Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

“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.