We Came Here to Forget

by Andrea Dunlop

  I’ve arrived early and the class before mine is still going on. I watch as a collection of adults of all ages pick their way through intricate combinations. A younger man and woman I assume are teaching assistants wander the room. They both wear T-shirts with the studio logo and periodically cut in on couples to demonstrate. They’re both horribly beautiful. He looks typically Porteño—Mediterranean with dark hair and green eyes—while she looks like she’s from somewhere else: Brazil maybe? She’s tall and lean with large luminous dark eyes and dark skin, her hair cropped close to her head.

  I walk in as the class wraps up, and the gorgeous male assistant comes by with a clipboard to check me in. The woman is standing in the corner, talking to Gianluca, along with a girl I recognize as his partner from the other night. I wonder if one of them is dating him. Are both of them?

  I feel a pleasant jangle of nerves as I wait with the other students for class to start. I’m not sure how my general athleticism is going to translate here; I’ve never been especially graceful. The commentators loved to contrast me with my top rival, Kjersti Larsen of Norway. They would remark that I muscled my way down the runs while she appeared to glide down seamlessly, breaking the laws of gravity that constrain mere mortals. Kjersti. I miss her. There was always camaraderie between the Norwegians and the Americans on the circuit. I miss the odd intimacy of our rivalry: the way we would catch eyes on race day and smile at each other.

  I don’t expect Gianluca to remember me, but he spots me leaning against the doorway, trying to be inconspicuous.

  “Ciao,” he says, walking over. Then, in English, “From Edward’s party, right?”

  “Right.”

  “I’m so glad you came,” he says, “I enjoyed dancing with you.” He kisses my cheeks. “Tell me your name once more.”

  “Liz,” I say. My face feels like it’s on fire and I pray it isn’t noticeable.

  “Liz!” he repeats, as though he’d just been on the verge of remembering it. “Welcome to my studio. It’s humble but I’m proud of it. This is the main studio, there’s a practice room and an office in the back. Come with me, I want to introduce you to some people.”

  He takes my hand, which startles me. He introduces me to his partner, Angelina, and his teaching assistants—also part of the studio’s performance team, he explains—the gorgeous boy is Rodrigo. The girl is Calliope—Cali for short—and she’s American.

  “Where are you from?” I ask.

  “New York,” she says, her demeanor a little frosty.

  “Edward,” I say, “do you know him?”

  “New York is a big city.” She smiles. “I know him from here though.”

  I want to ask her more, but class is about to begin. As we disperse, I have the horrible thought that if Cali is American, she might recognize me.

  The room has filled up with a motley mix: college students, thirtysomething professionals still in work clothes, retirees, including one silver-haired woman in a full ballet costume.

  “Bienvenidos todos,” Gianluca says. He continues in his slow, precisely enunciated Spanish, “Thank you for joining us here. It’s an honor to welcome you to my studio. This is the beautiful Angelina, who will be helping me today.” Angelina stands beside him with her hands clasped behind her back. In the lights of the studio she looks even more girlish, twenty at most. “And in the black shirts, Cali and Rodrigo. They’re my advanced students, they’ll be watching you and helping. We will start with a basico, which is going to be the foundation for the dance, along with the walks.”

  Gianluca and Angelina take us through the beginner moves, and we mirror them as instructed.

  “Good, excellent. Now, first,” Gianluca says, “tango is not about the steps. And you are going to hear a lot of nonsense about tango in Buenos Aires, so I want to get you off on the right foot, yes?” A small giggle ripples through the crowd at his pun, but we’re all transfixed by him. “For one thing, what we learn here will have nothing to do with the stage tango, which is all melodrama. I teach real tango, which is all about connection. It’s not about how a tango looks—though of course it’s a beautiful dance—it matters how it feels. I will show you.” With this, he nods to Angelina and she cues some music on the stereo system. A song crackles to life. Gianluca and Angelina face off like bullfighters and come dramatically toward one another; he sweeps her into his arms and takes her through a spectacular and dramatic series of flairs and dips. The class oohs and ahs.

  “That,” he says, “is for the stage. Now . . .” He glances again at his partner as she goes to the stereo to restart the song. This time they come together slowly, as though they’re strangers meeting for the first time. He takes her in his arms and their movements are unchoreographed, and even more tightly entwined. They dance in a close embrace, with no space for dramatic flairs of Angelina’s long, muscled legs. They move together not in synchronization as before, but more as one being. It’s equally beautiful, but in miniature, as though the dance contains an entire world held firmly between the two partners. Watching them feels voyeuristic and tantalizing. “That,” Gianluca says, floating away from Angelina after several minutes, “is the real tango. It’s not a choreographed dance, it’s a language two people speak. You will never dance the same tango twice, even with the same partner to the same song. Tango comes from the streets; it’s a dance that’s owned by the people of this city, the working class, los inmigrantes. You will no doubt hear about it being danced in brothels. At one time, Buenos Aires was a place of many lonely bachelors, but don’t mistake it for being only about sex. It’s infused with centuries”—he gestures dramatically with both hands—“of longing, of yearning for home, for the love of a good woman.” He flashes a smile at Angelina. “And I want you to feel also its rebellious spirit. Tango is the dance of anarchists, revolutionaries; there is a longing not only to be sensual, but also to be free.” He pauses for a moment, and the silence in the room tells me I am not the only one in the palm of his hand. “So that, my friends, is the spirit I want you to keep in your hearts as you learn tango.”

  With that, we go into combinations and move in a circle, trading partners every few minutes. Each time I dance with Gianluca, I feel my attraction deepening. It feels elemental: the way he smells, the way it feels to be carried along while I’m dancing with him. But it feels distant too, like an unattainable crush. It’s the opposite of my feelings for Luke, which are so bound up in everything: in friendship, family, loss, loyalty, and betrayal.

  After the hour, we’re cast back out into the humid January night, and I’m counting the minutes until I can come back.

  The tango classes add some much-needed structure to my life in Buenos Aires, and soon I’ll also have my tours. I throw myself into preparing for my first outing with tourists by frantically studying the sites I’m showing and buying several guides and history books from the cozy bookstore around the corner from my apartment, which has a surprisingly large English-language section.

  The history of the city is entrancing and overwhelming. From the waves of Italian and Spanish immigrants that flooded in throughout the nineteenth century to the artists and anarchists who organized in Buenos Aires’s innumerable cafés, it was a place where people came to remake themselves, refashion the world itself. Tango. Borges. It’s also brutal: the Polish Jewish slave trade that brought in thousands of young women and forced them into the brothels, the rise of fascism, the military junta that “disappeared” thousands of Argentine citizens, including many college students. I’d been vaguely aware of some of this history before I came but am shocked to learn that the junta only fell in 1984, during my lifetime. All of the reading had the opposite effect I was hoping for; I feel less prepared than ever to explain this city to anyone.

  I make my way home from the café where I’ve spent hours over wine with my books, and find the streets of San Telmo have morphed. As I turn onto the side street off Defensa that leads to my doorstep, I feel I’m seeing this place for the first time as it truly i
s: choked with ghosts. As I look at the pools of light cast on the sidewalk by the streetlamps, I see not illuminated spaces but the depths of the darkness between and beyond them. It seems, walking these streets, you could pass through a patch of shadows and emerge on the other side an entirely different person. Or perhaps, never emerge at all.

  Penny’s Back Hurts

  THE SUMMER before I moved to Sun Valley to live with the Duncans seemed to drag on forever. I worked as a counselor at a local camp, taking ten-year-olds on hikes and nature walks, green with envy that Luke and Blair were at a training camp in South America that my parents hadn’t been able to afford. I was packing up the last of my things in my bedroom and beginning, for the first time, to feel nervous about leaving home.

  Penny came in just as I was taking down my Picabo Street poster.

  “All set to move in with your boyfriends?” she said, leaning on the doorframe. Her posture was made stiff by the new back brace she was wearing. She’d slipped a disk in her spine, and the doctor had her wearing a strange contraption that resembled a plastic corset. I was worried about her; the specter of back injuries haunted all skiers who’d been doing it long enough to see one of their peers be taken out of the sport permanently, as I had when fourteen-year-old Monica Friend had broken her spine at the Junior Alpine National Championships the previous year. Penny’s injury wasn’t that serious, but she’d been talking to the doctors about surgery, and it scared me. At least the bald patches on her head had filled in by then and were hardly noticeable when she wore her hair in a ponytail, as she did now.

  I rolled my eyes at her. “You know we’re just friends. Besides, Blair has a girlfriend.”

  “And Luke?”

  “Who’d sign up for that?” I smiled.

  “Um . . . you? Don’t tell me you’re not, like, saving yourself for him.”

  “Gross.”

  What I couldn’t bring myself to tell even Penny was that somewhere in the year we’d lived away from each other my feelings had changed. The less I saw of Luke and Blair, the more I longed for them in a way that began to feel subtly, amorphously romantic. I still couldn’t fathom that either of them would be interested in me; they’d had their own awakenings in my absence. Blair had Sabrina the snowboarder, and Luke’s new friends seemed to come with a harem of heavily made-up groupies. At that moment, I was hoping that being near Luke every day once again would squash these flutterings of alien girlish feelings. It wouldn’t, but it would be years before I did anything about it.

  My first year in Sun Valley flew by. My skiing improved quickly and drastically, just as Tad had promised. I turned sixteen and joined Blair in FIS races, making it a year before Luke, which—as I’m certain Tad had hoped—lit a fire in him and refocused his efforts on downhill. Soon, all three of us were skiing NorAms all throughout the season and competing against people a decade older, skiers we idolized in some cases. Luke, accustomed to being dominant, loathed getting his ass kicked at the higher level, but I relished it. At last, I was surrounded by female skiers who gave me a new bar to rise to.

  Tad swiftly took over my career, introducing me to his circle of wealthy ski fans, including a very impressive self-made female e-commerce millionaire who was dying to get her hands on a promising female skier. I felt no qualms about being her show pony. It wasn’t long before my old rival from juniors, Sarah Sweeny, fired her team at Vail and, with her rich dad and their entourage, decamped to the burgeoning Sun Valley club. I’d hoped that with more time together Sarah and I might become friends, but I quickly learned that her nickname—Snow Queen—was well-earned.

  Meanwhile, Penny started college at Boise State, sharing a room with Emily in a neobrutalist dorm on campus that she e-mailed me pictures of once the two of them had decorated with twin beds jacked up on blocks and fairy lights strung from the ceiling. My sister—who’d never been much of an academic—was suddenly talking about going premed. However, given the rotating cast of new college boys that otherwise dominated my phone calls with her, this scholarly turn felt unlikely to stick.

  Maybe I always would have gravitated toward Luke, or maybe it was only that the chance presented itself. It was 1998, Luke and I were nineteen and Blair was twenty-two and, to the surprise of his father and our coaches, it was the older brother who made the Olympic team first. Both Luke and I missed out by a few slots, leaving us home to pout while Blair—suddenly the golden boy of his father and the Sun Valley trustees—went to Nagano with Tad, Ann, and Bethany in tow. They’d offered to take us along, but somehow it seemed like being there would be worse. I felt I might combust with envy. This was a decision I’d come to regret for many reasons.

  The night before they left for Japan, I found Blair sitting by himself in the massive living room of the chalet, staring into the fireplace, a blanket over his knees.

  “Hey, B,” I said, coming over with a couple of mugs of hot chocolate I’d just made. “You want some or is it not on the Olympic regimen?”

  He smiled at me and lifted the corner of the blanket so I could get under it with him.

  “I’ll make an exception.”

  “How are you doing?” I asked. “Are you excited?”

  He nodded, though he looked preoccupied. “Of course. I don’t know, this isn’t how I pictured things, I guess.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, honestly, Bomber, if anything I thought it would be me going along as the third wheel to cheer for you and Luke.”

  I looked into the fire for a moment. I’d been so focused on how hard it was for Luke and me to be left behind, I hadn’t thought about how it might feel for Blair to be out ahead, on his own.

  “You know we’re so proud of you, right?”

  “Of course,” he said, draping his long arm around my shoulders. “And, okay, this is going to sound really petty, but I kind of wish Bethany wasn’t coming. I know it’s probably not fair, but it feels like she’s taking credit for something that’s not hers. It’s a big moment for my mom and I wish it was going to be just her and my dad. Or even just my mom, if I’m being honest.”

  I raised my eyebrows at him. Blair was usually circumspect about Tad. I’d never really heard him say a bad word about his father; he was always trying to keep the peace between him and his brother.

  “I know, like I said: petty. And I appreciate what he’s done for our skiing, but after everything he’s put my mom through, I’ve never felt the same about him. I wish I did.”

  “That’s heavy, Blair. But, I mean, it’s fair.” I was careful. As much as I was part of the family in one way, I didn’t have the luxury of hating Tad, or even Bethany. I actually didn’t mind her, I just didn’t get her, the way she made her entire identity about her husband and two sons that weren’t hers.

  It occurred to me that maybe it was Luke and I who were being petty by not coming along to support.

  “Blair, do you want me to come? I probably can’t get on the flight tomorrow, but I bet I could get there in time for your first race.”

  He turned and looked at me for a long moment. He leaned over and brushed a piece of hair that had come loose from my ponytail over my ear.

  “You know what? In four years, we’ll all be there together, I’m sure of it. I’d love it if you were there, but I’m worried about Luke being alone. He’ll do something stupid like ski off a cliff. Just keep an eye on him, will you?”

  This may have been him giving me an out, but he wasn’t wrong.

  “I will. I promise. And seriously, no one will be yelling louder at the television than me.”

  I wanted Luke to stay home and watch the opening ceremonies with me, to keep an eye out for Blair and drown our sorrows together.

  “Can’t. I’m going to watch it with Breanna,” he said, smiling cheekily.

  “Ugh, you traitor. And isn’t she like twenty-four? What is she doing dating a nineteen-year-old? Gross.” I didn’t want to admit I was jealous of the flavor-of-the-week girlfriend, or maybe I was too wrapped up in
my funk about Nagano to realize it.

  “Guys do it all the time. Don’t be sexist,” Luke said as he headed for the shower.

  I could see her appeal—she was comely with dark hair, long limbs, and breasts that seemed far too big for her slender frame—but I didn’t want to think that this was the kind of girl Luke was into. The kind whose hair was always perfect and makeup piled on. I suddenly realized what kind of girl I wanted him to like: me. I also didn’t see how he could be interested in anyone who wasn’t a skier.

  “Whatever, I guess I’m the only one who cares about seeing Blair.”

  “Bomber, don’t be a pain about this, we’re just watching it at her place. I’d invite you but . . .”

  I rolled my eyes and huffed dramatically.

  “Can you just get to know her at some point? Please? For me?” He threw his arm around me and my heartbeat quickened. God, when had that happened? We’d all been friends for so long. “Come on.”

  “Fine,” I said, smiling and nestling into his armpit—we’d always been physically close, the three of us, our lives being so hyperfocused on our bodies. “Bring her up with us then, tomorrow. I’ll be nice, I promise.”

  “Atta girl,” he said, ruffling my hair. He wasn’t much taller than me, though at six foot three he towered over most girls. Blair was a hair over six feet, meaning we were almost exactly the same height.

  Was I planning it? Subconsciously I must have been. Bring her up with us. I was challenging her on my own turf, after all. And I knew that she was an intermediate snowboarder at best.

  Predictably, Breanna spent the day tumbling over even the most unimpressive of moguls and generally slowing us all down. Luke has never been patient, and he certainly wasn’t when he was nineteen. I could practically feel his attraction to her leaking out of him on each successive run.