Douglas Nelson - Cat On A Blue Monday

"Let me make the first move in this mutual-obligation society. Dinner. My treat. Someplace really nice."

"You can't go to dinner, you work those hours."

"Not tomorrow night. I'm off."

"Tomorrow! That's awfully soon."

"Why, do you have to fast three days before dinner out?"

"Well, I should ... but okay, it's a date. What time?"

"Why not seven? I'm used to going to work then anyway."

"Fine. I'll meet you at the Storm in the parking lot."

Temple hung up with a smile. Matt was so serious about his obligations. Wait'll he found out what her idea of dinner out was beginning to be. Still, he hadn't given her much time.

Daylight was still rampant at seven o'clock of a Las Vegas September evening. Temple couldn't disguise her entrance under dark of night.

Matt was already by the car when she sashayed up--and she did sashay up in her purple-taffeta cocktail dress, a silver crocodile-pattern tote bag hung over her shoulder. He saw her from a distance--how could he miss?--and looked instantly worried.

Temple had never been one to let how she looked to someone else bother her. "Hi!" she greeted him in approved P.R. perky style.

Matt smiled uneasily. "I didn't wear a tie."

"Great!" she said, surveying his beige slacks and sport coat, the white shirt open at the neck.

"You look . . . great," he replied, unconsciously echoing her.

Temple smiled. She had checked herself out in the mirror, and concurred. Her dress was a halter-style purple-taffeta number that was modest around the Victorian-high collar, but that bared shoulders and back and clung to her torso to the hips, where it blossomed into a full, gathered skirt that ended above the knees. Matching strappy purple-satin high heels had been bought at a madly cheap Wild Pair shoe store in the local mall.

"Thanks," she said modestly.

Matt flashed a plastic card at her, as if eager to direct attention to other matters. "I got my Nevada driver's license in the mail today."

She took and studied it, even reading the statistics.

"Height: 5' 10". Weight: 170. Eyes: brn. Hair: bld." Uh huh.

"Good! Gosh, you even take a gorgeous driver's license photo! Remind me not to show you mine." She returned the license and dug in her tote bag for her key ring, then tossed the keys in a jingling arc over the Storm's low, aqua roof. "You drive."

Matt caught the keys to his chest, looking surprised and surreptitiously pleased. He came around to open the passenger door. Temple waltzed in, settling into the purple petals of her crackling skirt.

Matt went around and slipped into the driver's seat.

Temple slung the silver tote bag onto the backseat and smiled dazzlingly. "Drive," she ordered. "Drive me someplace dark."

"It's not dark yet."

"It will be."

"I've got reservations."

"You always have reservations. Luckily, I don't. Drive me someplace dark," she instructed in a Lauren Bacall contralto that came quite naturally when she was feeling playful, "and you won't be sorry."

He drove, looking worried.

Las Vegas spun by, the Strip beginning to light up for the night against a sky still tinted dusky purple and gold and scarlet.

The mountains and clouds came closer; the lights skimmed into the distance. Traffic thinned as the Storm followed Highway 95 north to nowhere.

Temple sat contentedly in the passenger seat, enjoying the rush of motion, letting the city sink behind her and the night open up like a Purple-Passion-colored peony of desert and sky and sunset and mountain and distance.

She began to delve in her tote bag while speaking huskily, like a voice on the car radio, which was not turned on. Yet.

Matt watched the road, not knowing quite where he was going.

She watched his unrevealing profile, knowing exactly where she wanted to go.

"This," she said, "is my prom dress. I never throw out a good dress. It's also a time machine of sorts. Tonight is June third in nineteen seventy-eight and we are going to the senior prom. I bought this dress especially, and you have brought me a lovely gardenia corsage."

She pulled a white florist's box from the tote bag. "Oh, how great, I can pin it anywhere. It won't work on my dress--" she eyed the halter top that bared her shoulders "--but it'll pin perfectly to my headband."

Temple plucked off the purple and silver satin band and affixed the gardenia blooms to its right side. "There." She re-donned the band and tilted her head at Matt, who glanced over and nodded dazed agreement.

"You are wearing," she said, staring forward into the distance that was darkening on cue, "a simple white evening jacket, so appropriate. Here's your boutonniere. Nothing garish. I hate tastelessly tinted flowers and so do you."

She leaned across the bucket seat to pin a red carnation to Matt's lapel. He was beginning to look alarmed as well as mystified.

Temple sighed happily and settled back into her seat. "I cannot tell you how wonderful it is to be going to the prom in a decent car. With a decent driver."

"Isn't this prom a little deserted?" he asked tentatively.

She smiled at the expression. Empty desert stretched on each side of the car, with a far, faint twinkle of Las Vegas lights in the rear-view mirror the only civilization. Darkness rang down on the desert with the speed of a black-velvet stage curtain.

"How far do I go?" he asked.

We shall see, thought Temple. "Stop wherever meets my specifications: dark and private."

Despite the emptiness of the land, it was all claimed and every off-road ended in a visible glitter of ownership. Matt finally pulled the Storm up a dirt road, then drove a few feet onto the desert floor before he stopped.

"Temple--"

She held up an imperious hand, like a conductor. This was her Lost Symphony and this time it would be played right.

"They usually hold senior proms nowadays in fancy downtown hotels, where it costs a fortune and everybody is trying to act so cool and so sophisticated. But we attend this tiny high school in a small town and we only have the school gym, all strung with crepe paper and a corny silver-mirrored ball--look, there it is!"

She ducked her head and leaned into the windshield. Matt did too. A full moon obligingly swung into view, tinted blue by the shaded top of the windshield. Bluooo moo-oon . Temple had checked in the paper that morning. Perfect timing. O sole mio .

Temple pulled a tape cassette from the bottomless maw of her tote bag and popped it into the tape player without pushing it all the way in. " Maybe we should check out the auditorium."

Matt got the cue and came around to open the passenger door.

'Thank you," Temple simpered in sixteen-year-old bliss. Such a polite young lady.

She brought the tote bag with her as she got out and went around to the driver's side of the car. She opened the driver's door so the interior car light came on, then pulled on the headlights Matt had extinguished.

"Oh, the decorating committee did a beautiful job," she raved, stretching her arms up to the star-sprinkled sky.

The sunset was a memory, a last welter of red haloing the mountains' jagged profile. The Storm was an oasis of light in the desert, its headlights beaming into the blue-velvet dark like those huge, sky-sweeping spotlights used at grand openings everywhere.

"Temple. The lights will wear the battery down."

"Not as much as the tape player." She plopped into the Storm's front seat to lean over and push in the tape. She turned up the volume, and music began filling the empty desert air.

When she exited the car, she picked up the tote bag, set it atop the Storm's hood and pulled out a thermos bottle.

"Of course we've got that tacky prom-committee magenta-colored punch that's far too sweet, probably made with Hawaiian Punch, but between you and me, that awful punk Boots Battista spiked it with vodka, so it tastes a little better."