Adventures of a Salsa Goddess (30 page)

“Mrs. Daniels, what in your opinion was Miss Jacobs’s motivation?” one of the female reporters called out.

“Well I can’t be sure of course, but I believe she did it for the most selfish of motives,” Elaine said smoothly. “To promote her career as the new columnist for ‘La Vie’ at the expense of our readers who wanted to believe in the dream that they too could defy the statistics, meet a wonderful man, and get married.”

Oh God! My life was no longer in the toilet bowl. It had just been flushed far back into the bowels of the New Jersey sewer system.

Missing Persons

I’d barely moved from my chair in the past twenty-four hours. Elizabeth had offered to come over again last night, but I didn’t want to see anyone. My mother, my sister, Andre, and Lessie had called, all of them mouthing words of sympathy and encouragement. I’m not even sure what I’d said to them in return.

I felt as hollow as if organ thieves had scooped out my insides in the night and the only thing they’d left was skin and bones. I was completely numb. I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t feel. My brain was on automatic pilot.

I remember so many times over the past fifteen years of my life feeling so bored that I would have welcomed almost any jolt just to spice things up. But now I’d give anything to have that boredom back. I craved normalcy.

I stared at the television set, watching yet another tearful interview of a betrayed
Tres Chic
reader. Throughout the day CNN featured clips of women picketing outside the
Tres Chic
building—me, not the magazine. Several dozen well-dressed women bundled up in wool coats, gloves, and scarves moved clockwise in a semicircle on the sidewalk. Some were holding signs, others were there mingling on the sidelines out of curiosity or, I suppose, for moral support,
we hate you mystery woman!
was the most common sign. Others included
burn in singles hell forever mw.
Clearly, the cold spell that had hit New York two days ago had done nothing to dampen their enthusiasm.

The phone rang. I picked it up without thinking.

“I know you didn’t know Robert Mack was a fake,” said an unfamiliar voice.

“Who is this?” I asked. My initial reaction was to clutch at the voice like a nicotine addict for a cigarette. It was the first positive thing I’d heard about myself in days. But then my brain remembered to be wary. It could be a reporter trying to ingratiate herself by buttering me up.

“This is Maya Beckett.”

Her voice was small, as if she were calling from overseas. A hundred thoughts swept through my brain at once. Where was she? Why had she quit
Tres Chic
two months ago without giving notice? And why in the world was she calling me?

“Listen, I think I can help you. Can you meet me in an hour?” she asked.

A cold drizzle fell as I exited my building and walked to the corner to hail a cab. Maybe I was imagining it, but it seemed as though everyone I passed was examining my face extra carefully. The dark sunglasses I wore on this gray dismal day were practically an invitation for passersby to give me a good ogling so they could figure out if I was someone famous who was trying to hide her identity, which of course was exactly what I was trying to do.

Maya had refused to tell me any more on the phone, and the place she had suggested for us to meet was strange, giving the whole thing a bit of a cloak-and-dagger feel to it. But at this point I had nothing to lose. Maybe she had some information that could help me? Normally I’d take the subway uptown, but it was easier to face the possibility that one cab driver might recognize me versus a mob of irate
Tres Chic
readers that might take their anger to the rotten vegetable level or even worse.

Thankfully, the cab driver,
a woman in her mid to late forties, had barely glanced at me during the drive. We crawled through the traffic.

“I’ve been married three t
imes,” she said breaking the silence, which had been interrupted only by the static of her radio and the steady scrape of the wipers back and forth across the windshield.

“The first two cheated on me. The last one, the only one I really loved, went out for a carton of cigarettes and never came back. So I decided to try being a lesbian,” she said, the same way someone might say, “I decided to try that new Ben & Jerry’s flavor.”

I felt as though I should say something, but I don’t know that I could’ve thought of anything to say, even if my brain had been in peak working condition.

“It’s not bad, but sometimes I miss having a hairy
, hard body next to mine at night. Not that any of my husbands had a lot of muscle or hair, but I liked the way they felt.”

Swish, swash, swish, swash
went the wipers.

“Have you ever thought about trying it?” she asked with a glance at me in her rearview mirror. “Nah, by the looks of you I don’t suppose you have.”

I didn’t know what that was supposed to mean, but I didn’t care enough to try and figure it out. We stopped at a light. She studied me in her mirror and then turned her body around to face me. “Are you all right, honey?” she asked me. “You look like you ain’t got a friend in the world. I’m not coming on to you or nothing. It’s just, well, you look like shit.”

I smiled. It was the nicest thing anyone had said to me in days. “I’ll be okay,” I said.

“This one is on me,” she said with a flip of her hand when we pulled up to the curb and I handed her a twenty-dollar bill. “We girls need to stick together. You just take care of yourself,” she said with a smile.

Inside the white spiral building that
had always looked to me like an upside-down wedding cake, I looked about for Maya. The last time I’d visited the Guggenheim, I’d come with my sister, Susan, when she was eight months’ pregnant, and she’d waddled down the exhibit ramps like a rocking ship, taking lots of breaks.

“When I think of Elaine Daniels, this is what I see,” said Maya when she appeared at my side five minutes later, pointing to a statue by Alberto Giacometti, aptly named “Nose.” The bronze head hung from a rope suspended in a rectangular cage with an enormous pointed nose that would’ve made Pinocchio’s look like a button in comparison.

“I didn’t mean to be so mysterious,” Maya said. “The Guggenheim is my favorite museum. I live just a couple blocks away. I come here at least once a week.” She was much taller than I, probably six feet in her stocking feet and close to six three in the black leather boots she wore. Her thin legs stuck out of a red leather miniskirt. If she walked into a bar, heads would turn. But if you took her features apart one by one, the bump on the bridge of her nose, her shiny but too-thin straight brown hair, and her mouth, which was too wide for her narrow face, they weren’t attractive. But at a glance, the total package was striking.

“I have to tell you something difficult, but promise me you’ll hear me out,” she said tensely, moving with the fluid grace of a dancer.

“Okay,” I said. What could possibly be worse than what I’d just been through? God, could it really have been just one week ago today that I’d found out my fiance was a lying scoundrel?

“I’m the person who told the press that you were the Mys
tery Woman,” she said.

“Okay,” I said with a shrug. I was far too shell-shocked to let anything I might hear jolt me. “How did you find out?”

Maya exhaled and looked relieved. “Elaine told me,” she said.

“But Elaine wanted it kept secret. The only other person who knew was Sally.”

“Do you remember the day you called Elaine to tell her you’d gotten engaged?”

I nodded. How could I ever forget celebrating the day that I’d made the biggest mistake of my life, saying yes to Robert’s proposal?

“Right after that call,” Maya continued, “Elaine had called me upstairs and told me that I was being transferred back to Features and she’d decided to give my column to you.”

I couldn’t help but be amused by Maya’s proprietary tone about “my column.” I’d felt the same way for the short six weeks I’d had it.

“But Elaine told me you were giving it up voluntarily, that you asked to be transferred back to a regular department,” I said.

“Who’d be crazy enough to do that?” Maya said. “I loved that job. I never wanted to leave it. At first, Elaine told me she
was no longer happy with my work, which I didn’t believe. I don’t mean to brag, but I got tons of fan mail. So I confronted her and demanded to know what was really going on.”

I raised my eyebrow but said nothing.

“Then she told me everything. About you, your assignment in Milwaukee, and that she’d promised ‘La Vie’ to you if you pulled it off. She said if I agreed to go along with everything, she was going to give the column back to me in January while you were on your honeymoon.”

“That bitch!” I said. A security guard, a small thin black man wearing wire-rim glasses, raised an eyebrow in my direction and lowered his chin in disapproval.

“I quit right then and there,” Maya went on. “I was so furious all I wanted to do was get back at her. So I went to a good friend of mine who works for the Associated Press and well, the next day, you were exposed.”

“It’s okay. I probably would’ve done the same thing in your shoes.”

“But I’ve got a plan to fix everything,” she said.

Lottery Winner

I gazed across the table at Andre, whom I hadn’t seen in nearly seven months, not since our trip to Peru. We were at the Wolfgang Puck Cafe in Los Angeles. We’d spent the day, my last in town, finally seeing the tourist highlights, including the Hollywood Bowl, the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard, and a bus tour of the stars’ homes.

For the first week after my meeting with Maya, I went out to White Plains to stay with my sister, Susan. Domesticity, spending quality time with my niece, and staying away from the media had helped immensely. I’d even tried a couple of salsa clubs out in the burbs, but they couldn’t compare to the clubs in Manhattan or L.A. But then my sister and I had started to get on each other’s nerves and I knew it was time to leave.

Luckily, Andre had called, offering his condo to me. He told me I could stay as long as I needed. I’d been in L.A. for over a
month. Andre had been out of the country for the first two weeks so I’d been alone, mostly just vegging out by his pool after salsa dancing every night until four
a.m.,
which had been more therapeutic than anything else.

Salsa had certainly helped me to keep my sanity, but it had done far more than that. Salsa was so freeing, so liberating that I’d finally been able to discover who I really was. I wasn’t the person that Elaine or my mother had expected me to be. It was too late with Javier, but in the future I would never again make the mistake of falling for a man just because he was someone that other people approved of.

“Sam, why don’t you fly to Paris with me tomorrow and we’ll celebrate New Year’s Eve there together?” Andre asked me.

“Two weeks is a long time for you to stay in one place, isn’t it?” I said, teasing him. Andre lived to travel and, luckily for him, could do so whenever he wanted to, thanks to a trust fund that he’d gotten when he was twenty-five.

“There’s salsa dancing in Paris,” he said with a gleam in his eye.

I couldn’t explain it, but I had a feeling I needed to get back to New York. But for what I wasn’t sure, other than the fact that I was finally ready to face reality.

“I appreciate the offer, but it doesn’t feel like the right thing to do,” I said. I would always love Andre, but only like a brother.

“You’re going to find someone, Sam. You are the most interesting woman I know. And you should see how beautiful you look right
now,” said Andre.

“Thanks, Andre,” I said, wondering if he would ever settle down.

“So here’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, what are you going to do when you get back to New York, Sam?”

I didn’t have a clue. From the Guggenheim, Maya and I had gone straight to Maya’s reporter friend at the AP. I’d given him copies of my files from the summer that showed how I’d originally drafted my articles about my Milwaukee dates. But it had been Sally, Elaine’s executive assistant, who had actually saved the day. Elaine had treated Sally like her personal slave for years, so it hadn’t been too difficult to convince Sally to go on the record with everything Elaine had done. She’d provided her own e-mails and computer files as proof of my own. After that, Maya’s reporter friend had flown to Oxford Federal Prison in Wisconsin to interview Robert. He’d also interviewed Sebastian Diaz, who’d corroborated that I’d known nothing about Robert or his dealings with Single No More until that fateful day when Sebastian had shown up at Robert’s condo to tell me everything.

According to my latest phone call from Elizabeth, who was reading my mail and paying my bills while I was in L.A., three New York publishing houses were trying to find me to sign a book deal about everything that had happened over the last seven months.
Tres Chic
was in serious trouble. Sales had dropped off forty percent and the press had crucified Elaine Daniels ever since the AP article had come out about everything five weeks ago, including what Elaine had done to Maya Beckett.

“You’ve got one of those faraway looks on your gorgeous face,” Andre said. “You’re thinking about him, aren’t you?”

“I don’t hate him anymore. Now I just feel sorry for him. I think he really loved me, in his own way. But I finally realize, I was never in love with him.”

What I thought was love was really, as it had been with David, just being in love with the idea of getting married and having a family with a man who’d fit the qualifications of what
I’d been conditioned to look for my entire life—superficial qualities that I’ve finally learned, at the ripe old age of forty-one, don’t matter in the least. I had to admit that it was extraordinarily painful and not a little embarrassing to see how shallow I’d been my entire adult life when it had come to men—just like the “fictional” character Mary in my essay, “The Three Date Rule.” “Maybe three more years in prison will finally change Robert and he’ll go straight, maybe even marry a nice woman someday? ”

“Sam, I’m not talking about Robert. What about the man you are in love with?” asked Andre.

I didn’t say anything. Aside from my father’s death, losing Javier was one of the most painful events of my life. I knew from past experience that someday I would get over him, but at the moment it seemed impossible.

* * *

My plane landed exactly on time at JFK. I took a cab to my apartment and walked in. A fresh bouquet of purple and white irises sat on my kitchen table, along with a note from Elizabeth welcoming me back and reminding me that I could meet up with her and Doug that night. But I didn’t want to socialize.

I looked at my watch, seven o’clock on New Year’s Eve. Right now I would have been walking down the aisle at The Plaza, in front of five hundred of my mother’s closest friends and a few of my own. In another twenty minutes I would’ve been married, ready to fly to Europe for my three-week honeymoon the next day. And then? We would’ve been happy, for a while. Eventually it would’ve fallen apart. Being in love with the idea of a man wasn’t enough to make a marriage work.

I didn’t feel like unpacking and was far too restless to sit in my apartment, so I bundled up and went out. I walked the streets for hours, passing elegant couples in tuxedos and long evening gowns, street bums curled up on street grates drinking from bottles in paper bags, and groups of laughing twenty-somethings full of life and optimism. I looked into bar and hotel windows at midnight and watched champagne toasts, chaste cheek kisses, and passionate full-mouth smooches.

And as I walked, I thought about everything I’d learned over the past seven months. I’d agreed to marry Robert because it was the easy thing to do, for my job and to please my mother. It’s not that I didn’t like him, and I’d convinced myself that I’d loved him, but I’d fooled myself into believing that I had to end up with the great-on-paper guy or I could never be happy. I couldn’t believe it took me forty-one years to finally grow up. I smiled inwardly. That was what Lessie had said the last time we’d had lunch together. Ironically, over the past summer I’d felt that between the two of us, I had been the mature one. After all, I wasn’t necking in humidors or having sex without birth control. But at least Lessie hadn’t held back her feelings. And because I had, I’d lost the love of my life.

At two
a.m.
I walked into my apartment. A moment later I heard a frantic knock on the door. Normally I’d look through my peephole, but for some reason I flung the door open only to see the one person I was certain I’d never have the joy of seeing again.

“Javier! How did you get here?” I asked, flabbergasted and elated at the same moment.

“I flew,” he said, breathing heavily. His nose and cheeks were red from the cold. “Where have you been, Sam? I’ve been walking all over your neighborhood for hours looking for you.”

“Really?” I restrained myself from throwing my arms around him.

“Lessie told me you were getting back from L.A. tonight.”

“What?” I could barely think since I was just beginning to grasp that Javier was actually here at my doorstep, and that maybe I had another chance.

“Would it be all right if I came in?” he asked with a smile.

Ten minutes later as we sat together on the couch, sipping champagne that I’d had in my fridge
it felt with Javier as it always had. It was as though we hadn’t spent any time apart over the last four months.

“I thought you were furious with me,” I said.

“I was more hurt than anything else. But then Sebastian told me that in October when he came to tell you that your ex-fiance was in jail, the first person you asked about was me,” he said.

“True,” I said.

“When I heard that, I knew then how you really felt about me,” Javier went on. “But, I was seeing someone at the time. I tried to forget about you, but I couldn’t.”

“So you’re not seeing her anymore?”

“I broke up with her last month. I tried calling your home number but it just rang and rang.”

After Elaine fired me on national TV, my phone never stopped ringing, so I’d cancelled my voice mail and for the last six weeks while I’d been out of Manhattan, my phone had been unplugged.

“So I called Lessie. She told me you were coming back tonight so I booked a flight and here I am.”

My heart started pounding faster.

“I have never stopped thinking about you, Sam,” he said. I hadn’t forgotten his warm, brown eyes, or his warm dimpled smile, just as I hadn’t forgotten how easy it was to be with him.

“I couldn’t stop loving you.” Javier reached over and grabbed my hand. “Sam, will you marry me?”

I knew my answer in an instant. Suddenly, I felt the magnetic north and south poles flip. I heard trumpets and harps and choirs of angels bursting into song. In the frozen mountains of Nepal an explorer stumbled into a beautiful verdant valley and discovered that Shangri-La really exists. Well, okay, not really. But it felt wonderful to finally show my true feelings, what I’d known for months but had suppressed, that I’m crazy in love with Javier.

“Yes, yes I will marry you, Javier.”

“So when do you want to get married?” he asked.

“Today is January first, this seems like a good way to start the
New Year,” I said as we fell into each other’s arms.

This time when we made love, I let myself go completely, more than with any other man
I’d ever been with. Javier whispered over and over that he loved me and I did the same as we kissed each other everywhere. We came together, and as he held me close, I started crying.

“Sam, what’s wrong? What is it
querida
?” he asked, stroking my face.

“I’m just so happy, I thought I’d lost you,” I blubbered. “I was so stupid, it took me forever to figure out that I love you.”

“It did take a quite a while,” he said with a smile. I stopped crying and playfully punched his arm.

“I think I started to fall in love with you the night we had dinner at that Spanish tapas restaurant,” I continued. “And then at Summerfest, remember when we were sitting on the rocks by Lake Michigan and you said you wanted to share your life with someone? I thought you were talking about Isabella. But I wanted it to be me.”

“And I fell in love with you during our first bachata dance, in my studio. Remember?”

“You made my spine melt that day, of course I remember.”

“I could try and make your spine melt again. Horizontal or vertical? I’m ambidextrous,” he said.

I laughed. “Both, but horizontal first.”