Cat on a Blue Monday

by Douglas, Carole Nelson

"Fine. I'll meet you at the Storm in the parking lot."

  Temple hung up with a smile. Matt was so serious about his obligations. Wait'll he found out what her idea of dinner out was beginning to be. Still, he hadn't given her much time.

  Daylight was still rampant at seven o'clock of a Las Vegas September evening. Temple couldn't disguise her entrance under dark of night.

  Matt was already by the car when she sashayed up--and she did sashay up in her purple-taffeta cocktail dress, a silver crocodile-pattern tote bag hung over her shoulder. He saw her from a distance--how could he miss?--and looked instantly worried.

  Temple had never been one to let how she looked to someone else bother her. "Hi!" she greeted him in approved P.R. perky style.

  Matt smiled uneasily. "I didn't wear a tie."

  "Great!" she said, surveying his beige slacks and sport coat, the white shirt open at the neck.

  "You look . . . great," he replied, unconsciously echoing her.

  Temple smiled. She had checked herself out in the mirror, and concurred. Her dress was a halter-style purple-taffeta number that was modest around the Victorian-high collar, but that bared shoulders and back and clung to her torso to the hips, where it blossomed into a full, gathered skirt that ended above the knees. Matching strappy purple-satin high heels had been bought at a madly cheap Wild Pair shoe store in the local mall.

  "Thanks," she said modestly.

  Matt flashed a plastic card at her, as if eager to direct attention to other matters. "I got my Nevada driver's license in the mail today."

  She took and studied it, even reading the statistics.

  "Height: 5' 10". Weight: 170. Eyes: brn. Hair: bld." Uh huh.

  "Good! Gosh, you even take a gorgeous driver's license photo! Remind me not to show you mine." She returned the license and dug in her tote bag for her key ring, then tossed the keys in a jingling arc over the Storm's low, aqua roof. "You drive."

  Matt caught the keys to his chest, looking surprised and surreptitiously pleased. He came around to open the passenger door. Temple waltzed in, settling into the purple petals of her crackling skirt.

  Matt went around and slipped into the driver's seat.

  Temple slung the silver tote bag onto the backseat and smiled dazzlingly. "Drive," she ordered. "Drive me someplace dark."

  "It's not dark yet."

  "It will be."

  "I've got reservations."

  "You always have reservations. Luckily, I don't. Drive me someplace dark," she instructed in a Lauren Bacall contralto that came quite naturally when she was feeling playful, "and you won't be sorry."

  He drove, looking worried.

  Las Vegas spun by, the Strip beginning to light up for the night against a sky still tinted dusky purple and gold and scarlet.

  The mountains and clouds came closer; the lights skimmed into the distance. Traffic thinned as the Storm followed Highway 95 north to nowhere.

  Temple sat contentedly in the passenger seat, enjoying the rush of motion, letting the city sink behind her and the night open up like a Purple-Passion-colored peony of desert and sky and sunset and mountain and distance.

  She began to delve in her tote bag while speaking huskily, like a voice on the car radio, which was not turned on. Yet.

  Matt watched the road, not knowing quite where he was going.

  She watched his unrevealing profile, knowing exactly where she wanted to go.

  "This," she said, "is my prom dress. I never throw out a good dress. It's also a time machine of sorts. Tonight is June third in nineteen seventy-eight and we are going to the senior prom. I bought this dress especially, and you have brought me a lovely gardenia corsage."

  She pulled a white florist's box from the tote bag. "Oh, how great, I can pin it anywhere. It won't work on my dress--" she eyed the halter top that bared her shoulders "--but it'll pin perfectly to my headband."

  Temple plucked off the purple and silver satin band and affixed the gardenia blooms to its right side. "There." She re-donned the band and tilted her head at Matt, who glanced over and nodded dazed agreement.

  "You are wearing," she said, staring forward into the distance that was darkening on cue, "a simple white evening jacket, so appropriate. Here's your boutonniere. Nothing garish. I hate tastelessly tinted flowers and so do you."

  She leaned across the bucket seat to pin a red carnation to Matt's lapel. He was beginning to look alarmed as well as mystified.

  Temple sighed happily and settled back into her seat. "I cannot tell you how wonderful it is to be going to the prom in a decent car. With a decent driver."

  "Isn't this prom a little deserted?" he asked tentatively.

  She smiled at the expression. Empty desert stretched on each side of the car, with a far, faint twinkle of Las Vegas lights in the rear-view mirror the only civilization. Darkness rang down on the desert with the speed of a black-velvet stage curtain.

  "How far do I go?" he asked.

  We shall see, thought Temple. "Stop wherever meets my specifications: dark and private."

  Despite the emptiness of the land, it was all claimed and every off-road ended in a visible glitter of ownership. Matt finally pulled the Storm up a dirt road, then drove a few feet onto the desert floor before he stopped.

  "Temple--"

  She held up an imperious hand, like a conductor. This was her Lost Symphony and this time it would be played right.

  "They usually hold senior proms nowadays in fancy downtown hotels, where it costs a fortune and everybody is trying to act so cool and so sophisticated. But we attend this tiny high school in a small town and we only have the school gym, all strung with crepe paper and a corny silver-mirrored ball--look, there it is!"

  She ducked her head and leaned into the windshield. Matt did too. A full moon obligingly swung into view, tinted blue by the shaded top of the windshield. Bluooo moo-oon. Temple had checked in the paper that morning. Perfect timing. O sole mio.

  Temple pulled a tape cassette from the bottomless maw of her tote bag and popped it into the tape player without pushing it all the way in. " Maybe we should check out the auditorium."

  Matt got the cue and came around to open the passenger door.

  'Thank you," Temple simpered in sixteen-year-old bliss. Such a polite young lady.

  She brought the tote bag with her as she got out and went around to the driver's side of the car. She opened the driver's door so the interior car light came on, then pulled on the headlights Matt had extinguished.

  "Oh, the decorating committee did a beautiful job," she raved, stretching her arms up to the star-sprinkled sky.

  The sunset was a memory, a last welter of red haloing the mountains' jagged profile. The Storm was an oasis of light in the desert, its headlights beaming into the blue-velvet dark like those huge, sky-sweeping spotlights used at grand openings everywhere.

  "Temple. The lights will wear the battery down."

  "Not as much as the tape player." She plopped into the Storm's front seat to lean over and push in the tape. She turned up the volume, and music began filling the empty desert air.

  When she exited the car, she picked up the tote bag, set it atop the Storm's hood and pulled out a thermos bottle.

  "Of course we've got that tacky prom-committee magenta-colored punch that's far too sweet, probably made with Hawaiian Punch, but between you and me, that awful punk Boots Battista spiked it with vodka, so it tastes a little better."

  Temple poured the punch--it was indeed a lurid, red-pink shade--into two plastic cups and offered Matt one.

  "Temple," he said, "you're creative and wonderfully crazy, but--"

  "Shhh. This is our prom night. The one you never had, and the one I had but shouldn't have. We don't get many second chances. Listen to that music."

  "I don't recognize it."

  "You will. I specially recorded my all-time favorites.

  Maybe some of them are a little chronologically off, but, hey, they're classics."

  Bob Seger's "We've
Got Tonight" was unwinding slowly.

  Temple held out her arms. "Let's dance."

  Matt stood paralyzed, an untasted cup of Teen Time punch in his hand. "I ... I don't dance."

  "Right. You do martial arts. And the martial arts are designed to keep people at a distance. Dancing isn't." Temple stepped closer, took his plastic cup and put it on the car hood. "Do you . . . shuffle?"

  He looked down at their feet, at a dimly visible desert floor hard and sandy, just like a hardwood floor sprinkled with cornmeal for no-slip dancing. Perfect, Temple thought. If only I can bring it off. She put her left hand on his right shoulder. Then you do the hokey-pokey and you turn yourself about. She extended her right hand, elbow crooked, wrist cocked, palm up, like a magician or an emcee presenting something. Voila!

  "It isn't hard if you try," she softly quoted her current martial-arts instructor.

  "Temple--"

  We've got tonight, the Bob Seger classic promised, who needs tomorrow? Matt took her hand. The center of his palm was only slightly damp. Better than dweeby Curtis Dixstrom already.

  Temple led. For a man who could dance over a poolside mat in dazzling defensive moves, he was a statue on the dance floor, or the desert floor. She had expected herself to lead all the way.

  She made sure her shiny purple shoes carefully bracketed his shuffling feet without puncturing toes and listened to the music, moved to the music.

  The beat quickened into John Mellencamp's rhythmic teenage anthem. All right, hold tight. Who ever knows if they're doing it right? Amen. Forever and ever amen, as in a country song. No country music unwound on Temple's tape, just soft-rock classics, just distilled teenage angst and ecstasy, just hope pure and simple.

  " Stand by Me" segued into ''Sometimes When We Touch," with all of its impassioned lyrics and instrumentalzation. Temple loved her setting, her lights, action, camera, but she was beginning to feel a teensy bit foolish, despite her determined intention not to. Here she was, dancing with a handsome cigar-store Indian, playing with fire and ice, interfering in something she hardly understood. . . .

  Matt's hand suddenly moved to the back of her waist, which he had avoided so far.

  Temple held her breath.

  He caught her to him, crushed her to him. As embraces went, it was convulsive and awkward, and it took her breath away.

  She dared not move. The singer sang, the tape ran on, the moon shone at the same steady rate, her heart beat well above her aerobic target zone, her face was forced sideways into his shoulder, her fragile gardenias were getting bruised by his chin; she could smell their battered fragrance flying free to perfume the whole damn desert ....

  He stepped back, away from her. She felt like a fool. A failure. Tears stung her eyes. You can't go back, and you can't take anyone with you, not even for their own good. Other people's "own good" often destroyed them, and you as well. She was sorry, so sorry. . . .

  Matt looked down at her, as if he had never seen her before. He wasn't touching her anywhere at all now, and the gulf between them was more than a few years and different sexes and different parts of the country and different cultures, different backgrounds ... it was endless, depthless.

  He looked down at her, the moon burnished his blond head, he leaned down

  And Temple saw, realized

  Temple was back there where innocence began

  He was going to kiss her

  She knew it

  It was probably his first kiss

  It was hers

  And the moment was perfectly innocent and scary and sweet and she had forgotten everything adult she ever knew; she was just amazed and grateful

  And it happened

  It went on forever and for not long enough

  Their lips touched and that was all

  And nobody expected anything beyond the instant

  And it was magic.

  Again,

  Chapter 39

  Aftermatt

  "Dinner was great," Temple said primly in front of her apartment door. "The restaurant was very understanding about our car breaking down in the desert, and we weren't that late."

  Matt nodded agreement, still disoriented by the unexpected evening and trying not to show it. He had been trying not to show anything all night, though the moment of the kiss had slid almost naturally into another song, another shuffle, and then Temple had gathered up her memory-lane props and suggested they try the restaurant.

  "I had a wonderful time."

  She was saying the stock teenage line as if she meant it, smiling up at him with the gardenias moon-white against her flagrant hair. He would never forget the scent of those gardenias against his chin, storming his nostrils with their heady, honeyed scent. Had she planned even that when she pinned them to her headband? He was beginning to recognize that Temple was a peerless organizer of special events, from public-relations campaigns and murder investigations to ambushed emotions.

  "It was the Perfect Prom, Matt. Trust me; I'm an expert on imperfect proms. Perfect. And they almost never are."

  "It was a little late."

  She shrugged. "I'd better get in, or my folks will be blinking the porch light. They do that kind of thing."

  He glanced at the eternally lit carriage lamp beside the door, wondering if he should kiss her again, kiss her goodnight.

  He didn't want to, not on the brink of this threshold so identical to his own, in these familiar surroundings, under the glaring light. . . .

  Matt took her shoulders--bare, a foreign surface, an intimacy-- and bent down and kissed the top of her head. It was his Perfect Prom, too.

  Temple smiled that smile women have sometimes, the one that is accepting and undemanding, and slipped inside her already unlocked door.

  He was surprised a few moments later to find himself standing by the elevator, dumbly waiting. Usually he walked a single flight; tonight he moved in a numb cocoon. Father

  Hernandez flashed into his mind. He would have to keep in touch with him; he was responsible now for the secrets that he knew and kept, not only for Father Rafe's sobriety, but for his innocence.

  He walked off the elevator without remembering being on it and let himself into his unit.

  "What the--?"

  An island of items sat in the middle of his bare floor, as if a visiting child had piled some toys there: an ivory plastic tray filled with grayish sand and a slotted spatula. A set of stainless-steel dishes, one filled with water, one with a mound of noxious-looking green pellets. A plastic jug with a label reading "Pretty Paws." A box labeled "Free-to-be-Feline." He looked around.

  A lean little black cat reclined on his Goodwill sofa like a pagan idol, front paws stretched long before it, golden eyes regarding him with the aloof interest typical of the breed.

  Matt bent to retrieve the white envelope atop the Free-to-be-Feline and read the note inside.

  "Electra managed the transfer while we were out dancing. Give this nice kitty a chance! Cats are quiet and clean, cheap, and make great companions--and Louie is major miffed about another set of paws around the place. Her name is Caviar, but you can call her anything you like. Pretty please! Temple."

  Matt looked back at the cat, who suddenly leaped off the couch and approached him with mincing, silent steps. She walked like a runway fashion model, each long leg slightly crossing the other with every step.

  The envelope also contained a coupon for spaying at the "veterinarian of your choice."

  Matt sighed as the animal massaged his calves, leaving short black hairs on his slacks. He gave it a cursory pet and it began purring. It had spent some time with Temple, all right.

  He checked his watch--almost eleven. He wasn't used to winding down at this early hour, but the television in the bedroom didn't attract him. Maybe getting the cat settled would distract him, not that it meant that he would keep it. Her.

  She followed him into the kitchen as he moved the food, and leaped atop the countertop with a happy chirrup.

  "I hope you're
not a spy, Caviar," he told her. "I don't need any turncoats reporting back to Temple; she's nosy enough already."

  His voice echoed strangely in the rooms bare of rugs and furniture. He realized that he never had anybody visit him here, that he was always utterly alone in his home and as

  silent as a monk in his cell.

  Matt wasn't sure that having a cat to talk to was much improvement in his private life. He went into the bedroom, where the futon was perpetually unrolled on the floor, where the small color TV sat on a secondhand brass stand, where two cheap particle-board bookcases formed the biggest solid front of furniture in the place.

  He turned on the television without checking the channel or the program schedule from the Sunday paper. Was this room that much different from the cell Peter Burns was occupying at this moment? Was he himself as imprisoned by his lifelong past with the church as poor, crazed Peter, whose obsession with what he hated about the church had directed his entire life?

  Matt sat on the lone kitchen chair that served as an informal clothes tree and took off his shoes--black wing-tips left over from parish priest days and still so suitable for more formal civilian occasions. And socks, also black.

  He threw them across the room. They silently hit the wall and fell to the floor, looking like dead bats.

  Temple was crazy! Out of her mind to mess with his life that had already been messed up so thoroughly by other people. By family, such as it was. She didn't know, even with her investigative instincts, what she was getting involved in. He had wanted to hit her with the ugly reality, to shout it out. The church's dirty laundry was coming out in the wash with a vengeance these days, and the statistics, although vague guesstimates shrouded in secrecy, weren't pretty, given the traditional noble concept of the priesthood: up to fifty percent of priests were not celibate; as many as thirty-five to forty percent were gay. Most priests, however sincere their vocation and their spirituality, had found a home in the church precisely because their families had failed them in some way. Some families had failed so spectacularly that young seminarians were unconscious of the hidden booby traps in their own psyches. Now, in public, idols were falling on all sides, all answering to the name of ' 'Father."