Spanish Disco (15 page)

But it was more than that. Disco has a rhythm that screams of sex. An endless cha-cha-cha of late-seventies/early-eighties decadence, and she moved in a way that enveloped the pulsating boom, boom, boom of the back-beat. I couldn’t help watching. I couldn’t help being jealous. She could dance and twist her body in ways that other people, upon seeing her, could only hope to learn to do and never would. Hell…she had
dance fever.

Closing my mouth, which had somehow fallen agape, I walked backwards, retreating and watching her. And then I tripped over Roland Riggs.

I was too startled to yell. Instead I let out a rush of air, a gasp, and I jumped near out of my skin.

“Jesus Christ, Roland, what the hell are you doing here?” I whispered.

“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” he said as he resettled himself on the lawn, cross-legged, and watched her dance as if I hadn’t just nearly landed in his lap and interrupted his reverie.

“Isn’t this a little sick? You staring at her through her curtains? Let’s go inside.”

“I can’t.”

“Whatdaya mean, ‘you can’t’?”

“It’s what I do every night at this time. She dances, and I can’t help myself.”

“She’s a wonderful dancer, who would, I am sure, be really
freaked out
if she knew you were spying on her. This is voyeurism. Let’s go.”

I looked at him looking at her, and in an instant, I realized why it was he ate her food. Why it was he allowed all these cats when he had allergies. Why the man ignored potato bonsai growing over all his available counter space. Why he had bunnies that pooped on his green carpets.

“Christ… How long have you been in love with her?”

“So long, I can’t remember.”

I sat down on the grass next to him.

“As long as I’ve been breathing, it seems. Since I met her, I think. But she was just a kid back then. And she’s still…young. And I, my dear, am growing old. I am exiting this world as she is in the midst of its dance.”

“Age doesn’t matter. It’s all in the mind. If you love her…”

“Don’t finish that. I can’t. But I thought that maybe…maybe you could teach me to dance.”

“I don’t dance.”

“You said you knew the Bee Gees that first day you came here.”

“Roland, Maria dances. I just move around like a boob. She has Latin rhythm. That’s no myth. She can
be
the music. She probably grew up on salsa and mariachi and music pulsating her world. I can only listen to it and hope to react appropriately.”

“But you know the hustle.”

“Sort of. It’s been a while.”

“I read the piece you wrote for
Esquire.
On the end of disco. I knew you could help me.”

The full force of what he said took my breath away, just as a breeze picked up from the ocean, blowing Maria’s curtains gently. She wore a leotard and her hair was loose and down to her waist.

“Is that why I’m here?”

He didn’t answer.

“Roland,” I said more firmly, “did you choose your publisher based on the fact that his editor once wrote a piece on disco? Lamenting the loss of the free-spirited age. Tell me you didn’t pick Lou, pick me, because of that piece.”

He sighed.

I felt the nausea of my tequila-induced state rise again. I felt my heart beating wildly in panic and fury. I stared at him. And then, without thinking, I knocked him over and pounded on his chest.

“You fucking bastard! That poem? How can we publish it? What is this all? A joke to you?”

“No joke. My poem is a work of art. And so is the dance. I need you. And West Side needs me.”

“Like a hole in our collective head we need you.”

I stared at Maria, now fully writhing to Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family.” I looked at Roland. My head was throbbing with an intensity usually reserved for New Year’s Day hangovers.

I had to think. Think while disco pulsed through my brain. I punched Roland in the arm. Hard. “I’ll make you a deal. You write me a book I can sell, and I’ll teach you to dance.”

“Deal.”

“Shake on it.”

He put out his hand.

“I’m going up to bed. First lesson is tomorrow. We’ll have to do it somewhere where she won’t hear us.”

“We’ll wait until she goes to her cottage.”

“Okay, Roland.”

Walking back to my room in the moonlight, I saw him framed against her cottage. A man in love with a disco queen. All the Tylenol with codeine and tequila in the world wasn’t going to fix this mess.

18

I
called Michael. Midnight my time put it at dawn his time. Payback’s a bitch.

“He-llo?” His groggy voice answered the telephone.

“Greet the dawn with me, Michael.”

“Cassie!” I heard the phone drop and him muttering, “Bloody blast it!”

Then…“Are you still there, Cassie?”

“Didn’t mean to make you drop the phone. Is it that shocking to hear from me?”

“Yes…I mean no.” His voice was a little hoarse. He sounded hungover.

“Rough night last night?”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

“You must stop bedding all those nubile young women.”

“If only that were true.”

“Ah-ha! You pretend to pine over me, but what you really want is a nice, young piece of ass.”

“What I really want is you, Cassie.”

“Please, Michael. Really. It’s absurd. We’ve never even met.”

“Then why did you call?”

“I missed you.”

“Really?”

I sat on my bed, enveloped in my bathrobe, my skin nearly dry from my swim, my hair damp, and thought for a moment. I had missed him. Missed his voice and missed talking to him.

“Yes. Sort of. I miss the old Michael. Your twin. The Michael of just a short time ago, prior to getting this stupid idea that we should meet.”

“Is it really so stupid? Cassie, love of my life, what I fail to understand is how you can think meeting will ruin everything.”

“Did I ever tell you the story of my first marriage?”

“No.”

“Suffice it to say, Michael, that I am not bred for captivity. I am decidedly…what is the word I’m looking for?”

“Difficult.”

“Yes.”

“Moody.”

“Yes.”

“Foul-mouthed.”

“At times.”

“Hostile.”

“Keep going.”

“Ill-tempered.”

“Yes, that too.”

“Sloppy.”

“I’ve told you about my bathroom then. My last cleaning lady was a lovely woman from Guatemala who quit after one day with my mold-covered tiles.”

“Impossibly bright, which makes you smug.”

“Yes. I suppose that, too. Now, let’s look at the logic of all this, Michael. You claim you want to meet me. That you are falling in the L-word with me, and yet you can rattle off a sizeable list of very major flaws. Huge flaws. Fatal flaws. I am hardly the type of girl you want to bring home to mother.”

“My mother is dead.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s been years. And you’re impossibly right, as always—which, I may add is another reason I adore you—she couldn’t have handled you. A Yank
and
a bitch. Or perhaps they go hand in hand.”

“Oh sure, start with the Yank jokes.”

“Cassie…” his voice grew very soft. “Are you falling in love with this mystery author?”

“No. But I do have to dance with him.”

“What?” I heard a flash of anger in his voice.

“Long story.”

“Well, I’m listening. You’ve gotten me bloody up this early when I had a terrible night last night, and you can tell me this long story. Dancing? Dancing? What’s next,
Cassie? A tango one minute—and we all know what they say about the tango—”

“It’s disco, actually.”

“A discotheque? Exactly what kind of working relationship is this?”

“As complex as ours, Michael, if you must know. And we’re not going to a disco. Look…it really would take me a week to explain.”

“Are you sleeping with him?”

I laughed out loud, though it came out as a sort of cackle. Or maybe a howl.

“What’s so funny?”

“Michael…I think this hangover you have is making you take leave of your senses.”

“I haven’t been with a woman in two years.”

His statement hung between us—across the Atlantic—for a long moment.

“I haven’t. And even that was…well, she wasn’t you.”

Michael Pearton was so handsome that I had not a doubt in my mind he could bed every woman in London if he so chose. And then there is the entire sub-breed of literary whores who dream of bedding famous authors, only down a rung or two from rock stars and movie actors.

“You’re scaring me,” I whispered.

“Why?”

“Because this sounds like obsession, and I can’t be obsessed, Michael. My father was obsessed with my mother, and he was ruined by it. He was broken the rest of his life, and he’s broken now with no hope of fixing it.”

“I am not your father.”

“Well, no. You speak with a British accent for one.”

“Stop it!” His voice was harsh.

“What?”

“Stop making this a joke. What about the night we talked six hours. Do you have any idea what my phone bill was? But what we had that night was all about a connection between two minds and two hearts. It wasn’t a game to me, Cassie. You’ve never been a game to me.”

I felt my own heart beating against my chest. I pictured my father begging my mother to stay. Begging. It was so…degrading. I spent years trying to erase the night from my memory, but of course, I couldn’t.

I snapped, “No, it’s not a game. But you’re trying to make it something grand, and…and isn’t it all about phone sex and lying there naked talking to a woman?”

“For someone so brilliant, you are bloody stupid, Cassie Hayes. So bloody God damn stupid.”

I heard a glass crashing against a floor or a wall.

“What was that?” I asked him.

“Nothing. Nothing. Blast it. I’ve got to go, Cassie.”

And he hung up.

I thought of calling back. With all of me, I fought this urge to call him back. To tell him I loved him. It was as if I had a physical battle going on inside of me. Like Jekyll and Hyde, I fought the monster. And I fought against it. Down, Devil. Down. And stay there. Stay deep. My monster had a name. I called my monster Love.

19

M
y mother used to drink gimlets. Does anyone drink them anymore? My father drank red wine. Fine, rich cabernets. He knew about the grapes, the region they were grown in, and he chose his bottles carefully, like a horseman selecting a stallion.

I drink tequila. It’s hard and wicked, and a woman who can slam, suck, shoot back a lemon and a glass of tequila is a force to be reckoned with. I drink brandy, too. Hot drinks, with no ice. I drink to forget that my father has forgotten me. I drink to sleep after a caffeine-hyped day. I drink to avoid thinking about how badly I crave Michael.

I woke up the morning after Michael hung up on me with an insatiable hangover. My hangovers all crave one thing. Coca-Cola. The nectar of the gods. It’s the only thing to calm the queasies, give me a caffeine lift, and pump sugar
to my brain. I massaged my temples and pulled on shorts and a T-shirt before heading to the kitchen.

“CASSIE!” Roland boomed at me.

“Stop talking so loud.”

“I’M NOT TALKING LOUD.”

“You are, too,” I whispered, my mouth full of dry rat hair. I know some people speak of cotton-mouth. That’s far too sweet an image for my hangovers. Cotton. Like fluffy clouds. Let’s call the dryness in my mouth something
real.
Rat hair. From dead sewer rats. Now we’re talking.

“WHATEVER’S THE MATTER WITH YOU?”

I stared at him.

“HANGOVER?”

I nodded.

“JUST THE CURE…” He pulled a can of tomato juice out of the refrigerator. This is a mistake. People think they can chase away a hangover with something that has the thick texture of semen.

“A Coke. All I want is a Coke.”

Thank God, he pulled a classic red can out of the fridge, which I proceeded to open and guzzle down with the abandonment of a pirate drinking grog. The phone rang. It pierced through my skull, and I guzzled more Coke. Roland’s face again held that peculiar look of a man who never receives phone calls.