"The Dragon Lady of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department is taking hints from amateurs?"
"She's keeping an open mind. What about Cheyenne, bisexual or no?"
"Probably." Danny shrugged. "I didn't pay much attention to the daily do-si-do. Some people--gay and heterosexual--do like the edge of being with someone who cuts both ways."
"Even in the age of AIDS?"
"Especially in the age of AIDS. You forget that gays aren't the only ones who run on self-loathing. The promiscuous lifestyle isn't 'gay' in the old sense, or glamorous and knowing, or even smart. If being gay can be hell, I imagine that being bisexual nowadays can be purgatory."
"I'm surprised. I would have thought you, of all people, would be comfortable with your orientation."
He laughed, as if to say, "Oh, you kid!"
"Look, darling girl. The flagrant act is a kind of bravado, and a kind of defiance. Even straight theater people spread around the easy affection, because we all graduated from the same Odd Duck School.
We're family, all of us in the sweetie, dearie, darling set, who assemble and disperse for temporary shows, temporary togetherness. There's both an intimacy and an eternal isolation.
"High school was hell, and being openly gay was suicide in my day. You barely begin to guess who you are at that age, sexual preferences aside, except that you know you don't fit in a thousand ways."
"Who does fit?" Temple wondered suddenly. "Do all the supposedly cool kids really feel so sure behind the facade?"
"A few are cursed with no self-doubts. That's why the supercool kids in high school never amount to much afterward. That was it. Their peak. At least the ugly ducklings are still waddling toward swanhood later in life."
Danny leaned against the homely concrete wall by the back-stage phone. With its graffiti of phone numbers, it reminded Temple of a set from West Side Story.
"Anyway," he went on. "I knew as soon as I hit high school that my social life was going to be non-existent. I was already being called queer for taking dance lessons, then I realized that I wasn't going to be any Adonis, or any taller than five and a half feet. Kids like me back then usually found an older guy outside high school who would use us, or we might use them. Which was which wasn't always clear. But I still had to ask some poor girl to the high school prom, and sweat it that she'd turn me down, or--
worse--think that my invitation meant something. After I got out, I stumbled into the underground gay scene. And then I did it all, took all those risks, too soon and too long. And I developed my front-fag, my swish and bravado just so everybody would know where I was coming from, especially me. Hey, it keeps women from getting the wrong idea, heaven forbid. Well, I guess heaven wouldn't want to forbid that, a gender-preference conversion, but it ain't gonna happen. I'm so gay that I don't understand bisexuals."
"Me neither," Temple agreed. "Sometimes I think celibacy is the simplest answer."
"You?" Danny mocked her. "Miss Hot Redhead of the nineties? Besides, do you know any happy celibates?"
"Maybe. At least they're disease-free."
"And emotionally empty, I've got to believe. At least I was when I was celibate. I don't believe in taking physical risks, but emotional risks are always necessary."
He paused, regarding Temple with a stark serious face that made carefree Danny Dove look like his own worried older brother. Even his happy, curly hair seemed to have straightened.
"I'm not the gadabout gay you think. I have a partner," he said, still in a sober mood. "We've been together--monogamous--for seven years. He had HIV when we met, but he's hanging in there. Safe sex, of course, which is a bore but better than regret after the ball is over, so to speak." Danny's bawdy laugh deliberately broke the mood. Temple suspected he seldom allowed anyone to see his serious side.
"Seven years. That's . . . great." Like all supportive murmurs, hers was vague and somehow inadequate. Even Temple wasn't sure whether she referred to the duration of Danny's relationship or the duration of his partner's survival. But Danny didn't care about the quality of her cue lines; he was reciting from his life story.
"He's a landscaper. Really into xeroscape--native water-sparing plants. I worry about melanoma, out in this hot sun so much. I make him wear sunscreen, nag him about hats. He hates hats."
She nodded. She hated hats, too, almost as much as she loved shoes.
"And then I think--" Danny made a self-deprecating face. "Hey, at least what he does has a life beyond a few hours on stage. If he dies--when he dies--there won't only be a grave to visit. There'll be all those scrubby little, ecology-saving cactus corners to drive by every day. ..."
"I'm sorry," Temple said, voice breaking and eyes welling. She disguised her emotional downfall by hugging Danny.
His reciprocal hug nearly cracked her ribs. "You've got heart, girl." His voice was raw. "Don't you let anybody break it."
Easier said than done, Temple thought, especially when she herself seemed bent on imperiling it.
Chapter 23
Catfood vs. Dogmeat
I like to consider myself a pretty liberated guy, despite the usual hoots at that idea from the Midnight Louise corner. (And why, do you suppose, would such a liberated little doll keep a name that is a rip-off of her unesteemed pater familias felinus?)
Still, I must admit that some modern-day scenarios are enough to turn a few of my muzzle hairs gray, and I do not need any artificial assistance in that area nowadays.
Scenario is exactly the word to describe the situation that has made a successful takeover bid on my mind these days, to the exclusion of such usually distracting and juicy subjects as Chef Song's koi pond and Miss Temple Barr's latest murder victim. (Although she and I share living quarters, we also share a penchant for dead bodies; we differ only in how they arrive in that state and what we desire to do with them afterward. Miss Temple is consumed by the cause and effects of said dead condition; I cause the condition and consume the effects. Except for these wee differences, we have much in common.) In the case of human demise, I can confine myself to pure curiosity: death as an intellectual exercise. This is why I have been so useful to Miss Temple during her homicidal adventures.
But these days I have little appetite for the quick or the dead of any species, even the slow of paw and fin. I suffer from emotional indigestion, and the reason is simple: the ladylove of my life, the Divine Yvette, is pussyfooting up the stairway to stardom with some other dude.
That he is a well-known media figure is yet another claw in my coffin.
So while Miss Temple noses around below-stage, having put herself into the unenviable position of Incredible Hunk playmate, I play games of a different sort in a sequestered ballroom at the Crystal Phoenix. There the Divine Yvette is going for the animal acting Oscar by waxing enthusiastic over the latest Incredible Gunk designed to catch the feline fancy.
If the script calls for her to throw cat fits over co-star Maurice, she will be a natural for the Incredible Acting award.
I find my way onto the closed set by braving the kitchen during breakfast hour, under the cover of every stainless steel cart in sight. Should Chef Song spy me eeling beneath these low-lying islands of safety and concealment, I would lose more than a few loose hairs. His meat cleaver would give my coat a center-part so deep that I would develop a permanently split personality. And my nine lives would be down to four and a half and counting.
But in the kitchen at rush hour, omelets and pancakes are sizzling off the stovetops faster than hundred-dollar bills off the wad of a Texas poker player. All the white-coated figures are flying around looking up, not down.
"A hair!" Chef Song suddenly solos like a demented Barber of Seville, bending over the yellow fluff of an omelet. "Short and black. A moustache hair. Who has not shave?"