Cat in a Topaz Tango

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  So it was Latin to the core.

  The man was the matador, macho and lethal.

  The woman with her elaborate Spanish skirts was both the scarlet cape the matador wielded with swashbuckling dash and the wild creature, the bull to be conquered. Or not.

  Temple was always pro-bull whether it came to the ring or the rodeo, but this time she wanted the matador to win. Well, she wanted Matt to come off acceptably. To master his inner sexist and slayer. To outMax Max.

  This was terrible! How could she be so shallow? What was best about Matt was that he didn’t have any of that macho baggage. Oh, heck, like any other red-blooded American girl, she just wanted her sweetie to come off hot and sexy.

  Max could do this number. A given. He’d been a performer forever and knew how to turn sexy on and turn it off like a switch. Rafi could do this dance. He had that smoldering Latin love-hate attitude toward women, twice removed, culturally and personally.

  José would do it, exquisitely. He was from the culture.

  Crawford Buchanan couldn’t.

  Was she so wrong for hoping that Matt could?

  Yes, because she’d coaxed him into doing this gig, taking this chance, putting him out of his element. It was a good career move. It just might not be a good move, period.

  Temple swallowed. Her throat felt like a wad of gum had stuck in it.

  Everything that was good about Matt would not work in this dance. It would have to be a total acting job. He was cast utterly against type and could be exposed as a wimp in front of the whole world, although he was anything but.

  What had she been thinking?

  Crawford’s bass voice was issuing a dark challenge. “Tonight we separate the men from the boys. Tonight the matador rules the dance floor in the sexy pasodoble. Who of our quartet of competitors is man enough to command the cape and the bull and the killing ground?

  “Who will deliver the final thrust to his partner and competitors?”

  Temple was slinking down in her seat, Zoe Chloe Ozone curling up in anxiety within her.

  Mistake.

  She couldn’t watch.

  The order of performance and pairing of the partners was never announced beforehand, or known to anyone on the show but Leander Brock, the producer and judge, who gave Crawford his notes at the last minute. The dancers rehearsed in secrecy.

  Crawford was back, crooning verbally into the mike.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we have our first pasodoble couple, and they go together like Salt and Peppah.”

  Temple cringed at Crawford’s attempt at being hip-hop.

  “I give you . . . Keith Salter and Motha Jonz! Together again! Without interruption, we hope. Live and in passion”—Zoe Chloe almost hurled—“on the Dancing With the Celebs stage.”

  The audience ooohs celebrated the fact that Salter was upright, and back dancing. Scattered clapping audience members stood in tribute to the stricken celebrity chef’s grit in going on with the dance.

  He wore a gaudy black-and-white, embroidery-scrolled Cisco Kid outfit, if anyone remembered the early TV series that featured Latino stars seven years before Lucille Ball forced studio execs to accept her Cuban husband, Desi Arnaz, as a costar.

  The embroidery was the pattern you’d see on the huge sombreros of mariachi bands at Tex-Mex restaurants. On Keith it looked like a drizzle of angel hair pasta over a burnt potato pancake. Cheesy in a Velveeta way, not flattering. More nacho than macho.

  Motha Jonz was a tasty Latin sausage in ruffled scarlet satin stolen off of José Juarez’s back. They glared at each other in that fiery manner across the raised stage, then stomped down the stairs to the dance floor a fourth-beat off rhythm.

  “Lame,” a watching Mariah leaned across her mother to rasp in Temple’s ear. “Even EK could be sexier than Motha Jonz and she hasn’t the boobs to go with the costume.”

  The music was heavy on trumpets and castanets, but no amount of will could make the pair look sexier than an animated set of red pepper flake shakers maneuvering on a border diner’s Formica tabletop.

  Temple cringed, but Zoe Chloe nodded with sage teenage disdain. “Lame lamé mama!”

  Alas, Salter and Jonz were game but just as lame as she’d anticipated. The food poisoning incident had taken the starch out of the chef’s onstage presence, and Motha Jonz was just too hefty for him to dominate.

  Temple spent a full minute stifling giggles imagining this odd couple in each other’s dress. That would be a more believable scenario.

  The rest of the dance was plain painful, but the audience gave Salter a few, fevered huzzahs.

  “Undercooked,” Danny decreed. Keith Salter, he declared, “was the Taco Bell version of a matador, heavy on the stuffed enchiladas and light on hot sauce. Not your dance, either of you. The attitudes are stiff but the moves must be as supple as a fencing foil. You both got ‘stiff.’ Alas, supple eluded you. Six.”

  “Passive,” Leander echoed. “A pair of dancing bears lumbering about a bullring, a pair of dolorous bullfrogs courting on a lily pad, two dinosaurs sinking with their great weight into a tar pit, that would best describe your pathetic attempt at a pasodoble. Five.”

  Temple cringed for the winded and unhappy couple in the camera’s eyes, got up in froufrou like figures on a Weight Watchers midway point cake.

  “Well,” said Savannah importantly. “I . . . just . . . lurved . . . it.”

  The silence made its own impact but the panting couple looked toward her hopefully.

  “Wonderbar!” Savannah said in German, puzzlingly. “You were cooking, Chef Salter, and, Motha Jones, you were the peppa to his salt. Oh, yes, you were! You are on my choo-choo train from Savannah to Havana heaven, honeys. Hot Cuban crimes of passion.

  Whoo-whoo!

  “You are perfectly matched. So cuddly and cute! I like fluffy things with coot, chubby, widdle cheeks, top and bottom.” She winked, broadly and commended Motha Jonz’s commanding pacing and strong turns.

  Six, five, nine!

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Crawford’s booming bass trumpeted, “our next performers are that gay blade”—Temple cringed. Surely even Crawford . . . —“of the Olympic fencing team, José Juarez, and the queen mother of the P.M. suds, Miss Olivia Phillips.”

  Temple cringed again. Gay blade? Sure, point out Olivia was pushing sixty. Clod!

  After Crawford’s overhyped intro, the audience sat back.

  They were waiting.

  The lights dimmed, the music paused, and the spotlights showed two silhouettes at each side of the wings. A cigarette spark flared at each etched facial profile, then went out. The pair stalked toward each other.

  Another thrill of guitar music, two lean bodies profiled against the stage far pillar. A high Spanish comb and mantilla making the woman looked horned. A flat-brimmed hat, cape, and sword etched the man’s silhouette against a drawn red velvet curtain.

  José and Olivia were perfectly matched figures, like mobile wrought-iron images: tall, thin, dark, intense.

  Even everybody in the greenroom caught their breaths.

  This was a contender couple.

  A whip uncoiled from the man’s side to snap once. The woman fled down the four steps in a trail of trembling lace ruffles. The whip snapped and followed.

  When they reached the dance floor, she turned to confront him, haughty profile defiant, hands upraised to twine around each other like sinuous serpents. The whip cracked one last time and was flung aside as the dancers circled each other like courting scorpions.

  The man flourished a sword, then wrapped his scarlet-lined cape around it and wafted it to and fro, frowning at the circling woman, who seemed to spit disdain and seduction at him in equal measure.

  Her skirts swirled to match the cape as he advanced threateningly. With a grand gesture, he flung sword and cape to the floor, and seized her to flourish instead. He swung her from side to side like a ship’s sail in a storm, took her from standing to skating across the floor, a fallen heap of limp
skirts and suddenly—she was an uprising figure of spine and spitfire, challenging him again.

  José and Olivia made the perfect pasodoble couple, as lean and wired as whips, gliding in a lethal mating dance that picked up pace and tempo until they were coming together like lightning even as the moves of the dance had them spinning apart; she was thrown down and sliding across the floor like a fan of limp lace, only to rise when he drew her up for an anguished embrace.

  Their pasodoble was a dramatic battle of the sexes, their fingers flaring as they caressed each other’s faces, looking as if they’d like to scratch each other’s eyes out after a passionate kiss.

  The live audience was already standing and hooting and applauding before they took the final pose, him bent over her like a conqueror, but she rising up from her prone position, a serpent ready to strike.

  “That was awesome,” Mariah shouted, hardly able to be heard over the enthusiastic hooting of Los Hermanos boys and screams of junior dancers. Even Rafi and Molina applauded.

  Zoe Chloe Ozone kept strangely silent among the whistling, hooting, and screaming teens.

  What had she got Matt into? They didn’t teach that in seminary, for sure.

  Olivia was so winded it looked like she’d do a Marie Osmond dive before the judges let her vanish backstage to the greenroom cameras for a postmortem on their scores and the dance. José managed to uphold her and swoop up his abandoned cape and sword en route to the judges’ table.

  The judges rained praise down on the couple, Danny incisive and urbane, Savannah Ashleigh making a total fool of herself rhapsodizing over José, who offered a deep bow and sword salute to the only female judge.

  What a showboater!

  “Fabulous,” Danny (the traitor) said. “Perfect tempo, perfect intensity, a thorny rose of a pasodoble, totally flammable.”

  Leander was already nodding. “What can I add to that? I was utterly absorbed in the dance and the emotions. You both have outdone yourselves. The ideal partnership and you two are the ones to beat in this competition.”

  “Well,” Savannah said, and then paused. Of course everyone held their breath. She was always contrary. “You two were shocking . . . shockingly good. Olivia, you are my ‘vamp of Savannah,’ and you make the real one look like an ice cube, if I say so myself.”

  The results: nine, nine, nine.

  Temple calculated. Matt had drawn either Glory B. or Wandawoman as a partner. She prayed it was Glory B. As Matt had reported that Danny had noted so naughtily, Matt was used to slinging a petite woman around and this was what the pasodoble asked of the man.

  The seriously muscular Wandawoman? She’d been a rhythmless lump in her dances so far. Given the small number of contestants, it was too likely they’d draw each other again.

  So, fingers crossed: Matt and Glory B. And then . . . Dancing With the Celebs glory. It would take a lot to overtake José and Olivia, but Matt and Glory B. could do it. Maybe.

  “Now, ladies and gentlemen, our third scintillating couple,” Crawford announced. “The Cloaked Conjuror and Glory B.”

  No! Matt had drawn Wandawoman.

  A hand pushed down on Temple’s shoulder. “Take it easy, Ms. Ozone,” Molina’s husky voice whispered in her ear. “You’re hyper-ventilating.”

  In the greenroom, the clustered Los Hermanos Brothers rooted for CC, liking his massive masculine presence. None of them looked en route to massive. They were clean-cut teenage boys who could attract tween-age girls’ ecstatic devotion, with the only sexual pressure being in everybody’s heads.

  Temple remembered that stage of girly development well.

  So she would have to sit there, subdued, and watch CC flourish his usual cloak and toss Glory B. around like a graceful handkerchief. It would be his best dance, because his partner was so easy to handle.

  The Cloaked Conjuror’s usual cloak lined in crimson satin was now the toreador’s cape. Glory B., a tumbling leaf of scarlet burnt black around the edges came hurtling and spinning and sliding into the center spotlight. Her blond hair had morphed into a dead-black, high-piled wig edging her face with a wrought-ironlike mask of brunet spit-curls. She looked small and poisonous, like a teen pop tart Medusa, with a long-stemmed rose in her small white teeth.

  A mere webbing of black laces held her costume to her torso and the skirt was a peacock-tail grand swoop of scarlet ruffles overcast with spiderweb black lace.

  The routine began slow and sultry, CC’s bulky masked persona more suited to the role of bull, but making a commanding toreador.

  CC and Glory B. did not fight the battle of the sexes, but rather went through the motions with intensity, if not passion. The audience’s applause announced that they were pleased but not bowled over.

  “This dance,” Danny told the couple before the judges’ table, “is a paean to power. There is a ritual stalking element, which you both captured well, but beneath the controlled moves lies guts and glory, a life-and-death drama, and you danced right over the top of it.”

  Savannah jumped in out of turn. “Well, I thought the rose in the teeth thing was just too ‘cute.’ And when he tore it away and stomped on it, all I could think was those thorns must be hell on lip gloss.”

  “The thorns had been stripped off,” Glory B. interjected.

  “No pain, no gain, honey.” Savannah shrugged to display her ruffled off-the-shoulder neckline of scarlet silk roses, in case anybody viewing the show didn’t know who really ought to be out there shaking her flounces and stomping her high-heeled jackboots, so to speak.

  In the greenroom the girls giggled nervously.

  “She is so lame,” Mariah said.

  “So old for that dress,” Sou-Sou added. “Her shoulders look fat.”

  “And her mouth is just a funny blob,” Patrisha pointed out.

  Zoe Chloe resisted making a crack that obviously Savannah’s collagen had shifted to her collarbones. After all, she was the “older” woman in this youthful bunch and didn’t need to pile on here.

  Leander Brock shifted magisterially in his seat when he commented.

  “Of course I favor our masked friend the Cloaked Conjuror. He has deliberately handicapped himself by wearing disguises that limit his vision, and I do understand that problem. A stirring rendering, sir, but unfortunately the pasodoble is a stern, fast, sharp, stiletto-lethal dance, and you are a broadsword. Your partner couldn’t match your onstage strength.”

  Still, the pair walked off the set with two eights and a seven (from Danny), a respectable score.

  “Booring,” was the chorus from the greenroom kibitzers, boys and girls together.

  At least, Temple thought, CC wore a mask and any criticism that stung wouldn’t show.

  Temple was almost in cardiac arrest. Why had she encouraged Matt to enlist for this crazy, accident-haunted competition? Nothing had jinxed any contestants yet tonight. Matt was on last. He had Wandawoman to squire around in the most demandingly macho male role in all the dances, except for the final tango.

  Temple cringed inside Zoe Chloe. No one was going to outmacho José Juarez tonight. Matt was toast.

  Stomp ’Em If You

  Got ’Em

  “Matt’s next,” Mariah breathed reverentially in her ear, all hero worship and teen crush.

  Zoe Chloe managed to growl a sour “Olé,” but Temple stuck a fist in her big mouth.

  Take the shot. It’ll be good exposure for your career.

  Publicly humiliating your intended was so not a good move. She’d just never thought about this whole Latin dance thing. Matt came from northeastern European stock, Polish stock. They fought for centuries for freedom from foreign rule, not to kill cattle.

  But it was too late. Matt’s hat had been thrown into the ring.

  By her.

  And Crawford was already gloating at the mike.

  “Well, well, well. Our first three contestants have surprised the audience and the judges by turning in their finest performances of the competition so far. The pasod
oble seems to be the make-or-break dance. What will our mild-mannered radio guy do partnered with the formidable wrestler babe, Wandawoman? Methinks he’s outclassed in the weight department. In the center ring, ladies and gentlemen, gentleman Matt Devine and the lady who’s not for burning, but who could start a few conflagrations, Wandawoman!”

  Temple closed her eyes. And couldn’t keep them that way. She split her mascaraed lashes just a little.

  “Ai carumba,” Rafi muttered on her left. “Wandawoman is a heavy-metal load.”

  “Ouch,” Molina murmured on her right.

  “Don’t watch,” Mariah urged from her mother’s other side.

  The music again deepened into the Latin chords of big-bodied acoustic guitar, piercing trumpets, and shaken, not stirred Mexican maracas.

  Temple understood this dance celebrated the moves of teasing a bull to madness and then striking it dead of a sword stroke in the ring. She always rooted for the bull. Now she was obligated to cheer—symbolically—for the bull-slayer.

  José had copped the whip, sword, and mask of a Zorro costume. Chef Salter owned the plain black pants and shirt concession. The Cloaked Conjuror had captured the massive cape and boot approach.

  What could the exhausted costumers have left to do with poor Matt, who danced last?

  “Locked and loaded,” Manda had said.

  The stage was dark, one spotlight on the center.

  The guitar strings trembled.

  A man stepped from the dark pillar of the wings, caught in silhouette.

  His head bristled with stiff projections like a metal crown. Temple recognized the miniature projectiles. She’d signed some online petitions against the ignoble sport of bullfighting.

  Before the toreador even enters the ring, the bull is tormented by three banderilleros on horseback each sticking a pair of lances called banderillas into the charging bull’s neck and back. Six wounds tormented by the very act of moving, forcing the bull to run around the ring trying to escape the agony.

  The pain-maddened creature charges the cape-flourishing toreador on foot, distracted by the moving cape, not the human pole around which it flutters, until he’s drawn close enough for the bull-fighter to drive his sword into the killing point, the neck aorta. At least José’s sword was no longer on stage.