Adventures of a Salsa Goddess (23 page)

“You’re not going to pull this off
, are you?” she said in a hyper calm tone that instantly turned my bowels to jelly. “I want results, Samantha, and I want them yesterday or don’t bother coming back to clean out your desk.”

Click!

I’d completely forgotten about Joe the M&M engineer until Elaine had asked about him. That made three men who’d told me they were going to call and hadn’t.

It seemed about the only absolute positive in my life was salsa. While dancing, my worries, my fears, and all of my thoughts—except
trying to follow the man I was dancing with and doing the proper footwork—just fell away. Salsa was keeping me sane, but was so much more than that. Nothing I’d ever experienced before had made me feel so shockingly alive and utterly joyful.

Javier and Robert hadn’t called, and I could be on the verge of losing my job. I needed a heavy dose of the best antidepressant on the market. I jumped up and got ready to go out. An hour later I walked into Club Cubana.

I didn’t see Javier when I walked in, but didn’t have time to look for him since an older man in his late fifties immediately took my hand and led me to the dance floor. Although the tempo of the salsa song was fast, we were moving much slower than the other couples on the dance floor. His style was fluid arid so smooth it felt more like ice-skating than dancing. Although I preferred a faster pace, I was thrilled that I’d been able to follow his lead.

After we’d finished dancing, I saw Javier coming toward me. My heart leapt at the sight of him.

“Sam, I’m sorry I didn’t call you,” he said, taking hold of my hands. “I want to talk to you. Let’s go out to the balcony.”

The air was chilled and the balcony was empty. We leaned against the railing, facing each other. It felt so good to be with him.

“I’m so happy you’re here tonight,” Javier said. “I was worried you might have regretted what happened when we were together the other day.”

“Javier, I
...”

“I know I’m not the kind of guy you usually date, Sam,” he continued. “But to tell you the truth, you’re not the kind of woman I’ve ever been with before. But when I’m with you everything seems right. I feel like we were ...”

“Javier ...”

“Sam, please let me finish.” Javier moved closer and clasped my hand to his chest. “Well, I guess I’ll just say it. I love you, Sam.”

“You do?”

“Yes, I do,” he said, and then he broke out into a huge grin, flashing his dimple.

As Javier brought my hand up to his lips, I sensed someone watching us, and turning, saw Sebastian Diaz staring at us. But I felt an unmistakable, intense gaze coming from the person behind him, whom I couldn’t quite see because Sebastian’s massive body partially blocked him. Then he stepped out of the shadows.

I felt faint, although I’ve never fainted before so I’m just guessing this was how it felt, like someone had drilled a hole in my head and filled it with formaldehyde. In slow motion my brain processed what my eyes were claiming they saw. But it didn’t seem possible. I’d
never told Robert about Cubana, and what were the chances that the very man I’d been thinking about for five days would magically appear? Had he followed me here?

My heart dropped to my stomach, did several back flips, and
then ended up in two different places, half of it on the northern side of the balcony with Javier, the other half on the southern side with Robert. I had never before felt so torn between two men. There was every logical reason in the world for me to join Robert. He was everything Elaine and my mother had in mind for me. But...

“Let’s dance, Sam. We haven’t danced all night,” Javier said, grabbing my hand and leading me out to the dance floor. When I looked back over my shoulder, Robert hadn’t moved.

I heard the music playing, and oh shit! It was the dance that dare not speak its name—bachata.

Javier pulled me close, much closer than he’d ever danced with me before in public. Maybe he was caught up in the emotions of what he’d just told me and didn’t care that he’d temporarily abandoned his usual professionalism. He moved his hands up to my head, cradling it as if he were holding an expensive piece of crystal. Then he bent me back in a dip that induced temporary amnesia.

I felt my leg slipping between Javier’s as he squeezed it tight between his thighs. Of course I was upset about Robert, but weirdly, all I could think about as our cheeks pressed together was how good it felt to be with Javier. And normally he didn’t wear cologne, but tonight he was wearing a scent that was musky and animal sexy.

At the exact moment the middle of my naked right thigh was pressed up against Javier’s nether regions and we moved up and down in rhythm to the music, I glimpsed Robert and Sebastian skirting along the edge of the dance floor. At least a half dozen dancing couples blocked a solid view of them. I caught them only in pieces—a shoulder, a strong chin, a set of distressed eyes. But then the sea parted long enough for me to catch a full view
of Robert, who stared at me, looking more shocked than anything else. Then the two of them disappeared down the stairs.

Easing my way back into a semi-lucid state, I told Javier I had to run to the bathroom. I darted downstairs to catch Robert. I had to explain. But he was gone.

I walked back inside Cubana, standing at the door for a moment wondering what I should do.

“Looking for someone?” asked a voice suddenly at my side, and I saw Sebastian towering over me.

“Yes, a friend of mine,” I said.

“Who? Maybe I can help.”

“Robert, Robert Mack.”

“Who?” Sebastian asked again, in a silky-smooth voice.

“The man you were talking to on the balcony. The one you just walked downstairs with,” I said. Why did I always feel, while talking to Sebastian, like a trout that was trying valiantly to paddle upstream to spawn, but kept swimming into the rocks?

“Oh, he’s just somebody I bumped into at the bar. Actually, he asked me a few questions about you and Javier, and seemed to get quite edgy. Is he a close friend of yours?”

“How would that be any of your business?” I said a little too sharply.

“I didn’t mean to pry,” he said, and then, with an almost imperceptible nod, like an obsequious butler, he walked away, leaving me feeling guilty for being rude to him, which was all the more infuriating since I had never liked the man to begin with.

I walked back upstairs. Javier was dancing, but stopped in mid-dance, something he’d never done before, and came directly over to me. He pulled me back out to the balcony, which was once again empty.

“Sam, is everything okay?” He slipped his arms around my waist.

“Well, I need to tell you something, Javier, something I should’ve told you before the other day happened,” I said. What I had to say was hard enough, but was made all the more difficult by our close physical proximity. I didn’t want to do this but I had no choice.

“Javier, I’ve been dating quite a bit this summer and there is
... there’s a man that I started seeing before you, and I got involved and I need, I mean I want to see where things go with him.”

Javier stepped back from me. He looked upset and surprised. I felt terrible. I shouldn’t have let things go so far with him. The last thing I wanted to do was to hurt him.

He just stood there. I wished he would say something, anything.

“I need to get back to work,” he said finally, and then walked back inside.

I knew that this was the right thing to do. I liked Robert and wanted to see where things could go with him. So why did I feel like I’d just made one of the biggest mistakes of my life?

Cheer Up, Listen to the Blues

—If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all,
hard luck and trouble is my only friend
—Booker T. Jones and William Bell

“Okay, we’ve got The Cowboy Junkies, The Smiths,
The Way We Were
,
Love Story
and
The Yearling
,” I said, fanning out the videotapes and CDs toward Lessie. “Choose your weapon.”

“
The Yearling
?”

“It always makes me cry when the fawn
... you know, at the end when Gregory Peck ...” Lessie’s blue eyes, rimmed by puffy red lids, grew big and watery. “Have you ever seen it?”

“No,” said Lessie.

“I don’t want to give the plot away. Trust me, it will make you bawl.”

“Just what I need, more crying,” Lessie mumbled. “Do you have any blues?”

Some people like to listen to the blues when they’re depressed, but I prefer The Smiths, music to blow your brains out by. This may sound odd, but for me, the blues is a surefire cure for depression. Let country music have their dead dogs and broken down pickup trucks, but I’d take the blues any day. Until I’d discovered salsa, I loved the blues more than anything, the way a bee loves honey, thoroughly and completely. But I could still appreciate and enjoy its anguish, its brazen indifference to political correctness, and its blatant sexism. When B.B. King sings about his woman who can’t see the doctor when he’s away and should “just suffer” until he gets home, I always feel better realizing that, hey, I don’t have it so bad after all.

“The blues,” I said, patting her on the arm, “an excellent choice. Maybe it will even cheer you up?”

Lessie looked at me for a long moment. “You know something, Sam, you’re really weird sometimes.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” I quipped, putting on a B.B. King CD while Lessie raided my freezer and cupboards.

We settled ourselves on the couch with a smorgasbord of misery foods on the coffee table in front of us. She picked up the Chubby Hubby and I chose the Cherry Garcia. After a while, Lessie grabbed the bowl of sour cream and onion potato chips and I reached for the cashews. Then we switched, and switched again, crunching and slurping in the silent company of our own thoughts.

When I was younger, I’d assumed that by the time I got to the age I was at now, I’d know what I wanted and would always make the wise choice. In fact, things had only gotten worse. I felt most of the time like a lumberjack backpedaling on a log, trying desperately to stay afloat to avoid the murky water of error below. But somehow, I was constantly losing my balance, falling in, and like a half-drowned cat, getting back on the log, only to fall off again, just after my clothes had dried.

I couldn’t stop picturing Robert with that shocked, sad look on his face when he saw me with Javier on the balcony and then the two of us dancing together. Assuming Robert would ever speak to me again, maybe things could work out with him? That, of course, would be the perfect scenario. And then would we live happily ever after? Could Robert make me happy?

But I couldn’t stop thinking about Javier either. I’d never let myself picture or consider the possibility of having a serious relationship with him. I just couldn’t let myself go there, as much as I wanted to. I’d purposely prevented myself from caring too much about Javier and had conveniently convinced myself that my feelings for him were just a silly crush, which I realized wasn’t the truth.

But my problems were nothing compared to Lessie’s. I was very worried about her. When she had come over this afternoon and taken off her sunglasses to reveal eyes so bloodshot and swollen that I barely recognized her, I’d assumed the worst. So when I finally got up the nerve to ask, I wasn’t expecting her response.

“I haven’t told him yet,” she said, and then sobbed loudly, adding to the ocean of tears she’d already cried over the past few days.

It seemed a shame that Lessie had wasted such an awful surfeit of valuable energy on crying, energy that could’ve been put to better use say, single-handedly building a bridge from Los Angeles to Honolulu.

That women are able to cry at absolutely nothing and everything was certainly nothing new. We’ve been doing it from the dawn of time, ever since our cavemen husbands grunted that they’d rather go on a dangerous saber-tooth tiger hunting mission with the guys than snuggle with their women under the antelope skins next to the fire. Even worse, human beings (all right,
men) have not evolved a wit in the tens of thousands of years that have elapsed since that so-called primitive point in our history.

A few months, ago Elizabeth and I had been at our usual Friday night hangout in Manhattan when we’d overheard a group of fifty-ish businessmen at the bar swilling their scotches and bourbons and talking about how they’d rather play golf than make love with their wives. I sometimes wonder, why do I even bother?

I glanced at Lessie as she drizzled a teaspoonful of Cherry Garcia ice cream onto a sour cream and onion potato chip and popped it into her mouth.

Then again, perhaps her pregnancy hormones were wreaking more havoc than usual on her emotional equilibrium. When my sister, Susan, was pregnant last year, she’d told me she’d cried more in those
nine months than she had in the previous thirty-five years of her life—and she has a happy marriage and a great job as an architect designing new art museums. One day, seven months into her pregnancy, Susan had burst into tears at the sight of an empty ketchup bottle that her husband had returned to the refrigerator. It was at that moment that she claimed to finally understand what existentialism was all about—the utter absurdity of life, the cry in the wilderness that was never heard. I don’t know why she didn’t just throw out the empty bottle and buy another.

“Lessie, are you sure you want to have this baby?”

“I’m forty-two. This might be my last chance to be a mother.”

It was a reason, but not necessarily a good one. Single motherhood was nothing to enter into lightly, although for most single mothers, I suppose, that was exactly how it happened. You’re having carefree, fun sex with your boyfriend, and then one day the condom breaks or you forget to take a pill. Then the
guy who was so cute, so attentive, and so wonderful suddenly vaporized and you were on your own.

“Lessie, this might be a bit personal, but how did you, I m
ean were you guys using ...?”

“Not the first time,” she said, and then gave me a shame
faced sideways glance like a dog that’s just been caught nipping a sirloin steak off the counter. “I know, I know, I’m worse than a teenager,” she went on in a rush. “It was really stupid. But who would’ve thought a forty-two-year-old woman could get pregnant for the first time in her life, the first and only time in her life she didn’t use birth control?”

I knew what she meant. After being technically able to have a child since I’d turned thirteen, but never having been pregnant, birth control and sex seemed completely unrelated. At this stage in my life, using contraception had become an unnecessary hassle, like having to fiddle with the burglar alarm code every time you left your house, but never getting burglarized. Of course, the day you didn’t bother was the day it happened.

“When was the last time you ate?” I asked Lessie, noting that she had devoured a full pint of ice cream and nearly all of the chips. But I was really thinking, What the hell was she waiting for? Why didn’t she just tell Eliseo and get it over with?

“Yesterday. I’ve been reall
y nauseous, but today I’m starving,” she said. The food and the music seemed to be doing her some good. She had color coming back to her cheeks.

“Have you talked to Eliseo at all?” I asked, brushing close to the subject, but not quite hitting it full on.

“I’ve talked to him, but I haven’t seen him,” she said. “I told him I have the flu. Not too far from the truth. I’ve lost three pounds.”

“Do you want
to order a pizza?” I asked her, changing the subject temporarily because now I was really concerned. I’ve never been pregnant, but I understand that traditionally, pregnant women gained, rather than lost weight, and Lessie didn’t have much to lose to begin with.

I called a place called Pizza Man that Lessie said was the best in town and that guaranteed delivery in twenty minutes, and ordered a large cream cheese, Canadian bacon, and pineapple.

Sitting back down next to the human vacuum cleaner, I asked her a few necessary questions.

“Are you sleeping?”

“A little. Enough,” she said, nibbling a handful of cashews like a squirrel.

“Exercising?”

“Well, I’ve cut back on my usual workout, but I’m still doing Pilates.”

“Have you set up an appointment with your OB-GYN?”

“Yes, for next week. And I appreciate your concern, I really do, Sam. I might be a little emotional right now, but really I’m fine.”

Fine! Fine? When the hell was she going to tell Eliseo?

“I’m going to tell Eliseo tomorrow night. I just wanted to be sure that I was ready to have this baby no matter what, in case he ... Well, I’m finally ready for any reaction from him.”

I breathed a sigh of relief.

* * *

“Sam, Sam.” I felt someone shaking my arm. “Wake up, Sam.”

I woke up and looked at my watch. It was midnight. We’d, put on
Love Story
after finishing the pizza, and apparently I’d fallen into a food coma. It was just before the end of the movie, during the hospital scene where Ali MacGraw was moments away from dying, but managed to look breathtakingly beautiful, and healthy as Hercules on steroids.

“I’m ready to tell Eliseo now,” said Lessie.

“Now? Well, okay, I’m sure everything will be fine. Good luck.” “No, I need you to come with me,” she said.

“Isn’t it a little late or early or something?”

“I don’t want to wait until tomorrow night, I want to tell him now. And I want you to stay in the car in case he throws me out.” “That’s not going to happen, Lessie,” I told her. “But of course I’ll go with you.”

I got up, brushed my teeth, and threw on a sweater. As soon as we got downstairs to the underground parking garage, the cool summer night air woke me up.

“How are you going to tell him?” I asked her, as I turned onto the freeway.

“Well, I won’t be using the ‘Hi, honey, guess what, I’ve got great news’ approach. I really don’t know what I’m going to say.” Fifteen minutes later we pulled up across the street from Javier’s duplex. The downstairs dance studio was dark.

“Okay, give me twenty minutes,” she said. “If I don’t come out by then you can leave.”

I grabbed her hand. “Lessie, it’s going to be okay,” I said, hoping that I was right.

She leaned into the window and smiled. “Thanks, Sam.”

For ten minutes I listened to the radio. Then I reached over to the glove compartment and pulled out a salsa CD. I looked at the digital clock on the dash. Javier was going to be home any minute from Cubana. My heart started pounding at the thought of seeing him. As much as I tried to push him out of my life, it wasn’t working.

Just then I saw Javier pull up in his pickup truck, followed by someone in a small red car that parked directly behind his. My pulse quickened. I wanted to catch him before he went inside. Who knew what was going on upstairs with Lessie and Eliseo?

I’d just put my hand on the door handle and was about to get out of my car when I saw Javier’s ex, Isabella. She looked even more flawless and beautiful than the last time I’d seen her. Her dark chestnut hair shone under the streetlights and flounced perfectly about her shoulders. She looked like a Breck
shampoo girl running to catch the subway. When she reached his side, Javier put his arm around her shoulder, and as the door closed behind them, my favorite song on the salsa CD ended on an upbeat note as a sharp pain stabbed through my heart.