“Waiting” by Mary-Charlotte Domandi
I have a summer job as a darkroom assistant in an arts workshop near Aspen. I want to be a photographer, but I don’t know where I belong, so I try it all—large format camera technique, experiments with old-fashioned media like cyanotype and sepia, aerial photography, low-light photography. I’m surrounded by brilliant, patient teachers and by students who produce startling, beautiful work. I never do.
One teacher uses the word “handsome” to describe the students’ prints. One day after he uses the word handsome for the fourth time, I say aloud, “handsome prints.” Nobody in the class hears me except one beautiful man, who looks up and laughs. We lock eyes and he becomes my boyfriend for the rest of the workshop. His work is exquisite. I write him love limericks.
I ask one of the teachers how I can find my place in this world of photography and she says, “You just have to wait. It will happen in its own time. Just wait.” I wait, and the summer goes by. It doesn’t happen. One the way home, driving down I-25 I see a triple rainbow against a sky so dark it seems to defy physics. I don’t stop to take the photograph because I know that my picture will be nothing more than a memento, not a work of art. I have a sensation in my body of letting go of photography, of visual art. I don’t know what is going to replace it. I am a trapeze artist who’s released one swing and hasn’t yet caught the next one. But unlike the trapeze artist I don’t know whether the next one is even coming. I am 28, empty and frightened, and I just left my future profession back in a Rocky Mountain rainbow. But I also have a full tank of gas and an irrational sense that something good is bound to happen sooner or later.
I wait. The beautiful man invites me to Vancouver, and I go for two weeks. His apartment is full of his photographs, each more gorgeous than the last. He has an eye for catching a moment, for framing, for visual wisps of humor. In his eyes a canyon rock becomes a mother and child, a forest becomes the glow of life itself, an icy tree becomes an acid hellscape. He owns only five books, all of them by Kurt Vonnegut.
The chemistry between us is high level, and his skill set as a lover is beyond anything I’ve ever known. He is an artist of human touch as well as photography, and I know I can’t keep up.
Also, I know that it’s just not meant to be. His obsessions are photography, Kurt Vonnegut, and Oliver Stone’s JFK movie, which he’s seen eleven times. And he lives in Canada and I live in New Mexico and neither of us is going to move, certainly not for one another.
I go home and we write to each other. He sends me letters in flowing blue ink on yellow paper. He has an elegant, narrow handwriting and I keep his letters on the shelf headboard of my super single waterbed and reread them when I want to feel that someone loves me. But one day the letters become lifeless, they feel dry and brittle as old parchment. I know it’s over. I get one more yellow letter from him saying that his old girlfriend has reappeared. I never hear from him again and I never write.
I wait. I live in this odd apartment perched on top of a row of do-it-yourself storage garages behind a little strip mall that features a diaper service, an upholstery shop, a foreign auto mechanic, a computer music business. I’m the property’s caretaker, so my rent is crazy low. There’s a dumpster into which people throw out the old furniture from their storage units and I rescue it for my empty apartment. The upholsterer gives me fabric samples and I sew them into couch covers. I get a job doing data entry at the tofu factory, working for a left-brain accountant lady.
Then one day it happens. It’s a Friday night and I’m sitting alone in my apartment with the windows open, listening to All Things Considered. The news ends and suddenly they’re playing salsa, only I don’t know what it is. I know only that it’s the most glorious music I’ve ever heard. It’s alive, it’s intense, it fills my blood with energy. It’s love at first sight, except it’s sound, and there’s nobody there but the stereo speakers, filling my little apartment and spilling out across the cinderblocks and asphalt.
I call the radio station. The DJ is friendly and tells me in accented English, This is salsa! I ask him for the names of the bands, which I can’t spell, but I write them down. I start recording the show every week and playing the tapes in my car, in my house, over and over. I have no idea what they’re singing about, but I learn some of the words phonetically and sing along.
At some point it enters my brain that this is dance music, and I open the Yellow Pages and call the only studio with a Spanish-sounding name. A man named Juan Manuel answers the phone and invites me for a free 20-minute lesson. An hour later I am on his dance floor. The movement is foreign to me, I have never moved my hips like that. I am hooked and sign up for the eight-week package.
I am no longer waiting. I have arrived, though I have no idea where, really, or what will happen next. I don’t know that I will learn Spanish, that that I will be a DJ on the show I’m obsessively devouring. That I will go to Havana seven times to study Latin dance. That I will be adopted into a Cuban family, that I will marry not one but two South Americans. All I know is the sweep of the rhythms…the pow! punctuation of the horns…the aural reverie layered with instruments of distinct colors and textures, rough and polished…vigorous voices without a trace irony or cynicism…pure joy bursting through frames of consummate musicianship…and permeating it all, a layered and sophisticated eros, bright as the sun itself, lights me from within. This is Love. I have been dropped by parachute onto a distant land where I don’t know any of the natives. But I am home.
Mary-Charlotte Domandi is a radio and podcast producer, writer, and Latin music DJ. Her public radio program, the Radio Cafe, has won numerous awards, and she currently produces Down to Earth, a podcast on regeneration and sustainability. She has studied social and folkloric dance in Cuba, and has interviewed many distinguished Latin musicians.
Her print journalism has appeared in New Mexico Magazine, The Albuquerque Journal, and Aperture magazine, and her writing has been featured in two anthology books, Ask Me About My Divorce: Women Open Up About Moving On and We Came to Santa Fe. She is currently working on a creative non-fiction memoir.
