“Temple!”
“Just saying. Pride can often go in drag as false modesty.”
Tears made Mira’s eyes sparkle like those signature blue topaz earrings. She looked away. Briana appeared and took a perky pose, two soft, luscious silk dresses hanging from either hand.
Mira looked back, her spine straightening. “The one on the right,” she said. “Possibly.”
Briana was actually going to have to “sell” this client.
Temple bit back a smile and sank back in her cushy chair with a sigh.
Chapter 52
Here Comes the Bride
For church weddings, Temple knew, the bride was usually with her girlfriends fussing over her apparel in one room, and the groom was with his cronies in another.
Here at the Circle Ritz, Mira prepared in Temple’s condo and Philip changed into his wedding suit at Matt’s place directly above.
Temple’s fairy godmother duties were almost done. She changed into a saffron ’80s dress with a full pleated chiffon skirt and puffed-sleeve fitted jacket. She’d been tempted to wear the Midnight Louie pumps, being they were black and white, but decided that pavé Austrian crystal shoes with black cats on the heels were too scene-stealing for a wedding.
She gave Mira a last, fond inspection. “Those beige silk sling-backs that go with your Chicago suit are perfect with the new outfit,” Temple said.
The “something new” dress was divine, or Devine. The bodice was pleated chiffon, the waist emphasize by a soft ruffle above it, and the skirt’s slanted tiers of alternating lace and chiffon bands flared out below the knee to tea-gown length. The high neck ended at the back in a lavish bow with tails to the waist. And the lace jacket ended with marabou cuffs below the elbow, which would look smashing in the bouquet-at-waist position all brides made on their entry.
Temple knew the guys wouldn’t have a clue about these high-design details. They’d just think Mira looked like a movie star.
She gazed at herself in the full-length mirror in the condo’s second bedroom that served as Temple’s home office. “This looks … nice.” She sounded surprised.
“And so do you. Now, bend over from the waist.”
Mira obeyed, completely on program. Temple ran her brush through Mira’s Chicago-set hair from nape to tips.
“Straighten up and shake your head.”
Mira checked out her fuller, looser hairstyle, which also showed off the blue topaz earrings better. “You’re an amazing woman. Where do you learn these things?”
“Girly School. TV news makeup departments, at repertory theaters, in Allure magazine. I always had to scrounge to get my girl on, having all older brothers at home. Now, I collect my heels and we’re ready to go downstairs and knock ’em dead.”
Temple raced across the condo’s living room to the master bedroom on the other side, Mira trailing her like a duckling.
Since the Stuart Weitzman Austrian-crystal pumps were off the menu, Temple had chosen a dainty pair of ’80s-vintage silver satin pumps with ankle straps buttoned by gold crystals. Only one was standing upright in front of her ajar closet door.
“Darn! I do not want to go digging on my knees in the closet in this outfit.” Temple searched the bedroom, finding no mate for the shoe. “I could have sworn they were both standing paired together like soldiers on parade. Louie?”
A meowed protest came from the floor beyond the far side of the California king-size and ended abruptly as Louie landed on the zebra-pattern coverlet. He sat to lift his hind leg and scratch at the band of vintage white silk bow tie around his neck.
“Meet your ‘something borrowed,’” Temple told Mira. “Louie will be the ring bearer. Don’t worry. It’s his second wedding gig. I tie the ring to his collar like a tag.”
“Is he all right?” Mira wondered. “He’s recovered from his ordeal in Chicago?”
“Fit as a Stradivarius. He lost a couple of nail sheaths, that’s all. Well!” Temple put her hands on her hips. “I’m just going to have to wear different shoes. Let’s see. White is too gauche, black too somber … so it’s the white-and-silver print Weitzman’s with the bows on the back of the heel. They’ll match your blouse bow.”
“Whatever you say, Temple.” Mira shook her fluffed-out hair. “You’re such a dynamo, I don’t even have time to think about being nervous about the ceremony.”
“Then I’m doing my maid of honor job.” Temple pulled out the new pair of shoes and donned them, glad to do a last survey from her usual height.
“Wait!” Mira ordered. “Look at the floor.”
“You’ve spotted the missing shoe?” As Temple bent down, Mira stepped close and drew the hairbrush from Temple’s nape to the curling ends of her hair.
“Now you’re fluffed.”
“Tricky lady.”
“Oh. What pretty earrings you have too.”
Temple touched the delicate webs of tiny rubies and diamonds. “Your son is a really good judge of earrings. And rings. So. Let’s go down and cause dropped jaws.”
“What about the cat?”
“Oh, he’ll come along in his own way and his own time. He always does.”
Temple winked at Louie and took Mira’s arm. “Let’s get married.”
Chapter 53
Evening in Paris
Max couldn’t decide whether he was at work as an ace agent or not at work at all as a Los Lonely Guy when he abandoned the black Maxima from Garry’s garage to the Paris Hotel parking attendant.
It was still daylight, yet entering the casino immersed him in the always-nocturnal landscape of velvety black punctuated by a couple galaxies’ worth of supernovas.
No one stood in line for the single elevator to the Eiffel Tower restaurant at this unfashionably early hour. Tourists ran on a schedule hotel hours subtly established. About now, the women were still moving from baking in the hotel pool areas. The pools closed early to shoo the women back inside to dress for a long day’s night on the town in the restaurants, shops, and casinos. The men were still killing time at the blackjack, baccarat, and craps tables.
Revienne was already primed for the night. She perched on a stool beside a nearby bank of slot machines. Her blond hair was sleeked back into a bun the size of a doughnut hole that emphasized her swanlike neck and shoulders.
She wore a loose-knit sleeveless top woven with beige and iridescent yarns, braless, and a short white-silk pencil skirt, both highly seduction-worthy. He’d expected no less.
He came up behind her and produced a twenty-dollar bill for the slot machine before her hand could slip in another ten. “You’re losing. Try my money.”
She stood and slipped his bill into the toy purse set beside the slot machine, along with a casino card for the Paris consortium. “We can gamble later, dine now.”
“You’d never know you were new to Vegas,” he commented.
“I’d never have known you were here if you hadn’t visited the campus,” she answered, eyeing his newly shorn hair with the bit of gel nonsense at the top. “I hope that’s not a result of brain surgery—?”
“Heat exhaustion preventive.”
“Then you’re new to this so very hot climate.”
“As you know, I’m a world traveler. Nowhere is entirely new.”
He escorted her to the elevator that whisked them up a mere eleven stories to the first stage of the half-scale replica of the Eiffel Tower. The hostess and the bar were straight ahead, so they were swiftly escorted to the prized corner table in the glass-walled restaurant, facing northwest into the mountains and directly across from the Bellagio’s famous dancing fountains.
“You have ‘pull,’” she noted discreetly after the waiter had seated her. He’d taken the corner seat so she could look past him at the floor show of the lighted fountains.… Also, his back was to the wall of glass so he could survey reflections of the restaurant and bar like a security camera.
“You’ll see the sunset during this early seating,” he told her. “I know most
people prefer to be fashionably late. Especially the French.”
“So you’ve been in Las Vegas before?”
“Don’t know,” he lied.
“As you had been in Zurich?”
“Zurich? No. That was a first.”
“As with me.” She glanced down to her glittering petite purse, slowly opened the jeweled clasp, and slipped out a slim gold compact to apply a nearly colorless gloss to her lips.
Whew, Max thought. Frenchwomen lived up to their seductive reputation, even when they were half-German.
“It’s so dry here in this climate.” She snapped the lip gloss compact shut.
Now that she’d invoked memories of their impulsive rendezvous in Europe, Max figured she found him sufficiently drugged, web-bundled, and ready for devouring. The question was whether she worked for the Real IRA or the old IRA, or some other interested international entity. Max wondered if it was necessary to play cat and mouse with her, but he supposed it would exercise his brain, if nothing else.
They ordered boutique martinis while scanning the menu.
“I hope, Miss Schneider, our necessary detours in Switzerland didn’t interfere too much with your forthcoming academic obligations here in Las Vegas.”
“No. Quite the contrary, Mr. Randolph. It was a very existential romp. Who am I? Who is he/she? Who is trying to kill us? Will we kiss or kill each other? Or both? Believe me, for a woman with a challenging but never lethal psychological practice, it was quite invigorating.”
“Exactly my response.” Max toasted her with his martini. “I’m not surprised that you’re in international demand.”
“Nor I, you.”
“I didn’t know the local university had such a prestigious psychology department,” Max observed.
“Sadly, you must have only availed yourself of the gaudier features of Las Vegas on previous visits.”
“Remedial classes are not on my schedule.”
She shrugged. “We all can improve on past performance.”
Clever. She was trying to egg him into topping himself. He recalled their previous engagement perfectly. Too bad. It had been intense, but he was pretty sure he’d been confused, haunted, and hurting more than he had ever allowed himself to be with a sane mind. More vulnerable, ugly word. She’d never believe it, but if he had it to do over again, he wouldn’t.
“I mean your memory, of course,” she said.
“Of course. I didn’t realize your work would take you to the United States.”
“Hugo, Herr Professor Gruetzmeyer, is a mentor of mine originally from—please don’t laugh—Vienna, home of Herr Freud and my father. Also, I can fly to Los Angeles easily from here to work with teen anorexia there. California is very hard on women’s self-esteem. Many female performers are on the ‘cigarette and cocaine’ diet, and of course, women young and old face the same issues.”
He should have remembered, a common thought for him nowadays, that her older sister had committed suicide because of anorexia when Revienne was only twelve or thirteen. That she had shared that personal trauma with him, at a time when he was all trauma, all the time, might explain their strangers-in-the-night connection.
Without thinking, he said, “You’re an extraordinary woman.” Even if she was an enemy.
“Why do you say that?”
“I know it’s hard to lose a sibling young.”
“You never mentioned any family.”
He shrugged. “We lost touch.”
“Over that sibling death?”
“Yes.”
“Who blamed whom?” she wondered.
He suddenly knew. “Everybody tried not to blame anybody and it went horribly wrong from there.”
They were silent as waiters danced around them, refilling, removing, replacing. The act of eating would have been an almost weightless, timeless process, except that their conversation obliterated everything, even the fountains.
“My first boyfriend,” she said, attending to whatever was on her plate, “was a radical Socialist.”
He laughed at the radical change of subject.
“I know. It’s ridiculous. So goes politics in France. I thought it was so … cool. We were in the student protests. I don’t remember over what, just the marching and singing and dodging the police. I took him for a hero, but it was all about him being a big shot, as you say.”
“So Frenchmen are really like the notorious DSK? Lord, that sounds like a rap star name. It’s true they’re into assault?”
“‘Into’?”
“An expression. Prone to.”
She made a noise of dismissal. “They are selfish and think Frenchwomen should feed their egos. Unlike in the Muslim countries; women are beaten up in the press only if you speak out against their indignities. So the women shut up and starve themselves. Simplistic, but that’s why I work with young women.”
“Gratis.”
“Gratis?”
He’d forgotten English was her third language. “You don’t take pay for that work.”
“Yes. Do you do anything gratis?”
“Just my whole life,” he said, appalled to realize it was true. Everything was to make up for his cousin’s Sean death. Just as everything evil Kathleen O’Connor had done was to make up for her mother’s utter rejection by her time and society.
“You are an extraordinary man, Mr. Randolph.”
The use of Garry’s surname brought him back to reality.
What was he doing? Getting vulnerable again with the possible enemy. Or she might not be. No, had to be; just the fact of her being here proved it. No sense kidding himself.
Dessert was descending on them and he couldn’t remember what they’d ordered. Relapse. So many more important things were coming back. Or maybe this moment was important.
Revienne was beautiful in the reflected light from the illuminated fountains dancing like aurora borealis across the Strip. Max turned around to view the fiery blue green water show in front of the spotlighted Bellagio palace façade, with Caesars Palace towering over it all. This was magic time, as he’d so carefully arranged it.
“The view over your shoulder is glorious,” she said. “Quite as lovely as Paris at twilight, more so, because of the mountains, which I love. They are so lonely and strong. Impassive sometimes, it seems, but they are always shifting under the surface, changing in the light.”
“My only official memories,” he replied, “of the Alps, are not as enthusiastic.”
She laughed as their coffee and liqueurs arrived. Baileys Irish Cream, as he’d always had with Garry.
Work on the road, lonely, ironic, never make personal connections.
“You know I’ve never trusted you,” he heard himself say.
“You shouldn’t. I know I’ve never before met a man as wary as I myself am.”
“So. How many patients have you slept with? A rough estimate will do.”
“It matters?”
“Male ego. You must have learned about that in school.”
“Let me burnish yours, then. None. That is totally unethical and I would never, never do such a thing.”
“What do you call me?”
“My dear Mr. Randolph, you were no longer my patient the moment you forced me to ‘escape’ with you from the Swiss clinic. Thanks to my unwilling association with you, my nails were broken, my shoes destroyed. I had to beg for food from farmers along the way and saw off leg casts, as well as tend a stubborn delusional stranger who was quite possibly insane but the gutsiest, cleverest person I have ever met. I was kidnapped by brutal men in a fast car, fought over on the most expensive street in Zurich, made love to in the most innovative positions of my life and wined, lunched, designer-attired, and dumped on the street outside the Zurich train station. I have never had such a wonderful time in my life.”
“Why me?”
She actually thought that one over, then gave a very French shrug. “Questioning such things is counterproductive. I found it refreshing that your memory loss
meant you had no romantic, what they say here, ‘luggage.’”
“Baggage.”
Not true. There was the unsinkable Temple Barr. Obviously, she and Matt Devine were forthright, delightful people. Obviously, they made a forthright, delightful couple. All tucked away for the night and life ever after.
The fact was, he and Revienne had confided in each other. They shared a devastating teenage sense of failure and loss. The question was, Did you do that with mere strangers because there was no risk, or because it was all risk in lives so carefully lived ever after?
Max’s instincts were out to lunch. The adage about keeping your friends close and your enemies closer rang true, but he couldn’t define his motives when it came to Revienne.
“In your position,” she said, sipping from the demitasse of coffee and the tiny liqueur glass and sampling the plate of miniature sweets, including a white chocolate Eiffel Tower, “you are having a total eclipse of the mind and emotions. That’s my professional opinion. Anything you might think or do now is extremely unreliable. You shouldn’t trust yourself and you shouldn’t trust me.”
“An excellent diagnosis. When do you leave Las Vegas?”
He pulled her toy purse over to his side of the small table, opened it, and inspected its contents. The twenty-dollar bill he’d contributed, the lip gloss compact, a European brand he’d never known or couldn’t remember. The case had no hidden sections. The gambling card and the room card.
“When my work is done,” she said, unperturbed.
“Your classes in existential angst?”
“It’s a more common problem than you’d think.”
“Your ‘baggage’ is annoyingly innocent.”
“Thank you.” She reclaimed the compact and reglossed her lips as he put the credit card that read GARRY RANDOLPH with his green-eyed photo in the bill packet. Nothing he or Garry did had ever been innocent.
Cat in a White Tie and Tails Page 30