When I hobbled sans crutches down the stairs to Desert Investigations the next morning, I discovered Jimmy already at his computer. Was it my imagination, or was he looking older these days? Maybe he missed my delightful presence at the trailer. Not.
“Hey, look at you,” he said, smiling. “On your own again.”
“Call me Speedo.” I limped over to my desk and sat down a little too quickly. Now my ass hurt, too.
My sour mood must have communicated itself to him, because he said nothing more, just went back to work on his computer. While he did his finger dance, I looked through the big plate glass window onto Main Street. Deserted. At nine o’clock it was too early for tourists, but they’d be along as soon as the art galleries opened. Especially since the weather was mild. The sky had clouded over again, but perhaps the sun would soon emerge. We Arizonans were so spoiled. We averaged, what, three hundred and twenty-five days of sunshine a year, yet we belly-ached all the way through those other forty.
The telephone calls hardly lightened my gloom. People wanted this, they wanted that. Husbands wanted to find out if their wives were cheating, wives wanted to find out ditto about their husbands. When I explained that Desert Investigations did not take marital cases, they cursed me.
People don’t like each other any more, do they?
Toward the end of the day, when the phone rang again, I prepared myself to repeat the usual speech, but the voice on the other end of the phone had me smiling instead. Dusty.
“Hey, I got back from the trail ride last night, so let’s get together.”
My first instinct was to tell him I was busy, but he would know better. Besides, after my treatment of Jimmy, I needed all the friends I could get.
“A movie?” I suggested.
“Sounds good to me. What’s playing?”
Leaning over, I plucked the Scottsdale Journal out of the trash can and found the Arts &Entertainment section. Scanning through the movie listings, I found a Meg Ryan romance, the latest Quentin Tarantino gore-fest, another Eddie Murphy comedy.…
And Cold Sky, written and directed by Sappho, a.k.a. Victoria Alden-Taylor.
“I’m in the mood for a Western,” I told Dusty. “How about you?”
At the sound of his laugh, I realized my mistake. The man had spent several days out on the trail with a passel of dudes, trying to recreate an Old West that had never existed in the first place. “Oops,” I said. “Well, there’s a horror flick at the mall, one of those guy-in-a-ski-mask-type things.”
The laughter died down. “Lena, you know I hate malls. The Western sounds fine. Who knows, maybe it’ll even be accurate.”
***
“So what did you think of the movie?” I asked, as we left the Camelview, Scottsdale’s only remaining venue for art films. Not wanting to deal with my crutches in a crowded theater, I had left them back in the apartment, so now I limped badly. No problem, though. Dusty had his arm around me.
“Well, I’m not sure you can call it a Western.” He chuckled as he hoisted me into the front seat of his pickup truck. “Even though it had cowboys, Indians, and horses.”
“And lesbians.”
“I really liked that part.”
I gave him a look. “I’ll bet you did, cowboy.”
Another chuckle. “You’ve got to admit, babe, it was a pretty good flick.”
For all my carping, I thought so, too. And the movie had delivered a surprise. Regardless of its artsy-fartsy trappings, the movie had a strong love story. The fact that the love element had been between two women—a school teacher and a saloon gal—was immaterial. Sappho’s film revealed her warm heart.
The question was, where did she get it?
***
I had my own heart troubles. Or lack thereof. That night, as we lay together in my bed, I found that I could not respond to Dusty’s caresses. After almost an hour trying to light my fire, he finally gave up and rolled over on his back.
“I’m sorry,” I said, trying to keep my voice from shaking. “You can, well, you know. Anyway, I don’t have to respond for you to enjoy yourself. I hear married people do it like that all the time.”
He leaned over and stroked my hair. “But we’re not married, are we?”
It was a measure of my distress that I had even pronounced the M-word, and now I regretted it. “You sure you don’t want to, um…?”
“No, Lena, I don’t want to um. I want to lie here beside you.” His arms tightened around me.
I sniffled, then tried to hide it with a sneeze. “I think I’m getting a cold.”
“You’re such a terrible liar. That’s one of the things I love about you.” He buried his nose in my neck, then followed it up with kisses designed more for comfort than arousal.
Blinking my tears away, I said, “I’m such a mess.”
“Yes, honey, you are. But so am I. So are half the people in this world. They simply put on a better front than we do.”
I started to argue about that, then stopped. Maybe it was true. Maybe I was no more troubled than anyone else. I had almost convinced myself of that when I finally fell into a dreamless sleep.