I wrote this little ditty, changing the location a bit, in the basement library room of the Fair View Lodge in Mesa Verde National Park while waiting for my turn on the hotel's computer that had an Internet connection. I tapped out the story while watching a mouse scurry from under one bookcase to the next. I'd just returned from dinner in the inn's Metate restaurant, where I saw a chattering matron getting less attention from her boy toy than he was giving a flamboyantly obvious waiter. Hope you enjoy the bit of fluff.
*
It had been a grueling six-hour drive from their last stop on Sheila Worthington's nostalgic sweep around the region in which she had grown up before leaving for New York, a chorus line, and then a succession of well-heeled husbands, all of whom heeled over themselves during the past parade of decades.
As Dominic maneuvered the Jaguar around the last hairpin turn and turned into the long upward-incline drive up to the resort hotel that wound around the peak of the mountain overlooking a large lake and several lakeshore communities, Sheila sighed and said, "Let's go ahead and eat at the hotel restaurant right after checking in. When I get to the room, I want to sleep the sleep of the dead."
"Sounds good to me," Dominic said, forming a charming smile on his pouting-lipped chiseled face and tossing a black curl out of his eye. And indeed it did sound good to him. He'd felt like he'd been on a tight leash for several days of the trip now. Sheila was OK, and she paid him well to drive her on this tripâand for other driving servicesâbut, boy could the old babe talk. She'd yakked incoherently for the last two hundred miles about people he barely knewâand felt little loss at not knowing wellâat the tennis club where she'd picked him up, dazzled him with an overstuffed pocketbook, bedded him, and planted him in her pool house.
When they approached the hostess desk at the restaurant, the host gave them a well-trained gaze and assessed them as money and boy toy hunk. He could see that the woman was nearly spent. She was tall and thin and had been quite a looker twenty years earlier, but now her high-fashion clothes looked a bit rumpled, her heavily applied makeup was beginning to droop, and not every starched hair on her head was behaving. And the hunk, a steamy Latin who looked every bit the nicely muscled tennis pro he really was, looked tight as a stretched rubber band and ready to spring in some direction or other in frustration. He'd also given the host an up-and-down look of speculation that the host had long ago identified as possible sexual interest.
Dominic's eyes met those of the host, while Sheila rattled off somewhat cattyâbut quite accurateâcomments on the over-the-top Western style dĂŠcor of the restaurant perched high over the lake below, the vistas provided being the establishment's best featureâand the host gave Dominic a knowing look that permitted Dominic the slight escape valve of being able to roll his eyes in a "women, what can you do with them?" fashion.
With a thought not only to the preferences of his fellow workers but also, he thought, to the preferences and needs of this Latin stud standing before him, the host picked up two menus and a wine list and said, "Come with me, please, I have just the table for you."
It was a very nice table by the window overlooking the vistaâwhich Dominic latched his attention on while Sheila talked about the impossibly spoiled frou-frou dog her friend, Maurine, had just acquired. "You'd think that anyone with white rugs and white furnitureâall white dĂŠcorâwould think twice about getting a high-strung Pomeranian that . . ." Dominic didn't so much see the mountainside tumbling charmingly below him to the edge of the lake as that, looking out of the window, he didn't see Sheila with her mouth flapping as she devoured a hunk of pita bread like a cougar having its last meal. And this, of course, was why he was gazing so intently out of the window.
"Wine, beer, or me?"
"Excuse me?" Dominic said, as he turned. There was his waiter standing beside his chair, talking down just to him and smiling. Sheila was lost in her rambling of all of the cleaning supplies Maurine had tried thus far without success.
For the first time Dominic noticed their waiter, who he now remembered as the young man who showed up after the host had said, "Sandy will be your waiter. He'll take good care of you," and then had smiled and wafted off.
Sandy. Yes, Dominic could see where the lad had gotten that name. He was a redhead, although it took Dominic a minute for the "he" to register. The voice had been male, if a bit squeaky, but looking closely at his waiter now, Dominic could see that the rest of it was some sort of question mark. He was small of body and wore black tailored trousers and a tuxedo shirt with a ruffle. And he was standing there, hands on hips and slightly bent at the side that Dominic thought of as a "Bette Davis" stance. All he needed was a long cigarette holder in one hand and he'd slip all the way over into the Tallulah Bankhead pose. His face was made up. It was subtle, but he unmistakably was wearing red lipstick. His hair wasn't long on top, but it was slicked back in an obviously carefully considered "do," and there where long curls over his ears at each side. He was looking at Dominic with an "I just could eat you up" expression in his eyes.
Dominic looked over to Sheila, but she had moved on to rambling about the mistake her friend Dorothy had made in the choice of a tennis outfit or her latest husband. Dominic couldn't gather which it was, and his noncommittal mutterings of ascent seemed to satisfy her and keep her motor running.
Throughout the service, Dominic could tell that the waiter, Sandy, could hardly keep his hands off him and, indeed, he did brush by awfully closely from time to time.