Adventures of a Salsa Goddess (20 page)

Turning to the next page, she picked up the album for a closer look. “Wow, either this is a new addition or somehow I’ve missed him before. Look at those eyelashes!”

“You mean that one?” I said, pointing my finger at the very first photograph I’d selected at Single No More. I had a weird feeling that I couldn’t begin to describe. She was looking at the man who told me on our last date that he thought he was falling in love with me. What should I do?

“Is something wrong?” Jane asked. “Do you want to go out with him?”

“No, no that’s okay. You saw him first,” I said, but I suddenly felt as though I’d swallowed a tennis ball. Was Robert dating other women from Single No More? I was dating other men, but after all, it was for my job. I had an excuse.

“I’ll bet he’s your type,” Jane suggested. I smiled inwardly. Women were always naturally thinking of others’ feelings. Men would handle this situation a bit differently, no doubt working out an equitable and sensitive sharing arrangement, something like, “I’ve got more money than you and drive a better car, so I get the first poke at her. When I get sick of her, you can have her.”

We each chose two photographs. I breathed an inward sigh of relief that Jane hadn’t chosen Robert after all. We gave our selections to Bunny, who then offered to pull their videotapes. But I told her I was in a hurry, which I was, in a hurry to avoid lapsing into severe depression if I spent five more minutes in there. The place gave me the creeps. I filled out my two postcards, wished Jane luck, and quickly left.

As I walked outside to my car, a brown sedan parked almost directly across the street caught my eye for some reason and I took a second look at the driver wearing dark sunglasses and a hat. I turned to put my key in the car door lock, and immediately whipped my head back around. Was that Sebastian Diaz? It definitely looked like him. What was he doing here? Before I could even think about whether I should wave, the sedan suddenly sped off. Weird. But then again, everything about that man was weird.

When I got home, I called Elizabeth to discuss the issue that had been bothering me since that first night at Club Cubana. I hadn’t realized how much it would bother me that Javier hadn’t kissed me good-bye earlier that afternoon. I needed to resolve what I should do about him, and I knew Elizabeth was the best person to talk to.

“Elizabeth, if you met a guy who was younger than you, let’s say hypothetically nine years younger, and he’d never been to college—let’s say hypothetically he’s a roofer—and you found him smart and incredibly nice, would you go out with him?”

“This isn’t the guy you met from the video dating service,” she said. “Who are you talking about?”

“No one,” I said quickly.

“You’re under a lot of stress, Sam, so for now, I’ll spare you my exceptional cross-examination skills and let you slide,” she said. “The real issue is, who cares about the age difference? Men date and marry much younger women all the time and no one blinks an eye,” she said, making it sound so logical. “If your hypothetical roofer is mature and doesn’t care that you’re older, why should you?”

“Yes, but a decade? He wasn’t even alive when Martin Luther King was killed.”

“Do you want a lover and a friend or someone you can discuss historical events with?” said Elizabeth.

It was true that Javier didn’t seem to care about the age difference. I’d warned him. I’d given him a fair chance to run away from me. But he kept coming back for more.

“Well, there’s a bit of a height difference,” I said, “He’s an inch or two shorter.”

“Sam, I know you well enough to know you don’t care about things like that. What’s the real issue?”

“Okay, what do you think about a professional college-educated woman dating a blue-collar guy?”

“Well, I’ve never gone out
with a guy without a college degree,” she said, “but I guess if I met one I really liked, and I thought he was smart, I might go for it. But you’ve got a bigger problem.”

“I know. My job,” I said. Elaine had made it very clear whom I was supposed to end up with. Fifty percent of the 900,000 readers of
Tres Chic
had college degrees. Thirty percent had master’s degrees and seven percent had Ph.D.s. Blue-collar men only appeared on their radar screens when they needed their cars or plumbing fixed or when they stayed late at work and bumped into them mopping the hallways.

We caught up on Elizabeth’s life. Her weekend in the Hamptons with Judge Doug had gone great. They were now seeing each other about three times a week.

“So is Doug the ...?”

“Stop,” she interrupted. “I don’t want to go there and break the spell. I’m taking this slowly, one step at a time. I haven’t even met his kids yet. And his divorce won’t be final for another couple months.”

“Okay, I understand. Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

“Look who’s talking. But Sam, I have a very strong feeling everything will work out for you.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“I know I’m right,” she said. “By the way, I saw your picture on the cover of
The National Enquirer
. I’ve got to say it wasn’t your most photogenic angle.”

“Very funny, Elizabeth.”

“So will the wedding be in New York or on Planet Zuron?”

“Enough,” I said, to her uncontrollable laughter. And I
would have laughed with her if I hadn’t been so consumed by my mixed feelings about Javier.

I sat down at my computer to type my weekly report for Elaine, which I knew was not the news she would want.

Week Six Status Report:

Had date with the only man who answered my personals ad from the newspaper, Mark, an orthopedic surgeon. He might have a bedside manner at work but he’d obviously left it at the hospital. Date was, in a word, awful!

As for the Singles Sand Volleyball league, it is highly recommended that only women who know how to play volleyball or who are willing to make contact with the ball be encouraged to join. I will not be finishing out the series. However, after game number one, I met Joe, a chemical engineer who took me out for ice cream and said he would call. Still waiting.

Attended my first and last gathering of the local Milwaukee chapter of Mensa. While it may be true that many marriages have been made among Mensans, it appears that this is a fait accompli
in Milwaukee. The Milwaukee chapter has only one active single male member, a would-be novelist, whom I would not consider dating if he were the last available man on earth. I do NOT recommend Mensa as a way for single women to meet men.

Returned to Single No More and selected two more potential dates.

Had fourth date with Robert Mack, things are fine.

I pressed
send
. I had been tempted to add a snide comment about what could she possibly expect with me being so utterly average, but I restrained myself, knowing that it would just be wasted energy with megalomaniac Elaine.

Although I was giving Elaine the cold hard facts about the Milwaukee dating scene, when the next issue of
Tres Chic
came out, I realized that truth was a concept that Elaine preferred to ignore or hadn’t quite yet grasped.

“Lessie, have you seen this yet?” I asked her, handing her a copy of the July 8 issue of
Tres Chic
. We were downtown having drinks at Ilsa’s, a chic restaurant overflowing with the beautiful people of Milwaukee.

Lessie picked it up and began reading the cover article titled, “Sexy Jock, Manly Mensan or Charming Surgeon—Which Would You Choose?”

“Did you write this?”

“Let’s just say it was heavily edited by my wonderful boss,” I said. Thanks to Elaine’s
Oprah
appearance, every day there were dozens of new articles and radio spots about the Mystery Woman and single professional women over forty wanting to get married. I had become a national sensation.

I took a sip of my chocolate martini as Lessie continued to read. “The volleyball guy is the Sexy Jock, right? And the Charming Surgeon? Isn’t that the guy who was under the delusion that he looked like Mel Gibson?”

“Right,” I told her. “And, Joe, Mr. Volleyball, never called, but that little fact didn’t stop Elaine from making it sound like the guy is practically chasing me to the ends of the earth.” Lessie looked back down at the magazine. Her blue eyes scrunched up as she continued reading.

“The article says that Mensa is a haven of single sexy studs. She’s calling them ‘geniuses with penises.’” Lessie looked at me and raised a quizzical eyebrow.

“More like dorks with forks,” I said shaking my head. “And Elaine had the nerve to steal that line from the book about that schizophrenic math genius. What was that called?”

“
A Beautiful Mind
,” said Lessie. “This article makes it sound like you can’t step outside to take out the garbage without running into a mob of gorgeous eligible men sweeping to their knees and pulling engagement rings out of their pockets.”

Lessie put the magazine down on the booth next to her and reached for her glass of wine. “Eliseo is great, but I wish I lived there.”

“You do live there! I mean here, remember?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said.

* * *

The next night was date number five with Robert for the Fourth of July. Robert picked me up around six, bringing along a picnic dinner for us—cashew chicken salad, roasted red pepper potato salad, and brownies. He hadn’t made any of it, but the effort was sweet. He’d packed it in an old-fashioned wicker picnic basket, the kind with a big handle and a cover that flips open on either end. While he’d unpacked our dinner, he’d pulled out a mini American flag on a stick and handed it to me.

“And these are for later, after dark.” he said, pulling out a package of sparklers.

“Sparklers! I haven’t played with those since I was a kid,” I said, smiling.

Next he pulled out a bottle of chilled Perrier Jouet champagne and two crystal flutes. He popped the cork. I looked at the bubbles flowing upward in my glass as he poured his own.

“A toast to Uncle Sam, bowling, and France,” he said. Our
glasses clinked. I took a sip, perfectly chilled and dry. Ah champagne, nectar of the gods, my favorite.

“Do you think we should toast to another country on the Fourth of July?” I asked.

“Why not? We have a lot to thank the French for: French fries, French champagne,” he said holding up his glass, “and ...” he leaned over and kissed me.

“Sam,” he said, “I know I’ve been a little moody lately. It’s not an excuse, but I’ve been under a lot of pressure with my business. Will you forgive me?”

“Yes, of course.” He scooted over to me and took a sip of champagne. Then he caught me staring at him.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“I want to talk to you about my job,” I said.

“What about it?”

How would he handle learning that he’s the “video guy” from the last issue of
Tres Chic
, the “live one”? I opened my mouth to speak and was silenced by a loud boom. The fireworks had started.

Safe Sex

Could salsa dancing be the meaning of life?

I pondered this weighty philosophical issue as I put on Marc Anthony’s
Contra La Corriente
, one of a dozen salsa CDs I’d bought over the past couple weeks. Lying on my couch, unmoving, listening to song number three, “Si Te Vas,” I felt my chest swell, thinking of dancing with Javier.

What was it about salsa dancing that made me feel like I was having the best sex of my life, starring in a major Hollywood movie, and stuffing myself with calorie-free Godiva chocolates, all rolled into one incredible feeling?

Salsa, the ultimate in safe sex—no risk of disease, pregnancy, or emotional devastation. You get the physical closeness, the emotional thrills, and the surging hormones without any of the messy stuff that came with a real relationship—arguing about whose turn it was to take out the garbage or whether to go with vinyl or steel, siding? Just show up at a club, dance the night away with a few handsome strangers, and then go home. Alone.

I used to look at people with passions—things such as gardening, taxidermy, collecting thimbles from around the world— without ever really understanding their enthusiasm. But now I was living it and the CDs were just the start. I’d spent $385 plus tax on three pairs of salsa dance shoes, which together weigh less than a cream puff and amount to little more than a few strands of dental floss attached to plastic soles. As for the clothes, I don’t even want to add up how much I’ve spent on a bolero jacket, a couple of tango shirts with ruffles and lace, two pairs of lace-up-the-back matador pants, and a bustier—the kind of practical clothes that a slutty bullfighter might invest in.

And then a few nights ago, I had gone to Cubana. Alone. It wasn’t my usual night. I didn’t call Lessie. I just snuck into the club the way someone might slip into a crack house to get their fix. Javier was dancing with a very young, mousy brown-haired woman when I’d walked in, and a few minutes later when he’d begun another lesson, that same mousy girl, named Nicole, chose the empty stool next to me and sat down.

Although this was only Nicole’s second time at Cubana, she’d already fallen under the
Javier spell. The signs were unmistakable: the dazed look, the wistful stare at Javier while he danced with another woman, and the nonstop chatter, all about him. Nicole told me that she’d arrived at Cubana at seven, and had talked with “the instructor” (she didn’t even know his name for God’s sake!) for an hour straight.

I looked at my watch. This meant that Javier had not only talked to her for an hour, he’d danced with her for an hour too.

The little salsa whore! Nicole was obviously just after Javier, ready to ruin everything for people like me who were here for purely wholesome reasons like getting exercise and expanding my awareness of new cultures—learning that bachata dance, for example, from that foreign country, wherever it was, when I got to, I mean was forced to, grind my pelvis into his and press my sweaty body against his and his oh-so-kissable lips were mere millimeters from mine.

Later that night, after all of the customers who’d wanted lessons had gone, Javier and I, the only ones left upstairs besides the bartender, were dancing bachata. We started dancing and soon our pelvises were very much together as we moved in smooth precision to the
music. I don’t know how he did it, but somehow he slipped my knee between his legs and moved me up and down as my thigh pressed up against his crotch.

“Javier, do you dance like this with everyone?” I’d asked him casually, although my heart was in my esophagus.

“No. The bachata is very passionate,” he’d told me.

Really? I’d barely noticed.

“I only dance this way with very special women,” he’d added a moment later, softly into my left ear.

I nearly fell off my couch remembering how Javier had made me feel that night. Dancing bachata with Javier had been an experience like none other for me. It was the sexiest, most intense ninety vertical minutes I think I’ve ever spent with a man. If only I could get paid to do Latin dancing. I looked at my watch and saw that it was time to go and grabbed a salsa CD and my new pair of Harley Davidson shades for the drive to Lessie’s house.

Glancing into the rearview mirror at my big, dark sunglasses, I couldn’t help but be painfully reminded of the last forty-eight hours. I’d had three of the worst dates of my life. Not the usual kind of bad dates. These were the sort that suck the marrow from your bones and make you think that there are worse things than living another fifty years and never having sex again, although I couldn’t think of any at the moment.

“I’ll bet you that some of my dates were worse. Much worse,” said Lessie, as I sat slumped into one of her patio chairs while she poured me another margarita.

“Are you challenging me to a bad-date duel?” I asked her, and then made a motion with my right hand as if to fire a pistol.

She fired back with her index finger and thumb saying, “You’re on. I’ll even let you go first.”

“Okay, Friday lunch with Todd from Brunches or Lunches. Nice looking, financial planner, seemed perfectly normal. The first words he uttered to me as we sat down at the restaurant were not ‘hi,’ ‘nice to meet you,’ or ‘what do you?’ No, his very first words to me were—drum roll please—‘The world is about to end, are you ready for the rapture?’”

Lessie folded her arms across her narrow chest as if to say she wasn’t the least bit impressed.

“I spent the entire meal listening to him lecture me about how I was doomed to battle the forces of evil on earth after the rapture because I’m not a believer,” I said.

“You call that a bad date?” Lessie taunted me. “That’s a match made in heaven compared to my blind date with Roger, forty-eight, stockbroker, divorced, attractive, jazz lover, drove a
convertible Porsche, and took me to a fancy French restaurant.”

“This was your first date?”

“First and only. Dinner was lovely. Naturally, the delusions started around the escargot appetizer, and by the time the creme caramel was served, I’d had us married with two kids, a boy and a girl.”

I nodded. Been there, done that, too many times to count. It
all started when we were little girls and wrote our first names with the last name of the boy in our class who we had a crush on.

“After dinner he planned to take me to his favorite jazz bar. We walked out to the parking lot and were just twenty steps away from the restaurant when he let go of my hand, walked over to the bushes and took a piss right in front of me! Then he shook, zipped up like nothing had happened and reached for my hand.” Lessie pursed her lips and gave me a smug, try-and-beat-that
look.

“Biological destiny,” I said. “It’s too easy for them. No squatting while trying to avoid pissing on their pants, no need for toilet paper. They love the fact that they can write their names in the snow. For some men, the world is just one big toilet.”

“Roger was a misogynist,” Lessie protested. “Obviously he had no respect for women.”

“So?” I teased. “My turn. Larry was yesterday’s lunch date. The conversation was okay, but he kept looking at me in a weird way. Not normal polite conversation looking, but actual staring. After a while I couldn’t take it anymore, so I asked Larry why he was looking at me like that. He told me that he usually doesn’t date women my age but made an exception for me because I looked so young in what he called my ‘visuals,’” I said, holding up my fingers to make quotation marks in the air as Larry had done.

“Then,” I continued, “he wondered if Single No More put a special lens or Vaseline over the camera to ‘help’ certain clients, like they do for aging Hollywood actresses,” I said, my voice cracking. “I took a good look in the mirror today, Lessie. I think he’s right, my face is sagging off my skull!”

“Sam, Larry is an asshole.”

“The skin is melting off my head like wax off a candle!” I repeated.

“You don’t look a day over thirty,” Lessie said, putting her hand on my arm. “You’re gorgeous!”

“So did I win?” I asked with a laugh.

“No! My turn,” she said with a pout. “Okay, let me see, there was Barry, another blind date. First, he picks me up in a Chevy pickup truck that has a big white Playboy Bunny painted smack dab in the middle of the back window of his studmobile. Needless to say I was really impressed with that.”

“That’s all?”

“Hold on, sister, there’s plenty more. Barry, a chiropractor by day and nutcase by night, chose to wear an eye patch for our first date. He told me he’d lost his eye in a car accident when he was twenty-five and owned a glass eye, but preferred to wear ‘the patch’ when he wasn’t at work. But that still wasn’t the worst of it. He’d just gotten a yellow lab puppy. Guess what he named him?” I shrugged.

“Satan! He named an eight-week-old yellow lab Satan! ‘Satan, come here Satan.’”

“I went out with a guy once who had a small dick and flaming carrot-red pubic hair,” I said. “I think I could’ve gotten used to one of them, but both? No way.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” asked Lessie, shaking her pretty head.

“Maybe the eye patch or the dog named Satan, but not both? Just a thought.”

Lessie rolled her huckleberry-blue eyes and flipped her hand to indicate it was my turn.

“Last but not least,” I began, “there was Ken. I found his profile on MilwaukeeDates.com. Where do I begin with the yin and yang of Ken? A date so hor
rible it will go down in the annals of dating legend and lore, a date so awful ...”

“Sam, enough with the melodramatics,” she said.

“Okay, Ken, if that’s his real name,” I said, “claimed to be a pharmaceutical salesman. But if he was, he’s peddling hallucinogenics and imbibing most of his own samples. First, he tells me that when he was in his twenties, he was in the French Foreign Legion in the jungles of the Congo.”

“The French Foreign Legion? Does it really exist?”

“That was my reaction. This being the first legionnaire I’d ever met, naturally I was curious. I asked him what it was like.” I leaned forward across the patio table and lowered my voice “Ken tells me, ‘You wouldn’t believe it if I told you. You don’t want to know.’”

Lessie laughed. “French Foreign Legion my ass. What kind of nom de guerre is Ken? Ken is the name of my plumber.”

“Exactly. Then I asked him why he’d joined. He said, ‘The money is good. That is, if you can stay alive long enough to enjoy it.’ Then he chuckled in a danger-is-my-middle-name sort of way and took a deep drag from his cigarette. I felt like I was in a really bad movie.”

“And then,” I said slowly, and with as much dramatic flair as possible, removing my new sunglasses. Lessie gasped as she saw my black eye.

“I told you I could top anything you could possibly come up with,” I said smugly. “So after dinner, Mr. Legionnaire and I get in his car so he can drive me home. He turns to me and says, ‘I hope I don’t kill you. Tonight is the first night I’ve driven in a year and a half. The last time I drove I was dodging mortar shells in Rwanda and I used to be a race car driver in South Africa.’ I didn’t have time to put on my seat belt. He zoomed out of the parking lot and slammed on the brakes, my head hit the dashboard, and bang, my black eye.”

“That is a bad date,” Lessie said, nodding. “A really bad date. I give up, Sam, you win.”

“I can’t do this anymore Lessie!”

“Calm down,” she told me, rubbing her thin fingers through her auburn locks. “I have a solution. From now on just meet them for a drink, and when desperate, use the cat funeral excuse.”

“The what?”

“True story. My friend Tiffany’s fifteen-year-old Persian died. She loved that cat more than she’s ever loved her husband, but that’s another story. Anyway, she scheduled Muffy’s funeral for a night that I had a blind date, so I couldn’t go. My date, if you can picture this, was wearing a cowboy hat and a white-fringed cowboy shirt open to his nipples. Picture Roy Rogers gussied up as a lounge lizard.”

I moaned.

“But then I remembered d
ear-departed Muffy,” she continued. “I took a sip of my drink and told him I had to go to my friend’s cat’s funeral and left. As they say, all is fair in love and dating.”

* * *

Robert had been out of town all week on business in California and Florida, but had called every day, sometimes a few times a day.

Exhibit A, Robert’s call from Los Angeles five days ago: “Sammie, it’s so hard to get any work done when I’m thinking about you,” he’d said with a hint of sadness.

He’d taken to calling me “Sammie” on day number two. Unexpectedly, I’d found this new mushy, amorous tone of his as infectious as laughter. I still had reservations about Robert, but that didn’t stop me from acting like a complete fool. Exhibit B:

“How often do you think about me?” I’d asked him, day three, in a Marilyn Monroe voice, all breathless and girlish, hardly recognizing myself.

“Constantly,” he’d said. “I can’t even sleep.”

Could it be true that I’d been relieved at the end of our Fourth of July date when he’d left me at my apartment without any heavy duty “I love you” or “I want to make love to you” declarations?

Day five had been, by far, the worst. Exhibit C: