“I could apply to graduate school,” I muttered quietly. “For writing.”
That small admission startled me, but to Mum it was inevitable. Befitting. Overdue. Perhaps, I thought, instead of living underneath the prose of others, no matter how immortal, I’d find that I had something real to say. That I could build a life with my own words. I was in no way sure, but suddenly, on that sticky street, I wanted very much to try.
“Bravo,” she said.
“Brava,” I mumbled.
“Don’t be such a little asshole, Meghan,” she laugh-snorted. “I’m American.”
“Sorry.”
“Surely you can do that from down here,” she said.
I felt resistance, then relief. I sat down on an empty stoop and thought through my routines, removing subway rides and rent checks, deleting fire trucks and blaring horns. That there was life in other places I was ready to concede. Then I remembered tango. My heart sagged in my arms. “But tango is here,” I said. “And tango’s all I’ve got.”
My mother, clothes-ironer, sense-talker, hair-holder of my youth, said only, “I know, honey, but you need more than that.”
Her certainty by far outmatched my own. In the months between decision and execution, I tried to shut my ears against the private chorus of my second thoughts, but I could not. Leaving felt at once too easy and impossible. I gave three months’ tentative notice, as though I still might change my mind. I talked to Peter, who was then in France, to ponder whether we could break our lease. We were still pondering when our slumlord landlord moved an old plaid couch he’d found out on the street into the basement of our building. Within two weeks, bedbugs had marched upstairs and underneath our door and tunneled into our new blue couch, into my brand-new single-woman bed. Two weeks after that, my office suffered an unrelated infestation. The city was conspiring to kick me out.
Peter paid for our possessions to be piled into a fumigation truck. One Friday afternoon in late July, I watched the movers throw my things in boxes and heave those boxes two by two downstairs. I closed the door behind me, shut the keys inside the mailbox, shouldered a single disinfected duffel bag, and left. Behind me: my street, the loaded truck, and my beloved arrabal. Above me: one last Amtrak thundering across the Hell Gate Bridge. The life that I’d attempted there so easily undone.
The threat of rain gave way to a reality of rain. I tried to call my mother, to tell her I had done it, but my cell phone battery was dead. I rode the empty N train to Manhattan, watching Astoria vanish behind me in the tunnel underneath the river. I could almost hear the snapping of steel cables, the ties that held me to the city breaking, and the giddy vastness of the void.
Chapter Eighteen
the plan was this: Mum would spend August with her cousin on the Cape and fetch me on her way back down the coast. I had one month left, and vowed to spend it dancing. One last fling with tango and New York—my Carnival—before I had to give up both for Lenten abstinence.
I danced through “La cumparsita” almost every night. It is perhaps the best-known, most played tango of all time, and every time it’s heard it marks an ending. The name translates to “the little parade,” as it was once a simple march for carnival in Montevideo. The martial rum PUM pum pum . . . bah deedle dah dum drags you to your feet in search of one last partner, to rejoin the line of dance for one last lap. Astor Piazzolla denounced it as “lo más espantosamente pobre del mundo”—the most frightfully poor tango in the world—though he went on to record four different versions. Juan d’Arienzo, “El Rey del Compás” (King of the Beat), recorded six. There were dozens of recordings, and I learned each one. The song became a knowing friend, a temper to match my every mood. There was that first gramophone crackle of the Firpo version, De Caro’s strange cats-crying cartoon strings, Troilo’s brooding, piano-plonking romance, and Di Sarli’s heavy dream. Varela had taken a beautiful, though melodramatic, stab at it, as had Hugo Díaz. I was partial to the later D’Arienzo arrangements because they were best to dance. By midsummer I knew the song by heart, and could identify it, whichever version, within the first two beats.
It seemed only fitting to use it as my farewell anthem. To drain the dregs of each milonga before returning to the guest room Peter’s family had so generously offered me. I had nowhere to be in daylight, so I took my time, wandering through Manhattan in the wee hours, high on dancing, whistling tangos to myself, and basking in the late-night wind across my legs.
As my days reeled in the chaos of ending and beginning, tango remained calm. I found balance only on the dance floor, only in my new mail order Comme il Fauts: black suede with seven-centimeter heels and open toes. In tango, at least, I felt the floor beneath me. I’d reached a state of priestess peace—preferring to withdraw into enigma rather than to try and right the details of my capsized life. Each dance was cosseted in darkness, like an ancient poem of death where that was nothing to be feared. My eyes sank to a close. A soft curtain fell. Behind it, there was only music, and I moved through air.
I never got particularly good. My curves were flat, my feet too big, and I never quite acquired the necessary haughtiness, nor the paranormal powers of the tango witch. I could not dance a leader into madness. But I was friendly and enthusiastic and I put my heart in every step. Leaders often figured me for a midwestern farm girl. I laughed too much, made nervous jokes, and generally lacked the flair for the dramatic that any really bewitching follower ought to have. I was a four-door Volvo among Ferrari coupes. I grinned and waved to leaders as I passed them. I still squealed “Wooh! Sorry!” every time I flubbed a step. I broke decorum in cortinas. I was the earnest girl, without a stitch of tango cool, but still I’d finally found my place around the Robin Thomas water cooler.
Tango was like a running dinner party at a massive table, and I was the guest who slunk in late and didn’t linger once dessert was cleared. If I didn’t make it one night, I knew they’d welcome me the next. And not just Marty—everyone. The cool kids turned out to be less exclusive than I had assumed. I danced with my tango betters—even on days when I was dancing like an old appliance. I started making conversation between dances, getting to know the architects and interior decorators, the bioethicists and engineers. I met photographers and poets, chemists, models, flame swallowers, telephone technicians, an activist, an acrobat, a yoga teacher, two costume designers, a neurologist, investment bankers, writers, chamber violinists, and a Balanchine ballerina. I met women who had walked away from their careers, renouncing partnerships and pensions, just because they loved the dance and life was short. I told them I was jobless, drifting, with all my worldly things in storage. They told me I was brave.
I started to refine my tastes, in close and open. It was no longer a question of wanting to dance each tanda until the night was over, to suck as much tango from the carcass as I could. Leaders felt distinct, depending on their musicality, how long they stretched their strides, how smooth they were in turns, their flexibility. The lanky, long-haired cool kids were the best for rhythmic softness and their gentle, rapid twists. The sturdy, broader-chested men were often best for slow songs because they milked each sostenuto in the strings and made me feel that I was floating, balanced on the wide pillow of their embrace. Certain men had power, others pluck. Still others refinement. And, for those nine to fourteen minutes, I was different with each. I learned to sit somewhere strategic, to look for the right eye when the music turned a certain way.
It didn’t always work—and I was never very bold about it. No matter how my stare bore toward a leader between tandas, without eye contact there could be no cabeceo. The men had the advantage here. They sat less, hunted more, had more control over their whens and whoms. They sought out favorite partners for breakneck milonga tandas, saccharine sweetheart valses, drama tangos, and the restive, rhythmic ones requiring spunk. I began to notice how unprincipled these predilections were. Some men looked to me to dance Di Sarli, and I stretched longer, danced more wistfully, and laid my arm across their b
acks with extra tenderness. Some men beelined to me for toe-tappers with a pulsing, driving, syncopated beat; I grinned the whole way through those dances, stealing beats with little stamps and piques on the floor, squeezing their hand in praise whenever we made some particularly playful moment in the margins of the tune—a feat of timing, temperaments in sync.
Good dancers changed their personalities to suit the tanda. Those unearthly tango highs depended on your luck in landing the right pairing at the right time. My shorthand for sorting leaders into categories—dreamboats, backbreakers, clutchers, broncos, chicken hawks—was not unique. You met so many people dancing tango whom you remembered only by a flash of color in their clothing, or this tactical report: His lead was firm. His hand was limp. He felt like this.
The men trade notes as well. Enzo once danced with Guillermina Quiroga, a tango fantasía goddess, and compared her to a Lamborghini. You barely have time to fasten your seat belt and she’s off. Other women are more like tanks, which can be a compliment. I’d been called a feather, a siren, a soothing wind, a refrigerator, and a water buffalo.
After eighteen months of dancing, I was finally beginning to understand the mechanics of improvisation at the heart of tango. How the leader moves first, in anticipation of the music, and at the same time—fractions of a second before stepping—tells the lady where to go. He sends infinitesimal impulses, which she has milliseconds to interpret: muscles tightening in his torso or his legs, a half-extended invitation. She moves and he moves with her, already preparing what comes next. Only the couple’s outer works are visible in tango—legs moved, shapes made, figures drawn—just as a clock’s hands belie the intricacy of its operation. The inner work of cogs and weights remains unseen.
The leader also has to steer. It is important not to collide with anyone or stand on toes, not to kick anyone or dance into the furniture. And, should a lady skewer some unfortunate with her stiletto, the gentleman who led her takes responsibility. Her eyes were closed in close embrace.
The follower, in exchange for accident insurance and protection, bestows on him her trust. But this, I’d come to realize, was not as patriarchal as it seemed. There was so much more within that clock than I had thought. The dance, for all it sounds like man say, woman do, is not an act of domination. The best leaders speak of leading how the follower wishes to be led. This mystified me. I had so far believed my preferences were immaterial, and that the leader had complete imaginative control. “How can you tell,” I asked one of the cool kids between tandas, “what a follower wants?” I raised a skeptic eyebrow. We were having one of those tango-typical half conversations where both people have one eye angling through the milling crowd for cabeceos.
“You can always tell,” he said. He made a point of dancing to a partner’s level—meeting her where she was comfortable, but also listening for how she liked to move. “Some ladies want a lot of time in the parada,” he said, referring to the move that interrupts her ochos. The leader inserts a foot into her path, halting her elliptic figure eight, and she is stopped (parada). What happens next is usually up to her. She can stall, embellish, flirt, demur, or shine her shoe up the leader’s inseam. She can also whisk herself over the doorstop and continue dancing. Ladies’ choice. The leader waits, his foot outstretched, until she crosses over.
I was a speedy threshold crosser. Maybe I gave my leader’s foot a little tap or nuzzle just before I made the leap, but I was too self-conscious to milk the moment, to leave any real feeling there. I was still convinced that every impulse was a test with one right answer. That there were no choices I would have to make, except to riddle out and execute whatever any given leader asked of me. That the object was to disappear.
I was on the verge of understanding. That my style, my preferences, my physiology factored in. That I, the follower, had power. As Cesar Coelho had told me, the dance was conversation. A circle of anticipation. The leader led, but that lead meant nothing if not executed, and I controlled the execution. The choice, whether to accept what he proposed, was always mine.
I started dancing with a man I’ll call the Mogul, who drove a fancy car and owned a meat processing plant outside the city. He smelled strongly of soap and pungent just-for-men shampoo. Despite his chin-length curls and slightly tasteless shirts unbuttoned sternum deep, he was empirically good-looking, tanned and chiseled. Because he often wore nylon athletic pants to the milongas, he had a bottom-heavy swagger when he walked the room and a slight rustle when he danced—which was like warm gin over ice. I’d had a tanda with him months before and flubbed it. So when he fixed me in his cabeceo one quiet Sunday night at RoKo, I had to glance behind me to make sure he wasn’t eyeing someone else.
His hand was soft. His well-gelled hair had hardened into strands that tickled as I pressed my forehead to his cheek. We danced to late-era Pugliese, all dramatic flounces and Borgesian knife jabs of bandoneón. All very virile. I was embarrassed by the way it made me feel: electric, lithe, important. Not skittish and frangible as I had felt with Enzo. The Mogul took huge forward steps—lunging, pushing, martial steps I had to run with. I had no trouble keeping up. I flexed my knees and bore down into the floor.
We stalked laps around the other couples. I was breathless after. He made little clichéd mmm sounds in my ear, and toyed with my fingers briefly as we broke apart. Many men did this; it’s not always suggestive. I noticed he was slightly deaf and slurred a bit. We each did the standard cortina trick of looking vaguely at separate corners of the room, waving our eyes past the other’s like a searchlight until it seemed too awkward not to speak. I spoke. He stared back blankly as if he hadn’t understood. Then he smiled, slow and broad. He was the kind of handsome man that tango made much handsomer.
We danced another song, and broke apart. “Wow,” he said. “You are a beautiful dancer.” I blushed and thanked him.
“No, really,” he said. “Just lovely.”
As we finished the tanda, I noticed the compliment had unlocked an unusual and reckless radiance in me. I danced with a kind of confident abandon I had never felt before, striding, pushing, stretching. This heady music had always been my least favorite. With the Mogul it was different. Capacious and invigorating. I felt powerful, and liked it. We danced another, thanked each other, parted, and I strode away with a swagger in my hips I’d only seen on television.
He was older than I thought he was and used to getting what he wanted. For some reason I could not then comprehend, that included me. Meet me at the Black & White Ball, he texted, referring to the expensive summer benefit milonga I had planned to skip. I will pay for you. Or: I know you have dinner plans, but come dance with me after. Just wear a dress and bring your shoes. He befuddled me. He opened doors and steered me through them, his lion’s paw at my lower back. He exuded sex, but didn’t seem to want a thing from me but dances. Sometimes he drove me home from the milonga, revving his automatic engine, skipping traffic lights, and blasting Héctor Varela’s late-fifties histrionic tango hits. I was still playing a role—adult female in possession of herself—and so at every turn I acted as though in control, which I was not.
He was the sort of man who filled his loft apartment with expensive things, modern furniture and works of art, and scolded me for treading shoes across his white wool rug. He was always late, distracted, thumbing through his BlackBerry, skipping through the tuner on his radio. But he seemed lonely to me in that obnoxious car, its engine purring. Lonely in that austere and kitchenless apartment, without a woman or a pet.
He was a Leo, into horoscopes and proud of it, and so I came to think of him as leonine. Sometimes he looked at me as though he might devour me, but he never did. He often drove me home, and we’d spend hours in stilted conversation, always with the engine running, until he’d lean over with a warm and lingering brush of lip across the corner of my mouth to say good night. There were no other intimations. I accepted his invitations, and his offer of a freelance job designing marketing materials for his line of deli meats. We
met for pre-milonga meals to discuss promotional brochures. I almost dared him to seduce me—thinking, if he did, that I could cease being the guileless girl that Enzo hadn’t wanted. But he did not. He bought me an (illustrated) anniversary copy of The Elements of Style, a gift that might have been construed as romantic—the gift of grammar!—had I not had four copies already on my shelves at home.
One night he took me to a beach-themed rave on Governors Island. It was, not surprisingly, my first such party, but I feigned ease among the glow sticks and the fake palm trees and shirtless frat boys from Long Island. I drank a shot I never would have ordered for myself, and tried to act my age. We picked our way through patchy sand, trying not to spill our draft Peronis in their plastic cups, and swayed together. Our tight canyengue rock steps modulated into dancing I would have to classify as dirty. I shut out everything but the trancelike beat, my eyes hard on his chest, my body unrestrained. He pulled me close, ostensibly to protect me from the brutish moshing, and I thought perhaps I felt his hands threaten to part the fabric of my sundress, a halter fastened at the neck. But the beats came thumping to a close, the coeds scattered, and we rode the ferry back like teenagers on an awkward date.
In many ways, he was extraneous. I was drunk with tango, not with him. He was a coveted leader I was lucky to score dances with. When he came slinking into RoKo, I could feel a dozen fellow followers tune their forks to him. But I knew that he would ask. I knew his hair-flipped head-cock cabeceo. I knew the music he would choose. I also knew, or hoped, he’d save me for the end, for when the strings went mad. So I avoided him for hours until they did.
Tango Lessons Page 17