no possibility of romance, there’s no possibility of
rejection,
either. Which is comforting to someone who is very afraid of having her worst fears about herself vindicated.”

Natalie pulled her hand from beneath the couch and got up on her knees. “You stupid cunt,” she sneered at the television.

“But,” said Frank, “if they don’t see any possibility of romance, then how—I mean, uh—how does it happen that—”

“At first
they don’t see any,” she corrected him, raising her forefinger. “But later, after the woman has made friends with this dazzling, funny, handsome man who shares all his intimate thoughts and who seems to like her for who she is, it’s only natural that she find herself falling for him. And as you may know, when you’re in love, all things seem possible. Even though she knows for a fact that her dear friend is attracted only to other men, she begins to see in his kindnesses and confidences increasing evidence of romantic feelings. And it becomes her obsession to help him realize that’s what they are.”

Natalie dipped her fingers into the Nutella jar, scooped out a gooey dollop of it, and flung it at the screen. To her delight, it hit Alice Bremner square in the eye. “Hah!” she barked.

But Alice Bremner, oblivious to this blow to her dignity, kept right on talking. “She sees his friendship as the basis for reforming him. And it doesn’t matter how many times he denies that he has any sexual feelings for her, she’ll just keep plugging away, convinced that he’s blocking it. And the more he rejects her, the more insecure about herself she becomes; the lower her self-esteem plummets. But, paradoxically, this convinces her that her gay friend is her only chance at love; it makes her all the more determined to have him. I mean, at least
he
talks to her, which, she now knows for certain, no heterosexual man ever would.”

Frank had his hand on his chin, the better to pretend rapt attention. “Don’t her friends tell her she’s on the wrong track? Doesn’t her family set her straight? I mean, it seems pretty obvious—”

“Most fag hags don’t have a lot of friends, Frank—except for gay men, who aren’t likely to realize what’s going on in her head.”

The Nutella fell from the screen, leaving a greasy smudge on the glass.

Frank leaned back in his chair. “Well, how did
you
break out of this—this cycle, this behavior, Alice?”

She crossed her legs, which, the camera now revealed, were adorned with neon-orange tiger-stripe lycra tights. “It wasn’t easy. Every woman who loves a man who loves men will one day face the ultimate rejection from him—the one final ‘No’ that makes her realize she’s been fooling herself all along. It usually happens after he’s found a lover. For the woman involved, it can be a very dangerous epiphany. I’m
still
in therapy. But I was lucky; my gay friend, Greg, was very supportive of me, and felt bad that he’d unwittingly been the cause of so much of my craziness, and he went out of his way to help me heal. A woman whose gay friend just dumps her and walks away is in for a very hard time.”

Natalie got to her feet, somewhat woozily, and went over to the TV itself. She placed the finger on the POWER button. But she didn’t immediately switch off the set. What was she waiting for?

“So now you’ve written this book,” said Frank, holding up a copy of
Women Who Love Men Who Love Men.
“Is this part of the healing process?”

She nodded enthusiastically. “Oh, yes! It’s been very cathartic. But I also wrote it to help other women who fall into the same trap I did—women who find themselves believing the impossible. There are a lot of them. Ask any gay man; I think every one of them has a story about an insecure, desperately lonely woman who attached herself to him like a barnacle, whom he at first considered a close friend—maybe for years—only to realize much later that she was emotionally unbalanced. It’s for those woman that I wr—”

Natalie pressed the POWER button.

“Stupid,”
he said, seething, standing tall and speaking to no one but herself. “Another goddamn expert on everyone else’s life. Just because
she
was a ‘fag hag.’ Just because
she
—”

Tears were begging to be released; but crying would be an admission of some kind, and she had, as she reminded herself again, nothing to admit. She was furious with herself for even having to remind herself. It was too silly and humiliating, letting a cheap TV show bother her even that much.

She had a bowl of Ben & Jerry’s cookie-dough ice cream and went to bed.

T
HE NEXT DAY
, out of a vague sense of desperation, she called her old agency and asked for another temp job. Fortunately, it wasn’t the bitch Monica who answered the phone; it was Agnes, the rather matronly rep who’d originally hired her.

“Sure, Natalie,” she said. “Glad to have you back. Little hiatus do you good?”

“I guess.”

“Fine. I’m just checking the books now. Ever worked at a talent agency?”

“What do I have to do? Sing?”

She chuckled. “Answer phones, light typing, clerical. It’s a small shop. Some computer work; and specialized stuff, like processing talent payments. They’ll train you.”

“How long?”

“Hard to say. Right now there’s a movie being filmed in town, so lots of locals are being used. They’ve got enough work for about three days to a week, depending on how fast you are.”

“I’ll take it.”

T
WO WEEKS PASSED
and she still hadn’t heard anything about Peter and Lloyd. Since tracking the minutiae of their daily lives had been her sole occupation for months before the robbery, this continued deprivation was almost beyond endurance.

She tried burying herself in her work. The job at the talent agency had taken her two days, not three to five, and the head of the firm, a leathery old battle-ax named Jennifer Jerrold, was so impressed that she hired her on full-time. The agency mainly represented voice talents for TV and radio commercials, and its office was on Michigan Avenue, near the major advertising agencies. Natalie was learning a lot, but in a kind of frenzied way; she was just trying to fill her head with distractions.

Soon a paranoia gripped her, and grew daily larger.
What if Peter knew it was me all along?
she wondered.
From the moment he first turned and saw me?
During the entire ugly scene, he never once indicated that he
didn’t
know who it was. He had only said those three words, “Oh, Christ, please.” He hadn’t said, Who are you? What do you want? What are you doing here? Only, “Oh, Christ, please.” Did that mean he already
knew
who it was,
knew
she was there for revenge?

No, no; if he’d known who it was, he would’ve told Luigi. But as days passed and her fear increased, she thought,
Maybe he didn’t tell Luigi because he was embarrassed he’d been tied up by a female. Maybe he was afraid to tell an agent of the police that he’d been attacked by a woman he’d slighted in favor of a man.
(After all, he was undoubtedly too upset to figure out Luigi was gay, too.) Or maybe Peter was just trying to protect her—feeling more pity than anger at the extremes to which she’d been driven. Maybe he and Lloyd were even now plotting some way to get her committed to an institution for the criminally insane.

But no; he couldn’t possibly have known she was his assailant, because he wouldn’t have been able to recognize her. She’d lost too much weight. But, she reminded herself later, other people had seen her. Other people might have reported to him how thin she’d become.

Or maybe Peter
hadn’t
recognized her during the robbery but had been putting the pieces together over the past few weeks and was just now figuring it out. Maybe that final, ill-advised kiss she’d blown him, had set the wheels in motion…

Finally, she psyched herself out to the point where she would cross four lanes of traffic rather than pass a policeman. And every time her telephone rang at home, she sat gripped by fear until her machine took it.

Jennifer Jerrold came over to her desk one morning and sat on top of it. “How are you, Natalie?” she asked, her voice both intimate and affected at the same time. (It was her usual manner of speaking; she’d had a career on the stage.)

“Fine, I’m fine.”
What does she know?
Natalie wondered.

“I only ask, because we’re all a little worried about you.”

“Why?”
Whoops, that had been too defensive. Keep calm! Maybe she knows nothing.

“Well, your work is tops—I mean, you know that. But you seem a little…skittish lately.”

“I’m fine, really.” She took a breath and tried to stop herself from picking away the skin around her thumb; in the past few weeks, she’d almost flayed it. “Just a little trouble sleeping. Thanks for asking.” She smiled; and even as she did so, she could feel it was an awful, unconvincing attempt.