Paul Levine - Night vision

She unchained and let me in. We faced each other awkwardly in a sitting room tastefully done in muted tropical colors. A sliding glass door led to a balcony with a floor-to-ceiling view of the Atlantic. She wore an ankle-length floral satin robe and no makeup. The sculpted cheekbones still showed their granite planes. Her green eyes were still spiked with flint. Her auburn hair was pulled straight back and tied in a ponytail.

I was too late for breakfast. The room-service cart was there, covered with a white tablecloth and decorated by a vase with fresh-cut lavender flowers. An empty cereal bowl sat on one side of the table and the remains of a western omelet on the other. Two chairs, two place settings, one big pot with two coffee cups. My inductive reasoning told me that Pamela Maxson had not dined alone. I was getting so good at this I decided to ask Nick Fox for a raise.

"Kiss me quick before I die," I said.

"What in heaven's-"

"The flowers on your table. I don't know the real name, but as kids, that's what we called them, kiss me quick-"

"Before I die." She picked up one of the flowers, a white eye in the center circled by a lush lavender. "How quaint."

"The color doesn't last. Even on the shrub, it'll fade to pale lilac and then a ghostly white in just a few days."

"Gather ye rosebuds," she said, twirling the stem in her hand.

"Something like that. Flowers, people, we're all a-dying, aren't we?"

She didn't answer. I thought I heard the water running in the bathroom, but it might have been the next suite down the hall.

"Coffee?" she asked.

I nodded and she poured into a used cup. The coffee was still hot.

"Business or social call?" she asked.

"I was wondering how you were doing."

"Fine."

"Think you'll stay here long?"

"No."

"You need anything?"

"No."

Reluctant witnesses either blather incessantly about irrelevancies or one-word you to death. I drank somebody else's coffee and stared through the glass door at a tanker three miles offshore, heading south. I wanted to put all the little fishes on the reefs on red alert.

"Pam…"

"Yes?"

"I thought we could talk about-"

A sound from inside the bedroom stopped me. Maybe a dresser drawer closing. I watched the door.

"Oh, Jake. Just come out and ask. There's no reason to be so sensitive about it. I'm surely not."

"All right. I'll ask. Why? Who? What's going on?"

The bedroom door opened and out walked Bobbie Blinderman.

She was dressed in a hot-orange, body-molding leather mini held up by two straps. The shoes were matching orange with stiletto heels. She puckered her orange glossy lips and blew me a kiss. "'Morning, Lassiter."

I wished it had been Mel Gibson.

"Jake, don't look so surprised. My goodness, you're actually turning pale, isn't he, Bobbie?"

"As a ghost," she said.

"Jake, I'm helping Bobbie with some of her problems. She's-"

"Great, who's helping with yours?"

"Oh Jake, don't."

"Is the little boy angry?" Bobbie jeered. "Somebody steal his candy bar?"

"Jake, bisexuality is quite normal, really. Some of the greatest figures in history were bisexual. Socrates, for example."

"Elton John," Bobbie added.

"Oscar Wilde," Pam said.

"David Bowie," Bobbie countered.

This went on for a while, like a vaudeville routine.

Pam said, "Henry III."

And Bobbie said, "Janis Joplin."

Pam said, "Colette."

And Bobbie said, "Bessie Smith."

"Okay," I said. "I get the point."

Pam said, "All of us are born bisexual and have those tendencies until puberty. The heterosexual merely sublimates his homosexual cravings in friendship and other social engagements with the same sex. Some don't sublimate it."

"I understand," I muttered.

"So why are you so…threatened?"

Bobbie sat down on the sofa and crossed her legs, hiking the leather dress toward her hips. What was it she told me that day in the courthouse? That I really didn't know her at all, and the less I knew the better.

"Hey, I don't care if people are homosexual, bisexual, or if they like inflatable dolls or rubber duckies," I said. "It just gets personal when somebody I'm involved with, somebody I thought I was involved with, turns out differently than I had supposed."

"Would you be as upset if I left for a man?"

"I don't know, maybe not."

"Why?"

I was getting tired of her analyzing me. "While we're talking about why, tell me why you're the way you are."

"Do you really want to know or do you need reinforcement that your manhood isn't diminished by my choices?"

"No. I want to know. I came here today because I missed you, couldn't understand why you left. So now I know part of it, the tip-of-the-iceberg part…"

"I suppose I could tell you about the positive and negative Oedipus complex. For a girl it's very complex. To become heterosexual, she has to transfer her love from her mother to her father, then must repress that love and transfer it to other men while still identifying with the mother. If the girl has incomplete identification with her own sex, she combines characteristics of both sexes. If she cannot resolve the positive Oedipal complex, if she cannot transfer her love for her father to other men, she will become homosexual or bisexual." Pam studied me to see if I was following the lecture. I just looked out the window and watched the tanker steam south, black puffs belching from its smokestacks.

"You get an A-plus for clinical psychology," I said, "but I want to know about you. Your childhood, your parents. What made you what you are?"

"What I am!"

"Wow," Bobbie breathed. She squirmed on the sofa and turned toward Pam. "He thinks you're a thing, an it, a lesbianic creature from outer space."

"You two are having fun with this, aren't you? Baiting me."

Pam stood and walked toward the balcony. The tanker was gone.

"Jake, it doesn't greatly concern me what you think of me, though I should like to enlighten you. A hundred years ago, Dr. Krafft-Ebing declared that heterosexual cunnilingus was a perversion of fetishists."

"He probably didn't like oysters, either," I said.

"My point is that attitudes change. In ancient Greece-"

"I don't care about ancient Greece. I really don't. But I care about you, or I wouldn't have come here."

"Good. I care about Bobbie. And there is no reason we cannot all care about each other."

"Before we start caring too much," Bobbie said, hoisting herself up on long legs, "I gotta go to work."

"Me too," I said. "Too much enlightenment before breakfast gives me a headache."

"Your sarcasm is readily apparent," Pam said.

I shrugged. The two ladies said ta-ta and their lips brushed, Pam giving Bobbie a little squeeze on her burnt-orange behind.

I examined the tops of my shoes as Bobbie Blinderman and I shared an elevator. A middle-aged man with a fresh sunburn, an aloha shirt, and a conventioneer's tag identifying him as a risk-loss specialist from Omaha stopped talking to his wife and stared at my six-foot-tall orange lollipop. Bobbie showed her hundred-watt smile, and then turned to me. "I'm gonna be sore for a week, you big moose." My risk-loss friend snickered and slapped me on the back when the doors opened at the lobby.

It took the valet ten minutes to coax the Olds out of the stable. If you drive a Rolls or a Jag convertible or if you arrive by limo, they leave your machine out front in the shade of the palms. Impress the tourists, justify the room rates. If it's a convertible older than the valet, they often put it on a concrete deck in the broiling sun where the salt spray can speckle it.

A sleepy-eyed teenager in a red vest was opening Bobbie's door as I got in on the driver's side. I had my right foot inside and my left foot on the ground when I saw the blur.