"The Flamenco Academy" (15 page)

“
Yo también
,” he repeated, his mouth
so close to mine that I felt the words on my lips. Again, I was
certain he was going to kiss me, but he spun away abruptly.

“Come on. It’s my turn now to show you
something.” He led me down a street, away from the flashing neon
along Central Avenue. There were no lights on anywhere in the quiet
neighborhood. All the houses were dark. It was only then that I
realized how late it was. That the rest of the world was asleep. I
should have wondered about Didi then, if she was safe at home. But
I didn’t. My mind was completely filled with following this
stranger wherever he led.

“Look?” He stopped and tilted his face up.
The full moon, which had been dazzling silver, was darkening to a
color that reminded me of a blood orange.

“A lunar eclipse,” I whispered as the moon
vanished entirely and the street fell into total darkness. We had
met on the night of a lunar eclipse.

He grabbed my hand and tugged me along.
“Come on. The stars will really be amazing now.”

We emerged on Lomas Boulevard where
streetlights cast a dim glow onto the deserted road. When we passed
Our Lady of Fatima, he crossed himself and kissed his thumb. To me,
it was an act as exotic as if he’d knelt down before a cow in the
streets of Calcutta. He glanced up and down the empty street, then
set off west. “I think it’s up here.”

“What?”

“The secret park? You ever been there?”

I shook my head no.

“Good. I want to be the first to show it to
you.”

We turned, then turned again, and once more
the streets grew dark and silent. In the middle of a block, he led
me off the street entirely, off the sidewalk, and onto a path that
ran between the houses themselves. It was so well hidden I would
never have noticed it. The narrow passage slithered dangerously
close to the windows of houses on either side where sleepers
dreamed. I thought of the gun Mom used to keep in her nightstand in
case of “home invasion” and worried for one second about a nervous
homeowner shooting us. In the next second, I realized that this
night I was immune. I had walked through the gold curtains and
emerged into a world where I could prowl the night streets and
capture the attention of a man who might have descended from
conquistadors or angels.

As we stole along the narrow path, a cloud
of fragrance like a tropical rainstorm enveloped us. Any other
time, I would have identified it as the exhaust from a dryer
blowing out the smell of fabric softener, but on that night it was
a tropical rainstorm.

The path abruptly opened into exactly what
he had promised, a secret park. Hidden behind the houses of this
ordinary suburban block was gloriously open space where cottonwoods
soared into the night. We left the choke of houses behind and
walked into the middle of the park. Only three of the dark houses
that ringed the park still had lights on. Without the moon, we hid
in a night that was as dark as nights get and stared at the lives
illuminated in the lighted rooms more intently than museumgoers
studying dioramas. In one display an old man stood in his open
patio door, T-shirt tucked into white boxers, and smoked a
cigarette. In another a young mother in a shortie nightgown walked
a crying infant. A woman in her fifties sat in a living room
completely dark except for the flickering light from the television
she watched.

I was outside all those rooms. All the rooms
where ordinary life was happening.

He took my hand, sat us down at a concrete
picnic table, bent over his guitar, and played more of the music
that poured directly into the hole in my brain. An odd luminescence
played across his skin as he sang a song in Spanish that made all
the vowels sing their names. They sang the
a.
The
e.
The
i.
The
o.
The
u.
And sometimes they sang
the
y.
Daddy had been right, I would fall in love with the
first boy who gave me vowels.

“Hey, the giant’s swing.” He laid the guitar
on top of a picnic table and ran to the tallest, oldest cottonwood
in the park. Hanging from it on long, thick ropes was a swing. Not
a cheap metal swing suspended from clattering chains either, but a
big, old-fashioned swing someone had made from a plank of oak. It
was a giant’s swing.

He jumped onto the swing with an explosive,
balletic grace and, standing on the seat, rode it into the air. He
soared up, then swept back down, his dark hair rising around his
face like black wings. Up again, he rose high enough that he could
reach out, grab a handful of leaves, rip them loose, and toss them
into the air. I tilted my face up to receive the rain of greenery
that showered down. I caught a leaf. It was a perfect heart. I
tucked it under the waistband of my skirt.

“Come.” For a second, two, he opened his
arms to me and balanced on the swing with no hands, then grabbed
one rope with both hands and jumped off the seat, hanging by his
arms, smiling a pirate smile. He was Errol Flynn swinging on the
rigging across the deck of a ship he was about to plunder. His feet
touched the earth; he sat down and patted the empty swing next to
him. “Come on,
ruka tan caliente
, plenty of room.”

I ambled over, hiding my nervousness behind
a slow saunter.

When I was near enough, he clasped my hips
and dragged me toward him.

I could either fall face-first onto him or
step over the sides of the seat. I stepped over the sides of the
seat and sat down, straddling him. He leaned far back, stretching
the ropes in his hands as he went, tugging me toward him until my
chest rested against his, my face hovering above. A pocket of
warmth rose up carrying the scent of beer and sweat, shaving cream
and soap.

His arms were cables beside my head,
straining to hold us both. I felt their intricate machinery work,
pulleys lifting his head until his lips pressed against mine. His
breath had the dense, smoky scent of marijuana, illicit and sweet.
His tongue was delicate, a calligrapher’s brush on my lips writing
words there I had never spoken, thoughts I’d never thought that
became in that instant the only words I ever again wanted to speak,
the only thoughts I ever again wanted to think.

Any lingering suspicions that I might be a
lesbian vanished entirely.

I leaned forward, avid for his taste. The
instant I pursued, the muscles of his arms bunched as he strained
hard, pulling back against the ropes. His legs surged beneath me
and we were launched, soaring together toward the black velvet sky.
My hair streamed over my shoulders, onto his face, as the wind
rushed through it. The stars, brighter in the eclipse-darkened sky
than they had ever been, spattered dopplered light across his face
as we flew heavenward.

At the top of the swing’s arc, we paused,
then dropped back to earth. The direction of the pendulum reversed
and it was my turn to look into the sky as we sailed up into the
night. As I streaked upward, his body pressed down on mine. Above
the lofted twirl of his hair, the bright stars blurred. My eye was
drawn to the North Star, the one my father had shown me so that I
could always find my way home. But like all the other stars, it had
become a silver smear across the night sky rather than a fixed
point.

He hauled back on the ropes, pumping his
legs beneath us so that the swing rose as high above the earth as
the long ropes would allow.

We swung back the other way. High at the top
of the next arc, he let go and wrapped his arms around me. “Take
the wheel, Lucille.”

“No!” I shrieked, struggling to hang on as
the swing wobbled beneath us. He laughed, heedless and wild. I
barely managed to keep my hands clamped on the ropes as we
plummeted down. Willfully oblivious to the danger that I would lose
my grip while we were thirty feet in the air, he kissed my neck,
drew me close. His lips, his tongue whispered a warmth into my ear
that made me forget to breathe.

“Don’t let go.”

As the swing rocked his weight onto me, he
grew hard, a surging that, though I had never felt it before, still
seemed both familiar yet thrilling beyond anything I had ever
dreamed.

Gradually, the swing lost altitude, ticking
through a shorter and shorter arc until we sat swaying slightly,
me, drained, gulping for breath, still clinging to the ropes to
hold us upright, him, kissing my neck, sliding the strap of the
camisole off my shoulder, covering my breast with his mouth. My
arms drooped from the ropes and he held me tighter. His hand was
under my skirt. Pushing my panties aside, he felt how wet I was and
fumbled with his fly. He pushed into me, then stopped.

“You’re a virgin?”

“I’m sorry.”

“
You’re
sorry? How can you be a
virgin?”

“I don’t want to be. It doesn’t matter.”

“Yeah, it does.” He reached down and
buttoned his fly. “Being a virgin is a big thing. A very big
thing.”

“Not to me.”

He unhooked my legs from around his waist
and stood us both up. “Well, to me it is.”

“But I thought it was, like, some big male
deal to, you know, deflower a virgin.”

“You did, huh? Where are you getting your
information? That friend of yours? The one in the parking lot?”

“Where are you going?”

“Taking you home.”

I followed him out of the park. The perfumed
air no longer smelled like a tropical rainstorm; it smelled like
fabric softener from a dryer.

We walked in silence back to Lomas, then up
the street to Carlisle where he stopped and looked around. “Which
way you live?”

I pointed in a vague direction. “Off that
way. But don’t worry, you don’t have to walk me home.”

He didn’t argue. “Okay, well, see you
around.”

With that, he strode off down Carlisle,
toward the interstate. Car lights approached from a distance. He
turned so that he was facing the lights, facing me, stuck his thumb
out, and kept walking backward. The approaching car pulled over. It
was a beat-up Toyota truck with a camper shell on the back covered
with stickers from scenic wonders around the country. The driver
yelled, “Where you headed, man?”

I ran closer so I could hear his answer. But
all he said was, “Wherever you’re going. I’m headed wherever you
are.”

“Throw your stuff in the back.”

He opened the little door at the back of the
camper and stowed his guitar there. When he pivoted around and
found me standing on the sidewalk blocking his way, he seemed
surprised. Neither one of us could think of anything to say.
Actually, I wanted to say a thousand different things and every one
of them was wrong. Mostly I wanted the night to start all over, to
sit at his feet and listen to him play the guitar forever.

“Will I—” I started to ask the most wrong of
all the wrong things: if I would see him again. He was already
shaking his head no, telling me not to say the words.

He backed into the truck and slammed the
door. Before he left, though, he rolled down the window and peered
up at me. “You’re trying to play out of your league,
chica
.
It’s going to get you in trouble.” His voice softened and was kind
as he added, “Just be who you are.”

He turned away and the camper drove off. I
watched until the taillights were specks of red that flashed when
they turned onto the interstate, then disappeared.

Far overhead, the hidden moon slipped back
into view, but the sun was already rising. Night was over.

“Where the hell have you been?” Didi woke up
when I was halfway through the window we’d “retrofitted” so we
could come and go without encountering Catwoman. She blinked as if
I were part of a dream she was having. “I thought you got arrested.
What happened? Where did you go? Did you leave before the cops
came? What time is it?” She grabbed the alarm clock on the floor
beside her bed. “Shit, girl, it’s five thirty in the a. of m. I’ve
got to pee.” Didi jumped out of bed and ran into the bathroom.

I plopped down on my bed. Everything in the
Lair looked different. I’d wandered around for hours after he left,
then tried not to wake Didi up when I finally got home. I was
worried that one look at my face would tell her that I’d seen her
and the cop last night. More than that, though, I wanted to keep
last night, keep him, to myself. I wanted hours alone to remember
every note he’d played and every word he’d spoken.

“Okay, details, details, details.” Didi came
back out, patting her washed face dry with a towel. A stretchy
orange band held her hair off her wet face. She plopped down on her
bed, grabbed a Pop Tart from the package sitting on the nightstand,
and settled in as if she were taking a seat in a movie theater. The
Pop Tart’s white frosting was speckled with colored sprinkles like
a kid’s birthday cupcake. Didi liked sprinkles as they fit in with
her philosophy of Eating Obstacles. A fanatical dieter, always just
a lettuce leaf or two away from anorexia, Didi made herself eat
things in segments as small as were feasible so that consumption of
the edible item took as long as possible. She could make a taco
last an hour, eating every shred of cheese, every nubbin of tomato
individually. Sprinkles, of course, offered fantastic
food-stretching opportunities.

Sitting cross-legged on her bed, plucking
first the blue, then the red sprinkles off her Pop Tart, her hair
skinned back, no makeup, Didi looked about eight years old. I
thought she would seem different after what had happened last
night, what I’d seen. But she looked exactly the same as always,
exactly the way she had looked after dozens of other nights. The
only thing different about last night was that no one famous was
involved and I’d seen what usually only happened after I left. It
didn’t matter. Nothing mattered anymore except him.