Adventures of a Salsa Goddess

by Hornak, JoAnn

  Twenty-five

  Lottery Winner

  I gazed across the table at Andre, whom I hadn’t seen in nearly seven months, not since our trip to Peru. We were at the Wolfgang Puck Cafe in Los Angeles. We’d spent the day, my last in town, finally seeing the tourist highlights, including the Hollywood Bowl, the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard, and a bus tour of the stars’ homes.

  For the first week after my meeting with Maya, I went out to White Plains to stay with my sister, Susan. Domesticity, spending quality time with my niece, and staying away from the media had helped immensely. I’d even tried a couple of salsa clubs out in the burbs, but they couldn’t compare to the clubs in Manhattan or L.A. But then my sister and I had started to get on each other’s nerves and I knew it was time to leave.

  Luckily, Andre had called, offering his condo to me. He told me I could stay as long as I needed. I’d been in L.A. for over a month. Andre had been out of the country for the first two weeks so I’d been alone, mostly just vegging out by his pool after salsa dancing every night until four a.m., which had been more therapeutic than anything else.

  Salsa had certainly helped me to keep my sanity, but it had done far more than that. Salsa was so freeing, so liberating that I’d finally been able to discover who I really was. I wasn’t the person that Elaine or my mother had expected me to be. It was too late with Javier, but in the future I would never again make the mistake of falling for a man just because he was someone that other people approved of.

  “Sam, why don’t you fly to Paris with me tomorrow and we’ll celebrate New Year’s Eve there together?” Andre asked me.

  “Two weeks is a long time for you to stay in one place, isn’t it?” I said, teasing him. Andre lived to travel and, luckily for him, could do so whenever he wanted to, thanks to a trust fund that he’d gotten when he was twenty-five.

  “There’s salsa dancing in Paris,” he said with a gleam in his eye.

  I couldn’t explain it, but I had a feeling I needed to get back to New York. But for what I wasn’t sure, other than the fact that I was finally ready to face reality.

  “I appreciate the offer, but it doesn’t feel like the right thing to do,” I said. I would always love Andre, but only like a brother.

  “You’re going to find someone, Sam. You are the most interesting woman I know. And you should see how beautiful you look right now,” said Andre.

  “Thanks, Andre,” I said, wondering if he would ever settle down.

  “So here’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, what are you going to do when you get back to New York, Sam?”

  I didn’t have a clue. From the Guggenheim, Maya and I had gone straight to Maya’s reporter friend at the AP. I’d given him copies of my files from the summer that showed how I’d originally drafted my articles about my Milwaukee dates. But it had been Sally, Elaine’s executive assistant, who had actually saved the day. Elaine had treated Sally like her personal slave for years, so it hadn’t been too difficult to convince Sally to go on the record with everything Elaine had done. She’d provided her own e-mails and computer files as proof of my own. After that, Maya’s reporter friend had flown to Oxford Federal Prison in Wisconsin to interview Robert. He’d also interviewed Sebastian Diaz, who’d corroborated that I’d known nothing about Robert or his dealings with Single No More until that fateful day when Sebastian had shown up at Robert’s condo to tell me everything.

  According to my latest phone call from Elizabeth, who was reading my mail and paying my bills while I was in L.A., three New York publishing houses were trying to find me to sign a book deal about everything that had happened over the last seven months. Tres Chic was in serious trouble. Sales had dropped off forty percent and the press had crucified Elaine Daniels ever since the AP article had come out about everything five weeks ago, including what Elaine had done to Maya Beckett.

  “You’ve got one of those faraway looks on your gorgeous face,” Andre said. “You’re thinking about him, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t hate him anymore. Now I just feel sorry for him. I think he really loved me, in his own way. But I finally realize, I was never in love with him.”

  What I thought was love was really, as it had been with David, just being in love with the idea of getting married and having a family with a man who’d fit the qualifications of what I’d been conditioned to look for my entire life—superficial qualities that I’ve finally learned, at the ripe old age of forty-one, don’t matter in the least. I had to admit that it was extraordinarily painful and not a little embarrassing to see how shallow I’d been my entire adult life when it had come to men—just like the “fictional” character Mary in my essay, “The Three Date Rule.” “Maybe three more years in prison will finally change Robert and he’ll go straight, maybe even marry a nice woman someday? ”

  “Sam, I’m not talking about Robert. What about the man you are in love with?” asked Andre.

  I didn’t say anything. Aside from my father’s death, losing Javier was one of the most painful events of my life. I knew from past experience that someday I would get over him, but at the moment it seemed impossible.

  * * *

  My plane landed exactly on time at JFK. I took a cab to my apartment and walked in. A fresh bouquet of purple and white irises sat on my kitchen table, along with a note from Elizabeth welcoming me back and reminding me that I could meet up with her and Doug that night. But I didn’t want to socialize.

  I looked at my watch, seven o’clock on New Year’s Eve. Right now I would have been walking down the aisle at The Plaza, in front of five hundred of my mother’s closest friends and a few of my own. In another twenty minutes I would’ve been married, ready to fly to Europe for my three-week honeymoon the next day. And then? We would’ve been happy, for a while. Eventually it would’ve fallen apart. Being in love with the idea of a man wasn’t enough to make a marriage work.

  I didn’t feel like unpacking and was far too restless to sit in my apartment, so I bundled up and went out. I walked the streets for hours, passing elegant couples in tuxedos and long evening gowns, street bums curled up on street grates drinking from bottles in paper bags, and groups of laughing twenty-somethings full of life and optimism. I looked into bar and hotel windows at midnight and watched champagne toasts, chaste cheek kisses, and passionate full-mouth smooches.

  And as I walked, I thought about everything I’d learned over the past seven months. I’d agreed to marry Robert because it was the easy thing to do, for my job and to please my mother. It’s not that I didn’t like him, and I’d convinced myself that I’d loved him, but I’d fooled myself into believing that I had to end up with the great-on-paper guy or I could never be happy. I couldn’t believe it took me forty-one years to finally grow up. I smiled inwardly. That was what Lessie had said the last time we’d had lunch together. Ironically, over the past summer I’d felt that between the two of us, I had been the mature one. After all, I wasn’t necking in humidors or having sex without birth control. But at least Lessie hadn’t held back her feelings. And because I had, I’d lost the love of my life.

  At two a.m. I walked into my apartment. A moment later I heard a frantic knock on the door. Normally I’d look through my peephole, but for some reason I flung the door open only to see the one person I was certain I’d never have the joy of seeing again.

  “Javier! How did you get here?” I asked, flabbergasted and elated at the same moment.

  “I flew,” he said, breathing heavily. His nose and cheeks were red from the cold. “Where have you been, Sam? I’ve been walking all over your neighborhood for hours looking for you.”

  “Really?” I restrained myself from throwing my arms around him.

  “Lessie told me you were getting back from L.A. tonight.”

  “What?” I could barely think since I was just beginning to grasp that Javier was actually here at my doorstep, and that maybe I had another chance.

  “Would it be all right if I came in?” he asked with a
smile.

  Ten minutes later as we sat together on the couch, sipping champagne that I’d had in my fridge it felt with Javier as it always had. It was as though we hadn’t spent any time apart over the last four months.

  “I thought you were furious with me,” I said.

  “I was more hurt than anything else. But then Sebastian told me that in October when he came to tell you that your ex-fiance was in jail, the first person you asked about was me,” he said.

  “True,” I said.

  “When I heard that, I knew then how you really felt about me,” Javier went on. “But, I was seeing someone at the time. I tried to forget about you, but I couldn’t.”

  “So you’re not seeing her anymore?”

  “I broke up with her last month. I tried calling your home number but it just rang and rang.”

  After Elaine fired me on national TV, my phone never stopped ringing, so I’d cancelled my voice mail and for the last six weeks while I’d been out of Manhattan, my phone had been unplugged.

  “So I called Lessie. She told me you were coming back tonight so I booked a flight and here I am.”

  My heart started pounding faster.

  “I have never stopped thinking about you, Sam,” he said. I hadn’t forgotten his warm, brown eyes, or his warm dimpled smile, just as I hadn’t forgotten how easy it was to be with him.

  “I couldn’t stop loving you.” Javier reached over and grabbed my hand. “Sam, will you marry me?”

  I knew my answer in an instant. Suddenly, I felt the magnetic north and south poles flip. I heard trumpets and harps and choirs of angels bursting into song. In the frozen mountains of Nepal an explorer stumbled into a beautiful verdant valley and discovered that Shangri-La really exists. Well, okay, not really. But it felt wonderful to finally show my true feelings, what I’d known for months but had suppressed, that I’m crazy in love with Javier.

  “Yes, yes I will marry you, Javier.”

  “So when do you want to get married?” he asked.

  “Today is January first, this seems like a good way to start the New Year,” I said as we fell into each other’s arms.

  This time when we made love, I let myself go completely, more than with any other man I’d ever been with. Javier whispered over and over that he loved me and I did the same as we kissed each other everywhere. We came together, and as he held me close, I started crying.

  “Sam, what’s wrong? What is it querida?” he asked, stroking my face.

  “I’m just so happy, I thought I’d lost you,” I blubbered. “I was so stupid, it took me forever to figure out that I love you.”

  “It did take a quite a while,” he said with a smile. I stopped crying and playfully punched his arm.

  “I think I started to fall in love with you the night we had dinner at that Spanish tapas restaurant,” I continued. “And then at Summerfest, remember when we were sitting on the rocks by Lake Michigan and you said you wanted to share your life with someone? I thought you were talking about Isabella. But I wanted it to be me.”

  “And I fell in love with you during our first bachata dance, in my studio. Remember?”

  “You made my spine melt that day, of course I remember.”

  “I could try and make your spine melt again. Horizontal or vertical? I’m ambidextrous,” he said.

  I laughed. “Both, but horizontal first.”

  Twenty-six

  Black Sand Dreams

  The waiter smoothly traversed over the black sand beach carrying a tray with another round of daiquiris. He was built like a bullet train, but none of us were paying him the slightest amount of attention.

  “I’d like to propose a toast to Dr. Victoria Huber,” I said, holding up my glass.

  “Who?” asked Lessie and Elizabeth in unison, leaning forward on their beach chairs, both with blank looks on their pretty faces.

  “The woman who said it couldn’t be done,” I said. “That sociologist who said a never-married, over-forty, professional, single woman has a better chance of winning the lottery than ever getting married. We’ve all done it.”

  “But I’ve been married before,” said Lessie.

  “Yeah, but you’re forty-three and you’re getting married again,” I said.

  “Marty and I haven’t picked a date yet, remember?”

  “Why don’t you get married here, in Hawaii?” suggested Elizabeth.

  “That’s a great idea!” I said.

  “Well, it’s not a bad idea,” Lessie said. “Let me talk to him about it.”

  We each sampled our drinks.

  Lessie put her drink down and stood up. She shouted to a red-haired, heavily freckled man, sitting in the sand. He was making a sand castle with an eight-month-old girl wearing a flowered sunbonnet. “Honey, can you put some more sunscreen on her?”

  He flashed her a thumbs-up.

  “Marry him, Lessie. He’s in love with your daughter,” I said.

  “And with me,” she said, gazing at the two of them.

  Elizabeth sat up and waved to a tall man walking parallel to the ocean and carrying a surfboard. He waved back and then waded into the water, flopped down on his board, and paddled out.

  “That’s my husband the surfer,” said Elizabeth.

  Lessie and I laughed. Elizabeth had made a point of referring to Doug as her husband at every opportunity. But they’d only been married for eight weeks so I guess I couldn’t blame her.

  “Sam, I just remembered, do you know what today is? Besides my husband’s birthday,” said Elizabeth.

  “October fourteenth I think?”

  “It was one year ago today that your boss fired you on national TV,” she said.

  I groaned at the memory of the worst day of my life. Tres Chic had finally folded three months ago. Elaine Daniels was getting divorced from her sixth husband and had filed for bankruptcy. I supposed she was feeling the same way I had on that horrible day last year when it felt as though my life were over. But she’d brought it all on herself. I didn’t feel like gloating. If anything, I felt sorry for her.

  “So when is your book going to be done, Sam?” asked Elizabeth.

  “Next month, as soon as I go over the galleys,” I said.

  It wasn’t the gossipy tell-all about Elaine Daniels that the publishers had wanted. My book, Lessons in Love, was about what I’d learned about myself over the past year. It included plenty of my awful but humorous dating experiences as the Mystery Woman and my discovery of salsa, but also the struggle I’d gone through trying to fit into a mold just to please my boss and my mother. I was uncomfortable exposing my insecurities and incredible immaturity in prior relationships, but I knew that I needed to share an honest and personal account of everything that had happened.

  “Hey, that reminds me, you guys know you’re my best friends. But I was thinking of dedicating the book to my mother,” I said.

  “Really, why?” asked Elizabeth.

  “Well, I’m hoping it might improve our relationship,” I said. After Javier and I had eloped in Las Vegas on New Year’s Day, we’d planned our real wedding for this past June in Milwaukee. My mother had wanted it in New York, but Javier and I wanted it where we’d met. I suggested having another ceremony in July in New York, but she was hurt we weren’t doing it on her turf first. She’d come to my wedding in Milwaukee, but wasn’t happy about it. But it seemed like she was finally starting to come around. She’d actually begun referring to Javier by name and was helping us decorate our apartment in New York.

  Lessie and Elizabeth were chatting and laughing when Javier slipped up behind me.

  “How’s my salsa goddess?” he asked, kissing me on the neck.

  “Did you have a nice nap?” I asked him, smiling.

  “It was lonely without you,” he whispered into my ear. Javier looked out at the beach at Rachel, Lessie’s daughter, who was thumping a little red shovel against the sand.

  “When are we going to have one of those?” he asked me.

  �
�I don’t know. But I’m willing to start trying.”

  “Me too. How about now?”