“If you were in L.A.,” Elizabeth continued, “he’d probably be asking you if you’d had a boob job and the name of the surgeon who’d done it. What’s the worst that happens? He buys you dinner and you waste one evening.”
“Because it’s not just a wasted evening, Elizabeth,” I protested. “Blind dates are torture! It’s like coyote ugly plus coyote brain dead. Not only do you want to gnaw off your arm to get away because the guy is so repulsive, but you also want to rip your brain out to take away the mind-numbing conversation that always comes with that package. ‘So how many brothers and sisters do you have?’ ‘What are your hobbies?’ ‘What’s your favorite color?’ I can’t go through another one of these evenings, Elizabeth! I can’t do it!” I said, my heart beating wildly in my chest.
“Okay, okay, so don’t! There’s just one problem,” she said calmly. “Isn’t this your job for the summer?”
“Why did I agree to do this?” I sighed, plopping down on my sofa.
“Think of this summer as a challenge, as the most exciting time of your life,” she said, in her infuriating way of sounding like a TV commercial urging wayward teenagers to sign up for technical college or to join the armed forces.
“You’ll be fine. Just don’t let anyone, especially Elaine Daniels or your mother, push you into anything that isn’t right,” she added.
“No need to worry about that,” I said. No one tells me what to do. I’m my own woman. “So what’s going on with you and the judge?”
She and Doug were going away that weekend to the Hamptons to his beach house. His divorce was going to be final by Labor Day and she was getting less concerned about being the transition woman. Things were going very well for Elizabeth. And maybe, if I played my cards right, things would turn out for Robert and me as well? And as for Javier, well, all I could do was try to resist him as best as I could. Step number one should be to cancel any future private lessons. Well, one more wouldn’t hurt. Would it?
* * *
We’d met at an Indian restaurant, the kind that mysteriously stays in business despite the fact that five waiters in black suits stand idle most nights to wait on three customers. Indian classical sitar and flute music softly whined in the background.
“So how many brothers and sisters do you have?” asked Dr. Mark, a minute into our date. I stared longingly at one of the waiters leaning against the wall in the elegant dining room, doing nothing. Maybe if I looked pathetic enough, he’d take pity on me and slit my jugular on his next trip to the kitchen, which by the looks of things might not be until next month.
Mark looked about as much like Mel Gibson as I looked like a broom handle. Actually, Mark looked like a broom handle. No wonder the man was obsessed with fat; he didn’t have an ounce of it. I’d seen healthier looking famine victims on CNN. So naturally, I ordered the most fattening dish on the menu. Mark winced and exhaled audibly as the waiter took my order: rich cheese balls in tomato cream sauce, two orders of garlic naan, and a Kingfisher beer. He ordered plain chicken tikka, no bread, no rice, and mineral water.
“Do you have any knee or ankle problems?” was question number two. Mark, the orthopedic surgeon, then bent under the table to examine my extremities. Apparently he was searching for scars, deformities, or a lack of vitamin D that had led to a rare case of childhood rickets.
“I feel like a horse,” I told him when his cue-ball-sized head had popped back up. “Would you like to look at my teeth while you’re at it?”
“Do you have teeth problems as well?” he asked me.
“Well, this is very embarrassing, Mark. But I feel I can confide in you as a doctor. I have a recurring case of trench mouth. I brush my teeth once a month. I don’t understand what the problem is.” This is what I’d wanted to say. Instead, I smiled politely and lapsed into unconsciousness as Mark continued jabbering on about his favorite subject, himself.
How is it that men like Mark, egomaniacs who weigh less than one of my thighs, are considered prizes, while single women like me are practically objects of pity? Even worse, men seem to upgrade to better and younger women as they get older, but as women age, we get stuck with the bottom-of-the-barrel leftovers.
The next day at the grocery store, a sudden image of emaciated Dr. Mark popped into my brain. I’ve never had to worry about my weight, one of the few genetic blessings I had inherited from my mother, but suddenly I had an urge to load my cart full of the most fattening items I could find: ice cream, avocados, crackers, peanut butter, macadamia nuts, Oreos, cream cheese, and bagels. While I was waiting in line, I glanced at the candy bars, thinking about adding some to my cart, when I glimpsed a copy of the National Enquirer. My mouth fell open. I ripped one off the stand.
On the cover was a full-page grainy black and white photograph of an enormously fat woman with her face obscured by pixels. She had her arms around the pencil thin neck of a bubble-headed alien, a quarter of her size. A flying saucer hovered several feet off the ground in the background, in case anyone had mistakenly confused the alien with a really ugly human being.
The headline read, “Extra-Terrestrial Impregnates Mystery Woman: Celestial Wedding Bells to Ring!”
“I knew it would be tough for that Mystery Woman being over forty and all, but I didn’t think she’d settle for an alien,” I heard a raspy smoker’s voice say over my right shoulder.
I whirled around to face a rotund, middle-aged woman in line behind me. She wore pink polyester pants and a shapeless top with an orange-and-blue flower print and had shoulder-length brown hair, which hung from her head like an overturned bowl of cooked spaghetti.
“You don’t actually believe the stuff you read in here, do you?” I asked, as I rattled the paper in the poor woman’s alarmed face. Why was everyone assuming your life was over at forty if you were a woman and still single?
“I sure do,” she told me as she gestured with her doughy white arms. “My cousin was abducted by an alien and she said he was not an attractive man at all. Slimy and green with those big eyes, she didn’t want to get near him. But you know, you don’t have a choice ’cause they have those mental powers of telepathacity that hold you down against your will.”
I tried to stop listening, realizing that, as outrageous as it was that I was being slandered by a national publication, there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.
“What happened to my cousin on that space ship would curl the toes of a dead man!” she added with a shudder.
Maybe by the time I’m sixty-five I’ll be able to laugh about this with my grandchildren.
“Grandma Samantha, did you really look like that?” they would ask, pointing to a yellowed copy of the tabloid. “No,” I’d say to them. “But that’s exactly how your grandfather looked when I met him.”
I bought five copies of the paper.
* * *
Date number four with Robert was quickly revving up to the red zone of my dating tachometer. I leaned my back against the outside of a brick building as he gently pressed his body against mine, deliciously invading my personal space. I could feel my hipbones pushing into his abdomen. A momentary knot of concern swept his face as he brushed aside a hair that had foolishly fallen out of place.
“What is Samantha Jacobs thinking right now?” he asked. Just then the movie let out at the theater next door.
“I’m thinking all these people don’t need to see us acting like a couple of teenagers,” I said, gently pushing him away.
I didn’t want to be on display for the streams of nighttime moviegoers hurrying back to their cars. I remember, seeing a couple the age Robert and I are now making out in a car parked under a streetlight when I was eighteen. I had been appalled, assuming that when I got to my forties, which at the time seemed about as old as the pyramids, I’d be mature enough to confine all such foolishness to the bedroom. What I didn’t know was that at forty-one, I’d feel like I was twenty-five and still be single and dating.
“Now for the next stop on our agenda,” Robert said
, disengaging, “there’s a little-known but strictly enforced local ordinance on the books. While living in Milwaukee, you must try bowling at least once.”
“Is this attorney Robert Mack speaking?” I asked him.
Robert stopped in mid-step and took a deep breath. “I’m not a lawyer anymore, Sam, remember?” he said in a hyper-calm voice.
“You sound annoyed,” I said. I felt like I’d swallowed a vat of hot grease.
“Of course I’m not,” he said smiling, and the moment passed, at least for him. This was the second time I’d seen an abrupt mood shift with Robert that made me feel very uncomfortable.
“So, have you ever gone bowling before?” he asked. “Basically, if you can walk and throw a ball at the same time, you’ll be fine.” Grabbing my hand, he led me inside the East Side Lanes bowling alley.
We ordered a pitcher of beer and took over lane number five of a six-lane alley. Robert hammed it up, acting like a professional bowler one minute, squatting down on one knee to line up his shot, while in the next moment he posed with the big blue ball and pretended to do an instant replay in slow motion. I bowled a 72 the first game, skyrocketed to an 80, and then dropped to a 63. Robert bowled all three games in the 150 to 180 range.
“For your first time you did great,” said Robert, as we walked back to my apartment hand in hand. A lone shirtless jogger ambled by without a glance in our direction, and an old man with a cane shuffled along the opposite side of the street, but I felt as if Robert and I were alone in this city of over half a million people.
“It was a lot more fun than I thought it would be,” I told him. “I’m joining a bowling league first thing when I get back to New York.”
“I don’t want you to go back to New York, Sam, at least not alone.” Robert stopped. “Sam, I think I’m falling in love with you.”
Love? Where did that come from? It would seem only fair that a woman should receive some sort of warning before an announcement like that, one that could change the course of history, was made.
“Can I come inside?” he asked. He took me into his arms and bent down to nuzzle my neck. I stiffened at his touch. He stopped kissing me.
“I need more time,” I said simply as I watched him walk away.
* * *
The next day I woke up feeling like the inside of a death shroud. I had that foggy, dull headache that comes with having gotten about five minutes of sleep in between hours of fitful tossing and turning. Three cups of strong coffee did nothing to lift my mood. I sat at my kitchen table looking at Lake Michigan and the beautiful, sunny day beyond. The weather gods were mocking me. There should be some way to make the weather match our moods.
The problem with going slow was how to do it without having the guy assume you were rejecting him. I really liked Robert. But I had to admit, it wasn’t love at first sight. It sounds sappy, but with David my ex-fiance it really had seemed magical, as though it had been meant to be.
David and I had met in an elevator in the Flatiron Building in Manhattan, where I’d been visiting my friend Vicky. Our eyes had caught and held for a few seconds as he stepped on, until he politely assumed the proper elevator position. I kept hoping it would get stuck, that the two of us would be trapped in there for hours, and after pouring our hearts out to each other, we’d fall madly in love before being rescued. I even lingered briefly outside the building, hoping we’d bump into each other or that he’d run up to me and say something like, “You’re the love of my life, I can’t let you get away.” But instead, I’d watched him and his briefcase disappear down Broadway before I grabbed a cab and headed back to work.
Five hours later, I’d met Elizabeth in SoHo at a little neighborhood bar that neither of us had ever been to before. Just as I was telling her about the mysterious tall, dark, handsome stranger on the elevator, David walked in. We gaped at each other, for a long moment before laughter broke the spell. He’d told me that the entire ride down in the elevator he kept wondering what he should say to me. But he’d been so nervous, the only thing that kept coming to his mind were bad pick-up lines. The rest was history, until he told me he’d never loved me.
How do you ever know whether a guy was the right one? Robert was bright, articulate, and fun to be with and was certainly very attractive. So what was wrong? I guess the problem was that I could no longer trust how I felt. The only thing I knew for sure was that I didn’t want to make another mistake like I’d made with David.
That afternoon, I took a nap and then got ready for Javier, who’d called me the day before to ask if I wanted to go to Summerfest, Milwaukee’s biggest summer music festival, held at Lake Michigan. It was hot and humid and still in the nineties at five p.m. I toweled off after a quick, cool shower and put on a pair of white shorts and a red cotton tank top. I looked in the mirror and saw my after-nap hair, all rough and wild like an overgrown polar bear pelt. But the dark circles under my eyes were gone, so I no longer resembled a walk-on for a horror movie. A touch of Pizzazz Pink lipstick, brown mascara, and spray gel for my hair and I was almost good as new. I heard the downstairs buzzer sound.
“Sam, wow, you look fantastic!” said Javier. He took my right hand, lifted it up over my head and led me into a twirl and a dip. I’d never been greeted like this before! Javier smelled wonderful. He had a clean, fresh scent like soap and wore a pair of khaki shorts and a light blue knit top that made his swarthy dark looks all the darker.
Pulling me close, he extended my right arm out in front of me and led me into a fox trot down the length of the hallway and back. We laughed as I pulled him inside my apartment. When we left the air-conditioned comfort of my apartment to step out onto my balcony, the hot air hit us like the blast of a furnace.
“It looks like a big sleepy ocean,” he said, as we stood at the railing looking out at Lake Michigan. And it did. It was utterly calm, as if the heavy, humid air had put it into a deep slumber.
“Is that live music?” I asked him.
“Yeah, it’s coming from Summerfest.”
“I didn’t know I lived that close.”
“The water helps carry the sound. You’re about a mile away.”
We walked out of my building to Javier’s rusted pickup truck. He opened my door and I hopped in.
“No air-conditioning, sorry about that.” His arm worked the crank on my window as he rolled it down. I couldn’t help but admire his swelling biceps and the fact that Javier was a true gentleman.
“We’re so close, I don’t mind walking,” I said, and he agreed. We slowly strolled down Prospect Avenue toward the festival grounds.
“Did you work today?”
“Yeah. We’re roofing a four-family apartment building.”
“How do you work outside in the sun with this heat?” I asked, wondering if he’d be happier with an office job, not that being walled inside a cubicle under florescent lights while staring at a computer screen all day was superior to manual labor.
“You get used to it, sort of. In heat like this you have to take a lot of breaks.” We were silent for a few minutes. “We spent most of dinner the other night talking about what I like to do. Now it’s your turn. What are your passions besides dancing, Sam?”
“I love to travel. I went to Peru in May and climbed Machu Picchu,” I told him, realizing that this was the first person I’d talked to about my recent trip to Peru since arriving in Milwaukee. I told Javier about my five-day trek along the Inca trail to the ruins, the waterfalls, the cloud forests, the high mountain passes, and the incredible beauty of seeing the lost city in the mist.
“Have you done any traveling outside the U.S.?” I asked.
Javier said he’d gone to the Dominican Republic last year for the first time since he’d left with his family when he was three years old, staying with his grandparents and meeting most of his cousins for the first time.
“I was there during the Latin Music Festival,” he said. He stopped momentarily to pet a golden retriever that had eagerly bounded to him, b
ut then we continued on, much to the dog’s apparent distress. “I danced every night until dawn. For the first time in my life, I felt really connected to my roots. I decided after that trip that I wanted to open my own dance studio.”
Summerfest was packed with wall-to-wall people. The body heat coupled with the heat index put me into something close to a drug-induced state as we slowly drifted from one music stage to another—a twelve-piece big band here, an R&B band there, and even an Elvis impersonator whose sideburns had flipped up at the ends and were peeling off from the sweat pouring down his face.
“Do you remember anything about living in the Dominican Republic?” I asked Javier a while later as we sat on the rocks on the shore of the lake, drinking beer.
“I remember Eliseo and me playing in the dirt, barefoot, chasing one other. I have another memory of my mother baking bread in the kitchen and of going to the outdoor market with her. The old women sitting on the ground selling fruit would cut off pieces of mango and pineapple and feed me. And they always pinched me,” he said, pointing to his left cheek.
“I’m sure that with that dimple you were too cute to resist.”
“What is it with my dimple?” he wondered. “I’ve gotten more attention from women because of that than anything else. Women don’t love me for me, it’s only for my dimple.”
I had an urge to reach over and caress his face, but I restrained myself. Javier was so different than any man I’d ever gone out with before. In the past, my relationships with men had typically felt like a high-wire act; one wrong move or word and boom, it was over. But being with Javier was effortless—not that this was a date, although admittedly it had quasi-date qualities to it.
“Tell me about your family, Sam,” he asked.
“There’s not much to tell,” I said, as I readjusted myself on the hard rocks and looked out at the lake. “My father died when I was sixteen. Cancer. I have a younger sister, Susan. She and her husband have a daughter who’s five months old. Unfortunately, I don’t have much in common with my sister. We get along, but I can’t really confide in her or relate to her life. But I don’t think she can relate to mine either.”
Adventures of a Salsa Goddess Page 14