Meanwhile, I flirted with the many facets of Ms. Parker’s personality, as inscribed across her characters. I fake-swilled stage martinis. I hung up who I was with men offstage—timid, frightened, and forlorn—and tried on “kittenish” instead. Racy. Pouty. Scathing. Broad. I left my cast and crew each evening and went straight to tango, though my onstage boldness seemed to vaporize once I passed the borders of the building. I bundled in my grey wool coat and shivered my way downtown to dance.
I didn’t know that it would be my last production. I was sure windows were opening. More adaptations. Press clippings. A future company. My director, Max, saw through this. She’d known me since the height of college stardom, and could see the balance shift.
“You don’t want this anymore,” she said, on a night when we had brawled. She was staying with me, and she’d made me soup, roasted squash and ginger, which I’d declined to eat. I was on my way to a milonga, when she thought we should be planning set designs or staging. I fought her, even as I stuffed my shoes into my purse, even as I took half a spoonful from the pot and swooned and wished for just a moment to stay home with her and eat and talk and have that be enough. I bellowed at her; she had no right to tell me what I wanted, what I worked for, what I felt. I shouted at her, sobbed, then went to tango.
“It’s okay,” she said, much later. “It’s okay to walk away.”
Max was a good enough director, thankfully, to harness my deep Enzo angst, and play it against the new nubility I had acquired in tango, wringing from me the performance that she needed. She let me kid myself that theatre was my priority, even as we met for dinner meetings three blocks from tango studios, even as I stumbled through rehearsals underslept—though never truly unprepared. I designed the program on my work computer, writing liner notes and balancing the budget spreadsheet between sales meetings. I schlepped to midtown costume shops and thrift stores on my lunch hour. I did not stop dancing. I went on Wednesday nights, and Thursday nights to La Na—late, after rehearsal—and crept home after two. Sometimes I crept back to Jersey City, shivering but barely speaking beside Enzo as we crossed the desolate streets between his place and the PATH station in ghostly Journal Square.
“Keep your wits,” Max warned. “You need more you and less men.”
I went to RoKo Sunday nights for respite; it was the only place Enzo never went. It took me months to realize he never went because he wasn’t good enough. Perhaps he was afraid of looking foolish next to all that talent, too self-concerned to realize he wasn’t being judged. The RoKo lights were up too bright for Enzo, with all those young people glowing at 120 watts. Or maybe it was too nuevo, and he preferred to linger in the darkened corners of tradition. Either way, it was the only place my dance had not been stained with him.
We spoke only in the prose we passed between us, other people’s words. He read Melville into my answering machine, I wrote to him in Plath. I pored through the dog-eared pages of the books he lent me, thinking I might find him there. I never once invited him to my place. He never asked. I did his dishes, folded his discarded pants, tucked his sheets back underneath his mattress. This was what I knew. How I had learned to show my love. We drank tea and herbal digestifs. We avoided definitions, conversations. Whatever this is, we said, and I would glance away to hide my disappointment.
I knew that if I asked for anything, he would run. I asked for nothing. I had Ms. Parker’s mandates in my head: They don’t like you to tell them you’re unhappy because of them. If you do, they think you’re possessive and exacting. And then they hate you. To avoid the accusation that our relationship was too much work, I was determined to be no work. Here I was again, with a man I cared for, mutely, and a mutually unmet list of needs.
I knew things were bad, that he was bad for me. That this was no relationship at all. But I wanted him, and had no self-esteem; I thought everything that had gone wrong had been my fault. And the more I thought that, the more I thought we could be salvaged, and give each other what we’d been withholding, consciously or otherwise. My buried feline abandon. His accountability. I wanted him, but I was still afraid that if I reached for him, he’d cringe. That he would pull away and I’d be left to stumble in the emptiness between us. It always felt like an audition. I watched his gaze narrow—weighing me—and shrank.
Then I performed for him. Singing half-veiled love songs to him in the cabaret, acting out the relevant Parker parables from the black box firetrap we’d rented on West Seventy-seventh Street. Both times, he showed up late; I begged stage managers to hold the house. He watched and said it was the first time he could understand me. I whispered, he said, in a mumbling geisha voice with him, but was a booming, wailing, fearless bawd onstage. After a Friday night performance, my hair still abounce with curls, he fêted me with cava and moules frites. I beamed across the bistro table in my greasepaint, thinking that he finally understood. Thinking I had won.
Mum flew up for the show as well. “Against my better judgment,” she snorted, braving the February cold despite her vow never to set foot in another Northeast winter. She bought herself a down parka with a fur-lined hood at T.J.Maxx, which she would never wear again. She took me to the Algonquin afterward, for twenty-dollar cocktails, which we drank on leather plush chairs, twenty feet from our beloved Round Table. We took tourist pictures underneath the painted homage to the Vicious Circle, with Ms. Parker sneering at us from beneath her wide-brimmed hat.
She told me it was the first time she had seen me that way—meaning sexy. Luscious and assured. That I had carried myself, spoken, and moved with a certain upright womanly maturity. “I know it’s acting and everything, Meg, but you were a grown woman up there.” Whatever Enzo was doing to me, she thought, had loosened something, dislodged some long-lost piece.
It was over before it ever started. In adjective form, kanienge means “worn-out” or “tired.” Done. Melted, but by something—time, music, or something worse. Enzo had melted me. And I had given him too much room. Room to let him love me if he ever wanted to, if I were only sweet enough. Despite the progress I had made in character, beyond the fourth wall I made very little noise. I took up very little space. I ate and ordered daintily. I waited for my cues. “Eat!” “Talk!” he’d say, as frustrated as I was with my diffidence. But I just stared at him, unblinking.
He needed space. I’m freaking out, he wrote. I’ll call you in ten days. When he did, I didn’t answer. We should talk, his message said. Sure that he was ending it, I went meekly to the slaughter. I stood flipping pages in a SoHo bookstore waiting for him. He marched me to a sidewalk bar, damp from a day of rain. We ordered tea and tiny glasses of Cynar. He ordered dinner, and we didn’t speak until he took two bites.
“I don’t do things halfway,” he said. “And what we’ve been doing . . .” He trailed off.
“Is basically book club,” I offered. “With semiweekly sex.”
He laughed, startled by my candor. I laughed too, and stared into my iron teapot, touching my fingers to the scalding belly of it. It was too hot to hold, and yet the warmth was mooring. Relationships were hard for him. He hadn’t been with anyone in eleven years, he said. “I’m still not sure I can.” But he wanted to make an honest go of it with me. My patience had redeemed us both. “I want to try and embrace this,” he said. “For real.”
“That’s . . . not what I expected you to say,” I stammered.
“Me neither.” He smirked, and just then, it was spring. I laughed again, and kissed his bitter liqueur lips. I did not go home with him that night. He put me in a cab at Houston Street, and I flew across the Queensboro Bridge, back to my turret, giddy with my luck. I imagined cooking for him. Lighting candles around my bookshelves, setting a big red bottle out to breathe. Bob Dylan B-sides on the stereo. The windows open to the dewy arrabal outside.
Three days later, he needed space again.
If only he had never called. If only I’d been gutsy—as he had seen me be onstage—or managed to share with him what he’d unlocke
d inside me. Instead, I was heartsick all the time, unable to ask anything of him, touch him, or reciprocate. Unable to throw my arms around him even when he presented me with an offering of first editions, treasures from a rare book store. And trying, always, to convince him just how undifficult I was by letting him dictate the terms.
Here, too, I was following; I wasn’t dancing back.
He was cruel at the end. The last day of our affair was May Day, a Saturday freakishly warm, spent at the beach. It was a marathon of an attempt: picnic, swimming, racing horses, beer. We did what he thought couples ought to do. On the Long Island Railroad on the way back home, we read Mockingbird Wish Me Luck. A Bukowski new to both of us. We took turns thumbing the pages, murmuring into each other’s ears, pretending the words did not apply to us. By the time we ordered midnight omelets in a diner on Fourteenth Street, all was lost. I was the mockingbird alive inside his tomcat mouth, wings fanned and feathers parted like a woman’s legs. He took me back to Jersey one last time. I hung my grey bikini in his shower to dry.
He made love very tenderly that night, barely mussing the sheets beneath us. He did all the things a man in love was supposed to do; he touched my face, looked deep into my eyes, and met his lips to mine with so much care that, for the first time ever, I made noise. A little whimper of a moan.
Monday he called—the cat calling the bird, to bargain it to another place.
“I tried,” he said. “God knows I tried.”
No, I said. I could initiate. I could speak louder. Be louder.
“I’ve been pretty shitty to you,” he said. “And you’ve just let me.”
I argued. And the bird was no longer mocking, / it was asking, it was praying. There were things I’d never thought to need, and things I never knew were mine to give. Things I felt I hadn’t said. Did he not feel it there? Roiling and subterranean and possible? Did he not feel it too? He did, he said. Of course he did. Our tremendous connection, as he called it. “That’s what makes this so hard.”
Later, he would accuse me of not meeting him in the middle, never realizing I was only waiting for the middle to stop shifting underfoot. Still, there were moments worth remembering: the night we saw John Hammond dwarf a thirty-five-foot stage, warm cans of Guinness smuggled in our coats. The night we shared charred octopus at a table strewn with rose petals—our accidental Valentine. The night we kissed under an awning in the rain. “My god,” he’d breathed, “that mouth.” But then he’d put me in a cab and hadn’t called again for days.
We both knew it wasn’t working, that it would not work. Though I did beg.
“Sometimes you just have to say no,” he said, after one interminable pause. “I’m saying no.”
Chapter Fifteen
it was harder than I thought. This hurts like hell, I wrote to Mum, from bed, through tears, at seven the next morning. She sent back my horoscope for that day: Life can’t bring you the sublime gift it has for you until you interrupt your pursuit of a mediocre gift. Was Enzo a mediocre gift? I knew that I would miss him, fiercely—miss swimming with him through all those pretty words, miss sitting with him in the dim and dank while gruff men sang sad songs. I wanted to be somebody’s great love; maybe I had wanted to be his. This ending felt like goat song, tragedy. I went to work that morning with Eliza Bennet in my head: I was humbled, I was grieved. I repented, though I hardly knew of what.
We had a few awful encounters after that. Choked conversations on street corners at three in the morning, post-milonga, sanitation trucks beeping, blowing dust up in our faces. All the things we’d never said we shouted at each other, finally. I was, once more, for a moment, the woman he’d so recently unleashed onstage. Then I gave up and played dead in his teeth.
We met a month later to make peace. We saw a Goddard film. He felt clammy next to me, with a stale brownie on a paper napkin, spilling his tea onto his hand. Only then I noticed he was balding slightly, back to front. Maybe he was kanienge too. The film ended and I gave him his Bukowski volume back, a handwritten letter hidden in the poems, thanking him for “thawing” me. I would like to think he did more good than harm. I signed it, yours for a winter and a half.
Edward said, “I told you so. Good riddance!”
Peter expressed relief. “He’s not even good-looking, Biscuit.”
Still, I thirsted for him, for the possibility of him, or who I was with him, or maybe simply who I was. I hadn’t been myself with Enzo, but I’d come closer, somehow, to something true and taciturn in all that heat. He had been my flowering. I consoled myself with Ferlinghetti: Yet I have slept with beauty / in my own weird way. / and I have made a hungry scene or two / with beauty in my bed. That felt like something real.
I had muddled sex and tango into one pulpy cocktail. It was a rookie error, a mistake I vowed never to make again. I had fallen victim to the very cliché I myself had sworn did not exist. I’d slid my fishnet thigh up someone else’s pinstriped trouser leg. Who would now believe me when I insisted tango wasn’t sexual? I no longer had an answer for my mother, or for anybody else.
The circles under my eyes had grown pale and deep as tile grout. I stayed up far too late and danced, even more than usual, and staggered my way through the workweek. Enzo had told me I was young and beautiful, that boys would come break down my doors, but I did not believe him. Didn’t want to. I went on a strange date with a man who asked me with distaste, “Why are you so serious all the time?” then tried to muscle his way into my bed. I sent him home and took a boiling shower until I felt the fear recede. I didn’t want him. I would rather be alone.
Enzo became a phantom. A memory of stumbled, apologetic tandas and awkward glasses of prosecco. For months, he haunted my milongas; every dark-haired man his height was him. Sometimes it really was—standing with his back against the bar, and glaring at me through the Boschlike sea of bodies. Like a leopard, I watch, he said. And so did I.
In an attempt to cheer me up, my father sent me a pair of Elvis earrings he’d found at a flea market. Such was his code: all humanity filed neatly between the twin poles of “that rat bastard Nixon” and “the King.” Elvis beamed out at me from each of two mismatched enamel squares. The only charm I’d need.
Peter came home, armed with take-out once again, and sat me on the couch and made me laugh. He had a new girlfriend, who hated the idea of me, but he came anyway. “I wanted to make sure you weren’t lonely,” he said, and we spent the evening watching doctor shows and rummaging for junk food in the pantry shelves.
I filled my calendar, tried doing some non-tango things. Movies, the symphony, parties thrown by friends. I met a cinematographer at a party for a friend of friends who talked to me for hours about Aristotle and taught me to say “rosy-fingered dawn” in Greek. He kissed me, right there in someone’s kitchen, and then asked, “Where did you come from? You are nothing like the girls your age.”
I didn’t want him either. He asked to see me the next evening; I declined. Instead, I cooked and ate an elaborate three-course solo dinner, filling the apartment with the scent of sautéed garlic and tomatoes, only for myself. I was finding an axis, finally, off the dance floor.
I was one year into tango, not counting the months I’d spent away, in France and after, and still astonished by how much there was to learn. I’d moved up a weight class, to a pair of gold and lavender heels with open toes. I went to RoKo every week and sat and danced and sat again, wallflower hopeful, on the pleather couches. I watched the expert dancers, their movements as simple and elegant as drapery cascading to a puddle on the floor. I wanted that, the heavy-rooted sureness in their steps, the lightning quickness of their ankles, the stillness of their heads. Even when the dreamy cloud had lifted, and it all went back to foot muscles and tedium, I still wanted nothing more than tango. Certainly not more dates. Not even acting, which I had stopped entirely, relieved. I stopped other things, too, that interfered with dancing: drinking, eating onions, sleep. I lived by tango rules. The cubicle computer screen collage spil
led off onto the wall.
I would use the dance to lick my wounds. The best revenge on Enzo, after all, was to surpass him, to dance until he disappeared.
Nadtochi, whether he knew or not, was helping to rebuild my tango mettle.
“I have a student,” he said one afternoon, when we had finished our lesson. “He says he tries to cabeceo you. Are you not paying close enough attention?”
Obviously, I was not. The man in question was a tax attorney in his fifties—though you’d hardly know to look at him. He stood six foot one in dancing shoes, with a grey hairline fighting through a helmet of black dye. I’d seen him at La Nacional, looking, very seriously, over my head. He had a sort of sternness to him I’d found intimidating, some pseudo-dignified milonga game face I hoped I didn’t have. It had not occurred to me that he’d been waiting for my eye contact to initiate the eyebrow nod.
I finally caught his cabeceo and we danced. As I recall, it was a vals, sugary, in 6/8 time. He was every bit as serious as I had feared. He met me, scowling, on the floor and offered me his arm. I took a deep breath, lunged up on my metatarsal bones, and settled into his taut chest. He was a little stiff, but I could feel how much he cared—about the angle of his arm, about my comfort, about the swing set rhythm of the vals. His dance was very elegant, if rigid, and full of careful turns. We bobbed together for that tanda and the tango tanda on its heels. When we were finished, he paid me a respectful compliment. His “thank you” was sincere.
Tango Lessons Page 14