The Gardenia and the Cowboy Hat

Tonight she wears a Gardenia, floating precariously above her left ear and not really restraining too many of her chestnut strands. Her dress is black, short and trimmed in red sequins that highlight her olive complexion. It is too short for a woman of her age, according to Glamour. Yoga and the South Beach Diet have served her well. Her three-inch heels accentuate her calves, making her Cha-cha-chá in “Copacabana” a little bolder and her kick-step in “I Love New York” noticeably higher. Lounge Lizard, this term disgusts her. She likes to think of herself as a moonlighting opera singer; a classicist who misread directions and ended up playing in the wrong house – The Elks Club instead of Teatro Alla Scala.

It is a good and stable gig every Tuesday evening that pays $25 and includes the All-You Can-Eat Spaghetti Dinner, bottomless sodas and seven cankerous, wrinkly fans who get aroused by tapping her bottom with their canes. She does not sing for the money. Her husband owns the biggest hardware chain in New Mexico and is looking to expand nationally. She makes her own money, at least a little, as a social worker in the greater Albuquerque area where she spends more time moving line items around on complicated state budgets than moving children out of unsafe homes. She is as ineffective with children in need as she is with her own adult son and daughter, who simply do not need her.

Bureaucracy and ineffectuality fade when Minerva (known by her friends and family as Mina) takes the stage for 45 minutes every week. On this night, she starts with "Blue Moon," sitting in a rickety oak chair under a peculiar royal blue spotlight. Her rendition begins with Ella Fitzgerald- like improvisation, but quickly morphs into a more buttoned-up version tinged with nervousness and the vocal range of a professionally trained opera singer. Cacophony hangs in the rafters waiting to make an appearance, but before dissonance fully arrives on stage, she sees the glow of the red exit sign reflecting off of his black cowboy hat. Clarity resumes and she smoothly transitions into “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Confidence, charm, eloquence and beauty. She has it all when he is there. He has been coming every week for seven months, always arriving after she is on stage and always leaving before she exits the stage. Each time he walks out, it is like he leaves the note on her windshield all over again: “The ring is yours. Take comfort in your music. Love always, Max.”

The ring, the note, a box filled of gold-embossed invitations (still in a storage unit twenty-two years later), a few of his abstract paintings and a handful of his poorly executed poems is all she has to show for their three years together at an prestigious art school in the Northeast. Boundless, care-free youthful love and an impulsive proposal. Her passion for her music ignited his passion for the opera singer – her drive, her commitment to her craft made Minerva all the more beautiful. She was a serious artist, and he was nothing more than a dilettante with unnaturally white teeth and good posture. A bit of guitar playing, poetry loaded with murky, moderately macabre images and too many 50-cent words, multi-media sculptures, black and white photographs, excessive charcoal drawings of nude women, and some paint thrown on canvas that fell in strangely refreshing ways that appealed to old women in upscale garden and bridge clubs. Like all his artistic phases, he eventually tired of opera and gained interest in contemporary dance. He followed the dancer to the Ukraine before graduation and later shared a loft with an environmental poet in Paris then bedded a novelist in Milan. Eventually, in Barcelona, he married a professor of Spanish who is fourteen years his junior; they have three-year-old twin boys and a sheep dog named Hank. Eleven months ago, they moved to Santa Fe to open an art gallery.

No degree. No real legal work history. No credibility. No capital and not a lot drive. Only three artists trust Max to sell their work, and one is his brother. Even his brother gives him lesser pieces, keeping his high-dollar works for the real art dealers. Max fills the remainder of the gallery with a hodgepodge of his work. He sells enough pieces to afford a condo in Santa Fe’s art district and to send the boys to an elite preschool. On the weekends, his wife works in the gallery to push Southwestern pieces on their Spanish-speaking customers. Every time she hits upon a trilled "r," Max turns slightly pink and his mouth quivers with a sense of familiarity. He frequently caresses her shoulder and puts his hand around her waist. His life is good.

Tonight, Minerva does not wait for the band members to bow. She does not talk to her fans. She leaves the stage amidst applause and runs into the parking lot.

“Stop,” she yells.

They look at each other, knowing they should embrace. Should it be a tight squeeze like lovers at an airport who are finally reunited after weeks of separation? Or, should it be a contained, respectful hug like at funerals, or the sweet but generic grasp felt at weddings and baptisms? They stop short of touching. She motions her head towards the door. He follows her to the bar.

She struggles to start small talk with the man who left her twenty-two years ago with a note and no songs to sing and now has suddenly re-appeared in her life with no explanation.

“Why?” she asks.

“I just like the way you sing.”

Her eye twitches and she clenches her fist.

He grabs her hand and places his fingers in between hers.

“Do you understand?”

“Yes, I guess, I do.”

They remain at the bar, holding hands but not looking at each other. They each sneak a few peeks, but mostly stare at the clock that indefinitely reads 9:15. There was no need for words. The silence was only broken by the hostess, “Mina, it is time for you and your friend to leave.”

He kissed her check and walk out the door. She watched until she could no longer see the trim of his hat.