Cat in a Quicksilver Caper

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “That did seem like a lot of kids for Protestants in Minnesota, but my oldest brothers were already in high school when I came along and seemed more like . . . cousins or young uncles. Come to think of it, somebody did once suggest to me that my family was so large because my parents wanted a girl.”

  “That may have been part of it, but who wouldn’t have wanted you?” Kit smiled fondly as she stroked Temple’s blond hair. “You were adorable. I was almost ready to escape back to New York with baby you. Yeah, I think Karen really, really wanted a girl. Because she was the older sister and she always thought they hadn’t raised me right. But then you turned out to love all the things I had. Theater. Writing. Fascinating guys who aren’t about to settle down to nine-to-five jobs and backyard barbecues. With lutefisk yet. Life isn’t fair.”

  “Oh.” Temple had never seen her family like that, through the opposite end of a telescope, far and wee, as a whole unit of time and distance and many different personalities. She was that little red dot, there, on the fringes of the four boisterous older brothers and her harried parents. Like a little red wagon left out in the rain.

  She was supposed to be Kit, only doing the right Minnesota thing: staying in the home state, marrying and having kids, driving a minivan, and not worrying about dead men hanging from bungee cords. Or what her magician boyfriend was really up to, or whether she should marry an ex-priest at a Las Vegas wedding chapel, maybe even with Elvis officiating. . . .

  “Oh,” Temple said. “So that’s it. That’s the vague something I always felt. I was a disappointment.”

  “Not to me, kiddo.” Kit chimed mug brims with her. “Just don’t go all Carpool Mom on me now. I was out until four. So? I don’t ask what your ex-live-in does when he comes creeping in at three A.M., do I?”

  Temple felt her face flushing, not a good complement to ice-cool blond hair.

  “Listen,” Kit said, “I am very carefully not prying into your love life, although your landlady has told me ‘The Tale of the Bed’ one floor up in lavish detail.”

  “Things are a little . . . unsettled lately,” Temple confessed.

  “No kidding.”

  “So . . . what about your love life?”

  Kit lifted her cup in a toast. “Viva Fontana!”

  “What? All of them?”

  “I’m flattered by your question, but no, alas. I’m not as young as I used to be. Aldo and I have been doing the town.”

  “Aldo?” Temple rapidly pulled up a mental image of a lineup of Fontana brothers. They had such an impact en masse: tall, dark, handsome guys in pale designer suits with an air of concealed Berettas and expensive cologne possibly named Vendetta. Nine in all, not counting their brother Nicky, the clan’s white sheep, who owned the Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino. They had always treated Temple like a kitten among a litter of adolescent Dobermans, protective and playful and ever so careful to see that she never got hurt.

  They were like fairy-tale brothers, she realized. Not rough or teasing and distant like her four real brothers, but courtly and happy and good to have on her side and really cool to be seen with. Now her own aunt Kit was poaching on one of her idealized foster family.

  “Isn’t the age difference—?” Temple began.

  “Math was never your strong suit, right?” Kit asked.

  “No,” Temple said meekly.

  “Figure it out. Ten brothers. Even a Mafia matron could hardly crank ’em out faster than one every eighteen months to two years. The eldest Fontanas are pushing fifty.”

  “No!” Temple felt a cherished assumption melt like cardboard in the rain.

  “Well, forty-five anyway,” her aunt temporized in the face of Temple’s horror. “Cheer up. That’s mid-life, a stage that lasts a whole lot longer these days. Anyway, I’m not exactly robbing the cradle.”

  “Oh.” That meant her aunt was sleeping with a Fontana. “But you must be—”

  “Don’t go there, kid, or I’ll call your mother on you.”

  Sixty, Temple was thinking. Her mother was way past sixty, like sixty-three. Kit was either there or almost there. She was cool, yes, and didn’t act her age. Just like the Fontanas.

  Oh.

  “So what’s going on with you?” Kit asked, pouring more coffee.

  Kit’s eyes were wide open now. She had a pretty square face with strong, camera-loving features: sharp jaw, small nose, high cheekbones, deep-set eyes. She looked, with her attractively faded reddish hair tousled and her glasses off, maybe . . . forty-something.

  More like Temple’s big sister than her aunt.

  “Not much lately,” Temple admitted after sipping straight black bitter coffee. She was too listless for some reason this afternoon to rustle up the fake sugar and watery milk that usually adulterated her morning coffee. “Max and I don’t seem able to coordinate our schedules these days.”

  “Maybe more than bad timing is the problem. What about Mr. New Bed upstairs?”

  Temple groaned. “I don’t know.”

  “What don’t you know? You don’t really dig him? He has bad habits, like cleaning his toenails with a beer opener? I would think an ex-priest would be incapable of being unfaithful, but then I would have left my kiddies with one before the headlines came out.”

  “None of that, Kit. There’s nothing wrong with him.”

  “Nothing? He’s a saint?”

  “Almost. Well, his faith might force him to have kids.”

  “Faith equals force. You gotta love it.”

  “I guess that’s it. Faith is important to him. He’s working his way through what kind of life he can live with it.”

  “And you come second.”

  Temple stirred her coffee so not in need of stirring with a nearby fork while she thought. Not so much thought, but worked out her emotions. “Doesn’t look like it. Looks like I could call the shots. And that’s a lot of responsibility. Who wants to supplant the Virgin Mary?”

  “No modern woman. Doomed to lose all she cared about and be married to a eunuch.”

  “You are so irreverent. Do you work at it?”

  “Daily, my dear. It’s a requirement for living in New York City. So. Matt sounds serious. What are you going to do about Max? He’s not chopped liver either.”

  “I don’t know! But Max hasn’t come up with the M word lately, and Matt has. That means I’m running out of time. I have to give Matt an answer.”

  “You don’t have to but it would be merciful.” Kit sighed. “Got a little flavoring for this coffee? It’s seven P.M. in Manhattan.”

  “What goes with coffee?”

  “During a major-life-decision discussion like this, anything eighty proof.”

  Temple pawed through her lower cabinets until she brought out the battered bottle of Old Crow. She poured some in her aunt’s mug, then more when ordered to. She kept her own mug alcohol free.

  “Okay.” Kit took a long swallow, then spoke, her slightly husky voice so like Temple’s. She was really more like Temple’s mother than Karen.

  Temple now understood that had always rankled her mother. Things ran in families: talents, voice quality, looks. Sometimes in just the wrong members of the family.

  “You have to,” Kit said, “find and follow your heart. Which direction is it going?”

  “Both! Honestly, Kit. I was crazy in love with Max. Then he vanished for a year for pretty good reasons. That gave me just enough time to really get to know Matt. He was playing catch-up with life. I know what he feels for me started because I helped him when Max was gone. But . . . he’s all caught up now, and he wants an answer. He wants me.”

  “And—?”

  “It’s mutual but I still love Max. I don’t get it. How can I feel this way?”

  “You’re such a chick out of the shell here.”

  “I’m thirty, for God’s sake. I should know what I want and what I want to do.”

  Here Kit laughed uproariously, and she’d only had one swallow so far of the doctored coffee.

 
; “You think you will ever know exactly what you want? Let me clue you in, Niece. Thirty. I’m almost twice that . . . no, I won’t get more specific. None of your business.

  “Want to know what issues I’m dealing with? For one thing, all the men my age are facing prostate problems.”

  “Mom has mentioned that some men—”

  “All men. Cancer is just the poisonous icing on an unpalatable cake. The aging dough is . . . how shall I say it to a tender blossom of thirty? Well, the songwriter Leonard Cohen said it best, ‘I ache in the places I used to play.’ ”

  When Temple remained stunned and speechless, Kit shrugged. “I guess you have to hear it in his own post-midlife growl. Anyway, a younger man makes a lot of sense to an aging single woman. And I haven’t told you what starts happening to women at forty or so.”

  “Forty!” Temple felt her jaw drop. That was only a decade away.

  Kit leaned closer. “Your mother didn’t tell you?”

  Temple leaned closer and reached for the bottle of Old Crow. “They don’t talk about things like this in Minnesota. At least not to me.”

  “Peri-menopause,” Kit intoned as if naming some hideous harpy from a Greek tragedy.

  “I’ve heard about menopause, but this peri-thing . . .”

  “No one tells you it starts in your forties. First, you feel as frisky as a sex kitten. But that’s just a last gasp. Then, you hit the dry period, then the hot and sweaty and sleepless period, only you have nothing really good to do while you’re lying awake all that time. Then, the earlier ‘symptoms’ settle in for a nice long stay, and you hit the emotional roller-coaster period. And no one can stand to be around you. And then you have no periods. And then you’re over the hill and sixty is looming.”

  Temple saw Sixty Looming. She saw far ahead on the road of life over the daily hills and dales to a big sign by the side of the highway: sixty miles per hour. The speed limit. All she could do. And her oil was dry, her air-conditioning was inoperative, her ragtop had turned gray . . . and that was only thirty years away.

  She looked back down the highway as far as she could see. There was a tiny sign. She’d made the trip this far in the blink of an eye . . . she looked ahead. She would hit sixty in a blink as rapid and unexpected.

  She eyed her aunt, who nodded soberly.

  “On the other hand,” Kit said, “there are vitamin supplements that are claimed to be effective, and a younger man can work wonders.”

  In her mind, Temple deserted her car, her darling zippy new little red Miata, and ran screaming down the highway.

  But . . . which way?

  Little Black Dress

  The Circle Ritz’s sole elevator ground through its rare, mysterious movements in the middle of the night like a cranky architectural bowel. This was past the middle of the night. Past two A.M.

  Temple thought of the timeline documentaries PBS liked to present: if all human history was a clock and it was one minute to midnight, we, the people, would not even exist. Dinosaurs would rule the earth. As if dinosaurs had ever had political ambitions.

  On the other hand, all politicians had dinosaur tendencies.

  She next heard the slow approach of footsteps on parquet flooring, a dull tick-tock, tick-tock, like a clock. Her heart was off beat, pounding triple time.

  A shadow filled the opening to the short hall that led to the unit’s front door. The covered light by the door was an old friend to her by now; she’d been here for more than half an hour, but the light was new and blinding to anyone who emerged from the main circular hall. Even a resident.

  The shadow had stopped to try to figure out what, or who, she was. The shadow was a bit wary. She bet its heart had speeded up too, but not enough to match hers.

  It moved toward her again. Not afraid, just puzzled.

  The light hit Matt’s features. “Temple?”

  “I heard your radio show tonight. It was good. You were good. You always are.”

  “Thanks. But—”

  She didn’t say anything else, just let him come closer.

  “Is something wrong?” he asked.

  Matt lived to fix things that were wrong, you could hear that on his radio advice show. That’s why he was such a success, why droves of people called in, wanting his attention, his help, his wisdom, his caring, his voice, his touch. . . .

  Except Temple knew now that he wanted her attention, her help, her wisdom, her caring, her voice, her touch. . . .

  “Temple?”

  It was like some damn jazz ballet in West Side Story, slow, dreamy, stagy, romantic as roses. It was driving her crazy.

  He came closer. “What are you doing here?”

  And then he saw her in the light. What she was wearing. Her explosive silence. What this meant.

  His hand reached out, touched the small black buttons down the middle of her dress, the same fitted knit dress, long sleeved, long skirted, closed by black plastic buttons from throat to hemline, that she had worn to his awful stepfather’s funeral, a sort of sexual cassock. The very dress she’d worn when he’d melted down afterward. He’d ordered her to keep it. Matt. A man to ask, not to order. To wear it for him at some future time, when the time was right, ripe, for their separate truths and overheated instincts.

  She’d unbuttoned the top eight buttons, not being a sadist.

  He took in her, the dress, the hour, the place, the words not spoken, and acted.

  She was in his arms, in a deep kiss, a tight embrace, as he unlocked the door and pushed their entwined bodies through it. He spun her back against the interior door and their union pushed it shut.

  He turned the deadbolt with one hand while pulling her closer and walking her, backward, unerringly through the sinuous path of living room furniture to the bedroom door, which was shut.

  There, he kissed his way down the undone buttons and undid a few more, and pushed the bedroom door open, then waltzed her through and kicked it shut behind him and shot another deadbolt—on a bedroom door? Perhaps a wise security device . . . for privacy at any rate.

  There she managed a gasp and a few explanatory words. Like they were needed. “I thought it only right that you shouldn’t have to inaugurate your new bed by sleeping alone.”

  “You’re after sleeping, are you?”

  “Eventually.”

  They fell together onto the bed, where he ripped the remaining buttons from their tight threaded nests. Temple heard a small plastic rainstorm of hail on the bleached wooden floor.

  The bed was a ghostly galleon on a cloud-swept sea as they rocked together in the heart of a storm of their own making, and there was no going back to shore.

  Temple tiptoed back to her own condo at five A.M. holding her buttonless dress together fairly unsuccessfully.

  Her aunt Kit was awake, sipping cocoa at the kitchen counter.

  “You’re out later than I was,” she observed. “Most impressive, but you are younger. Forgive my waiting up. An unexpected maternal spasm. Are you all right? That dress sure isn’t.”

  “I can’t talk about it,” Temple said.

  “Then to bed, as they say in Shakespeare, but you look like you already have been.”

  Temple toddled into her bedroom, shut the door in Aunt Kit’s face, and let the dress fall to the floor. Her underthings and her emotions were in a twist, but the deed had not been done, despite mutual satisfaction on a scale most teenagers would consider quite satisfactory.

  She’d gotten cold feet.

  Her. Not him.

  He’d told her everything. How hooked he’d been on her way, way back when. When they’d first met. His hands and voice had trembled, but she had too, because it was too much, this Perfect Storm. It could eat her alive.

  There was nothing blasé about him.

  This was the central event of his life. His love. Because he did. Love her. Always. Only. Had burned for her from the first, not understanding why he could think of nothing, no one else. Trying to pull his outward personality together. Tryin
g to respect her wishes, her past alliances. Refraining from undermining Max. Trying even to relate to other women. Recognizing his sexual drive and still coming back, always and only, to her.

  She’d never been so touched, so shaken. So . . . okay, Max was a great lover, but this was beyond any experience or anticipation. This shook her to her soul, which she apparently still had. And a conscience too. This maybe was the thing she couldn’t live without. Except . . . was she worthy?

  The responsibility was numbing. She knew what to do, how to do it, where to do it, but not where it would lead. And it had to lead to something significant, something . . . holy, or it was a lie and cheat and she would die before she would be part of it.

  So. She’d chickened out. Matt thought he needed a license, or to offer her the option of one.

  She didn’t. She needed to believe in what he did. Herself. She’d blown it. Stopped the music when it was the most sublime and irresistible. Still, there was something to be said for coitus interruptus. Like increased desire. The Scarlett in her smiled in hapless helpless kittenish anticipation. Temple tumbled into bed, reliving every instant and enjoying it more with every rerun, even as she shied away from the ultimate truth.

  She was headed for the dreaded sixty: better enjoy thirty while she could. But glib answers weren’t for her. Or Matt. Or Max. That’s what made them all worth something to each other. My God, they were an awesome triangle! That tripod couldn’t keep its balance forever. Could it? At some point, it would be only two, and one would be so alone, and off-balance and hurt.

  Temple fell asleep, next waking in the morning light sifting through her bedroom miniblinds. Midnight Louie was snuggled up to her hip, black hair shiny and soft, clawless feet pummeling her back, all dark embracing domestic pet.

  She remembered Max and burrowed under the dark of the covers and wept for an hour. She remembered Matt and wept for another hour. She was an equal opportunity wuss.

  Until she realized Kit was knocking tentatively on her door, promising coffee, and she knew she had a life-changing decision to make PDQ and a disintegrating status quo to deal with ASAP and a job to do at twelve o’clock high. STAT.