All Over the Map

by Laura Fraser

  I lie there soaking, listening to the music, a group called the Gotan Project, some modern tangoish music, and then drain the tub. I jump up and grab a towel. I am going to learn to tango.

  THE IDEA BEHIND taking tango classes isn’t quite as straightforward as hoping I will run into the man of my dreams at a milonga, though that could certainly happen; I love a man who can dance. I’m thinking of it as part of my self-improvement effort, which might help me develop the right kind of energy to attract the right man—hopefully, by the time I turn forty-five.

  Tango, for the woman—or for the follower, anyway, because in San Francisco, of course, men can be followers and women leaders—is all about playing the traditional woman’s role: passive, responsive, flirtatious, tempting but even more erotic in its restraint. It’s fun and full of frisson. Maybe a little tango could teach me something about letting go of control, allowing myself to be led. As ridiculous as it seems to try to realign the basic way you relate to men in your forties, I figure a little tango couldn’t hurt.

  So I buy some sturdy jazz heels and a flippy black skirt and sign up for classes.

  From the first session, I realize it’s not going to be easy. For one thing, it’s obvious that I am not built like most women tango dancers, who tend to be delicate and lean, wear slinky dresses slit up to the thigh, and have disproportionately long legs. My physique is better suited for African, Brazilian, or salsa dance, by which I mean I was born with a rather steatopygic derriere and sturdy, muscular legs. (When I was dancing at a party in Kenya once, a local gentleman remarked, “You are very unusual for a white woman,” which I took as a compliment, and, were I not planning to be cremated, I might have etched on my tombstone.) Since tango is all in the leaning torso, flicking legs, and coquettish footwork—not in the grooving hips—I do the best I can.

  I’m a pretty good dancer. I’ve taken hundreds of dance classes over the years, but almost always dancing solo in groups. I get jittery dancing with a partner. It makes me feel like I did in third grade, at a piano recital, suddenly so self-conscious I blanked on the music. It’s as if when someone is holding my arms I can no longer feel the rhythm in my feet. At tango class, I learn the steps, but my constant challenge is to trust my partner to hold my weight and to wait for him to move, not to anticipate or lead. At one point a partner steps back, crosses his arms, and, when I finally notice him, asks me when I am going to stop twirling around by myself. They’re difficult lessons.

  But I keep going to class and then to milongas and realize that you can dance tango every night of the week in San Francisco if you like, and a lot of obsessed people do. I sit there and wait, as if at a high school dance, for a man across the room to nod to me, so I can nod back, and he drifts over and offers me his hand. Often it is a little too much like a high school dance, where I just sit there, pretending to find something fascinating at the bottom of my drink. But sometimes I spin around the floor and, for a few minutes, feel light and sexy, my body responding to whatever move the man desires.

  THE TANGO LESSONS seem to work a little magic when I have my first date with Evan, a college friend of a friend I meet at a dinner party. I let him decide where to eat, even though, in picking restaurants and ordering dishes, I’m usually what my friend Anne calls a “restaurant top.” Instead, I try what he suggests—the Korean barbecue is wonderful—listen to him and respond, and squelch the impulse to take over the conversation, to tell stories and entertain him, which is what I always do when I’m uncomfortable. He takes me to his favorite bar in Oakland, Cafe Van Cleef, which is my favorite bar in that town, too. It’s the kind of place where, after a couple of drinks, you can show someone how to hold you in a tango embrace and no one glances your way. His goatee tickles me. “I like that,” he says, his hand lingering on my waist. “We should go dancing sometime.”

  But I am actually leaving in a couple days to go to Buenos Aires to study tango and its feminine wiles more seriously. That news seems to lend some urgency to our date. On the way back to the car, Evan pulls me into an alcove on a deserted downtown street and kisses me.

  “You’re so pretty,” he tells me. “Do people always tell you that?”

  “Not always,” I say with a little smile. Like maybe not since the Reagan administration.

  We go back to his house and play on his couch for a while, but when he wants to have sex—“Why not, do you think we’re going to get married or something?” is a revealing comment—I have the good tangoish sense to insist on going home after a little more kissing and general appreciation of my body. “Here’s to full-bodied people,” he says, as if we are just that much more full of life. I move to get up from the couch, and he holds me down with his beefy arms, looking me straight in the eyes with his bright blues. I have a leap of feeling and for a moment think it’s fear or panic. Then I close my eyes and breathe; I remember this feeling, it’s not fear, it’s excitement; it’s feeling hot.

  “Open your eyes,” he says. “I want you to think about this in Buenos Aires. This is exactly how I’m going to fuck you when you get home.”

  That leaves quite an impression on me, but I have a plane ticket and am on a mission. Never mind that I seem to have a habit of meeting promising men and then leaving on a trip; I am on a campaign to learn how to be better in a relationship. Plus I’ve landed an assignment writing about being a turista tanguera in Buenos Aires, so it’s a work gig.

  WHEN I STEP out of the taxi in Buenos Aires, I am infatuated. The town is a faded beauty, with elegant, decaying European architecture wearily trying to ignore the brash new concrete neighbors. Intellectual, poetic Argentines have weathered unspeakable political and economic tragedy, which partly explains why there are more psychologists per capita than in Manhattan. Buenos Aires is sexy and the one place where I can speak my combination of Italian and Spanish and everyone will understand me. It could even be a perfect place to find a man who has read Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, backward and forward, has a nice cellar full of Malbec, and can sweep me off my feet dancing tango.

  I stay at the Tango Academy in San Telmo, the neighborhood where the dance was born—in its brothels, as a kind of foreplay, before it became more respectable and stylized—and still thrives in late-night corner bars. I want to take lessons and slide right into the scene. The hotel proprietors make me feel at home amid the worn velvet drapes, spiral staircases, wrought-iron balconies, and high chandeliers, and I love the cheap glamour of the place.

  The first evening, I go to a tango lesson at the hotel, where I meet other turistas tangueras (many of them American couples whose wives aren’t thrilled to have their husbands trading partners) and locals who are willing to twirl a beginner around the floor. Anders, a handsome Swede, though too young for me (barely drinking age), is a perfect partner, leading me assuredly across the dance floor. I also meet Claudia, a forty-two-year-old Mexican film location scout, who drifts with me from tango practice to late-night milongas, stopping to drink a glass of cheap Bonarda wine and eat succulent grass-fed steaks when our feet are too sore to dance.

  Claudia has thick dark hair and big eyes; she’s attractive and accomplished in a creative field. Like me, she is divorced with no children and wondering what’s happening next. She also loves to travel and is considering a move to Argentina. She is fed up with Mexico City because there are no men there, the way I am fed up with San Francisco, the way urban women in their early forties are fed up with cities in the entire postindustrialized world. She seeks solace in tango, when she can drift in a man’s arms and feel him leading her and then move on to the next encounter. Her relationships are like that, too; last night she met a gorgeous man in his early thirties, said good-bye to him before coffee, and now rolls her eyes at his text message on her cell, though she’ll probably meet up with him again later on. Claudia has stopped having any expectations of men except to dance with them, and sleep with them when it’s convenient and fun. She seems pretty happy with this arrangement; it’s one that has made me h
appy, too, at times, just not necessarily the next morning. She’s focusing on her career and her move and isn’t worried about having a partner, though her family in Mexico thinks she’s crazy, an old maid, ruining her last chances.

  We go daily to the Confitería Ideal, a grand old ballroom with tarnished mirrors, worn tablecloths, and white-jacketed waiters, for afternoon milongas. We wait on the sideline with the other women, nervously sipping water, for men to ask us to dance with a glance from across the room. The porteños—B.A. natives—are friendly, and the dapper, aging men give me courtly advice as we dance, calling me “bambina,” or “little girl.” I dance with perhaps fifty men at the classes, each two-minute dance like a one-night stand—physically close but emotionally distant. Only such strict indifference allows people to rub their chests close and intertwine their legs, moving across the floor like caressing skin.

  Since Claudia and I both speak Italian, we are in demand by a couple of gentlemen visiting from Florence. Otherwise, aside from the classes, I sit out a lot of dances. Tango is a real meritocracy: men choose women not for their beauty or youth but for their ability to close their eyes and meld into the man’s lead. The woman who gets the most dances, bless her, is a short, stout señora in her seventies with a sparkling blouse and a skirt slit to the knee.

  Discouraged on the dance floor, I try to find a regular partner, someone I can relax with and work on a few steps. I go on Match.com, saying I am seeking a man who can show me the tango scene for an article. Many men contact me—being a relatively blond American seems to hold a certain allure in B.A.—sending me virtual besos, but most want quick sexo. I chat with a couple by phone but violate some cultural rule by brazenly suggesting coffee; men, it seems, do all the inviting in Argentina. It’s a tango thing. One man wants to take me to an Argentine ranch but won’t meet me for coffee first, and I am not about to set out for the distant pampas alone with him.

  Then Juan Miguel, a fifty-year-old, cueball-pated architect who also teaches yoga, contacts me. He invites me out to a trendy Middle Eastern restaurant in Palermo Viejo, reaches for my hand over dessert, and makes poetic comments about my appearance. “Piel como terciopelo.” Skin like velvet. “Ojos como topacio.” Eyes like topaz. He correctly guesses my astrological sign—“You’re such a free-spirited woman, you must be Aquarius”—which makes him think we might be fated for each other.

  But it is not to be. After dinner, we go to a crowded milonga, where Juan Miguel drives me around the dance floor like a bumper car, crashing into other couples, whose female partners adroitly jab me with their spiked heels. No one, including Juan Miguel, has a sense of humor about things. In fact, tango and Argentina in general seem to lack a spirit of fun. No más.

  Back home in San Francisco, the tango scene is less inviting than in B.A. In Argentina, the men understand that the point of dancing with a woman is to make her look beautiful, to dance well together, so they lead at your level. With a strong leader who has nothing to prove, even if all you can do is a basic step and a few forward ochos, you look and feel graceful, transcending the steps and sliding into a subtle sense of rhythm, connection, and, for small, restrained moments, passion. Not so in San Francisco, where men tend to learn complicated routines in classes and force you to stumble through them without establishing a basic connection, then slowly leading you to something a little trickier. There’s also an atmosphere of formality and strictness at the milongas and an emphasis on technique that isn’t quite suited to my personality.

  As much as I love the elegance and glamour of tango, as well as the tragic romance of the music, I start leaving my tango shoes in the back of the closet. I’ve learned something about letting go of control, holding on to my space, and making myself receptive to a man’s lead, but I’ve also learned that tango really isn’t my dance. For me, dancing is an expression of joy, music entering your body like spirits, releasing them through movement. Tango is too restrained for me and not enough fun; any dance where you aren’t supposed to shake your ass is clearly made for someone else’s body.

  Instead, I think, I’ll sign up for salsa lessons.

  AT HOME, EVAN calls to invite me to a baseball game. I walk to the ballpark under a clear San Francisco sky, watching people happily making their way from downtown offices to the stadium by the bay. Evan meets me with Mardi Gras beads in the Giants’ colors to wear and takes my hand to lead me to the bleachers. I love the crowd’s good-hearted cheering, stomping, and booing and the friendly way everyone in the bleachers chats with one another. I spread out a little tablecloth on the bleachers and surprise Evan with a picnic: Australian wine, Italian prosciutto, pecorino, and olives. He turns from the ball game, takes a few bites, and groans with home-run enthusiasm. “I love you,” he says, which I take to mean “I love this picnic,” and he kisses me on the lips.

  Later, walking toward the Muni bus, the Bay Bridge glittering in the background, Evan puts his arms around my soft, custom-made Argentine leather jacket. “I would love to go traveling with you,” he says. “Where in the whole world would you like to go?”

  I put my hands in his pockets. Nepal? The Seychelles? Back to those Sicilian islands? I rest my head on his shoulder, still jet-lagged, and he strokes my hair.

  “How about dinner at my house?” I say, and he gives me another kiss.

  I decide to stay at home for a while to see how things develop in my personal life, if given a chance. I sort through my closet as a vicarious way of rummaging through my personal issues, creating some order in my life. I feel the need to toss out old stuff, pare down to things that are really important to me, let go of things I’ve been hanging on to, like jeans I bought ten years ago, hoping I’d lose fifteen pounds. Maybe I should figure out how to do this process internally, but for now I’m just cleaning my closet.

  I come across my old wedding dress, a simple, tea-length chiffony frock that doesn’t scream “bride;” I wore it to my friend Cecilia’s fiftieth birthday party at a winery with a big garden hat and flip-flops and no one had the slightest clue about its former, now-tattered glory. Eyeing my pile of clothes to give away, I have to acknowledge that floaty, off-white dresses in general have limited use but am reluctant to part with it. In the spirit of renewal, I have the bright idea of dyeing my old wedding dress to wear to a party. This strikes me as a good idea, like when I swapped the stones in my wedding ring, added a few more bands to symbolize more happy relationships in my life, and shifted them to my right hand as divorce rings.

  So I run to the fabric store, pick out the first color that catches my eye, ignore the directions, and throw the dye in the wash with the dress. When it comes out a splotchy Halloween orange instead of the pretty coral on the box, I cry—for my ruined dress, my stupidity, and my relationships that have failed partly due to my darned impatience. I wished I could start over: undye the dress, take back what I said, and look before I leaped.

  I guess I’ve always had mild issues with what psychologists call impulse control. I know I’m not the person to rely upon to say “no” to things, whether it’s another glass of wine, late-night dancing at a dive club, or a five-day trip into the Sinai Desert with Bedouins I just met a few hours ago. I rarely stop to weigh pros and cons, risks and benefits, long-term costs, and, worst of all, more sensitive people’s reactions. I like to do things fast, and do them now. It’s hard for me to resist my urges—to buy cobalt blue shoes, book a trip to Italy, or tell someone off. This does me no good: If I’m upset with a friend or colleague, I’ll whip off a scathing e-mail. I jump into flirtations with men I barely know and then get furiously hurt when they aren’t in love with me. I always say what’s on my mind, even when my mind isn’t fully engaged. My actions are immediate, but the consequences—embarrassment, burned bridges, badly fitting boots—are lasting. Basically, I could use a pause button.

  Not long after I leave my former wedding dress in a free box on the sidewalk in the Haight for a homeless person to wear, a magazine editor calls to ask what my worst trait
is. “Impulsiveness,” I immediately reply. When she then suggests I go see a woman named Sharon Salzberg for some help and then write about it, I instantly agree. It isn’t until I’m on the plane, reading the blurb on one of her books, Lovingkindness, that I discover that Salzberg is one of the country’s leading meditation teachers. I’ve done it again! By not thinking things through, I’ve landed in a disastrous situation. The last thing I am capable of doing is sitting still to meditate. I’ll do it wrong, fail to write the story, and, the way things are going, end up waiting tables. I am an idiot, but there’s no turning back.

  I arrive at the hotel where Sharon is staying, expecting to meet an ethereal, remote woman in flowing robes and maybe a shaved head. But when she opens the door to her room, she is casual, sharp, and funny—with a New York accent—and somehow makes me feel as if I’ve known her for years.

  I dive right in, explaining that I suspect I act rashly because I can’t bear to sit with uncomfortable feelings. I’m always booking plane tickets to run away from them, I say. In the past, I managed my emotions by the mouthful, using food to stuff down pangs of loneliness, rejection, unworthiness, or failure. When I was younger, the fact that I had such little impulse control led to some seriously chaotic eating problems, which I eventually overcame. But even after I learned to eat more mindfully, savoring every taste and smell, my impulsiveness just spun out in new directions: shooting off my mouth, cutting my own bangs, getting overly invested and upset about a guy whose profile I first read on Match.com the morning before, and making a general mess of my life.