"I don't want to--"
"Intrude! Go ahead, Matt dear. You need to intrude more. Walk right in. Break down a few doors if you have to. Come as you are, Leave as you want to be, Smile. And sing some for me before I go back to bed. You do sing?"
I used to, but not exactly pop tunes."
Maybe he should say he's into Latin rhythms, Matt thought, realizing that Electra had improved his mood. Hmm. Latin rhythms with hymns. Church music is seldom heard elsewhere, unless a monk's choir becomes an international novelty act for a half note on the endless scale of media fads.
Churches are made for music like vases are made for flowers. His mind and fingers revisited some of his favorites. Attending high mass at a major cathedral, high, heavenly voices filling the eaves. Visiting the small wooden playhouse of a neighboring black Baptist church on Sunday, where the Gospel choir can clap their way into high heaven. He'd always gone on these informal ecumenical expeditions in Roman collar. So blond amid all that black, he understood the isolation of oppositeness.
Afterward, the congregation spurned the polite distance toward line-crossers that you found in white urban churches. They beamed and called him "Reverend." "Fine day, Reverend," they'd said, nodding on the way out.
The minister would pump his hand at the simple single doorway, cheered by a visit from a brother clergyman. Matt would say, "Fine sermon, Reverend. Great choir." "Thank you, Father. Thank you very much," the other Reverend would say, meaning it.
Matt didn't visit non-Catholic churches now. He felt he had no right. No instant brotherhood wherever he went.
His hands finally found something secular Electra would know. "Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man," mellow and made for the organ. He found his voice again, not intoning measured responses but searching old, mysterious words for new meanings and emotions.
Electra's arms tightened on his neck when he was finished. "Terrific, hon. You should sing more often."
She bent to give him a motherly kiss good night, then left him to the dark and the melancholy organ notes.
Matt always welcomed spontaneous affection, but found it startling. Affection was something left unsaid rather than demonstrated in his life. But Electra, with her five husbands and earthy attitude, was too outgoing to skirt his reticence, or even notice it. Affection. Matt liked it.
And then his willful hands were playing Bob Dylan's "Spanish Harlem Incident," a romantic song the title belied, as Dylan's titles often denied any romantic contents of lyric or melody. Somehow the flamenco-dancing, fortune-telling gypsy girl the songwriter celebrated reminded Matt of Temple. Or maybe he just identified with the singer longing to warm himself at the errant flame of the eternal female.
Dylan's songs about male-female relationships could be bitter, or cynical, or playful. And even Biblical. His moving "Sara" was a wail of Job to his lost wife as they separated. Matt wondered if the recording field was capable of supporting constancy. Then he wondered if that would matter more than the changes Electra mentioned.
Break down doors, huh? Suppose Matt started doing that? How many new doors would Max Kinsella materialize to stop him? How many doors had Matt himself slammed shut over the years to barricade himself against chance, and change?
Chapter 7
An Elevated Experience
Strapped into Midnight Louie's carrier, with Louie in it, Temple set forth early Thursday morning to catch a cab to Colby, Janos and Renaldi.
With her various burdens, flat-footed boots and bulky down-stuffed jacket, she felt (and probably looked) like a Sherpa guide enroute to an assault on Mount Everest.
Catching a cab was enough of a challenge. The first step was crossing the street. She had to flag down a cab pointed in the right direction: uptown. The next step was spotting a free vehicle. In the gray December daylight, telling whether the milky light topping each cab like a button on a beanie was off or on was a toss-up. The greatest challenge, though, was luring the empty cab to her.
Apparently neither she nor Louie had cab magic. She watched seasoned New Yorkers arrive Johnny-come -lately on the block she had been firmly planted on for minutes, then spy, call and snag cabs that by right of being there first should have been hers, dammit!
What did she have to do? Throw herself and Louie into midtraffic?
Actually, that finally worked, although some rude drivers made a point of swerving away at the last minute and trying for a world's record horn-honk.
But at last she had trapped one of the wily Yellows. She collapsed into the backseat on her tailbone, feeling relief if not comfort. The only position she could take in a cab with Louie weighing her down was the slightly reclining one of a partially upended turtle. At least it kept her too low to see out of the window, which meant that she didn't have to witness the thousand close shaves that New York cabs are heir to.
The address she gave the driver had gone down smoothly. Madison Avenue was a major street that caused cabbies no gray hairs, and Kit had said the building Temple wanted was in the "Larry block," so named after a long-standing, celebrated watering hole called Larry's on one corner. In what seemed like a wink, the cab jerked up short and stopped.
Temple struggled upright to glimpse the meter, before pulling out the right amount of money. Then she had to wrench the door open and tumble out. Louie growled softly during all the maneuvers; her exiting position resembled a jackknife in gym class, and his boyish girth was the only part of the equation that could give.
Safely upright and on the sidewalk again, Temple adjusted the straps on the twenty-one-pound carrier-with-cat, pushed up her jacket sleeve and slid down her glove to bare enough of her wrist to check the time. Fifteen minutes early. She'd have to stroll the rest of the way to avoid arriving embarrassingly early.
A search of the building's stone facade revealed the very numbers she sought, their tall aluminum dignity mimicking the skyscraper.
Temple joined the people scurrying through the chrome revolving doors into an echoing lobby as busy as all outdoors.
"Does everybody know where they're going?" Temple muttered to Louie. His head was twisted so his big green eyes could study her soulfully. He produced a silent meow of protest to her transportation arrangements so far.
Temple had memorized the office number: 3288. She threaded through the humorless crowds, hunting for the elevators, for a while, it looked as if there weren't any. Only when she had penetrated the building's interior to an alarming degree, worried about exiting shortly on the opposite street, did she spot briefcase beaters hurtling around a corner like zombies caught In a speed warp.
Temple scrambled to follow. In a few steps she had entered a granite-paved narrows between two opposite banks of the most gorgeous examples of Art Deco elevator-door metalwork that she had ever seen. Shangri-La-La land.
Naturally, she came to a dead stop to gawk.
Naturally, no one else would stop dead here even to view the dead, were anyone so unlucky as to be laid out before them. If Temple didn't get moving, she would be laid out beneath them.
Clutching cat and tote bag, she headed for a pair of elevator doors opening like the beaten-gold temple doors in a Cecil B. DeMille Bible epic. Just in front of them, she stopped dead again. Must be a death wish. People parted behind her like an angry Red Sea and flooded the elevator car.
Temple jumped back just in time to keep Louie from being ground to death in the closing jaws of classic Art Deco style.
Temple edged away from the next wave of people clogging up behind her. She stared at a set of tall, elegant numbers, these arranged in a semicircle, with an ornate golden hand lazily gliding past them: one to twenty-two.