My Most Excellent Year (13 page)

Dear Jacqueline,

It looked good on paper, but when I found myself standing in the downstage wing at the top of the show, all I wanted to do was beg Papa and Mamita to move us back to Mexico City, preferably within the half hour. I was so thoroughly paralyzed with flop sweat that an emergency room physician would have thought rigor mortis had set in on Saturday.
Have you lost your sanity entirely?! Who ever said you had talent? And only one run-through with Mr. Disharoon! Dear God, even Chita Rivera knew better than to go on without at least six weeks of rehearsal. And she was Chita Rivera!!
If Lee Meyerhoff hadn’t been standing behind me with her hands on my shoulders, I’d have fallen forward like a glass chopstick in a red cotton dress and shattered into a hundred pieces.

Since I watched the first fifty minutes of the show through a scarlet glaze over my eyeballs and a deafening heartbeat in my ears, I vaguely remember only occasional moments of consciousness:

Augie wearing a top hat and tails, carrying a cane and selling “You’re Gonna Hear From Me” as though he were a very short Fred Astaire, only much, much cuter.

Stu Merliss grabbing his crotch in the middle of “I Feel Like a Dork,” which, compared to his lyrics, was probably his idea of class.

Andy Wexler as “Blake, the much despised”—sliding into first, overshooting the base, and skidding butt-first into the stage left wing. It was the acrobatic highlight of the evening.

Brucie Daniels running six minutes longer than we’d timed him because nobody had counted on the screaming laughter that just wouldn’t stop.

Lee’s grip on my trembling shoulders growing inexplicably
stronger until I realized that she’d been replaced by Anthony, who began whispering softly into my ear as we moved closer and closer toward the end of the show. “Stop shaking. Augie’s been talking about you for forty-eight hours straight without taking a breath. He doesn’t even do that for
Madonna
.”

Regaining just a shred of confidence—not because I believed what he was saying, but because
he
did.

Watching him calmly walk out onto the stage toward the podium in a dark suit, a conservative tie, and the poise of Mount Rushmore.
Look at that. Not even a tremor.
Nothing
scares him
. Only then did I vaguely wonder why on earth he was dressed that way in order to recite Marc Antony’s monologue.

And that’s when I snapped out of it.

Oh, my God, Jacqueline. Nobody was prepared for the Kennedy Inaugural. I don’t know how long it took him to learn Jack’s moves, his inflections, or the utter conviction of every word he spoke, but when he jabbed the air with a restless right forefinger, the clock instantly turned back forty years. “
We observe today not a victory of party, but a celebration of freedom.”
Then he zeroed in on the “pay any price, bear any burden” passage, and there were actually gasps running through the audience—like an ungrounded electrical current. More than anything else it was the voice. The voice I’ve laughed at for its overbroad
a
’s and its three-syllable pronunciations of two-syllable words has deepened so gracefully over the last two months, I never noticed how much he’s come to sound like your husband. Even
you
would have been fooled. And when he reached the finish, the ovation began while he was still delivering “knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly
be our own.” That’s when he turned toward the downstage wing, stared directly into my eyes, and ended on a shrug and a sheepish grin that was pure Anthony.

Oh, if only I could have gone home after he was done. I was already on emotional overload.
He put himself through all of that for
you
, girl. Get used to it.

“For our last act, please welcome Alejandra Perez from Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s homeroom, who knows that the two most important things in her life are the music and the mirror.” GET ME OUT OF HERE!!

I turned to Lee in a blind panic, but without any warning the lights blacked out while Mr. Disharoon played a long drumroll on the piano—and when they came up again, all that was lit was a bank of upstage mirrors that hadn’t been there before.
Mirrors. My God, Augie actually got me
mirrors
!
Maybe they were only the six-foot kind that you can buy at Target for $5.99, but they were mirrors! Ten of them hammered together, side by side, glittering like I doubt they ever did for Donna McKechnie.
Okay, Augie. All is forgiven
. In fact, I was so mesmerized by the dazzling visuals, I completely forgot that I was supposed to be a part of them. Then Lee shoved me out onto the stage bodily and it all came back in a rush—especially after I’d been hit with a spotlight that Augie had insisted on commandeering himself. At that point I stared out into the darkened auditorium at a silent audience that was waiting for me to do something—and that’s when I realized I had four choices: I could die, I could scream, I could run, or I could sing. There really didn’t seem to be any other alternative.

“Give me . . . somebody . . . to dance for,” I began tentatively,
wondering whose voice I was hearing. It sounded a little shaky, but since Cassie is nervous anyway when she sings the song in the show, it’s
supposed
to come off shaky. (The Perez family knows how to rationalize on its feet, though nobody excels at it the way Carlos does.) Yet it was at that exact moment that I had my first musical comedy epiphany—
such
an Augie thing to do.
What did Ethel Merman say in
Gypsy?
“Here she is, boys! Here she is, world! Here’s Rose!”
And that was all it took. On some level I must have channeled her attitude, because the next five and a half minutes passed in an accelerating blur.
“Play me the music—” Pivot, lunge, hitch kick, you go, girl. “Give me a chance to come through.” Anthony watching me from the wings with both of his thumbs in the air.
“All I ever needed was the music and the mirror—” A red streak twirling in front of Augie’s mirrors. Is that
me
?? “And the chance to dance—” Center stage again. “For you!”

Lee told me at the party that when I stumbled into the wings at the end of the number, I was crying. I don’t remember that. I don’t remember the unending hug from Augie, I certainly don’t remember the kiss on the cheek from Anthony, and I have absolutely no recollection of the inexplicable noise coming out of the audience. Lee said it was something called applause. I took her word for it.

Now I know how you must have felt in Paris. I think we both surprised a lot of people—especially ourselves.

Fondly,

Alejandra

Dear Jacqueline,

Augie’s parents and Anthony’s father took us to Bartleby’s for our own version of a post-Oscar party, along with Lee—my resident alibi for the evening—and the inevitable Andy Wexler. (Augie “sort of asked” Andy if he wanted to join us, and Andy “sort of said yes.”) Bartleby’s is smack in the middle of Kenmore Square and it’s almost always a safe call for hamburgers, celebrations, and Stevie Nicks—especially on a night like this.

“Say ‘Kenmore Square,’” I insisted.

“Kenmaw Sqway-ah,” replied Anthony automatically.

“Say ‘Nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina.’”

“Nothing could be finah than to be in Caroliner.”

“You’re doing that on purpose.”

“I’m
not
. I sway-ah.”

We were out in the middle of the dance floor, and I’m still not entirely sure how we got there. An hour earlier I’d been ready to kiss off my toe shoes for the rest of my life, but shortly after we’d been seated, Anthony looked up awkwardly from a Coca-Cola and blurted, “Um, do you want to dance?”—and there was no way I could have turned him down. It was probably the “um” that did it. Men become vulnerable when they’re unsure of themselves, and “vulnerable” is the new “hot.” Besides, Alanis Morissette was blaring through the speakers, so I had an entirely different set of reasons for saying yes. Really. I did. (I also pretended not to notice the high five that Anthony and his father exchanged behind my back. They’re all such children.) Which is how we wound up shimmying shoulder to shoulder on the parquet floor while I tested the limits of his suddenly legitimate Kennedy accent.

“Just say it!”

“Okay! ‘Jackie, I’m out of underway-ah.’”

“You think that’s the way they sounded behind closed doors?”

“Oh, right. Like I’m
so
sure she did his laundry.” By now, Alanis had given way to k.d. lang, and we were drenched in swirling colored lights. Aqua is a dangerous shade for anyone who doesn’t want to get too close to Anthony—it brings out everything it shouldn’t: his teal blue eyes, how well he moves his body, how little it takes to make him smile, and how effortlessly he can be charming when he leaves the gray T-shirts and Gap easy fits at home.
Be careful, Alejandra. It’s the same old Anthony who all but propositioned you on the first day of school. Don’t let the suit and tie fool you. He didn’t get us out of the Bay of Pigs mess, he didn’t insist on a nuclear test ban, he didn’t go after Big Steel, and he most certainly did
not
promise to put a man on the moon. He’s just Anthony.

Meanwhile, Lee had gotten so fed up watching Augie and Andy staring dejectedly at the D.J. and each other like two sock-hop wallflowers who’d just dropped in from the 1950s, she grabbed them by their respective arms and dragged them out onto the floor with us.

“
Some
body’s going to dance with me,” she warned them, hiding her game plan behind a frown. Only then did they remember that they had feet. Augie was the better hoofer, but once Andy had loosened up, he got prolific fast. Never give your boyfriend an edge, even when he’s not officially your boyfriend yet.

“Dude,” insisted Andy, pulling Augie toward him, “show me how you did that.” By the third verse, Lee had them boogeying face-to-face and getting used to the fact that they were doing just
fine without her—which of course was the whole idea. Only then did she edge over to where Anthony and I were trying out a new lockstep that we’d both seen on
American Idol
.

“Well,
that
only took ten minutes,” she mumbled into my ear. “Do you think they realize they’re actually dancing with each other?”

“Probably on some primal level,” I whispered back. “But don’t tell them that.” Lee thought about it for a minute before she shrugged in agreement.

Correction. They’re not teal blue. They’re azure.

Fondly,

Alejandra