Chapter 6
Radio Magic
Matt managed to wait until almost noon to call Temple the next day.
"And aren't you up bright and early for a night owl!" She greeted him cheerfully enough, but sounded a bit groggier than an early-bird robin should at high noon.
"I wanted to catch you before you went out, in case you have something scheduled this afternoon?" His explanation had turned into a question.
His careful reluctance to assume nothing about her schedule, to pre-deny all interest in its specifics, warred with an overriding compulsion to know what she was doing, with whom, every moment. Matt wasn't used to being bounced between the wildly conflicting extremes of rationality and romance. He realized that he'd best serve himself by appearing calmly normal when he was the opposite. Did everyone go through this charade?
"I'm not going out for a while," Temple said. "What's up?"
"Um, I've got this . . . letter from my mother that's rather interesting. About my real father.
And l could use your tape machine. I've got a tape I should hear."
"Oooh, news from the Chicago past? Come on down!"
Matt's relief exited on a sigh as he hung up. He'd been right to use the mystery of his parenthood as the primary lure. Temple couldn't resist speculating any more than she could resist dispensing advice. He certainly knew her, if he didn't quite recognize himself these days.
He picked up the tape and the letters from the table, keys to contact with Temple. He'd known her for almost a year now, and he'd known for most of that year that he found her attractive.
He hadn't known that he was in love with her until just after New Year's, only days after she'd resumed her interrupted relationship with Max Kinsella, "the mystifying Max." The magician's stage name was a remnant of the past now, but it lingered like a haunting refrain, which was probably a line he had heard in one of Carmen Molina's vintage torch songs.
At least Kinsella hadn't moved back into Temple's place at the Circle Ritz; there would be no way for Matt to slate his thirst for Temple's company if he had.
He hurried downstairs to her floor; no telling how much time they had. In the short hallway outside her door, he paused. He put his palm on the coffered mahogany, sensed her presence inside like an actor preparing for his first entrance onstage.
Then he knocked.
The door opened almost instantly, and yes, Temple looked the same: loose red curls too adult for Shirley Temple, a petite cyclone of energy and warmth with very honest eyes at the center of that engaging storm.
She was in her usual rush to do three things at once: finish getting ready to go out, deal with him, and feed the newly arrived Midnight Louie his umpteenth snack of the day.
"Here." She handed him a tin of smoked oysters. "Spoon this over Louie's Free-To-Be-Feline.
There's coffee in the carafe. I'll sit down with my mug and check out your letter, if that's okay."
"Sure," Matt found himself lying.
He'd hoped for a quiet tete-a-tete, not being drafted into dishing a noxious dollop of seafood over the cat's dry health-food pellets.
Louie, a massive black cat hunched over the shallow glass bowl, eyed Matt soulfully.
"Short shrift. I agree with you, my lad. And a little bribe on top doesn't do much to make up for it."
"Wow!" Temple, reading, was commenting from the living room.
Matt poured himself a mug of black coffee and followed his letters in there.
"Your mother has undergone a huge change of attitude. Now she wants you to look into your real father's background?"
"And now I don't want to do it." Matt sat on the side chair at right angles to Temple.
Temple was always to he found either in full career gear or out of it. Now her bare feet were tucked under her. She wore a loose aqua knit top over closefitting tights or leggings or something.
Her red hair was comfortably tousled and she looked about fifteen years old.
She hardly seemed like a woman he couldn't get out of his mind, night and day. Day and night.
Then she glanced up at him, and the clarity, perception, and humor in her Civil War eyes--
Confederate gray sometimes, and sometimes Union blue--nailed him to his chair.
"First she didn't and you did; now she does and you don't. I told you; life is all timing. Or the lack of it."
She could have been describing their own ill-timed relationship, except with them it was first she did and he didn't and now he would and she couldn't.
If none of it made much sense, he was beginning to discover that this was more often the case than not in the real world.
"And this letter from the radio station," she went on. " 'Ambrosia.' Get real!"
"I thought I should at least listen to the tape, which is why I need your machine, and someone to run it. It sounds like a maybe-job offer."
"Radio counseling. Not too different from hotline work.
But
. . . radio's an entertainment medium." Temple shrugged, then jumped up. "Come on in the other room. The receiver's in there."
He knew it was in there, and he knew that a couple of weeks ago she would have called the other room the "bedroom."
He'd had visiting privileges there before, in the most casual way, once when they were going out together. Now it was taboo territory.
"It might take a while," he began to caution her.
"Hey, this is portable. We'll move it out."
"You can put a tape in this?"
"Sure. Tape. CD. You can even sing karaoke on it."
"No kidding?"
"Yup. Has a feature that strips the voice out but leaves the instruments. You sing solo."
"I just want to hear what WCOO is all about. Maybe this is just some advertising scam.
Offering everybody their fifteen minutes of fame on the air."
"I don't know." Temple returned, carrying the squat black machine. "The letter said someone recommended you."
"And they had to get my address somewhere."
"Probably from your boss at ConTact. Maybe that's the recommender."
"But why not mention it to me?"
Temple plopped the receiver on the living room floor near an outlet and plugged it in.
"Sorry this is makeshift. You put the tape in here, and there's your volume control. That's it."
Matt stared at the crowded faceplate of buttons and labels.
"Looks like the control com of the Starship Enterprise to me."
"You'll get used to it. Gotta go get ready for a buzz by the Crystal Phoenix. I've been neglecting my duties as freelance Public Relations Whiz Kid, and the theme-park makeover at my biggest client's hotel-casino."
"How's that going?"
"Great, I hear! But I'm a cynical ex-news reporter. I don't believe in anything l don't see for myself."
"Speaking of not believing in things you don't see for yourself, what's, uh, the Friendly neighborhood magician Max doing these days?"
Matt could have kicked himself for the ensuing silence. He had time to deliver about four swift ones before Temple answered.
"Uh . . . the usual Mystifying Max stuff. Being mysterious."
"I was just wondering, if he was going to vanish again."
"Not this time. I think he's back in Las Vegas for good."
Or ill, Matt mentally inserted into another long pause before Temple spoke again.
"I've really got to get ready. You don't mind if I leave you alone?"
She realized it was a loaded question the moment it left her lips. So she stood there, quizzical smile fading. She had already left him pretty conclusively alone by resuming her relationship with Max Kinsella, errant magician.
Matt moved to reclaim his mug of coffee. "Go ahead. Do what you have to. I'll be all right."
Talk about banal double meanings.
She gave him a last, wrenchingly uncertain smile and returned to the bedroom.
"Just hit 'Play,' "she advised, closing the door.
Matt sat before the stereo on the polished parquet, a faint lemon scent tweaking his nostrils, feeling vaguely like a worshiper in a media-age church. Louie came over to investigate the intruder on the floor: the machine, not him.
He punched "Play" and kept his fingers on the volume button, in case it was too loud.
A woman's voice floated into the room, mellow, the tones as pear-shaped as a Rubens nude.
Ambrosia welcoming her petitioners to the seven-to-midnight shift at WCOO--"We Care Only about Others Radio."
Matt braced himself for smut, at worst, or schmaltz, at second worst.
Oddly enough, Ambrosia avoided both traps. People called in, shared their troubles or joys at her mellow urging. A lost love. An anniversary. A sick baby in the hospital. Then Ambrosia picked some soft-rock anthem or bathetic ballad perfectly attuned to the moment: Kenny Rogers's crooning about a time you weren't there for a thirty-something wedding anniversary.
"You Light up My Life" for an absent girlfriend. "Feelings" for a lost love.
Despite her inciting radio handle, Ambrosia was romantic rather than raunchy, and managed to sound sincerely sympathetic.
After a few minutes, Matt turned down the volume. He could hear the muffled shut drawer, the muted hiss of running water: Temple going through whatever motions needed in her own little world, which was as removed from his now as the orbit of another planet. Yet the mundane sounds of her passing through time and motion so near and vet so far, made him edgy. His skin felt so supersensitive that his clothes irritated it as he stirred.
He realized he was staring at the closed door like a mute animal, gazing until it opened for him. Ambrosia's professionally hypnotic voice was no competition for Temple's slightest unseen gesture.
Nuts! The entire phenomenon was nuts.
Matt glanced at Midnight Louie, who was watching him with the same concentrated stare that he himself had given the bedroom door. The cat's pupils had dilated to fill half his irises.
"I guess you go through something like this regularly, despite your unelective surgery last fall, huh, fellah?"
Louie lifted a paw and patted his knee. Honest to God, like he understood.
Silent masculine commiseration, Matt could choose to think. But that idea was as ridiculous as the obsessive longing that gripped him now.
Maybe an operation could fix him too.