Tango Lessons_A Memoir

by Meghan Flaherty

  This occasioned even more training. More tricky sequences to maim. I lapped it up, high on the dancing, thrilled by my own inexplicable allure. I was improving so much faster than my classmates—because of him, this stroke of luck. But we kept bumping heads against the low ceiling of his persistence. He made another overseas invitation, another loaded declaration. No, I told him. No.

  I told him he could care for me, but must not love me. He could hold me in his arms only to dance, where I felt nothing but the pure white blur of tango. I knew that we had gone too far, though in my folly couldn’t fathom how. I knew, and I did nothing but refuse him and apologize, again. Refuse. Apologize. Refuse. Pazzo, I called him. Crazy man. He called me innocent, pristine. “This clean girl with the unpolluted mind.” He wanted all or nothing. I should have walked away; instead, I begged him not to shut me out. I begged him for one last shot at platonic virtue, to remain his gran amiga. But he kept testing, pushing. Thrusting himself into my psyche with his leather pants and his insistent speech, his hard heels clapping the ground.

  The toe-sucking came just after this. We’d finished running through the choreography for the performance. I sat there, stretching, bending over hamstrings, elongating my calves. I took off my practice shoes and rotated tired circles with my ankles. “Here,” he said, and took my foot, began massaging. I remember thinking that stopping him might be insulting. He started to peel off my sock. I pulled away. He held on, and pulled me by the foot across the floor. My butt slid easily in yoga pants.

  My white fish of a foot was in his lap.

  There. I should have stopped it, slapped him, or ventriloquized a ringtone from the cell phone in my purse. I should have run—but I was sure he wouldn’t push. A foot rub—generous, benign. He raised it to his lap and kept on rubbing. I tried to speak, defuse the moment with my nervous chatter, found that I could not. He bent down and, in seconds, rested the whole of his lower lip atop my sweaty digits. As if about to play harmonica. Then he started breathing onto them. He lowered the hot cave of his mouth over my foot, and I just sat there, paralyzed, staring mutely at him, determined not to blink. I would not show my revulsion or betray the humid feeling that was surging up my legs in spite of me. My toes were in his mouth.

  This was too far; I had let it go too far. I extricated myself and my feet, as politely as I could. I did not stay for post-practice pierogi. I did not let him drive me home. I went and waited for the local E train, sitting on a concrete slab in the empty station, staring at my lap. Nauseated and ashamed. I told you it was creepy, nagged my mother’s voice inside my head. I told you to be careful.

  In hindsight, maybe it was funny. Maybe I should have run home to tell Peter that some old cad with half a mullet who’d been trying to nail me for the past three months had just tried to suck my toes. Maybe I should have found it perfectly ridiculous—how thoroughly I’d failed to grasp the situation. How I had stumbled, in my criminal naïveté, perhaps unwittingly encouraged him. But I was mortified. It was the single most erotic moment of my twenties, and it was wrong, all wrong. A nadie le confíes, I repeated to myself, and suddenly—ardently—wanted him to disappear into that secret world so I could seal him in with wet cement, just like I’d done with every other shame. Bury it deep and build again. Tell no one. Fortify another castle, crystalline and pure.

  It wasn’t all my fault, but I was culpable. I had thought that I could talk Svengali out of his infatuation, because I never quite believed him. I didn’t see myself as worth the wanting. The awful irony is that, even as I wrested toes away from the maestro, I was writing in my journal how I was not the kind of woman anyone could love. I inspired pathos, philio, even storge, but never romance, never eros or agape. And that is what I coveted: the kind of love you closed your eyes for. There was no connection between Svengali’s interest, sticky and leering, and my notion of romantic love. If I can explain my woeful missteps, then that is how: I did not take him seriously, in either word or deed. I couldn’t recognize eros even when it sucked me on the toes. And I had no idea of the power I might have, the power it must have looked like I was playing with so idly.

  I see now how warped it was—and had been from the start. I look back and all I feel are his eyes on me, assessing. Watching me marvel at my progress in the mirror. Deriving some sick pleasure from the way he made me squirm free of his snares. Feeding me just enough of what I didn’t know I needed, sensing I was thirsty for it. Preying on my need for fatherly acceptance—and my guilt. Always the guilt.

  I wrote to Mum and told her what had happened, how I’d cried myself to sleep, confessing, to her and to myself, that maybe there had been a part of me that had wanted to run away with him—or rather the idea of him. I did want to dance and travel and learn about the planes of astral light and be adored. I wanted this intense, magical friendship, though I hadn’t understood it wasn’t feasible with a strange man more than twice my age whose primary object was my conquest. “Why is that?” I wrote. “What kind of destructive nitwit behavior is that?” I knew with this last rejection the intensity would fade, and subconsciously, I knew, I had been feeding on it. The possibility that I could still tack wildly in an alternate direction. That I could be wondrous, wild.

  “I’m guessing the key word here is magic,” Mum wrote back. Magic, to her, was always hard to lose. “This probably isn’t the responsible mother thing to say, but I am glad you considered running off.” She didn’t think I was a nitwit. For the first time, I was just like her. And Svengali was the type of man she might have chosen: worldly, a little deviant, and—lord knows—in her age range. “Here’s the question, though,” she wrote. “Why do you keep picking men to fulfill you in so many ways your partner of choice doesn’t? Why are you settling for so little when the world has so much to offer?” She had too often done the same, she said.

  “Meg,” she wrote, “don’t cry. Live. Don’t have guilt that you are being unfair. Where in this pair of men are you seeing anyone being fair to you?” She thought Peter and Svengali were to blame, “a couple of clowns” taking only what they wanted from me without honoring the rest. “You, my darling girl, are only a nitwit in that you value yourself so little.

  “Keep dancing,” she wrote. “Keep flirting. Hold your head high and give them both a run for their money. You have nothing to prove to anyone. Do what you will, but I am glad you are feeling alive and sexy and vibrant. It’s about time, because you are.”

  I treasure those words now. Back then I could not believe them. Back then I felt only sick remorse. Back then, my stomach twisted at the mere thought of being considered “sexy.” I had never meant to flirt, or tease. I didn’t even think that I knew how. “A woman has always three parts in her,” the maestro had once written to me. “The little girl (that we love so much); the grown up, savvy and sophisticated woman (it’s OK); and the asshole part (the bitch, that we all hate).” The insinuation was that, in refusing him, I was playing at the last. I wanted to yell—to flail in his direction with my strangled feminism and my fists. I knew he was a sexist twerp. But I did nothing; I couldn’t quite channel the rage. Deep down, I feared he might be right—though not about the sophistication or the spurning bitch. The little girl, I felt, was me: constantly in trouble, constantly confused.

  I stopped going out to Queens. Our interactions after classes and rehearsals were perfunctory, curtailed. We both knew this was the end of our grand friendship. Perhaps he was embarrassed too. His motives were coming clear. I was no prodigy. I was an easy mark, the only twenty-something girl in a studio of mid-aged women.

  On the night of the performance, I stood at reception, waiting for Svengali, my shoe bag in one hand, my boots still on my feet, as if I planned to run. Another tango teacher came up to the desk. I’d seen him often; he taught intermediate and advanced classes full of pretty girls and ballerinas. His name was Enzo. He was handsome, and still shy of forty. He wore sweater vests and corduroys and carried a rolled-up New Yorker, an umbrella, and a scally cap. I assume
d that if he knew me, it was only through Svengali’s antics at the práctica.

  “The big night, eh?”

  “Such as it is,” I groaned.

  “Nervous?”

  We locked eyes. I told him I was terrified, then promptly disappeared to change my shoes and put on the crimson lipstick Mum had encouraged me to buy for the occasion. The studio was bustling as usual, and indifferent to my nerves. The stakes for these monthly promo nights were low—except for me, suddenly and sorely sure that everyone would see the blunders I had made writ large. There were eight of us performing, four couples dressed in black and red. We danced to “La bordona,” the 1949 Pugliese version of a stirring Emilio Balcarce tune. The later interpretation, recorded by Troilo, “el Pichucho,” in 1956, is considered the immortal one. But Svengali had chosen the Pugliese, and it was plenty rousing. It was a gallop of a tango—great sprints of tempo that race and slow and stall out into quiet sections like a majestic beast lowering herself to sleep. The strings in “La bordona” play that purebred beast, raring to stretch her gait to breakneck speed, but stifled by her rider’s whims for pomp and pageantry.

  The song is difficult to dance, especially for beginners, and the maestro erred on the side of vulgar showiness. This wasn’t real tango; it was choreography. There was lots of saucy leg-linking and posing, even one section in which the four men and four women broke apart to line dance toward each other, West Side Story–style. We bungled the stirring variation at the end with butchered ornaments and sloppy molinetes. My ankles quaked, my heart slammed at my ribs, I cringed. But the song came to its famous Pugliese finish, and that was that. Polite applause. I blushed, though not with the customary pleasure of performance. I was now not merely dancing, turning circles blind; I had been blinded.

  Peter had come to watch. “Good job, Biscuit!” he said. He looked genuinely baffled, possibly also proud. I neither introduced him to the maestro nor met Enzo’s eyes as I quit the room and gathered up my things. I freed my hair from bobby pins, and fled.

  Chapter Six

  peter steered me through the evening crowd of hipsters smoking outside cocktail bars. The throngs of normal people, ignorant to tango. There was a game on in a sports bar four blocks up. We went in through a wall of noise, sat down, and ordered fried food, foamy beer. I stared, dazed, at the screen, watching the points rack up in each team’s square. Modern music thumped through the commercials. I blinked across the table at my boyfriend, his focus squarely on the game. This would have been a good place to give up, to let tango recede. I swallowed my pint and wished the spell would break for good, and let me go. But it did not.

  Recently, I found this mantra etched into a notebook from that time: He visto mi alegría y lo voy a lograr. Meaning, roughly, I have seen my joy and I am going after it. I couldn’t let the maestro spoil my alegría, however mortified I felt.

  I waited a week or two, and then, in penance, sought out a female teacher: well-respected, smug, sadistic Mariela. She taught Pre-Intermediate technique on Monday and Wednesday nights, classes full of still more arduous walking exercises: keeping the body trunk over the leading foot, stepping toe first—sliding, and hovering in the middle of the almost-splits. It was essential training, the mechanics of the all-important walk. Keep your legs together; let no light between your thighs. Between steps, always collect the feet together at the ankles. Err on the side of tidiness, precision. These were basics I’d neglected in my hubristic sprint through Svengali’s showy sequences.

  Mariela taught in a rented space that wasn’t quite a studio—more like an empty room hidden in an unmarked building on a side street in the purse district. There was no warmth. Often, there wasn’t even music. The class was small and strangely populated: a Bangladeshi banker, a stylish Asian art dealer in a pillbox hat, a potbellied middle-aged white guy named Bill. Again, we didn’t speak. Two expert leaders, whom I called her fan club, were on hand to help. They offered no more encouragement than she.

  Mariela distributed pieces of paper for each of us to place beneath our feet. In tango, after all, both feet—stepping and trailing—must maintain contact with the floor. Our task was simple: keep the paper underfoot.

  “If you lose the paper, you’re doing it wrong,” she barked, in a voice far too sultry to be shrill, her vowels accentuated in the perfect Argentine liquescence of her speech. She was a lovely human being off the classroom floor.

  We stumbled around for twenty minutes, grunting, desperate for success. One by one, we lost our balance and our papers slipped.

  “No,” she said, pacing the room. “Wrong.”

  She wasn’t even looking at us. She had eyes in her dominatrix bun. Sometimes she’d shake loose her hair, the jet-black waves that hung like shiny meat, and wind it back into a knot. It was too much hair for such a tiny woman. Too much glossy beauty, too much poise. She was petite, maybe five foot three in flats, and I resented her low center of gravity, her incorruptible balance, and her sturdy turns.

  She was not the slightest bit impressed with me. I was not special. I was just another beginner breaking rules, too eager to advance. She seemed terrifically bored with me, with all of us. For the first time, I grasped how onerous it must be for professionals to suffer all these boobs stampeding on their national bequest. The idea of being just another tango tourist gave me a pang of self-reproach.

  For the first time, my dedication wavered. I stifled intermittent yawns. The class dragged on in drills that seemed devised to make us look ridiculous. It was possible, I thought, that after all these weeks and fees I’d never get the hang of tango. Not with all the Mondays in the world. What was so effortless for Mariela and her humorless assistants seemed impossible. And she wasn’t even wearing tango shoes, but knee-high four-inch-heeled leather boots.

  “No. Wrong,” she’d repeat, as if exhausted by us, by our failure to achieve. She yawned and checked her watch. “Again.”

  Her lack of kindness was disheartening, but she was a genius. “Stop,” she’d cry, and march into the middle of the room to demonstrate. She made it look so easy; her turns were fluid, gliding—not frantic and halting, as Svengali’s had seemed. “Use the floor,” she said, her outstretched index finger pointing strongly downward as she pivoted. I noticed she spent more time monitoring our progress than Svengali, and less time preening and twirling in the mirror.

  We started another exercise, this time partnered: ochos. We formed a circle to simulate the line of dance. Guiding us by the elbows, the leaders drove us around the room, skating our little backwards figure eights while Mariela crossed her arms, patrolled. “Now walk,” she said, moving clockwise against the line of dance to catch us in the act of dancing badly. “No,” she said, pointing to me. “Wrong.

  “Use the heel,” she said. “Complete the step.” I only imagined the riding crop in her hand.

  I learned one vital thing from Mariela, which is that one cannot learn to tango overnight. The dance is an indefatigable mistress to whom you must surrender totally. She requires patience and humility and time. In 1920, when a young porteño wished to learn, he found himself a mentor at the local academia, and prostrated himself at that man’s shined-up shoes. Tango wasn’t really taught as much as it was inherited. There were no studios. No group class cycle schemes. No syllabi for Basic, levels A–D. The old maestros were just tangueros and their pupils pimpled boys, young men with varying degrees of skill and social grace, who learned by trial and error—and example—how to improvise. Since the advent of canyengue in the 1890s, apprentice dancers learned by watching, learned by trying, learned by all-important touch. Men practiced with men. A master didn’t differentiate between what he danced and what he taught to newer generations at the práctica. He simply took those young men in his arms and moved.

  I imagine these sessions were similar to class with Mariela, only more hands-on. Learning to lead by following, without the luxury of demonstration. “No. Wrong.” The student would be corrected and appropriately shamed. He would wor
k to sweating, work to failure—three hours a day, every day. Slump home with his dance shoes sagging, practicing enrosques (tight, leaderly embellished turns) in his underclothes, watching with insouciant sadness as the more experienced dancers strode past on their way to the milongas, where tango was danced each night. I see him staring out some back corner window, a sliver cut into the brick, and looking down onto their glossy, lacquered heads, their black crepe suits, white scarves, their polished, pointed shoes. And of course, at all the women he was not allowed to touch.

  For generations, tango dancers trained for years before they risked the social dance floor. Honest workers and crime bosses alike would drill like soldiers, until their skills were sure enough to function even underneath the magic spell of the milonga. The goal was—then as now—to improvise, and to impress. Even with the white slave trade importing eastern European girls by the hundreds and confining them to brothels and to social clubs, men in the city outnumbered women almost ten to one. Tango was often the only opportunity for men in turn-of-the-century Buenos Aires to hold a real live lady in their arms without having to pay.

  A man could, however, purchase tickets—called latas, as they were made of tin—and dance with women hired by the academias for social dancing. Tener la lata, to hold the tin, meant to wait for hours to hand one’s ticket over to a certain woman. But he’d have to learn to dance with other men. And wait until his maestro deemed him fit for introduction at the dancehalls. Even then, one misstep was enough to banish him. Tango was a privilege, something to be earned.

  If only Mariela had been the kind of maestra to take me in her arms and teach me with that surety and care. I longed for her to step in as my gatekeeper, to tutor me until she judged me worthy of the dance. But she remained indifferent. I settled for her biweekly boot camp, accustomed myself to the lack of praise, and tried a little harder every week to keep my paper underfoot.