"The Flamenco Academy" (16 page)

“So? Tell,” she prompted. “Where have you
been until five-thirty in the morning, young lady? Huh?” She
bounced her eyebrows lasciviously.

“Deeds, it wasn’t like that.” It wasn’t like
anything that had ever happened to Didi. She wouldn’t
understand.

“Like what?”

“Like that. All hubba-hubba, baby.”

Tone. Like pygmies deep in the forest who
can give a word a dozen different meanings just by the tone or
pitch, Didi and I spoke a language of tones. One word, it didn’t
matter what the word was, everything depended on the tone in which
we spoke it. From that we could deduce all the rest. She read my
tone, put the Pop Tart down, and studied my face. In the silence
that followed, I heard what sounded like game-show music but had to
be whatever jazz album Mrs. Steinberg had just sold. It was
interrupted by her computer making the scary ambulance noise her
software used to alert her that one of her auctions was getting
some play.

“Oh my God, you met someone.” Instead of the
mockery I would have expected, there was a whispered reverence. She
did understand. I couldn’t stop myself then, I nodded, and made a
face, a grimace that encompassed the enormity of what had
happened.

“Oh my God,” she whispered again. “This is
the real deal.” Briskly, she brushed sprinkles off her hands as she
got down to business. “All right, what’s his name?”

Just Didi saying that pronoun, “his,” was
enough to make me feel as if she had invoked his presence, as if he
were in the room with us. “I didn’t... He didn’t tell me.”

Didi shrugged as if that were a small
detail, an obstacle, like eating sprinkles in a color-coded
sequence. “Okay, then, where does Mystery Man live?”

“I don’t know.”

“Phone number?”

“He didn’t give it to me.”

“No digits? Wow, this is going to take some
serious reconnaissance. Recount your exact movements for me. You
must have met him at the Ace High, right? Or did you leave as soon
as we split up?”

I didn’t like her questions. She was
treating this like a groupie mission. But it wasn’t. Next week,
when Didi had forgotten about Julian Casablancas or whomever she
was currently obsessed with, I would not have forgotten about him.
Not next week or the week after or any of the weeks that would
follow. “No, I met him there,” I answered, adding lamely, “but we
left. Before. The cops. Or whatever.” I didn’t want Didi to know
I’d seen her. In the alley. With the cop.

She stared into my face again and I couldn’t
help myself. I remembered. Again, I saw the cop hauling her face to
his crotch. I ducked her gaze. “Never mind. This isn’t like a, you
know, mission.”

Tone. Tone never lied. Didi, insulted,
bristled, “Well, then I can’t help you.”

She went to her computer and started writing
an e-mail. I curled up with my back to her and replayed the entire
night like a miser running her fingers through a chest filled with
treasure. I saw the heart-shaped cottonwood leaves twirling down in
the starlight, feathering across my face. I plotted the lines and
curves of his face, noting that his nostrils were perfect
teardrops. Thinking about him made something fizz beneath my bottom
rib like a fuse sizzling that would soon detonate my heart. He was
so enormous in my mind that I imagined I could look out the window
and find him looming above the city bigger than Sandia Peak. I
thought about the taillights disappearing in the distance as he
headed off toward the interstate. I didn’t know his name. He didn’t
know mine. Before last night, I could never have imagined someone
like him in my life. Now I could not imagine living without him. I
panicked. “Didi, please, you have to help me.”

When she turned back around, she didn’t look
like a kid anymore. Early morning sun raked in the low window,
settled on the hard planes of her face, and lighted what was behind
the harshness: she knew I knew. “So you want him?”

Want him? Last night, it had seemed too much
of a presumption to ask him his name. How could I say it? How could
I say I wanted him?

“I want him.”

“You really want him?”

“I really, really want him.”

“This is the one?”

“This is the one.”

“And you don’t care what you have to do to
get him?”

“I don’t care what I have to do to get him.”
I answered automatically, but automatic wasn’t good enough.

“You don’t care what you have to do to get
him, even if it’s...”

For a sliver of a second, the defiance that
I thought saturated Didi down to her bones disappeared. The image
in her mind transferred itself to mine and I saw her kneeling in
the perfect circle of her matador skirt spread on the black asphalt
of the Ace High Motel parking lot. That image was a pact laid
between us waiting for my acceptance. If I repeated her words, it
would signal my agreement that nothing Didi did in the pursuit of
her obsessions could be considered a humiliation. I thought of
taillights disappearing and imagined that I would never see him
again. That the rest of my life would be the way it had been before
he laid my head against his guitar, before he swept me in a giant’s
swing up to the stars. I could not go back. I would do anything I
had to not to go back to the life I would have without him.

“I don’t care what I have to do,” I
said.

“Just for your information,” Didi said, her
eyes holding mine, “I’m not groupieing anymore. That part is over.
I just wrote to all the Kumfort Gurlz, telling them I’m through.
From now on it’s going to be all about Didi. My music. My
career.”

“Good. That’s good, Deeds. No more
groupieing.”
No more of what I’d seen last night.

“Good?” she asked, offended. “It’s great.
It’s way overdue. It’s my turn. I’ve spent way too much of my life
focusing on everyone but me. Madonna had a record contract by my
age! Shit, this town sucks so bad. I am never going to get anything
going unless I leave this hole. I have got to get out of here.”

I figured that this would be the motif for a
very long summer and was surprised when, just as suddenly as the
black clouds had blown in, they lifted and Didi was all smiles
again. She plopped back down on the bed, and even bounced slightly
in a slumber party sort of way. “All right, this marks the official
beginning of Operation Mystery Man. So? Details?”

I told her a chain of events but not how
each link closed around the other. I gave her the prose version and
kept the poetry for myself. I only slipped when she plucked up, by
its stem, the cottonwood leaf that had fallen from my skirt.

“And what do we have here?” she asked.

I snatched it back but, before I could stop
myself, burbled over. “It’s from the most enormous tree you’ve ever
seen. From this park that’s hidden in the middle of this totally
ordinary neighborhood.”

“No! You have to take me to see it.”

“If I could ever find it again. It was all
dark and everything.”

“Hey, Rae-rae, don’t ever pursue a career in
acting. You’re the worst liar on earth. If you don’t want me to see
your precious park, just say so.”

“It’s not that.” It was exactly that. I
wished I had never mentioned the park. My park. Our park.

“Whatever. Anyway, what would you say his
mental state was?”

Her cross-examination style reassured me.
“He said last night was the worst night of his life.”

“He give any reason why? Woman trouble?
Money trouble?”

I knew it had to do with his music. With
flamenco and having to be black to play the blues. But I didn’t
want to tell Didi that. I wanted to keep that for myself. “Not
really.”

“Okay, he played this amazing music for you.
What was it? Classical? Jazz?” I shook my head no. “Don’t tell me,
not country? He’s not some C and W asshole?”

“No.”

“Well then, tell me. What kind of music does
he play?”

“What does it matter?”

“We need to narrow the known world a little
here. You do want me to find him, right?”

“Flamenco.” As soon as I said the word, I
regretted it. It felt like the one piece of treasure I should have
hoarded. “He plays flamenco.”

“Oh, that is too easy,” Didi said. All she
had to type in the search was
flamenco, guitarist,
and
New Mexico,
and a list of matches popped up. She brought up
one after the other. I peeked over her shoulder as images flashed
past of guitarists in puffy-sleeved shirts, guitarists in
flat-brimmed hats, and guitarists in black suits with white shirts
buttoned all the way up.

Suddenly the screen filled with his photo.
It was the cover of his CD being sold on the site of a very obscure
recording company. His head was bent over the neck of his guitar
just as it had been the first time I’d seen him. Dark hair fell
across his face, covering everything except his lips, his chin. I
didn’t need to see his entire face; I would have known him from his
hands, the fingers long, the beds of the nails the tiniest bit blue
against his brown skin. His hands seemed older than the rest of
him. Not wrinkled or spotted but filled with knowledge the way very
old people’s faces are. They curled around the neck of the guitar,
around the strings.

“Whoa,” Didi said, impressed. “I hope this
is Mystery Man.”

I couldn’t speak, just nodded.

“Major hottie.” She ran a finger over his
lips and spoke the name that appeared beneath the photo: “Tomás
Montenegro.” Didi’s tongue expelled the first
T
as she
pronounced his first name the correct way. She repeated it in her
beautiful Spanish accent, giving it to me like a gift, “Tomás
Montenegro.”
Toe-mas Mon-tuh-nay-gro.

Vowels. So many vowels. Toe-mas
Mon-tuh-nay-gro. Toe-mas Mon-tuh-nay-gro. Toe-mas
Mon-tuh-nay-gro.
The syllables ricocheted around in my head
with the same propulsive rhythm as his music, then settled into a
whisper that played as ceaselessly as the prayers that cloistered
nuns never stop saying.

The only other bits of information on the
page were the name of his CD,
Santuario
, his birthday,
August 23, and a number to call to order the CD. Didi immediately
started punching the numbers into her cell. I grabbed the phone out
of her hand. “What are you doing?”

She grabbed it back. “Don’t spaz out. We’ll
probably just get a recording.”

But as she dialed, the feel of his presence,
of him watching me, mounted again until it was like spiders running
up and down my neck. I was certain that the next sound I heard
would be his voice. Didi held the phone out so I could listen to an
automated message inform us that the number was no longer in
service.

“Oh well.” Didi shrugged, turning her
attention back to the Pop Tart. “We’ll really dive in after you
sleep for a while.”

The jangly excitement that had kept me
hiking all over the city for the past few hours made me protest. “I
won’t be able to sleep. I’ll never be able to sleep again.”

Didi smiled indulgently, the wizened veteran
amused by the new recruit’s greenness. “That’s what I thought after
my first mission. Wow, we really are blood sisters now.” She broke
off a big chunk of Pop Tart and held it out in front of me until I
folded my hands under my chin and stuck my tongue out. She placed
the piece of Pop Tart on my tongue as if it were communion. Then,
in a rare moment of unbridled consumption, she stuffed the rest
into her mouth and chewed. We grinned at each other through a
mouthful of tart mush. A few minutes might have passed after I
swallowed, but I don’t remember them. I only remember falling
asleep with my mouth full of Pop Tart thinking that I’d never
tasted anything so delicious in my life.

I woke to find Didi hard at work with her
protractor and ruler. “I scoured the Internet,” she said when she
saw that my eyes were open. “But there is no other trace of Tomás
Montenegro, flamenco guitarist, so we turn to the stars,
right?”

Pausing only to consult various texts and
mumble names of planets, houses, cusps, trines, triplicity,
anaretic degrees and aspects, Didi drew circles surrounding smaller
circles. These she filled with numbers followed by signs for
degree, latitude, longitude, and all the houses of the zodiac. In
the inner circle, she carefully drew lines in pink, brown, and
green from one precisely marked point to another, all the while
muttering things like “Sun position, eighteen degrees forty minutes
of Scorpio.” And “Mercury, twenty-nine degrees, forty-five minutes
of Libra.” At the top of the paper she’d written his name, Tomás
Montenegro. I knew then how seriously she was taking my quest: she
was throwing his chart.

As she finished mapping out Tomás’s destiny,
her jaw dropped. She turned to me. “This is the most fucking
amazing thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life!”

I didn’t usually listen to Didi’s bulletins
about the most fucking amazing things she’d ever seen in her entire
life since she averaged roughly eighteen such sightings a day. But
since this was Tomás, I jerked to attention. “What?”

“All the positions of his planets are
exactly the same as Julie’s.” She meant Julian Casablancas of the
Strokes. She shook her head in wonder as she studied Tomás’s chart.
“Wow, they’re virtually identical.”

“Tell me! Tell me!” I insisted, wide
awake.

“Okay, okay. Let’s see.” She studied the
arcs and transits. “Venus in Aries. Wow, that means he is an ardent
and passionate lover.” Didi wiggled her eyebrows at me. “I’m
starting to see the attraction.”

I shrugged, happy as always to participate
in the fiction that I was a hot number. “What else? What else?” I
wanted every clue Didi could extract from the stars or tea leaves
or reading head bumps. I didn’t care. All that mattered was the
answer to the question, “How do I get him?”