Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

Afternoon Delight

Now that Temple’s personal life was in a sensual shambles, the art and magic extravaganza at the New Millennium was starting to pull together.

She may have enjoyed a brief encounter, an intimate interlude that had ended in a draw: she and Matt had both drawn back, shaky, from a brink that was still awaiting them with a sweet, edgy certainty. Hesitation only intensified the Danse Romantique.

But crass reality didn’t slow down life crises for a second.

The media, like a Roman coliseum audience having had a dead body thrown to it, had buzzed around like flies. Then they’d accepted the notion of a petty thief caught in his own inept web and moved on to other, more gruesome crimes. Hanging was so bloodless.

And Art Deckle’s rap sheet was too penny ante to present a serious threat to such a major event. He was a fruit fly caught on adhesive paper meant for a far larger pest.

Temple felt rather bad about that. She considered that if she really wanted to really feel bad, she’d make sure she and Max rendezvoused soon so they could seriously examine the state of their union.

But she didn’t feel quite up to that yet after her brief but warm encounter with Matt yesterday afternoon.

So, she lingered at home for a change, brooding over her four P.M. energy-boost coffee and yogurt smoothie while Kit padded back and forth from the living room to her office bathroom with an ex-actor’s heavy-lidded dislike of mornings.

“You must have been up really late,” Temple said as her bath-robed aunt sleep-walked past for the sixth time. “I’m sorry this New Millennium project has put the kibosh on our running around town and having fun.”

“Don’t be.” Kit paused beside Temple at the kitchen counter stool and yawned. “I have been running around and having kinky fun anyway.”

“But Vegas isn’t a place to see all by your lonesome.”

“Who said I was lonesome?”

“I thought we’d do all these girly things, like the hotel world-class shopping malls.”

“That will be fun.” Kit hopped up on the adjacent stool and poured coffee into a clean mug.

“There’s Splenda in the dish.”

“No thanks.”

“Cream or milk in the fridge.”

“No thanks. I want this cup as hot as hell, as black as sin, and as strong as the devil.” “Goodness, Auntie!”

“. . . has nothing to do with it, as Mae West remarked. I didn’t come in until four A.M., but you were slumbering like the babe you so clearly are in my memory. Glad I didn’t upset your dreams.”

“Four A.M., Aunt? What were you doing?”

“None of your business, Niece.”

“Have you picked up some gambling jones while I wasn’t watching? Mom would never forgive me.”

“Why should she? She never forgave me.”

“Forgave you for what?”

Kit’s pale blue eyes, now half open, eyed Temple over the mug’s thick rim.

“Let me count the ways. For being her younger sister. For majoring in something as impractical as theater, for leaving Minnesota when I was twenty-two, for never marrying, for actually getting acting jobs in New York, for never having kids, for becoming a writer on top of everything when I got too old to play thirty-somethings.”

“Kit. I thought you and mom were . . . okay with each other.”

“There were just two of us, Temple. Two sisters only a couple years apart in age. That’s an awful lot of sibling rivalry for one family. Didn’t you ever wonder why you were her fifth child?”

“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?