We went home to the house on the river. Tomás stopped playing anything but cante jondo. His toque was drenched with loneliness, regret, abandonment, and betrayal. I assumed that the last, the betrayal, was his confession to me and I fell into a state of panicked rage. We talked about this in the only way we had ever talked about anything, through flamenco. Since we exchanged so few words, his every gesture took on heightened meaning. The entire time I’d known him, Tomás had always held his guitar the way the old-timers had, with the guitar resting on his right leg, pointing upward on a diagonal that allowed the left hand easy access to the fretboard. Around this time he adopted an even more torturous position that made the fretboard almost invisible, with his right leg crossed over the left, guitar hugged into the hip and tilted away from his body. He looked like Picasso’s Old Guitarist draped around the guitar, his left hand crooked painfully into a position that strained the muscles and made the nerves go dead. He complained about the pain, the numbness. Then he would go back to practicing with his instrument tilted even farther away.
One morning, I stepped out onto the porch and was surprised to discover that somehow the season had changed from late summer to winter with no fall intervening. The Sandias had turned a steely blue and a light dusting of snow crowned them. Tomás’s booker had organized another tour: San Diego, Phoenix, Chicago, Montreal. He had a big following in Montreal. All solo engagements. There was no mention of my going with him.
If there was a gap long enough between gigs, he flew home. What survived of our relationship existed in those sputtering installments. On the nights before he left again, I tried to inoculate him against other women. That winter, it always started with my pulling him close in the darkness, yanking his sweater off over his head so that in the dry air, static electricity crackled and flared and an aurora borealis flashed across his back, his arms. His hair would rise above his head, an unearthly frame for his ruinous beauty, the beauty that was both animating and obliterating my life. We made love in panicky, desperate sessions. I put up NO TRESPASSING signs on him with necklaces of hickeys and let him flay my neck, my cheeks, my breasts with his beard. We ground ourselves into each other, brutal at some moments, then tender. In the only arena I had left, I was competitive in bed. I intended that each swivel of my hips, each touch, each syncopation be better than that of any of the other women I knew he would sleep with. I gauged each erection, calculating whether another woman could inspire one harder, more enduring. His orgasms were how I kept score. Were the convulsions of passion strong enough to ward off interlopers? I clung to the promises made by the wet slap of our bodies.
I inhaled his odor, the smell of our animal selves, the fragrance we made together. Before he’d even left, the scent made me nostalgic for us. I kissed the furrows of his ribs, his flat stomach, my tongue running over the small hairs, letting my own hair tickle him, and moving downward toward the place where the smell was strongest.
Near dawn, I would creep out of bed and write long letters, inventories of desire cataloging everything we’d done, everything I still hoped to do. I packed these missives into his suitcase. I spent a fortune express-mailing them to hotels, concert halls, whatever address I had, wherever they would reach him before another woman did.
At dawn, I would drive him to the Sunport. We passed the bandage factory as the sky just started to turn pink with early morning light and we gazed upon the woman painted on the side of the building, raising her arms in a flamenco pose that came to look more and more like pleading.
Denial and fantasy. Longing and deprivation. Like a cactus that could survive on little more than the moisture in the air, I was made for the arid emptiness of the long-distance relationship. After years of sustaining a one-sided relationship, I was ideally adapted to subsist on Arrivals and Departures. I could live on airport moments alone. At the Departures gate, after he pressed fervid last-minute erections against me, I would will myself into hibernation until the next arrival. Then, as Tomás sauntered in carrying the Santos Hernandez guitar he would never dream of abandoning to the faulty attention of baggage handlers, my life would stutter and start up again. I didn’t question this contract since I’d written it myself. My consolation was that I was the one he came home to. Of the five hundred, the sultan had chosen me to wait in his chamber. He would leave, would visit others, but I had been installed in his personal quarters. I waited for him in a house by the river that wasn’t mine and wasn’t his, dancing to his CDs, waiting for him to return.
Each time he came back, his dark mood would have turned darker. He played nothing but soleares, the Gypsies’ songs of desolation and exile. Because I knew the code so well, I could translate the rhythms he played. I knew the songs of suppression, of a spirit yearning to be free. I knew that he believed his duende, his crazed flamenco passion, was suffocating. I assumed that he believed the blanket of domesticity I had enshrouded him in was the villain. I finally found the courage to ask if he wanted me to leave.
All he said was, “I have to show you something.” We drove to the Rosario Cemetery in Santa Fe and he led me to the Anaya family plot. Though I couldn’t have said where it had gone, a year had disappeared since the audition. The weather was as cold and gray as it had been on the day when Tomás had entered and Didi had exited my life. A black wrought-iron fence and thick hedges of lilac bushes encircled the plot, securing the rest of seven generations of Anayas. I spotted headstones with dates on them that reached back three centuries. Though the branches of the tall lilac bushes were bare and snow mounded over their roots, I could imagine that stepping inside the lilac maze when they were green and blooming would have been like entering a seraglio, a prison where scent alone could hold you captive.
“The twins,” Tomás said, pointing to two small graves, side by side, guarded over by a granite lamb. “Efren and Jacobo. They were my tío Ernesto’s cousins. They died when he was six, back in the twenties. They were all out playing when a storm rolled in over the mountains. Efren and Jacobo took shelter under a cottonwood. There was no thunder. Barely even any clouds. The two little boys were waving at him to come, get under the tree with them, when the lightning struck. He said everyone laughs at him, but when the lightning struck, he saw every bone in the boys’ bodies. He hated El Día de los Muertos. All those grinning skeletons, they reminded him of his cousins.
“Mi tío Ernesto.” We stood next to his great-uncle’s grave. “He introduced me to everyone in this plot. He told me that it didn’t matter that my parents weren’t Anayas; everyone buried here was my family. All the Anayas had come from ancestors who’d come from Spain. That made me an Anaya. And he made me Anaya. It didn’t matter what blood I had running in my veins. We’re all just bones in the end and my bones would end up here, next to his.
“He had that carved before he died.” Tomás pointed to the headstone. In the middle of the stone was chiseled ERNESTO TIBURCITO ANAYA. On one side was Doña Carlota’s name with the inscription BELOVED WIFE. On the other was Tomás’s name with the inscription BELOVED SON.
His long hair fell forward, covering his face. I would never have known he was crying if a cold wind had not lofted the dark strands away. I put my arm around him. After all the ways we had touched, at that moment when he needed the animal comfort of another human the most, he turned from me and walked back to his car. We drove in silence to the inelegant south side of town, past an empty lot humped with mounds made by prairie dogs, now hibernating in their burrows. We turned onto a street where no grass grew. All the small, square houses had lawns of round rocks. A semi cab was parked on the street. Tomás stopped in front of a house that looked like all the others and handed me his keys.
“Take the truck. Do whatever you want with it. I’ve got to go north. Spend some time at the cabin.” He didn’t reveal to me the name of the village that Guitos had said was his true home, where his heart was.
“I’ll drive you up there,” I said, but meant, Let me in. Give me a chance. Let me see the world I should have reshaped myself to fit.
“No, thanks. My cousin Chucho lives here. He’ll drive me.”
“When will you be back?”
“I don’t know, Rae. I need to think. Then I’ve got a tour coming up. They want me in Spain again. The biennale.”
“Will you come back before you leave?”
“Rae, I—I don’t know. Maybe. Don’t expect me. Don’t count on me. Okay? That would be best. Just don’t count on me.”
“That’s all? That’s all you’re going to say?”
“Rae, we... I... I’m sorry. Stay at the river house for as long as you want. I’ll send money. The bills are taken care of. I’m... I’ll call, okay?” He grabbed his jacket and his guitar and backed quickly away from the truck, his boots crunching over the gravel on the front yard. I didn’t see who opened the front door and let him in.
I drove home to the house on the river, knowing that Tomás would never return to it. I’d made a deal long ago to do anything it took to get him. I just forgot to specify for how long. The opiate that had been plugged into my brain the night I first heard Tomás play was ripped out. The withdrawal was, literally, physical. I felt the way I had after Daddy died: like I was perched on the edge of a cliff about to fall. Didi had pulled me back then. Now there was no one to rescue me.
At the end of the first week, I called HomeTown and told each succeeding person who answered and informed me that congregants weren’t allowed to take unauthorized calls that I was going to kill myself if they didn’t let me speak to my mother. I was lying, but it was the lie that occurred to me.
Finally, she was put on.
“Mom, it’s me. Cyndi Rae.”
“Cyndi Rae, what’s wrong? Are you crying?”
“Yeah, Mom, I’m crying. Mom, could you come?”
“There? To Albuquerque? Cyndi Rae, I work, you know I work. We just got an order in from a boutique hotel to do all their quilts. It’s the biggest account we’ve ever gotten. I’m Team Mom and half of my girls are down with the carpal tunnel. Even if no one takes off a minute from now till Easter, we’ll barely get the order done. And I can’t fly. You know I can’t fly.”
“I know, Mom.”
“I would if I could. You know that. I’m your mother. I’d do anything for you. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yeah, Mom.” My tears stopped. “It’s fine. I’ll be fine.”
“Well, okay, Cyndi Rae. I’m glad you’re fine. They need me. The hotel specified mauve and cream. They won’t accept the order if it’s anything other than mauve and cream. I have to get back.”
“Yeah, sure. Okay, Mom.”
“I pray for you, Cyndi Rae. Every night.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“Brother Ed needs the phone now, I’m going to have to go. Call me if you need anything else. I’ll do anything I can for you. Just don’t ask me to do things you know I can’t.”
“Okay, Mom. I won’t. Bye, Mom.”
I hung up and didn’t let myself think, just drove Tomás’s truck into town and went to see Mrs. Steinberg. I knocked on the front door. After a long time, I heard shuffling. My heart seized up. Didi was there. She was home and, from the heavy, slow tread, it sounded as if she might be sick. A muscular teenage boy wearing a sweatshirt with the sleeves torn off opened the door.
“Uh, hello. Is Mrs. Steinberg here?”
“She moved.”
“She moved? Where?”
He shrugged. The heavy bulk of his shoulders rose and fell. “Dunno. Malta or something. My mom’ll be home later. You can ask her.”
“Manila?”
“Yeah, that’s it, Manila. Hey, are you gay?”
“Gay?”
“Your name. Are you Gay?”
“Rae. I’m Rae.”
“Oh, cool. This weird chick came over and left some shit for you. She paid us to hang on to it. Said you’d be coming by. But shit, that was like a year ago or something. We almost tossed it.”
The footlocker was too heavy for me to carry. The guy helped me haul it out and lift it into the bed of the truck. Back at the house by the river, I had no one to help me unload the heavy trunk so I left it where it was and opened it there. The inside of the lid was covered with numbers printed so meticulously they looked like a pattern. Neatly packed inside were my best skirts and tops, my favorite shoes. Everything I’d left behind when I’d walked out with Tomás a year ago. There was a note from Didi on top.
One Month After That Goddamn Audition
Rae-rae, Hey-hey,
If you’re reading this, it means there’s still hope. It means you came to find me. I guess you found out that Catwoman finally did it. Finally moved back to Manila. So we’re both orphans now, right? Don’t stop reading! I know that last statement just pissed you off.
She was right and that made me even angrier.
I tried to find you until I realized you truly did not want to be found. I don’t know what you think happened at the audition, but it wasn’t enough for you to disappear: Jesus, you won, right? Talk about a sore winner. Hah!
Rae, you were astonishing at the audition. But, before you were astonishing, you froze. Whatever I did, whatever you THINK I did, I did to thaw you out. Obviously, he picked you, you’re with him. I miss you sosososo much. Fuck, Rae, he’s not even my type. He’s a BOY for God’s sake and I am so over boys! GRRLZ 4Ever 4Me.
I’m leaving too. Really no reason for me to hang around Bookay anymore.
Let’s face it, you are what I have in this life and I am what you have,
Didi
Call me. You have my new number
The pattern on the lid of the footlocker was Didi’s cell number written thousands of times. Underneath my skirts and shoes was her old cassette tape of AC/DC. I dug through the trunk, reaching back through the geological strata of our friendship while Didi’s signature song played in my mind, the one about dirty deeds done dirt cheap.
Everything Didi had rescued from the Lair was stored in ziplock bags and marked as carefully as if it all had come from an archaeological dig: A shard of the Temple of Dionysus we’d constructed together and she’d covered with a mosaic of glass from broken liquor bottles. A copy of one of her dad’s DownBeat magazines. A Puppy Taco take-out menu. “McKinley and the Tariff of 1890,” the American history paper I’d written for her. A black basaltic rock from the West Mesa.
Didi had cataloged every tick of our friendship. What I had assumed was service she’d taken for granted had been noticed, appreciated. Snow began to fall, sifting feathery flakes across the bags. The slippery pile of ziplocks was as much as I could claim of a record of my time on earth. It was the baby book my mother had jettisoned for Jesus. I swept the flakes away, closed the lid, and, with more strength than I thought I had, dragged the trunk inside.
The drug lord’s palace was freezing. I paced for an hour, fighting the desire to call her. I counted how many times she’d written her number on the lid of the trunk nearly a year ago. When I reached three thousand, I dialed. My fingers were stiff with cold and nerves. Each number I punched in, though, warmed me. She was right. I had frozen at the audition. And I was frozen now. Didi would thaw me. Didi would help me out of the hole. It was only then, with her phone just starting to ring, with the hope of rescue forming, that I could admit how much I needed rescue. It would be all right now. Didi had my back. She answered my call as if she’d spent the past year sitting by the phone waiting for it.
“Mi amor, mi amor, mi amor! Why didn’t you call sooner?”
I was overcome at the sound of her voice. My throat tightened against the sob of relief that rose from my chest. And then it hit me: the number she was responding to with such love was Tomás’s.
“Are you there? What’s wrong? Can you not talk? Is she in the room? Why are you calling from the river house? You said you were never going back there. Mi amor, what’s—”
I clapped the receiver down before she could finish asking what was wrong. Asking her “amor” Tomás what was wrong.