Adventures of a Salsa Goddess (4 page)

“Wow, this is just like those reality TV shows, only I guess it’s reality magazine?”

It was real enough I suppose, although nothing before in my life had ever had such a bizarre, surreal quality to it. It was difficult to grasp the concept that it was now my “job” to find a husband, something I’d thought I wanted since I was a teenager, except that now I was no longer sure.

“You’ve picked a hell of a city to try and find a husband,” Lessie continued, shaking her head. “I know that’s why you were sent here, but...”

“Is it that bad?” I asked her.

“The first words that spr
ing to mind when I think of Milwaukee’s dating scene are
black, soulless wasteland of loneliness and despair
,” she said in a voice, serious soft, like a mother explaining that the hamster isn’t sleeping, it’s dead.

My face must’ve collapsed at that point, since she immediately broke out into a huge grin. One of the things I’d always loved about Lessie was her wicked sense of humor, which was so disarming and unexpected coming from someone who’d grown up on a dairy farm in the middle of Minnesota. At least she used to look wholesome. Her sense of humor fit her new looks perfectly.

“The problem is that we have an epidemic of un-dating,” she said.

“Un-dating?”

“You know, men who don’t really ask you out. They suggest meeting them at a bar, maybe buy you one drink, and then expect you to jump into bed with them.”

“Yeah, we have that in New York too. I guess I was hoping the Midwest was a little more traditional,” I said.

“Or maybe they do ask you out, sort of, but then make the women do all the work,” she said.

Lessie recounted a story about meeting Kirk at a summer festival the year before. I exchanged my own un-dating experience, telling her about Brad, a wealthy entrepreneur whom I’d met weight lifting at my health club a couple years ago. Our first date had been great, but then he’d followed up with a lame e-mail wanting to know if we were going to have a second “meeting.” I made a mental note to write about un-dating in my journal later. I wanted to have ideas and columns ready for “La Vie” when I started in September.

“For the first two years after my divorce, I was looking for a real man who would treat me well. But over the past year, I’ve downsized my criteria. Now I’d be happy with a man whose picture isn’t hanging on the wall of the post office.”

“So the dating scene here is bad?”

“It’s not great, but I suppose it all depends on what you’re looking for,” she said. “Let me see if I have this straight. According to your boss, you’re supposed to find a college-educated, professional guy, attractive, but preferably movie-star handsome since it will make for a better cover shot, never married, or if divorced, no kids or skeletons in the closet, right?”

“Basically,” I said. She made it sound like I was in the market for a luxury sedan with all the standard equipment plus all the options.

“Good luck,” she said, as she played with her left hoop earring.

If gorgeous, smart, and sexy Lessie had been looking for three years without much luck, I’d be lucky to have one good date this summer.

“I’m going to be publicly humiliated. In September I’ll be revealed to the nation as the loser who couldn’t find a husband.”

“Your boss doesn’t seem to have a clue what it’s really like out here in the bowels of singlehood,” Lessie said.

She didn’t know Elaine Daniels. Of course Elaine didn’t have a clue, and if she did, she wouldn’t care.

“So what’s your plan of action?” Lessie asked.

“I thought I’d go through the white pages alphabetically,” I told her. “Hello, my name is Samantha. If there’s a single man in your household between the ages of eighteen and seventy-five, could I speak to him please?”

“Aren’t you limiting yourself a little with that age range?” asked Lessie.

“Okay, I’m supposed to do the video dating thing, Internet dating, personals ads, three-minute dating, singles volleyball, a singles’ cooking class, baseball games, stuff like that,” I said.

“Are you going to have time for any fun this summer?” she asked.

The waitress came by and Lessie ordered another glass of wine. A toddler in a high chair at a nearby table gurgled happily at his parents.

“Do you still want to have kids?” I asked her.

I knew that the kids issue had been the main reason Lessie had divorced Steve. After years of trying, Lessie hadn’t gotten pregnant so she’d gone through all of the tests, which she’d passed. Then, after begging Steve for years, he’d finally gotten tested. They’d found out he was sterile due to a case of mumps when he was fourteen. Lessie had wanted to use a sperm donor or adopt, but Steve wouldn’t even discuss it or go to marriage counseling.

“I’m not sure I want to have kids anymore. I think I’m getting too old,” Lessie said.

The waitress brought her glass of wine. We both passed on dessert.

“How about you, Sam, do you want kids?”

“Yes,” I said, “but I don’t see myself as a single mother. Every time I go to the gynecologist’s office, I get that look from my doctor like ‘what are you waiting for?’ I want to tell her, I’m waiting for the whole package and in the usual order, the husband and then the kids.”

I used to think a lot about the children I would have. David and I had had it all planned out—two kids and then maybe adopt one. But then, everything fell apart because of a chicken wing.

Just three months before our wedding, David and I were having dinner when I’d made the fateful mistake of wondering out loud how many eggs I had left. I was only thirty-eight at the time, practically up to my eyeballs in eggs, but I thought I was getting too old to have a child. When I told David I wanted to get pregnant right after we got married, he inhaled a chicken wing and started choking. He grabbed his throat and turned beet red. I watched in horror while the waiter saved him with the Heimlich maneuver.

Having a chicken wing temporarily lodged in his throat turned out to be a life-transforming experience for David. First, he started talking about giving up his partnership and quitting Ernst & Young to travel to India and stay for a while at Swami something-or-other’s ashram in the Himalayas. If you knew David, you would understand that a declaration like that would be a little like Hugh Hefner announcing that he was giving up women, sex, and his publishing fortune to pursue a life of asceticism. Not only had David given a new definition to the word
workaholic
(he’d slept at his office two or three nights a week), I’d begged him since we’d first started going out to take some time off to travel with me. But David had always claimed that he couldn’t get away from work.

Next, he was no longer sure he wanted to have children and had suggested postponing the wedding. I’d thought he was just getting a
normal attack of wedding jitters. But it wasn’t the usual case of cold feet. His had become encased in glaciers that wouldn’t thaw until the next millennium. And a week after that, David had told me he didn’t love me anymore and wasn’t sure that he ever had, and then he’d broken off our engagement.

When the bill arrived I pulled out my
Tres Chic
American Express card and put it on top, waving Lessie off when she reached for her wallet.

“I think we should do something special to inaugurate your arrival in Milwaukee,” said Lessie with a devilish smile.

* * *

“You can open your eyes now, ma’am.”

I’d just suffered the ultimate in humiliation, being called ma’am in a tattoo parlor by a kid young enough to be my son.

Part man, mostly tattoo and metal, the tattoo artist had a face that could launch a nuclear attack. He had so many piercings, I couldn’t tell where his skin ended and the metal started. Eyebrows, nose, forehead, cheeks, lip, and chin were lined with dozens of tiny silver hoops, while his arms were swathed with snakes, dragons, and what looked like a mermaid being swallowed whole by a whale. A scorpion was tattooed on the front of his neck, and a U.S. flag dead center on the back.

I’ve had my share of zany moments, and I suppose this was one of them, although I hated to admit that I might actually be one of those women who refused to acknowledge the fact that they were—although technically only in the numerical sense of the word—middle-aged. You know this kind of woman. She still shops for clothes in the juniors section and gets Botox injections and face-lifts until her head hovers a few feet above her shoulders. She dates much younger men, pierces her navel, and lets someone she hasn’t seen in three years talk her into getting a ...

“Let me see your tattoo,” said Lessie, who’d stepped back into the room as soon as the needle had fallen silent.

The three of us looked intently at my stomach as if peering into a still, very deep pond. The delicate wings, the tiny bow, the quiver of arrows, the cherubic face ... What the hell had I been thinking?

“It’s a beautiful Cupid!” said Lessie.

“Thanks again, ma’am,” the tattoo artist said to me as we left.

Ma’am
. I wouldn’t go near a magnet if I were you kid, not unless you wanted to have your face sucked off your skull.

But the night was far from over. Fifteen minutes later I stood with Lessie outside a two-story caramel-colored brick building in downtown Milwaukee. The music blasting from the upstairs out onto the second-floor patio above us was so loud, the building seemed to
pulsate like a giant beating heart in rhythm to the music.

Lessie stood on the first step with her hand on the brass door handle. She lowered her voice, trying her best to be serious.

“This may be the last oasis of sexy, sinfully delicious single men left on the face of this planet,” she told me. “I must warn you, this is not a place for amateurs. I met a prime specimen here myself a couple weeks ago, and he’s supposed to be here tonight!”

The downstairs of Club Cubana wasn’t much to look at. A few guys in suits were at the bar smoking cigars and drinking. We ordered two frozen margaritas and headed straight upstairs past a brightly painted wall mural of the heart of Havana— fifties cars, the Bacardi factory, and the name of a bar I thought I remembered as being one of Hemingway’s haunts when he’d lived there.

As we reached the top of the stairs, the music hit me physically, like a G-force. Couples were spinning and twirling to salsa music on the packed dance floor.

“There he is! ” said Lessie, waving to a handsome Latino man dressed all in black who was standing on the other side of the room, next to the patio doors. As soon as he saw her, I could almost hear the deadbolt click shut as their eyes locked. Skirting around the dancers, he slowly made his way over to us, seemingly oblivious to everyone in the bar except her. When he kissed
her on the cheek, Lessie giggled like a high school girl being introduced to the star quarterback.

“Sam Jacobs, I’d like to introduce you to Eliseo Lora,” she said as we shook hands.

“Eliseo is a fabulous salsa dancer,” gushed Lessie, who immediately latched herself to his arm like a vise—not that I could really blame her since Eliseo’s looks were the kind that typically graced the covers of romance novels. He was handsome in a way that made me want to stare and look away at the same time.

Eliseo explained that he
and his family came from the Dominican Republic to Miami when he was six and that his entire family had moved to Milwaukee five years ago when his younger sister got a scholarship to Marquette University.

As Eliseo talked, Lessie stared. Her cheeks had flushed to a delicious apple red, and she kept giggling, at nothing, both obvious signs of a woman who had already entered the dangerous deep crush phase that preceded finding out if he was a ladies’ man, a rebounde
r, or if the planets had magically aligned themselves in just the perfect order and she’d landed herself a real catch.

Once the introductions were over, Lessie and Eliseo entertained themselves by gazing deeply into each other’s eyes while I stood there feeling invisible. I took a sip of my margarita and licked the salt
off my lips:

The dance floor was filled with couples—black, white, Latino, Asian, young, old, clumsy, graceful, and everything in between. And they all looked happy. The brassy horns and the quick drumbeat were so irresistible that I tried a twirl, tripped, and spilled the rest of my margarita down the front of a stocky man about my height, who grabbed on to my arms to steady me.

“Oh! I’m so sorry,” I said. Without thinking, I dove in, trying to mop up the damage with a napkin that shredded, leaving little clumps of white tissue sprinkled down the front of his black nylon shirt. I felt his breath on me and looked up into his face. A hot flush rushed through my body like a surge of electricity. Suddenly, everything seemed different. What was I doing with my palms on the chest of this total stranger who seemed so familiar to me? My heart was pounding inside my chest and my legs felt like jelly, but I forced myself to remove my hands from this man who I wanted to touch for the rest of the night, and I took a step backward.

“I see you’ve met my baby brother, the salsa teacher,” said Eliseo, who’d walked up to his side holding hands with Lessie. Brother? They shared the same coloring, dark chocolate eyes and hair, and skin the shade of a medium roasted coffee laced with a generous dose of cream. But beyond that they looked nothing alike. While one was tall and lean, the other was short and stocky. And where Eliseo was dangerously handsome and unsmiling, his brother was cute with a disarmingly friendly expression. Not my usual type, so I couldn’t understand why my heart was flip-flopping and beating wildly.