"The Flamenco Academy" (45 page)

I looked around and saw every detail of the
room. I noticed that my teachers were clapping
palmas
,
snapping
pitos
for me. They were shouting
jaleo
,
praise and encouragement:
Óle! Así se baila! Eso es! Que toma!
Que toma!

In slow motion, I saw a bead of sweat roll
down the side of Tomás’s face, tracing the beautiful, dark curves
of his hairline until he leaned forward and it trembled for a
moment at the edge of his eyebrow before dropping onto his guitar.
There was only one thing I wanted any longer: for Tomás to keep
playing. I knew then why Vicente Romero had died onstage dancing
one last
escobilla
. I knew why
cantaores
had drowned
in their own blood singing one last
letra
.

These deaths no longer seemed tragic to me.
I understood every one. I felt I was on the verge of piercing a
veil, learning the unlearnable, knowing the unknowable, when Tomás
began to stare at me. Not at a dancer he was trying to follow, at
me. His gaze drew me back into the present. I stared back and found
what I had to express contained within that second: desire.

In some distant corner of my mind, I was
ashamed of the desire that I was revealing more nakedly than if I’d
stripped off my clothes. My mother’s face, pinched, silent, stoic,
floated into my consciousness. I stamped my shame down until it
turned to rose petals beneath my heels, filling the studio with
their fragrance.

I finished with a thunderous closing that
Tomás had to labor to keep pace with. When it was over, we stared
at each other, panting. It wasn’t that I knew then we would be true
lovers; we already were.

How does a small tree kill a big tree?

You take the sun away from her.

Tomás stood, took my hand, and we left
without a word passing between us. After the volumes we’d just
communicated there was no need. As we passed Didi shouted
high-pitched congratulations, pretending that she’d intended my
triumph from the start. I closed my ears to her. My heart had
already been shut.

Tomás drove an old Ford truck that looked
like a piece of turquoise, faded blue with streaks of rust running
through it. The companionable chug of its engine was the only sound
as we drove down Central Avenue. He passed several motels and
didn’t stop until we reached the Ace High, just as if he, too, had
spent the last years working to return to this place. When he came
back to the truck with a room key that bore the number 312, my
heart soared. What else could I conclude but that he remembered? It
was as if we’d agreed, all those years ago, to meet back here as
soon as we could, to return the instant I had learned all the
secret flamenco codes and signals, rituals and rhythms that would
allow me to enter his world.

We stepped into room 312. Tomás closed the
door. At the second our bodies joined, time, the time that had
stopped when he left me standing on Carlisle Avenue all those years
ago, started again. In the glass of the balcony doors, I saw our
reflections. The dim light behind us shone on the drapes, turning
the mustard color gold. They were half open, framing Tomás and me
as if we were onstage at the moment the curtains parted and the
second act began. His head was bent above mine, his dark hair
swinging forward, his face buried in my hair. My arms were raised,
embracing him. He kissed me. I closed my eyes, but the image of us
together remained, growing brighter, more golden, in the dark on
the other side of my eyelids.

His smell was exactly as it had been the
first time, sweat and marijuana and oranges. He tugged down the
zipper on my skirt and it slid to the floor, a black shadow that I
stepped over without a thought. I raised my arms high and he pulled
the stretch top over my head. I pushed his clothes away.

The feel of his naked skin against mine was
such a relief that I couldn’t remember how I had existed without it
for any second of the past three years. It was both an immediate
essential necessity and the most voluptuous luxury imaginable.

In the reflection on the balcony doors, he
knelt, dark head bowed, his hands drawing me to him. My pale
fingers were icicles melting into his black hair. I had been
chosen. I was the one odalisque, the one girl out of the five
hundred whose dance had won the sultan.

He stood. The intricate pull and bulk of his
back muscles came alive against my palms as he bent to kiss me. I
tasted myself on his lips. His flesh inside of me was a formality,
the signature on a pact we’d made in this room all those years ago,
the fulfillment of a contract we had already written in twelve
beats. We fit together with an inevitability that made each touch,
each kiss as familiar as it was thrilling. The night was of one
continuous piece as we reenacted every note, every pulse, every
advance, every retreat of the dance we had already
choreographed.

When the room filled with murky predawn
light, I watched as he slept. He lay on his right side, facing me.
His lips, severe and disdainful when he was awake, puckered needful
and plump as a baby’s in sleep. The black scrolls of his hair fell
to either side of a broad shoulder and tangled with the gold chain
around his neck. The chain jumped in rhythm to his heart beating
through the vein at his neck. Women generally know better than to
fall in love with beauty, the thing that the whole world can see
and covet. They know to find what is only there for them alone. I
tried to pick out flaws, tiny snags in his beauty that could be
mine alone to love. Perhaps his nose was a bit too long? The
furrows between his eyes, might they not deepen unattractively as
he aged? His teeth were tanned by coffee and cigarettes, they were
not perfect American teeth. His lower lip was dimpled and darkened
at the spot where he always held his cigarette. All these flaws did
was to make his beauty more memorable.

Tomás woke, caught me staring, and kissed
each lid. We made love one last, exhausted time; then he wrapped
his arms and legs around me and laid his head on my shoulder like
the famous photo of John and Yoko. I toyed with his dark curls and
breathed in his smell. He spread his hand across my heart.

“You might be the palest woman I have ever
known.”

“I know. I’m an albino.”

“You’re beautiful. Rae. Rae. Ray of
sunshine. X-ray. Can you see through me, X-ray? Pale, pale Rae.” He
studied his dark angers curving around my breast, fascinated as a
child making shadow animals against a wall.
“Güera, rubia,
gabacha, gringa.”
He crooned the words that meant “pale,” that
meant “other.” “Vermeer would have painted you. Scarlet here.” He
traced a finger over my lips. “Lapis lazuli here.” My eyes. “Cream
and rose here.” My cheek, throat, shoulder. He sighed and
whispered, “I have to get back to the gym.”

His words were so at odds with his touch
that I couldn’t reconcile the two. “Why?”

“A few more auditions.”

“But yesterday? There was no one after me. I
was the last.”

“I know, you should have been. But you know
the flamenco grapevine. Once word leaked out, Alma started getting
calls from all over.
Una bailaora
from New York was supposed
to have flown in last night. Another is driving down from Denver.
There’s a pretty good scene in Denver. You’d be surprised.” He
kissed my shoulder, sat up, and lighted a cigarette. The odor of
Ducados, harsh and strangely Oriental, filled the room. He clasped
the cigarette between his lips and, shutting one eye against a coil
of smoke, pulled on his shirt.

“No. Don’t.”

Flipping his hair out from under the shirt
collar, he froze.

“Don’t see any other dancers. Pick me. Take
me with you.”

Motion started again. He buttoned his shirt.
“X-ray, you are definitely in the running. I promise. Definitely.
You are insanely
fuerza en compás
. Really, one of the
strongest I’ve ever seen.” He offered the cigarette to me. I took
it, dug out one of Didi’s joints, lighted it from the cigarette’s
glowing end, inhaled as deeply as I could, closed my mouth over
Tomás’s and exhaled.

Passing the Ducado and the blunt back and
forth, we fortified ourselves with the illicit airs of flamenco.
Tomás sagged back against the pillows, eyes closed, mouth gone
slack. I lay beside him, unbuttoned his shirt, and trailed my
fingers along his chest as I murmured in his ear, “Take me, Tomás.
I am what you need. You might find a better dancer than me, but you
will never find a better canvas for painting your art.” All those
missions with Didi. All the flattery, the cajolery. These were
Didi’s weapons. I took them and armed myself. “Your tour is to
introduce the greatest guitarist in the world to America. Not the
greatest dancer.”

I had clung to Guitos’s secret. Hoarded and
harbored the knowledge that Tomás was driven by the fear that the
Gypsy heritage he’d built his reputation on was a lie. It was time
to use the one advantage I had: his secret. “I will be the light
that exalts your darkness. I will be the pretender who proves your
legitimacy.”

Tomás opened his eyes. Skepticism tautened
his features. I had overreached. I was certain he suspected I knew
his secret and would now hate me for possessing that knowledge.
“Ozu!”
he expelled the Gypsy curse on a snort of laughter.
“What kind of shit do they teach you girls at that university?
Lah-jit-tuh-mah-say?” He mocked the word with an exaggerated
homeboy pronunciation. “What kind of shit is that?”

“Stupid shit. Kind of shit that says Tiger
Woods can’t be the best in the world. Kind of shit that says he has
to decide if he’s black or Asian or white. Kind of shit that says
everyone has to declare themselves and be whoever their
grandfathers back to Adam were.”

“Kind of shit that says a white girl can’t
dance flamenco.”

“Kind of shit that says a white girl can’t
dance flamenco.”

His grin, white in the dark room, was a
goofy, stoned flag of surrender. I had done it. I had used his
secret to turn us into allies. “Fuck it. When did I say I wanted to
spend two days looking at dancers? I never told Alma that. Come
here,
güera
.”He tugged me on top of him, sucked a hit from
the joint, and exhaled it into my mouth. Flamenco communion. We’d
both taken it. We both surrendered, sinking into the voluptuous
abandon that was the birthright of all those born into flamenco.
And all who could learn how to decipher its code.

We didn’t leave room 312 of the Ace High
Motel. We stayed all day and made love. But Tomás never recalled
that he had been there before. That he had met me before. Why
should he? Why should he have remembered the girl he’d met once
many years ago when I myself had now forgotten who she was?

The curtains that had been gold were
mustard-colored in the early morning light. A shaft of that light
illuminated Tomás. Hunched over his guitar, playing softly, he
looked like a young monk bent over his prayers in a medieval
cathedral. His music rose fragrant as incense toward the heavens.
He had made love to me with the same pure intensity.

“Did I wake you?” He put the guitar aside
and crept toward me in a jokey, panther-stalking-his-prey way that
turned serious as he slid beneath the covers.

“We’re good together,” he said, later,
holding me. He put two fingers lightly on my neck and two on the
carotid artery on his own neck.

“What?” I asked, but he shushed me as he
concentrated, his lips moving as he counted.

“Just like I thought. Our hearts beat in
compás
. The exact same
palo
. Gypsy
compás
.”
Just saying the word Gypsy was a struck nerve and he bounded out of
bed, dragging me with him. “
Vamos ya!
We have to start
rehearsing. We should have started a month ago. The tour is already
completely booked. I have to call the promoter and give him your
name for advertising.” He clapped his hands like a director calling
for a new scene to begin, for action to commence. “Okay, do we need
to stop by your house? You have your shoes, a skirt? Do you need
anything else?”

Didi might be there, in the small house on
the alley. I didn’t want to see her. If I saw Didi, she would
convince me that she had not betrayed me. Had not tried to steal my
chance with Tomás. She would say she had not seen my signal that I
was ready to step back into the lead. That whatever she’d done had
been for me. I imitated Didi’s laugh, heedless, taunting, and
answered, “Shoes, skirt. What else does a dancer need?”

“
Ándale pues.”
Let’s go then.

It was late afternoon when we emerged into a
sunless day knifed through by a north wind. The worn seats of his
old truck creaked from the cold when we sat.

“Takes a minute to warm up,” he said,
turning the key in the ignition. I shivered in the cold. “Here.” He
took his jacket off, wrapped it around my shoulders, and buried his
face in my hair. The sun, already slumping down onto the West Mesa,
broke through the clouds and lasered slices of light onto Central
Avenue. Each crummy business—the Winchester Ammunition Advisory
Center, the Leather Shoppe, the Pussycat Video, the Aztec Motel—was
gilded in the dazzling illumination of late afternoon.

“Wait until you see this place where I’m
staying,” he said as we sailed along I-25, high above a dusty plain
that stretched out to our west all the way to Mount Taylor, a
distant, snow-capped blue. “It’s
mi primo’s
from up north.
He lets me stay there whenever I’m in town.” Though I’d driven I-25
dozens of times, that day was the first time I noticed that painted
on the side of a cinder-block building was a woman in a flamenco
pose, her hand tossed to the sky.

“What’s your cousin do?” It was a stupid
question that I asked mostly to show him that I knew what
primo
meant.