Closet Case (Robert Rodi Essentials) Read Online Free PDF Page B

retrieved a flashlight from his nightstand drawer. He switched it on to make sure it was working, then brought it back to the hallway.
    “Here,” he said, passing it to Yolanda.
    She snatched it from him — clearly too anxious to be polite — and dragged its syrupy yellow beam across the floor, inch by inch. “You do not understand Bob,” she said as she scoured the hallway. “His scorn can be very wounding. He tries to teach me so much, but I am a slow learner and have far to go. I am so grateful for his patience, Lionel.”
    “His patience? What about yours?” He crouched down beside her again and resumed the search. “I’ve watched you sit there, not saying a word, while he spends forty minutes telling you about a pair of shoes he almost bought.”
    She shook her head, and a snaky tentacle of hair fell into her face; she stuck out her lower lip and blew it away. She was, he recognized without feeling it, intoxicatingly sexual. “Lionel, please. Do not talk so about Bob. It makes me feel disloyal even to listen.”
    “Sorry, Yolanda. Really I am.” And he was. Once, while totally plowed, sitting with her between the cars in a restaurant parking lot during a tedious Mardi Gras celebration they’d slipped away from, he’d been foolish enough to pour out his disdain for Bob in one vehement gush, knowing even as he did so that it was the kind of contempt only a desperately closeted gay man can have for a brazenly effeminate straight one. “For God’s sake, Yolanda,” he’d said, “how can you waste your time on that trivial, shallow, self-obsessed piece of work? Can’t you see he’s just using you? I mean, the guy just got divorced from a debutante, for Christ’s sake — he’s slumming. He probably read in Details or Interview that it’s hip to have an ethnic girlfriend. You’re the equivalent to a holiday in Rio for him. I’m warning you, when push comes to shove, he’s not going to be able to forgive you for not being a strawberry-blond trust-fund goddess named Phoebe. All this guy wants out of a relationship is photo ops. When those run out, he’ll be gone.”
    Yolanda had stared at him, her eyes brimming with tears and her face the exact shade of crimson it would’ve been had he just hauled off and slapped her. Had she then told him that he was full of sour grapes, that he was jealous because Bob Smartt had the confidence to do all the things Lionel Frank was afraid to, like get adventurous haircuts and wear flouncy clothes from Ultimo and gush fulsomely over Mabel Mercer records — he’d have had to admit defeat. But she wasn’t sober enough to see that; she knew only that she had to choose between her lover and her friend, and accordingly fled the parking lot in tears, leaving Lionel with a forty-dollar bar tab that he couldn’t move his legs to go and pay. (He eventually fell asleep with his face pressed against the tire of a Chevy Nova, whose owner was considerate enough not to awaken him before driving the car away. Lionel told his co-workers that the rubbery smudge across his forehead had been left there by scuba gear; no one bothered to ask where he’d gone diving in Chicago in February.) Days later, he forced himself to apologize, and had made a point of being kind to Yolanda ever since. Everything about her — her barrio accent, the curious formality of her speech, the little-girl-in-a-woman’s-body vulnerability she exuded so unconsciously — invited his kindness, made it almost imperative.
    She let the flashlight lie limp in her hand for a moment and turned to meet his eyes. “Things would perhaps be different if you were a different kind of man, Lionel,” she said in a soft voice. “But you are not, so I am with Bob.”
    He smiled. She had her ways of being kind to him, as well. He certainly didn’t think she meant what she’d just said. She’d never shown any romantic interest in him before. But then, she’d been long settled in her apartment by the time he