I went on a real date. With an actor-chef named Dean who looked like vintage Brando and who took me and my new three-hundred-dollar dress for an extravagant post-birthday tasting dinner. He also kissed me—on the sidewalk, in the taxi back to his place, and on the unmade bed where he had thrown me, physically, upon opening the door. When he yanked my dress off, I asked him—please—not to undress me further, not just yet. He rolled over irately and asked, “Do you have any idea how much that dinner cost?”
The doubts clotted around me. It rained, unseasonably, for a week. I fell asleep to swirls of it howling outside the turret of my bedroom, flooding the backstreets of my arrabal. I felt chastened and rebuked, as though the 33.33 percent might just as well elude me.
I settled in for winter out in Queens. Peter and I brought home a Christmas tree, bought from a stoner camped outside the Ditmars Rite Aid with a stock of balsam pines. We lugged it back to our frigid apartment and hung my childhood ornaments from it as we shivered to a soundtrack of Baroque choral hymns. Christmas was our shared favorite holiday; we sat on benches in the park with peppermint lattes, wishing it would snow. It did. I went dancing in it, despite the train delays. By the time I got home from the milonga, sloughing up half a foot of snow before me on the unplowed sidewalk, it was three thirty a.m. and the world was white and quiet but for the ice chips flying in my face. I took a deep cold breath that stung my lungs, safe in the stillness of the street, dizzied to think that not a soul knew where I was.
Since the breakup, Dad made sure to phone me daily. He was still coming out of his post-divorce “Well, Meg, it’s your life” phase of self-imposed neutrality, withholding judgment to an almost absurd degree, but he made himself a reassuring presence on the phone. He’d call my office line to chat minutiae. The five minutes we spent talking about nothing were often the most grounding of my day. If ever I seemed low, he tried to cheer me up. “Think of it this way,” he would say. “That son of a bitch Richard Nixon is still dead.”
He reverse commuted from wherever he was contracting to spend his weekends in the city with his now steady girl. Whenever he could, he took me out for Friday lunch. Over lattes and salad, he’d ask me about work, and men, and whether we had heat yet, which we didn’t. As we neared December, he asked what I might want for Christmas.
I answered without thinking. “Tango lessons.”
I couldn’t tell then whether he approved. He did. I know now that he bragged about me, his daughter who had infiltrated the New York City tango scene, no matter how unsure she felt about herself. Then, however, he just chuckled, paid for lunch, and sent me money for five lessons with Nadtochi. I went back to work with one eye on the prize of tango prowess and one eye on my LaserJet montage.
Meanwhile, the holiday party season started. Time to think was at a premium. I spent work fund-raisers refilling empty wineglasses and collecting wadded cocktail napkins from would-be major donors, and social evenings singing carols or hovering by the cheese board. For three weeks I ate canapés for dinner, and snuck off to dance as soon as I knew I would not be missed at whichever gathering I fled. I closed most weeknight milongas, right down to “La cumparsita.” I slept very little, survived on free wine and cookie platters, and pumped every spare hour and resource into tango. By the middle of December, I’d popped a blood vessel in my left eye, like a little badge, a red freckle of delicious excess. I flirted ever closer to the idea of misbehavior, to being rash, or unreliable, or hedonistic. I left my office-ready pumps at home, saving my feet, and pushed the too restrictive woolen pencil skirts back in my closet. I started wearing wide-legged jeans or cotton jersey tango skirts to work. My new look was wholly unprofessional, but spared me a nightly costume change in Starbucks bathrooms.
I sang—for the first time—in a three-woman cabaret, the sort of money-losing passion project dreamed up by a piano player and three not-working actresses. It was our best shot at scraping our way onto a stage, any stage—even one we had to pay for. We called it The Best Friend, The Ingénue, & The Vamp. I was the ingénue, and wore a short black dress over new lace underpants and sang ballads about just how much I wanted to be loved. We all teamed up for bawdy group numbers, culminating in a growled collective “You Don’t Own Me,” asserting our independence from men, and casting agents, and the wide, indifferent world.
We celebrated our modest triumph with another party at the vamp’s house on a Saturday in mid-December. She lived in New Jersey, somewhere between Guttenberg and Weehawken, and had filled her house with food and festive cocktail napkins. She’d made gravy in a Crock Pot, trays of meatballs, wedding cookies, and a bourbon champagne punch. We sat around and laughed and drank and made fun of all the men who’d hurt our feelings. We sang along to Eartha Kitt. By half past eight, my breath was thick with roasted garlic, and I felt warm and wobbly from the punch. Tango had wandered from my thoughts, but as we left to catch the bus back to the city, I received a message from Nadtochi. He was going to the All-Night Milonga, and would save a dance or two for me if I was going too.
It was not a date, an overture, or really even any kind of invitation. It was a statement. A summons. The promise of a tanda, maybe two—and this time, not out of mere politeness. It meant, or might mean, he thought I might prove worthy of his art. My heart thumped through the fog of food.
I was in nowhere New Jersey. I didn’t even have my shoes.
I spent the bus ride back to Port Authority deliberating, half an ear on my companions’ conversation, half an eye on Nadtochi’s text. If I caught an N train from Times Square and sprinted home first, I might make the milonga by eleven thirty. This was the sort of spontaneity I’d acquired. Running out on social obligations, brushing my teeth in panic, rushing for the train. I’d even started wearing eye makeup.
Sure! I punched into my phone, my crossed leg bouncing madly in anticipation.
The All-Night Milonga was on the ninth floor of a Twenty-sixth Street office building, across from the Hill Country BBQ. Entrance cost fifteen dollars and came with paper wristbands. There was a crowded little lobby, changing rooms, a water fountain, and a bar selling vinegary wine in plastic cups. Dancing took place in the blond-floored ballroom, which was so big, thin pillars were needed in the center dancing space to hold the ceiling up. These were vined with twinkle lights and tulle. Tables and chairs were pushed against the walls. There was a cloakroom to the left, and to the right a small and sweaty back room where those inclined danced neo-tango. The closed door bore a handwritten hot pink sign that read Alternative. This I would avoid.
I ran into Edward in the cloakroom. Nadtochi wasn’t there yet and I was nervous—overfed and garlicky and slightly sodden from the punch. I hung my coat and sat down on the bench beside him to catch up, making far too upbeat conversation, pretending not to scan the dance floor through the doorframe. I knew one person there; I had not come in vain. My nerves abated as we chatted, and I felt nearly normal when he elbowed me.
“Oh, look,” he said, “your friend!”
I thought: Edward was my only friend in tango. I had no idea what he meant.
I looked up and Enzo loomed before me in his maroon merino wool. Smirking, one arm on his backpack strap. A heartbeat or two fell out from under me. It had been months, and I had long stopped looking for him first in every ballroom.
“I was wondering when I might run into you,” he said, all teeth. His tone felt casually rehearsed. I swallowed, said, “Hi!” with too much held breath in my voice. I leapt to greet him—going for natural, polite, surprised. He placed a grandmotherly peck upon my cheek that zinged down through what would have been my axis, had I felt more rooted to the ground. He still smelled of aftershave.
“May I join you?”
“Of course,” I said, and there we were: three on a two-seat bench, my left thigh soldered into Enzo’s. The men shook hands across me and exchanged the standard niceties. I laughed, too loud, at someone’s not-amusing joke. Enzo patted my knee with one hand, absently, and left it there.
He didn’t move it as he reached into his backpack with the other hand to brandish red wine in a paper bag.
“A toast?” he asked, with sideways grin, as he began to work the corkscrew.
I nodded, wordless.
“Oh, why not,” Edward acquiesced. “But just a splash.”
A toast. To nothing. For the sake of toasting. Edward hoisted his plastic cup and took a timid mouthful, then took his leave of us. We sat in speechless silence, sipping, thighs still touching, though the bench had opened up and there was room to separate. He asked questions and I answered them, but they weren’t real questions. I wasn’t really answering. He put his heavy olive palm down on my knee again and rubbed my spandex leggings nervously. We were talking past each other. Each more focused on the movement of his palm across my leg. How thick that fabric felt between my skin and his hand. The music in the next room seemed impossible, remote. There was no one in the cloakroom but the two of us. Some twenty-five feet beyond, a mirror at the darkened end showed our reflection: red sweater and red sweater dress, very close together on a bench.
He pressed his lips together, let out breath. “When did you get back?”
“Ages ago,” I stammered.
“I’ve been hermiting,” he said. “And la belle France?”
“She was magnificent.”
“I suppose . . . to be expected?” It was a painful conversation—not unlike a tango in its rhythm—dark, and full of sudden, heavy pauses. “Wow,” he said, and laughed at nothing. I laughed too. The air between us crackled manically. I was giddy with it, leaning against the wall to hide my nervous agitation. To slow my circulation, muster poise. We finished our splash of wine. He tucked the bottle back into his bag.
“Would you like to dance?”
Nadtochi still had not arrived, so I unsheathed my heels and peeled away my winter socks. I wedged in my pale, unpolished feet and buckled the straps across my ankles, hoping to stay my hands from trembling as I did. Enzo laced his as calmly as a kindergarten teacher. He was not the all-business tugging type. There was no rush into the fray. I fumbled with my second buckle tooth, then hopped up, stashed my boots and purse haphazardly beneath the bench. I pretended to watch the dancers through the doorway as I waited for him to lay aside his street shoes. Nearly levitating in anticipation. He took his sweater off and folded it, like a handkerchief, into a perfect square.
We embraced although the song was ending, taking just one step before the resolution, the chan chan, then separating. His striped cotton shirt exuded heat. I mumbled something about being rusty, being tipsy, being far too young for him (in tango, let alone in age). Or I was about to, when the cortina ended and he pulled me into close embrace and whispered, “Shhhh.”
We danced three tandas, four. Memory fails. There were moments when my feet worked underneath me, flexing, pivoting, when I felt the suede soles of my shoes stretch against the hardwood floor. There were moments when I felt more like a helium balloon, and had no feet, and was in danger of floating into aether. But Enzo had my cord; he reeled me back. There must have been two hundred other people there. Songs began and ended. He did not release my hand between them. He rubbed his calloused thumb along my fingers and my Claddagh, awkwardly, compulsively. He looked at me with big brown camel eyes, as though I were his personal mirage. We must have taken breaks, for wine, for water, for me to retreat into the ladies’ changing room and stare down the strange new woman in the mirror, her faint eye shadow, red forehead and cheeks, and sweat strung through her hair. I remember trying not to trip, not to collide with anyone or walk into the walls. I was drunk with desert thirst. For all things warm and dry and winter. I forgot about Nadtochi, forgot why I was there. I was spinning in Di Sarli, in slow motion, dust unsettled in a shaft of light—always falling, not quite landing.
If we stopped dancing, we would lose our balance. We teetered to and from each other, paralyzed. We commented on the cortinas, which were unusually circuslike that night and full of haunting harpsichords and horns. We ran out of words. After all, what did we have in common, save dancing and that one book we’d both read? We stood there, anxious, laughing, drugged, our pupils blank and wide. Whenever music started, we would move as if by accident, him stumbling, walking forward into me, and me receiving him. I absorbed the shock of us in my beginner backsteps, still a little too far forward on my toes. Heels up, relevé. I scooted my startled game feet in reverse, teasing the hunter. Beckoning. He led sequences I was not advanced enough to follow—not out of ostentation, but because he was no longer in teacher mode. He was just dancing. Honestly, and at his level. I scuffled to keep up. He led colgadas, wherein we each moved off our axes for a moment, our feet meeting between us, swinging our centers out and away from each other, like a drinking straw dispenser at a soda counter. Centrifugal. But once I fell away from our center, I was disoriented and unsteady. Sorry, I exhaled into his face, my eyes squeezed against our shared cheeksweat. Mmmm, was all he said.
“This is a dream,” he breathed. “I’m dreaming.” I didn’t think it was a line.
After one strange xylophone cortina, I noticed Nadtochi with a start, dancing in the distance. I caught his eye just over Enzo’s shoulder, and smiled by way of explanation. He gave a sagacious nod. But he was on another planet, not the moonstone cavern I was lost in. I shut my eyes and danced with Enzo. Only Enzo. We were sonar tethered. I barely heard the music above the din between us.
We fell from the line of dance into a pair of folding chairs. Empty tables were strewn with half-eaten butter cookies, wadded cocktail napkins, and plastic cups half-full of wine and water. Nadtochi was gone. There were only stragglers now: couples, loners, Argentines drinking Fernet in the corner.
“It’s late,” he said.
“It is.”
We danced another tanda. This was the drama hour. Every late milonga has one. All violence in the strings. As if the music had grown tired of flirting, maybe even tired of dancing. It sounded like a lady swooning, shouting, her heart sinews strung tough as steak. We’d found a rhythm: pulsing walk, tight rocking turns. I was barely breathing and my arches ached. Cortina.
“Shall we?” he asked. I nodded and we tottered off the floor.
It took too long for me to change my shoes; somehow I couldn’t get the buckles loose. Someone had turned the lights off in the cloakroom. When I got out to the lobby, I expected he’d have gone. He met me there.
“I have a treat for us,” he whispered. We had the elevator to ourselves.
“Close your eyes,” he said. “Open your mouth.”
I heard the snap of mist, his thumbnail rupturing the rind. The elevator swelled with it. I felt the peeled segment pass my lips. A clementine.
For months, that smell was his. The crispness of it, sweet orange water on the tongue. We staggered out into the street and crossed it, moving away from the milonga, into a shadowed patch of sidewalk. He fed me pieces, dropping little petals of the peel into the street. It was after four. We stood in shadows, as if Sixth Avenue weren’t just around the corner, waking up. He put the last piece on my tongue and kissed me, which was—even after all that came before it—somehow a surprise.
His sweater smelled of books and shaving cream. My coat smelled of frozen wool. We kissed again; my mouth opened to the warmth of his. He pushed me up against plate glass, cold, his arms around my waist. It felt like an extension of our dancing. I could still feel the bass line of the music in my pulse, and echoes of the melody sawed in my ears. We kissed until that faded into snowy static.
“I don’t suppose you’d—”
I was not the kind of girl who went to Jersey City in the dead of night, back to a man’s apartment after kissing for an hour up against the windows of Hill Country BBQ. But my body couldn’t bear to drift more than an inch beyond his hands, so I said yes. He pulled me by the hand to Sixth, where everything was brighter—dawn was almost breaking—and I waited in Duane Reade for him to buy us fruit juice. We stood for a moment in the fluorescent v
estibule, squinting in the harshness of the light.
The taxi was absurd, expensive. In it, we shared the juice. The world was seasick—tunnel, roadway; only we were steady. “This is crazy,” he mumbled between sips, that hand upon my thigh. “This isn’t real.”
A sleeping street. Dark-windowed row houses. Spindly unleafed trees. We took four steps down from street level and stood a moment in the cold, the taxi gone, as Enzo fumbled with the lock. There were wet leaves clotted at his feet. Cobwebs. The door opened to the basement level, to a single room crowded with books and mildewed record covers. He called his place disaster; I called it beautiful. A rash of papers in the entryway, a scattering of shoes and scarves. A pair of belted trousers slung over a chair. Then walls and walls of hardbound art books, hoarded photographs and records. He’d been through fire, then a flood. His books were yellowed, carbon-dusted refugees, well loved. He took the special ones down from shelves and laid them in my open hands. I riffled through them, reverent, as he made tea. I sat down on his bed, beneath a wall of paperbacks. I ran my fingers gently down their spines, and smiled. He sat down beside me, handed me a mug, and read to me. From Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express. The passage where the author reads to old, blind Borges for the first time. I felt old and blind as well, but also very, very young as I gaped up at him. I closed my eyes and let the words wash over me, in sepia.
“Gradual blindness is not a tragedy,” Borges was saying to Theroux. “It’s like a slow summer dusk.” Words swam behind my eyes. Words, I understood. I listened to them in Enzo’s voice and heard the way he loved their shapes and quirks, the way he held them in his mouth with wonder. The two men traded anecdotes and went dissolving into Kipling, a whirl of iambs and trochees through the old-grey widow maker with the ten-times fingering weed to hold you. “How beautiful,” Borges said. “You can’t say things like that in Spanish.” I could hear Enzo smiling as he reached the end, where we see a sly cat has chewed the author’s sweater sleeve. “Its eyes were tightly shut,” he finished, and I opened mine.
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