Read Online Closet Case (Robert Rodi Essentials) by Robert Rodi - Free Book Online

line. Everyone was “outing” everyone else these days, and Lionel could easily envision it happening to him. Donna would do it for his own good; that’s how she’d see it.
    He went back to his desk and put his hand over his forehead. His brain had started to hurt. It was just massively irritating to have to consider all these possibilities and counter-possibilities, all because of a few tiny slip-ups he’d allowed to pass unchecked. Well, he wasn’t going to allow them to ruin his life; but for the moment, he was just plain stumped as to what to do about them.
    Finally Gloria Gimbek from the media department buzzed his office intercom to ask if he was free to go over an All-Pro radio buy, and he was forced to abandon the dilemma before he had resolved it. He was relieved to do so, because after manipulating cold, hard numbers with Gloria, he could approach the murkier matter of manipulating his fellow human beings, armed with a fresher perspective.
    At least that’s what he hoped.

6
    That night, Lionel drove to the suburb of Western Springs to dine with his family. He’d received the invitation — command, really — late in the day, when his father, Lieutenant Colonel Samson X. Frank (United States Army, retired) phoned him at the office.
    “Lionel,” he’d said, his voice so crisp and authoritative that it forestalled any opposition, “dinner will be served here at seven, and your presence is expected. I will tell you why. Your aunt has, predictably, made far too much lobster bisque for just the three of us in residence, and, as you know, I refuse to eat leftover seafood because the dangers outweigh any possible economic advantage. Therefore, we are forced to recruit additional diners from outside the house. I tell you this so that you know you may bring a date if you wish. You may bring the population of Uruguay if you wish. Your aunt has single-handedly placed Maine lobster on the World Wildlife Fund endangered species list.”
    Lionel sighed and said, “Okay, Pop.” He had never refused one of his father’s invitations. His older brother, Eugene, had done that once. Eugene now lived in Minnesota. Lionel kept hoping one day he’d sneak back into Illinois for a weekend or something.
    Rush-hour traffic on the Eisenhower Expressway was appalling — “gas-valves to grille-holes,” as one radio announcer put it. Lionel jumped around the dial, alighting on a succession of fudge-voiced classical music announcers reading overwritten advertisements for suburban restaurants, colorless news broadcasters reciting the litany of S&L bailout effluvia, and wearyingly smug disc jockeys chortling over their own sophomoric witticisms. Music, when he could find it, was no improvement, consisting largely of treacly piano concertos he couldn’t hear over the white noise of traffic, bass-heavy rap numbers exalting the punishment of women, and gooey rock songs about the hardships of a musician’s life on the road (performed, inevitably, by twenty-four-year-old millionaires).
    Eventually he gave up, switching off the radio entirely and concentrating instead on changing lanes to get ahead of traffic. This was only possible to a limited extent, and after swerving dangerously into and out of the congested lanes on either side of him for close to fifteen minutes, he found himself still roughly neck-and-neck and with bright orange Tastee Hen truck that had been right alongside him at the start.
    Abandoning the effort, he curled his left leg under the seat and leaned his left shoulder against the car door. He could keep up with the stop-and-go, snail’s-paced flow of traffic by alternating his right foot between the brake and the accelerator — a tiny tap here, a short rest there, and so on. He sighed dejectedly, put his mind on hold, and settled in for a long drive.
    And inevitably he found himself dwelling on the problem of his family. There was his father, first of all, who had retired from the army at the insistence of