"Don't laugh. La femme could be cherchez-ing me now, because I know too much."
"So. You're looking over your shoulder for a female killer. And that's why you're edgy."
"Maybe. If I am edgy. I'm not sure I endorse your diagnosis."
"What about the divine Mr. Devine?"
"Matt? He's not edgy. Au contraire. Although he did sound a bit hyper for him when he called me after I got in."
"He called you. I've been wondering about that. Are you two--?"
"Oh, stop making that matchmaker wiggle with your hand, as if my love life could go either way with either guy. It's all at a standstill. Them, me, it. We are all stuck in the mud. Up to our fenders in snowdrifts or sand dunes or self-delusion. Mired."
"I can think of worse men to be mired with."
"How do you know?"
"I've been mired with them. The worse men, that is."
"It's so . . . serious nowadays. With AIDS. Max and I have a tremendous investment in our relationship. Almost two years of monogamy, if you count our six months in Minnesota waiting out the AIDS tests, and the six-month honeymoon in Las Vegas and then another six months of separation."
"Two years? Tremendous?"
"It is! If you want to be real and don't want to take risks."
"And while he was mysteriously away?"
"He says he was faithful. I know I was."
"You believe him?"
Temple stared into the wine's garnet depths. A wine with body seemed thick, like blood. Certainly thicker than water. The wine left a viscous slick on the glass if you tilted the container, then leveled it again. Playing with your drink was always a sign of indecision.
"I don't know what to believe about Max Kinsella nowadays, even what he tells me himself. But fidelity? That I believe. I'd stake my life on it."
"Temple, you're being seriously inconsistent!"
She shrugged. "C'est la vie"
"How do you know Max is that reliable?"
"Because I never even considered telling those creeps who were beating me where he was, and wouldn't have, even if I had known, and I'm no . . . Joan of Arc. There are some betrayals neither of us is ready to make yet."
"This is not logical."
"No, that's how I can be so sure. But just about that."
"What about Matt Devine?"
"Oooh, worse conundrum even than Max."
"Temple, you're obsessing over this stuff. This stalking woman, and the two men in your life. You're young. Go with your heart."
"You can't nowadays, Kit. You don't know. You didn't grow up in the age of AIDS, when you knew all about it by junior high school. Half the men in the U.S. who die between the ages of twenty-five and forty-four die of AIDS. Think of how many 'eligible' guys are exposed, and arc out feeling immortal, exposing new partners. Just because you're from an older generation who's pretty much out of it--"
"Oops. Beg your pardon. I'm not entirely out of it. I have hopes, even at my advanced age, which you'll see when you get there."
"If I get there."
"I had no idea you kids were taking this so seriously."
"This one is. That's why I'm hamstrung. Reason says stay with Max, where we've both invested ourselves. But there's so much he's hidden from me . . . and Matt--"
"Matt you don't know well enough to trust when he reports his safety record." Kit nodded sagely.
"That's just the trouble. I do know his background all too well."
"And he got around pretty thoroughly. Well, that's natural with his looks--"
Temple laughed bitterly.
"That laugh would do so well in Private Lives," Kit, the casting director, said. "But you're not brittle enough to play Amanda yet," her aunt added. "Wait till you're thirty-five."
"You don't understand."
"Maybe not. But I understand more than you think about all this." Kit leaned over to refill her glass.
Perhaps they were getting a bit sloshed, Temple thought, but it was just us girls ... we girls? And Midnight Louie, and he didn't seem to be listening to a darn thing they said "Just how damn old do you think I am?" Kit's eyes were schoolteacher-stern over her incongruously kicky metallic-framed half-glasses.
"Mom's nearly seventy." Temple idly rotated her ankle until one bedroom slipper lived up to its name and floated to the floor. When she felt Kit had been held in suspense long enough, she added, "you've got to be sixty-something."
"That's right. And that's not the end of the world for the libido either. Sixty doesn't look so bad once you've managed to get there. And I didn't get here the same way your mother did. I'm not your mother, Temple, but I'm going to give you a crash course in Life 101A."
Temple swallowed, but not wine. Somehow she'd irritated her aunt, without meaning to. Now here came the lecture that was one of the few perquisites of age.
"You know I left Minnesota for New York to become an actress. Just nod or shake your head, and I'll fill in. You don't have to say a thing. This is my monologue. Well. Here I am in the Big City, my Midwestern cheeks rosy, my miniskirt not nearly as short as the ones on the streets of New York, my hair blowin' in the wind and long enough to touch the bottom of my miniskirt."
Kit took in the tribute of Temple's widened eyes and settled back into her pillows, her foggy-bottom voice growing more reflective.
"It was the sixties, the age of rebellion and rabble-rousing. Make love, not war. A revolutionary concept, and my own generation's invention. We appeared nude in Hair. Some of us burned flags. Some of us burned pot. Some of us burned the candle at both ends, usually ours. Can you imagine what it was like to plunge into this sociopolitical-sexual insurrection away from home? The city was our circus, our arena, our life. We were young and we were going to star on Off-Broadway and drink ouzo at four in the morning and walk alone at midnight through Central Park and smoke dope in front of a TV camera and make love with whoever we felt like. So we did."
"We? You mean the generation, not you personally."
"Do I?"
"I mean, Aunt Kit, you weren't, uh, promiscuous?"
"Not in my own mind. I was in the forefront of a revolution, a happy campaigner. I was smashing taboos, stamping out repression, having fun."
"You couldn't have had that kind of fun! You were from the Midwest."
"Honey. Big-time repression brings big-time rebellion. It isn't a coincidence that the Times Square area with the most underage hookers was known in the seventies and eighties as the 'Minnesota Strip.' "
"I heard about that. I mean, in high school. But I didn't really believe it."
"Nobody believes reality. That's why there are-- ta-dah! --actors."
Temple frowned and sipped judiciously from her glass, thinking that it was about time she sipped judiciously.
"But women then weren't that careless--"
You know Garrison Keillor's hallmark description of Like Wobegon?"
"Lake Wobegon! That name is such a priceless satire--'where the women are Strong and the men are good-looking...' "
Kit shook her head, "The women in my day were never strong. They were just well controlled."
"You're saying you were--"
"Taken for a revolutionary ride. Used. Again. I was too busy being an artiste to get in the protest movements more than superficially, but when women started waking up from the sexual revolution and took a look at what they did during the civil-rights and Vietnam-protest wars, Mommy, it was manning the coffee and mimeograph machines--a primitive sixties duplicating device, kid--worshiping at the feet of the male gurus who made the speeches and smoked the dope, and scrubbing the floors with their backs. Why do you think women's lib was the last liberal movement of the trio to come along?"