“Where the hell have you been?” Didi woke up when I was halfway through the window we’d “retrofitted” so we could come and go without encountering Catwoman. She blinked as if I were part of a dream she was having. “I thought you got arrested. What happened? Where did you go? Did you leave before the cops came? What time is it?” She grabbed the alarm clock on the floor beside her bed. “Shit, girl, it’s five thirty in the a. of m. I’ve got to pee.” Didi jumped out of bed and ran into the bathroom.
I plopped down on my bed. Everything in the Lair looked different. I’d wandered around for hours after he left, then tried not to wake Didi up when I finally got home. I was worried that one look at my face would tell her that I’d seen her and the cop last night. More than that, though, I wanted to keep last night, keep him, to myself. I wanted hours alone to remember every note he’d played and every word he’d spoken.
“Okay, details, details, details.” Didi came back out, patting her washed face dry with a towel. A stretchy orange band held her hair off her wet face. She plopped down on her bed, grabbed a Pop Tart from the package sitting on the nightstand, and settled in as if she were taking a seat in a movie theater. The Pop Tart’s white frosting was speckled with colored sprinkles like a kid’s birthday cupcake. Didi liked sprinkles as they fit in with her philosophy of Eating Obstacles. A fanatical dieter, always just a lettuce leaf or two away from anorexia, Didi made herself eat things in segments as small as were feasible so that consumption of the edible item took as long as possible. She could make a taco last an hour, eating every shred of cheese, every nubbin of tomato individually. Sprinkles, of course, offered fantastic food-stretching opportunities.
Sitting cross-legged on her bed, plucking first the blue, then the red sprinkles off her Pop Tart, her hair skinned back, no makeup, Didi looked about eight years old. I thought she would seem different after what had happened last night, what I’d seen. But she looked exactly the same as always, exactly the way she had looked after dozens of other nights. The only thing different about last night was that no one famous was involved and I’d seen what usually only happened after I left. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered anymore except him.
“So? Tell,” she prompted. “Where have you been until five-thirty in the morning, young lady? Huh?” She bounced her eyebrows lasciviously.
“Deeds, it wasn’t like that.” It wasn’t like anything that had ever happened to Didi. She wouldn’t understand.
“Like what?”
“Like that. All hubba-hubba, baby.”
Tone. Like pygmies deep in the forest who can give a word a dozen different meanings just by the tone or pitch, Didi and I spoke a language of tones. One word, it didn’t matter what the word was, everything depended on the tone in which we spoke it. From that we could deduce all the rest. She read my tone, put the Pop Tart down, and studied my face. In the silence that followed, I heard what sounded like game-show music but had to be whatever jazz album Mrs. Steinberg had just sold. It was interrupted by her computer making the scary ambulance noise her software used to alert her that one of her auctions was getting some play.
“Oh my God, you met someone.” Instead of the mockery I would have expected, there was a whispered reverence. She did understand. I couldn’t stop myself then, I nodded, and made a face, a grimace that encompassed the enormity of what had happened.
“Oh my God,” she whispered again. “This is the real deal.” Briskly, she brushed sprinkles off her hands as she got down to business. “All right, what’s his name?”
Just Didi saying that pronoun, “his,” was enough to make me feel as if she had invoked his presence, as if he were in the room with us. “I didn’t... He didn’t tell me.”
Didi shrugged as if that were a small detail, an obstacle, like eating sprinkles in a color-coded sequence. “Okay, then, where does Mystery Man live?”
“I don’t know.”
“Phone number?”
“He didn’t give it to me.”
“No digits? Wow, this is going to take some serious reconnaissance. Recount your exact movements for me. You must have met him at the Ace High, right? Or did you leave as soon as we split up?”
I didn’t like her questions. She was treating this like a groupie mission. But it wasn’t. Next week, when Didi had forgotten about Julian Casablancas or whomever she was currently obsessed with, I would not have forgotten about him. Not next week or the week after or any of the weeks that would follow. “No, I met him there,” I answered, adding lamely, “but we left. Before. The cops. Or whatever.” I didn’t want Didi to know I’d seen her. In the alley. With the cop.
She stared into my face again and I couldn’t help myself. I remembered. Again, I saw the cop hauling her face to his crotch. I ducked her gaze. “Never mind. This isn’t like a, you know, mission.”
Tone. Tone never lied. Didi, insulted, bristled, “Well, then I can’t help you.”
She went to her computer and started writing an e-mail. I curled up with my back to her and replayed the entire night like a miser running her fingers through a chest filled with treasure. I saw the heart-shaped cottonwood leaves twirling down in the starlight, feathering across my face. I plotted the lines and curves of his face, noting that his nostrils were perfect teardrops. Thinking about him made something fizz beneath my bottom rib like a fuse sizzling that would soon detonate my heart. He was so enormous in my mind that I imagined I could look out the window and find him looming above the city bigger than Sandia Peak. I thought about the taillights disappearing in the distance as he headed off toward the interstate. I didn’t know his name. He didn’t know mine. Before last night, I could never have imagined someone like him in my life. Now I could not imagine living without him. I panicked. “Didi, please, you have to help me.”
When she turned back around, she didn’t look like a kid anymore. Early morning sun raked in the low window, settled on the hard planes of her face, and lighted what was behind the harshness: she knew I knew. “So you want him?”
Want him? Last night, it had seemed too much of a presumption to ask him his name. How could I say it? How could I say I wanted him?
“I want him.”
“You really want him?”
“I really, really want him.”
“This is the one?”
“This is the one.”
“And you don’t care what you have to do to get him?”
“I don’t care what I have to do to get him.” I answered automatically, but automatic wasn’t good enough.
“You don’t care what you have to do to get him, even if it’s...”
For a sliver of a second, the defiance that I thought saturated Didi down to her bones disappeared. The image in her mind transferred itself to mine and I saw her kneeling in the perfect circle of her matador skirt spread on the black asphalt of the Ace High Motel parking lot. That image was a pact laid between us waiting for my acceptance. If I repeated her words, it would signal my agreement that nothing Didi did in the pursuit of her obsessions could be considered a humiliation. I thought of taillights disappearing and imagined that I would never see him again. That the rest of my life would be the way it had been before he laid my head against his guitar, before he swept me in a giant’s swing up to the stars. I could not go back. I would do anything I had to not to go back to the life I would have without him.
“I don’t care what I have to do,” I said.
“Just for your information,” Didi said, her eyes holding mine, “I’m not groupieing anymore. That part is over. I just wrote to all the Kumfort Gurlz, telling them I’m through. From now on it’s going to be all about Didi. My music. My career.”
“Good. That’s good, Deeds. No more groupieing.” No more of what I’d seen last night.
“Good?” she asked, offended. “It’s great. It’s way overdue. It’s my turn. I’ve spent way too much of my life focusing on everyone but me. Madonna had a record contract by my age! Shit, this town sucks so bad. I am never going to get anything going unless I leave this hole. I have got to get out of here.”
I figured that this would be the motif for a very long summer and was surprised when, just as suddenly as the black clouds had blown in, they lifted and Didi was all smiles again. She plopped back down on the bed, and even bounced slightly in a slumber party sort of way. “All right, this marks the official beginning of Operation Mystery Man. So? Details?”
I told her a chain of events but not how each link closed around the other. I gave her the prose version and kept the poetry for myself. I only slipped when she plucked up, by its stem, the cottonwood leaf that had fallen from my skirt.
“And what do we have here?” she asked.
I snatched it back but, before I could stop myself, burbled over. “It’s from the most enormous tree you’ve ever seen. From this park that’s hidden in the middle of this totally ordinary neighborhood.”
“No! You have to take me to see it.”
“If I could ever find it again. It was all dark and everything.”
“Hey, Rae-rae, don’t ever pursue a career in acting. You’re the worst liar on earth. If you don’t want me to see your precious park, just say so.”
“It’s not that.” It was exactly that. I wished I had never mentioned the park. My park. Our park.
“Whatever. Anyway, what would you say his mental state was?”
Her cross-examination style reassured me. “He said last night was the worst night of his life.”
“He give any reason why? Woman trouble? Money trouble?”
I knew it had to do with his music. With flamenco and having to be black to play the blues. But I didn’t want to tell Didi that. I wanted to keep that for myself. “Not really.”
“Okay, he played this amazing music for you. What was it? Classical? Jazz?” I shook my head no. “Don’t tell me, not country? He’s not some C and W asshole?”
“No.”
“Well then, tell me. What kind of music does he play?”
“What does it matter?”
“We need to narrow the known world a little here. You do want me to find him, right?”
“Flamenco.” As soon as I said the word, I regretted it. It felt like the one piece of treasure I should have hoarded. “He plays flamenco.”
“Oh, that is too easy,” Didi said. All she had to type in the search was flamenco, guitarist, and New Mexico, and a list of matches popped up. She brought up one after the other. I peeked over her shoulder as images flashed past of guitarists in puffy-sleeved shirts, guitarists in flat-brimmed hats, and guitarists in black suits with white shirts buttoned all the way up.
Suddenly the screen filled with his photo. It was the cover of his CD being sold on the site of a very obscure recording company. His head was bent over the neck of his guitar just as it had been the first time I’d seen him. Dark hair fell across his face, covering everything except his lips, his chin. I didn’t need to see his entire face; I would have known him from his hands, the fingers long, the beds of the nails the tiniest bit blue against his brown skin. His hands seemed older than the rest of him. Not wrinkled or spotted but filled with knowledge the way very old people’s faces are. They curled around the neck of the guitar, around the strings.
“Whoa,” Didi said, impressed. “I hope this is Mystery Man.”
I couldn’t speak, just nodded.
“Major hottie.” She ran a finger over his lips and spoke the name that appeared beneath the photo: “Tomás Montenegro.” Didi’s tongue expelled the first T as she pronounced his first name the correct way. She repeated it in her beautiful Spanish accent, giving it to me like a gift, “Tomás Montenegro.” Toe-mas Mon-tuh-nay-gro.
Vowels. So many vowels. Toe-mas Mon-tuh-nay-gro. Toe-mas Mon-tuh-nay-gro. Toe-mas Mon-tuh-nay-gro. The syllables ricocheted around in my head with the same propulsive rhythm as his music, then settled into a whisper that played as ceaselessly as the prayers that cloistered nuns never stop saying.
The only other bits of information on the page were the name of his CD, Santuario, his birthday, August 23, and a number to call to order the CD. Didi immediately started punching the numbers into her cell. I grabbed the phone out of her hand. “What are you doing?”
She grabbed it back. “Don’t spaz out. We’ll probably just get a recording.”
But as she dialed, the feel of his presence, of him watching me, mounted again until it was like spiders running up and down my neck. I was certain that the next sound I heard would be his voice. Didi held the phone out so I could listen to an automated message inform us that the number was no longer in service.
“Oh well.” Didi shrugged, turning her attention back to the Pop Tart. “We’ll really dive in after you sleep for a while.”
The jangly excitement that had kept me hiking all over the city for the past few hours made me protest. “I won’t be able to sleep. I’ll never be able to sleep again.”
Didi smiled indulgently, the wizened veteran amused by the new recruit’s greenness. “That’s what I thought after my first mission. Wow, we really are blood sisters now.” She broke off a big chunk of Pop Tart and held it out in front of me until I folded my hands under my chin and stuck my tongue out. She placed the piece of Pop Tart on my tongue as if it were communion. Then, in a rare moment of unbridled consumption, she stuffed the rest into her mouth and chewed. We grinned at each other through a mouthful of tart mush. A few minutes might have passed after I swallowed, but I don’t remember them. I only remember falling asleep with my mouth full of Pop Tart thinking that I’d never tasted anything so delicious in my life.