A Really Big Shoe-down
"It's no use, Louie," Temple announced at 10:30 p.m., slapping back the covers so quickly that the cat was forced to edge aside.
Midnight Louie, rearranged in the Sphinx/Leo position so prominent in Las Vegas nowadays, regarded her sitting form with polite yet bored amazement. Cats were as good as concealing their thoughts as . . .
well, the Sphinx.
"I just can't sleep," she went on aloud despite Louie's obvious disinterest, "and I won't spend any more time tossing and twitching over men whose names begin with the letter M. There is more to life than angst in the first degree. I'm outta here."
She picked up the red shoe phone and sparred a round of numbers into it, by heart. It wasn't answered until the fourth ring, but Temple felt no guilt whatsoever. She'd had it with guilt.
"Did I wake you? Sorry. I won't take more than a minute. Electra, get me out of here! It's a go on your GROWLers. Whisk me away to Wishful Thinking Land. Reality . . . mucks. Eight tomorrow morning? No problem."
She set the phone down on its high red heel and disconnecting black sole, then regarded Midnight Louie in her turn. "There's only one place a girl can go when everything has gone wrong in her life, and I'm on my way."
Temple jumped up, tore off her Garfield T-shirt, no doubt to Louie's supreme relief, and sprinted over to her fifties dresser with the foot-deep drawers.
Pantyhose hurled left and right until she found a pair that lacked runs, snags and holes in the toes.
Her flurry of action had lured Louie from the bed to the floor, where he was playing footsie with the rejected pantyhose.
"Eat 'em if you want to," Temple advised him in atypical abandon. "Why keep defective hose around that I'll never wear?" That line might also apply to certain human beings whose first names began with the letter M, but, like Scarlett, Temple wasn't going to think about that until tomorrow.
She donned a linen culottes and top in such a cheery shade of butter-substitute yellow that it would make teeth grit for miles around, snarled a brush through her bed-tousled curls and left the bedroom.
In five minutes flat she had her red patent leather tote bag on the passenger seat and was weaving the aqua Geo Storm in and out of the Las Vegas Strip's twenty-four-hour traffic jam.
Caesars Palace was lit up like a wedding cake, all illuminated white columns. The image did nothing for Temple's mood, but she parked the Storm in the lot and hoofed her way into the churning crowds.
The dark casino with its thousand pinpoints of low intensity light was a blurred, sound-barrier-breaking, warp-speed passage to her.
Seconds later she broke into the tasteful beige ambiance of the hotel's marble-lined Forum shopping area. Here she finally paused, although it was a detour on her ultimate route. Despite the hour and the hot action in the casino, crowds still jostled through the tangled byways of shopfronts. Temple hitched the tote bag straps higher on her shoulder. Don't mess with me, purse*snatchers!
She was coming up fast on the pale Cararra-marble backside of Michelangelo's David, a replica that loomed eighteen virtually nude feet into the mall's airy classical vault. The surrounding rotunda was painted bawdy-house red with oodles of white plaster-work, creating an intimate bedroom ambiance for David's marbled muscles. Another slick imposter, Temple thought darkly. A costly imitation of the real thing. Just like certain relationships !
She cast David's insouciantly bare, ultra-masculine form a glance. His name decidedly did not begin with an M. Soon she would be seeing similar territoriality in the flesh at Electra's G.R.O.W.L. conference.
Growl! So what!
Like Caesar, she stood at a personal Rubicon: between two vastly different paths. Hah! Did her subconscious think it was referring to matters metaphysical? No. This choice was far more crucial than a mere fork in the rocky road of her lovelife.
Should she go east, or should she go west? East lay the more familiar turf of the Appian Way, a well-heeled shopper's paradise of vamp and sole, most of them not manmade, but the real thing.
West lay the Place-She-Dare-Not-Contemplate and remain sane, the Place-She-Had-Been-Ignoring, the guaranteed site of temptation beyond budget. Temple had never laid eyes on the exact location, though she had known of its existence for months. To plunge into such a dangerous region in her state of emotional chaos was folly, but there are times when only exquisite excess will soothe the savage soul.
Sole.
Even now she thought she could hear the siren song of high heels tapping, could see the sad, stirring vision of rows of unoccupied shoes lined up like doggies in a window, hoping for a possessor. ... Pick me.
Pick mel Pick me!
She turned right, west, and marched to her doom and to her delight. Odd how often those opposite concepts went together!
First, she decided on a frontal attack, which was the long way around, but a brisk walk does wonders to soothe the savage heart. She retraced her way through the casino and out the sweeping front entrance flanked by more reproductions of classic statues. Given the mating habits of the Roman gods they represented, reproductions were oddly apt. Temple followed the curving walk from pool to pool of dramatic lighting, pausing only under the huge rotating Planet Hollywood sign at the midway point.
By the time she reached the Strip, she was braced for the background clatter of cars and foot traffic, and bathed in millions of kilowatts of a neon symphony. Caesars's warm white incandescence glowed on her left; the Mirage's sophisticated coppery cliff-side shone amid tropical splendor. The Mirage volcano emitted a cigarette cough as it prepared to whoop and roar with artificial fireworks, the Strip's only chain smoker.
But Temple was pointed between these titans of the Las Vegas Strip, toward her own temple, a rotunda bristling with gilded horses flaunting their twenty-four-carat hooves. A hop on the moving sidewalk and she was wafted, alongside a stream of tourists, up a gentle incline toward The Forum Shops at Caesars Palace. (Omit the apostrophe in Caesars, she mentally reminded herself, like a good PR
girl who knows all the local quirks, and even some national ones: the Dr in Dr Pepper never has a period, nor does the S in Harry S Truman, nor does Caesars Palace sport an apostrophe.) Like Jean Paul Sartre's Hell, the novice found No Exit from The Forum Shops except through Caesars'
casino. Las Vegas architecture was as canny as a maze. Despite all the bells and whistles, the object was to maroon visitors right where the management wanted them: dead center in a casino.
No such illusions would do for Temple tonight. This was a serious pilgrimage. So she brushed by aimless tourists with single-minded skill. Many people had slowed to gawk at the eternally blue trompel'oeil sky, where wispy clouds shimmered in a shifting bath of sunset haze. She dodged around the massive marble obstacle of the first indoor fountain. A ring of people was awaiting the hourly animation of Bacchus, Plautus, Apollo and Venus, but Temple rushed through, unimpressed by the dome's laser-lashed storming sky, or the emerald constellations of stars that twinkled through.
She streaked past Planet Hollywood like a copper-topped comet, did not pause to watch its indoor world-shaped sign turn above the neon-framed cave of the trendy restaurant. She de-toured around the gigantic sculpted fountain in the ersatz street's center, not even glancing at the honored Italian names under the surrounding Greek pediments surmounted by statuary: Versace, Gucci, Escada, Armani. Once again it was Romans over the Greeks, and everybody else, by a designer logo.
She knew most of the stores here, but kept an eye out for the newest one. By now the black yawning maw of Caesars, glinting with the gold teeth of casino lighting, loomed beyond the Forum Shops's eternal twilight glow like a monster mouth.
Where was it? Had she overshot her goal? No! Her feet were tiring. Even the businesslike clicks of She squinted at the shop signs above the doors, deliberately underplayed to showcase the brilliantly lit shop windows below. Temple's heart began beating faster as she recognized part of a name. Surely that first word .. . S-t-u? Yes! She had never seen it before, but she would have known it anywhere. Her feet moved faster.