Tango Lessons_A Memoir

by Meghan Flaherty

  As RoKo came of age in tango, so did I. I started risking conversations on the sidelines, realizing (better late than never) that I didn’t have to talk about myself to talk to other people. I’d make a joke before I reached across the table for a carrot stick or Costco madeleine. I’d compliment a lady’s earrings in the restroom. Despite the thousands of people dancing worldwide, tango remains a very minor subculture everywhere but Buenos Aires, Finland, and Berlin. RoKo felt central to me, immense; but just outside it, Herald Square was noisy and indifferent. Maybe 750 people danced tango in that city of 8.245 million, and 29 West Thirty-sixth Street and what happened there on Sunday nights is unknown to all but 0.00009 percent. It seemed prudent to start getting to know a few of them. Perhaps I had been getting to know myself dancing with strangers, stepping from behind the scrim and peeling off the mask. I met them unadorned, and listened to their bodies in the swirling dark to learn about my own. Maybe they didn’t need to be strangers any longer for the trick to work.

  After a few Sundays under the scarves and twinkle lights, I noticed how easily it came. I cuddled up against these unfamiliar male bodies as though I had been doing it all my life. I had grown accustomed to the heat of someone else’s body, to the touch of someone else’s palm.

  Sometime just after midnight, Robin or Ko would play “La cumparsita,” the song that always signals the impending end of a milonga. When that was over the fluorescent lights were flipped, and volunteer crews started pulling down the decorations and the tablecloths and pouring coffee down the sink. Robin would play his exit song, I’m going home, whoa yeah, all drawn out and bluesy, as people switched their shoes and said goodbye. The affluent donned their fur-lined coats and hailed taxis while the students rushed around the room collecting trash. Our secret world was stripped and sealed for one more week.

  Leaving a milonga is like stepping off a treadmill. You move differently, as though you’re still submerged inside the bathtub echo of the music. As I retraced my steps back west through the shock of neon to the subway, the strains of Robin’s song hung in my ears. The pavement braced against my feet, against my throbbing foot bones. Come tomorrow, I would feel my legs filled with concrete. It was half past twelve, a Sunday night. Almost winter: forty-odd degrees and spitting rain. Midtown shuttered and geared for Monday morning. Everywhere, piles of frozen trash. The sidewalk, emptied of Sabretts, a graveyard for umbrellas, their metal carcasses torn and frayed. I waved to other tango dancers as I passed them, the feel of their handprints still in mine.

  Tango has a way of taking over, like an invasive vine, until the landscape of your life is changed. For some of the 0.00009 percent, it is a ritual. For some it is a cult, a drug. For me it was a lifeboat off a sinking ocean liner. A postcard mailed backwards to my sixteen-year-old self. The music I had loved before I understood it. The movement I remembered from a few steps in a basement bookstore bar. It was more devotion than escape.

  Chapter Twelve

  that October, Peter and I went to western Massachusetts on a weekend trip. We went for dinner and, over crème brûlée and dregs of wine, we had an honest conversation. Peter had been glaring at a stroller parked beside the table next to us for the best part of an hour. I could feel him balling fists under the table, digging his nails into his palms. He did things like that, to keep from punching walls in frustration. Sometimes, like a mourner, he would tear an eyelash. He was unhappier than I was then. I thought we had been holding each other together all this time; maybe we’d been holding each other back. Stuck in a mesh of our own untended longings, our unmet needs.

  I met those eyes, wide, blank, and pale blue. “You really don’t want children, do you?”

  “Nope,” he said.

  “Really?” I asked. “Never?”

  “Really,” he said. “Never. No.”

  The air was too warm, echoing. I was perspiring slightly in my turtleneck, twisting a triangle of tablecloth between my fingers. Some clipped-wing, flightless bird flapped in my chest.

  “And you’re never going to want to marry me.”

  “Not really,” he said, honestly apologetic. “No.”

  I nodded. It stung, the truth I’d been afraid to see for years because he was my family. Hearing it outright, however bracing, I felt free.

  “But—” he added. “I will if you want me to.” It broke my heart. We could have each gone on like this for years, convinced that staying in our strange relationship meant we could protect the other from all pain.

  It was hot and airless and I shook my head. “I think we have to let each other go,” I said. “I think it’s time.”

  I thought my saying this would shock him. He just nodded. He looked stricken, but relieved.

  He paid the bill. We walked to a whisky bar, where we nursed smoky single malts and talked through the logistics. We wept a little, then went bowling, and stayed up too late laughing, drinking watery domestic beer. It was the most unfettered fun we’d had in months. In the motel, we slept in separate double beds. I spread my arms and took up most of mine.

  It was the world’s most amicable split. We remained close friends. We even kept our shared apartment, though I bought myself a bed and he resettled his health magazines and free weights in the second bedroom. He still very rarely slept there, but the presence of his mess behind the door was comforting—his toiletries, his winter coat, his scattered gym socks on the floor.

  I moved the mattresses alone. This was the final gesture, and would make us both a little sad. Sharing a bed had been the last pretense of our relationship. Now it was the last thing to give up, the thing that made it real.

  Our mattress weighed a hundred pounds or so, and nearly flattened me. I heaved it off the bedframe, dragging, pushing, one corner at a time. It thumped flat to the floor. My socks slid as I tried to lift it. I started sweating, wheezing from the effort. I should have waited for Peter to come and help me, but I was impatient. He hadn’t been around in days, and my new bed had been delivered. I tried to heft the huge, unwieldy square onto its side, to push it through the bedroom door. It flopped into a lamp, knocking a bookcase, and broke a much-loved framed print into shattered glass. In grappling the thing aright, I stubbed my toes and bruised my arms. The mattress cover tore. The mattress dropped. “FUCK!” I screamed, and the word echoed chillingly off the thin boards of the walls and whatever inner bolts held them in place. I found myself hurling frustration at it, at that awkward, senseless bed we’d shared but never really shared, its coils and feathers standing in for Peter. Peter Pan, who would not grow up, and who would never love me in the way I wanted to be loved. Peter, whom I loved so much and had loved for so long, just never in the way I’d wanted to. There were so many nevers there. And so I cursed it, grunting, heaving, swearing. The mattress and the man had blurred and I was angry—suddenly, and mostly at myself. At the two years I had spent unhappy, thinking it would change, that we would find our spark as if by magic and he would be the one. Knowing he would not grow up the way I thought he should—not because he couldn’t, but because he didn’t want to. Moving his bed, I realized my egotism and my error. He wasn’t any better off settling with me than I with him. No matter how depressed he might have been, my staying tethered to him hadn’t helped.

  Then, just as suddenly, I mourned. That mattress in that moment was my albatross, the weight of all of it on all of me. I cried, loud and ugly, and crumpled like an exhausted child onto the bed. I cried because I loved him, because he loved me just as much, and still we hadn’t fixed each other. Now I’d made an even bigger mess. Now I had broken things. I was alone. His mattress smelled of mildew, faintly, and was grimy at the edges. Mine stood upright in my bedroom, brand new and plastic-wrapped. I lay there, surveying the room, the toppled lamp, the shards of glass. I didn’t want to be afraid to be alone.

  I stood up and I finished it. I toppled mine onto its metal frame, then muscled his around the corner out of sight. Finally the mattresses were moved, the beds were made, and it was done.
I sat there on his for a long time before I straightened a stack of dusty bedside books, and left, shutting his door. Some nights he would come in through the nursery window and everything would be just as it was. Some nights he wouldn’t. But now one room was his, and one was mine. It felt cruel, though I knew it wasn’t. There was a violence in decision, and I had chosen this. We had chosen this. And so the loneliness I’d swallowed and ignored for months rose up as if to pull me under. Without him there, I found that I could name it, finally, and stand before it, heavy as the bed.

  Chapter Thirteen

  i spent my first Friday evening as a single girl home alone with a box of cheddar crackers and a twenty-dollar bottle of wine, watching murder shows. I was on an unfortunate Nietzsche kick at the time, writing things like the greatest events—they are not our loudest but our stillest hours in my journal, and thinking about la pausa, essence of the tango: in all that forward motion, the ever-present need to pause.

  The little silver heart, centerpiece of the Claddagh ring my dad had given me when I was sixteen, just before my trip to Argentina, now tipped away from me and into the unknown. Every time I looked down as I typed, or rummaged in my wallet for my MetroCard, I saw it and felt a not unpleasant chill.

  Peter and I charged bravely forward in our new modus vivendi. He’d spend a night or two each week at our apartment, and we’d order takeout, eat on our new couch by television light, and laugh together like we hadn’t laughed in months. We retired to our separate rooms, our separate bedside lamps, our privacy. Sometimes we shouted jokes or good nights through the closed doors and the wall. No one else quite understood our new arrangement. “To hell with them!” we said, and cheersed ourselves, both so glad to have the ease between us back. We’d found an honest way to put each other first, and the logistics weren’t anybody’s business but our own.

  I felt like Odin, yanked up by his ankles, hanging headfirst into a brand-new world. Dizzy with the endlessness of what could be now that everything was upside down—resentful that even in this tidal flood of change, some things stayed the stubborn same.

  Work was still a wall of grey. Windowless. Whole days spent under the fluorescent light strip in my cubicle, editing solicitation letters. There was so much waste within those forty-hour weeks—time, money, and thought—and I was losing patience with the memoranda and the meetingspeak. I was reading too much Henry Miller—Tropics full of mad, banned prose, and all things unabashed—to accept the lack of luster in the business world. To settle, waiting for my life to happen to me—now that I felt it could.

  I started printing RoKo photos every week, taping them to my computer monitor until tiny, out-of-focus versions of myself in skirts and heels were circumtangoing the screen. My form was bad, but in my idle moments—conference calls, strategy meetings, oatmeal breaks—I’d gaze at them and see the radiant amateur: her eyes shut, arms around a stranger, smiling to herself. Her haircut shorter, longer, shorter, in a circle. More a flip book than a shrine. Sometimes I could not believe that she was me.

  As often as I could afford, I slinked away on lunch breaks to Nadtochi. I wore business casual; he wore track pants. His studio space was rented from an antique furniture dealer, the key to the restroom charmingly affixed to a wire replica of an 1890s ladies’ shoe. It had a very Great-Aunt-Mildred’s-parlour atmosphere that I equated with the faded grandeur of the Golden Age.

  The first twenty minutes of our lessons were for warming up, and often unremarkable. The longer you let lapse between your dances, the more your shoulders tense up to your ears. Your joints and fasciae stiffen, hardening your muscles out of place. Your nerves are citified, your pulse too rapid, and your reflexes too swift. It takes at least a warm-up tanda to let go enough to follow, let alone to dance.

  Nadtochi led me, slow and steady, back in time. Walk. Turn. Pause. Breathe. Until my heart rate slowed. Until my eyes stayed shut without my squeezing them. Until I couldn’t hear the honking and the shouting and the city noise outside. He felt this before I could. He felt my lungs expand against his ribs. He felt my legs grow heavy, enough for him to feel my feet through the floor. When the music no longer sounded as though it had been swallowed back in time, he stopped and I opened my eyes.

  The second twenty minutes were for skills: he’d walk me through a movement for two minutes, some kind of sacada or boleo or enganche. In the last, he’d interrupt my step, making space beneath his leg for mine to swing in, then up, then out again into the step or turn. A brief leg wrap, without pausing for effect. Enganche, like gancho, means “hook,” but feels more fluid in its execution, and more concerned with the release than with the catch. Your leg is an arrow drawing back against a bow; the point is in the letting go. He led, on repeat, until my body understood the cadence. Then he’d spend the following eighteen minutes trying to trick me out of preempting the move each time I thought I saw it coming. Testing me, leading me to the very moment of the leg wrap and then shifting gear. He led everything but the move in question, until he could surprise me with it. Until I wasn’t moving my leg through the enganche; it was moving me.

  A good instructor breaks you down until the skills take root in tendons. Following is not anticipating; it’s receiving. What Nadtochi taught me, in his infinite patience, was to listen, not just hear. To quiet my mind and to surrender my free leg—not stiffly shoot it out before the step was led. Once he felt my body pliant and my muscles tuned, he’d turn the volume up. “Now we just dance,” he’d say, blasting Biagi. The pedagogue disappeared and he became a jungle cat again, all sinews—striding, crouching, as the music swirled.

  Dancing is like chess, for leaders, but for followers it is a form of meditation. You reach the floor, configure yourself into a pair of arms, and close your eyes. The rest is up to chance and skill. Within this calculus of partner, music, and improvisation, you surrender to the lead. But this is not the same as switching off. You must be absolutely in it. Listening to the void, the music, learning to interpret what you hear. Following is meant to be an active verb, your own unique response to each suggestion.

  I was learning to feel the love that Dardo swore lived in my hips, and very tenderly to assert myself when I heard something in the music that I wanted to express. This was Nadtochi’s doing too. Embellishments were means to make each dance my own. He taught me a handful of these adornos, from stolen beats tapped between steps to the shoeshine of my toe along his trouser leg. Each time I tried one out, however roughly—a hidden kick (amague, which is like a threat or feint), or the outward flexing of my heel in a turn—he shouted, “Esa!” and I beamed. It was no longer enough to follow, to be “danced,” Nadtochi taught me. Dance back, he would demand of me.

  “You see,” Gavito used to say, “we are painters. We paint the music with our feet.”

  The last few minutes of his lessons were a rapid, wordless whirl. I listened with my cartilage, attempting the crude embellishments he’d shown me, feet flicking at the floor like tongues. Wisps of hair were plastered to my temples in a glaze of sweat, both mine and his. My collarbones shone with it; my eyes shone with the dancing. When it was over, we high-fived and made small talk as I changed my shoes and buttoned up my coat. It was the closest I had ever come to feeling like a track athlete or, for that matter, an adult. The one hour a week in which I felt alive—before I went back to the office, slid the eraser across my name under the “Out” column, and eased into my swivel chair.

  Chapter Fourteen

  i welcomed the familiar melancholy chill of fall. Our landlord had cheated on a building permit, so our apartment had no heat or cooking gas—for months—and our complaints had long been lost in city red tape. Concerned third parties disapproved of our living situation, for this and all the other reasons. We ignored them. The nights got shorter, darker, cold. Peter brought home an expensive space heater and more take-out and we huddled under blankets in separate corners of the couch. When we needed to, we talked. We talked about the things we had denied ourselves to be together—
what he named our missing 33.33 percent. We talked about everything we did and didn’t feel, which was mostly free.

  As autumn deepened, Peter came home less and less. His room became a door ajar, an unmade bed, a stack of boxes half-unpacked—while mine accumulated bamboo plants and books and all the decorative flourishes I’d missed about myself, living with someone else. Our shared apartment was a comforting idea—continuous, not altogether true. We each kept a tender eye on the other, and gave each other latitude. I made a secret list of wants—to date, to mount a last-ditch, redoubled acting effort, and to daydream of advanced degrees. I was emboldened. I cut my hair. To keep from fidgeting with unripe possibility, I danced.

  I turned twenty-six on Thanksgiving that year. Feast day before the long, cold, lonely winter. Peter brought home an espresso machine and a bunch of flowers big enough to fill my bedroom windowsill. The holiday was hard for both of us, a little awkward for his family, but we stormed forward, undeterred. Relegated to the outskirts of this family I’d adopted as my own, I felt again the loss of mine. The scattering: My mother to the south, abandoned to warm weather and her own resilience, working six-day weeks for twelve dollars an hour at a spa and fitness center for the snowbird country club elite. My father drifting in and out of town, from contract job to contract job, and trying to right his own life on the rails. I could not mend what had been broken—on either side of our once invulnerable triangle. I could not make them civil to each other, let alone paste our lives back together, or make them whole again by force. Holidays as an adult, I realized, would always have this tinge of loneliness and mourning. No matter whom I spent them with. But after we were full of turkey and champagne, bone weary from digestion, Peter’s family brought out a candle-laden carrot cake and sang. I thought back to something I had overheard his mother say in France. She’d been talking to visiting friends. “Oh, Meg,” she’d said. “She’s one of us.”