Adventures of a Salsa Goddess

by Hornak, JoAnn

  “Remember to chew on the leaves when you’re finished,” he said.

  “Why?” asked Lessie.

  “I don’t know. Tradition I guess,” he said.

  I took a sip. It was a little on the sweet side, but refreshing. With our drinks in hand, we went upstairs, where Javier was giving a group lesson to two couples. He smiled and waved when he saw us. Eliseo apparently hadn’t arrived yet.

  Lessie and I walked out to the balcony and I leaned against the railing, looking inside at the dance floor. I saw the usual salsa crowd, but then my eyes focused on someone new. A trim middle-aged man was dancing alone, making flamboyant arm movements and weird contortions with his face, as though his mustache were caught in his teeth.

  “They call him the Lone Salsero.”

  I turned to find Sebastian Diaz looming behind and above me, invading my personal space. I smiled up at him, said a quick hello, and turned back to the dance floor.

  “What does salsero mean?” asked Lessie.

  “A salsero is a male salsa dancer and a salsera is a female salsa dancer,” Sebastian said. “The Lone Salsero never speaks to anyone, and always dances alone.”

  “Sounds very mysterious,” said Lessie with a giggle. “Is that salsa dancing he’s doing?”

  The three of us stared at him as his face contorted into spasms of apparent agony alternating with something approximating the kind of grin you see on a baby’s face when he’s passing gas.

  “So how’s the research and writing going, Sam?” Sebastian asked.

  “Wow, you look great! What is that?” asked Javier, who slipped up to me, put his hands on my hips, and bent down to my waist for a closer look at my tattoo. I hoped he couldn’t see that my stomach was flip-flopping like a dying fish on a pier.

  “It’s a Cupid,” I said, trying to act nonchalant at Javier’s unexpected and rather intimate gesture. It was one thing to have him touch me while he was teaching, and quite another to have it occur off the dance floor.

  Under Lessie’s peer pressure, I’d bought three midriff tops. The one I was wearing, a V-neck black cotton sweater, showed off more of my stomach than I was used to. I’d also splurged on a pair of tight, hip-hugging, black cotton/lycra pants and a strappy. pair of black spike-heeled shoes, the kind I’d seen the really good salsa dancers wearing. If I never learned how to salsa, at least I’d look good trying.

  “Nice tattoo, Sam,” said Javier.

  “The god of love,” said Sebastian. “How interesting.” I was certain that for a split second he’d been sneering, but then he’d instantly covered it up with a smile.

  “Javier, where’s your brother?” asked Lessie. “I’m itching to dance,” she said, as she undulated her hips seductively and raised both arms in the air above her head.

  “He’s going to be late tonight,” said Javier. Lessie froze like a statue, and Javier quickly added, “My sister has a new boyfriend. She brought him over to meet my family and Eliseo is there to translate for my parents. But by now he’s probably grilled the poor guy to the point that he’s sorry he ever met her.”

  “Oh, that’s sweet,” Lessie said, looking relieved, but also a little embarrassed. She’d told me on the drive over that her date with Eliseo on Saturday night had gone so much better than the first, that instead of feeling happy about it, she had become only more insecure about him. I knew exactly how she felt.

  “Hey, you guys should go out and dance,” she said, shooing us toward the dance floor.

  Grabbing my hand, Javier pulled me inside through the double patio doors. The room was muggy, almost tropical. Ceiling fans swirled above us.

  “I don’t think Sebastian likes me.”

  “What? He told me he thinks you’re ... interesting.” I didn’t like that pause. That’s exactly how I would struggle to describe my boss, Elaine, or my mother to a third party to avoid coming off like a bitch.

  “Now I’m positive he doesn’t like me,” I said wryly.

  “Sam, Sebastian and I have been friends since I moved to Milwaukee five years ago,” he explained. “I know him better than my own brother. Believe me, he would tell me if he didn’t like you.”

  We started dancing. The mustachioed Lone Salsero gyrated by us, looking like Saddam Hussein with a serious case of jock itch. No one seemed to be paying him the slightest amount of attention.

  “Besides, how could anyone not like you?” asked Javier, as he led me into a double twirl.

  My heart bounced up to the ceiling and back. I guess it didn’t matter what Sebastian thought of me as long as it didn’t influence Javier’s feelings about me.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Let’s drop it.”

  “Everything you think matters,” said Javier, “to me.” I met his eyes, but then he looked away from me. It was the first time I’d seen him be anything but completely in control and at ease.

  Tonight I was following well enough that I couldn’t help but envision Javier and I moving together so gracefully that we unquestionably mesmerized the other dancers who would form an awed circle about us, marveling at our performance. We finished with a spectacular dip as I walked off the dance floor feeling like a movie star stepping out of a limo to her throngs of adoring fans, although I had to admit, it didn’t look like a single person was glancing in my direction.

  My feelings of euphoria lasted precisely nine seconds until Javier went up to the DJ booth and turned up the tempo of the music. Apparently he had slowed it down to toddler level for me. I hadn’t been salsa dancing after all. I’d been salsa crawling.

  I stood on the side and caught my breath as I watched Javier and a stunning blond woman proceed to soar over the dance floor in one long string of dips and twirls, moving in perfect fluid motion. Their dance ended to a burst of applause.

  “I want to dance like her,” I said, when Javier came up to me a minute later.

  “You need to practice and have a little patience,” he said, flashing me his one-dimpled smile.

  Patience was out of the question. As my dad used to say to me, “Patience is a virtue, possess it if you can, seldom found in a lady,” and then it was supposed to be “and never in a man.” But he would change it to, “and never in Sam.”

  “How much more practice do I need?”

  “Irene’s been dancing since she was fifteen and winning salsa competitions since ... forever,” he said, tilting his head in the direction of the blonde. I looked at her. She wasn’t even out of breath. Not a drop of perspiration graced her forehead.

  “I could give you a private salsa lesson, if you don’t mind that my studio isn’t fixed up yet,” Javier told me. “Eliseo and I live on the top floor of a duplex. I plan to remodel the first floor into a dance studio, when I get a loan.”

  “A private lesson sounds great,” I said breezily.. I said “great” but was thinking “dangerous” as I was just beginning to realize that when I was with Javier, I no longer felt like myself. Something about Javier was causing me to lose control,

  Javier put on another salsa and began dancing with another student. I stood watching him.

  “A man doesn’t move like that unless he’s got the whole package,” said a beautiful Latina woman standing at my side. She was about my height, and her shoulder-length brunette hair had blond and reddish streaks running through it. I watched her as she watched Javier. The lower half of Javier.

  Javier certainly was a pleasure to gaze upon. He kept his upper body perfectly still as his hips slightly swayed back and forth, a move far more subtle than the female dancers, but still incredibly sexy.

  “Have you danced with him yet?” I heard her say. I tore my eyes away from Javier’s package to look back at her.

  “Yeah, he’s giving me lessons,” I said, wondering, does she like Javier? Was she checking out the competition? Wait a minute, Sam. Stop flattering yourself. You’re way too old for him. He’s your instructor. You’re his student. And that’s all.

  “They say he can make your spine melt,”
she said in a low purr, before taking a wide detour through the middle of the dance floor and brushing up against Javier while pretending to ignore him. I’d give her a 9.5 for that move if what she’d just said about Javier didn’t annoy me so much. When she reached the bar, she met up with Sebastian Diaz, who hugged and kissed her.

  I felt like an extra in a salsa soap opera, except that clearly I was the only one who hadn’t been given a script, had never met the cast of characters, and had no clue what the plot was.

  After Javier finished his lesson, he came up and asked me if I wanted to try a merengue, a dance that was much easier than salsa. Javier took a moment to demonstrate its simple marching beat, one two, one two, right left, right left.

  Eliseo and Lessie drifted by, their pelvises fused together as one unit, gyrating back and forth to the two-step rhythm. Good thing they had clothes on, because the thin material of Lessie’s cotton skirt and Eliseo’s jeans were their only means of birth control.

  “Who is that woman talking to Sebastian?” I asked Javier, thankful that for once I could hold a conversation while dancing since I didn’t need to concentrate at all on these steps.

  “Which woman?”

  “The tall woman at the bar with the red and blond streaks in her hair,” I said, seeing that she now appeared to be throwing all of her powers of feminine persuasion Sebastian’s way.

  “I don’t know her,” said Javier. “Why?”

  Eliseo and Lessie drifted by again, still oblivious to the world. They had melded together to such a degree that nothing short of the jaws of life could pry them apart. Truthfully, I was disappointed that Javier maintained a professional pelvises-several-inches-apart distance from me.

  “Just wondering who’s who in the salsa scene,” I said, and could see from his expression that he didn’t believe a single word. Not that it mattered. I could tell that he liked me.

  * * *

  The phone rang at 6:30 the next morning, at least three hours before I’d planned on getting my first jolt of caffeine. Elaine Daniels was one of those people whose brains needed to be dissected and studied when they died, because she didn’t need more than five minutes of sleep a night to generate her usual amount of energy, enough to power the Hoover Dam. The woman practically glowed in the dark.

  “Good morning, my dear,” she said so sweetly, I thought for a moment I was dreaming. “How’s your love life?”

  “There’s a guy I like,” I said, feeling an immediate flashback to the time I’d had a crush on Sal Marquardt, the star quarterback, who’d spent all of high school strutting past me as if I were something that had belonged in a petri dish.

  “Tell me about him,” Elaine gushed as if we were two girlfriends gossiping during lunch period, which couldn’t have been further from how I felt. My preferred response would’ve been along the lines of, “None of your damn business,” but I quickly rattled off the laundry list that I knew she’d want to hear—name, age, profession, and educational background.

  “He’s a widower?” she said with a merry lilt, which she tried to cover up with her next statement. “Oh, that’s a shame. But it will generate a lot of sympathy. How many dates have you had with him?”

  “Two.”

  “I don’t mean to pry, Samantha, but have the two of you ...?”

  “No,” I barked, which was the same answer I would’ve given even if we had. I had no intention of inviting Elaine into my bedroom.

  “Well, I guess it’s smart to make him wait a little. But we don’t want to be a prude now do we?” she said in a tone thick with condescension.

  “Elaine,” I said, “I’d like to tell Robert why I’m really in Milwaukee. I’m starting to feel guilty about ...”

  “Absolutely not, Samantha,” she snapped. “Your assignment must be kept secret. Once the two of you are engaged you can tell him everything. Remember, ‘La Vie’ is yours if you pull this off. Now, our readers are going to be thrilled to hear all about Robert. Fax me your copy about him by Friday. Ciao!”

  Click!

  My dream job, “La Vie.” Was it worth all the lying and the string of abysmal dates? And the answer had to be “yes.” Maya Beckett had done a decent job of that column for the past eight years. But what “La Vie” needed was, well, me.

  I kept current on world events. I read People magazine. I’ve been to really bad nude performance art shows. At eight years younger than I, was it even possible Maya had experienced that dark-night-of-the-soul feeling, in the immortal words of B.B. King, that, “Nobody loves me but my mama and she might be jivin’ too”? I highly doubt it. Certainly, Maya had never suffered through the dating dry spells I had, droughts that could wither a herd of camels. I’ve seen the sky over the Brooklyn Bridge on a cold December morn ...

  And, I’ve completely lost my mind.

  I made myself some coffee and went out onto the patio with a cup. Hopefully by September I’d be engaged. No I would be engaged, and to a wonderful man. But what if I didn’t meet anyone I could fall in love with? Would Elaine stop at taking “La Vie” from me? Probably not. Next she’d fire me. Then, my failure would be exposed to the nation via a glossy cover photo compliments of Tres Chic. But after that, the worst would come: the talk show circuit.

  “Well, Oprah, I’d had such high hopes for Samantha,” I could hear Elaine saying. “She’s such a lovely young woman. But how could I have known she’d be too picky and pass up dozens of eligible men whom she’d met in Milwaukee over the summer.”

  “But what about her first date with Paulo the computer whiz and entrepreneur? What was wrong with Paulo?” Oprah would ask.

  “Not a thing, Oprah. Paulo was an extraordinary man, but I guess not good enough for our precious Samantha. Apparently some women really don’t want to get married after all,” Elaine ‘would add, sighing deeply.

  Then I would have only one option left: run away and join the circus. Come see The Spinster, the oldest living never-married woman in the universe!

  In order to avoid a career as a circus freak, I went on two more dates over the next five days, one from Single No More, the other from Brunches or Lunches. On the bright side, I didn’t drop dead of boredom during these dates. The fact that I’d had to hold my hand in front of my mouth a few times to check if I was still breathing might not be enough to deter some women from going on second and even third dates with these guys. But I’m not one of those women. I’ve never learned how to choose practical versus passion, the dull diamonds in the rough over the exciting bad boys. And the reason for that was simple. I’ve never been able to follow The Three Date Rule. I got up and grabbed my journal. I was so excited by this idea for “La Vie,” that I didn’t even have coffee first.

  I spent the rest of the day preparing my weekly report for Elaine about how my dates were going and working on my humor columns in my journal, all while trying to stifle my excitement about my private lesson with Javier. I’d debated what to wear to an afternoon private lesson, and had decided that subtly sexy was the way to go—a pair of black rayon pants with little slits at the ankles and a black V-neck sleeveless cotton shirt.

  I’d arrived precisely at four and Javier greeted me with a huge smile and a kiss to my cheek.

  “On these two walls I’m going to have floor-to-ceiling mirrors and a ballet bar,” said Javier with a sweep of his arm around his dance-studio-to-be. “And I’m going to buy a sound system and have a special wood floor installed, the kind found in professional dance studios. And the ceiling is going to stay just the way it is.”

  We both looked up. I’m terrible at judging distances, but the ceiling had to be at least fifteen feet high and was covered with old-fashioned etched tin squares of the type commonly found in older buildings. That was lovely, but the rest of the room could use some work. The linoleum floor was cracked and faded, and a stained couch with a broken spine sulked against a wall next to a rusted sink with a dripping faucet.

  After we had practiced salsa for about an hour, I collapsed on the co
uch and Javier pulled up a chair and sat across from me, taking deep gulps from a bottle of spring water. I noticed his Adam’s apple moving up and down under the caramel-colored skin of his throat. Aside from the dimple, on which I was passionately and irrationally fixated, he was far from being classically handsome. In fact, if I walked by him on the street, I don’t think I would notice him. But after spending time with him, I was struck by the way he radiated the inner peace of a person who was completely at ease with himself—the rock in the storm. Javier wasn’t trying to impress anyone and yet he’d impressed me far more than I’d wanted to admit.

  “I can tell you really love to dance,” I told him, and then reached down to brush some dust off my new dance shoes, a pair of silver ankle-strap high heels.

  “Well, I have two people to thank for that,” Javier told me. “The first was my father. He was a musician in the Dominican Republic. As a kid he worked on a farm. When he was eleven, his uncle gave him a guitar. He taught himself how to play and at eighteen he moved to Santo Domingo, worked construction during the day and at night played in merengue bands. So, I guess you could say the music is in my blood.”

  I could listen to Javier talk all day. He was so open, so easy to talk to, and so remarkably refreshing after David, my ex-fiance, who seemed to have problems divulging what he’d eaten for breakfast.

  “Who’s the second person?”

  “I saw Celia Cruz perform once a long time ago in Miami. The next day I went out and bought all of her albums,” he said. He ran his hand back and forth through his thick hair.

  “I don’t know who she is,” I said.

  “She was a famous singer from Cuba. She died in 2003. Some people called her the Queen of Salsa, others, the Salsa Goddess,” he said.

  Wow! Salsa Goddess. I wanted someone to call me that, just once in my life.

  “Is teaching at Cubana your full-time job?” I asked him. It occurred to me that, as drawn to Javier as I was, I knew very little about him.

  “No, that’s just three nights a week. My real job is roofing,” he said, and then gestured as if pounding a hammer. “My father and I own a roofing and siding company. Eliseo and a few other guys work with us part-time.”