by Sarah Bird
Sitting cross-legged on her bed, plucking first the blue, then the red sprinkles off her Pop Tart, her hair skinned back, no makeup, Didi looked about eight years old. I thought she would seem different after what had happened last night, what I’d seen. But she looked exactly the same as always, exactly the way she had looked after dozens of other nights. The only thing different about last night was that no one famous was involved and I’d seen what usually only happened after I left. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered anymore except him.
“So? Tell,” she prompted. “Where have you been until five-thirty in the morning, young lady? Huh?” She bounced her eyebrows lasciviously.
“Deeds, it wasn’t like that.” It wasn’t like anything that had ever happened to Didi. She wouldn’t understand.
“Like what?”
“Like that. All hubba-hubba, baby.”
Tone. Like pygmies deep in the forest who can give a word a dozen different meanings just by the tone or pitch, Didi and I spoke a language of tones. One word, it didn’t matter what the word was, everything depended on the tone in which we spoke it. From that we could deduce all the rest. She read my tone, put the Pop Tart down, and studied my face. In the silence that followed, I heard what sounded like game-show music but had to be whatever jazz album Mrs. Steinberg had just sold. It was interrupted by her computer making the scary ambulance noise her software used to alert her that one of her auctions was getting some play.
“Oh my God, you met someone.” Instead of the mockery I would have expected, there was a whispered reverence. She did understand. I couldn’t stop myself then, I nodded, and made a face, a grimace that encompassed the enormity of what had happened.
“Oh my God,” she whispered again. “This is the real deal.” Briskly, she brushed sprinkles off her hands as she got down to business. “All right, what’s his name?”
Just Didi saying that pronoun, “his,” was enough to make me feel as if she had invoked his presence, as if he were in the room with us. “I didn’t... He didn’t tell me.”
Didi shrugged as if that were a small detail, an obstacle, like eating sprinkles in a color-coded sequence. “Okay, then, where does Mystery Man live?”
“I don’t know.”
“Phone number?”
“He didn’t give it to me.”
“No digits? Wow, this is going to take some serious reconnaissance. Recount your exact movements for me. You must have met him at the Ace High, right? Or did you leave as soon as we split up?”
I didn’t like her questions. She was treating this like a groupie mission. But it wasn’t. Next week, when Didi had forgotten about Julian Casablancas or whomever she was currently obsessed with, I would not have forgotten about him. Not next week or the week after or any of the weeks that would follow. “No, I met him there,” I answered, adding lamely, “but we left. Before. The cops. Or whatever.” I didn’t want Didi to know I’d seen her. In the alley. With the cop.
She stared into my face again and I couldn’t help myself. I remembered. Again, I saw the cop hauling her face to his crotch. I ducked her gaze. “Never mind. This isn’t like a, you know, mission.”
Tone. Tone never lied. Didi, insulted, bristled, “Well, then I can’t help you.”
She went to her computer and started writing an e-mail. I curled up with my back to her and replayed the entire night like a miser running her fingers through a chest filled with treasure. I saw the heart-shaped cottonwood leaves twirling down in the starlight, feathering across my face. I plotted the lines and curves of his face, noting that his nostrils were perfect teardrops. Thinking about him made something fizz beneath my bottom rib like a fuse sizzling that would soon detonate my heart. He was so enormous in my mind that I imagined I could look out the window and find him looming above the city bigger than Sandia Peak. I thought about the taillights disappearing in the distance as he headed off toward the interstate. I didn’t know his name. He didn’t know mine. Before last night, I could never have imagined someone like him in my life. Now I could not imagine living without him. I panicked. “Didi, please, you have to help me.”
When she turned back around, she didn’t look like a kid anymore. Early morning sun raked in the low window, settled on the hard planes of her face, and lighted what was behind the harshness: she knew I knew. “So you want him?”
Want him? Last night, it had seemed too much of a presumption to ask him his name. How could I say it? How could I say I wanted him?
“I want him.”
“You really want him?”
“I really, really want him.”
“This is the one?”
“This is the one.”
“And you don’t care what you have to do to get him?”
“I don’t care what I have to do to get him.” I answered automatically, but automatic wasn’t good enough.
“You don’t care what you have to do to get him, even if it’s...”
For a sliver of a second, the defiance that I thought saturated Didi down to her bones disappeared. The image in her mind transferred itself to mine and I saw her kneeling in the perfect circle of her matador skirt spread on the black asphalt of the Ace High Motel parking lot. That image was a pact laid between us waiting for my acceptance. If I repeated her words, it would signal my agreement that nothing Didi did in the pursuit of her obsessions could be considered a humiliation. I thought of taillights disappearing and imagined that I would never see him again. That the rest of my life would be the way it had been before he laid my head against his guitar, before he swept me in a giant’s swing up to the stars. I could not go back. I would do anything I had to not to go back to the life I would have without him.
“I don’t care what I have to do,” I said.
“Just for your information,” Didi said, her eyes holding mine, “I’m not groupieing anymore. That part is over. I just wrote to all the Kumfort Gurlz, telling them I’m through. From now on it’s going to be all about Didi. My music. My career.”
“Good. That’s good, Deeds. No more groupieing.” No more of what I’d seen last night.
“Good?” she asked, offended. “It’s great. It’s way overdue. It’s my turn. I’ve spent way too much of my life focusing on everyone but me. Madonna had a record contract by my age! Shit, this town sucks so bad. I am never going to get anything going unless I leave this hole. I have got to get out of here.”
I figured that this would be the motif for a very long summer and was surprised when, just as suddenly as the black clouds had blown in, they lifted and Didi was all smiles again. She plopped back down on the bed, and even bounced slightly in a slumber party sort of way. “All right, this marks the official beginning of Operation Mystery Man. So? Details?”
I told her a chain of events but not how each link closed around the other. I gave her the prose version and kept the poetry for myself. I only slipped when she plucked up, by its stem, the cottonwood leaf that had fallen from my skirt.
“And what do we have here?” she asked.
I snatched it back but, before I could stop myself, burbled over. “It’s from the most enormous tree you’ve ever seen. From this park that’s hidden in the middle of this totally ordinary neighborhood.”
“No! You have to take me to see it.”
“If I could ever find it again. It was all dark and everything.”
“Hey, Rae-rae, don’t ever pursue a career in acting. You’re the worst liar on earth. If you don’t want me to see your precious park, just say so.”
“It’s not that.” It was exactly that. I wished I had never mentioned the park. My park. Our park.
“Whatever. Anyway, what would you say his mental state was?”
Her cross-examination style reassured me. “He said last night was the worst night of his life.”
“He give any reason why? Woman trouble? Money trouble?”
I knew it had to do with his music. With flamenco and having to be black to play the blues. But I didn’t want to tell Didi that.
I wanted to keep that for myself. “Not really.”
“Okay, he played this amazing music for you. What was it? Classical? Jazz?” I shook my head no. “Don’t tell me, not country? He’s not some C and W asshole?”
“No.”
“Well then, tell me. What kind of music does he play?”
“What does it matter?”
“We need to narrow the known world a little here. You do want me to find him, right?”
“Flamenco.” As soon as I said the word, I regretted it. It felt like the one piece of treasure I should have hoarded. “He plays flamenco.”
“Oh, that is too easy,” Didi said. All she had to type in the search was flamenco, guitarist, and New Mexico, and a list of matches popped up. She brought up one after the other. I peeked over her shoulder as images flashed past of guitarists in puffy-sleeved shirts, guitarists in flat-brimmed hats, and guitarists in black suits with white shirts buttoned all the way up.
Suddenly the screen filled with his photo. It was the cover of his CD being sold on the site of a very obscure recording company. His head was bent over the neck of his guitar just as it had been the first time I’d seen him. Dark hair fell across his face, covering everything except his lips, his chin. I didn’t need to see his entire face; I would have known him from his hands, the fingers long, the beds of the nails the tiniest bit blue against his brown skin. His hands seemed older than the rest of him. Not wrinkled or spotted but filled with knowledge the way very old people’s faces are. They curled around the neck of the guitar, around the strings.
“Whoa,” Didi said, impressed. “I hope this is Mystery Man.”
I couldn’t speak, just nodded.
“Major hottie.” She ran a finger over his lips and spoke the name that appeared beneath the photo: “Tomás Montenegro.” Didi’s tongue expelled the first T as she pronounced his first name the correct way. She repeated it in her beautiful Spanish accent, giving it to me like a gift, “Tomás Montenegro.” Toe-mas Mon-tuh-nay-gro.
Vowels. So many vowels. Toe-mas Mon-tuh-nay-gro. Toe-mas Mon-tuh-nay-gro. Toe-mas Mon-tuh-nay-gro. The syllables ricocheted around in my head with the same propulsive rhythm as his music, then settled into a whisper that played as ceaselessly as the prayers that cloistered nuns never stop saying.
The only other bits of information on the page were the name of his CD, Santuario, his birthday, August 23, and a number to call to order the CD. Didi immediately started punching the numbers into her cell. I grabbed the phone out of her hand. “What are you doing?”
She grabbed it back. “Don’t spaz out. We’ll probably just get a recording.”
But as she dialed, the feel of his presence, of him watching me, mounted again until it was like spiders running up and down my neck. I was certain that the next sound I heard would be his voice. Didi held the phone out so I could listen to an automated message inform us that the number was no longer in service.
“Oh well.” Didi shrugged, turning her attention back to the Pop Tart. “We’ll really dive in after you sleep for a while.”
The jangly excitement that had kept me hiking all over the city for the past few hours made me protest. “I won’t be able to sleep. I’ll never be able to sleep again.”
Didi smiled indulgently, the wizened veteran amused by the new recruit’s greenness. “That’s what I thought after my first mission. Wow, we really are blood sisters now.” She broke off a big chunk of Pop Tart and held it out in front of me until I folded my hands under my chin and stuck my tongue out. She placed the piece of Pop Tart on my tongue as if it were communion. Then, in a rare moment of unbridled consumption, she stuffed the rest into her mouth and chewed. We grinned at each other through a mouthful of tart mush. A few minutes might have passed after I swallowed, but I don’t remember them. I only remember falling asleep with my mouth full of Pop Tart thinking that I’d never tasted anything so delicious in my life.
Chapter Thirteen
I woke to find Didi hard at work with her protractor and ruler. “I scoured the Internet,” she said when she saw that my eyes were open. “But there is no other trace of Tomás Montenegro, flamenco guitarist, so we turn to the stars, right?”
Pausing only to consult various texts and mumble names of planets, houses, cusps, trines, triplicity, anaretic degrees and aspects, Didi drew circles surrounding smaller circles. These she filled with numbers followed by signs for degree, latitude, longitude, and all the houses of the zodiac. In the inner circle, she carefully drew lines in pink, brown, and green from one precisely marked point to another, all the while muttering things like “Sun position, eighteen degrees forty minutes of Scorpio.” And “Mercury, twenty-nine degrees, forty-five minutes of Libra.” At the top of the paper she’d written his name, Tomás Montenegro. I knew then how seriously she was taking my quest: she was throwing his chart.
As she finished mapping out Tomás’s destiny, her jaw dropped. She turned to me. “This is the most fucking amazing thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life!”
I didn’t usually listen to Didi’s bulletins about the most fucking amazing things she’d ever seen in her entire life since she averaged roughly eighteen such sightings a day. But since this was Tomás, I jerked to attention. “What?”
“All the positions of his planets are exactly the same as Julie’s.” She meant Julian Casablancas of the Strokes. She shook her head in wonder as she studied Tomás’s chart. “Wow, they’re virtually identical.”
“Tell me! Tell me!” I insisted, wide awake.
“Okay, okay. Let’s see.” She studied the arcs and transits. “Venus in Aries. Wow, that means he is an ardent and passionate lover.” Didi wiggled her eyebrows at me. “I’m starting to see the attraction.”
I shrugged, happy as always to participate in the fiction that I was a hot number. “What else? What else?” I wanted every clue Didi could extract from the stars or tea leaves or reading head bumps. I didn’t care. All that mattered was the answer to the question, “How do I get him?”
“How do you get him?” Didi repeated as she drew her finger along the lines she had charted, the lines of his destiny that, I prayed, I would entangle with my own.
“Okay, here it is.” Didi pointed to the mandala tangle in the inner circle. “His moon is in the tenth house, which means the guy has this constant struggle between security and doing the high-wire act that his talent demands.” She looked up. “That’s it. That is how you get him.”
“What! What!? Quit being so vague! Tell me, tell me how I get him!”
“Chill, okay? Okay, you have to be both this total, total hot vamp and the big, plushy mama cooking up pots of posole or whatever. You know someone who will be sexy and totally take care of him.”
I absorbed this information, soaking it right into my DNA, willing, anxious, no, ecstatic to change everything about myself to make it fit whatever template would be most likely to ensnare him
“Oh God, look at his south node.”
“What the fuck is a fucking south node?”
Didi’s eyebrows jerked up at my language, at my forgetting our roles: she was the bad girl, I was the goody-goody sidekick. But already, in that very moment, I had begun turning myself inside out, reversing all my polarities, waiting to become whatever, whoever, would make him mine. I tried again. “The south node?”
“Essentially that’s whatever tendencies he developed in past lives. The north node is what he’s gotta work on in this life. Since they’re one hundred and eighty degrees apart, they totally control his relationships. His work houses and his love houses are inseparable. Can’t have one without the other. His work is who he is and who he’s gonna fall in love with.”
“What does that mean? Should I learn to play guitar?”
“God, no. Guitar guys do not like guitar chicks. And don’t say Courtney Love cuz she plays for shit.”
“What then?”
Before Didi could answer, the phone rang. My first thought was It’s him. How did he find me? But it was
only Alejandro wondering when we were coming in to work.
Outside, I was surprised both by how bright the world was, sizzling in the sunshine of an early summer morning, and by how new it was. Every cottonwood tree we passed flaunted the green hearts that told the world my secret. His presence was so strong that it felt as if he were in the car with us. As we cruised down Central Avenue, I could barely glance at the Aztec, the De Anza, and just the barest peek at the Ace High as we pulled into the parking lot of the Puppy made me feel as if I were going to throw up. I felt his eyes on me as I got out of the car and walked across the lot.
Ever since my mother left, Alejandro had let us eat before we started work. Since I’d moved in with Didi, I was always starving because there was never any food at her house. He had my favorite, blue corn enchiladas with green chile, all ready and waiting for me. But I couldn’t look at them. The jangly excitement that had seized hold of me the instant I set eyes on Tomás clamped around my throat so tightly that I couldn’t even think about food.
“Not hungry?” Didi asked, teasing as she picked sesame seeds off the bun of her Mexi-burger and popped them one by one into her mouth. “You are so going to waste away.” Didi, mistress of the weirdo diet, was jealous that I wouldn’t have to resort to any of her old standbys—laxatives, a finger down the throat. “You are so lucky. Puking rips hell out of the old tooth enamel.” She tapped her front teeth, which she’d had to bleach after they’d turned slightly gray from years of frolics with reverse peristalsis.
“It’s gonna be all right, mija,” Alejandro said softly when he caught me pushing the enchiladas away. He had been even nicer than usual to me since my mother left. But that day, hearing him talking to me as if I were his daughter made me miss Daddy so much that tears I pushed back stung my eyes. I knew I wouldn’t have told Daddy about Tomás if he were still alive, but it would have been nice to think that I could have.
Didi, who usually got mad at me when I was sad, surprised me that day by putting her arm around my shoulders and whispering in my ear, “He knows.”