“Liz,” he says, a departure from my nickname, but still not, of course, my name, “that’s beautiful.”
“I’ve never felt anything quite like that.” I’m breathless now, it’s been so long since I spoke to anyone like this. I say the words before I can get self-conscious about how it all sounds. “Not with another person, anyway. Only on the mountain.”
I let it hang there for a moment, as though it might explain itself, deciding he might just take it as some sort of metaphor. His hand moves from my knee, his fingers trace the inside of my thigh.
“What mountain?” he finally asks.
“Before I came here. In my old life, that is, I was really into skiing,” I say, telling him, not telling him.
“Yeah? I’ve never been skiing. I bet you were great at it.”
“Pretty much.” I nod, and he laughs.
Before I came here, I didn’t exist outside of skiing, and not talking about it is more difficult than I’d imagined. And if I could in this moment, I’d fold myself into G. He feels safe. He’s stroking my thigh, but it feels more affectionate than sexual, or it feels both. It feels intimate. He’s my coach, and coaches are our confessors, the holders of safe spaces and secrets.
“Tiger, that explains a lot about you,” he says. “I should have known I was in the presence of greatness.” I feel something that’s been deadened in my chest come back to life a little. I do want him to know I’m great, or at least that I was. “Why’d you quit?”
“I got injured.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. So when you say dancing reminds you of the mountain, I’m curious, what does that mean?”
I shrug. The panacea of dancing with him is wearing off and I am suddenly aware that I have made myself vulnerable by telling him so much already. My sweat has turned cold on my skin. I refill my whiskey glass without asking and take a long sip. He smiles.
“Back in the vault, huh?”
“What?”
“Since I’ve met you, you’ve been on the defensive, and tonight, for the first time, you were different.” He takes his hand away from my leg, and I wish he wouldn’t.
“I’m not defensive,” I say, sounding defensive. “I’m just private. What’s wrong with that? I know putting the intimate details of your life on Facebook or whatever is all the rage right now, so pardon me.”
“Is that what you think I do?” He’s amused.
“Well, no, not you, just . . . people,” I say. What I want to say is women, women are expected to be vulnerable. When men are tough, we call them masculine, and when they’re vulnerable we practically throw them a fucking parade. But women are just expected to go around with our hearts hanging out like it’s the natural way of things.
“Can I tell you the real meaning of your nickname?”
I feel the blood draining from my face. I shrug, as if to say, you can’t hurt me, even though it’s clear to both of us that he can.
“It was this image that came to mind the first time I danced with you. I thought: this big, strong, beautiful girl will tear you to shreds if you try to get too close to her.”
I nod slowly. Am I insulted by this or kind of impressed with myself? I can’t decide. A tiger sounds like someone who could protect herself.
“And what was I tonight, a kitten?”
“No, Liz,” he says, “tonight you were a woman.”
I want to blow it off, but how can I? Tonight was the first time I have felt human in so long.
“And what about you?” I say, letting myself smile. “What animal are you?”
He laughs. “I don’t know, an aging stallion?”
“You still strut like a prize stud.”
“The important thing is that I still have my balls, Liz. I haven’t let the world make a gelding of me.”
“Have a thing for horses then?” I say.
He shrugs. “I grew up around them,” he says. “My father owned an estancia in Chascomús.”
I wouldn’t have pegged him as having grown up a rich kid. But the estancias, as least as I understand them, are fancy, like the vast ranches in Montana or Wyoming not far from where I grew up. This is definitely true of the ones that are as close to Buenos Aires as Chascomús.
“You know I’ve heard some pretty colorful stories about you,” I say.
“I’m sure. Do tell.”
“Let’s see: That you’re secretly a disgraced Spanish matador. That you’re the illegitimate son of Juan Perón. That your father was a Nazi general.” I realize as the words come out of my mouth that the last one, if it’s true, would be devastating and I’m sorry I said it. “But I’m guessing none of those are true.” I nearly throw in the story about the yacht, but I don’t want to betray Gemma.
He laughs and shrugs.
“You’re just the son of some perfectly nice rancheros,” I say.
“I am the son,” he says, downing the rest of his glass, “of ghosts. It’s late.” He gets to his feet. “Escucha, there’s a milonga we all go to the first Sunday of each month, it’s off the Caminito on Pinzón. It’s a little café—Calle Roja—and the owner likes to sing tango standards when he closes up in the evening. We get there around one a.m. The team will be there, of course, but if you tell any of the other students, I’ll have to kill you,” he says, smiling.
I put my hands up. “Not a word. It’s been fun getting to know everyone on the team.”
“They’re my family,” he says.
“Do you ever think of growing the team or . . .” I say, trying to sound casual.
He smiles. “Maybe. Why? Are you interested?”
I shrug, knowing how obvious I am. He nods, considering it.
“You could be good,” he says. “We could get your dancing up to speed. You’d need to lose some weight though.”
He says it so casually. Mortifyingly, I get tears in my eyes almost immediately. I nod, trying and failing to take this as I would have when I was an athlete. But I’m not an athlete anymore, I’m not anything anymore.
“Hey,” he says, reaching for my hand. “Hey, don’t take it personally. Listen, you’re gorgeous. There’s just a difference between what I think is sexy and what looks good onstage.”
The bitter with the sweet. My head is spinning.
“Yeah, of course. Listen, I’ve got to get going. I’ll see you Sunday, okay?”
Penny Is Going to Be Fine
IT WASN’T surprising that Penny started trying to get pregnant so fast—she’d always wanted to be a mom—but when it became her single-minded obsession immediately after the wedding, the past began to feel like prelude. The ghosts of the two little girls, shrouded in mystery, wouldn’t leave me. I couldn’t find a way to tell these fears to Luke or anyone else. I couldn’t say it aloud, but I was scared to death of her getting pregnant again.
“I just don’t think it’s healthy to be so focused on it,” was all I could manage to express to Luke and Blair.
“Well, she’s a newlywed,” Blair said, smiling. “And her husband is great, right? You like him?”
“Sure. I mean yeah, she seems more stable with him.” We were still all clinging to the idea that Jon had been the source of Penny’s troubles and that Stewart represented the solution. “I just don’t see what the hurry is. She’s only twenty-seven!”
“She wants that baby like you want a gold medal,” Luke said, not knowing quite how right he was. Penny and I shared a capacity for obsessiveness. She would try and try again until she got a child. We would both keep pushing our bodies until they gave us what we wanted.
“I have to have surgery,” Penny told me on the phone one night, choking back tears. After months of trying, she’d been to a fertility specialist. “They have to remove scar tissue, from last time.”
How can I explain the mental gymnastics I did then? Scar tissue, surgery, more proof that her lies about the babies had been in the details, not about their actual existence. They’d been there at some point, they’d left her with wounds. I held on to the delu
sion that Penny’s lies were discrete, rather than a vein of poison that ran through her. Because the most mysterious of all was why she would lie about any of it.
After Penny’s surgery, she immediately started fertility treatments, a monstrous-sounding process that she documented in prolific social media posts about injecting hormones into her belly, the hormonal and mood swings that mimicked pregnancy without any of the payoff, and, all the while, negative pregnancy test after negative pregnancy test. It was all made worse by her lupus, which was causing horrible bouts of insomnia and fatigue, swelling in her joints, and inexplicable nausea.
I worried about where she was getting the money to cover the fertility treatments. I offered to help out. After my bronze in Salt Lake and the hullabaloo around Luke and me, Red Bull had signed on as a sponsor and I had more cash than I’d ever had. She told me I didn’t need to, but I wired the money.
After my initial unease, I’d become desperate for Penny to have a baby as well. A healthy baby would wipe the slate clean. The marriage had felt like a new beginning, but we were never going to be able to forget what happened until Penny had a living, breathing, healthy child. And Penny’s need for a child seemed depthless. Nothing else could be enough.
When I was home visiting one week, I decided to surprise Penny at her office at the Kootenai Health Clinic to take her out to lunch. I hadn’t seen her in months. I’d texted her that morning, so I knew she’d be at work. We hadn’t planned to see one another until that evening.
“Hey, Beth,” I said to the receptionist I’d known for years, one who’d danced at Penny’s wedding.
“Hey, Katie!” She got up and gave me a hug. “It’s so great to see you. What are you doing here?”
“I’m in town for a few days, I thought I’d come by and take Penny to lunch. Is she in with patients now?”
Beth looked confused.
“Penny’s . . . not in.”
“She isn’t? I texted her earlier and she said she was on her way here.”
“You’d better talk to Penny,” Beth said, growing more uncomfortable by the moment.
“Beth . . .” I began, but the phone rang, and Beth put her finger up, her face apologetic. I gave her a meek wave and walked out, bewildered.
My heart was racing. Was this beginning all over again? Once you know someone is capable of lying, you’re never on solid ground again.
That night, Penny and Stewart came to my parents’ house for dinner. I meant to pull her aside and ask her about the office, but she preempted me. She was pregnant!
It felt like a buzzkill saying anything, but at last I mentioned it gingerly.
“Penny, I stopped by Kootenai this afternoon to take you to lunch.”
“Oh,” she said serenely, her face already beatific in pregnancy, “I went home early, I was having horrible joint pain. With the baby and my lupus, I have to be extra careful.”
I nodded. Later, much later, I’d remember the look on Beth’s face. Oh how powerful it is: the desire not to see the truth.
Liz Is Not Your Little Project
I TELL MYSELF I just need new clothes as I duck into a San Telmo boutique that I’ve peered into the windows of a dozen times. But, really, I’m dressing up for G. I’m hopeless at shopping for clothes and spend an hour parsing through the racks of the small shop before choosing a handful of things to try on. I buy a floaty, feminine skirt with a pattern of red flowers, something Katie never would have worn.
Embarrassingly, I’m imagining a movie sequence in which the heroine removes her eyeglasses, shakes down her hair from its topknot, and is revealed to have been beautiful all along. I can’t go five minutes without replaying his comments from the other night: You would need to lose some weight. And instead of being mad, I just want to please him. I’m disgusted with myself.
Cali picks me up in a cab to take me with her to Calle Roja.
“Hey, you look great,” she says. “I’m excited for you to come to the milonga. It’s the only thing I look forward to more than the social.”
Since the dinner party at Edward’s, I’ve been spending a lot more time with Cali—filling the space between dancing and tours. Seeing how relieved she clearly feels having opened up, I wonder if I shouldn’t as well. But then, Cali’s story is nothing like mine. Cali and I mostly talk about dance and Buenos Aires and gossip about Gianluca. She tells me how being here has saved her, how dancing has given her something she never thought she’d have again: a way to not just listen to music, but also to be right inside of it, to let it come through her. And the team itself—along with the studio and Gianluca—has given her community, a sense of being part of something bigger than herself. It’s let her come back to life, to re-become herself.
We grow silent as we turn off into the entrance of La Boca. Caminito is a tourist trap, and during the day it’s packed with people taking in the iconic multicolored houses, the tango dancers on every block, and the cheerful, cheeseball cafés and taverns. The neighborhood’s Italian roots run deep and it even briefly seceded from Argentina and raised the Genoese flag in the late nineteenth century. But beyond the tiny area that’s been sanitized for tourists, La Boca is a rough neighborhood: packed with shanties made from colorful corrugated iron and parts of old ships, the aroma of the neglected port assaulting anyone who gets too close.
“I’ve never been here at night,” I say.
“We’ll make sure the cab stays put until the door opens.”
“Now I feel much better.”
“Relax, it’s so much fun. You just have to be smart in this neighborhood. Tourists don’t come here at night, why do you think G loves it so much?”
“Ocho-siete-seis Pinzón, ay está.”
The driver is grandfatherly and seems reluctant to leave us. I assure him we’re meeting friends, but secretly I’m relieved that he’s obviously going to stand by while we get let in.
We knock twice and, after a moment of waiting, a beautiful dark-haired woman in her forties answers the door, cocking an eyebrow at us. I can hear the music from the street: the low growl of a burned-out voice carrying a melody in a way that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
“Sí?”
Cali tells her we’re with Gianluca. The woman widens the door, making no other gesture of welcome. I turn and wave to our cabdriver, who shakes his head and drives away.
Calle Roja at any other time would look like an ordinary, slightly shabby Argentine café. The floorboards are smooth with wear, and the photographs on the wall are aged and yellow with cigar smoke. But at this moment, with the tables piled high and haphazard in the corner and the chairs pushed to the edges to create a dance floor, it’s like something from an old film. The lighting is low, with giant candelabras blazing from the corners. The dancers are expert: there are some oldies who look like they’ve been at it for a century mixed in with young, impossibly sleek-looking couples who move with the precision and barely constrained drama of professionals. I spot several team members locked in with one another.
“There’s G,” Cali says, and I look to where he’s standing in the corner, talking to a rotund older man. The sleeves of his shirt are rolled to his elbows, he has a glass of Fernet in his hand, a day’s worth of scruff on his chin, and a smile on his face. My stomach lurches with a mix of desire and humiliation. Cali pulls me along.
“Ah good, you brought Liz,” he says. He kisses Cali’s cheek and then puts his arm around my neck in a proprietary way. I stiffen at his touch, but it makes him pull me closer.
“Oh,” says the old-timer, “qué bonitas. Young ladies, I must insist that you dance with me this evening.”
“You don’t want to say no,” G says exuberantly. “Horatio was practically there at the invention of tango.”
“It’s my bar, so I get to dance with the most beautiful women first. Droit du seigneur,” says Horatio. “Also, I have to show cocky young bailadors like Gianluca how it’s done, it’s a service.”
“Well that’s the firs
t time anyone has called me young in a while, Viejo, but I’ll take it. You know”—Gianluca leans in, and I can smell the anise of the Fernet, feel the heat of his breath— “Horatio started this milonga when the junta was in power and tango was forbidden. He has an outlaw soul.”
The song ends and the next one begins. Horatio extends a hand to Cali, which she delightedly accepts.
“We’ll dance in a bit, Tiger,” he says, leaning back against the bar top on his elbows. “What’s your poison?”
“What’s on offer?”
He glances over his shoulder. “Looks like Malbec and Fernet.”
“Malbec.”
He nods, pours me a paper cup, and hands it to me; as he does he studies me. I’m avoiding eye contact.
“You’re not mad at me, are you?”
“Of course not,” I say too quickly.
“Oh,” he says, putting down his glass and looping his arms around my shoulders. “You are. I’ve hurt your feelings. Cariño! I forget how sensitive Americans are.”
I feel at once unwieldy and yet at the same time so flimsy. I don’t have anything to hang my self-worth on anymore. I’m a ghost of myself.
“I think you’re beautiful,” he says, but now I think I hear pity in his voice, and it makes me squirm. I take his arms off my neck.
“I’m fine. Anyway, tell me about Horatio.”
“His father was a dock worker, like a lot of the people around here. But Horatio always had an artistic soul. He loves to sing; he’ll do a set for us later. When the neighborhood became a tourist attraction during the day, he started his café, and he hired some of the best dancers around to lure people away from the Caminito. The man has vision, I’ll tell you.” G pivots to face me and leans in closer. I take what I hope is an inconspicuous deep breath to take in the smell of him. “During the day, he covers his little patch of sidewalk with a specially made temporary dance floor, much nicer than most of the ones on the main street. And so many great dancers love him: they’ll come perform. So,” he says, leaning in a fraction closer, “the wide-eyed tourists will be wandering down the Caminito, with all of these hucksters in their faces saying ‘Sir! Madame! Come, come, best lunch special on the Caminito, best tango in Buenos Aires!’ And these cheesy dancers doing bullfighter impressions, and then, they glance down an alley and what do they see but Horatio’s little oasis? The canny son of a bitch. Of course, then it got listed as ‘the best kept secret’ on the Caminito in a half-dozen guidebooks, so now there’s usually a long wait during the day. But his milongas are the soul of the place.”
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