Douglas, Nelson - Cat in a Flamingo Fedora

I can see that I had better scram, especially when Miss Savannah Ashleigh starts mixing metaphors. I slither out to the other room when her back is turned, and find a sheltered hunkering-down spot near the entrance doors. Surely someone will come or go one of these hours, and then I will skip out the door to my former freedom.

"Ooh, Mommy's sweetest 'ittle pussums," I hear crooned from the bedroom. "You would never let Mommy down, 'ould you? No, no, no."

I am afraid that the Divine Yvette is getting one of those saltwater baths that are so damaging to her fur coat.

Will humans never learn the proper care of their boon companions?

I think on other dark and disagreeable subjects for a couple of hours. Imagine my surprise when the person that finally frees me rustles, fully dressed to kill, from the bedroom. Miss Savannah Ashleigh does not even look down, her nose is so high in the air. She jerks open the door and struts out of it. I have to be quick to avoid getting a tailectomy as I bound through the door with her.

Well, I was this close to the Divine Yvette, and once again her puzzling devotion to her straw-headed mistress has foiled our perfect union.

I am beginning to think that the Divine Yvette and I are not meant to be. That is such a depressing thought that I hurry back to the Circle Ritz, planning to snuffle on Miss Temple Barr's shoulder.

Chapter 16

Fly on the Wall

Eleven o'clock on a Sunday night, and the ConTact help lines were still.

Matt sat facing the three white sides of his cubicle. He watched a fly crawl over the hole -

studded soundproof tiles, adding a random element to the perfect pattern of perforations. Matt kept waiting for the fly to crawl into one of the round black holes, and disappear.

But it didn't. Its splay-footed legs moved delicately over the aisles of white between the perforations and never made a misstep. If only people had the discriminating instincts of a common fly!

But they didn't, and that's what made his job interesting, even on tedious nights like this.

"Want me to call you up and pour out my troubles?"

Matt leaned back in his stenographic chair to eye the only other counselor on duty right then: Bennie Cordova.

Bennie was grinning over the plastic frames of his glasses, highly magnifying half lenses that made the bags under his sixtyish eyes look like they were packed for an around-the -world cruise.

"You have troubles?" Matt joked back.

No doubt Bennie--whose baptismal name was Bienvenido, "Welcome"--had been a cool guy during his sixties heyday, probably thumbing his nose at authority when it wasn't busy inhaling pot. If anyone had told Bennie then that his dark hair would gray and retreat screaming from his forehead with the inevitability of an ebbing tide, that he'd someday wear grandpa glasses and cardigan sweaters to work on a chilly Las Vegas night, Bennie probably would have beat him up. Now, time had beaten up Bennie, and his knees and neck were stiff, but he s till had his sixties insouciance. No sweat, man. Stuff happens, even growing old instead of up.

"Everybody has troubles, man. What about yours?"

"Minuscule."

"Min-a-school. Where'd you get words like that?"

"In a school."

"Very funny, man. Say, when dullness walks in the door around here, it doesn't fool around."

Bennie sipped from the mug of coffee constantly at his right hand. The mug's design commemorated Earth Day 1983. "Sheila still trying to get you to dial her line? I miss all the good stuff, being a substitute. It's like missing a week in a soap-opera plot; everything's different."

Matt shook his head. "Not here. Sheila's still working here, but that's about it."

"Still working on you, I bet. Man, when I was young, chicks were prettier and people knew how to groove."

"It was safer then too."

"Naw. We just thought it was. The power of positive thinking kept us from bad trips and ugly consequences, that's all. We were just lucky."

Matt nodded. Ignorance was bliss, he understood that more every day, as his ignorance inched away as subtly and irrevocably as Bennie's hairline had retreated. Growing old but not up. Bennie would snort to hear that Matt felt that way at thirty-three, but every generation had its twisted time frame and its own values.

"You still live at that far-out Circle place?" Bennie asked.

Matt nodded.

"Man, that must give you willies. Every room ends in a curve, the halls are curved ... I suppose the elevators go up in a curve too, huh?"

"Not that we notice. You seem to know the building pretty well."

"Did some work on it back in the seventies. The outside marble facing needed some spit and polish; that was when I still did construction work. Now I'm ree-tired."

"So you volunteer to come in here nights and listen to sad stories."

"Right. Doan wants miss what's happenin' out there. Besides, I'm a pretty good drug counselor." Bennie winked over the Santa Claus glasses. "Oughta be."

Matt noticed that the fly had settled on a spot dead center of four holes to clean its face.

Maybe he'd get some more coffee and--

And answer the phone. His line. He pulled the earpad on his headset into place and let his focus on the fly fuzz out.

"ConTact. Brother John."

The idea behind pseudonyms was to guard the counselors' privacy. The use of "handles" also gave a stressed caller something to focus on, and personalized the counselors while still letting them keep the necessary distance. Matt's handle got a lot of initial reaction. It was more than a name, it implied a relationship. "Brother John" sounded like family.

The caller must have thought so too.

"Brother, can you spare a dime?" he began.

Matt tensed as he recognized the strong, confident voice. He was used to hesitaters, or nervous "spillers," not to a man who sounded like he should be giving advice instead of taking it.

"I thought you were through with us," Matt said.

"With you, buddy, not the organization. But... I'm feelin' blue and like doing something foolish on a Sunday evening and I thought I'd better call my buddy at ConTact. Great name, ConTact. I have its card right here before me. See, you can take the name two ways: 'Contact,' as in connection . . . phone connection, personal connection, and 'Con' as in the Spanish 'with' and

'Tact' as in knowing what to say, or maybe just knowing what people want to hear. Same difference, right? I do it all the time myself. Tell people what they want to hear. That makes us peas in a pod, I guess. So, you make up that name? 'ConTact.' "

"I had nothing to do with it. Whatever thought went into it, happened before I got here."

"Now, that's hard to imagine. I think of you always sitting there, eavesdropping on us lower Slobovians, like God."

"You're feeling a lot of hostility tonight."

"Yeah, I'm hostile. People think I'm joking all the time, and most of the time I am. They think that I'm all pose and no sincerity. They never ask themselves if that's not exactly the way they want me to be."

"How do you want to be?"

In the pause, Matt heard angry ice cubes rattle, as if they were being slammed into an empty glass.

"The way I am, without everybody coming at me complaining."

"What do they complain about?"

"What I say and do, who I see. What they think I'm thinking."

The ice-cube, feisty-castanet chatter softened to muted clinks, probably sinking under a potent sea of hard liquor. Since he began his phone nightlife, Matt had become adept at inventing faces and settings for his callers. He might be totally wrong, but it helped him sense their hidden messages, the heartbreaks they weren't mentioning.

Only, with this caller, this frequent phoner, the imaging trick had backfired. The caller had used it on Matt, assigning him attitudes and a posture Matt didn't possess. People who had lost touch with their own inner burns and dodges often misinterpreted other people, usually those they were most closely involved with. That this particular caller would play this game with