As instructed, I watch their chests. Through the fog of my envy at watching G with this girl—who I already assume he loves, and who’s a far better dancer than I’ll ever be—I see it. Though it appears Angelina is moving in many different directions, they remain connected as though by an invisible tether, locked into each other’s orbit as though they couldn’t move from it if they wanted to. They start simple with some basic walks and ochos, then add some crosses. Then, they ramp it up dramatically and spin around the tight axis they’ve created, her feet hooking around his legs and vice versa; they move into and out of the other’s space with precision and ease. I’m mesmerized by the depth of their connection.
“Thank you, Angelina,” G says, and she smiles, nods at me, and goes back to the practice room, where she’s working with a student.
“That sets the bar pretty high,” I say. I feel like he’s shown me this to put me in my place.
“Angelina has been dancing her whole life,” he says.
“All sixteen years, huh?”
He smiles. “Nineteen. And she’s originally from Russia. They’re more grown up than most at that age.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Oh, I bet. How long have you two been dancing together?”
“A year,” he says, and this strikes me as rather convenient. I try to muster up some disgust. G must be at least in his midthirties, and he’s way too old for her. But still, all I feel is admiration and envy.
“The point is,” he continues, “I don’t expect you to emulate that exactly, but you can learn to have that connection with a great number of partners.”
“Kinky,” I say, smiling.
G laughs. “It’s not about sex. Well, not exactly. It’s an intimacy between you, your partner, and the music. Without the music, this dance means nothing. This is why tango is so precious to Porteños. Our entire history—the beautiful and the brutal parts—is encoded in the music. It brings us all together.”
“I thought it was the dance of anarchists and immigrants.” Did I say that to show I’m listening or to be contrary? Both.
“It began in the conventillos, was created by the poor, by the children of slaves, like most art forms worth anything. But then the rich boys who liked to go to the brothels on the wrong side of town got a yen for it and took it with them on their European tours. Once it became the rage in Paris, the high-class Porteños wanted their export back, this freshly laundered version of it. But its heart remains the same, and if you don’t hear the heartbeat, Liz”—he closes the space between us in one swift movement so that his breath is in my ear—“you can’t dance it.”
G goes to find a song on his playlist. It has the regular elements: violin, flutes, bandoneóns, but it’s jazzed up with unexpected drums and rhythms overlaying the classical strains. It’s still dramatic, but more playful too. G is rolling his shoulders back and forth as he walks back to me. I pull my frame up, ready to be taken back into his capable arms. He shakes his head at me. “You see, I like this because it’s a ‘new’ style, but in reality it’s a throwback to the origins, when tango was fused with Candombe still, with the echoes of African drums. Now, close your eyes.”
I look at him, confused.
“Close. Your. Eyes.”
I do as I’m told.
“Don’t worry about steps, just move to the music for a few minutes.”
I open my eyes. What am I doing here? I’m in one of the bad dance movies that Penny and Emily used to watch over and over in high school.
“Closed,” he says. “Move. Feel.”
I want to laugh. I feel silly. I tentatively start into a tango step.
“No steps,” G says, grasping my shoulders and holding me in place. “Just stay there and move. You need to give yourself over to the music, get out of your head.”
I feel like I’m naked and being examined by a roomful of strangers.
“Relax,” he says.
I start to sway my shoulders back and forth.
“I don’t think I can do this.” My heart is hammering.
“You can, just let go. Don’t think. Be in your body: your hips, your shoulders, your hands,” he says, his hands brushing first my hips, then my shoulders. “Don’t think about tango, don’t think about dancing at all. Just move, find something to connect to.” I still have my eyes closed, but I can hear that he’s close to me, only inches away.
“Good, good. There we go,” he says.
I give myself over to the tonic of his approval, the warmth of his nearness, the many layers of the music that I can both hear and feel coming up from the floor. But halfway through the song, I lose my nerve and stop. I open my eyes. He smiles at me.
“This is making me really nervous,” I confess.
He nods. “You don’t feel good about your body.” His voice is completely neutral, his statement a diagnosis.
I blush furiously. I don’t want this to be true; it feels tired. I want to defend myself, tell him it wasn’t always this way. My body used to be my job and I respected it. Now it feels like the extra layers of flesh carry everything that’s happened to me.
“No,” I say at last, “not especially.”
“This is my biggest challenge, when I’m teaching people to dance. Before you can connect with a partner, you need to be able to be in your own skin. Watching you right now, I see you let go for a second and it’s beautiful, but then you catch yourself. You’re fighting it.”
I’m flushed and fear I might start crying. As the next song begins, G pulls me in to lead me. “Relax, relax,” he says into my ear. “Open, open.” I’m relieved to be back as the follow, and I feel myself dancing more smoothly. It’s what a good coach does: pinpoints the little fix that will open you to the next level of yourself. But this feels like something else too. It’s addicting to be near someone who sees potential in you and can cultivate it. Even if I end up paying for it.
Penny Knows All about Love
LUKE AND I didn’t sleep together right away. He would be my first, and I knew I would not be his. It was palpable how much we both wanted it, but he was careful not to push. After we’d made it official, I felt relieved that Luke was still Luke. I’d feared that being together would change everything between us, that Luke would somehow no longer see me as his equal. And when I was stupid enough to ask him how many girls had come before me, he was stupid enough to answer honestly: five.
Of course five is not so many—not, frankly, as many as I’d feared. I’d had plenty of firsthand experience watching girls throw themselves at Luke, something that unfortunately continued long into our relationship. But at that age, when Luke was only the second boy I’d so much as kissed, five was an army. I began flipping through my mental index of the girls I’d seen him with: the petite girl with the giant tits who did promo for Red Bull, the tall, elegant Rossignol rep in her late twenties who’d come through for the season the year before. Since I didn’t know which of them Luke had actually slept with, I pictured him with all of them. I envisioned them performing impossible sexual pyrotechnics.
I hated the idea of being awkward and fumbling, of being vulnerable. I wanted to be prepared, but I couldn’t exactly get experience ahead of time. Instead, I did research. I tried watching some porn, but even as a virgin I knew that this couldn’t be what real sex looked like: the hair flipping, the squealing, the vociferous enjoyment of giving a blow job. I decided to step it back and just grab a Cosmo. I sneaked it in with my groceries and shuffled off to one of the new grocery clerks who didn’t know me by name. Not only was I buying the girliest magazine in the world, but I was also buying it because I wanted to read the section teased on the cover as “50 Sexy Moves That Will Make Him Your Slave.”
At home, I squirreled it away to my bedroom, as if it were no less illicit than porn, and flipped straight to the dirty stuff.
“Eat him for dessert. Literally, spread your favorite yummy treats like whipped cream and chocolate sauce all over his manhood and chow down!”
That sounded b
oth messy and not nutritionist-approved. Next.
If you’re not in the mood for the whole enchilada, why not give him a mind-blowing hand job? Start by running your index finger up the seam of his member, then trace circles around the head with the tip of your finger going first clockwise, then counterclockwise. Get your other hand in on the action by gripping and twisting the shaft in the opposite direction your finger is moving. Trust us, this will bring new heat to holding hands!
This one seemed like it would take a week at a specialized clinic to be able to execute. I needed to talk to Penny. Being with Luke gave me some common ground with my sister—I was in boyfriend land, where she’d long had a permanent residence. The credit card incident lingered in my mind, but I wove a safety net of justifications around it. Penny was right; after all, I did live in a bubble. Maybe the debt was just a normal part of being out on your own for the first time. And she’d lied only because she was embarrassed.
Sometimes, I envied my sister her quiet life back in our hometown: her straightforward job, her eternal, uncomplicated relationship with Emily. I relished finally having something in my life that she could relate to: a boyfriend. She’d long made it clear that she had no interest in hearing about my skiing. I knew that from the outside, the life I wanted seemed insane. As talented as I was, as much potential as I had, the chances of turning it into a sustainable career were minuscule. Even if I started racking up World Cup wins this season, as I planned to, there was always someone faster, gutsier, and more talented waiting in the wings. In Austria and Norway, being a ski racer was a real career, but in the United States no one other than diehard ski fans cared about it for more than five minutes every four years during the Olympics. And the threat of injury lurked around every gate on the course. We’d all seen it a dozen times: a skier having the run of their lives and, in an instant, their season—maybe their entire career—was extinguished. It was unreasonable to expect Penny to understand why I wanted this madness. But boyfriends were Penny’s gold-medal event. I took the chance to pick her brain about it when I was home for Thanksgiving.
I took the short flight home Wednesday night. I was nursing a sore hip flexor, and my coach had put me on R & R for the long weekend. I was relieved to get out of the gym for a few days. Penny came into my bedroom that night. Being in there always filled me with nostalgia.
“Are you sure you don’t want to come to Turkey Bowl with us tomorrow?” she asked, referring to the annual game of touch football she and Emily played with their high school friends to celebrate them all being home from college. After the botched back surgery, Penny had become a bit heavier than she used to be, but she wore it well; it made her softer, more feminine. She’d been trying to get back to exercising, she told me, but then had gotten an infection in her ankle joint—a complication of her lupus—and it had sidelined her. She was designated cheerleader for the big game the next day.
I shook my head and smiled, scrunching up my feet to make room for her to sit at the foot of my bed.
“Coach would kill me.”
“You could come cheer with me?”
“I’ll bring my pompoms,” I said with a smile. “When’s Jon getting in?”
She beamed at the mention of her boyfriend. “Tomorrow afternoon. He’ll be here for dinner. I’m so glad I get to spend some time with him before he has to go back to Arizona; this long-distance thing is killing me.”
“I bet. So no Turkey Bowl for him either, huh?”
Penny made a face and shook her head. “He would take it too seriously anyway. He’s so competitive.”
This squared with my experience of him. Jon was shorter than me by several inches and, perhaps because of this, seemed doubly intent on broadcasting his masculinity whenever I saw him. He was the sort of man who went to the gym every day and got too invested in the outcome of sporting events he wasn’t participating in. His shoulders were broad and his chin square, his countenance that of a grouchy bulldog.
“Hey,” I said, “can I ask you something?”
“Of course!” She leaned back on her hand. Penny was pretty in that all-American kind of way, with her green eyes and the smattering of freckles on the bridge of her nose and cheeks. Men had always liked her, and she’d always returned the favor. She would never have been so nervous her first time, which I assumed had gone down with a high school boyfriend, though she hadn’t confided in me about it.
“So Luke . . .”
“Ye-es? How goes it with the new boyfriend?”
“It’s fine. But we haven’t slept together yet.”
Penny shrugged. “Well that’s fine, no reason to rush things.”
“It’s just . . .”
She looked at me expectantly.
“It’s my first time so . . .”
Penny smiled. “I know, honey.”
“How do you know?” I asked indignantly. Was it that obvious?
“Relax,” she said with a little laugh. “I just guessed. You’ve never had a boyfriend before, and I didn’t really think you would have just given it up to some random. It’s a good thing. It should be someone you love.”
“Right.” I was suddenly mortified; my sister and I didn’t talk about sex. I wondered suddenly if Blair and Luke did, or if they had ever appealed to Kristina for her advice on women.
“So do you love Luke? Is he the one?”
“The one what? You mean like the one?”
Penny dealt in romantic absolutes: there were no half measures. She was always deeply in love and planning the rest of her life with whomever she was with, spinning off a fantasy outcome—wedding, babies, a rooted existence on some cul-de-sac somewhere, a kind of future I couldn’t even wrap my head around. It wasn’t that I didn’t ever want these things, but they existed in a far-off universe beyond the glory of gold medals and World Cup globes.
“Whatever,” Penny said. “Don’t have a heart attack. Is he the one you want right now? Do you love him?”
I knew I did. After all, I’d told him so. But saying it out loud to another person was different. I nodded.
“Well, there you go,” she said. “I don’t think you’ll have regrets.”
“But how . . .” I began. Penny’s brow furrowed. “That is, how do I . . . do it?”
She smiled at me sympathetically.
“Luke’s been with other girls.” Five, I thought, as the image of the miniharem came back into my mind. “And I’m afraid that he’s going to expect me to . . . and I won’t know what to do. Like, are there techniques or . . . ?”
With this, Penny lost her composure and giggled.
“Ugh, forget I asked!” I pulled a pillow over my head to hide my furiously blushing face.
“No, no, no,” Penny said. “Come on, I’m sorry.” She pulled the pillow away from me and I narrowed my eyes at her. “It’s sweet. I didn’t mean to tease you. It’s just that I’ve never seen you like this! My little sister is intimidated by something! Finally! Let me revel in the fact that you need my advice for just a second, won’t you?”
“Revel away,” I said.
“Okay look, Katie, it’s not like a super-G. You don’t need to, like, plot your turns or whatever. Just take it slow and do what feels good and try to tell Luke how you’re feeling, let him in. Don’t make that face at me, I know being vulnerable is not your forte. It’s a different kind of brave. You’ll get the hang of it.”
“But what if I’m terrible?”
“First of all, there are only two ways for a girl to be terrible at sex: one is to lie there like a dead fish, the other is to do something truly weird that ends up hurting his dick. So, you know, don’t do either of those things and you’ll be fine. Are you on the pill?”
“I’m not stupid,” I said.
“Just checking. Anyway, the first time with someone new, especially the first first time, is a little awkward. Think about your first time on skis.”
“I don’t remember my first time on skis,” I said, thinking that my dad had told me that e
ven the first time, I was pretty good.
“Okay, bad analogy. But you’ll be fine, I promise. And if Luke loves you—which, duh, he always has and I always knew that, just saying—he’ll be patient.”
So instead of going in protected by preparedness, I did something much harder: I dropped my armor.
It seemed, somehow, that as soon as I’d made the decision to sleep with Luke, he knew. He came into my bedroom as he did every night, and yet everything felt different this time. He kissed me, and I told him I was nervous. He replied that he was too.
“Why are you nervous? You’ve done this before,” I said, trying not to let any bitterness creep into my voice.
“Because this is different.”
“How?”
“My first time wasn’t with someone I loved. It wasn’t you. I wish . . .” He trailed off and his voice faltered. He was nervous. My fearless friend. He’d had to lay down his armor as well.
“What do you wish?” I whispered.
“I wish I’d waited. For you,” he said.
Somehow, hearing this allowed me to let go of whatever else was holding me back. Luke ran his lips down my torso, but this time when he reached the edge of my underwear—our fail-safe—he slowly removed them. He kept kissing and went down between my legs. I think he registered my surprise because he looked up at me.
“I’m just going to . . .” He smiled and spread my legs apart. I felt his tongue and experienced a ratcheting of nerves, a thundering of blood. I wasn’t entirely naive. I’d had an orgasm before, but only on my own, furtively alone in bed thinking of someone—usually Luke—or in my dreams when I’d be taken by some faceless man. This was something new and breathtakingly intimate. This was my best friend, his tongue, his lips, his hands. What came next was painful in a way that was not unpleasant. Sex would get better, cease to be painful, become a path to discovery of new things the two of us could do with the finely honed machines of our bodies. But even that first time, it was like a miracle to be that close to him.
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