Adventures of a Salsa Goddess

by Hornak, JoAnn

  I felt a stab of disappointment. A roofer. I don’t know what I’d been expecting him to say, but it wasn’t that. Elaine and my mother would never approve.

  “It’s not my first choice,” he quickly added. “When I was younger, I wanted to be a professional dancer. Well, the truth is, I wanted to be a movie star. Picture John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever except it was going to be me starring in a salsa dancing movie. After I graduated from high school, I drove out to L.A. with five hundred dollars. I figured that was plenty since I was sure it would only take a couple weeks to get my first part.”

  “What happened ?”

  “I slept on my cousin’s couch and went to every audition I could,” he said with a be-dimpled grin. “The first dancing job I was offered was ... well, this is even more embarrassing—I don’t know if I should tell you.”

  “I swear I’ll take it to my grave,” I said, and could tell by his expression that he was anxious to tell me.

  “A Chippendale dancer.”

  “Really,” I said in a playful tone, looking him up and down like I was selecting a stud from the stable.

  He shook his index finger at me like a kindergarten teacher at a boy who keeps pulling all the girls’ ponytails. “You promised, Sam, to your grave.”

  “Okay. Then what happened?” I asked, assuming the attitude of mere salsa student once again. I knew I needed to stop flirting with him, but I was having problems controlling myself with him.

  “I turned that job down and then nine months later I made it to the big-time. I was in a movie,” he said.

  “You were? Which one?” I asked excitedly.

  “Calm down. It’s no movie you’ve ever seen or heard of,” he said. “It never even made it to the theaters, went straight to video. I was one of the back-up dancers. I’m in three scenes, no lines.”

  “What’s the name of it?”

  “Salsa Inferno,” he said, rolling his brown eyes. “It wasn’t even a B movie, more like a D or an F.”

  “I want to see it.”

  “Believe me, you don’t,” he said shaking his head. “It has no plot and the choreography sucks.”

  “What happened after your movie debut?”

  “My father got hurt, fell off a second-story roof and fractured his back. He was in traction and therapy for months and couldn’t work for almost two years. I had to go back to Miami and take over the business to support my mother and sister. And here I am, let’s see,” he paused and counted on his fingers, “... thirteen years later,” he said, shaking his head. “What about you, Sam? Do you like what you do?” he asked.

  “Not really,” I said, which was true. But I felt a stab of guilt because Javier was someone I didn’t want to ever lie to. “I want to do more creative writing,” I added, staying as close to the truth as possible without blowing my cover.

  “Like what?” he asked me, leaning forward on his elbows, all ears.

  I couldn’t speak for a moment. It had been so long since a man had seemed so genuinely interested in my hopes and dreams. He was probably just being polite. Besides, you’re too old for him, Sam, and you need to stay focused on your assignment.

  “My dream would be to have my own humor column in a magazine or newspaper,” I said matter-of-factly.

  “I’d like to read some of your stuff, Sam, if you don’t mind sharing it?”

  “Only if I get to see your movie,” I told him with a smile. Stop it, Sam! Stop flirting with him. Next lesson I’ll have to have some duct tape handy to wrap around my mouth.

  “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,” he quipped. “You drive a tough bargain, Miss Jacobs,” he said, standing up. “I want to teach you a new dance. It’s from the Dominican Republic and it’s called bachata.”

  The steps were more difficult than merengue, but easier than salsa. Bachata had a high-energy beat, but the melody was completely different. Salsa was complex, brassy, and sophisticated, while bachata was simple and folksy.

  “One two three tap, one two three tap,” said Javier. I had to concentrate so I wouldn’t lose the step.

  “It’s such happy music,” I said, as the guitar twanged its upbeat melody out of a boom box on the coils of an old-fashioned radiator. “I love it!”

  “This song is about divorce,” said Javier. “The last one was about a man who is in love with a woman who doesn’t love him back. Some people call bachata musica de amargue which means ‘music of bitterness.’”

  We continued dancing to the sad songs with the happy, melodies. With the slightest push of his hand or pull on my waist he was able to lead me until we were dancing with our bodies pressed together. Then, the music took on another dimension. Underneath the cheerful plucky rhythms pulsed a powerful sensuality. After a few songs, Javier stopped dancing but he still held me tight, with his right hand pressed to the small of my back.

  “Sam, you are so beautiful,” he said, his dark eyes suddenly intent on mine.

  I wanted to respond to him, to tell him how I felt, although I really didn’t know how I felt about him. And, even if I did, I shouldn’t let myself get involved with Javier. But I couldn’t ignore how powerfully attractive I found him, inside and out.

  Javier leaned in and kissed me. I couldn’t help myself—I kissed him back. I felt myself dissolving into his arms, into his delicious kisses, until I came to my senses a few minutes later and broke away from him.

  “I’m almost ten years older than you,” I said, not meeting his eyes. I walked over to my purse. “How much do I owe you?” I asked him, holding my wallet. But then I looked at his face and knew I had hurt him without meaning to. I felt awful.

  “I’m not going to take your money, Sam,” said Javier.

  “Well, okay then, I’ll buy you a beer sometime,” I said, looking down at my feet. “See you at Cubana.”

  Eight

  Dating Circle of Hell

  “Dating sucks, sucks I tell you! I hate every goddamn minute of it,” said Angie, a skeletal woman with a scowl on her face that could scare puppies. She stabbed her cigarette onto her bread plate with enough force to poke a hole through it. “I just want to be married already.”

  I looked around the table at our ill-fated group of five. This was a new one for me. Now I was blind dating in a pack, as if one-on-one blind dates weren’t horrible enough. Thanks to the services of The Dating Circle, the five of us were here at a quaint Italian pizzeria, the kind with red-checked tablecloths, candlelight, and slightly vinegary Chianti.

  According to Sally, who’d made the arrangements from New York, The Dating Circle catered only to professionals, arranging for six men and women in the same age range to have dinner together—separate checks, no obligations, no messy videotapes or photos, and no phone numbers or e-mail addresses exchanged, unless you chose to after dinner. You were all just thrown together like shipwreck survivors in the hopes that your lifeboat wouldn’t sink and sparks would fly.

  We’d just finished introducing ourselves. Angie, a legal secretary at a law firm, sat to my right. At the far end of the table was Ned, a shoe salesman at a department store, a short balding man who didn’t seem to meet anyone’s eyes. To his right and across from Angie was Floyd, a used-car salesman who could have been anywhere between twenty-five and fifty. He had ruddy cheeks, lamb chop sideburns, and a chin so big it hovered over the table like a blimp. Seated directly across from me was Steve, a manager at a video store, a perfectly nice-looking man, except that he wore a T-shirt emblazoned with life’s too short to smoke cheap pot.

  Angie blew a big puff of smoke over the table and took a deep sucking drag on her second cigarette, which caused her cheeks to cave in to such an alarming degree she resembled a shrunken head.

  “I’m allergic to cigarettes,” Ned the shoe salesman said. But his voice barely rose above a whisper. “And I think we’re in the non-smoking section.”

  “I wouldn’t mind lighting up myself, but I don’t think I could get away with my very special brand of tobacco her
e, if you know what I mean,” said Steve, breaking into a loud horsey laugh and shooting Angie an exaggerated wink. Angie rolled her eyes and gave a long weary sigh that spoke of a thousand and one prior bad dates.

  “Do you know what I mean?” Steve repeated. He held his T-shirt out from his body and pointed to the enormous marijuana leaf on the front of it, I suppose in case any of the “professionals” here didn’t know how to read. Steve’s laughter rankled across the restaurant causing several diners to look our way.

  “We all know what you mean,” said Floyd, jutting his chin out toward Steve as if menacing a weapon. Steve’s laughter stopped cold. Sparks were flying all right. Just not the kind hoped for by the Dating Circle people.

  “Dating is fun, my mother says,” continued Angie in a high-pitched imitation of her mother’s voice. “But men were different when she dated, they were actually men.”

  Angie lit up another cigarette, ignoring Ned, who coughed into a closed fist. The waitress came by and brought us two more carafes of Chianti. We all dived in to refill our own glass. Clearly, it was every man and woman for himself or herself in our sinking lifeboat.

  “How ’bout you guys?” Angie continued, looking in turn at Steve and then Floyd. “When is the last time either of you had the balls to punch the numbers on a telephone to ask a woman out?” The two shrunk back, as if they were about to be castrated, while Ned covered his face with a napkin.

  “It’s a scientific fact that men are turning into neuters,” Angie continued, holding court over the table. “I read all about it in Cosmo. It’s the chemicals in our environment and cooking our food in plastic containers. In two hundred years, the human race is going to be extinct, thanks to Tupperware.”

  She picked up her glass of wine and threw it all back in her mouth like a shot of whiskey.

  “Here I am, gorgeous, in my prime at twenty-nine, and I can’t seem to find a man,” Angie continued. “I sure feel sorry for that Mystery Woman from that magazine. At least I still have time. At forty-something, she doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell.” It took me a moment to realize that Angie was talking about me. How comforting to know that I was an object of pity in her eyes. And could she really just be twenty-nine? Was it possible that I was the oldest person at the table? I might be the oldest person in the whole restaurant? Any minute now the waitress was going to come up and offer me the 10 percent discount for seniors. And then when I walked out of the restaurant, a Boy Scout would probably offer to help walk me across the street.

  “Sam?” I felt a tap on my shoulder and jumped. I turned and looked up at Javier’s friend and inquisitor of decrepit old women, Sebastian Diaz.

  “I hope I’m not interrupting,” he said. Of course he was interrupting, but that’s exactly what he’d intended to do.

  “Hi, Sebastian,” I said, feeling a prickle at the base of my neck. What the hell was he doing here?

  Angie turned to glance at him and did a double take. Her eyes poured over his arms and muscular chest like syrup over a stack of pancakes. I hated to admit it, but Sebastian did look particularly handsome that night, wearing a black button-up shirt opened at the neck and black pants, standing there like he was James Bond and the very fate of the world rested in his hands.

  “Are you here for the Dating Circle dinner?” Angie eagerly asked him.

  “You’re on a date, Sam?” Sebastian said, looking over the table to Ned sitting motionless, still holding the napkin over his face. “With all of these people? How interesting.”

  There was that word again, interesting. I wanted to die. It was awful enough being on a bad date with just one guy, but here I was, surrounded by the Three Stooges. Why don’t I just get myself a big sandwich board that reads L-O-S-E-R and wear it around town for the summer? What if Sebastian tells Javier about this? Would Javier think that I was desperate? Pathetic? Well, what else could he think, given that he didn’t have a clue about my real mission in Milwaukee?

  “Just a few ...” I paused, as I struggled to swallow, “friends having dinner.”

  “Then I am interrupting,” Sebastian said. “I apologize. I just wanted to say hello.”

  “No, please sit down,” Angie said. “Please, please sit down.” Angie rose and grabbed on to Sebastian’s arm as though it were the last bicep attached to the last man on earth.

  “Another time perhaps, thank you,” he told her and, having bestowed upon me a final speculative look that spoke volumes, left.

  “Is that guy a friend of yours?” Steve asked as soon as Sebastian was out of earshot.

  “Not really,” I told him. “Why?”

  “That guy is an undercover cop,” Steve said. “Believe me, I can spot them a mile away.”

  “A necessity, I’m sure,” said Floyd.

  “I could tell, the way he read my T-shirt,” Steve continued. “Narcs seem to think we don’t have free speech and rights and stuff in America.”

  “Who hasn’t read your damn T-shirt?” Angie spat. “That’s why you’re wearing it, aren’t you? To make a statement?”

  Angie and Steve continued bickering as I watched Sebastian from across the room, holding out a chair for his date, a Barbie doll clone with thick blond curly hair flouncing about her silver dollar-sized waist. She was the kind of woman who caused an epidemic of whiplash every time she walked through a room. As soon as he sat down across from her, he reached out for her hand and kissed the inside of her wrist. An involuntary tingle went through me. It was those tiny, seemingly insignificant moves that had the ability to sweep a woman off her feet.

  Well, let Sebastian sweep a million women off their feet. I didn’t care. I just hoped he didn’t tell Javier about this.

  * * *

  Spending time alone is a healthy and necessary part of life for any mature adult—which automatically excludes me. When I spend too much time alone my mind wanders to places that would’ve given even Sigmund Freud the willies. No e-mails, no telephone calls in days, and no mail, not even of the junk mail variety. Even the credit card companies have deemed me unworthy of them.

  This morning, after staring at my blank computer screen for an hour, unable to write a single word, I found myself so desperate for company that I clicked on the Microsoft paper clip guy to wake him up and actually had a conversation with him. A bit one-sided to be sure, but it was crystal clear that I’d reached the very nadir of my existence.

  Today, I could relate exactly to how Bridget Jones felt when she said she was afraid of dying alone and being eaten by Alsatians. Except that I was the only living, breathing, sentient higher life form in my apartment. If I died I’d simply rot away to a skeleton. Maybe if I expired under my bedspread with the dehumidifier on, I’d mummify. Centuries from now they’d unearth me and discover the last single woman over the age of forty on the planet. Then they could put me in a museum, right next to the A and B cup bras.

  Of course the real problem was not that no one had called me, it was that he hadn’t called. The rational part of me argues that this is not the end of the world. It had only been a couple of days—three days, fourteen hours, and twenty-nine minutes— since I had last spoken to Robert Mack. It couldn’t possibly be that I’d broken the rules when I’d called him? Could it?

  I’d been hoping for a call from Javier as well. He’d kissed me before he’d found out about our age difference and now that he knew, he was probably no longer interested, which was just as well since he didn’t have the right credentials for Elaine or my mother.

  And of course I was well aware of the Murphy’s Law of the Telephone. The man you want to call will do so only after you leave your apartment. The phone will not ring if you’re at home, pretending to be busy. And he definitely won’t call if you’re picking up your phone every so often to make sure there’s still a dial tone, and listening to your voice mail for a message that you might have missed while you were in the shower, or during the sixty seconds you had the blender going to make your midmorning fruit and yogurt smoothie.
/>   Then again, there are other possible explanations for the non-call. Men are incapable of mentally multitasking. A woman can simultaneously think about her five o’clock deadline for a fifty page report on marketing strategies for the new millennium, the fact that her best friend is going through dating turmoil, a manicure appointment for next week that needs to be rescheduled, the latest Ebola outbreak in the Congo, her mother’s latest nagging phone call, and the man she’s currently crazy about. On the other hand it is a well-known fact that a man is only able to focus on one thing, whether it’s clipping his nose hairs or attempting to negotiate a contract for weapons-grade plutonium.

  Most important of all, men live in a different time and space continuum from women. Time for them is a meaningless vacuum filled with mysterious manly concerns, which only sporadically relate to the woman he is currently seeing. Three days to a man is like an ESPN instant replay of the last four seconds of the NBA playoffs. Whereas three days to a woman waiting for that call is a soul-sucking eternity, filled with wrenching thoughts of self-doubt and analysis of every word of every conversation, every look exchanged, while she desperately tries to figure out what must have gone wrong, all the while trying to stifle the horrible thought that he may never call again.

  I stared at the telephone now, wondering if I should rip the jack out of the wall and end this living hell, when it rang. I screamed and jumped back a foot as if it were about to attack me. Please let it be Javier or Robert. Wisely I waited for the third ring to pick up, because I’m an extraordinarily busy person after all.

  “Bonjour, Samantha, ca va?”

  I did a salsa sashay out to my balcony and plopped down on my lawn chair. Robert and I talked for nearly an hour. He had been out of town on business as I’d suspected. He was remarkably blase about almost failing to close a deal on a banking executive who’d wanted to relocate from Memphis to Palm Beach, as if a six-figure transaction didn’t matter.