"The Flamenco Academy" (41 page)

Her name was Leslie. She was a nice woman in
her late forties with a placid manner and thin, pale hands. When
she asked why I’d come, I told her I was depressed, lonely. My best
friend had moved away, and I hadn’t really made any new friends.
Not any close ones. I didn’t seem able to make a relationship work.
I had no interest in dating. Leslie assumed I was gay. I actually
laughed and told her I wished it were that easy. We talked about my
mother running off to HomeTown and how it made me feel. I talked
about how much I missed Daddy. Leslie was sympathetic and nice in a
professional way. That changed when I mentioned Tomás. I’d been
seeing Leslie for more than two months before I let it drop that
I’d spent the last three and a half years of my life transforming
myself into someone a man I’d met once would fall in love with. The
way Leslie hunched forward ever so slightly and tried too hard to
act casual, nonjudgmental, made me realize how polite her interest
had been up until that point. Even though I held back the full
story, she asked if I wouldn’t like to start coming in twice a
week, then prescribed a new medication that had just been
released.

I Googled the pills and found out they were
for obsessive-compulsive disorder. When I arrived for my next
appointment, Leslie hurriedly put away a book she’d been reading.
It had a plain cover, the typical binding for journal collections.
I memorized the call number and looked it up later when I went to
work at Zimmerman Library. It was the
Journal of Psychoanalytic
Psychology
. The volume she’d been reading contained an entire
issue devoted to erotomania. A medical dictionary told me that the
official definition of erotomania was “the false but persistent
belief that one is loved by a person (often a famous or prominent
person), or the pathologically obsessive pursuit of a disinterested
object of love.” When I Googled erotomania, the word
stalking
came up frequently. I started taking the new pills.
Other than nausea and sleepiness, though, they didn’t seem to have
much effect. Leslie told me I had to take them for three weeks
before they would start working.

For my senior thesis, I’d chosen the topic
“Flamenco: The Eroticism of Concealed Passion” and read every
obscure book, article, monograph, and thesis ever published about
flamenco. In my few remaining hours, I blotted out consciousness by
rehearsing the
soleá por bulerías
that Didi and I were going
to present for our senior project. Why Didi cared about getting a
degree, I wasn’t sure. But she did care, and I was happy to take
care of this last detail. It kept me occupied, distracted. No
dancers had ever performed a duet to fulfill the final requirement
for a degree from the UNM Dance Department in flamenco arts. But it
was generally accepted that Didi was an exception to all the rules.
Even Alma and the rest of the purists acknowledged that Didi was
our star, the one who opened up like a hibiscus, vivid and showy,
under the glare of the spotlight. I, on the other hand, had shown,
time and again, that the spotlight was a place where I tended to
wilt. I suspect that we received special permission to perform
together in the same way they would have granted a blind student
permission to have her guide dog with her.

Since Didi only stopped in long enough to do
her laundry before she hit the road again, I had to create a dance
that was like a banquet in which I cooked all the food and she came
in at the end to sprinkle on the parsley. My job was to make it
appear as if the parsley was the essential ingredient. So I gave
Didi all the splashier bits, the
zapateado
, the linked turns
of the
vuelta quebrada
that would transform her hair into a
waterfall flowing from her upturned head as she twisted around the
stem of her waist. Meanwhile I would be keeping her coloring within
the lines, pounding out the time so strongly that she could stay in
compás
and work the magic onstage that only she could
perform.

On a day in late autumn when the light was
so sharp it hurt my eyes, I stepped out of the old library and
noticed that summer and most of fall had passed. I had a few
minutes before my appointment with Leslie, so I ambled over to the
duck pond to sit in the sunlight. The ducks were waddling toward me
for a handout when my cell phone rang. It didn’t ring often and I
had to hunt for it in the bottom of my bag. It was Guitos calling
from Madrid. His message was brief. “I talked to Tomás. He is going
back to New Mexico. He wants to restart his career. He wants to
tour again. I convinced him he needs a dancer and that the finest
in the country are at the university. That is where he will go to
find his dancer. This is all I can do. The rest is up to you.”

Overhead, a hot-air balloon in the shape of
a gigantic pink elephant wobbled drunkenly across the blue, blue
sky. I waved at the tipsy elephant. The pilot pulled on the burner
to roar a greeting down on me.

I canceled my standing appointment with
Leslie. There was no longer time to spare for anything, not eating,
not sleeping, certainly not therapy. All I had time for was
dancing. Tomás needed a dancer. I had to be that dancer. I didn’t
know when he would return, but I would be ready. I all but moved
into studio 110. The blond wood of the floor became a Sahara I had
to cross one
golpe
at a time to reach the oasis I saw in the
silver mirror. The image there of a dancer who would bewitch Tomás
proved to be a mirage that receded the closer I came. The only
solution was even more hours of practice. I dispensed with
everything that didn’t make me a better dancer. Leslie’s pills took
the edge off my drive so I stopped taking them and came fully awake
again. An electric charge that the pills had defused sizzled
through me once more and fired my dancing. A vividness that had
slipped out of my life reentered it, leaving me prone to fits of
wild exultation and despairing crying jags. All the calluses and
bunions on my feet broke out in fresh blisters that wept pink fluid
when I danced. I bandaged them, tugged my shoes back on, and kept
dancing. I had to be ready.

A week before Christmas, Didi returned. She
had a gig at the KiMo Theatre for a show on Christmas Eve where she
was opening for Bijou, a singer-songwriter who’d come up the hard
way, sleeping in cars and getting electroshock before she’d risen
to fame during the bygone heyday of Lilith Fair. Of course, Didi
stayed with me in the little house behind Frontier Restaurant. It
was like the time after she’d returned from New York. She collapsed
into bed, slept around the clock, and I brought her smoothies. When
she woke up, she bubbled over with stories from her new life. It
was as though everything she’d done, every adventure, every
romantic conquest, every professional triumph had all been achieved
for me, just so that she would have stories for us to share. All
she wanted to do was spend time with me. We went to the academy,
and I showed her the duet I’d been working on. She watched as I
danced with a beatific look on her face like she’d just fallen in
love with me. When I finished all she said was, “Rae, it’s really
lonely out there without you.” She didn’t even want to try the sham
part I’d cooked up for her. All she wanted to do was take me out
and buy me the best meal I’d eaten in months along with more
margaritas than even Catwoman could have put away. We talked about
everything that night. Everything except Tomás.

The next day Didi had to start doing radio
interviews and talk to reporters for Local Girl Made Good features
to promote the show, but she dragged me along. We hung out together
in a way we hadn’t done since high school. I remembered how much
sheer fun Didi could be. How she could make you feel like the most
important person in the world when she turned her attention on you.
I knew that Didi could lie about everything, but no one can lie
about time and she spent every second with me. I stopped
practicing. Maybe Tomás would come, maybe he wouldn’t. The
possibility began to seem remote. I believe, if we’d had another
day together, Didi would have told me that I was insane. And, who
knows? I might have laughed and agreed. But we didn’t have another
day because, on Christmas Eve, Bijou herself arrived.
Singer-Songwriter was already half in love with Flamenco Poet, and
fell all the way the moment they met in person. Bijou whisked Didi
away to the suite her label had booked. Didi put me on the guest
list for the show Christmas Eve and begged me to come. I told her
I’d try to make it, but I didn’t. The instant Didi left, I was
seized by panic, realizing how much practice time I’d lost. While
Didi was onstage, I was back in studio 110.

The next day I was home only because it was
Christmas and the academy was locked and I couldn’t find a janitor
anywhere to let me in. That Christmas morning, I was sitting in the
kitchen of the tiny apartment on the alley, my chair pulled up
close to the space heater that was failing to take the chill from
the dry, winter air, drinking a mug of Earl Grey tea, smoking a
Ducado, and trying to wake up enough to absorb a text about
flamenco’s murky psychological underpinnings that I wanted to
incorporate into my thesis when Didi sauntered in. She was still
wearing her gig clothes, a cross between a toreador’s suit of
lights, shimmering with thick crusts of sequins, and a biker jacket
worn with a pair of ultra low-rider jeans.

“Wow, I didn’t expect to see you for a few
days.”

She had an odd, distracted look on her face
as if she were adding numbers in her head.

I instantly went on red alert, assuming that
something horrible had happened. “Didi? Are you okay? Was the show
okay? I’m sorry I didn’t go. I got—”

She held up her hand. “I have information
for you, and I don’t know whether I should even tell you or
not.”

My heart slammed. “What? Is it about my mom?
What happened? Is she okay?”

“No, no, nothing like that.” She reached
into the depths of her floppy, woven bag and fished out a sheet of
yellow paper folded in fourths, held it out, said, “Merry
Christmas. I guess,” and handed it to me. “Alma gave it to me last
night. She got the call yesterday and had just finished making the
flyer. She’s only going to post them in a few places. Faculty
lounge. The conservatory. Very selective.”

I stared at her, searching for clues as I
opened it. It was a call for auditions for dancers. Notices like
this went up every week, a student production needing bodies,
someone starting a company. Too often, it meant performing for free
in a parish hall or school lunchroom. This was the level I was at,
the level Didi had long ago left far behind. I would have seen a
notice like that one the instant it was posted. Ever since Guitos’s
phone call, I had combed every possible newspaper and bulletin
board and turned over every leaf on every grapevine I knew of,
searching for information about Tomás’s return.

And then I saw it, his name, at the bottom
of the flyer. Shock froze every detail of that moment in my memory:
The flyer, plain black type on goldenrod paper. The scent of
bergamot from the tea, ancient and exotic. The leggy geranium on
the rounded, adobe windowsill. The spider making a web in the
corner of the casement window. The harsh sunlight streaming in the
window turning the steam from my tea into a dazzling cloud above
the mug. Each word of the last paragraph I read was burned into my
memory:

The eroticism of flamenco is the eroticism of
concealed passion, never of revelation or consummation. In a simple
summary, the dancers are enacting a narrative about the pleasures
and pains of human separateness, and of being alive.

When time began to move again, I glanced at
the flyer, my heart lurched, then froze. I gasped for breath that
wouldn’t come.

“Jesus, I guess I don’t have to ask if
you’re still interested in Mystery Man. Breathe,
hermana
.
Here, have a sip.” She pushed the mug of tea into my hands, which
had gone cold. I took a drink. She pulled a crocheted throw off the
couch and wrapped it around my shoulders. “Wow, if this is what
happens when his name comes up, it’s no wonder you stopped talking
about him.”

I managed a laugh, a feat that only Didi
Steinberg could have helped me to accomplish at that moment. “I’m
really glad you’re here.”

She tucked the throw around me more tightly.
“Rae, this is a total cakewalk. You do realize that, don’t
you?”

I didn’t and she knew I didn’t. I cared too
much, and that was deadly.

“Rae-rae, sweetie, you really have nothing
to worry about. No one can touch your technique. Your choreography
is flawless. You are a machine with the fucking
compás
. You
are Metrónoma.”

“He can buy a metronome.”

“Okay, maybe, possibly, perhaps, you could
put yourself out there a little more. But, Rae, that’s the easy
part.”

“For you.”

“You too, Rae. Getting the spotlight is all
a matter of a few tricks. I’ll show you everything you need to
know.”

Overwhelmed, I shook my head at the
impossibility.

“Don’t stress. Rae, take it, take your shot.
Girls always wait for the world to give them things. To see what
sweet, smart, obedient girls they are, then paste a star on their
foreheads. It doesn’t work that way. The things you really want in
life, you have to take. Do you really want this or not?”

She didn’t wait for my answer, just barged
on to ask what I planned to dance.

“Well, of course, I don’t know what
palo
he’s going to call for. So, I’ve been working up
routines, rough ones, for all of them. I even have some ideas for a
siguiriyas
.” I mentioned that style hesitantly. Since it was
the most
jondo
, the deepest, saddest, most intense of all
the
palos
, it was almost never danced.