Adventures of a Salsa Goddess (3 page)

Brew City

“There’s supposed to be a lake out there somewhere, but I can’t see a thing,” I said into the cordless telephone.

I thought I had landed in the Bermuda Triangle. All I could see out my new patio doors from my eighteenth-floor vantage point was pelting rain and swirling mists of fog. Just before I left New York, Sally, Elaine Daniels’s executive assistant, had given me a copy of the real estate ad that described my two-bedroom apartment as being “on the. fashionable East side of Milwaukee with expansive views of sunny, scenic Lake Michigan.” The thermometer attached just outside the door read forty-two degrees.

“Have you met any men yet?” asked my best friend, Elizabeth, who I called the second I’d arrived in my new apartment.

Elizabeth liked to cut through all the chitchat and get straight to the point, which I suppose she couldn’t help since she lives and breathes the law, working sixty to eighty hours a week for Hobson, Dwight, and McKenzie, the third biggest law firm in New York, since graduating from UCLA law school fourteen years ago.

“Not since the plane landed forty-five minutes ago,” I said. I was in a city with almost 600,000 people and I only knew one of them. I was already feeling very lonely.

“I’m disappointed in you,” she said, a smile in her voice.

Elizabeth and I had been friends since we were both three years old, having met in a preschool ballet class. Although I have no memory of our first acquaintance, a photograph that I’ve carried in my wallet for years, taken at our first recital, shows the two of us in our little pale pink tutus, our arms around each other’s shoulders, with my golden-blond Barbie doll shoulder-length hair leaning against Elizabeth’s dark brunette Audrey Hepburn pixie. I have a vague memory of asking Elizabeth if she wanted to be my best friend and her saying yes, and here we were nearly thirty-eight years later, still best friends.

While I talked to Elizabeth, I did a tour of my new apartment. The living room had a tacky starving artist’s landscape painting above a plain brown couch. A wood veneer coffee table sat on powder-blue dentist’s office carpeting. Bedroom number one—queen bed, dresser, straight-backed chair, graying walls, gray carpeting, and a gray bedspread. I took two steps across the hallway to bedroom number two—black laminated computer desk, black metal filing cabinet, and a door leading out to the balcony. My apartment had all of the warmth and charm of a mental institution.

“Just think, your future husband is in the same city as you,” said Elizabeth.

I had my doubts, but, if he was here, chances were excellent he was intoxicated. According to the guidebook about Milwaukee that I’d read on the flight over:

Milwaukee is a great city on a great lake with countless ethnic festivals and nonstop flowing taps of beer. With its large German population and a reputation as one of the friendliest cities in the United States, you’ll often hear Milwaukeeans speak of their famous
gemutlichkeit
. At its zenith, Milwaukee had close to sixty operating breweries. With a tavern on almost every block, it’s no wonder this thriving metropolis has garnered the nickname “Brew City.”

When my plane had landed, I’d half expected to see throngs of drunken men in lederhosen and serving wenches with heaving bosoms spilling over low-cut tight-fitting dresses, all of them swilling beer and dancing gaily on the tarmac. Instead, I’d landed in the midst of a monsoon with all of my checked luggage having apparently taken a side trip, probably to a warmer destination. The airline assured me my bags would be delivered tomorrow or in three days, after the Memorial Day weekend.

“You know, your husband might even be living in your building,” Elizabeth said. A split second later, a mighty crack of thunder sounded, the deafening, biblical kind of thunder, loud enough to scare all dogs within a hundred-mile radius under beds and bring sinners to their knees.

“Did you hear that?” Elizabeth asked. “It’s a sign. I’m sure your husband is there. I can feel it.”

Once Elizabeth had received a sign—thunder, a black cat walking under a ladder, crop circles—she couldn’t be dissuaded even if God herself came down from heaven, shook her by the shoulders, and told her to get a grip.

“I just want to get through this summer,” I said, looking out my patio doors. It looked
as though the storm was subsiding. I could now see a horizontal gray line that had to be Lake Michigan.

“Be positive!” Elizabeth urged me.

It had only taken me a few minutes after leaving Elaine’s office two weeks ago to decide that I would do this crazy assignment after all. It was certainly time for me to shuffle the deck of my life. I was bored not just with my job as a lifestyle editor, a position I’d held for the past four years, but with everything. Besides seeing Elizabeth a couple times a week and the occasional date, I had no social life in New York. I lived for my four weeks of vacation a year when I could travel with my pal Andre. I loved my younger sister, Susan, her husband, and of course my new niece, Matilda, but Susan and I had never really connected. My father, whom I’d been very close to, had been gone now for almost twenty-five years. And every time I saw my mother, a woman who could drive the Pope to take a hit off a crack pipe, I wasn’t myself for days afterward.

Of course it would be a dream come true to get “La Vie,” my own humor column, but what had actually convinced me to come to Milwaukee was very simple: I wanted to see if finding a man I could fall in love with and marry was even possible. I had nothing to lose and potentially everything to gain by doing this assignment. Elizabeth was right as usual, I needed to be positive and take this assignment seriously.

* * *

The next morning I walked out onto my balcony under a perfect cloudless sky and turned my face up to the sun. White sailboats dotted the sapphire blue water. I could see weeping willow trees bent over a pond in the distance and a few colorful kites hovered
over a huge expanse of green. Rubbing my arms, which had broken out in goose bumps, I took in the spectacular view, which made me feel as though in the middle of the night I’d been whisked away to a commercial set for a feminine hygiene product.

After taking a quick shower, I slicked a comb through my hair and put on my favorite pink lipstick and a thin coat of mascara. I slipped on a red halter dress and a bright yellow sweater and was out the door in twenty minutes. Grabbing the Saturday paper I found on my welcome mat, I took the elevator down to the ground level and stepped outside to take my first sunny breath of Milwaukee. The smell of freshly cut grass hit me, reminding me of summer visits to my mother’s house in Scarsdale, New York.

In search of my morning caffeine fix, I walked by redbrick and brownstone mansions, twenty-story apartment buildings, the construction site of a new condo building going up, the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music, and a small art museum. The sidewalks were filled with people walking dogs, jogging, and strolling hand in hand. Outside a retirement home I passed, old men and women sat on benches, chatting in a broken language full of harsh consonants, probably Yiddish or Polish.

A few minutes later I saw the sign
The Java Junkie
and knew I’d found the perfect spot. Anything that implied unhealthy excess when it came to coffee was my kind of place. I ordered a latte and a blueberry scone and took them outside to the only free black, wrought iron sidewalk table.

Two sets of dewy-eyed hand-holding couples with the we’ve-just-gotten-out-of-bed-after-a-night-and-morning-of-amazing-sex looks on
their faces were sitting at tables on either side of me. Post-bonking hormones swirled through my airspace like unwanted secondhand smoke, and I felt my early-morning good spirits slowly sinking into emotional quicksand.

Not a good way to start the summer. I packed up my scone, grabbed my coffee cup, headed back to my new apartment, and spent the rest of the day trying to do as little as possible. I unpacked my carry-on suitcase, finished reading the paper, and went out to my balcony, where I must’ve dozed off, since the downstairs buzzer woke me at six.

I opened the door to a stunning woman with a pierced navel and a blue and gold shooting-star tattoo soaring over her belly button. Her wild auburn, strawberry, and cherry hair was gelled into crazy two-inch spikes, and big silver hoop earrings dangled from her ears.

“Can I help you?” I asked, thinking it might be the apartment manager or a neighbor wanting to share some of that famous Milwaukee
gemutlichkeit
.

“Sam, don’t you recognize me?” she said, throwing her arms around my neck and giving me a hug, which was followed by one of those awkward it’s-good-to-see-you-and-I-want-to-look-you-over-to-see-how-three-years-have-changed-you-but-don’t-want-to-be-impolite-and-stare moments. I couldn’t get over how different she looked.

“Lessie, wow, you look fantastic!” I said finally, not wanting to bring attention to her weight loss directly.

“You do too!” she assured me cheerfully. “You haven’t changed at all except, what happened to all your hair?”

I’d had shoulder-length straight blond hair my entire life up until three years ago when, in a post-ex-fiance-David-break-up-frenzy, I’d had my hair chopped off the very day that we were supposed to get married. I’m sure it had nothing to do with the fact that he loved my long blond hair and had told me that several times a week for the entire three years we’d been together.

“I have the same question for you,” I said, looking at her short spiky locks, which seemed to change color as the sun hit them when she walked across my living room.

The first time I’d seen Lessie had been in the bathroom of our dorm during our freshman year at Brown University. I’d noticed her hair immediately. She’d had magnificent hair, the kind that was capable of launching a thousand ships—waist-length, thick as molasses, golden blond, and perfectly straight. Lessie had always been pretty, but I’d never seen her wear makeup and her weight had always been a problem. Every year she’d added another five to ten pounds, and by the time we’d graduated, she must have been close to two hundred. But Steve, her fiance, at six foot five and probably fifty pounds lighter, had loved her exactly as she was. After graduation, they moved to Milwaukee, Steve’s hometown, and were married six months later. Three years ago, just before David and I had broken up, Lessie had come to visit me in New York just after she’d filed for divorce and when she’d still looked like the Lessie I’d known in college. It was the last time I’d seen her, but we’d been in constant contact via e-mail and telephone since that visit.

Lessie, a high school art teacher, stood in the center of my living room and looked around, hands on her narrow hips. She wore a cropped white halter top, white Capri pants encircled by a hip-hugging silver chain
-link belt, and white sling-back sandals. I glanced down at her hipbones jutting out through the thin material of her cotton pants.

“When I lost all my weight after my divorce, the biggest thrill of my life was discovering I actually have hipbones just like
everyone else,” she said. “But I have to be careful, if I so much as think about ice cream, I gain five pounds.”

Men don’t know how easy they have it. If one of their buddies whom they hadn’t seen in a few years had lost a lot of weight, they’d either avoid the topic altogether (impossible among Venetians) or say something like, What the hell happened to your fat ass and beer gut? Women on the other hand must follow the unwritten rule of never calling attention to physical imperfections, former or present, because when we look into the mirror, we see every facial hair, trace of a wrinkle, and cellulite molecule beginning to form on our thighs. But bald, chinless men with guts that could qualify for their own zip codes look in the mirror and think “stud” before going out to try and pick up a woman half their age.

“Great apartment!” Lessie said, stepping out onto the balcony. “What a view!” She turned and flashed me a huge smile. “So, Sam, you were all mysterious on the phone about why you’re in Milwaukee. What’s up?” she asked me, her blue eyes expectant. “You’re on assignment, aren’t you?”

I handed Lessie a copy of the May 27 issue of
Tres Chic
with a silhouette of a woman’s head on the cover carrying the lead story: “Will Our Mystery Woman Defy the Statistics and Find Mr. Right?”

“Holy shit, are you the Mystery Woman?” she asked, gaping at me as though I’d just announced the date for my sex change operation. “I heard something about this on the news yesterday.”

I shrugged. “I’ll tell you the whole story over dinner.”

* * *

“So this whole thing isn’t just a publicity stunt for
Tres Chic
?” Lessie asked me a half hour later. She stabbed a forkful of greens with her right hand while she grabbed a French fry off my plate with her left, swiped it through the ketchup, and popped it into her mouth. “You’re not going to get a quiet annulment a few months after everything dies down?”

“No scam. I’m here to find true love,” I said. I cut another slice of my filet mignon, taking full advantage of my healthy expense account. “And my wedding is already set for this New Year’s Eve at the Plaza.”

I had also finagled a three-week honeymoon to Europe from Elaine once I realized I had some leverage. Unless Elaine wanted to go with a freelance writer, and I knew that for this type of assignment she preferred to keep it in-house, I was the only choice, being the only woman over forty and never married presently working at
Tres Chic
.