Tomás stood, took my hand, and we left without a word passing between us. After the volumes we’d just communicated there was no need. As we passed Didi shouted high-pitched congratulations, pretending that she’d intended my triumph from the start. I closed my ears to her. My heart had already been shut.
Tomás drove an old Ford truck that looked like a piece of turquoise, faded blue with streaks of rust running through it. The companionable chug of its engine was the only sound as we drove down Central Avenue. He passed several motels and didn’t stop until we reached the Ace High, just as if he, too, had spent the last years working to return to this place. When he came back to the truck with a room key that bore the number 312, my heart soared. What else could I conclude but that he remembered? It was as if we’d agreed, all those years ago, to meet back here as soon as we could, to return the instant I had learned all the secret flamenco codes and signals, rituals and rhythms that would allow me to enter his world.
We stepped into room 312. Tomás closed the door. At the second our bodies joined, time, the time that had stopped when he left me standing on Carlisle Avenue all those years ago, started again. In the glass of the balcony doors, I saw our reflections. The dim light behind us shone on the drapes, turning the mustard color gold. They were half open, framing Tomás and me as if we were onstage at the moment the curtains parted and the second act began. His head was bent above mine, his dark hair swinging forward, his face buried in my hair. My arms were raised, embracing him. He kissed me. I closed my eyes, but the image of us together remained, growing brighter, more golden, in the dark on the other side of my eyelids.
His smell was exactly as it had been the first time, sweat and marijuana and oranges. He tugged down the zipper on my skirt and it slid to the floor, a black shadow that I stepped over without a thought. I raised my arms high and he pulled the stretch top over my head. I pushed his clothes away.
The feel of his naked skin against mine was such a relief that I couldn’t remember how I had existed without it for any second of the past three years. It was both an immediate essential necessity and the most voluptuous luxury imaginable.
In the reflection on the balcony doors, he knelt, dark head bowed, his hands drawing me to him. My pale fingers were icicles melting into his black hair. I had been chosen. I was the one odalisque, the one girl out of the five hundred whose dance had won the sultan.
He stood. The intricate pull and bulk of his back muscles came alive against my palms as he bent to kiss me. I tasted myself on his lips. His flesh inside of me was a formality, the signature on a pact we’d made in this room all those years ago, the fulfillment of a contract we had already written in twelve beats. We fit together with an inevitability that made each touch, each kiss as familiar as it was thrilling. The night was of one continuous piece as we reenacted every note, every pulse, every advance, every retreat of the dance we had already choreographed.
When the room filled with murky predawn light, I watched as he slept. He lay on his right side, facing me. His lips, severe and disdainful when he was awake, puckered needful and plump as a baby’s in sleep. The black scrolls of his hair fell to either side of a broad shoulder and tangled with the gold chain around his neck. The chain jumped in rhythm to his heart beating through the vein at his neck. Women generally know better than to fall in love with beauty, the thing that the whole world can see and covet. They know to find what is only there for them alone. I tried to pick out flaws, tiny snags in his beauty that could be mine alone to love. Perhaps his nose was a bit too long? The furrows between his eyes, might they not deepen unattractively as he aged? His teeth were tanned by coffee and cigarettes, they were not perfect American teeth. His lower lip was dimpled and darkened at the spot where he always held his cigarette. All these flaws did was to make his beauty more memorable.
Tomás woke, caught me staring, and kissed each lid. We made love one last, exhausted time; then he wrapped his arms and legs around me and laid his head on my shoulder like the famous photo of John and Yoko. I toyed with his dark curls and breathed in his smell. He spread his hand across my heart.
“You might be the palest woman I have ever known.”
“I know. I’m an albino.”
“You’re beautiful. Rae. Rae. Ray of sunshine. X-ray. Can you see through me, X-ray? Pale, pale Rae.” He studied his dark angers curving around my breast, fascinated as a child making shadow animals against a wall. “Güera, rubia, gabacha, gringa.” He crooned the words that meant “pale,” that meant “other.” “Vermeer would have painted you. Scarlet here.” He traced a finger over my lips. “Lapis lazuli here.” My eyes. “Cream and rose here.” My cheek, throat, shoulder. He sighed and whispered, “I have to get back to the gym.”
His words were so at odds with his touch that I couldn’t reconcile the two. “Why?”
“A few more auditions.”
“But yesterday? There was no one after me. I was the last.”
“I know, you should have been. But you know the flamenco grapevine. Once word leaked out, Alma started getting calls from all over. Una bailaora from New York was supposed to have flown in last night. Another is driving down from Denver. There’s a pretty good scene in Denver. You’d be surprised.” He kissed my shoulder, sat up, and lighted a cigarette. The odor of Ducados, harsh and strangely Oriental, filled the room. He clasped the cigarette between his lips and, shutting one eye against a coil of smoke, pulled on his shirt.
“No. Don’t.”
Flipping his hair out from under the shirt collar, he froze.
“Don’t see any other dancers. Pick me. Take me with you.”
Motion started again. He buttoned his shirt. “X-ray, you are definitely in the running. I promise. Definitely. You are insanely fuerza en compás. Really, one of the strongest I’ve ever seen.” He offered the cigarette to me. I took it, dug out one of Didi’s joints, lighted it from the cigarette’s glowing end, inhaled as deeply as I could, closed my mouth over Tomás’s and exhaled.
Passing the Ducado and the blunt back and forth, we fortified ourselves with the illicit airs of flamenco. Tomás sagged back against the pillows, eyes closed, mouth gone slack. I lay beside him, unbuttoned his shirt, and trailed my fingers along his chest as I murmured in his ear, “Take me, Tomás. I am what you need. You might find a better dancer than me, but you will never find a better canvas for painting your art.” All those missions with Didi. All the flattery, the cajolery. These were Didi’s weapons. I took them and armed myself. “Your tour is to introduce the greatest guitarist in the world to America. Not the greatest dancer.”
I had clung to Guitos’s secret. Hoarded and harbored the knowledge that Tomás was driven by the fear that the Gypsy heritage he’d built his reputation on was a lie. It was time to use the one advantage I had: his secret. “I will be the light that exalts your darkness. I will be the pretender who proves your legitimacy.”
Tomás opened his eyes. Skepticism tautened his features. I had overreached. I was certain he suspected I knew his secret and would now hate me for possessing that knowledge. “Ozu!” he expelled the Gypsy curse on a snort of laughter. “What kind of shit do they teach you girls at that university? Lah-jit-tuh-mah-say?” He mocked the word with an exaggerated homeboy pronunciation. “What kind of shit is that?”
“Stupid shit. Kind of shit that says Tiger Woods can’t be the best in the world. Kind of shit that says he has to decide if he’s black or Asian or white. Kind of shit that says everyone has to declare themselves and be whoever their grandfathers back to Adam were.”
“Kind of shit that says a white girl can’t dance flamenco.”
“Kind of shit that says a white girl can’t dance flamenco.”
His grin, white in the dark room, was a goofy, stoned flag of surrender. I had done it. I had used his secret to turn us into allies. “Fuck it. When did I say I wanted to spend two days looking at dancers? I never told Alma that. Come here, güera.”He tugged me on top of him, sucked a hit from the joint, and exhaled it into my mouth. Flamenco communion. We’d both taken it. We both surrendered, sinking into the voluptuous abandon that was the birthright of all those born into flamenco. And all who could learn how to decipher its code.
We didn’t leave room 312 of the Ace High Motel. We stayed all day and made love. But Tomás never recalled that he had been there before. That he had met me before. Why should he? Why should he have remembered the girl he’d met once many years ago when I myself had now forgotten who she was?