"The Flamenco Academy" (19 page)

Although the program is widely known in the world of
flamenco, enrolling students from all over the country and around
the world, it has been a well-kept secret in its hometown. That is
all about to change.

“Doña Carlota’s modesty has always prevented her
from granting interviews and allowing us to do any sort of
publicity. She has recently had a change of heart and has agreed to
our christening the dance hall the Doña Carlota Anaya Flamenco
Academy and doing more promotion outside of the flamenco community.
So from now on, the rest of the world will know what we’ve always
known, that the University of New Mexico has a world-class flamenco
program and we owe it all to the amazing Doña Carlota Anaya.”

When Didi came home a week later, she had
crabs, borderline malnutrition, and a demo of her songs. I had a
plan. “I’m going to study flamenco at the university.”

“Oh yeah, right,” she mumbled, struggling
against exhaustion to remember. “Flamingo. Mystery Man. Cool.” She
dragged her eyelids up one last time and took me in. “You got buff.
You look hot.” Then her eyes dropped shut and she slept for three
days straight.

Didi could barely raise herself to chug down
the smoothies I brought before plunging back into a state that
resembled a coma. I was seriously worried. Worried that she was
sick or that something traumatic had happened in New York. When she
finally woke up, she wasn’t sick, but that didn’t stop me from
treating her as if she were. I bought actual groceries and made
scrambled eggs and toast that I put on a tray with a flower and
brought to her in bed. I imagined the heinous things that might
have happened in New York and kicked myself for ever letting her
leave in the first place. Obviously, Paco had broken her heart. I
tried, in very subtle ways, to bring him up by asking variations of
the question, “So, how was New York?”

Didi didn’t have much to say about New York.
Not that it was good or bad. The most she would say was, “New York
was useful and, for the moment, New York is over.”

I thought that falling in love would have
matured me, made me closer to Didi’s equal. But switching from
obsessing about famous people to obsessing about becoming one
herself had changed Didi even more than meeting Tomás had changed
me, so she was still quantum leaps ahead of me. While she lolled
around in bed, getting her strength back, she plotted out how to
merchandise the CD Paco had helped her make. It had great cover
art. The title,
CD-DiDi
, was printed over a blurry close-up
of her mouth. There was never a moment when she slipped the disc
into the player for the first time, stepped back, and asked me what
I thought. She was playing it when she walked back in the door and
never stopped. Maybe it was just assumed that I’d think it was
phenomenal, amazing. Maybe the CD was like Didi herself, and it
didn’t matter what anyone thought—she was going to be who she was
going to be and do what she needed to do, whether you liked it or
not, so why bother asking?

Was it good? I guess I would say that her
songs, her voice, were, like Didi, an acquired taste. Who knew if
her voice was good or bad? Did Courtney Love have a good voice? Did
Bob Dylan? It didn’t matter; the CD stood out, made an impact. It
was Didi, it was unforgettable, and her life was now devoted to
making it a success.

“Celebrity blurbs,” she announced, grabbing
a clipboard to make notes in bed. “I’ve got to get the CD to the
ultimate killer celebs so they can give great quotes to use in the
press release I send to radio stations.” She started scribbling
names furiously. The first on the list was Julian Casablancas.

Maybe because I was so in love, I just
couldn’t give up the idea that Didi had had her heart broken and
was burying the pain. I was Didi’s support person, that was my job,
and I wasn’t doing it. Which is why I asked, in as casual a way as
possible, “What about Paco?”

She looked up from circling and underlining
Alanis Morissette
and gave me a blank stare as if she didn’t
recognize the name I’d just spoken.

“Paco?” I repeated. “What about him?”

“Oh, Paco.” It took her a second to remember
who I was talking about. “He’s not a celebrity,” she answered,
thinking I was suggesting him for her blurb list. Her attention
shifted to scribbling
Natalie Merchant
!!

I studied her face for signs of buried
heartbreak. “Yeah, but I just thought—”

Didi slapped her pen down against the
clipboard and peered up at me. “You just thought, for the one
hundredth time, that you’d bring up Paco or New York, which is the
same thing as bringing up Paco.”

“Not the hundredth.” Was it that many? “I’m
just curious.”

“You think I’m all hiding a deep, dark
secret or something. Why do people always think there has to be
some deep, dark, hidden secret? I got exactly what I could from New
York and exactly what I could from Paco and now it’s”—she swooped
her hand across her face as if she were brushing away a bad
smell—“next.”

“Oh. Okay.”

For a second, she teetered on the edge of
being truly annoyed, then backed away. She sighed and said,
“Thanks, Rae. Thanks for being the one person in the whole goddamn
world who gives a shit.”

“Deeds, Catwoman actually—”

“Catwoman is actually who she is. Catwoman
gives exactly what she can.”

“Didi, she really loves you. We talked a lot
while you were gone.”

“You talked to Catwoman?” She said it as if
I’d betrayed her.

“She was helping me learn Spanish.”

“Learning Spanish with Catwoman?” She winced
at the impossibility of the concept, started to say something,
stopped, and said instead, “You want to know my deep, dark secret?”
She patted the edge of the bed and I sat down next to her.

I nodded. “Sure, Deeds. Of course. You know
you can tell me anything. Everything.”

Tears welled up in her eyes. She dropped her
gaze. I scooted closer to her and took her hand. It was icy cold. I
couldn’t breathe. This was worse than I’d feared. Nothing cowed
Didi Steinberg. Nothing made her cry. Whatever it was, I’d help
her. It was my fault. Somehow I should have stopped her from
leaving.

“Okay.” Her voice trembled. “Okay, here’s my
deep, dark secret.” I examined the veins above the icy hand I held,
trying to warm it with mine. “My deep, dark secret is...”

As I was trying to think of one single adult
I could call to ask for help when this turned out to be worse than
even I could handle, Didi jerked her hand away, and snapped, “There
is no deep, dark secret. A total lack of secrets is my secret.
Okay? So, can we, please, just drop it?”

That was the last time we talked about New
York. I assumed that it wasn’t the crowning triumph she’d dreamed
it might be, but whatever happened had only fueled her ambition and
done a surprising thing: she returned open to the idea of going to
the university with me. All she would say on the subject was, “Even
Madonna did a few semesters.”

I handled all the paperwork so she could
register late. Naturally, the first course I enrolled in was
Beginning Flamenco Dance. I was pleased that the instructor listed
in the course catalog was going to be Alma Hernandez-Luna, the
young and vibrant director of the program I’d read about in the
paper. Then, since we both knew that the downfall of most great
stars was corrupt or inept management, I signed on as a business
major and added Intro to Financial Accounting to my course load so
I could keep Didi’s books when she was a star. Didi’s schedule for
the first three semesters included Movement for Actors, Voice for
Actors, Speech and Diction, and Acting for the Camera. “Important
for the videos,” she explained.

“No music classes?” I asked. “Voice?
Composition? Stuff like that?”

“Uh, how many
music
courses did
Madonna ever take?”

“None?”

“Correctomundo.”

I didn’t remind her that Madonna had been a
dance major. Dance, that was going to be my thing.

A week later, on the morning of our first
day of classes, I was so nervous about going to the flamenco class
I could barely breathe. “Is this better?” I asked Didi, holding a
baby tee against my chest. “Or this?” I held up the camisole I’d
worn when I’d met him. “Except, he’s already seen me in it.”

“Shit, you’ve got it bad. You actually think
he’s going to be there, don’t you?” She shook her head hard as if
it were an Etch A Sketch with a bad picture on it. “He’s not going
to be in a beginning flamingo dance class.” She always said
“flamingo” or “the big pink bird.” Half the time, she was teasing
me to keep me from being so intense. The other half, she just
forgot. That was fine with me. Flamenco was the one part of Tomás I
could possess and I wanted to keep it all to myself.

Didi studied me as I sorted through the pile
of tops I was trying on and discarding, then trying on again. “Do
you spend all day imagining he’s watching you? In spite of the fact
that he doesn’t know your name or where you live, every time you
step out of the house, do you think he’ll be there? Every time the
phone rings, do you think it’s him?”

I didn’t have to say anything. Just from the
look on my face, she knew she was right.

“Wow. Okay, it’s official. You’re
obsessed.”

It was like hearing a doctor say you had
measles when your body was covered with a red rash. The evidence
was so obvious, there was no point in denying it.

“Don’t worry. I was exactly the same with
Julie. Back when I was into that. You probably feel like Mystery
Man’s here right now, invisibly watching and hearing everything you
say.”

I tugged off the camisole, letting it hide
my face. I would never wash it. It had his smell on it mingled with
mine. Together they made a new odor, sharp and feral. I didn’t want
to talk to her about Tomás, didn’t want her to put him on the same
level with any of her groupie conquests.

“Hey, aren’t you supposed to wear a
polka-dotted dress or something?”

“No, you’re not supposed to wear a
polka-dotted dress.” My irritated tone objected to her mockery.

“Rae-rae, come on. Sit down. Let’s make you
beautiful.” She dragged out the tackle box she used to hold her
makeup, stair-stepped it open, and, holding up a lip brush, waited
for me to sit. It had been a long time since we’d done makeovers on
each other. She patted the bed and I plopped down.

“Do like this,” she ordered, stretching her
lips over her teeth. I mimicked the posture and Didi leaned
forward, breathing coffee and Pop Tart breath into my face as she
outlined my lips with a brush, then painted them the color of
garnets.

“Sorry. I didn’t think you were still so
crushed out.”

“Didi, I do know that he’s not going to see
me.”

“That is so not the point, is it?”

She picked up her mascara wand and ordered,
“Up.”

I rolled my eyeballs heavenward so she could
brush mascara on my bottom lashes.

“Keep looking up. I’m gonna put some white
on the lower lid. Opens the eye up and makes the whites really
pop.”

Didi’s ministrations calmed me. She spangled
my cheeks with pink comet’s tails glittering with crushed
mother-of-pearl, my lips with the sparkle of a metallic bronze, and
my eyes with glimmering lilac shadow. She burnished and glossed me
until my face was a reflective surface, a mirror, in which Tomás
Montenegro could see whatever he liked.

Didi stepped back and studied me, tilting
her head from side to side, closing one eye then the other. She
finally shrugged, said, “What can say? I’m a genius,” and handed me
a mirror. In it I saw that Didi had transformed me into what I most
desired to become: an offering.

The drive to campus was stiflingly hot. The
once-regal ’Stang was a battered wreck, its AC a memory. Didi
cracked the windows enough to let a little air stream in but not
enough to mess with hair or makeup.

By the time we found a parking spot at the
edge of campus on Central and Girard, we were late. We ran across
the soccer fields outside Johnson Gym, hurrying to the student mall
shaded by locust trees in giant planters, their dark, spiraling
seedpods drying in the sun.

“Slow down!” Didi ordered as we reached the
mall. “You’re sweating. You’re gonna ruin my cosmetic
masterpiece.”

We rushed by the student union building.
Students sat outside at concrete tables sipping coffee and reading
the college paper, the
Daily Lobo
. We were sweating by the
time we passed Zimmerman Library. At the pond in front of the old
library, a little boy in a yellow T-shirt shrieked. His mother
scooped him up as a squad of ducks waddled menacingly toward him
and the plastic bag of old bread he clutched in his chubby
hand.

“Cut through Hitler and Eva Together
Forever!” Didi yelled out her name for the fifty-foot-long,
intersecting concrete tunnels that had been fobbed off on the
university as art. No one liked the monolithic structure except the
stoners who hid out inside the tunnels to sell dope and get high.
We stopped at our traditional spot, right in the center where the
two main tunnels met. The concrete was thick as a bunker. It was
tomblike in the center; sound was deadened and the air was always
damp. Didi sniffed. “Smells like we’re too late.” As usual, the
tunnels reeked of pot.

“Okay.” She pointed one index finger toward
one of the four openings at the end of a tunnel and the other
toward another opening. “You go to your flamenco class and I’ll go
check out”—she perused her schedule until she found her first
class—“Acting for the Camera.” She shook her hair back, flared her
nostrils, then froze in a dramatic pose and said, “Mr. DeMille, I’m
ready for my close-up.” She unfroze. “We’ll meet back here at
burrito-thirty and grab some lunch at Frontier.”