Didi barely came home for most of the summer before our senior year. Mrs. Steinberg had abruptly stopped drinking and, through her Internet connections and extended family back in Manila, had found a new life. She never talked to me about it directly, so I had to gather clues from peeking at her computer screen and eavesdropping on phone conversations. From what I could piece together, she had become an onsite screener of potential husbands for the daughters of friends and relatives back in the Philippines. This involved lots of high-pitched, hectic conversations in which vital information was exchanged; then Catwoman would leave for days at a time. When she returned, more conversations followed that centered on descriptions of cars, houses, quality of lawn care, overall impressions of neighborhoods. If that was all satisfactory, face-to-face interviews with the prospective suitor would be arranged. It seemed that Mrs. Steinberg was the perfect person to investigate exactly how an unknown American man might treat a mail-order bride.
With both Didi and Catwoman gone most of the time, the Lair revealed itself for what it was: a converted garage furnished by two high school girls. Being there made me lonely. I felt as if I were living in a monument to our friendship, a friendship that existed mostly now in memory. It was time to move on. I found a garage apartment on the alley behind the Frontier Restaurant. It was cramped and drafty, but it was across the street from the university, and I could walk to the academy in five minutes.
Everything shifted once I left. Maybe it was leaving the hideout where I’d holed up after Daddy died and my mother decamped. Maybe it was just not having Didi around. With Didi, I was the solid one, the one with her feet on the ground. It was like standing next to a flaming red billboard. I could be wearing chartreuse and still look fairly ordinary. Without the three-ring circus of flaming red distractions that Didi always provided, the chartreuse began to stand out. I started seeing a therapist at the Student Health Center.
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.
“Oh, brilliant. A light and lively funeral piece. Rae, come on, in a million years he’s not going to go for that. The secret to winning anything is to play the game on your field. You’ve got to control this deal or it’s going to get away from you. So decide right now what you want to dance and we’ll work on that. Period. End of discussion.”
“What? I just go in and tell him what I want to dance?”
“Absolutely. Oh my God, Rae, the duet, that is what you have to do. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”
“Uh, Deeds, it’s a duet. He’s not hiring two dancers.”
“Duet, right. My part is a joke. It’ll take, what? Five minutes to remove it and, honest to God, Rae, you nail that the way you did the other day and no one will be able to touch you. Pick up the other end, there.” She was already moving the table out of the way. I helped her haul it and the few other pieces of furniture in the apartment to the alley. We pulled up the rug and started reworking the duet.
She was right. It took barely five minutes to turn the duet into the solo it always was. When we’d finished, I started going over all the cambios again so I’d know exactly where the changes were.
Shaking her head, Didi stopped me. “Rae, you don’t need any more perfection. Perfection is your problem. Do it half as good. Do it sloppy. Do it like this.” She gave an extremely rough approximation of the last sequence. It was only a brief passage, but it perfectly illustrated the differences between us. Her timing and technique were for shit, but there was a superhighway leading directly from her heart to her face, hands, and feet. When I danced, my emotions took a donkey path. Didi tried to share her charisma secrets with me, but attempting to artificially inject the magic that came to her naturally was an arduous exercise in reverse engineering.
The next day, Bijou appeared and whisked Didi away. The last thing she said to me was, “Stop working. If you spend the rest of the time smoking opium, you’ll be in better shape than if you practice obsessively.” Then she left and I spent the rest of that week practicing obsessively. Each time I danced the solo, I improved. Still, I couldn’t help thinking how much more alive it would be if Didi were doing it. Tomás would choose her in a second. Thank God, she had no interest in playing second banana to another fenómeno.
Bijou left, and Didi reappeared with a contract to open for the singer’s next tour. That evening, I took her over to the academy where we found a janitor to let us into studio 110, and she helped me some more with the solo. A couple of hours into the rehearsal, a loud booming sound jolted me out of a concentration so deep that, for a moment, all I could say was, “Are we under attack?”
Didi dragged me outside where golden fountains of fireworks were exploding in the dark sky. “Happy New Year,” she said. “Here’s to dreams coming true.” Didi held up the panther bracelet I’d shoplifted for her on our last day of high school, and I fished out the cross she’d shoplifted for me.
“To dreams coming true,” I agreed. We clinked the cross and the panthers together as silver sparks rained down above our heads.