There were moments in which Mike did not understand Mimi. And this problem with El Olvidado was just such an occasion.
Some weeks ago, they had been rehearsing a particular move, and Mimi couldn’t get it. The simplest of tango motions, in which the follower is given the opportunity to lift her back foot slightly off the floor behind her, give it a little dissociated flourish, and then bring it forward and across, to be placed lightly—the very tip of it—by the side of the other, planted, foot.
A stylish period offered at the end of a delicate sentence. But Mimi couldn’t get it.
“Listen, Mike, lead it better,” she said after the fifth misapplication.
Mimi had accepted Mike’s invitation to be his partner for the upcoming La Pista Porteña, a competition in San Francisco (their first such together), even though when he asked her, he had felt insecure in his own abilities. After years of tango, he still worried that he was too Anglo-Saxon to essay the dance successfully, especially in an international contest being judged by…by an Argentine! There is about the dance a kind of unspoken requirement that you be at least Argentine, and even more so a Buenos Aires porteño, in order to do it well. An Uruguayan oriental from Montevideo too, if that’s what you’re stuck with. And there would be a number of immigrant porteños and orientales competing in this very contest.
The judge was to be El Olvidado, The Forgotten One, a tanguero on tour in the United States just now who was noted for his lovely traditional tango and its slow beauties. The New York Times had raved about him.
Mike’s insecurities had little to do with the mechanics of the dance and a great deal to do with the histories of mass immigration to Buenos Aires and Montevideo, the explosive finesse of west-African rhythms in both, and the benighted sorrows of Mediterranean-style betrayal and lost love that so flower in both capitols. These issues do not figure for much if you are a New England Protestant gringo, which Mike was.
He was nonetheless congratulated for his dance. He could do it. But even he knew that, by comparison to the compadres of the Rio de La Plata, he was a little on the wooden side.
Mimi too suffered, but for different reasons. Her unreasonable beauty put the lie to her signature talents as the director of technology of a San Francisco accounting software startup. She had a mind devoted to strict necessity. Mimi never forgot anything. Having led the design team for the software, and then been involved with selling it to places like Deutsche Bank, she approached most things with a sense of well thought-out, singular organization.
But her looks occasionally got in the way, the banker on the other side of the table being a little too forward for her to complete her presentation of the software’s benefits. If she herself were perceived of as the benefit, she had to become difficult in order to get him off her case and to close the deal. There is a danger in this, too, since being difficult doesn’t usually result in a sale.
That tango has so little to do with software was one of the principal reasons Mimi loved it. On the dance floor, she could let her grace and sensuality flower. It was the music. And tango offers lush movement that no business endeavor can even attempt. Mimi nonetheless looked for precision in her dance, despite the fact that so much of what tango offers has to do with erotic splendor. Perhaps, though, tango’s benefits were actually the very starting point for Mimi’s singularity in the dance, the ones that enabled her…rather, compelled her…to put on her dance pumps and to step marvelously into Mike’s arms. Tango wove itself in with Mimi’s lovely display. It threaded her movements with invitation, her emotional intensities with desire, however little that had to do with the spreadsheets she had invented.
Mike knew about spreadsheets. He was an attorney who helped California start-ups with their business-founding legal work. Curt, the principal partner of his firm, was a Yale graduate whose emotional thinness caused Mike to think of him as Absence in a school tie. He wanted to see only those spreadsheets that celebrated the financial success of his firm’s clients. He just glanced at those that showed ineptitude. Curt wanted to appear kindly and approachable, and told all his attorneys and even his employees to use his first name, although privately they grumbled about his ignoring them every chance he got. One day he criticized Mike for the numbers of one of his clients. Curt was on the board of that particular client. “It doesn’t show in the spreadsheets, Mike, so you’d better get on it!” This was unjust, and Mike protested. “Get on it!” Curt insisted, absently.
“You ask me to do something,” Mimi now said, stepping away from Mike. “I do it. And then you criticize me for it.”
“Mimi!”
“No! That’s what you do.”
“I do not.”
“You do, too.”
This quibbling between them was not new. They had found that, although each had been dancing for some years, even in Buenos Aires dancehalls, each felt the other was too demanding. Neither ever stumbled. They even had a certain showy joie de vivre that made their dance special. But the sense each had of his or her own wishes for tango caused them now and then to stumble emotionally. The footwork was okay. It was their hurt feelings that tripped them up.
“Look…can we work this out?” Mike said.
Mimi did realize that insisting only on your own point of view in tango is an open door to bad dancing. So, despite wanting to bop him one, Mimi allowed the wish to fester alone inside her heart, because she sensed that Mike really hoped they could meet each other on this issue. Their tango would suffer without it.
“Yes, we can work it out, Mike.”
“Okay. Good. So, try following—”
“No, no. You just lead it. I’ll follow.”
They soldiered on, and two weeks before the competition, they met El Olvidado.
They had attended a show he had choreographed and was starring in, at the Alcazar Theater on Geary Street. ¡El destino en sí! which is to say Fate Itself! El Olvidado was the principal dancer, with two other fellows and three porteñas, all of whom were superb. He had six fine musicians, also. Nonetheless, the show featured the usual inanities that so many producers feel are de rigueur in staged tango dance:
The whole thing takes place in a whore house.
The knife fight scene between two macho petty gangsters…
The testosterone-driven dance competition among all the petty gangsters, mano a mano…
The insolent resentment, on the part of the chief petty gangster, of the pretty prostitute’s sensuous indifference…
And much more.
Mike seldom went to such shows anymore because they are all alike, one to the next. He sensed that the producers of Argentine tango shows must be capable of deeper feelings than those exhibited in so much repetitive cliché. But he had not seen it. Once, a few years ago, when he had asked one of the dancers at another show why they all seemed to cherish these roles, and to dance them over and over, the fellow told him “Che ¡es tango!” Mike didn’t believe it. That wasn’t tango. Rather than the complicated heart of a difficult dance, it was the sorry display of raggedy, inauthentic machismo. The music is so varied and complicated, and the emotional commitment you have to make if you’re going to dance it at all so encompassing, that the “petty gangster” gig on stage is really just a comma in what is, given all of tango’s history, a massive classic novel.
El Olvidado showed up at the dance studio where Mike and Mimi practiced. His being gorgeous as well as famous, Mimi noticed him right away. About forty, slim with very straight, very black hair, with a finely formed chin that, if anything, enhanced the authority of his glance, he looked the petty gangster part himself even as he stepped in quiet toward a folding metal chair to the side of the dance studio. The part about being “petty” seemed immediately inaccurate. As he sat down, dropping his shoulder bag to the floor, he appeared, just settling and arranging himself, capable of heart-engaged passion.
He watched Mimi and Mike dance.
A moment later, they introduced themselves, telling Olvidado that they had seen his show.
“What’s your real name?” Mimi asked.
“They call me Olvidado, yes,” he said. “But I am Nono Bianchi.”
“Bianchi?”
“Yes.” Olvidado grinned. “Like the racing bicycle.” He turned his head to the side, lifting his large chin so that he could give the two dancers an impressive profile. “But no relation.” He leaned his head to the side, offering Mimi another smile.
“Then why El Olvidado?” Mike asked. “The Forgotten One.”
“Tango,” Olvidado said.
“How so?”
“It is a lost art. Disappeared…I mean, the way it was. The street corner. The poor young men. The immigrants. The boliche. The conventillo.”
Mike translated. “A boliche, Mimi, is like a little store or tavern, a tango dive, and a conventillo was a large Buenos Aires building that housed immigrants from all over. 1890s. Early 1900s.”
“Yes,” Olvidado said. “And tango, of course, came from both those places.” He sat back on the chair and sighed.
“So…they’re olvidados? Mike said.
“Quite forgotten. For tango, those were the long ago. With my great-grandfather Juanito, who lived in a conventillo as a young man and danced in boliches.”
“A dancer?” Mimi said.
“Sí ¡Y era fantástico, amor!” Olvidado shrugged. “At least, according to my grandmother. She danced with him when she was a girl.” He folded his hands and examined them. A look of saddened nostalgia took him over. “Those were the romantic times.” His face took on the appearance of a Goya peasant, drawn in swathes of grey and black. Passion and grit themselves. There was in it a sense of great loss, as though the times of which he was speaking were now so gone in distant memory that only a few people these days could conjure them up. The great tragedy of tango. The soul of it…disappeared. Replaced by emptiness. Lost in mere nostalgia.
Mike noticed the look of bereavement that Olvidado gave to Mimi.
Olvidado stood up and took her into his arms. Mimi was surprised and resisted although only for a moment. Quite soon, she gave in to him. “My great-grandfather held his daughter like this, you see.” Mike could tell that, given the ease and grace with which Mimi essayed a few steps with the Argentine, the Argentine well knew what he was doing. “Authority, but respect.”
They danced an entire tango that was so slow that the exchange reminded Mike of sad fluidity itself, especially on Mimi’s part. Once the music meandered to its end, Olvidado escorted her back toward the chair, releasing her hand. “And grace, of course.” He glanced toward Mike. “Con permiso…” He gave him a slight nod and a grin that implied he was making fun of him.“…maestro.”
Olvidado watched Mike and Mimi dance a few numbers, and then advised them. Mike felt he was being observed by some actor playing a dark role deepened by imminent danger.
The godfather.
At first, Mimi was even more nervous than Mike. But after a few suggestions from Olvidado, during which he formed and caressed the part of her frame that he wished to correct, she seemed to have softened and found new peacefulness. A lot of peacefulness, it seemed to Mike.
“Your back, Mimi,” Olvidado observed at one moment. “It is lovely.”
—
“Watch out for him.”
Mimi surveyed the glass of wine before her.
“These kinds of guys are famous in Buenos Aires.”
“None of your business.” She caressed the rim of the glass, studying it.
“Mimi, I—”
“You’re not my chaperon.”
“Yes, but we know women, you and I—we do!—who’ve been used by men like him.”
“Maybe you do. I like him.”
“Of course! He intends for you to like him, Mimi.”
“Mike!”
“He does!”
—
They danced in La Pista Porteña…and Olvidado gave them the win. The applause was noisy and convinced Mike after a few minutes that indeed he and Mimi had excelled. There were two Argentine couples in the competition and one couple from Montevideo. All these kept their congratulations of Mike and Mimi in reserve, and one of the Argentine men actually scowled at them as they took the floor for a post-celebration solo turn for the audience’s benefit. Mike knew the Argentine…a San Francisco wine merchant named Paco Odónaju, often called “Irlandés” by Argentine friends. Mike had known Paco for some years and had never had a successful conversation with him. Paco seemed to think that all yanqui boludos who even attempted tango were laughable. He was a fine dancer riven with jealous anger.
Mimi went out with Olvidado the next evening. They were going for dinner because, she told Mike, “he’s got some kind of proposal in mind.”
“A date? An affair?”
“Mike! Please!”
This inquiry of Mike’s surprised him as well. He had thought of Mimi as simply a dance partner. Before their relationship, he had danced with her off and on at milongas…nothing serious. He had kept his emotional distance, realizing how good a dancer she was and not wishing to turn his feelings for her, or hers for him, into anything more than professional regard.
Even then, Mike had La Pista Porteña in mind, and knew that he had to keep his eyes on the contest. And although they did have regard, they were not professionals or anything close to it; rather, devotees of the dance and the music. Certainly not of each other.
That is, until this moment….
Mike stuck his hands in his pants pockets and turned to the side, fighting off the scowl that wished to appear on his lips.
She phoned him the next day and cancelled their plan to dance later in the afternoon. “Olvidado’s got some things he wants to teach me.”
“Tango things.” Mike was jealous.
“Of course.”
“Nothing else.”
“Mike.”
Having finished the conversation with greying good-byes, Mike sat back in his chair and realized what was happening. He cared for Mimi, suddenly without warning and seemingly unaware of the possibility—until now clueless of its own existence—that he may be in love with her.
—
Mimi invited Olvidado for coffee.
She lived in The Marina, just a block from The Marina Green and its views of the bay and of Alcatraz itself. Mike had explained to her that in Spanish an alcatraz is a kind of seabird…a gannet, he had read. But maybe the Spanish explorer Juan Manuel de Ayala had mistaken west coast seagulls for east coast gannets, which de Ayala would have been able to see if he had discovered Penobscot Bay instead of San Francisco Bay. In any case, Mike had assumed that the island had once been a haven for seagulls, before it became the other kind of haven for which it is now so famous. He had visited Alcatraz a few times in his life and recalled seeing only occasional seagulls. They seemed no longer to go to the island for more than a startled glimpse of it.
“You enjoy it here?” Olvidado looked around the living room. He was dressed in a white shirt and khaki pants, a white tennis sweater resting about his shoulders, the sleeves in a loose knot on his chest. The red and blue stripes that bordered the neck of the sweater seemed to accentuate his square jaw and lovely eyes. He also wore a pair of black leather loafers with no socks. His southern Italian coloring made even his ankles appear alluring to Mimi.
Because of her business success, her apartment was a luxury. It was so well appointed that it had become the location of choice for her company for entertaining visiting clients. Although many software engineers have suddenly come into the kinds of money that would allow luxury like Mimi’s, few would understand the difference between the fine accoutrements in her kitchen and their own now dented and blackened pots and pans, the coffee-stained mug and so on, all bought a few years ago at Ikea.
Mimi was still without real love after ten years in software development. The other engineers where she had worked during that time had given her all the engineer-speak she ever needed, not a syllable of it thoughtful. Love’s language was so much more subtle than that provided by binary systems, no matter how many zeroes and ones and no matter in whatever combination of them.
She led Olvidado into the kitchen and began preparing coffee. She also brought out a few pastries from a bakery she loved named Jane: a citrus morning bun that was her favorite of all their goods, and one of their croissants, which she thought were the best she had ever had, even among those her mother had bought for her in Paris when Mimi was fourteen and on her first ever trip outside the United States.
She knew that software engineers know nothing about croissants.
“I do like it, yes,” she said to Olvidado. “We’re so lucky that we live in San Francisco.”
“I have danced in Oakland, across the bay. It is no San Francisco.” Olvidado fingered the croissant. “But you know that, I am sure.”
“I was born in Oakland.”
“Ay!” Olvidado removed his fingers from the pastry. “I am sorry. I mean no—”
“Don’t worry. San Francisco is in a league of its own.”
Olvidado broke into a large smile. “Che, como Buenos Aires ¿no?”
After coffee, he asked her to dance. They pulled aside the rug in Mimi’s living room, and Olvidado put Mimi through three of the most delicious tangos she had ever experienced. After that, they went for a walk that took them toward the Golden Gate Bridge, on the trail that borders the bay. The blue sky was enlivened by the whitest of clouds. The bay itself reflected the sky with a dark cerulean calm seldom experienced here, where wind is almost constant. But, on this day, no…and Mimi felt that the quiet that fell across the waters formed a kind of expectant listening to her conversation with Olvidado, in hopes of an affectionate revelation.
Actually, Mimi tried to put that notion aside because she knew that Mike was right about a certain kind of Buenos Aires tanguero. Among the women dancers in North and South America, Europe, and Asia…everywhere...they are well known and numerous. They flaunt their talent in the ways of pretty male birds in search of a mate. She did know women who had fallen for this, and most of them had decided that they had been fools, once the pretty male birds had escaped with some of their money. Or if not their money, a good deal of their virtue, which had been abandoned in expectation of what they feel must be the superior ability of such men to put women into ecstasy itself. This turns out not necessarily to be true. But the expectation opens the door for just enough time for the pretty male bird to put his sensuous talents into action, such as they may be.
After that, he’s gone.
But she was attracted to him. His English was formal, well-spoken, clear, and considerate. He asked her questions, and then listened to her answers. He offered little of the bony, obdurate insistence upon themselves that so many men seem to think is interesting to women. Although, when it was Olvidado doing that, it was interesting. His smoothness, about which Mike had warned Mimi, was for her a plus. It seemed so genuine, especially when it thrilled her expectations. He seemed more complete than any of her work compatriots, although she realized…once again and sadly…that the men she worked with were as incomplete as you can get emotionally. She knew that they had to have emotions. But the stumbling that was the feature of their response to any question that begins with the phrase “How do you feel about…” was what sufficed for language until they could get back to the matters at hand: sets of numbers, AI, the mouse versus the touchpad, the next round of funding….
They left the trail for a moment to walk out onto the beach that it borders. On such days as this, the beach is crowded mostly with young parents and their kids. It is a celebration for all, including the many dogs that run up and down, into and out of the water, their noise and happiness enjoyed by the kids themselves as they dig in the sand or splash their toes in the small waves. The Golden Gate holds court over it all.
Mimi stumbled on one of the small boulders on which they were walking to get to the beach, and Olvidado took her hand. When she got her balance, he kept hold of her hand, and Mimi did not object.
The following day, Mimi spoke only of steps and combinations as she and Mike practiced. He hovered around questions of her time with Olvidado, but did not actually voice them. Mimi didn’t bring up her stroll with Olvidado either. For a full hour, as they danced and talked, it was as if the stroll had not taken place. And, of course, there was nothing in the conversation about what Mimi and Olvidado did when they arrived back at her apartment, after the stroll.
—
Mimi threw a party for Olvidado. She invited Mike and many of the people with whom they danced tango. She also invited a few of the people from her company and, on a whim, two of the venture capitalists who had funded the company.
After a while, she addressed the guests. “And now my very dear friend Nono has asked me to dance with him.” Olvidado, standing behind her, his arms crossed, smirked.
Mike looked away. Nono?
“Professionally he is known as El Olvidado,” Mimi said. “And has danced tango everywhere in the world.”
Nono!
With the exception of Mike, Nono was the only man among the guests who wore a tie. Mimi knew that these days, as a fashion item, ties are out. She hadn’t liked this change, thinking that a tie brings great style to a man, no matter the state of the rest of his dress. Even a fine Uomo suit looks everyday if it is not accompanied by a proper tie. One of the things she had asked Mike to do when they danced at the milongas was to wear one, and to her surprised pleasure he always did.
The tangos Mimi and Nono danced stunned the onlookers. Especially Mike. Grumbling to himself, he had moved to the end of one of the couches, folded his arms, and leaned against the wall. He hoped he did not have a scowl on his face, but he did. He was hurt. And the dance he witnessed served only to enflame his wishes for Mimi.
Nono moved like the roué everyone in the room concluded he was. He was dark and thoughtful, his walking like that of a graceful, intimate lover intent on enhancing his partner’s very beauty. Mimi was no slouch either, and bore no resemblance to the women in Nono’s stage show. Her silk dress flowed about her like a gold and silver cloud. Her shoes, barely held to her feet by slim straps, were quite high-heeled and formed an extension of her legs that made her pretty toes breathtaking. Her dark hair, which was long, sometimes hid her eyes, which could be seen especially when they were half-hidden by it, their lashes curving with happiness.
Mike looked around the living room. Even the software engineers were interested.
Afterwards, Nono engaged the venture capitalists in talk. Both were men, and both carried themselves with aggressive self-admiration. His dancing may have impressed these fellows. But now, he spoke with them with the meaty gestures, the grudging confidence, and the blunt dismissals with which such men converse with each other. Like them, he had no wish to appear a flake. Even were he not a streetwise tanguero, Nono now had at least the appearance of a fearless venture capitalist himself, one of no doubt great notoriety in rough-and-tumble, ever-rising South America.
But Mike also noticed, when Mimi brought around a plate of hors d’oeuvres, that while these men offered congratulations to her for her dancing and smiled manfully at her obvious beauty, they paid her little real attention. Mike knew why: she simply was not one of them, and there was a reason for that. Her talents as an executive in the start-up were well known. But in the end, these fellows acted toward her as though some fellow could do just as good a job. Their thanks for a damp, cold shrimp dipped in cocktail sauce reeked of indifference. And, to Mike’s astonishment, their polite arrogance toward Mimi was acquiesced to by Nono himself. He seemed actually to urge the arrogance, so that they could bore Mimi and then get back to what he wished to talk about.
—
Fate Itself! was extended for three weeks at The Alcazar. With the three-day break asked for from the producers, Nono and Mimi motored in her BMW to the Napa Valley.
Mike took this opportunity to fall into despondency. Now, finally, he realized how much he wished for Mimi and the gristle and wonder of real love. He realized what she could mean to him. There was no equal for Mike to holding Mimi in his arms while being serenaded by tango. Where before they had maintained the emotional distance from each other, having the dance be the enjoyment, the Pista Porteña in view…now Mike realized that dancing with Mimi was not the end in itself. Love was the end. The dance was its vehicle. And now, even the vehicle was gone.
—
“Mimi, that is not what you should do.” Nono stepped away from her, turning his back as he brought the fingers of his right hand to his lips. The gesture implied glum self-importance. “You do not see what I am trying to give you.”
“Of course I do, Nono.”
“It is easy.”
“Nono.”
“It is easy!”
“Well, listen, Nono, lead it better.”
—
Mimi called Mike, and he invited her for coffee on Chestnut Street, a few blocks from her apartment. He knew that Nono had moved in with Mimi for the duration of Fate Itself! and he had not heard from her. The phone call came as a surprise. But Mike made the invitation immediately.
They sat down at a table before the cafe. It was a warm morning, and the umbrella that shaded them served to obscure the lines of worry that had appeared around her eyes. Mike noted them, but held back from any questions. She wore a pair of black slacks, a dark brown, long-sleeved silk blouse, a brooch that had a single pearl attached to the center of a sun-like circle of gold, and conservative black business heels.
“I’ve got to be in the office in an hour,” she said. She sipped from her chamomile tea. “But I need to talk with you, Mike.”
“Of course. What’s happening?”
“Nono.”
The pause that ensued was intentional on Mike’s part. Right away he wished to celebrate. But given Mimi’s worry lines, he felt that glee wouldn’t be exactly the right response to her murmur of anguish. And Mike saw right away that this was anguish.
“I thought he was the man I’d been seeking…you know, for all those years up to the moment he asked me to dance.” Mimi’s hands rushed about one another as she stared at them. “And in that dance, I felt he was it.” She lowered her head.
“What’s the problem?”
“Tango.”
“Tango’s the problem?”
She frowned. “No. But it’s the cause of the problem. I thought that….” She took in a breath, and then moaned. “Anyone who could dance like that…anyone who knows what it takes to dance like that…the personal sorrow and command that it requires—”
“All that.”
“Yes! I thought a man like that was, you know, the man.”
Mike sat back and looked out onto Chestnut Street. He realized that even he had misjudged Mimi. Yes, she danced better than anyone with whom he had ever danced. She moved with every intention of precision and grace. Her dance had no uncertain questions in it. But it was clear now to Mike that Mimi was a romantic, and that her sense of herself and her own value had been clouded by her expectations of Nono.
“How is it that he’s not?” Mike said.
The cookies they had intended to share lay untested on their white ceramic plate. Mimi unbuttoned a sleeve of her blouse and rolled it up to her elbow. A dark blue and brown bruise splotched her forearm.
“He hit me.”
Mike sat back. He stared at Mimi.
“He doesn’t like me to criticize him.”
“Do you?”
Mimi looked out on to the street herself. She let out a long breath. “If suggesting ways that he could dance better—”
“You do that with…El Olvidado?”
“I mean, that he could dance better with me.”
“You do that?”
The skin just above and below her lips became finely wrinkled. “Actually, he’s hit me a couple times.” Mimi placed a hand on her right shoulder and caressed it. This was the first time Mike had ever seen her lose the sense of her own appearance. He saw defeat. He saw rage.
“He kicked me.”
“What?”
“He pushed me and I fell down…you know, in my living room. We were dancing.”
“What had happened.”
“I had bitched at him because he wouldn’t leave me alone.”
“About what?”
“About how I was dancing.”
“And how were you dancing?”
Mimi slumped even more. “The way I always do. You know. With attention!”
“Verve.”
“I hope so,” she said.
“Grace.”
She now smiled, although with shyness and pain. “Thank you.” Mike knew she hated telling him all this. But he also sensed that he may be the only person she trusted in a matter like this one.
“He kicked me here.” She pointed to her right thigh and grimaced. “He was all apologies after that. All sad remorse.”
“And you?”
“I didn’t buy it.” Mimi slouched. “Of course, I didn’t buy it.”
“I wouldn’t think so.”
Mimi brought her hands to her face and, after a moment, dropped them to her lap. She lowered her head.
“But can you prove it?”
“That he did all this?” Mimi swallowed, looking away.
“Yes. Any witnesses?”
The silence in their conversation was invaded by the laughter of passersby on the sidewalk, the wordplay and patter of women and their teenage daughters, the passage of small children, hands held by their fathers or guided along on their tricycles by their mothers….
“I installed those little cameras,” she said.
“Cameras?”
“When I bought the place. The real estate guy said I should…you know, in case anybody broke in.”
“Could we take a look?”
Mimi shrugged. “I guess. If I can figure out whether they work.”
—
“Get the right attorney, Mike.”
He had called a friend of his, Steven Abajian. They had been in the same class at Boalt Hall in Berkeley. A criminal lawyer, Steven’s specialty was the defense of rock stars and Hollywood actors in drug cases. He had had many cases and was famous for those he had won. He once told Mike that he preferred defending black musicians because he understood that they had been arrested for being black, while the white musicians were arrested because they were foolish. It was easier to get a white musician or actor freed. But the defense of a black musician involved that musician’s civil rights, which, although a civil rights case brought in less money, enabled Steven to work with people who were truly being victimized and whose work he deeply admired.
Besides his street-cred, Steven Abajian had significant appreciation of stagecraft and musicianship. He was a large man who seemed always to be lost in thought, even when telling stories about his past cases, which was often. Stocky, slovenly (although always wearing a tie), dressed in enormous wrinkled suits, he had become a wealthy man. Mike enjoyed conversations with him because the people Steven represented were so often well-known, and the issues in their cases were so colorful, that few other attorneys in town could match him for anecdotal detail.
“Will you talk to Mimi, Steven?”
“Yeah. Have her call me.” Steven nodded. He grumbled, a deep re-arrangement of phlegm in his throat, and placed the fingers of one of his hands against his lips. He looked up. “She won’t ask me to dance, will she?”
—
It was the final night of Fate Itself! The theater was jammed, and in the last number, Nono did a spirited romantic turn with all three of the women in the cast. Each sequence brought a wave of applause, and when the musicians came to their final chord and the six dancers effected the usual photogenic poses that one always sees in pictures of tango dancers…the dark certainty of the men, the prideful disrespect of the women, all in poses of great corporeal superiority, their faces locked in self-assurance…the audience broke into stupendous clapping and noise. They came to their feet and cheered. In the curtain calls, Nono particularly received loud congratulation, and he returned the favor to the audience, smiling with broad intelligence and clapping for them.
As he walked from the stage, pounding one of the other fellows on the back and congratulating him, he was greeted by three policemen.
“Mr. Bianchi?” one of them said.
“Uh…bueno…”.
“Nono?”
“Sí. Yes.”
“You’re under arrest, sir.”
“Arrest!”
‘Yep. Battery. Assault.”
“But—”
“You’ll need to come with us, sir.”
“But I—”
“Now!”
Mike and Steven Abajian were standing back against a rear wall, next to a hanging, folded-up fire hose. As Nono shook his head and demanded to speak with his lawyer, one of the policemen read him his rights. Nono referred to this fellow and his fellow cops as malditos pelotudos until, finally, he was pushed out the stage door into the dank alley outside, where a fog-shrouded squad car awaited him. Steven nodded and offered a handshake to Mike. Mike apologized and pointed out that he was just now tapping in a number on his phone. Steven, of course, understood.
When Mimi answered, her voice was tremulous. When he told her the news, after a pained sigh, she thanked him. “From my heart, Mike.” She let out another sigh. “My very heart.”
____
© Copyright 2022 Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.
This story is from my collection titled San Francisco, available everywhere in print and digital editions.
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