hard luck and trouble is my only friend
—Booker T. Jones and William Bell
“Okay, we’ve got The Cowboy Junkies, The Smiths, The Way We Were, Love Story and The Yearling,” I said, fanning out the videotapes and CDs toward Lessie. “Choose your weapon.”
“The Yearling?”
“It always makes me cry when the fawn ... you know, at the end when Gregory Peck ...” Lessie’s blue eyes, rimmed by puffy red lids, grew big and watery. “Have you ever seen it?”
“No,” said Lessie.
“I don’t want to give the plot away. Trust me, it will make you bawl.”
“Just what I need, more crying,” Lessie mumbled. “Do you have any blues?”
Some people like to listen to the blues when they’re depressed, but I prefer The Smiths, music to blow your brains out by. This may sound odd, but for me, the blues is a surefire cure for depression. Let country music have their dead dogs and broken down pickup trucks, but I’d take the blues any day. Until I’d discovered salsa, I loved the blues more than anything, the way a bee loves honey, thoroughly and completely. But I could still appreciate and enjoy its anguish, its brazen indifference to political correctness, and its blatant sexism. When B.B. King sings about his woman who can’t see the doctor when he’s away and should “just suffer” until he gets home, I always feel better realizing that, hey, I don’t have it so bad after all.
“The blues,” I said, patting her on the arm, “an excellent choice. Maybe it will even cheer you up?”
Lessie looked at me for a long moment. “You know something, Sam, you’re really weird sometimes.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” I quipped, putting on a B.B. King CD while Lessie raided my freezer and cupboards.
We settled ourselves on the couch with a smorgasbord of misery foods on the coffee table in front of us. She picked up the Chubby Hubby and I chose the Cherry Garcia. After a while, Lessie grabbed the bowl of sour cream and onion potato chips and I reached for the cashews. Then we switched, and switched again, crunching and slurping in the silent company of our own thoughts.
When I was younger, I’d assumed that by the time I got to the age I was at now, I’d know what I wanted and would always make the wise choice. In fact, things had only gotten worse. I felt most of the time like a lumberjack backpedaling on a log, trying desperately to stay afloat to avoid the murky water of error below. But somehow, I was constantly losing my balance, falling in, and like a half-drowned cat, getting back on the log, only to fall off again, just after my clothes had dried.
I couldn’t stop picturing Robert with that shocked, sad look on his face when he saw me with Javier on the balcony and then the two of us dancing together. Assuming Robert would ever speak to me again, maybe things could work out with him? That, of course, would be the perfect scenario. And then would we live happily ever after? Could Robert make me happy?
But I couldn’t stop thinking about Javier either. I’d never let myself picture or consider the possibility of having a serious relationship with him. I just couldn’t let myself go there, as much as I wanted to. I’d purposely prevented myself from caring too much about Javier and had conveniently convinced myself that my feelings for him were just a silly crush, which I realized wasn’t the truth.
But my problems were nothing compared to Lessie’s. I was very worried about her. When she had come over this afternoon and taken off her sunglasses to reveal eyes so bloodshot and swollen that I barely recognized her, I’d assumed the worst. So when I finally got up the nerve to ask, I wasn’t expecting her response.
“I haven’t told him yet,” she said, and then sobbed loudly, adding to the ocean of tears she’d already cried over the past few days.
It seemed a shame that Lessie had wasted such an awful surfeit of valuable energy on crying, energy that could’ve been put to better use say, single-handedly building a bridge from Los Angeles to Honolulu.
That women are able to cry at absolutely nothing and everything was certainly nothing new. We’ve been doing it from the dawn of time, ever since our cavemen husbands grunted that they’d rather go on a dangerous saber-tooth tiger hunting mission with the guys than snuggle with their women under the antelope skins next to the fire. Even worse, human beings (all right, men) have not evolved a wit in the tens of thousands of years that have elapsed since that so-called primitive point in our history.
A few months, ago Elizabeth and I had been at our usual Friday night hangout in Manhattan when we’d overheard a group of fifty-ish businessmen at the bar swilling their scotches and bourbons and talking about how they’d rather play golf than make love with their wives. I sometimes wonder, why do I even bother?
I glanced at Lessie as she drizzled a teaspoonful of Cherry Garcia ice cream onto a sour cream and onion potato chip and popped it into her mouth.
Then again, perhaps her pregnancy hormones were wreaking more havoc than usual on her emotional equilibrium. When my sister, Susan, was pregnant last year, she’d told me she’d cried more in those nine months than she had in the previous thirty-five years of her life—and she has a happy marriage and a great job as an architect designing new art museums. One day, seven months into her pregnancy, Susan had burst into tears at the sight of an empty ketchup bottle that her husband had returned to the refrigerator. It was at that moment that she claimed to finally understand what existentialism was all about—the utter absurdity of life, the cry in the wilderness that was never heard. I don’t know why she didn’t just throw out the empty bottle and buy another.
“Lessie, are you sure you want to have this baby?”
“I’m forty-two. This might be my last chance to be a mother.”
It was a reason, but not necessarily a good one. Single motherhood was nothing to enter into lightly, although for most single mothers, I suppose, that was exactly how it happened. You’re having carefree, fun sex with your boyfriend, and then one day the condom breaks or you forget to take a pill. Then the guy who was so cute, so attentive, and so wonderful suddenly vaporized and you were on your own.
“Lessie, this might be a bit personal, but how did you, I mean were you guys using ...?”
“Not the first time,” she said, and then gave me a shamefaced sideways glance like a dog that’s just been caught nipping a sirloin steak off the counter. “I know, I know, I’m worse than a teenager,” she went on in a rush. “It was really stupid. But who would’ve thought a forty-two-year-old woman could get pregnant for the first time in her life, the first and only time in her life she didn’t use birth control?”
I knew what she meant. After being technically able to have a child since I’d turned thirteen, but never having been pregnant, birth control and sex seemed completely unrelated. At this stage in my life, using contraception had become an unnecessary hassle, like having to fiddle with the burglar alarm code every time you left your house, but never getting burglarized. Of course, the day you didn’t bother was the day it happened.
“When was the last time you ate?” I asked Lessie, noting that she had devoured a full pint of ice cream and nearly all of the chips. But I was really thinking, What the hell was she waiting for? Why didn’t she just tell Eliseo and get it over with?
“Yesterday. I’ve been really nauseous, but today I’m starving,” she said. The food and the music seemed to be doing her some good. She had color coming back to her cheeks.
“Have you talked to Eliseo at all?” I asked, brushing close to the subject, but not quite hitting it full on.
“I’ve talked to him, but I haven’t seen him,” she said. “I told him I have the flu. Not too far from the truth. I’ve lost three pounds.”
“Do you want to order a pizza?” I asked her, changing the subject temporarily because now I was really concerned. I’ve never been pregnant, but I understand that traditionally, pregnant women gained, rather than lost weight, and Lessie didn’t have much to lose to begin with.
I called a place called Pizza Man that Lessi
e said was the best in town and that guaranteed delivery in twenty minutes, and ordered a large cream cheese, Canadian bacon, and pineapple.
Sitting back down next to the human vacuum cleaner, I asked her a few necessary questions.
“Are you sleeping?”
“A little. Enough,” she said, nibbling a handful of cashews like a squirrel.
“Exercising?”
“Well, I’ve cut back on my usual workout, but I’m still doing Pilates.”
“Have you set up an appointment with your OB-GYN?”
“Yes, for next week. And I appreciate your concern, I really do, Sam. I might be a little emotional right now, but really I’m fine.”
Fine! Fine? When the hell was she going to tell Eliseo?
“I’m going to tell Eliseo tomorrow night. I just wanted to be sure that I was ready to have this baby no matter what, in case he ... Well, I’m finally ready for any reaction from him.”
I breathed a sigh of relief.
* * *
“Sam, Sam.” I felt someone shaking my arm. “Wake up, Sam.”
I woke up and looked at my watch. It was midnight. We’d, put on Love Story after finishing the pizza, and apparently I’d fallen into a food coma. It was just before the end of the movie, during the hospital scene where Ali MacGraw was moments away from dying, but managed to look breathtakingly beautiful, and healthy as Hercules on steroids.
“I’m ready to tell Eliseo now,” said Lessie.
“Now? Well, okay, I’m sure everything will be fine. Good luck.” “No, I need you to come with me,” she said.
“Isn’t it a little late or early or something?”
“I don’t want to wait until tomorrow night, I want to tell him now. And I want you to stay in the car in case he throws me out.” “That’s not going to happen, Lessie,” I told her. “But of course I’ll go with you.”
I got up, brushed my teeth, and threw on a sweater. As soon as we got downstairs to the underground parking garage, the cool summer night air woke me up.
“How are you going to tell him?” I asked her, as I turned onto the freeway.
“Well, I won’t be using the ‘Hi, honey, guess what, I’ve got great news’ approach. I really don’t know what I’m going to say.” Fifteen minutes later we pulled up across the street from Javier’s duplex. The downstairs dance studio was dark.
“Okay, give me twenty minutes,” she said. “If I don’t come out by then you can leave.”
I grabbed her hand. “Lessie, it’s going to be okay,” I said, hoping that I was right.
She leaned into the window and smiled. “Thanks, Sam.”
For ten minutes I listened to the radio. Then I reached over to the glove compartment and pulled out a salsa CD. I looked at the digital clock on the dash. Javier was going to be home any minute from Cubana. My heart started pounding at the thought of seeing him. As much as I tried to push him out of my life, it wasn’t working.
Just then I saw Javier pull up in his pickup truck, followed by someone in a small red car that parked directly behind his. My pulse quickened. I wanted to catch him before he went inside. Who knew what was going on upstairs with Lessie and Eliseo?
I’d just put my hand on the door handle and was about to get out of my car when I saw Javier’s ex, Isabella. She looked even more flawless and beautiful than the last time I’d seen her. Her dark chestnut hair shone under the streetlights and flounced perfectly about her shoulders. She looked like a Breck shampoo girl running to catch the subway. When she reached his side, Javier put his arm around her shoulder, and as the door closed behind them, my favorite song on the salsa CD ended on an upbeat note as a sharp pain stabbed through my heart.
Fifteen
Mission Possible
Week Nine Status Report:
Attended Singles Cooking Class. Got sick in the bathroom on undercooked chicken. Left early. Met no one.
Attended Three-Minute Dating event. Met forty men. Chose zero.
Went on blind date with pharmacist from Single No More. By end of our date, I was begging him to open his pharmacy at two A.M. on pretense I was interested to see where he worked. Actually was hoping that if I threw my arms around his ankles and begged, he’d give me a couple thousand prescription-free Valium. He refused and for some reason didn’t ask me out again.
Ophthalmologist from Brunches or Lunches cancelled our date, claiming to have suffered a sudden bout of situational blindness caused by extreme job stress. (Does this malady really exist? Sounds suspiciously like he was worried I’d turn out to be fat.)
Continue to have wonderful dates with Robert Mack.
I pressed send. Okay, the last line of my report was a bit of a stretch, but that sounded better than calling it what it really was, a bald-faced lie. I was now so deep into pathological liar territory that when I died, they were going to dissect my brain and put it in a jar next to Charles Manson’s and other assorted sociopaths and serial killers.
Why do relationships have to be so difficult? Maybe our great- great-great-grandparents had the right idea with arranged marriages. You met your fiance five minutes before you said “I do,” had eleven children, worked your twenty-acre plot of land, and died at forty-five. Think of the simple beauty of such a life—no choices, no decisions to make. You were stuck with whomever your relatives picked out for you and since everyone you knew was in the same boat, there was no resentment, no room for comparison, no coveting thy neighbor’s hot studly husband.
I was about to make myself a smoothie when the “You’ve got mail” voice boomed from my computer loud enough to cause an avalanche in Switzerland. I walked back into my office and clicked on the new message.
An e-mail from Sally:
“Hi Sam, sounds like you’re a little depressed. This is on the Q-T. Elaine thinks you’re lying about still seeing Robert Mack, and she’s madder than a bull charging at a red cape. My advice is to make your reports sound a little more upbeat—lie if you have to, for goodness sake. And be prepared to produce Robert or a suitable fiance in the flesh for a possible surprise visit from your fairy godmother. No details yet, but if I get wind of anything I’ll let you know. Good luck. Sally.”
A little depressed? Yes, you could say I was a little depressed. Javier makes love to me and tells me that he loves me, and twelve seconds later gets back together with his ex-girlfriend Isabella. Even taking into consideration the fact that I told him I’m dating other men, and one man in particular, how he could do this? Had it taken him all of five seconds to fall out of love with me, if he ever was in the first place? If Javier had been on the rebound from Isabella when we’d met, as Sebastian Diaz had warned me, then maybe I was just Javier’s quickie crush that had lasted only until he’d gotten back together with her?
Then there was Robert. He claimed to love me too, but then why didn’t he call me after I turned him down, but before he saw me with Javier that night at Cubana? He should have taken the mature, gentlemanly approach to my refusal to go to bed with him and gotten even more interested in me. Wasn’t rejection the most attractive quality a woman could possess, at least for most men? But, on the one hand, maybe his fragile state of widower-hood had cancelled out this normal male gene? Maybe when I told him I wasn’t ready to sleep with him, rather than feeling emboldened and spurred on by my rejection, it made him feel like an unused shoehorn gathering dust on the top shelf of a closet?
On the other hand, maybe Robert never really loved me either? The phrase “I love you” certainly doesn’t mean what it used to. Today, people say it all the time because it sounds nicer than the truth, “You’re okay, but I’m only hanging out with you until someone better comes along.”
On the other hand (yes, I know I have only two hands, but if men weren’t so ridiculously complicated, I wouldn’t need more than two), did it matter who called whom if Robert was the right man for me? Elizabeth said I should stop letting other people and events decide my life for me. Perhaps it was time to take action. Bold action.
> So I did. I called Robert, three times in two days, leaving three voice mail messages. And nothing. Nothing!
I’m not a person to be pressured by outside forces, you understand, but it was after I reread the e-mail from Sally that I devised Plan B, and decided to go to Robert’s office or his home. I would just show up, and we’d have an adult discussion about what was going on with us. There was just one problem with Plan B. I found Robert’s business listing in the phonebook, but it only had a phone number and a P.O. box listing, which was very strange indeed; There was no home listing. So I’d had no choice but to leave a fourth message yesterday with his answering service, to which I also got no response.
When I talked to my mother yesterday about my concerns regarding Robert—his lack of family and friends, all of his mysterious traveling, his erratic moods, the P.O. box—she simply dismissed them, telling me that the reason I was still single at forty-one was because I was too picky and looking for reasons to dislike rather than like a potential mate.
“Too picky.” I’d heard that opinion over and over from my mother and even my best friend, Elizabeth. Maybe they were right? So today I put Plan C into action.
I strode from my car, a woman on a mission. I could get Robert to speak to me if only I could find him. I’d worry later about how I really felt about him. I shuddered as I approached the familiar two-story building, although I was ready for anything at this point, including, if absolutely necessary, holding Bunny hostage until she’d divulged his home and office addresses.
I pushed on the glass-paned door, but it didn’t budge. Pressing my nose up against the glass, I peered inside, seeing darkness and dust, normal signs that a business might have gone out of business, except for Single No More. It had looked exactly this way the last time I’d been here. Maybe Bunny had gone home sick for the day?
Now what?
I turned back to my car and there he was, just there, on the sidewalk, as if he’d been standing there his whole life.
“Hi, Sam.”
Adventures of a Salsa Goddess Page 20