CHAPTER TWELVE #2
“Why should it? I know what I’m feeling on that stage.
I understand why you cut us down to three shows a week, at least until we know what we’re playing with.
But I’m on the cusp of something wonderful here, Alex, thanks to that man.
” She tilted her head toward the door, reaching to fasten her dress. “Help do me up?”
Alex waited for her to turn around, fastening two elusive clasps on her dress.
“Thanks.” Satisfied, Joanna turned around and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Now go let him work his magick on you. We’ve got an audience to wow.”
“What makes you think I’m not working my magick on him?” Alex said with a grin, picking up Jago’s wine and leaving her to finish getting ready.
When he closed the dressing room door, Jago was waiting, leaning against the wall in a dark corner, arms folded over his chest, watching Alex with smug satisfaction.
“You forgot your wine,” said Alex.
“Our wine.” Jago wrapped his hand around Alex’s under the glass.
Alex smiled as they raised it together. “To psychic flamenco.”
“To what?” Jago laughed.
Alex took a long sip. “Something Vicente said. I thought it was funny.”
Jago lifted the wine to his lips and finished the toast. “I’m glad you didn’t call it that. Though Dogs of Andalusia? I don’t know whether to be honoured or offended. I hope Dali and Bunuel don’t sue.”
“I doubt that. I didn’t know what to call it. Joanna suggested The Bitch of the Basque Lands, but I thought that would get us into even more trouble.”
“Next time, when you have a faithful audience.”
“I don’t know. Next time I thought we’d go for something really silly, about a boy that works in a café? Maybe we’ll give him a seagull’s head?”
“Dear gods,” Jago pinched the bridge of his nose. “You are—”
“Stirring you up.” Alex took the wine back and drew another long sip. “I’m just happy, is all. Though I would have liked you to at least check in with me before talking to Joanna.”
“Yes, bad manners, I’m sorry.” Jago kissed him, squeezing his shoulders as he withdrew. “I’m just happy you’re happy. That means everything. But you have an opening night public to schmooze.”
Alex winced. Seeing Jago in that smart white shirt with red swirls embroidered on it, atop black leather trousers? Schmoozing had little to do with what he felt like doing, and their public had even less. “Be my date?”
Jago stared at him with surprised delight. “I would not have been so bold as to ask.”
Alex took him by the hand, leading him out of the theatre.
* * *
Alex had been glad of Jago’s hand as they’d weaved through the genuine well-wishers, the rubberneckers, and the jealous pricks who’d come hoping to watch them fail.
Leo Mendoza fell into that last category, but Alex had smiled and accepted his congratulations with a frosty hug while Jago checked for knives in his back, or so they joked once Leo was out of earshot.
Vicente, who hated these gatherings, remained in the theatre.
Alex wondered if Joanna had allowed him access to her dressing room, or if he’d been brave enough to request it.
Maria had introduced Alex to several people sporting loud jackets and louder rouge whose names he promptly forgot, then abandoned him once it was clear Alex—or the cute item on his arm—could draw a crowd for himself.
He wanted another glass of wine. Or six.
The four who’d breakfasted at Café No Mismo the morning after Si-Man’s death had snuck in at the last moment, though the director, Red Jacket, perhaps eager to avoid recognition, had shown up in dowdy drag, and might have been quite anonymous had the other three not dressed in much the same fashions as they had that morning.
He offered Alex a knowing look in the lobby, which Alex took as good luck.
The theatre opened. The audience took their seats. Vicente gave the nod from the booth before Alex took his seat next to Jago.
“Ready to make magick?” Jago asked, grasping his hand.
Alex’s nerves denied him so much as a quick, sarcastic remark.
The evening was going better than he’d dared hope.
The crowd hushed, the house lights dimmed, and the same strange music that had haunted them at their impromptu audition filled the auditorium.
Jago’s hand grew warmer, its softness wrapping around Alex’s wrist, until he felt the steady rise and fall of a man’s chest under his arm.
Like a double exposure, he watched Joanna take the stage, each sweeping movement another sound in a language of male-on-male lovemaking in which she, to Alex’s knowledge, should not have been fluent.
But fluent she was, as the handsome, dark figure of a man vanished his cock in one confident swoop of his lips.
Gasps from the audience ranged from scandalised to excited to titillated.
Yet this was no pornography on stage. This was Joanna pouring herself into the dance and finding movements for words dubbed obscene for all that made them beautiful.
Alex was vaguely conscious of two or three walkouts, but he was too wrapped up in the performance to be sure, much less care.
Joanna played the scene until both men teetered on the brink of climax. Then, with one dramatic sweep of her arms, and a scream so full of joy it might have revived the dead for a second go-around, they came.
All of them.
Alex hadn’t even realised he was hard, and was relieved when his pants remained dry.
But the groans, cries, howls and gasps that passed through the audience as eighty-four semi-simultaneous orgasms erupted through the crowd like a string of firecrackers would surely haunt his nights for months to come.
Then, another gasp as the reddened, sweat-soaked face of the man who’d come with his lover within the confines of their story filled their minds—the modest, playful, grateful face of Federico del Segrado Corazon de Jesus Garcia Lorca.
This time, Alex was sure of at least five people walking out… and one screaming.
The music shifted, and Joanna progressed to the next movement.
Anxiety and a fear of discovery now replaced all horny sensuality.
It was clear from the clothes that their story was a period piece, full of 1930s peasants in drab, dirty dress, interspersed with military men wearing hard, cruel expressions.
The nervousness that overtook Alex wasn’t for them, however.
A poem. Joanna’s dance now spelled out the cadence and rhyme of a poem.
The anxiety of its near-completion gripped the audience in its collective gut, not knowing how they could read into the dance so clearly but unable to deny the sensation that unified them.
It was a fear every actor, every director, writer, musician, painter, sculptor, poet, designer …
every human who’d ever attempted to put anything into the world knew all too well.
The fear of their work not mattering. Of being forgotten.
Lorca’s image blended with Joanna’s again, as she sat down on the stage, accepting the embrace of the man who’d so pleased Lorca—and the audience—in his bed moments before.
The man caressed them with such assuring gentleness that the anxiety gave way to sadness.
Alex, along with every soul in the audience, remembered chances missed for fear of failure—songs, stories, and images that had longed with such urgency to be shared, only to be shamed into obscurity, a private joke never told or a song never sung, and behind each one, a memory that had meant so much more than a lost piece of art.
Joanna became the poem, filling the auditorium with such joy and hope, it was as if she’d reminded them—as if they had reminded them, for Alex was no longer sure where Joanna and her movements ended and the characters in their story began—why they’d chosen to be the person they were.
They would make any sacrifice necessary to share their songs, stories, poems, and pictures; perhaps even life itself.
Kindness, relief, laughter, irritation, the bitter words of an argument…
Joanna had a move for all of them, each one transforming as it reached the audience in a form they saw so clearly within themselves and those they loved; notions of family, born and created, notions of loyalty and betrayal that only poetry—or in this case, dance—could articulate.
A hush fell over the audience as anxiety returned, along with the military men who were this time, doubtless its cause.
But there would be no hiding. No chance of escape.
Thoughts of friends fled to France, Britain, or across the Atlantic fleeted through an audience now shifting in their seats.
There were no images of Lorca as Joanna darted from shadow to shadow, stealing every opportunity to speak and to read in a dance that required no translation.
By the time Lorca’s face returned, it was staring down the barrel of a dozen guns, including one wielded by the man who had brought him such sensual satisfaction.
Screams pierced the darkness as the men fired, and Joanna and Lorca fell to the ground as one. Alex didn’t know if it was shared knowledge, but as the lights faded, he knew who’d fired the bullet that had stricken Lorca’s heart.
Gentle clapping broke the silence, growing rapidly into rapturous applause.
By the time Vicente brought the lights back up on Joanna, the entire audience was on its feet, cheering.
Joanna took her bow with steady grace, before beckoning Alex and Jago to join her.
Jago held back, releasing Alex’s hand and allowing him to own the surreal moment.
He took the stage, acknowledging the audience with a deep bow before yielding the spotlight back to his star.
Only now did Jago join him. Then, they threw the audience’s love to the tech box, where Vicente accepted it with his customary stiff shyness.
Yet terror gripped Alex as the applause died down and all eyes returned to him. He hadn’t prepared a speech.
A panicked glance was all it took for Jago to jump to Alex’s rescue.
“Ladies, gentlemen, and persons of immaculate ambiguity…” A light chuckle and several cheers went through the crowd.
“Thank you so much for coming. It has been a delight to see and feel hearts and minds that are so open.” Jago shot Alex a sly wink.
“And I’m pleased to say, so is the bar.”
They escaped under the sound of more applause.
Jago grinned at Alex before stepping away. “Go own your night.”
Before Alex could ask why Jago needed to go backstage or speak to Joanna again, he felt a hand on his shoulder.
“Darling!” Maria’s voice was undeniable.
For the next twenty or thirty minutes—Alex couldn’t be sure—the introductions flowed as free as the cava. He stopped trying to remember them after ten minutes or so, instead letting Maria, who, now sure of a hit, made certain to introduce him to every guest with semi-flexible purse strings.
“Alex?”
“Vis, thank God.” Alex wondered if he’d said this aloud as he excused himself from a conversation to which he’d felt little more than an accessory and fell into Vicente’s arms. “We did it, I suppose?”
“We absolutely did. And I’m fucking dying for a piss.”
“Umm… so go? I think you’ve earned one.”
Vicente shook his head. “It’s a disco dispensary in that bathroom right now. If Maria wasn’t so busy running you like a race horse, she’d be furious.”
“Hey, if it gets us money—”
“I hear you. So, are we going to talk about what that was in there?”
“What what was?”
Vicente’s brow darkened.
“Alex! Come, have you met—”
With that, he was back on patron’s row. He’d expected his opening night to be full of Chueca bohos, queers and weirdos, not bored Los Geronimos widows looking to drop some liquid assets on the latest nonbankable discovery. At least it had kept Leo out of his hair.
The shrill blast of a police whistle silenced the evening’s revelry for only a second before the murmurings of panic began.
Whoever had brought the drugs didn’t seem to matter now.
They’d since dispersed through at least half the audience, who in various stages of inebriation or high, were now sobering up just enough to realise the implications of the black boots and uniforms now weaving through the crowd.
The sound snapped Alex out of his fugue all the same, at least enough to follow when Vicente grabbed has arm and pulled him back into the darkened theatre and backstage.
“Come on, man! We need to go!”
“What? Vis? What’s going on? Why are the police here?”
“Never mind that.”
“Never mind—”
“They’re gone, Alex!” Vicente propped him up against the dark wall, shaking him just hard enough to stir his attention. “Forty minutes, now, I haven’t been able to find them and now I know why. He took her.”
“What? Vis, you’re not making any sense.”
“Joanna!” Vicente barked again. “Your boyfriend? He’s taken Joanna!”