2Golden garland

by Douglas, Carole Nelson

  "Oh. Catholic. What's 'anathema'?"

  "Seriously forbidden, almost blasphemous."

  "Honestly, Matt! Those big, bad words. A lot to heap on a child."

  "They're a lot to heap on an adult."

  "So you really expect to get married once, and that's it? Is that why you're still single? Waiting for a sure thing?"

  "I don't know that I expect to get married, but if I did, I'd have to think that."

  "Everybody thinks that, when they're on a hormone high. But that's just Nature making sure more people get born to ride the real-life roller coaster and then check out. That's a pretty big gamble: to think you'll get married and stay married forever."

  "That's what I'd have to do."

  "Hey, I don't knock anybody's religion, but to this old broad, that's either admirable ... or insane."

  "Maybe the admirable is often insane."

  "You got it! We drive ourselves crazy trying to live up to other people's concepts of how we should live. That's why I don't take marriage seriously. It's a party that often turns into a funeral, but more often into pure habit. So I had five husbands, so what?"

  "Electra . . . five?"

  Hey, Liz had eight or something. I've changed a lot in the last forty-some years. Wasn't always a plus-size. Wasn't always a real-estate magnate and prominent justice of the peace either.

  "That's why you spray your hair all those colors, isn't it?"

  "Sure. Punk Senior Citizen. Hey, if you can't go wild in some little area that's all your own, what's the point of being here?"

  Matt stopped playing. He let his hands fall to his knees. "Maybe that's my problem. I don't have a wild little area."

  "Your problem is you're a nice young man who thinks too much." She rose, came behind him and wrapped her arms around his neck in a bear hug. "Why don't you plan on coming up to my place for Christmas Day? I don't cook the whole turkey and stuff, or stuffing, but I scramble some goodies together, and a couple of my 'adult children' are coming. You'll dig my daughter the herpetologist. She's not too much older than you--"

  "I don't want to--"

  "Intrude! Go ahead, Matt dear. You need to intrude more. Walk right in. Break down a few doors if you have to. Come as you are, Leave as you want to be, Smile. And sing some for me before I go back to bed. You do sing?"

  I used to, but not exactly pop tunes."

  Maybe he should say he's into Latin rhythms, Matt thought, realizing that Electra had improved his mood. Hmm. Latin rhythms with hymns. Church music is seldom heard elsewhere, unless a monk's choir becomes an international novelty act for a half note on the endless scale of media fads.

  Churches are made for music like vases are made for flowers. His mind and fingers revisited some of his favorites. Attending high mass at a major cathedral, high, heavenly voices filling the eaves. Visiting the small wooden playhouse of a neighboring black Baptist church on Sunday, where the Gospel choir can clap their way into high heaven. He'd always gone on these informal ecumenical expeditions in Roman collar. So blond amid all that black, he understood the isolation of oppositeness.

  Afterward, the congregation spurned the polite distance toward line-crossers that you found in white urban churches. They beamed and called him "Reverend." "Fine day, Reverend," they'd said, nodding on the way out.

  The minister would pump his hand at the simple single doorway, cheered by a visit from a brother clergyman. Matt would say, "Fine sermon, Reverend. Great choir." "Thank you, Father. Thank you very much," the other Reverend would say, meaning it.

  Matt didn't visit non-Catholic churches now. He felt he had no right. No instant brotherhood wherever he went.

  His hands finally found something secular Electra would know. "Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man," mellow and made for the organ. He found his voice again, not intoning measured responses but searching old, mysterious words for new meanings and emotions.

  Electra's arms tightened on his neck when he was finished. "Terrific, hon. You should sing more often."

  She bent to give him a motherly kiss good night, then left him to the dark and the melancholy organ notes.

  Matt always welcomed spontaneous affection, but found it startling. Affection was something left unsaid rather than demonstrated in his life. But Electra, with her five husbands and earthy attitude, was too outgoing to skirt his reticence, or even notice it. Affection. Matt liked it.

  And then his willful hands were playing Bob Dylan's "Spanish Harlem Incident," a romantic song the title belied, as Dylan's titles often denied any romantic contents of lyric or melody. Somehow the flamenco-dancing, fortune-telling gypsy girl the songwriter celebrated reminded Matt of Temple. Or maybe he just identified with the singer longing to warm himself at the errant flame of the eternal female.

  Dylan's songs about male-female relationships could be bitter, or cynical, or playful. And even Biblical. His moving "Sara" was a wail of Job to his lost wife as they separated. Matt wondered if the recording field was capable of supporting constancy. Then he wondered if that would matter more than the changes Electra mentioned.

  Break down doors, huh? Suppose Matt started doing that? How many new doors would Max Kinsella materialize to stop him? How many doors had Matt himself slammed shut over the years to barricade himself against chance, and change?

  Chapter 7

  An Elevated Experience

  Strapped into Midnight Louie's carrier, with Louie in it, Temple set forth early Thursday morning to catch a cab to Colby, Janos and Renaldi.

  With her various burdens, flat-footed boots and bulky down-stuffed jacket, she felt (and probably looked) like a Sherpa guide enroute to an assault on Mount Everest.

  Catching a cab was enough of a challenge. The first step was crossing the street. She had to flag down a cab pointed in the right direction: uptown. The next step was spotting a free vehicle. In the gray December daylight, telling whether the milky light topping each cab like a button on a beanie was off or on was a toss-up. The greatest challenge, though, was luring the empty cab to her.

  Apparently neither she nor Louie had cab magic. She watched seasoned New Yorkers arrive Johnny-come -lately on the block she had been firmly planted on for minutes, then spy, call and snag cabs that by right of being there first should have been hers, dammit!

  What did she have to do? Throw herself and Louie into midtraffic?

  Actually, that finally worked, although some rude drivers made a point of swerving away at the last minute and trying for a world's record horn-honk.

  But at last she had trapped one of the wily Yellows. She collapsed into the backseat on her tailbone, feeling relief if not comfort. The only position she could take in a cab with Louie weighing her down was the slightly reclining one of a partially upended turtle. At least it kept her too low to see out of the window, which meant that she didn't have to witness the thousand close shaves that New York cabs are heir to.

  The address she gave the driver had gone down smoothly. Madison Avenue was a major street that caused cabbies no gray hairs, and Kit had said the building Temple wanted was in the "Larry block," so named after a long-standing, celebrated watering hole called Larry's on one corner. In what seemed like a wink, the cab jerked up short and stopped.

  Temple struggled upright to glimpse the meter, before pulling out the right amount of money. Then she had to wrench the door open and tumble out. Louie growled softly during all the maneuvers; her exiting position resembled a jackknife in gym class, and his boyish girth was the only part of the equation that could give.

  Safely upright and on the sidewalk again, Temple adjusted the straps on the twenty-one-pound carrier-with-cat, pushed up her jacket sleeve and slid down her glove to bare enough of her wrist to check the time. Fifteen minutes early. She'd have to stroll the rest of the way to avoid arriving embarrassingly early.

  A search of the building's stone facade revealed the very numbers she sought, their tall aluminum dignity mimicking the skyscraper.

  Temple joined the people scurryin
g through the chrome revolving doors into an echoing lobby as busy as all outdoors.

  "Does everybody know where they're going?" Temple muttered to Louie. His head was twisted so his big green eyes could study her soulfully. He produced a silent meow of protest to her transportation arrangements so far.

  Temple had memorized the office number: 3288. She threaded through the humorless crowds, hunting for the elevators, for a while, it looked as if there weren't any. Only when she had penetrated the building's interior to an alarming degree, worried about exiting shortly on the opposite street, did she spot briefcase beaters hurtling around a corner like zombies caught In a speed warp.

  Temple scrambled to follow. In a few steps she had entered a granite-paved narrows between two opposite banks of the most gorgeous examples of Art Deco elevator-door metalwork that she had ever seen. Shangri-La-La land.

  Naturally, she came to a dead stop to gawk.

  Naturally, no one else would stop dead here even to view the dead, were anyone so unlucky as to be laid out before them. If Temple didn't get moving, she would be laid out beneath them.

  Clutching cat and tote bag, she headed for a pair of elevator doors opening like the beaten-gold temple doors in a Cecil B. DeMille Bible epic. Just in front of them, she stopped dead again. Must be a death wish. People parted behind her like an angry Red Sea and flooded the elevator car.

  Temple jumped back just in time to keep Louie from being ground to death in the closing jaws of classic Art Deco style.

  Temple edged away from the next wave of people clogging up behind her. She stared at a set of tall, elegant numbers, these arranged in a semicircle, with an ornate golden hand lazily gliding past them: one to twenty-two.

  Not thirty-two. Was this the wrong building? The wrong address? She turned and studied the numbers above the five other golden doors. The same numerals: one to twenty-two. She dislodged her clothing, feeling unbearably hot in the crowded lobby, to examine her wristwatch. Now she was only six minutes early.

  Holy cowabunga! Holy Howdy Doody! Now what was she going to do? Find someone who had to stand still in this mess, that's what, and answer a simple, heartfelt question: where's the thirty-second floor? What on God's green earth is wrong with people in Gotham City? Hasn't anyone ever noticed that half of this building is missing in action?

  Temple turned against the crowd's lemming like rush to the elevators. No one even noticed her literal figurehead, the face of Midnight Louie eyeing each and every one of them. Struggling upstream, she craned her neck to see over the mob, a fruitless effort in the best of situations.

  here must be a newsstand somewhere. A shoeshine stand. A fruit stand. A stolen goods stand. She'd even ask Frankenstein's grandmother if she were here selling something, like Tickle me, Igor dolls!

  In despair, Temple noticed that she had steered back between the flanking elevator doors. This must indeed be a circle of Dante's Hell.

  "Louie, we're going to be late for a very important date! What do we do?"

  He knew what to do. He twisted, snapping at the drawstring that hemmed his head in. The effort, though futile, didn't do Temple's precarious balance any good.

  She stared glumly at the heavenly Art Deco elevator doors and their frustrating lofty numbers. The only thing missing was the legend, "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here."

  She could almost see those fatal words etched in living flames above the floor pointer.

  Which now read . . . twenty-three to forty-six.

  She accelerated forward like a New Yorker-born and squeezed herself onto the next departing car. Louie's head protruded past the dark slit between elevator and shaft.

  "Baby on board," Temple caroled loudly, backing shamelessly into whoever was behind her. In this mob, who could see what really was in her carrier? From behind, Louie looked like a black-haired baby, nice little Italian baby, maybe, future Al Pacino of cat-food commercials . . . who's to know?

  She didn't notice a mass making-way, but as the doors slid shut, Louie's white whiskers bent at their pressure, then sprang to full width again after the doors had shut.

  Oops, Temple thought. How to reach the distant control panel to punch in her floor? No way in this sardine factory. No way to lift an arm to check a watch either. Crammed jacket to jacket and boot heel to boot toe with a phalanx of native New Yorkers, Temple resigned herself to shooting past the thirty-second floor and catching it on the way down.

  No way would she be on time for their appointment.

  Her luck finally turned. Someone else wanted the same floor, for the doors cracked their gleaming twenty-four-carat smile and the mob shifted, and someone behind her elbowed his or her way out. Temple let the natural riptide action pull her and Louie out after the dear departing one. She could kiss him/her.

  Actually . . . no, Temple reconsidered as the elevator doors shut behind her, stranding her in an almost empty hall. She would rather kiss a Tickle me, Igor doll.

  The man was Nosferatu in a trench coat, cadaverously thin with blue veins mottling his temples and a Grim Reaper look on his face that did nothing to relieve the initial impression.

  Temple let him go ahead, feeling she'd be trailing a hearse otherwise. More gilt numbers cast narrow shadows on the grass-cloth-covered hall walls. Probably the plaster was old and cracked, and grass cloth made an elegant camouflage.

  She noted that the number she sought was well within the awesome range indicated to the left, 3262-3298. She would have to tread in the creepy gentleman's footsteps, after all.

  "He'd probably be scared white if you crossed his path, Louie," she whispered to the patient cat. Carrying an animal up close and personal like this encouraged conversation, however one-sided. This was the way eccentrics were made, Temple thought, the pathetic folks who wander the streets discoursing with fire plugs and such. One day in New York City, and to this she was reduced!

  Just outside the double frosted-glass doors labeled Colby, Janos and Renaldi, Temple battled her outerwear for a condemned woman's glimpse of the time.

  One minute to 10 a.m. Well, she certainly wasn't embarrassingly early . . .

  She walked in. A small foyer, crowded with the usual people, awaited her. Incurious eyes looked up from magazines like Advertising Age, then dropped to the slick pages again. She marched up to the receptionist's desk, where a chic young black woman in beautifully sculpted dreadlocks drummed her mandarin fingernails on the desktop while she cradled a phone receiver on her shoulder.

  She looked up and actually noticed the cat. When she hung up, unsuccessful in reaching her party, Temple announced, "Temple Barr and Midnight Louie to see Kendall Renaldi."

  Much to the astonishment of everyone in the room, with the possible exception of Midnight Louie, Esquire, they were shown right in.

  Chapter 8

  A Killer Xmas Present

  By late afternoon, the gray collar of concrete surrounding the Circle Ritz pool like a homely pewter bezel hoarding an aquamarine had warmed in the December sunlight. At least the blue plastic exercise mats strewn over the surface didn't quite freeze -burn the soles of Matt's bare feet.

  The fifties-vintage pool was more decorative than functional these days. Thirty feet the long way cramped exercise fanatics. Devout sun tanners still thrived in Las Vegas, gauging by the dusky leatherwork on many faces. They would disdain the old-fashioned tables and chairs, not one a lounge model.

  Matt gazed at the deserted site, unable to concentrate today.

  He jerked the tie of his roomy white cotton gj tighter, as if deceiving himself about finally getting down to a serious workout. He really should do this at Jack Ree's gym during what passed tor winter months in this climate. He had started with tai chi, which looked like shadowboxing to Westerners. And he had stopped when he realized whose shadow he was boxing.

  The shadow wasn't very tall in person, but in absence it stretched into a long, thin tether of memory. Intended in flame, like a match.

  Like red hair. Temple was out of town for
the holidays, gone for Christmas, and that irritated him for some reason.

  Come on! he coached himself, not sure if the voice he imitated was Jack Ree's or Kyle Menninger's back in Chicago. Or Frank Bucek's in seminary.

  Matt hurled into a machine-gun burst of lunges and positions, punctuated by the ritual yells, his irritation striking its real target at last: himself. His sense of being stalled. Because Temple was gone, a niggling reason that shamed him. Because he couldn't find the always shadowy figure of his stepfather that he had pursued through Las Vegas like Francis Thompson's Hound of Heaven. That was a more legitimate reason that didn't shame him as it ought to.

  Moving through the martial-arts positions, he felt more like a hunting hound and less like a moping water spaniel. Sometimes his anger took him; he always performed better when it did. Yet anger was the least desirable quality in a martial-arts exercise. The art came in the control, in the seemingly artless control, of oneself, and thereby of others around oneself. That was the paradox so beloved of philosophers and religious leaders the world and ages over: to give up the self is to gain for oneself.

  "Impressive force."

  Was the voice a mere echo of a past master in his head?

  Matt had been so concentrated, body and soul, that he couldn't tell momentarily if he had heard a real voice. Wasn't that how those beautifully dangerous Old Testament angels had appeared to the poor humans chosen by God to marry a certain woman to sire a certain son, or later to sacrifice that son on a mountain top? Or to send their daughters into the streets to be raped.

  He turned slowly, knees bent to spring in any direction, at any enemy, even an invisible one such as delusion.

  He saw an angel, maybe, but no Old Testament emigre. Matt straightened, feeling a stranger had caught him enacting one of his fierce internal fantasies.