The Flamenco Academy

by Sarah Bird

  I didn’t have time to ask her who she meant, Daddy or Tomás, because the dinger started chiming madly and my breath caught. Against all logic, I was certain it was him. Of course, it was one of Didi’s disgruntled fan/customers running back and forth over the hose that made the clinger ring.

  “Take it away, ladies,” Alejandro said as he shoved open the back door to leave.

  Didi was actually eating her burger, so I slid back the order window, told the driver, a middle-aged guy in a Dodge Ram truck, that Didi was busy, and tried to take the order he barked at me: “Three Mexi-meals, cut the onions, hold the cheese on one, two diet D.P.s, a chocolate shake, two orders of tater tots, extra pico.” But his order slid through my mind as if he hadn’t spoken. All the synapses I’d formerly used to tend to details were now devoted to Tomás. I was making the truck guy repeat his order when a maid at the Ace High across the street opened one of the motel’s glass doors to shake a rag out on the balcony and a gold curtain flashed in the sunlight. My heart stopped and all I could do was stare, certain that he was about to step onto the balcony.

  Didi gently pried the pad out of my frozen hand and took over for me. Which is exactly what she was doing when a perfectly restored old Jaguar XKE pulled in. Logically, I knew it couldn’t be Tomás, but that didn’t stop me from peeking over Didi’s shoulder just to make sure. I saw everything that Didi did: the driver was in his mid-twenties, okay but far from great-looking, and obviously rich. He had CDs of Marilyn Manson, Lou Reed, the New York Dolls, and the Strokes spread across the passenger seat. We also noticed a travel mug with a Brown University logo and some suspicious scars on the inside of his left arm that brought a distant memory to mind of one of Sheriff Zigal’s drug lectures back in Houdek and the word tracks. I’m sure that Didi, who was always several steps ahead of me, had already put all the symptoms together and diagnosed a bohemian preppy with motive and means enough to finance a walk on the wild side.

  Didi leaned out the window until she was nearly close enough to lick his ear and asked, “You like the Strokes?”

  The driver picked up the CD, shrugged, and tossed it aside. “They’re okay.” He was one of those guys who acts like he’s handsome even though he isn’t. Everything about him was too long: his face, his nose, his teeth, his long neck with its long Adam’s apple. He looked as if he’d been held over a flame and melted. That didn’t stop him from staring at Didi and licking his lips in a cheesy way like some jerk watching a stripper circling a pole. None of that seemed to bother Didi. “Depends who you’re talking about. Julie can be kind of a prick. Al’s not bad. Fabrizio. Well, what can I say about Fabs?”

  “You know Julie and Fabs?”

  He shrugged. “I went to boarding school with them in Switzerland.” He kept staring at Didi like he was about to ask for a lap dance, running his tongue around his lips. He held a cell phone up. He asked Didi, “You want to talk to him?”

  “No! You can get Julie Casablancas on the phone?”

  “Come with me and find out.”

  As Didi looked at me, considering, he yelled out, “And bring a couple orders of taquitos to go!”

  “I thought you were through with—”

  Didi cut me off. “This isn’t a mission. He’s not famous.” She smiled. “He just knows famous people.” She handed me the order pad. “You’ve got Mystery Man now. Maybe it’s time for me to see what’s out there.”

  By the time Didi was out the door, the guy had cleared away the CDs so she could occupy the passenger seat.

  “Didi!” I yelled and she stopped for a moment as she was getting in the Jag. Then I didn’t know what to say. Be careful? Of what? Didi had negotiated much worse situations. She jumped into the car and was gone before I knew what I wanted to tell her.

  She came home that night very late, giddy as a game-show contestant who’s just picked the right curtain. She threw her arms around me. “I love you. God, I love you. I know you love Mystery Man best now, but I still love you best.”

  She was high. Extremely high. “What did that guy give you?”

  “ ‘That guy’? His name is Paco.”

  That sounded affected to me since he was such a WASP.

  “Oh, Rae-rae, you will love Paco and he will love you.” Didi dragged out her big duffel with wheels, opened drawers, and stuffed whatever she scooped out into the bag.

  “What are you doing? Are you going somewhere?”

  “God, I sure the hell hope so.” She laughed the way really stoned people laugh when they think they’re in on a joke that the straight world will never get. She yanked open a drawer and shoveled bras and panties into the bag.

  “Didi,” I said sternly, “where are you going right now?”

  “To camp!” she declared brightly as if that were the punch line to her special stoned-people joke. “A special camp in New York where I’ll get merit badges in schmoozing, seeing, and being seen, and”—Didi had to pause for a full laugh attack—“using people on my way up!”

  “Didi, really, where are you going?”

  “New York. Can you believe it? Paco went to that same ritzy school in Switzerland as Julian Casablancas did! They smoked hash together! Or, well, actually, Paco’s cousin did.” Didi always had a fine disregard for degrees of separation. “But the important thing is Paco is way connected in the whole New York glam-revival scene and—best part!—he loveloveloves my music.”

  “Your music?”

  “The stuff I’ve been working on. I haven’t written much down. It’s mostly in my head. I told Paco my influences and he totally gets it. What? Did you think I was going to be a groupie my whole life?”

  A horn honked outside. “Oops, Pock said if I wasn’t back in five minutes, I would have to travel naked.” Didi dragged the bag toward the door like a giant black dog on a leash.

  I jumped up and grabbed her. “Didi, you’re not going anywhere. You’re stoned.”

  She let the leash drop. The bag fell to the floor and with it any hint that she might be high. She suddenly seemed more sober than I’d ever seen her. “I’m not leaving because I’m high. Rae, I got high so I could leave. I couldn’t do this straight and I have to. I have to leave. School is out, baby. What could possibly, in a million years, happen to me that would be worse than spending the next three months sweating like a piece of old cheese in that grease trap?”

  “But Didi, you don’t know anything about this guy.”

  “Quit calling him ‘this guy.’ I didn’t call Tomás ‘this guy.’ And I know everything I need to know about him. I know he’s rich, I know he’s connected, and I know”—she held up her pinkie and leaned in close to me—“I can wrap him around this. And that is a hell of a lot more than you know about Mystery Man, and tell me you wouldn’t leave me for him in a heartbeat.”

  “Didi, I’m not leaving you. I’d never leave you.”

  She laughed as if the whole conversation had been a joke and I was stupid to have fallen for it. “Jeez, Rae, don’t lez out on me. Here.” She tossed me the keys to the Mustang. “Keep the battery charged.”

  “Didi, no. You haven’t even told your mom. Didi, you can’t just leave like this!”

  But she was already out the door.

  A few hours later, while I was debating whether to tell Mrs. Steinberg or just call highway patrol myself, Didi called on Paco’s cell phone. She was singing, “ ‘Would you get hip to this kindly tip?’ ”

  I knew right off that I was supposed to sing back, “ ‘Get your kicks on Route 66!’ Deeds, you’re taking Route 66!”

  “As far as we can!”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Okay? This is how I want to live the rest of my life.”

  “I miss you.”

  “Can you hear me, because I can’t hear you!”

  “I said I miss you. I really miss you!” But the call had already ended in a crackle of static.

  The next call came around two that morning. I was on Didi’s computer, reading everything I could find on f
lamenco. She was singing, “ ‘Cadillac, Cadillac. Long and dark, shiny and black,’ ” when I answered.

  I sang back, “ ‘Don’t let ’em take me to the Cadillac Ranch!’ ”

  “Ooo, girl knows her Boss.”

  “You’re at the Cadillac Ranch?”

  “At this very moment, Paco is spray-painting a giant white circle on top of all the graffiti so we can put the title of my first CD up there: DIDI’S CD. Isn’t that perfect? A really good friend of Paco’s does the cover art for the Strokes. Paco already called him and the guy is pumped to do my cover. Oh, he finished. I want to put the title up there while it’s still wet so it’ll run. Bye!”

  I knew they’d detoured when she called a few days later and sang a question, “I’m going to—?”

  “ ‘Graceland! Graceland! Memphis, Tennessee!’ ” I sang back. “You got off of Route 66.”

  “Had to come and pay our respects to the King, right? But, God, Graceland is so small, you wouldn’t believe it. And tacky? What’s the point of being an icon if this is all you’re going to do with it? Oh, Paco is waving for me. He’s doing a series of me in front of Japanese tourists.”

  Didi forgot to turn the phone off and I heard Paco pretending that Didi was famous and they were on an important photo shoot. By the time the battery went dead the Japanese tourists were asking Didi for her autograph.

  The next day, I visited every record store listed in the Yellow Pages: Borders, Music Mart, Hastings, Wherehouse. None of them carried Tomás’s CD, Santuario. There was only one shop left on my list, Onomatopoeia Records, an indie on Central. I didn’t usually have the nerve to enter Onomatopoeia alone since the guys who worked there had a withering sense of superiority they used to shrivel anyone caught buying uncool music. With Didi, I was fine since she was cool enough for two people, but on my own it took an act of courage.

  Inside the front door was a bulletin board blanketed with flyers for concerts and ads for henna tattooing, piercing, and a band seeking “Bass player into neo-funk.” I pretended to be interested in an ad for “body modification” and wished Didi were with me as I sneaked peeks at the store, searching for a bin labeled FLAMENCO. I couldn’t see one and tried to slip in unnoticed, but the clerk, a chunky guy with tattooed calves peeking out from beneath long homeboy shorts that held a wallet on a long chain, immediately lumbered over. “Need some help?” he asked, his attention on reordering the old vinyl records in the bin next to me.

  I could not imagine saying Santuario out loud, much less uttering Tomás’s name, so I shrugged and answered, “Just looking.”

  I guess the clerk didn’t get many just browsers because he snorted and said, “Whatever,” leaving me to search through all the bins that I thought might apply: Guitar. Instrumental. Latin.

  I was about to give up when the clerk appeared beside me again. “Sarah McLachlan, Liz Phair, Indigo Girls, Lisa Loeb.” He pointed down the aisle. “I’ve got them all quarantined over there in a special Lilith Fair section I just created.”

  “I’m not looking for them.”

  The clerk made a face at me to express both disbelief and disgust.

  “I’m not,” I protested. “I’m looking for Santuario, by—”

  “Tomás Montenegro. Put out by the now-defunct Kokopelli label. They went belly-up before the release. No promotion. Underground hit among the dozen or so aficionados who managed to snag a copy before the IRS seized everything. Not my cup of tea but a very tasty product. I’ve got one copy over in...” He went to a bin labeled WORLD MUSIC and pulled out Tomás’s CD.

  Once I had it, I was glad that Didi wasn’t around. She would have yanked it out of my hand and thrown it into the player in her car just as if it were any old CD. I rushed back to the Lair and didn’t even take the wrapping off until I was ready. I wondered if he might have touched that very CD. Maybe he’d delivered it to the store personally. The moment was so private that I couldn’t even bring myself to play it over the speakers. I clapped Mr. Steinberg’s old headphones on and carefully placed the shimmering disc on the player. Every click and whir was magnified. My heart was racing by the time the sound of his fingers on guitar strings reached my ears. The instant it did, I was back at the Ace High, my head against his guitar as he fed rhythm and passion, mastery and excess directly into my brain.

  Since listening to Santuario and daydreaming about Tomás took all my energy, I had none left over to find a better summer job than working at Puppy Taco. So when Alejandro, who’d opened a new location across town, offered me the manager spot, I took it. Unfortunately, the only interest I had in the Puppy Taco anymore was that it was across the street from the Ace High. All I did for entire days, long, hot days when the sun turned the stand into an oven, was stare at the motel and recall every second of The Night. I took out each moment I’d spent with Tomás as if it were a jewel on a black velvet tray and examined it from every angle. I replayed each word we’d exchanged, wringing a semiotician’s range of meaning from every utterance. I felt his presence constantly. He was the invisible audience for which I played my life. I searched all the cars that pulled in, stupidly expecting to see his face. I lost my ability to juggle five orders at a time and calculate tax in my head. Alejandro assumed it was because Didi had left, and he didn’t fire me. I was grateful for his patience and for my paycheck since it had been months since my mother had sent me anything from HeartLand HomeTown other than prayers and predictions of how badly I would suffer in the next life unless I accepted Jesus.

  With Didi gone, I got homesick and even started to miss my mom a little. But it was Daddy I really missed. I wanted to talk to him, to tell him about Tomás even though I knew that, if he were still alive, I never would have breathed a word to him. Didi always said that you got through the tough times with distraction. Fortunately, for the first time in my life, I had a distraction powerful enough to wash everything, even missing Daddy and Didi, out of my mind. I bought some guitar strings and rubbed them until my fingers smelled like his; that scent alone was enough to block out any other thought for at least an hour.

  But the best distraction ever invented was flamenco. I played Tomás’s CD night and day. During the day, I listened to it on my player while I fried burgers or hauled tater tots out of hot grease. At night, I cranked it on Mr. Steinberg’s old stereo while I surfed the Internet reading everything that popped up when I entered flamenco. I haunted the library, checked out the few books they had that mentioned flamenco, and ordered all the rest.

  It took almost a week for Mrs. Steinberg to notice that her daughter was gone. She accosted me as I left for work, “Where Didi?” Her once-beautiful Natalie Wood face was puffy and perfectly outlined by a seam of gray at the base of her overpermed, dyed-black hair.

  “She’s gone to this sort of music camp?” I didn’t know how much she understood or how much I could improvise, so I embellished with some feeble hand gestures somehow meant to convey music and camp. “To learn how to write songs and sing songs and do all the things that a rock star does.” I tried to translate as much as I could into Spanish, but I doubted that campo meant “camp.”

  “With boy in Jaguar?” It took me a minute to realize what she’d said since she pronounced Jaguar the Spanish way, hag-wahr.

  “Paco? Right. He’s going to the camp too. He gave Didi a ride.”

  Mrs. Steinberg bunched her eyebrows together, increasing her resemblance to a Pekinese dog. Then she said something in Spanish that even I could understand: “No se llama Didi. Se llama Rachel.” Mrs. Steinberg pronounced it the Jewish way, Rah-hel.

  I repeated it in English, mostly so I could hear it myself and understand. “Didi’s name is not Didi, it’s Rachel?”

  Mrs. Steinberg nodded vigorously, so pleased by our exchange that she ventured a bit more English. “Yes, father say Rachel but Rachel not good name of star. Not famous people’s name. Didi good name of star. Since little little girl she only want to be star. You good friend. You be good friend, okay?”

 
I nodded. “Yes, okay.”

  Mrs. Steinberg’s computer dinged loudly. She nodded and left.

  The heat that summer broke records that had stood for a hundred years. The ravens, disoriented by thirst, came down from the mountains to seek out sprinklers. But the city started water rationing and soon no sprinklers were allowed. Lawns turned crispy and brown. Raven bodies appeared in the gutter. I felt insulated inside a bubble where heat waves, sound waves, and my obsession made the world around me wobbly and out of focus. Only the memories of the night I had met him and dreams of when I would meet him again remained Arctic sharp.

  I passed the hours at work in a fog that lifted the second I stepped back into the Lair and worked feverishly on my strategy. Didi would have directed a frontal attack. We’d have tracked Tomás down and laid siege as if he were an ordinary groupie target. That was unthinkable. From the very beginning I wanted only one of two things: Either I wanted to worship him from afar and never speak to him again, leaving the memory of our night together the one, shining moment in my life. Or I wanted to own him. I wanted us to spend every second of the rest of our lives together, then be buried in the same coffin.

  That meant that I would never see Tomás again, never allow him to see me, until I had transformed myself into the woman he could love.

  I decided on a three-pronged attack. First was body modification. I had to completely change the way I looked. Fortunately, between the jangly excitement that kept my stomach sealed and the lack of edibles at Didi’s house, weight loss took care of itself. The jittery excitement fueled marathon exercise sessions. I bought every workout video on the market and did them all, marveling at how my bread pudding of a body firmed up into a solid new consistency.

  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. I knew Didi was more right about that astrological projection than she could have ever dreamed. The path to his heart was through his work. In order to transform myself into the woman he would love forever, I had to learn everything I could about what he loved most, flamenco. Obviously that involved learning Spanish.