We debated whether my metaphor for leading versus following was right.
“Is it like chess?” he asked with a forehead scrunch, and I explained.
“You see what we close our eyes to,” I said. “You stare, you steer, you peacock. We’re free and off in flight.” I added, “But it’s impossible. Our objectives never match. You never feel what we feel. The moment can’t be wholly shared.”
He thought for a moment, frowned, then tapped his finger on my knee.
“Sexing chickens!” he exclaimed, the finger waggling in the air. “It’s like sexing chickens.” It was my turn to frown. He went on. “You have to look really really hard to see what sex a baby chicken is.” Shared moments, he argued, were possible, as long as both parties were present. Leaders weren’t always only navigating. There was a place in the dance, he said, where the lead bypassed technique and navigation, and he moved from somewhere else, inside the music. When he was no longer thinking to himself boy, girl, boy, girl, but seeing the conveyor belt of chicks and just knowing which was which—though not necessarily aware of why.
“That’s the moment you feel,” he said. “It is shared.”
“You mean the moment of transcendence everyone in tango seeks is just the mutual sexing of chickens?”
“Exactly,” he said.
“Sexing chickens,” I said.
“Sexing chickens,” he agreed, and clinked my glass.
The rest was effortless. I’d said already what I could have spent two years avoiding telling him. I wish that it were all I needed, that all my shame disintegrated in that one bright honest moment, lost in the December winds; it wasn’t quite so simple. It was merely a beginning, our beginning—but for once, I’d started with the truth.
He was still there, my garrulous friend, with that arm over my shoulders, steering me toward a hotel bar somewhere on Tenth, a place that served us treacly off-season negronis. We were the only patrons, hunching together, elbows against the neon bar. We might as well have been the only two people awake and alive in Manhattan. When it closed, we trotted east, arms around each other’s overcoats and shouting at the cold. It was the kind of cold that tears your eyes and floods your nostrils with the smell of sea. The stoplights blurred and it was Christmas, Thirty-fourth Street, Herald Square. When he bent his face to mine, honest to god, it still felt unexpected. I closed my eyes to sudden silence and the little watery blinks of red and green. Right there on Eighth Avenue. We missed I don’t know how many traffic lights, how many little neon walking men. We kissed until it wasn’t cold out anymore. And then we went inside Penn Station and kissed more, against a dirty pillar by a shuttered-up falafel shop.
I flew to Florida four hours later, for a visit, half-convinced that it had been a fever dream. I expected Barry to evaporate, as all other tango mirages had. He’d take a small piece of me with him, if he went, that gift of trust, and I was already scheming how to weather that loss gracefully. How to play it cool. I did an early gift exchange with my mother, my sore throat soaking up the warm, then headed home. But when I landed Sunday night, I took the subway straight to RoKo—just in case. He shot me a cabeceo laced with something between hunger and relief. We both trembled that time. The RoKorazzi caught us in the exact moment when we moved from close embrace to open, but had not opened our eyes.
I was dumbfounded. After the opera, we spent every night together until he flew home to Glasgow on the eve of Christmas Eve. Night one, we went for midnight wine and chatted, idly, as he twiddled with my Claddagh. At some point, I looked down to find it overthrown, likely accidentally, my heart now closed to village boys. I left it that way. He took me home, showed me his bookshelf, kissed me chastely, standing in his kitchen steeping cups of chamomile. At four that morning, his roommates burst across the threshold of his loft with cigarettes and bags of groceries and started popping cheap beer cans and chopping onions. They’d heard so much about me. Someone handed me a plate of puttanesca, and we all sat down to dine, just as the blackness beyond their massive window turned to blue. At dawn, we bundled up in woolen jumpers, and went upstairs to watch the sunrise turn the skyline salmon pink.
Night two, after a day of galleries, Neruda, napping: Nocturne. Night three, more dancing (RoKo), and then another late-night pasta dinner, a bottle of Korbel, a conversation about art. I set an alarm and fell asleep to Pushkin stories read aloud. Night four, a film, and mulled wine at a bluegrass bar. We traipsed from pub to pub with his roommates—gin and chips, a lunar eclipse. We sat around a Brooklyn bonfire, drinking hot spiked cider as the moon turned red, then back to white. We smelled of woodsmoke when we went to sleep. Night five was stolen, his flight home for Christmas canceled on account of weather. We spent it in his empty loft, sharing warm pie and prosecco, talking about his work, my work. We danced—slow—to Miles Davis while, outside, it snowed. He carried me upstairs.
I had to tell him then, before his hands removed the last lace barrier between us, how my body had been spoiled—and not just by the uncles. Part of me was sure that this confession, once uttered, would be the end of us, so I had steeled myself and put it off until I was there, beneath him, my nose in his neck. The thought of losing him burned in my chest. “Don’t be daft,” he said, and held me tighter, touched me more tenderly, wiped away my tears. He didn’t want perfection. He wanted me, as messy as I was.
We made love. I wept, but those tears were warm and mild, and joyful. It wasn’t dancing, but it was delicious—all the flesh and indecorum I had ever shied away from made suddenly luminous by mutual desire. My heart cleaved open with the ache of risk.
“I’ll see you in a week, you wonderful creature, you,” he said in the morning, kissing me goodbye. I stood on my toes, my naked legs goosefleshed and stretching up into his candy-red jumper. He flew downstairs bah-rum-pum-pum-pumming carols, and was gone.
Even then, I doubted him. I smoothed the quilt across his mattress, dressed, and left his jumper folded on his bed. I took the train back into midtown, where I cleaned someone else’s house. I went back to my pantry, slept eleven hours. Danced. Spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with my father, who cautioned me to guard my heart; I was, after all, the daughter known for desperate, chancy choices, the daughter perhaps too eager to love.
A blizzard hit, and slowed the city to a stop. I couldn’t dance. I took pictures of city buses stalled mid-street in drifts of snow. I studied math. The night before he came back, I was so nervous that I vomited up the bag of Skittles I had eaten at a movie, right into a snowbank. But the year drew to a close, and he returned, and there he was.
That afternoon I went to yoga class, lingering too long in savasana, breathing in the room sweat and the rubber mat, breathing out my doubt. I went home through the twilight of the new year, dressed, and went back out to his apartment, half-expecting to have made him up inside my head. But he was there, and he was still there with me later as we shot cheap champagne corks across the factory roofs of Bushwick, as we all linked arms and belted auld lang syne. He was with me when I shoved manila envelopes into a mailbox one Tuesday night outside an Office Depot in Times Square. With a little thump, there went my gamble: transcripts, letters, pages full of newborn prose. And then we danced. He was with me all that winter, while I waited for the news. He was with me so long past the point when I expected him to disappear.
Kerouac wrote, “It’s only later you learn to lean your head in the lap of God, and rest in love.” This took a while. Falling in love felt like a terminal disease. A beautiful flu I couldn’t, wouldn’t cure. Beside his nightstand built of books, we slept braided together as if the bed might plummet down the chute into the river Styx. It felt like lying in an empty field at the close of dusk, the world a quiet, windy blue, no sense of earth beneath us, no sense of world beyond.
It felt like a volcada.
We kept warm in the frozen grey of Brooklyn, hunkered in his loft, amid the squat industrial sprawl south of Flushing. We stayed in for cheap and cheerful suppers with his
flatmates—more raucous dinner parties staged at dawn. We drank whisky out of jam jars. We read each other’s work, drank tea, and sat together behind laptops at big wooden tables, shivering. We stood on his graffitied roof, with our hands stuffed inside each other’s pockets, overlooking all the concrete buildings stacked like blocks of ice, and missed the moment of the sunrise, precisely when the pink eyelid of the island opened wide.
We weren’t going to milongas much, but every day with him was dancing, one long tanda made for two. We played Canaro in the front room, with winter blowing in through cracks between the massive windows. We pivoted across the concrete floor in close embrace, dirtying our woolen socks. Unshowered, breakfast on our breath. We danced in the kitchen and the freight elevator, which swayed as we spun. We danced in the frigid corridor beside the dumpster. We danced in doubled sweaters, scarves, fingerless gloves. We hummed music to each other while we did sacadas on the subway platform, waiting for the L, the Q, the 1.
You might expect that we sang tangos to each other—or thought about our love in tango terms. We did not. Most tangos aren’t for love; they’re stories of poverty, injustice, long-lost lovers, broken hearts. Songs about betrayal—half hopeless and heart-shredding, the other half for dandies on the prowl, conquistadores congratulating one another on their well-oiled shoes and pompadours. One of my favorites, “Que te importa que te llore,” begs, “Déjame mentir que volverás, que volverás con el ayer,” or, leave me with the lie that you’ll return, that you’ll return with yesterday. Love is an illusion. What does it matter to you, sweetheart, if I cry?
Then there’s “Invierno,” the most deceitful melody in all the world—knives out even as it spins its cotton candy web, sweet and reminiscent of a childhood carousel. Volvió, Maida sings, el invierno con su blanco ajuar, y la escarcha comenzó a brillar en mi vida sin amor. Winter has returned with its white veil, and frost now sparkles in his loveless life. The orchestra cascades into a weightless plunge, the painted horses sink from view, and the world continues turning as the lovers’ laughter fades. It was a cruel parable for my winter—our winter, which I hoped might swallow the world in snow and stay forever.
The lovers in tango mourned and grieved, lamented, sneered. Varela’s red-hot rendering of “Historia de un amor” was nothing more than passion spent, a heart relinquished to a woman gone. She gave him light then snuffed it when she left. There are songs like “Pasional” that speak of love-right-now, of love that breaks the chest, but that is tortured love; it isn’t real. It is dying a thousand times of agitation. Lips whose kisses trammeled reason. Worship. Burning thirst. The famous line: estás clavada en mí como una daga en la carne. You are driven into me like a dagger in my flesh. “Pasional” asks you to die in someone’s arms. It is a savage fantasy, and after three minutes it is done.
Barry and I were not a savage fantasy. We were something else, and I could find no song that summed it up. In stockinged feet, at home, we danced to “Farol,” a song about a lonely lamppost in the arrabal whose light, with tango hidden in a pocket, was losing brilliance and had become a cross. Played by Pugliese, sung by viola-voiced Roberto Chanel, it’s full of síncopas and soaring riffs above an almost plodding beat in the piano and the bandoneón. It’s relatively simple, as tangos go—sweet in places, dramatic in the variación—and dancing it is no act of courtship. All the same, imagine being cheek to cheek and listening to the words of the elegiac Homer Expósito, his poem about the workers’ dreams that mingle in the dim light thrown from a dark corner, conversing with the sky, while far away some clock chimes two. It is not about romantic love. And yet you reach your half-gloved hand up to your lover’s neck. His arm tightens a little around your waist and you turn together, bundled in the dark fourth-floor hallway of a factory, in scarves and sweaters, unwashed hair. The romance is not in the music, but in how you feel the music—how you feel your own old world dying around you, how you feel yourselves agreeing how to move.
For the first few weeks, I will admit, we reveled in the amorousness of it. We kissed in practice rooms, kissed during dancing drills. There was that added edge of being lusty in a dance that lends itself so easily to lust. And maybe having held each other on the dance floor made it somehow easier for us to throw our arms around each other that first night in December, sprinting down the street. We already knew each other’s bodies. What was left for us to learn was who we were beneath our clothes and bones.
I liked my body when it was with his body. It was cummings’s so quite a new thing. And I liked his body, his hows, the thrill of him, our eyes big love-crumbs in the dark. Being with him made me want to shout and sob and laugh and recite verse—and all at once. I called Mum to explain my rapture, and she laughed at me. “Oh, Beanie,” she chuckled. “You idiot. That’s how it’s supposed to feel.”
She was right, I realized. She’d never wanted me to swing from chandeliers into the beds of men, or take to wearing racy leopard underpants, or to be “good” at sex. That province was hers. She’d only wanted me to find a way to feel loved enough to love somebody back. Enough to melt away the shame.
“But I’m too happy,” I told her. “He’s going to wreck my heart.”
“So what if he does?” she asked. “At least now you know what you’ve been missing.”
For a while, I feared sleep. The Barry in my dreams who came and went like tides. There was a lunar pull to him. I no longer feared being alone, but constantly anticipated how it ached when, finally, ultimately, he would leave.
There were times when—just to look at him—I could feel that saline warmth flood through me. We were connected even when there wasn’t any music, even when we didn’t dance. At some point, I realized, I had to make a choice. Whether to fear the unpredictable catastrophe, or close my eyes and trust. Not just him—myself. The choice that I had made, the choice of him. I stopped saying when this ends (because I was certain that it would) to my inquiring friends. Barry was my exception, my educated guess, a leap of faith—and would be, to whatever end. There was no armor to avail me. I had to stand right there in front of him, aloud and bare.
I worked mornings, all dishwater, dusting, and news radio. I went to yoga almost every day, using the mat, the wooden floor, the concrete angles of the walls to steady me, then ate the same three-dollar salad. Sometimes Dad joined me, and treated us to oatmeal raisin cookies and a latte. I enrolled in a night writing class at Hunter College, as a palate cleanser once a week, and spent my afternoons penning detective stories, in the library, in coffee shops, at my place, or at his. On Tuesday nights, before our tango class, we met to eat our brought-from-home dinners over paper cups of coffee at a deli on Seventh Avenue. Months later, long after we’d run out of money to finance FeralTango, I passed that deli, finally noticing its name. It was printed right there on the awning: The New Start.
There is a Fresedo song, “Buscándote,” dated 1941. It may be the most beautiful tango ever written, the song that makes you stick with dancing despite the doldrums of your beginner Basic class. It’s played often enough. It is steady and slow and good for practicing, for skiing across the room in socks. Maybe it was the first song that made your eyes well up in a milonga.
Three-quarters of the way through, Ricardo Ruiz comes in and in his satin morning voice sings, “Vagar . . . ,” which means to wander. He speaks of the cansancio, or weariness, of his endless “going,” his eterno andar, and his ansias enormes de llegar, huge anxieties to finally arrive. “Sabrás,” he sings again. You’ll know. Que por la vida fui buscándote. That all my life I’ve looked for you. Hastening his wandering, he strung long roads together, traveled leagues and leagues.
It is a song about finding love—searching for it without even knowing what it is or why—and resting there until you’re sent away. It says, now that I’ve found you, love, if you prefer, I’ll leave. It builds a yesterday into tomorrow, and hopes that neither ever comes. In two minutes and fifty-one seconds, it was the truest love song I had ever heard.
/> Chapter Twenty-Eight
wherever there are bodies, there will be body heat. At first I didn’t understand this. I was afraid of sex and thought that it and tango could be separated, like two disagreeing children. This was, admittedly, naïve. They are inseparable.
In the milongas of Buenos Aires, and all over the world, men and women mine tango for romantic love, companionship, torrid dalliances, and one-night tussles. The dance floor is an easy place for lonely people to meet other lonely people. Despite what Robin Thomas said, rock climbing isn’t worse; you may be bound to each other—physically, by rope—but the rules of basic math remain. One and one still make an even two. There is no heart-strung soundtrack, no instruments that wail with human anguish. And no pope ever tried to ban it on the grounds of prurience. The thrill does not come close.
A tango is not an act of sexual congress, but there are certain inalienable parallels. With few exceptions, you can learn a lot from how a person dances about how he or she makes love. And so the lines are sometimes blurred. A thousand girls before and after me fall for a thousand men like Enzo every night. The dance floor is rife with drama, coupling and uncoupling, betrayal and desire.
I think back to what Cesar Coelho said when I was still a tango schoolgirl in my freshly ironed pleats, when I was too unripe to fathom what he meant by “secrets shared between the bodies.” What is said and unsaid as we dance. I don’t know yours and you will not know mine. Without words, and with a stranger, you dance everything you wished you’d written in every love letter you never sent. In every eulogy you never gave. You do this with your body—with the push and pull of your embrace, your breath, the pressure in your palms, your eyelids lightly, tightly closed, the tenor of embellishments, the manner of your step. Your tangüedad. We perform our pain, elation. Our sad thoughts dance. Perhaps you drag your heel in a wide arc around your leader’s leg to slow a turn because the music moves you, or you caress his foot with yours. You’re speaking the song, like Chicho, saying, this is in here, and also this; and often this is pain. Or reverie, or lust. Bitterness ebbing away. And when two dancers feel the same thing for the same pulse of piano, the same snarl of bandoneón, it doesn’t matter whether they are talking to or through each other of some forgotten, private wound. The secret has been said.
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