The Most Beautiful

by Mayte Garcia

  I went next door and said, “I want to do Kamasutra.”

  I developed a script with a three-act structure. The first act was the hits, because Mama gotta pay them bills. The second act was Kamasutra, because—wow. It was classical instrumental, and with a darkness and sexiness that a dancer would drool to move to. The third act was all new music, because our long-term vision was to eventually come together in one spectacular show we could take on tour together. It meant a lot to me that he treated me with such respect, never second-guessing or selling me short. From the early years of our friendship, he made me feel that my endeavors as an artist mattered as much as his did, but this was something beyond that; he was prepared to invest in my vision. I was absolutely in the driver’s seat, but I welcomed his input.

  “Everybody should look different,” he said. “Like their hair should be purple or electric blue or shocking pink.”

  This was before shocking pink hair was popular, so I was into that and figured I could run interference if anyone objected. After a few months, these dancers were like my kids. They trusted me. The advance press was going well. Booking was a challenge, because he was going through a period of being very anti-agent, anti-promoter, anti-everybody. He did all this himself. He’d pick up the phone and say, “Yeah, I’d like to come and play at your place for a couple days next month.” Whoever was on the other end of that phone call was instantly falling all over themselves to pay him whatever he wanted to be paid and make sure he had the right brand of bottled water backstage.

  He expected me to do the same thing and couldn’t understand why it didn’t really work that way for me. I was pretty good at a lot of things. By this time, I had experience directing music videos, editing, and being the company director. I was choreographer, stage coordinator, stage director, lighting—all that. But booking a company of forty dancers was a bit more complicated than booking myself at a Turkish restaurant. We had some choice words about it, but these arguments felt like Akhenaten and Nefertiti in a joint effort to rule the world, not like Mama and Daddy in a jealous rage. It felt like the soul exercise Prince wrote about in that letter so long ago. We were finally there.

  Mama says she knew the minute she was pregnant with me because she was monitoring her temperature every day with a basal thermometer. My basal thermometer was a super-fancy digital version of that, accurate to a millionth of a degree or something, so when it showed a slight shift three days in a row, I checked my calendar and realized I was late. I hopped in my pink BMW and dashed to the grocery store for a basketful of pregnancy tests. I went to my office at Paisley and held the first box between my hands, saying a prayer before I opened it. I took that one in the office, then went home to take the rest.

  The little plus sign wasn’t as bright as it was the first time, but it was positively positive. Excitement and fear tangled up and tied a knot in my stomach. My hands were shaking when I called my husband and said, “Can you come home?”

  “We’re rehearsing,” he said. “I’ll be there soon.”

  “No. Come now.”

  I sat on a kitchen chair, willing myself not to freak out, waiting for the sound of the big garage door and that distinctive jingling step in the hallway.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  Everything that I’d been feeling—excitement, fear, hope, caution—it all flashed through his eyes, before he took a deep breath and said, “You are?”

  I held up the little stick, but he already had me tight in his arms, laughing for joy, kissing me, kissing my belly, shifting into Papa Bear mode.

  “What are you going to do with the dance company?”

  “Not dance.”

  “Maybe we should cancel.”

  “No, they’ve worked too hard for this,” I said, “and I want to stay busy so I don’t obsess on every little thing with—with everything. But I won’t dance. I’ll take it easy, I promise.”

  “I’ll step up and help however I can.”

  It was the end of August. My OB calculated the baby’s due date: May 10, 1998. Mother’s Day. Mama’s birthday. It felt like a good omen.

  “Let’s not tell people right away,” I said. “Let’s get through the first trimester and make sure everything’s okay.”

  All we had to do was make it to November 19, I told myself. Then we could breathe again. We could open the door to that big playroom at Paisley Park, turn on the lights, and give ourselves over to the sheer happiness.

  He flew with me to the dance company’s opening night in Chicago. All the band members came, so I felt wonderfully loved and supported. And I was proud of what I’d created. During dress rehearsal, I felt a surge of pride and a capable yeah, I got this handle on life. The baby growing in my belly made me feel like a creative tour de force. One of the guys in the dance company came to me fussing about his wig, and in full-on Nefertiti mode, I said, “Wear the wig or go home. Don’t stress me out.”

  On opening night, I sat in the audience with a headset, giving lighting cues as the performance came off without a noticeable hitch, and my husband sat next to me, looking smug and comfortable. I did him proud, and he liked feeling proud. We went home and after some heart-to-heart discussion, we disbanded the company, promising to come back to it after the baby was born. It would take a lot of time and energy to turn a profit. For now, I wanted to focus my energy on the baby.

  I also worried that it was an expensive production to put on the road, and while I wasn’t super involved in our family finances, I knew that distribution deal had gone bad, and that was not a good thing. I had never asked a lot of questions about money, but one day he sent me along with one of his bodyguards to buy a new Jeep Cherokee—white with a cream interior and every option known to automobile kind. He sent me along to pay for the $46,000 vehicle with an American Express card.

  I remember when I was a little girl, the very first check I wrote (one of those fake checks you get in your junk mail) was made out to Daddy for a million dollars. This felt kind of like that.

  At the end of that summer, my husband played the Pyramid Arena in Memphis, and he noticed that Larry Graham was playing a small venue nearby that same night. There was an aftershow at Music Mix Factory in Nashville. called Larry and asked him if he wanted to come over and jam. He was elated when he called me afterward. He said that he and Larry had an unspoken rapport—they didn’t even have to look at each other to know where the music was going. Larry’s psychedelic soul/funk pedigree was stellar—he’d come up with Sly and the Family Stone—and he’d innovated his own particular style called “thumpin’ and pluckin’,” which involves slapping the strings and creating a whole different sound.

  But the connection my husband felt with Larry was spiritual, not just musical.

  “This man’s faith is so certain,” he said. “There’s no room for doubts or fears.”

  I was happy for him. I thought this friendship would be a healthy, positive influence. He told me Larry was a strong family man and a brilliant musician. He’d had a handful of R&B hits, one that crossed over to Billboard’s Top Ten in 1980. After that, his experience in the industry was more typical than my husband’s. He worked hard and toured hard with genuine passion for the music and genuine faith that he would be led in the direction God wanted him to go. When Larry and his wife, Tina, came to Minnesota to hang out with us, I was impressed with their daughter and their obvious bond as a family. Tina was a personality-and-a-half, with a great laugh and church-lady grace. Larry had kind eyes and a broad, easygoing smile, and he was unabashedly crazy in love with his wife, which I found charming.

  The only thing that made me a little uncomfortable was that Larry sometimes went off on these long sermons about—I don’t even know. I can’t even tell you what they were about. These long-winded teachings were like no brand of Christianity I’d seen before. The more I heard about the Jehovah’s Witnesses and The Watchtower and Armageddon and the pagan root of birthdays and Christmas, the le
ss it appealed to me. There was so little room for celebration and even less for doubt. This was not a problem for me. I respect the belief systems of others, but I didn’t feel that mutual “whatever peanut butters your jelly” vibe coming back from them. It just didn’t sit right with me.

  “I’m not judging. I’m just not feeling it,” I said to my husband after sitting through another mind-numbing evening. I smoothed my hand over my belly. “I don’t know what kind of medical treatment this little one might need. And when he gets here healthy and strong, I’m not going to tell him his birthday’s been canceled. We’re celebrating. Balloons, acrobats, those inflatable jumping things, petting zoo—the whole nine yards. You’ll think you died and went to Glam Slam heaven.”

  In September, he went out on the Jam of the Year Tour and took Larry with him. As fall went by, he worked on Newpower Soul, staying late every night in the studio, and I was determined to stay by his side. Sometimes by three or four in the morning, I was sleeping with my eyes open, but I sat on that studio sofa, my head bouncing to the beat.

  We welcomed every little sign of a healthy pregnancy. If I got light-headed or sleepy, he’d be there with his arm around my waist. He’d spread his hands over my midsection, measuring the little pooch that was starting to be noticeable. This pregnancy felt very different from the first one, and we agreed that that was a good thing. My weight was on point. My belly wasn’t growing much, and my symptoms weren’t nearly as visible. My boobs grew, and I got dizzy, but nothing else. We wanted to wait until the three-month mark to listen for a heartbeat and start getting ultrasounds, but we were confident that this baby was healthy. Come on, November 19, I prayed silently. We can do this, little one.

  On November 19, I woke up, prepared for a busy, joyful day. I went into the bathroom and found blood seeping out of me. It felt like a long walk to the telephone.

  “I’m bleeding.”

  He took a short, sharp breath. “Okay.”

  “I’m going to the doctor.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll call you.”

  “Okay. Bye.”

  Click.

  I went to the doctor’s office and got an ultrasound.

  “The good news is that there’s no heartbeat,” she said. “There’s placenta, but no fetus. Your body is trying to naturally expel the products of conception.”

  I remember thinking, Thank God. I was intensely, selfishly grateful for every minute I had held Amiir in my arms, but to prevent his suffering, I would have been willing to suffer anything—including the heartbreak I was suffering now. I sat in the car sobbing, trying to find the strength to go inside and tell my husband what I had to tell him. When I was finally able to face him, we stood in my office. I told him what the doctor had told me, but the words weren’t even necessary. The reality of another crushing loss hung in the air between us. It was impossible to read the expression on his face.

  “Are you—”

  “I need to get back to the studio.” And he walked toward the door.

  I went down to stay with Mama for a few days, and she was concerned when the bleeding didn’t stop. I’d done the research on miscarriages and hoped it wouldn’t be an issue, but after several days, it seemed to be getting worse, not better. I was trying to go out on tour with my husband as much as I could, but I was miserable and still bleeding. As soon as we got home, I went to the doctor.

  “She says I need a D&C,” I told my husband. “Dilation and curettage. It removes the lining of the uterus so you don’t hemorrhage.”

  “Nature will take its course if you let it.”

  “But nature isn’t always—”

  “Either we have faith or we don’t. Larry is always saying—”

  “Larry has a child! He should thank God for that and stay out of other people’s business.”

  It came out sharper than I meant it to. This isn’t how I’d seen the conversation going. I looked at my husband, searching for something that felt like the protective stance that used to make me feel safe and sure of the world. There was only that same off-putting certitude that had troubled me about Larry—along with a solid refusal to place my physical well-being over his own self-righteousness.

  “I’m not going to risk my future fertility for something I don’t even believe in,” I told him. “I’m going to do what the doctor says. I’m going to the hospital.”

  He looked at me, and there was a flash of… something. Concern. Grief. Or maybe just fear. He said, “Do you want Tina to come to the hospital with you?”

  “No, I want you!”

  “I don’t believe in what you’re doing.”

  “I have to do this. I could bleed to death. Maybe God is taking care of me by sending me a doctor.”

  He called his limo driver to take me to the hospital. A compromise, I guess. The D&C was done, and a biopsy of the tissue they removed showed XX chromosomes.

  “It’s called a partial molar pregnancy,” my OB explained. “The egg is fertilized and implants itself, but it doesn’t develop for one reason or another. It can be genetic or inadequate nutrition.”

  “Like a vegan diet?”

  “I can’t say without genetic testing. You and your husband would need to be tested. That’s really the only way to know what’s going on with you.”

  “Would it work if I did the testing myself?”

  “To some extent,” she said. “If you test positive for certain genetic issues, that could be the answer, whether he’s positive or negative. If you’re negative… do the math.”

  I knew my husband was not going to participate in the testing, but I needed to know. I tried not to feel like a traitor as they drew the blood for it. Fine. Whatever, I told myself. I’m just a birthday-loving pagan. Nothin’ wrong with that. I said nothing about it when the test results came back. There was no abnormality in my DNA. I didn’t see any need for him to know that at the time. I figured I’d let him play and let myself heal, and then we could go somewhere private and talk about our options. I counted my Vicodin every morning and tried to keep an eye on it at night. I tried to get back on track, tried to keep up. I sat in a public restroom at a stadium in Fargo or some such place, feeling like my body was being turned inside out, but I was determined to keep going until I couldn’t.

  One day, he surprised me with a trip to Versace. He wanted to buy me a gorgeous gown to wear to some upcoming event, but this thing cost more than my first car. I went back the next day and returned it. I didn’t tell him. It was a sweet gesture, and I didn’t want him to think I didn’t appreciate it.

  In the spring of 1998, my husband asked me to direct a music video for a song called “The One.” The lyrics he’d written for me described both the man he didn’t want to be—

  a man who’ll treat you like anything but a queen

  I ain’t the one

  —and the man he did want to be—

  treat your every step… like you’re walkin’ on holy ground

  I am the one

  It spoke so powerfully of how hard he was trying to find his way back to me, especially when he mixed an alternate version in which he sang, “My my my my Mayte tay tayyyyy, I’m the One.” The arrangement, a lavish background by the NPG Orchestra, is an intoxicating blend of jazz and Arabic vibe. I danced the lead with my husband and cast members of the NPG Dance Company as the women of the harem. The choreography felt natural and sensual, taking us back to everything that had brought us together in the beginning.

  We created a story within a story: Dressed as a Charlie Chaplin hobo, he comes to the door of a shabby house where a girl (me) and her mother bicker. He sees her open a book that transports her to a harem where they dance with all the beautiful young odalisques. They try to distract him, but he always returns to the woman he loves, and by the end, we’re literally bound together. We return to the real world on the shabby front porch, and I open the door to find him standing there. In the colorful dream world that exists parallel to that gray place, The Prince puts his arm
s around The Princess, and they are one.

  He gave me carte blanche to do this short film however I wanted, so I reached for the moon and got it: Rita Moreno was cast to play my mother. The first day on set, when I saw her in the flesh, every little Puerto Rican girl’s triple-threat dream, I had to go in the dressing room and sit with my head down for a minute. My husband came in to see if I was all right, and I said, “Do you know who that is?”

  He laughed and said, “Breathe. Get it together, and go do it.”

  I knew what I wanted, but I questioned myself. It meant a lot to have him show me such respect and approval, and to have Rita Moreno asking me for direction—I can’t even. Hyperventilation. She was alert to everything going on around her and willing to try anything. We went over the storyboard and discussed the scene where we’re arguing with each other, and she came up with some hilarious bits—blowing dust in my face and smudging my blouse with dirt—which had my husband in stitches. He laughed and listened and asked questions. Never once did he say, “Hey, you know what would be cool…” I couldn’t have asked for two actors I loved and looked up to more than these two. They both recognized how important this little film was to me and gave me everything I needed to make my vision a reality.

  From the first rehearsals through the last cut of the editing process, I kept my hands around this piece. My husband came and went from the studio while I was working on it. He asked me to thread a secret message around the vignette scenes on the pages of the book, and he wanted the opening words of the story to be “In the beginning…” but beyond that, he left the whole thing up to me. He loved that I sensed the beats—of the music and of the eye—in a way he’d tried to explain to other editors without success.

  “The One” is the truest work we created together. When you look at it, even if you don’t know the backstory, the love between us is tangible. There’s a shadow of sadness in the music, but the sensuality overwhelms it. There’s tension in the choreography, but it’s overcome by grace. I saw it as the story of us: two souls that drift apart and come together again, over and over, just like the story of “7.” In keeping with my belief in our eternal love, the video ends with a black screen that reads THE BEGINNING.