Tango Lessons_A Memoir

by Meghan Flaherty

  I was nervous. My right palm was sweating in his left, my ankles quivering. I was certain he could feel my heart beat through my meager chest, and not because I was so attracted to him—which, of course, I was—but because he was a teacher. This dance was a challenge, an audition, and a test.

  A tango came on, a slow one. I wish I could remember which. Like many leaders, he hummed a few bars to himself, very quietly, mouth closed. For the first time, this did not annoy me. His shoulder blades were strong beneath my arm. His nose was bigger than I’d realized. It released warm gusts of respiration, like a horse on a cold morning. There was something of the stable about his arms as well. I shut my eyes and almost smelled the trampled hay. The other dancers, with their comb-overs and ruffled dresses, disappeared. The room did too. In its place I imagined walls of wood with hooks and metal instruments and leather straps. It was warm and musky there.

  There is a moment, learning to follow, when it’s simply not enough to shut your eyes and move where you are led. When it is not enough to turn blind circles in the dark. For every movement you interpret properly, every mirror you create by walking in his wake, every step you take into the empty air between you, there is something so much more important. That is standing still. La esencia del tango is in the pauses.

  I hadn’t learned this yet—which is why he held me there. In our impatience to improve, we new followers string ourselves so tight that we are always moving, always second-guessing. In the interests of litheness, listening, we strain ourselves to catch a leader’s signals before they’re even sent. Our starting bells ring out too soon. I was an untrained colt, braced for the gun—and Enzo made me wait.

  My ribcage stilled. The first step was a reflex milliseconds late, as if taken by surprise. I tried to relax, but it was difficult. A new leader is often a little hard to follow. You’re not accustomed to his rhythms or his engine quirks. Certain complex steps flow as they should, and others, which are easier, are blundered. “Wooh! Sorry!” I squawked again, and made my best awkward conversation in between the songs.

  He was patient. When I didn’t get a step, he led it slower, steadier, until my body understood it. My limbs grew heavy, warm and pliant. If I opened my eyes, I was sure the room itself would spin. We danced two tandas before he whispered, “Thank you, that was lovely,” in my ear and quit the floor. I steered myself back to the Malbec and my magazine, his breath still on my neck. I didn’t want to dance with any of those other men.

  I waited until Enzo disappeared into the men’s room before I donned street shoes and fled. Like every starry-eyed heroine met with every hairy-chested man who ever graced the pages of a romance novel, I was suddenly undone. Aware, finally, that something remained missing, some void in me that even tango lessons couldn’t fill. For the first time since I’d started dancing, I felt that I’d transgressed.

  The next evening, Peter and I flew off to the South of France, to his family’s summer home. I’d sublet the studio apartment I so rarely slept in, and taken a five-week unpaid furlough from my job. The nonprofit coffers had been grateful to suspend my meager monthly salary; I was grateful to be free. I spent those five weeks listening to Lucienne Boyer and picking lavender, biking to the plage des naturistes—a baguette, book, and towel in my basket—and lying naked on the sand. I was learning to read my body like a book full of forbidden knowledge. I’d been to Provence with him before, and lain there on my towel beside his, on that very beach, but this was different. Last year, the nudity meant nothing. I was but one body on a beach with many other bodies. Not even Peter paid me any notice; he was too busy ogling the more nubile of the bathers above the pages of his paperback. I read mine on my stomach, feeling brave, but at so little cost.

  This year, however, I felt noticed. Not by Peter, or the hazelnut old naturistes, or even the adolescent boys who snuck up from the normal beach to catch a peek. But by the sun, the warm, dry air, the water. I took the heat into my skin as though my cells were thirsty for it. I tanned my pale pink Irish skin to mauve, and only some nights drank enough rosé to find a pair of heels in my suitcase and do boleos on the balcony.

  Boleo is tangospeak for whip, a by-product of contra-movement and momentum, your free leg cracking fancy in a gesture to the long-forgotten pampas cows. I practiced these—half to test out this new sharpness in me, half as a dare. I tucked one knee tight behind the other and made little tongue-lash circles with it, like the flouncing of a bustled hem. Back boleo. I turned forward ochos on the terrace tiles and, every so often, changed direction rapidly so one leg crossed in front and licked behind me for the other. Front boleo.

  I wanted to know if Peter might see me differently in these stilettos in the still-warm night, exercising urges I did not yet understand. If he did, he never said. I didn’t ask. Tango had been an escape for me, from drudgery, uncertainty, and painful insecurity; now it was also a weapon I was half-afraid to wield. I wanted it to be the only answer, and it wasn’t; there were some things dancing couldn’t solve.

  Peter and I spent hours together. He played piano; I helped around the garden and the house. We drank cold wine at lunch. Each afternoon, he disappeared into the Internet, where he spent his leisure time—and I into books, where I spent mine. We were good company, good coexisters. Both of us were happier here, in utopian Provence—with each other, with ourselves. Ambition faded into stillness, into the minor errands of provincial life. Cheese, greens, wine, spit-roasted chicken. A day wanted to be lived immediately, like the bread we purchased every morning—and ate by evening, lest it stale. His mother fantasized about a wedding ceremony someday underneath the olive trees in the backyard, so I did too, picturing myself in antique lace, a crown of rosemary and snowdrop flowers in my hair. Sex wasn’t everything. What mattered was a family: folks around a table ripping pieces off the same baguette. Bad jokes and grandchildren. Laughing until drunk with it, then doing dishes as a team. Tucking children into cribs.

  Peter wanted none of these things. He hated children. Their noise and volatility made his muscles clench. A single wail of a newborn in a restaurant or on a plane was enough to make him wince. I’m not sure he believed in marriage, either, or any of the other things his mother wanted him to want. But he would have settled for them. Such was our affection for each other. I thought of the Kay Boyle poem “Monody to the Sound of Zithers.” I have wanted other things more than lovers. Peace, contentment, to learn by heart things beautiful and slow. This could be my life. The elements would be my lovers. Clean rain could kiss my eyelids, and the sea could fill my mouth. I could live here, even in the winter when the shops had closed, the crowds had gone, and there was nothing but the cold wind whining off the Alps. I could write books, the secret ambition I’d spoken aloud only to my mother, a dream unlikely and absurd, but that persisted whenever I tried to picture myself as old. Maybe the problem wasn’t that I was settling for something less. Maybe “less” was what I needed—to revel in the beauty of the chaste and unembellished, the uncomplicated life.

  I was talking myself into it. Uncertain, unconvinced, aware of my own folly. Tango murmured in the background of my indecision, like the sirens and the churn of motor yachts across the gulf. When Peter’s folks had gone to bed and things went quiet, I’d play Hugo Díaz on their stereo. Victor Hugo Díaz was a folklore musician, a child prodigy at the harmonica, who only began recording tangos five years before his death in 1977. His tangos were all instrumental, with his harmonica substituted for the bandoneón. It sometimes feels as though he’s scraping music straight out of your chest. It sounds like someone torturing a trumpet. It grimaces at you, squints, and wails. In quieter measures, you can hear his guttural intakes of breath.

  I left the porch doors open, went outside, and let his music follow, ripping through the night. While Peter read through his roster of pundits, a gin and tonic underfoot, I lassoed my feet behind me, one knee tucked demurely behind the other, laboring to point my toes. It became my ritual for saying all the things I didn’t have th
e heart to say.

  I wrote purple passages in my journal about yearning, about being twenty-five, and looking across the gulf at darkened jetties, and at all those faraway needlepoint stars. I got through all of my detective novels and picked up Anna Karenina, which I’d lugged across the ocean in my suitcase and, even as I’d done so, wondered why.

  I was relieved to find a woman in those pages more distressed than I. A woman not herself so much as someone else’s mother, lover, wife—mercurial and failing at all three. She seemed to storm through the wreckage she wrought of her life on passion only—against unfairness, a man she could not have, the liberty she could not choose. I did not admire her, but her empty places became mine. I sat by the pool, bees humming busily, my feet dangling in the water, and devoured her. With cocktail hours happening behind me, I read, accepting perhaps a Dubonnet on ice, my shoulders bronzing through my sundress.

  When I finished, I dashed off an email to Enzo, whose presence I’d felt lurking in the pages. Something like:

  e,

  thank you for the recommendation. I loved her, every word.

  my best from the sud de france,

  m*

  And then I curled into my corner of the king-sized bed I shared with Peter, a sea between us. That night, I think, he fell asleep above the covers, I below.

  Later that summer, Enzo sent a poem. About how he’d watched a tugboat pass on Coney Island that bore a name like mine. And how he sank into the hot Atlantic—how the heat of him, his body, nearly boiled the water—and he imagined how a fevered jet might reach across to me in France. Stunned, I sent one back. It was cheeky and evasive, singsong. Composed while treading seawater, faceup in a shaded cove. I floated, repeating verses to myself to put to paper. The tide swayed and I with it, watching Peter onshore in his sunglasses, eyeing women on the beach. The water buoyed me, cool on my skin, alive. I debated sending what I’d written, but I did—in a single flush of daring, frightened I had opened up a chasm underneath my feet.

  We wouldn’t speak again for months.

  Chapter Ten

  summer ended. I came back to the city bronzed, tranquil, and broke. Peter and I decided to move in together; inertia told us it was the thing to do. Perhaps more than that, it was the debt we felt to each other that compelled us. For better or worse, we’d linked our lives. We did not blame each other for the things we lacked. And I’d made room, too much room, in my heart of late—as if tango had snapped the lines I tried to live within and I feared hurtling off. I made Peter my anchor. I wanted him to fill and weigh my heart. Not because I would have been unfaithful, but because I wished for something more. It was a yearning I couldn’t see or speak. A fear that there was something in me I could not control.

  I knew it wasn’t my fault that he wasn’t happy, but my selfish splashing in the pleasure pits of tango could hardly have helped. We both needed something big to change. We found a two-bedroom apartment off Ditmars Avenue in Queens, and filled it with the contents of my studio. It was the third floor of a new construction, shoddy, cheap, but full of light. I spent three days scrubbing sawdust from the corners of the floors and windowsills, preparing it for us. He bought appliances and curtain rods, and I hand-drilled brackets into the wall to hold them. This was to be our home.

  I went back to work, and let the weeks notch by. My first boss—erratic, often cruel, but just as often inappropriately generous—had been replaced by a smarmy, ladder-climbing micromanager with a piercing adenoidal drawl. She’d worked her way up from the intern pool and made a mercenary grab for director of development behind my former boss’s back. She must have felt her windowed office, overlooking nothing charming, entailed the constant monitoring of her inferiors’ every move. There would be no more unpaid furloughs, no more comp time, no more long walks for a Friday morning latte. But we were helping people, every day, and that beat tending bar. I came in every morning with rededication: I took initiative, took careful meeting notes, took precisely fifteen-minute coffee breaks. By afternoon, I sat there in my swivel chair and felt the walls closing in. As if my lungs were empty, but I couldn’t take in a full breath of air. I’d spend the final hours of the workday staring at my screen saver until someone came near enough to see. I drank bottles of water just for an excuse to get up, pace down the office hall, and pee.

  I stalled in going back to tango. The idea seemed somehow remote to me, a nasty habit I had quit. The more I stayed away, the more I missed it, and the more that made me hesitate. Two months had passed since we’d returned from France. I was sure I’d lost whatever footing I had found before we left. But, I confess, the quality of that last dance with Enzo lingered in my skin, like the trace of water from the gulf half a world away. Sebastián Arce wasn’t wrong. Tango is diabolical; it is the marriage of your worse and better natures, in your own body, in the violin and bandoneón.

  I unpacked my red T-straps from their tote bag. They were rumpled, scarred, and somehow alien to me, despite having been deformed exactly to the contours of my feet. I thought about those long-ago porteño man-cubs at the feet of milonguero masters—waiting, desperate for a debut at the dancehalls—and my impatience flared. I remembered how it felt to be there in that dark bar behind the wall of scaffolding, unbeknownst to almost everyone in New York City. How it felt to sit and wait to be surprised. I remembered, too, the trepidation. My stomach dropping once I turned the corner and saw another stranger with a telltale shoe bag slipping past the neon signs and through the door. Then the mesmeric lullaby of music, cycling through tanda after tanda, turning the needle of the line of dance.

  I took a deep breath and went back to Lafayette, finding it every bit as dingy and rundown. This time I came alone, and early, to take the pre-milonga lesson with Dardo Galletto, Enzo’s mentor. At ten dollars a class, these were relatively cheap and entitled you to stick around for proper dancing afterward. I paid my fee and changed my shoes, watching the Argentines greet one another with dual cheek kisses. Always they seemed to be having a much better time than us yanquis, as they called us; perhaps they didn’t have to try so hard. For the rest of us, it was an awkward social haven, the illusion of spending time with other human beings—without having to communicate in words.

  The class began with all the lights on in the restaurant, with the bartender still polishing and stacking glasses on the bar. Dardo was short, but also ballet strong, and with a schoolboy’s innocence against the whorehouse of the world. “Love! Love!” he cried as we circled him, warming up. “You must show she that you love she.” His teaching partner was a goddess, forty-something and Italian, with all the jewels and bronzy softness to her skin that fortune buys. He called her Bella. She wore party dresses and a different pair of Comme il Fauts each night. These were special boutique Buenos Aires heels, four-inch gold and strappy numbers showcasing her painted toes. Always there were fewer men than women, so she lapped the room with Dardo, leading stragglers. She came to me, her perfume just behind her, and I was struck by a sticky whiff of sweet gardenia. She was elegant, expensive.

  “Yes, good,” she cooed to me, my face somewhere inside the fortress of her curls. “You do not rush; you wait,” she breathed into my neck. I blushed and thanked her. Dardo shouted, “Chaaaaaaange partnerrrrrr!”

  I learned from Dardo to find the heaviness in my hips, to really sink my weight into the floor. Tango starts to feel good when you do it right—as satisfying as a slingshot, or a hand held out the window of a moving car to catch the jets of wind. Dancers like Dardo milked the pauses, wound the body spiral tightest, near to breaking, going into turns. For them tango meant to hold and to release. To love everyone you touch for those three minutes, with total equanimity, then let them go. “Yes, yes!” our ringleader cried, triumphant. “Do you feel the love?!”

  I didn’t. I kept trying, but I was too tightly wound, and tentative. My hips too narrow, bony, and my body uninformed. What I needed was another maestro—one who wouldn’t try to suck my toes. On Edward’s suggestion, I starte
d taking private lessons with Michael Nadtochi, former Russian youth champion of ballroom dance. The Great Nadtochi (Mischa to his friends) was one of an armada of tango expats, pros and aspirants, living in the modern arrabales of New York—Brooklyn, Inwood, Queens, or in Nadtochi’s case, New Jersey. He and his then-partner, Angeles, taught in midtown one day each week, stocking a tiny studio in Koreatown with private students in one-hour segments back to back. They both had studied with El Gran Gavito, milonguero legend of the Forever Tango cast, and shared a very classic style. She was short and milky-skinned, with hair dyed beetroot red, lipstick to match, and an augmented bust of which she was extremely proud. He was long-legged and wiry, with hair gelled just shy of greasy, but with an air of absolute refinement, like a gentleman of old. When they performed together, she was all sequins and slits, and he wore tailored high-waist suits. A Muscovite Fred Astaire.

  As ever, dancing with a teacher, I was nervous. But Nadtochi spoke in soothing registers. “Tranquila,” he’d chirp when I apologized for misinterpreting—or some other sin of the feet. He was patient, positive, exacting. There was no false flattery, but when I got a movement right, he let me know it. “Esa!” he would hoot, and we’d high-five. Precision was important, but the journey there need not be arduous.

  Nadtochi moved like a jungle cat on hefty, silent haunches. He put my palm up to his chiseled abdomen so I could feel the flexing of his core. Then, for one paid hour, we would dance. Weeks passed in something like a training montage: for every session I could afford, I turned up in my mangy red suede heels and rolled-up jeans, or cotton dresses over footless tights. We danced to well-worn tangos, tunes off the beaten practice path. Ángel D’Agostino comes to mind, with his deferent simplicity—something from the days when Ángel Vargas sang for him and together they made tango de los angeles. Even with the raw heart of Vargas’s voice, D’Agostino’s tangos hold a steady pulse, guiding dancers through the dual storms of hopefulness and rue. This was golden music, tunes like dust motes swirling in a patch of yellowed, antique sun, and they made my life lovelier for one expensive hour every week.