Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins

at home somewhere down there. Where exactly did he live, she wondered; which lights shone in his windows? What was he doing at this moment? Sleeping? (Sleep was bright on her mind.) Drinking—the way the Indians drank in LaConner, Taos, Pine Ridge, etc.? Performing a clandestine ghost dance or chanting to his private totem as prescribed in the dreamer religion? Watching “Custer” on TV? Painting watercolors? Until the dawn, she paced and pondered.
    The day that followed had been a blur of boredom and misery; she was more asleep than awake. She found a loaf of Wonder Bread and wadded the soft individual slices into balls, as she had done when a kid, eating the bread balls on the balcony while watching traffic. Mostly, she sat around. (Were it not such an obvious understatement, we might say that she twiddled her thumbs.) When, however, at 7:45 P.M ., Julian Gitche called to announce that he was downstairs, her central nervous system treated itself to a double adrenalin on the rocks. She flashed into consciousness, inspected herself—wrinkle-free!—in the mirror, took a pee and headed for the elevator. She had arranged to meet him in the lobby. Somehow it had seemed inappropriate to her to receive Mr. Gitche in the Countess's penthouse, with its frilly, sloppy and decidedly un-Indian décor.
    Now Sissy was waiting for an elevator. She waited with a fatigue-induced approximation of that combination of stoicism and anxiety with which people wait for the Big Event that will transform their lives, invariably missing it when it does occur since both stoicism and anxiety are blinders.
    At last, as she was on the brink of weeping, she heard a ping and saw a wink of green. A door slid open with a mechanical slur, to reveal a uniformed elevator operator looking sheepish and not altogether unafraid. Having suffered the Countess's ire on previous occasions, he was on the alert for a walking stick that might be mistaking his skull for a grand promenade. Relieved at seeing Sissy alone, he expressed her to the lobby at maximum speed.
    The carpet felt like meadow to her hallucinating feet. The bronze fountain sounded like a mountain creek. Her redman glided from behind a tree (so what if it was a potted palm?). He was wearing a plaid dinner jacket and a yellow cummerbund. Of medium height, his shoulders were narrow, his face babified and puddingish. Approaching her, he smiled shyly. He reached to shake her hand—and fell immediately to his knees with an asthma attack.
    COWGIRL INTERLUDE (LOVE STORY)
    Some of the younger ranch hands—Donna, Kym and Heather; Debbie, too—have wondered aloud why Even Cowgirls Get the Blues couldn't be a simple love story.
    Unfortunately, little darlings, there is no such thing as a simple love story. The most transitory puppy crush is complex to the extent of lying beyond the far reaches of the brain's understanding. (The brain has a dangerous habit of messing around with stuff it cannot or will not comprehend.)
    Your author has found love to be the full trip, emotionally speaking; the grand tour: fall in love, visit both Heaven and Hell for the price of one. And that doesn't begin to cover it. If realism can be defined only as one of the fifty-seven varieties of decoration, then how can we hope for a realistic assessment of love?
    No, the author has no new light to beam on the subject. After all, though people have been composing love songs for at least a thousand years, it wasn't until the late 1960s that any romantic ballad expressed a new idea. In his song “Triad” ( "Why can't we go on as three?" ), David Crosby offered the ménage à trois as a possible happy remedy for the triangularization that seems to be to love what hoof-and-mouth disease is to cattle (to employ an analogy that any cowgirl can understand). Bold David (Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane recorded his song) sought to transport love beyond its dualistic limits; to accept the three-sided configuration as an inevitability,