Carole douglas: Cat in an Indigo Mood

She quite literally didn't know where to go, but once she turned onto the highway to Lake Mead, her choices narrowed one by one until she found herself by her namesake landing, Temple Bar.

Three O'clock Louie's restaurant wasn't open until lunchtime; tourists scarfed up the cheap and plentiful breakfasts along the Strip before heading to the hinterlands for day tours and lunch.

Lake Mead wasn't a walker-friendly body of water, like the hundreds of tree-rimmed lakes in her native Minnesota that attracted joggers, bicyclists, and dog-walkers in droves.

No, this was a large, fiercely blue expanse of water forced by the great wall of Hoover Darn to flood an even fiercer expanse of red desert rockland.

The effect was alien, like red Mars sporting a landlocked sea. People didn't stroll along the shoreline in this demanding sun-baked environment naked of shade. They arrived on wheels and swiftly embarked on boats or jet Skis.

Temple sat in the idling Storm, parked as close to the shore as she could get. Hers was the only vehicle out here, although within hours tour buses and campers and minivans would hunch wheel-well to hubcap, glittering in the sun.

Now it was quiet and cool.

She turned off the motor and sat in the silence.

She had just left Max, but she was thinking of Matt.

Her hands rested on the steering wheel, as if she still wanted to go somewhere, but she wasn't sure where.

Her left hand was bare of Max's ring. He had dismissed the opal's unlucky reputation when he gave it to her in New York City less than a month before.

Now it was gone. Stolen by a stage magician who had also disappeared. Deja vu all over again, as language-mangler Yogi Berra or Hollywood mogul Sam Goldwyn ("an oral contract isn't worth the paper it's written on") had said, but maybe somebody else had. No one had a lock on anything anymore, including ignorance.

Shangri-La the lady magician had left town, maybe even the planet. With her went the ring.

Temple glanced at the tote bag in the seat next to her. It occurred to her that she always carried such a big bag ("such a big bag for such a little lady," bluff strange men had been known to remark) not just because she could pack a lot of her working life into it, but because it made an ersatz companion for a single woman. Always a comforting bulk in the otherwise empty front passenger seat.

It did pack all her essentials: her day planner, sunglass case, bulging wallet, notebook and pen case, a cosmetic hag For sunscreen and makeup touch-ups, and a pair of tennis shoes now that she had played Nancy Drew often enough to think that she might have to make tracks fast--and now that her trademark high heels were becoming a luxury her lifestyle could no longer afford. Geez, to hear Max talk about how much danger she might face from the mysterious Kitty O'Connor, love of-his-schoolboy-life turned psycho, Temple might have to start wearing combat boots.

"Never!" she told the lake, gripping the steering wheel as if it threatened to wrench out of her grasp.

Her lists unclenched and fell to her lap.

There was something else nowadays in the clutter of her tote bag: the box holding the delicate crushed-opal cat necklace Matt Devine had given her.

She carried it around under the delusion that she really ought to give it back to him and would someday.

She continued to carry it around because she knew she never would, and everyone should have some talisman of paths not taken, some visible reminder of temptation and guilt. God! She was starting to think like a Catholic!

Max must have been reared Catholic, but he never mentioned the church. The Church, it was, in Ireland. Temple suspected that he blamed it for complicity in the Troubles that had made his life a shambles and a secret. He had put his religion behind him like his family, both too dangerous to confront.

So where was her sense of guilt coming from? From Matt? Was guilt contagious, like a flu hug? Could you get it from proximity, French kisses, osmosis, daydreams?

Temple thrust her lacquered nails into the wilderness beyond the tote bag's always-open and inviting maw.

She found the small square cardboard jewelry box and hauled it out into the light of day: cotton batting on which coiled a thin gold chain with a central cat-shape etched in a mosaic of black opals that shot red and green sparks onto the car seat.

First, she had felt guilty because Matt bought her a Christmas present when she hadn't bought him one. A second later she had felt guilty because she had spent her Christmas far away, growing closer to Max again, so close that she had accepted a ring from him as well as a resumed intimacy. And right after that, she had felt guilty because she had avoided telling Matt that their stuttering relationship had run out of gas just when he was finally getting his foot on the accelerator.

And, finally, like all women in whom it was ingrained from puberty onward, she was guilty because the gift had "cost too much," although social custom still decreed that man gave and woman accepted, from candy and flowers to engagement and wedding rings.

She touched the winking figure of the black cat, almost hologram-elusive in its crushed opal outline.

It had cost too much, and money, for once, had nothing to do with it.

She closed the necklace in her palm, and closed her eyes.

He hadn't asked about it, would never mention it again.

Just as she would never wear it again.

Just as they would never mention the . . . incident it had played a part in. which never would have happened if she had told Matt the minute she got hack from New York that she and Max were a couple again, had coupled again. If she hadn't been trying to spare everyone's feelings, which was a very female and, she gathered, a very Catholic thing to do. No wonder the nuns at Our Lady of Guadalupe had been so nice! They were doubly cursed. Maybe niceness was as dangerously infectious as guilt.

Temple felt tears welling behind her eyes, yet her sorrow had a warm nostalgic core, like the necklace warming in the close custody of her fist.

So. It never should have happened, that close encounter with Matt after his stepfather's ridiculous funeral. Except that it had; he had reached for her in ways that he had maybe never imagined, and she might have but never had dreamed could be so . . . inexplicable.

Okay. Analyze it, she told herself. What had happened, simple biology. A man, a woman.

Kisses and clothing shifting all over the place, intimacy. excitement. . .but nothing any teenager hadn't tried before senior prom. Nothing like serious sexuality.

Still, given Matt's repressive background, "nothing" meant a lot.

The Virtue policewoman in her had raised a stern hand to stop the Crime of the heart in progress, but the Social Worker advised against rejecting Matt's much-too-long delayed foray into fore-play. And poor, startled, slumbering Sleeping Beauty had been way too stunned and breathless and touched and turned on to do anything sensible but enjoy the big moment.

That was the problem; Matt might still be a babe in Toyland when it came to sex, but Temple was not. She knew solid from shabby. She knew all relationships have ups and downs, and hots and tepids. She knew Lady Godiva from Reese's Pieces.

Nobody had ever made love to her like that before, and nobody ever would. Because that moment had begun Matt's new vocation, sexual human being. And that converts intensity, that pent-up celibate energy, the dimly sensed spiritual drive behind the sensuality, that unholy lack of inhibition smoldering beneath the surface, well. Mae West was wrong. Goodness had everything to do with it.

"Goodness," she said aloud.

Her musings had created a receptive state that felt emotionally bottomless, but sexually shallow. Simple sexual fantasy was too empty a response to such a mystery. There could only be one revelatory, transforming moment like that per customer. A moment worth remembering, if she could manage to forget it for a few decades first, and get on with the rest of her life.