It was a dark, moonless Thursday night. I was parked outside Calista's apartment building, waiting for her to come downstairs. I felt strung-out, as if hungover, although I had not been drinking. The 48 hours since we had parted outside the Caps bar had been a special kind of agony, with visions of her face and voice drifting endlessly through my mind, no matter what I might be doing at the time. Sleep had come only fitfully. It had taken all my willpower not to contact her prematurely, so badly did I need to see her again.
I had chosen to drive us to the salsa club; it was in a bad enough neighborhood that there were few taxi or Uber drivers who would be willing to go there. It was even less likely anyone would pick us up. My car, also, was old, cheap and beat-up, making it an improbable target for theft.
Calista appeared, and my bad mood melted away, as if by magic. I got out and walked around the front of the car to hold the passenger door open for her. She was wearing a red, floral-print dress that, while not especially daring, showed off her statuesque figure. I was as awestruck as I had been the first time we had met, and barely managed to greet her properly. She touched my shoulder and smiled.
"Hello, Jason," she said, then added, "I must apologize if I seem a little tired just now, I have not had the best sleep."
My blood raced as I considered she might have suffered from insomnia for the same reason I had.
* * *
The salsa club did not have a name. There was no sign outside, only a large Latino man standing guard in front of a rusty metal door. He wore an over-sized black leather coat, and kept his right hand tucked inside, as if ready to draw a weapon. Like the Caps bar, the club was in another industrial neighborhood of the city. This area, however, suffered from a high rate of violent crime. It was the perfect locale for the club, however, as many of the musicians and patrons did not have visas, and wished to keep a low profile. All that said, Meg and I had met here, and, of course, had danced here frequently after becoming serious. We had never, ourselves, been victims of crime.
I found a parking space around the corner from the entrance. Calista and I made our way to the front door, passing several junkies shooting up in darkened doorways. The bouncer, Gil, recognized me, and let us in with a slight nod.
Calista was enraptured by the ambiance inside the club from the moment we crossed the threshold. It was dimly lit, and somehow smoky even though cigarette smoking was disallowed. A particularly good band from Colombia was in town, already in full swing. They were obscure, but I had heard them play a few times before. She wanted to get straight to the dancing lesson, so we went out onto the floor without stopping by the bar, and I started to teach her the basics of salsa. As it turned out, she was an excellent dancer. Whatever she had learned back home was indeed similar, and before long we were doing twirls and other advanced moves, as if we had been partners for years.
After one particularly flamboyant move, we bumped accidentally into a familiar-looking female dancer. It was Meg, my ex-girlfriend.
"Hi Jason," she said, expression pinched. Turning to Calista, she said, "And is this another one of your 'lesbians'?"
"Jason," Calista said, her face devoid of obvious mirth, "you did not inform me that I was supposed to be a lesbian! Miss, perhaps you can give me some advice regarding how best to effect that?"
Meg's dance partner, a man named George whom I had seen there many times, sensed conflict and slunk away. In an attempt to lower the temperature of the situation, I decided to ignore Meg's insulting greeting, and introduce the two women to each other properly.
"Calista, this is Meghan, we used to go out," I said, "Meg, this is Calista, we met at..."
Here I trailed off, as it dawned on me that saying we met at a mass gender reveal party, where I was the biological father of all nine children, probably was not the best way to ease the tension. For better or worse, Calista finished my sentence for me.
"We met at a gender revelation ceremony. Jason was there as the biological father of the nine fetuses, and I was with an acquaintance who had suggested the conceptions in the first place."
Calista said this in her near-monotone, although I could just perceive some tension along the sides of her eyes. Meg stormed off. Although I did not realize it at the time, it was to be the last time I ever saw her. Once she was out of sight or hearing distance, I burst out laughing.
"Oh my God, you are perfect!" I said.
"Your former partner is handsome, and also strange," Calista said, still keeping a straight face. "Why is she so agitated? And why did she imply I am a sex worker, and that I am being paid to feign homosexuality?"
I explained the incident at my apartment where Meg met the Twins unexpectedly, and then how she rashly concluded that they were faux lesbian call girls. Now it was Calista's turn to double over with laughter. Once we had both recovered, she touched my shoulder, and we went back to the salsa.
The evening passed in a daze. We only had eyes for each other, barely noticing the surrounding throng of dancers. During a slow number, she pressed her body to mine, and I clasped my hands about her waist. This resulted in an electric jolt shooting through my body; I felt like I had touched the third rail on a subway track. For her part, Calista seemed preoccupied with trying to rest her head on my shoulder, and eventually gave up. She was frustrated by her prodigious bosoms, which created too much space between us, even when she pressed in on me as hard as decency would allow. We did not leave until the other patrons had departed, all the lights were back on at full illumination, and the musicians were cleaning their instruments.
Calista went over to them and asked a question in fluent Spanish. I could tell this only because I had taken enough of the language in high school to recognize her flawless pronunciation.
"How many languages do you speak?" I asked her.
"Seven," she said.
"Amazing! Which ones?"
"English and Spanish, as you know. Then Modern Greek, Japanese, Bengali, Swahili, and Egyptian Arabic. I guess the correct number is actually ten if you include my native language, Latin and Ancient Greek."
"When did you learn all this?" I asked, flabbergasted.
"I was a diligent student," she said modestly.
On our way out, Calista asked, "Since we are discussing the subject of skillfulness, how is it that you are so proficient at dancing, Jason? My understanding was that in this country, males with your... background... are, usually, poorly skilled at that type of body movement."
"You're right, in general," I said, "but I come from a weird family."
As we walked to my car, I explained that, although my oldest sister, a team sports fanatic who was on two varsity teams in high school, had no interest in dancing, the next three sisters were all passionate about ballet, and, later, other forms of dance. As the youngest child, this limited my options greatly. By the time I was five, my exhausted mom insisted that I enroll in classes at the same studio my sisters attended. She was willing neither to drive me to another type of activity, with three kids already doing dance lessons all week, nor to allow me to sit around being idle while my sisters were busy. I did manage to get into the tap dancing class, which reduced the level of ridicule I received from my peers, albeit only slightly. By the time I hit puberty, and had some say in the matter, I decided to stick with dancing, and even branched out to other forms beyond tap, partly because I had grown to like it, and partly out of a realization that it was a good way to meet girls. This move paid off, as it was how I met both Sarah and Meg.
My exposition completed right as we were nearing one end of the dark street outside the dance club. There was not a soul around; even the junkies had found somewhere else to crash for the night. We rounded the corner and my forehead ran right into the end of a cold, metal object.
"Don't make a fuckin' move, asshole!" a quavering male voice said.
I could not see the man clearly, but I did recognize that he was holding a pistol, shakily, about an inch above the bridge of my nose. I started to reach for my wallet, under the assumption, and fervent hope, that all he wanted was my money. Before my hand had moved more than a couple inches, however, the weapon was gone from my sight, replaced by an image of Calista's fingers flashing by, wrapping around my assailant's wrist and twisting. Moving faster than I could follow, she soon had the skinny man on the ground, and was holding his right forearm in a painful, near-breaking position between his shoulder blades. With her left hand, she was aiming the assailant's gun squarely at his partner, another emaciated, pale-skinned male in an over-sized, dirty yellow bomber jacket. In my panic, I had not noticed this second man. He must have thought the two of us would be easy marks; his gun hand was still in the process of rising high enough to take aim.
"Drop your weapon now, or I will shoot you," Calista said loudly, without a trace of emotion.
The man paused, his half-raised revolver still pointing towards the asphalt.
"Fuck this dude, I ain't gettin' shot for your ass!" the yellow-clad man shouted at his partner, dropped his gun, and ran off down the street, quickly fading into shadow.
Calista calmly hit her captive on the back of his head with the butt of the pistol, knocking him out cold. She rolled him over and patted him down, and pulled his wallet from an inner jacket pocket. Using her phone, she took pictures of the man's face, and then his driver's license. Based on the tapping motions she followed up with, I think she sent the pictures to someone. The whole time, I was standing there, my mouth open, in a useless daze. I did not even think to call the police, and simply assumed the Calista would. All I could think about was that I had come microseconds from possibly having my brains blown out.
"Give me your keys," Calista said firmly, "we have to get out of here; there could be others."
Mechanically, I fished the keys from my pants and handed them to her, then plodded after her to the car.
"We will go to my apartment, Jason," she said as she started my car and swiftly pulled into the street, "You are about to experience shock when the adrenaline wears off, and it will not be good for you to be by yourself."
