Colorado High

by Joyce C. Ware

  “Sam?” He turned back. “That singer you mentioned? She wasn’t here tonight . . .”

  “So?”

  “You saw Scott introduce my daughter ... do you think maybe . . . ? I mean, they’ve been working together on the festival and, well, Garland’s a beautiful girl . . . .”

  Sam ran stubby fingers through his thinning hair. “Oh God,” he sighed. “Yes, she’s beautiful, very much so, but she’s not right for this new line. She’s too calm . . . too damn nice.”

  Tessa’s smile was wry. “I never thought of that as a bad quality.”

  “In a daughter or a wife, no. But it’s not right for Wildings. Not for Scott either, Tessa.”

  His tone was gentle, but his eyes seemed to be admonishing her.

  “Just what are you telling me?”

  “I wouldn’t presume to tell you anything. I’m merely suggesting you think twice before encouraging Garland to build on their present relationship . . . whatever that may be,” he added in a mutter.

  Tessa stared up at him, stunned. “For God’s sake, Sam!”

  “No, Tessa, for your daughter’s sake.”

  After Sam left, Tessa continued to sit, numbed by Sam’s insinuation. He had always seemed genuinely fond of Scott, in fact his tolerance of Scott’s frequent, abrupt, and often irrational dismissals of advertising concepts he had hailed as “mahvelous!” only hours before had been damn near saintly.

  What could have happened to change all that? Had Scott’s enduring appeal to women finally gotten to Sam? The cult of youth had begun to apply to men as it always had to women, and here was Scott, ten years or more older than Sam, looking at least as many years younger.

  It’s not fair!

  How many female voices had cried that since time began, Tessa wondered. Wasn’t it about time the boot was on the other foot?

  She took her empty plate back to the thronged living room, relinquished it to a smiling server, and looked for Garland, hoping she was ready, or at least willing, to call it a night.

  The crowd was quieter than it had been earlier in the evening. Less anxious to impress. Especially the ones who had been posturing on the couches. Their gestures were languid now; their eyes heavy-lidded. They looked what used to be called “laid-back.”

  Tessa frowned. No, that wasn’t quite right. You didn’t look laid back, you just were.

  More likely, she realized belatedly, they were stoned.

  Suddenly it became very important that she find Garland. She saw a flash of turquoise near the windows and a burst of applause as Garland was hoisted, laughing, into a chair set up on a low table. Tessa started forward.

  “. . . we picked the flowers yesterday,” Scott was saying.

  “Scott stuck them in the bottle of wine we were drinking,” Garland broke in. “ ‘To help preserve them,’ he said.”

  “Pouilly-Fuisse helps preserve me,“ Scott protested, “why not wildflowers?”

  “But I made him pour it out— “ Scott rolled his eyes— “and refill it from the creek.”

  “Gorgeous place!” Scott exclaimed. “What’s it called again, luv?”

  He calls everyone luv, Tessa reminded herself as she neared the group.

  “Yankee Boy Basin,” Garland supplied.

  “Don’t you love it?” Scott asked, reaching for the white cardboard box one of the caterer’s crew handed to him. He opened it, revealing a nest of pale green tissue paper. “Whichever is due the credit, the wine or the water, this is the result.” Reaching in, he lifted out a wreath of pale pink sweetbrier roses starred with larkspur, columbine, and yellow cinquefoil. Balancing it on the tips of his fingers, he slowly revolved it so everyone could see.

  “Oh Scott ... oh my,” Tessa heard Garland murmur. “It’s exquisite.”

  “So are you, luv.”

  Her sherry-colored eyes, a paler, brighter hue than his, widened as he reached up to place it on her head. Smiling tenderly, Scott gently settled it into the springy mass of gold hair. “There,” he said. “A garland for Garland.”

  Stepping back, he smiled at their small but appreciative audience. “Ladies and gentleman,” he said, making a graceful bow, “I give you Wildings.”

  “You mean stand-in for Wildings,” Garland protested. “I wouldn’t want to find myself accused of trying to ease Kayla Farrell out of her contract.”

  “Looking at you now,” Scott said, “I’m of the opinion that her loss would be a decided gain for me.”

  Flushing, Garland scrambled down from her perch and lifted her hands towards the wreath. “If it’s kept cool, this should last until Kayla arrives back on Monday. Think what a super photo opportunity it will make!”

  In her haste to remove it. Garland scraped the wreath’s thorny base against her temple. A drop of red swelled. Tessa moved forward instinctively, intending to stem the scarlet ooze, but Scott forestalled her. Intentionally? She couldn’t tell.

  Garland stood, unprotesting, seemingly mesmerized by his intense regard as he reached out with one long finger to gently wipe the blood from her cheek, and then, very deliberately, raise the crimsoned tip to his mouth and slowly lick it clean.

  Tessa heard a gasp, followed by an excited titter, as the sheer eroticism of the gesture registered on the spectators.

  She felt again the caustic twist of envy.

  Sharper this time. Hotter.

  Oh dear God.

  Irrational? She knew that. She didn’t want Scott; she never really had. But the knowledge failed to dilute the bitter aftertaste. The only thing she did want was to leave this place, these people, as quickly as possible.

  “Garland!” Her voice was hoarse, almost a growl. Garland’s face turned slowly towards her, as if unwilling to relinquish the attention of the strangers clustered around her. “You ready to go? It’s past two.”

  “I hadn’t really thought ...” Scott bent to murmur in her ear. “You go on without me, Mom. Scott says I can sack out here tonight. He says it would make things easier tomorrow.”

  “What things?”

  “Oh. I guess I forgot to tell you. The guy who’s going to photograph the wildflowers arrived today—he’s here somewhere,” she added, her eyes scanning the crowd, “and Scott thought my input would be valuable, so— “

  “I thought you spent all day Friday providing Scott with your valuable input.”

  “For God’s sake, Mom,” Garland hissed, suddenly aware of the interest generated by their exchange. Brightly smiling, she broke out of the loose circle, grasped her mother’s arm, and led her sputtering to the far corner of the room.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Tessa demanded, pulling her arm from Garland’s clutch.

  “What am I doing?” Garland threw up her hands. “You’re the one embarrassing me in front of my friends.”

  “Friends? They sure look like strangers to me. Fawning strangers. Psycho-somethings.”

  “Sycophants,” Garland supplied coolly. “An altogether different term, but just as objectionable.”

  “Yeah? Well, if you ask me,” Tessa said, eyeing them scornfully, “in this case both terms apply.”

  “At the moment, asking you anything is the farthest thing from my mind. Frankly, I find your sudden switch from stage mom to nursemaid both bewildering and insulting. If you remember, all this was your idea!”

  “Spending the night with Scott Shelby was never my idea. You two came up with that one on your own. I guess I don’t know you near as well as I thought I did. Maybe virginity doesn’t count for much these days, but I wish you’d saved it for someone more deserving. God knows Scott’s had more than his share.”

  Garland paled. Tessa, immediately regretting her words, reached out. Her daughter winced away from her touch.

  “I haven’t slept with Scott and, so far at least, I have no intention of doing so. But if I did, it wouldn’t be the momentous occasion you seem to think it would be. In case you haven’t noticed, Mom, I’m not a kid anymore. Haven’t been for some time. T
onight, when we arrived here, I compared this place to never-never land, remember?” Unable to speak, Tessa nodded. “At the time, I was thinking of the unreal celebrity world Scott lives in, where no one is allowed to grow older. But now I’m wondering if it doesn’t apply just as much to you.”

  Defeated, Tessa’s shoulders slumped. Her anger spent. Garland took her mother’s hand. “Go home, Mom. Scott has an appointment in Cottonwood tomorrow; he can drop me off on the way.”

  “In time for supper?”

  “I imagine so.

  “I’ll plan something that can be held over.”

  “Okay.”

  “Well, then. Thank Scott for me, will you? I really don’t feel much like . . .” Tessa’s words trailed off. She filled the void with a deprecating shrug, wanting to leave, yet finding it oddly hard to break away. She took a deep breath. One, two, three, smile. “Tell him I really liked the little fish eggs.”

  “Fish eggs?” Garland frowned. “Oh!” she said, her brow clearing, “the caviar!” Her eyes lighted with amusement. “Yeah, I’ll be sure and tell him that. In fact, I bet he takes it up. He likes being thought irreverent.”

  “He does? He wasn’t as sure of himself as that in my day.”

  As she said it, Tessa gazed earnestly into her daughter’s hazel eyes, but if Garland understood what she was trying to say, she gave no sign of it.

  “See you tomorrow,” Garland murmured as she leaned to give her mother’s cheek a dutiful kiss. “Drive carefully. And Mom? Watch for deer on the road home—you know the effect bright lights have on them.”

  Tessa nodded. On people, too, she thought.

  Misinterpreting her mother’s resigned expression, Garland smiled sheepishly. “Listen to me trying to teach you to suck eggs.”

  “I’ve never sucked an egg in my life, darling, but I appreciate the sentiment.”

  And she sincerely did. But as Tessa wound her way back down the road, her headlights throwing wide fans of light across the pale green trunks of the aspens massed along the verge, she wished the only thing she had to worry about was deer.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The morning sun slashed into Tessa’s eyes. She moaned, rolled over onto her stomach, and tried to ignore the taste of bile that welled, bitter and acid, into her mouth.

  She turned her aching head and cracked one eye towards the clock on the bedside table. Eight o’clock. My God.

  “Wasn’t it only the day before yesterday I told Garland I never sleep in?” she muttered, pushing down the covers. She sat up, immediately regretting it. She hadn’t had that much to drink last night, certainly not enough to account for her aching head and this miserable queasiness. Just the thought of breakfast made her shudder.

  It was the caviar, she told herself.

  Tell him I really liked the little fish eggs.

  Was Garland right? Would Scott really take that up?

  More to the point, would he take Garland up? In either case, she could easily picture the little smile, smirky yet winning, that would accompany it. The last of the red-hot charmers.

  No, she corrected herself, Scott was never that obvious. He was more the cool and lazy type. Feline. Crept up on you like . . . like hypothermia. Soothing, calming, insidious.

  She struggled to her feet. The room tilted. Calm, she most definitely was not.

  She forced down an austere breakfast of dry toast and tea. She snapped at Miguel when he phoned to ask when he should expect her at the corral. Then, in an excess of remorse, told him to take the day off.

  Tessa had planned to work with the bay colt, but she could hardly expect balance and grace from the horse if she herself was incapable of it. Sure, bloodlines were important, but when it came to performance, the trainer makes the horse. Didn’t she always say that bad results meant she should look to herself, not the horse, for improvement?

  However, having long ago made it a rule never to work the horses unless someone else was at hand, she had, by giving Miguel the day off, denied herself the chance of working with the colt even if she managed to pull herself together.

  Damn!

  Knowing Miguel, he would probably make a beeline for St. Margaret’s to confess sins hardly worth the cost of the gas to get him there, then stop off to visit with his nephew’s family on the way back. Tessa would be surprised if he returned before sundown, and Garland wouldn’t be home until God—and Scott Shelby— knew when.

  Was Scott coming to Cottonwood to see his ex-wife? she wondered. She couldn’t imagine what else would bring him down here. Except for his current interest in wildflowers, he wasn’t the type to tour the highways and byways oohing and aahing. None of them were, she thought as she recalled her lame attempts at conversation with some of the guests at his housewarming. Especially the couple who suffered with fixed smiles her animated description of the spectacular drive from Grand Junction to Telluride via Gateway’s red stone ramparts and the high green meadows below Lone Cone near Norwood.

  We don’t have a car, they told her. They flew in, they told her. In their own plane, they added. Well, la-di-da. It seemed to her that if they could afford their own plane, they could sure manage to shell out a few bucks for a car rental.

  It was all very puzzling. All those people, spending more bucks to set themselves up in the mountains than most people earned in a lifetime, then not bothering to look at them. She wondered if any of them had ever risen early enough to see the peaks washed with the rising sun’s clear yellow light, basked like lizards on a sun-struck slope above the high green grassy basins, and ridden through the twilight’s deep purple towards home and the smell of piñon logs crackling in the fireplace.

  Tessa shook herself. You can’t have it both ways, she told herself. Ruled in the sixties by a moral code that in Cottonwood hadn’t changed much since her parents’ day, she married Barry instead of allowing the fever to run its course. Having made that bed, she remained mired in it, too proud to openly admit defeat. The yearnings of her starving spirit came later, when the dry spell showed no signs of ending.

  In the beginning, she expected, wanted, little more than sexual gratification from her marriage. And in those first months, oh! what erotic bliss! Barry had been strong and hungry and untiring. She had luxuriated in the heat they generated—their friends, on seeing them, would elbow each other’s ribs—but by the half-year mark she sensed a waning of her desire, and by their first anniversary, boredom had set in. From a few things Jeannie had let drop inadvertently— in those days, Cottonwood wives didn’t exchange confidences about the marriage bed—Tessa suspected that even pudgy Art was more imaginative.

  Was it the slow grinding-down sameness of domestic life after her teen years of triumph? she wondered, or was it simply that marriage wasn’t good for your sex life?

  She recalled Scott laughing when, in the face of his persistence, she resorted to using her wedding vows as a shield.

  “Luv,” he had said fondly, “no one will ever try to package a movie with a title like A Marriage to Remember, because everyone knows it would bomb at the box office. Marriage is about putting the cat out at night and bringing in the milk in the morning.”

  “Bring the milk in? Not even Cottonwood has a milkman anymore. Say, just how old are you, anyway?”

  Scott had scowled. “The newspaper then. Stop trying to change the subject, Tessie. All I’m saying is that at the heart of every unappreciated wife is a fille de joie longing to be set free.”

  Though Tessa didn’t know French, she had figured out his meaning. “Well, you can look for your joy someplace else, Scott.”

  Convinced at last that she meant what she said; that she actually believed in the sanctity of the marriage bed, even one with Barry in it, he had rocked back on his Gucci heels, thrust his hands in the pockets of his creamy flannels, and smiled blazingly at her. “I get joy just from looking at you, Tessie.”

  Incorrigible.

  And she had loosed him on her daughter. A daughter who last night had said that if s
he did sleep with him, it wouldn’t be that big a deal, the implications of which didn’t really sink in until three hours later when she heard a knock at the front door while she was preparing lunch.

  No one ever came to the front door. No one she knew, anyway; no one, considering her still-fragile state, she had any interest in seeing. She ignored it.

  Another knock, louder this time. Followed, after too short a pause, by still another, louder and longer.

  Goddamn. She stuck the knife in the peanut butter jar—she’d already spread the jelly side of the sandwich—wiped her sticky hands off on her jeans, and strode out of the kitchen to the front of the house. Brushing cobwebs from the space between the rarely opened wooden and screen doors, she cautiously peered out. “Yes?”

  A man stood, faced away from her, leaning against the porch post, one hand curled around it. Lounging against it, actually, his long lean body bent in a taut curve, his shirt sleeves rolled high on tan, sleekly muscled arms.

  He turned. “Miz Wagner?” he asked, taking off his hat. His hair was a straight fall of glossy black. His features were shadowed, but the smile rivaled Scott’s. He was very tan.

  “I’m Frederico Chavez.”

  That explains the tan, Tessa thought as she automatically took the hand extended to her, wondering why he seemed to think she would recognize his name. “I’m afraid Miguel isn’t here ... I gave him the day off.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  So he didn’t know Miguel. “I ... we don’t need any hands right now. Maybe if you come back in the fall ...” Tessa retreated behind the screen door.

  “Actually,” he said, rotating the brim of his finely woven cream-colored straw hat in his hands, “I came to see Garland. I know I should have called first, but I was in Durango yesterday on business for my father, so I thought . . .” He hesitated. “I know her from the university, Mrs. Wagner.” His tone was cooler, more formal. “Gavin and me, we hang out together.”

  Ah, Gavin. Tessa relaxed and moved out from behind the screen. “I’m sorry . . . Frederico, is it?”