Adventures of a Salsa Goddess

by Hornak, JoAnn

  Robert had left the day before at seven in the morning. But throughout the day he had called me a half dozen times, from the airport, the taxi, or while snatching a few minutes in between his client meetings. Last night when he’d returned to his hotel room, we’d talked for hours. In between Robert’s calls, I’d made so many to my family and friends that the phone had practically fused to my head.

  First I had called Elaine. “Congratulations on a job well done,” she’d said cheerily, immediately followed by, “It’s about time, Samantha.” Now that was more like it, the warm and fuzzy Elaine we all knew and loved.

  When I called Elizabeth at work, she screamed into the phone loud enough to puncture my eardrum. “Oh, Sam, I’m so happy for you!’ she cried. “I knew you could do it!” Elizabeth was always there for me. She was the most unselfish person I knew. I was very lucky to have her as a friend.

  My sister, Susan, was next. I wanted to get to her before my mother did since they have each other on warp-speed dial. My six-month-old niece, Matilda, was crying in the background, so it wasn’t the best time to talk, but I could tell Susan was pleased for me.

  “Maybe now Mother will get off my back?” I said to her.

  “No, next you’ll be required to produce another version of the little monster you hear screaming in the background,” Susan pointed out.

  I reached my mother at home. It came as no surprise when she’d breathed a heavy sigh of relief and instantly burst into tears.

  “Thank God it’s finally happened,” she said, as though I’d been waiting my entire life for a heart transplant that had finally been scheduled. “When are you coming back to New York? We’ve got a million things to do before the wedding.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to meet your future son-in-law first?”

  “Yes, of course, but ...” and then she launched into talk of motifs, flowers, engravers, and ice sculptures.

  Finally, I broke off the call with my mother and phoned Lessie. I’d saved her call for last since I’d known that in so many ways it would be the most difficult one of all.

  “Sam, I’m so happy for you, but this means you’re going back to New York,” Lessie said. “I thought we’d have another month to hang out.”

  “I might have to go back a week or so earlier, but I don’t see why I have to rush back. I don’t start my column until September, and I need some time to relax and get used to this whole thing.”

  “You’re going to tell Javier, right?” she asked.

  Javier. Of course I had to tell him. And I had to tell him much more than the news of my engagement. I hoped he could forgive me for lying to him about why I was in Milwaukee and, if there was some possible way that the two of us could stay in touch, be friends ... But who was I kidding? There was no way I could ever think of him as just a friend.

  The doorbell rang. It was only seven-thirty in the morning. I jumped out of bed, put my robe on, and answered the door.

  “Good morning, are you Samantha Jacobs?” asked a squat man who came level with my chest. He stood ramrod straight as if trying to get the most mileage out of every centimeter of his height.

  “Yes, I am,” I said, wrapping my thigh-high purple silk bathrobe around me a little tighter. I really shouldn’t answer my door when I was dressed like a woman of the night.

  “I’m Mr. Sassafras, the building manager,” he said with a jovial smile. “It’s nice to finally meet you, Ms. Jacobs.” The s on the end of my name leaked out like the hiss of a deflating tire. I got the distinct impression he was one of those kids in grade school who’d been picked on mercilessly for not being able to say his s without sounding like he had a mouthful of marbles and spit.

  “I know it’s very early,” he said, “but there is a group of reporters and a sea of TV cameras outside the building. They want to see you.”

  Every s he pronounced slobbered over me as if a Saint Bernard had pinned me down and was licking my face.

  The telephone rang.

  “Excuse me for a moment, Mr. Sassafras,” I said. I’d dragged the last s out on his name a bit longer than normal. I wasn’t trying to make fun of him, but his speech impediment was as infectious as a bad rash.

  “Hello?”

  “Is this Samantha Jacobs?” asked a clipped voice.

  “Yes, who’s calling please?”

  “This is Chip Simpson, a reporter with the Fox news network affiliate in Miami, Florida,” he said brusquely. “Miss Jacobs, is it true that you’re the Mystery Woman of Tres Chic magazine?”

  I froze.

  “What makes you say that?” I wavered.

  “It came over the wire this morning. The AP is reporting that an anonymous but reliable source has named you as the Mystery Woman. Would you care to comment?”

  Oh God, how did this happen?

  “No, I’m sorry, no comment.” I slammed the phone down. A split second later it rang again. I hesitated, but had a feeling I should answer it.

  “How did this happen?” Elaine demanded.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I was hoping you could tell me.”

  “We don’t have time to talk about this now,” she snapped. “Sally has booked you a flight back to New York. It leaves at eleven. Come straight to the office and make sure Robert is in New York by four tomorrow. We’re shooting the cover shot then and moving up the release issue for August sixteenth.”

  This was all happening so fast. Eleven. That gave me almost no time to pack much less say good-bye. And Javier, I was supposed to have dinner with him tonight. I didn’t even have time to call him! I’d already hurt him so much and now I was doing it again. He would never forgive me.

  “So far, no one has a photo of you. You need to leave without anyone seeing you. I don’t want our cover issue blown,” said Elaine.

  “There’s no way; there’s a mob outside,” I said.

  “I don’t care how you do it. Put a bag over your head if you have to. Just make sure you leave without anyone getting a photo of you. This is my story!”

  Click!

  * * *

  An hour later, after I’d taken a forty-five-second shower and thrown my Milwaukee life into three suitcases, Mr. Sassafras returned to my apartment, having generously offered to drive me to the airport himself.

  “Here,” he said, handing me a large plastic bag. “I thought you might want to disguise yourself! Isn’t this exciting?” he said with a small squeak. He rubbed his hands together quickly and looked around the room as if we were two spies plotting our escape from a terrorist cell in Prague.

  I looked into the bag and pulled out a wig and a musty smelling leopard fur toque hat. Then I reached deeper and grabbed a pair of rimless mirrored sunglasses. I held up the wig, which was a mass of black shoulder-length braids studded with gold beads and shells attached to a beaded headdress.

  “My wife was Nefertiti last Halloween,” Mr. Sassafras, I mean Solly (he’d insisted that we be on a first-name basis), said by way of explanation.

  “Isn’t this going to look a little suspicious,” I asked, holding up the fur hat. “It’s seventy degrees outside.”

  “Oh, no you’re going to look glamorous, just like Marlene Dietrich,” he said.

  No, I’m going to look like a lunatic.

  “Sam, before we leave, can I get your autograph?” he asked me, pulling a pen from his pocket and sliding a copy of the May 27 Tres Chic out from under his arm. “It’s for my wife. She’s been following your story all summer. Just wait until she gets back from visiting her mother in Tennessee and I tell her we’ve had the Mystery Woman living in our building. She’s going to die!”

  I scribbled my signature across the silhouette head. Was this going to be my first of many autographs, just for getting engaged? I’d much prefer that it would be for something I’d created, like a book of humorous essays or a choreographed dance that would win first place in a salsa competition.

  “This is so thrilling,” Solly went on, as we took the maintenance elevator down to
the parking garage. “These kinds of things don’t happen in Milwaukee, and certainly not in my building. I’ve never had to escape from the paparazzi before!” That’s because they’re not paparazzi I wanted to tell him. But clearly he was having the time of his life. I hated to ruin it for him. We struggled off the elevator with my heavy suitcases and carry-on bag and walked over to his van. Then it hit me.

  “Oh no, I need to get back upstairs. I forgot to grab my files and my journal.” I looked at my watch. It was nine-thirty. I might not make this flight, but these were too important to leave behind. They were copies of my weekly factual reports, all the humor essays I’d written on the side this summer in preparation for my column, and my original articles the way I’d written them before Elaine had edited them.

  “I’ll be right back, Mr. Sassa—

  “Solly, remember?” he said with a big grin and a wink. “Hey, you’d better put on your disguise,” he said, holding up the plastic bag.

  “I’ll put it on when I get back to the car, I promise.” Looking like an escapee from a mental institution for the thirty-minute drive to the airport was a small price to pay to make one bored but extraordinarily nice man happy.

  Taking the elevator back up to the eighteenth floor, I was just about to slide the key in the lock when someone shouted.

  “Hey, Samantha!”

  I heard a click and saw a flash.

  “Got it!” said a tall man holding a camera and wearing a cheap suit and a cheap smile.

  Nineteen

  A Touch of Heaven

  By Samantha Jacobs

  I look out onto the dance floor at my favorite Latin nightclub and watch a young Latino couple. The woman, a wisp of a girl with a bare midriff, pierced navel, and waist-length black hair, is struggling to follow the lead of her handsome partner. He steps back from her occasionally to show off his fancy footwork. But it doesn’t matter that her salsa dance skills don’t come close to matching his. The pure bliss on their faces says it all. They are either in love, on cloud nine, or suspended somewhere in between.

  Some people compare partners dancing to foreplay or take it a step further and call it the ultimate in safe sex. Not a few compare it to a drug. The less prurient and prone to addictions say dancing makes them feel like a kid again. Others even claim that it comes close to a spiritual experience.

  For me, Latin dancing is all of that and much more. When I dance with a man whose touch is as light as a feather and yet communicates exactly what moves I should make. When we’re flowing together gracefully as one, the feeling I get is undeniably sensuous, but nearly impossible to describe. The closest I’ve come is to say it makes me feel like melted butter.

  I’ve always loved to dance, but the kind I’d done before I discovered salsa last summer was limited to fast and slow dances done at weddings and the infrequent girls’ night out to discos. Salsa took me by complete surprise. Never before has anything triggered in me a gut-level emotional response so intense it completely takes over my mind and heart, evoking emotions far too complex and powerful to express with mere words.

  On the one hand, it is so simple. A man and a woman move together, in rhythm, to the music. The perfect follow merely reacts to her lead’s touch. Unlike in the bedroom where a woman can take charge, while dancing, she shouldn’t anticipate moves or initiate any. By necessity, a woman gives up complete control to her partner. On the dance floor there are no concerns of equality or sexism, and she is free to let a man make her feel like a woman.

  But what is that nebulous, enigmatic, mystical something that makes salsa so incredible?

  Is it the satisfaction that comes when a man and a woman working as a team are able to successfully coordinate and execute intricate dance steps and arm movements? Is it a mere chemical reaction, a dancers’ high caused by the release of endorphins? Is it a connection with the music, your partner, or both?

  After months of trying to unravel the mystery of why salsa consumes my soul, I’ve finally come to terms with the fact that the thing I love most about it is that it makes me feel utterly alive in a way that nothing else ever has.

  My friend Javier, a Dominican by birth and part-time salsa instructor, once told me that when he’s dancing with a woman who smoothly follows his lead, “It’s like we’re floating, like there’s no one else in the room.” And then, he’d paused and added, “It’s like heaven.”

  I remember being floored by his words. It was as if he had read my mind. And, in that instant, I realized that men and women weren’t so different after all.

  And maybe, it is enough to simply know this?

  “What is this?” Elaine snarled, and then tossed my copy of “A Touch of Heaven” across her desk. She took off her black reading glasses and began cleaning the lenses.

  “The piece I wrote for the September thirtieth ‘La Vie’ column,” I said. She knew very well what it was, but still hadn’t forgiven me for having been out-scooped by People magazine last month.

  It turns out that the guy who’d snapped my photo in the hallway just before I’d left Milwaukee happened to live one floor below me in my apartment building. When he saw the reporters outside that morning, he’d called a friend who worked for a local television station to find out what the hullabaloo was about. He’d figured out who I was and took a chance that I was still inside my apartment. So he’d waited for me, caught me as I’d come off the elevator, and then sold the shot to the highest bidder.

  “Salsa is fun,” Elaine said, without a trace of warmth in her voice. “But this piece isn’t going to work. ‘La Vie’ is a humor column. Ha ha, funny, make our readers laugh, remember, Samantha?”

  I’d accomplished the nearly impossible task—according to the statistics of Dr. Victoria Huber—of finding the great on-paper and in-person professional educated man in the city with the worst possible chances, and doing it in less than the ridiculous time frame Elaine had given me. Sales of Tres Chic had steadily increased from the first Mystery Woman issue at the end of May and skyrocketed in August when the big issue came out. “Mystery Woman Finds Her Prince Charming in Milwaukee,” had featured a cover shot of Robert and me. Sales had tapered off a bit since then, but Elaine had reached her goal of the hallowed one million circulation.

  And then to top it off, I’d had to pinch hit for Maya Beckett when she quit Tres Chic without giving notice, just two days before I’d returned to New York. There was supposed to have been a transition period before Maya Beckett gave up “La Vie” and I took over. But Maya had left after ten years at Tres Chic, eight of those writing “La Vie,” without giving a single day’s notice. Luckily, I’d spent a lot of time on my journal over the summer so “The Three Date Rule” and “The Mammary Mirage” were ready to go with just some minor editing. But I guess none of this was good enough for Elaine.

  I remember when I first found out in May that Maya Beckett was giving up “La Vie.” Elaine had said that Maya’s original plan was to return to one of the regular departments. In my opinion, she’d lapsed into temporary insanity. Why would she give up the best job in the world? Even if she needed a change, as Elaine had told me then, Maya had far too much talent to make a move back to the mundane. It’s not that you can’t get exciting and interesting assignments in Features. It’s just that there’s a world of difference between creative humor writing and, say, doing an interview of Cameron Diaz to find out why she loves to belch.

  But the weirdest part of all was that no one knew where Maya was. It was as if she’d disappeared into thin air. She’d never been very close to anyone on the staff and kept her personal life very private. But you’d think someone would have known what had happened to her.

  I’m sure lots of offices are hotbeds when it comes to gossip, but at Tres Chic the tittle-tattle could corrode stainless steel. You couldn’t cough without someone spreading a rumor that you’d contracted a new strain of incurable tuberculosis. But wild rumors were all we had to go on—everything from Maya having joined a far-right religious sect
in Mississippi to another that she’d secluded herself away to write a tell-all book about Elaine Daniels.

  “Samantha, dear, when is the next time your handsome fiance is coming to town?” Elaine asked with a sugarcoated smile. Uh-oh. She wanted something.

  “He’s coming in tonight,” I said, grinning like a Cheshire cat, despite being wary of Elaine.

  Just five hours from now, assuming his plane got in on time, I was going to meet him at my door wearing a black silk robe with nothing underneath. I hadn’t seen him since last month when he left to go back to Milwaukee the day after the engagement party my mother had thrown for us at the Rainbow Room. The two weeks Robert spent here, we’d hardly had a moment alone together. Whenever we had been alone in my apartment, we’d often drop off to sleep exhausted, with barely a kiss good night. Our appearance schedule had been jam packed, taking us from photo shoots to parties to press conferences and even an appearance on Larry King Live. My life had been so different before that People magazine photo was snapped just six weeks ago. I missed it. But what exactly was it that I missed? Milwaukee, or ... No! I’m not going to let myself think about Javier and the fact that he hadn’t returned any of my calls.

  “Can the two of you pop in tomorrow?” Elaine said, interrupting my thoughts. “We need some more photos. Candid shots. Raul will be taking you two around the city. You know, Central Park, the Statue of Liberty, all the usual landmarks.”

  “Tomorrow is Saturday,” I said evenly. I’d planned to be horizontal with Robert for most of the weekend except for a mandatory brunch with my mother, sister, and her husband on Sunday. And these photo sessions were never a pop. I’d been photographed so much in the past six weeks since I’d returned to New York, I think my body had spontaneously produced cataracts to protect my eyesight.