Cat In A Topaz Tango

Temple spent a full minute stifling giggles imagining this odd couple in each other’s dress. That would be a more believable scenario.

The rest of the dance was plain painful, but the audience gave Salter a few, fevered huzzahs.

“Undercooked,” Danny decreed. Keith Salter, he declared, “was the Taco Bell version of a matador, heavy on the stuffed enchiladas and light on hot sauce. Not your dance, either of you. The attitudes are stiff but the moves must be as supple as a fencing foil. You both got ‘stiff.’ Alas, supple eluded you. Six.”

“Passive,” Leander echoed. “A pair of dancing bears lumbering about a bullring, a pair of dolorous bullfrogs courting on a lily pad, two dinosaurs sinking with their great weight into a tar pit, that would best describe your pathetic attempt at a pasodoble. Five.”

Temple cringed for the winded and unhappy couple in the camera’s eyes, got up in froufrou like figures on a Weight Watchers midway point cake.

“Well,” said Savannah importantly. “I . . . just . . . lurved . . . it.”

The silence made its own impact but the panting couple looked toward her hopefully.

“Wonderbar!” Savannah said in German, puzzlingly. “You were cooking, Chef Salter, and, Motha Jones, you were the peppa to his salt. Oh, yes, you were! You are on my choo-choo train from Savannah to Havana heaven, honeys. Hot Cuban crimes of passion.

Whoo-whoo!

“You are perfectly matched. So cuddly and cute! I like fluffy things with coot, chubby, widdle cheeks, top and bottom.” She winked, broadly and commended Motha Jonz’s commanding pacing and strong turns.

Six, five, nine!

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Crawford’s booming bass trumpeted, “our next performers are that gay blade”—Temple cringed. Surely even Crawford . . . —“of the Olympic fencing team, José Juarez, and the queen mother of the P.M. suds, Miss Olivia Phillips.”

Temple cringed again. Gay blade? Sure, point out Olivia was pushing sixty. Clod!

After Crawford’s overhyped intro, the audience sat back.

They were waiting.

The lights dimmed, the music paused, and the spotlights showed two silhouettes at each side of the wings. A cigarette spark flared at each etched facial profile, then went out. The pair stalked toward each other.

Another thrill of guitar music, two lean bodies profiled against the stage far pillar. A high Spanish comb and mantilla making the woman looked horned. A flat-brimmed hat, cape, and sword etched the man’s silhouette against a drawn red velvet curtain.

José and Olivia were perfectly matched figures, like mobile wrought-iron images: tall, thin, dark, intense.

Even everybody in the greenroom caught their breaths.

This was a contender couple.

A whip uncoiled from the man’s side to snap once. The woman fled down the four steps in a trail of trembling lace ruffles. The whip snapped and followed.

When they reached the dance floor, she turned to confront him, haughty profile defiant, hands upraised to twine around each other like sinuous serpents. The whip cracked one last time and was flung aside as the dancers circled each other like courting scorpions.

The man flourished a sword, then wrapped his scarlet-lined cape around it and wafted it to and fro, frowning at the circling woman, who seemed to spit disdain and seduction at him in equal measure.

Her skirts swirled to match the cape as he advanced threateningly. With a grand gesture, he flung sword and cape to the floor, and seized her to flourish instead. He swung her from side to side like a ship’s sail in a storm, took her from standing to skating across the floor, a fallen heap of limp skirts and suddenly—she was an uprising figure of spine and spitfire, challenging him again.

José and Olivia made the perfect pasodoble couple, as lean and wired as whips, gliding in a lethal mating dance that picked up pace and tempo until they were coming together like lightning even as the moves of the dance had them spinning apart; she was thrown down and sliding across the floor like a fan of limp lace, only to rise when he drew her up for an anguished embrace.

Their pasodoble was a dramatic battle of the sexes, their fingers flaring as they caressed each other’s faces, looking as if they’d like to scratch each other’s eyes out after a passionate kiss.

The live audience was already standing and hooting and applauding before they took the final pose, him bent over her like a conqueror, but she rising up from her prone position, a serpent ready to strike.

“That was awesome,” Mariah shouted, hardly able to be heard over the enthusiastic hooting of Los Hermanos boys and screams of junior dancers. Even Rafi and Molina applauded.

Zoe Chloe Ozone kept strangely silent among the whistling, hooting, and screaming teens.

What had she got Matt into? They didn’t teach that in seminary, for sure.