That Friday, we signed up for a tango lesson.
Tessa and I and six other couples entered the Elks Hall, with its terrible acoustics and all-pervading clamminess. We were conventionally dressed; I wore a secondhand sport coat and wide tie, Tessa a black sheath that struggled to control her well-muscled shape. The others were more South American in style—hot-red lipstick on their small-town faces, tortoiseshell combs in their swept-back hair. Some of the men had gone with a pomaded look that betrayed their sense of mission. They seemed to smolder in anticipation of their future proficiency.
Our instructor was Juan Dulce, or just Dulce, a genuine Argentine who worked his way around the American West giving lessons. He had created a real interest in the tango in the most unlikely places—cow towns, oil towns, uranium towns, coal towns—where this hint of another kind of life carried a special allure. He was perhaps sixty, as thin as a herring, and wore striped pants, a formal black coat, a ruby cravat, and stacked heels. His hair, slicked to his skull, emphasized eyes that seemed to belong to a marine creature of some sort. He was without humor and he effectively conveyed the sacredness of his task. I doubt that I shall forget the sight of him standing on a Pepsi crate and pouring out his introduction in a deep and vibrant voice that seemed to make the room hum.
“When I am fifteen in Buenos Aires I am longing for love and suffering and, above all, success—the hope of becoming a legend of our hot and drowsy tango. I underwent numberless deprivations, but success would reward the sensual designs that I demonstrated in many venues. Now the money I earn is exchanged for my fatigue, but I have no other way to go, and there are days I awaken upon wretchedness. Once I converted my dancing of three weeks’ duration by a pocket ruler into three hundred seventy-two kilometers. Still, tango is all! Without tango my face inspires doubt. Therefore, my advice is press your tango to great advantage! And now we begin.”
He turned on the big sound system, which had hitherto been employed to enlarge the voices of prairie politicians bent on higher office and nostalgic Scandinavian chorales with cow horns on their heads. The system had astounding capacity, and the room was soon filled with the somber, inevitable cadences of this prelude to intercourse. (As a student, I had not only enjoyed several instances of actual copulation—albeit with Mr. Goodwrench staring down at me—I had seen the act explained on huge blackboards, so that there could be no doubt about what was going on.)
We began to learn the steps, in the chest-to-chest Argentine style. We arrayed ourselves counterclockwise and concentrated on the spacing between us and the other couples. My exhilaration at Tessa’s great power soon gave way to apprehension, as though I were riding an unruly horse; and, when I failed to comprehend the crossover steps as described by Dulce, Tessa used her might to drag me into position with a determined expression on her face. To avoid potential humiliation, I attached myself to her flying carcass with a wiry grasp. Her cry of alarm brought Dulce to our side and the other dancers to a stop just as I was beginning to enjoy myself.
“Señor! Grappling has no place in our national dance!”
“I cannot follow her movements,” I explained in an accent identical to Dulce’s, which I found unexpectedly infectious.
“You are not to follow—you are to lead!”
“It’s my fault,” Tessa said. “I lost patience with him during the first abrazo. He just seemed lost. I’ll try to do better.”
“Perhaps this is the time to work on our syncopation,” Dulce said sternly to both of us, “with greater respect for the movements of each other.”
“The music is unfamiliar,” I explained. “You don’t happen to know ‘La Bamba’?” He held his head and moaned as though he’d been shot.
The other couples had deftly caught on to the oddly triangular chests-together, feet-apart position. An older pair of bottle blonds, obviously trained in various kinds of ballroom dancing, made an effort to dance past at close range. The woman had a fixed and toothy Rockettes smile, and when she swept by she caught my eye and called out, “Piece of cake!”
I gave Dulce my word that I would syncopate respectfully, and I began to dance in earnest. At first, Tessa complimented me on my “good hustle,” but she soon proved unequal to my speed and dexterity. Whatever had been going on in my life up to that point poured into my tango, and the exultation I began to experience was interrupted only when Tessa let out a real showstopper of a screech. Then Dulce came between us and made the mistake of laying hands on me. Insofar as I retained a modicum of male pride, this contact quickly devolved into a dustup on the floor, oddly accompanied by the raucous music of Argentina and the sounds of angry interference from the other students. With their help, I was flung into the street. “Good night, Doctor!” I realized that Tessa had told the others that I was already out of medical school and that she was no cradle robber.
I recall feeling breathless and completely without direction as I allowed Tessa to take charge of our stroll. She stopped momentarily, between two old commercial buildings, not far from the railroad yard, looked straight at me, and said, “Boo. Hiss.” We went on. “I’m lucky you didn’t request Mannheim Steamroller,” she added. I was defeated.
“Now, don’t be offended and, more important, don’t walk in front of that car,” she said. “I realize you aren’t attracted to me, are you?”
“That’s not the real story,” I replied. “I need encouragement.” These two sentences were uttered with such sincerity that I could see Tessa respond with visible happiness.
“Then let me tell you my own fears. Why? Because you’re adorable. Of course you’re a complete idiot but, within that, there is a certain appeal—I’ve felt it before in pet shops. But I have fears, too. Isn’t that real friendship, to tell someone your fears? You could have been extremely disagreeable over those phone calls.”
“What good would it have done?”
“None, but few people would have recognized that. I sense that you have a good heart, a good heart trapped in a self that is a hop, skip, and jump from needing day care. Obscene phone calls from a stranger are intolerable. But when they come from someone you know, particularly a deluded old walrus like Hoxey, well, they don’t arouse quite the same wrath. You had the right to revenge and you declined to take it. Hoxey and I are in your debt.”
I had a strong glimpse here of the sensible side of Tessa, and I had a sudden hunch that she would end up a friend, which rather worried me because she was the sort who might anchor me and teach me to accept reality, such as it was then emerging.
“How about you just walk me home?” she said finally. “That work for you?”
“Of course.”
We paused at the railroad tracks to watch a big northern express rip through. She watched intently and I positioned myself behind her in such a way that it looked as if the train were pouring in one of her ears and out the other. I knew then that I would kiss her.
I suppose it took ten minutes for us to get back to the house, during which time Tessa did her level best to tell me her hopes and dreams, which were honest and simple: ride old man Hoxey into the ground and clean out his estate. That wasn’t how she put it, naturally. Her motive, as she expressed it, was a passion for aesthetic rarities. “No one knows the inventory as I do. No one cares as I do, and no one knows the importance of getting it into strong and caring hands as much as I do.” I didn’t say anything, and I suppose she found my silence censorious.
We entered her apartment. Before pulling the door closed behind her, she said, “At the end of the day, it is what it is.” I wondered what that meant. Of course it is what it is, and it didn’t even have to be the end of the day to be what it was. I couldn’t understand this sort of thing at all, and in a way kissing someone who said things like that was like kissing air. When I did, it was with the kind of apprehension one feels on placing an open mousetrap in a promising location. Afterward, she held me at arm’s length and looked at me with what one of my professors had called the copulative gaze. She seemed all-c
onsuming. I thought of the big-bang theory, wherein a tiny speck of matter and energy mysteriously explodes, expanding into the universe.
I said, “What do you think?” My heart pounded.
She said, “Let’s give it a whirl.”
We made love on the couch. I performed in a state of amazement at all that skin. Skin everywhere! At one point, she said, “I wonder if you could change your expression. I can barely do this.” When I reached that moment to which all our nature ascends and by which the future of the species is assured in spasm after spasm, she remarked, “Never a dull moment.”
* * *
—
Over the eight years that followed, as I made my way through medical school and graduated, I’d occasionally see Tessa going about the affairs of Hoxey. She had acquired a questionable reputation around town by then, as he was now sick and demented, and she was seen as exploiting him. Then Hoxey died, and whatever worries I might have had for her were briefly allayed, as it seemed that she had inherited the business.
She made an appointment to see me at the clinic. I had forgotten just how large and burningly vital she was. Her hair, piled atop her head and held there by a bright-red plastic comb, seemed to represent fulminating energy. She had a white streak, which she attributed to “trauma.”
“Hoxey’s henchmen have put me on the street,” she told me, “with little more than the clothes on my back.”
“Tessa, I find this very hard to picture.”
“Perhaps a few prints, a watercolor or two.”
“Who exactly are these ‘henchmen’?”
“His children. Grown daughters. I never factored them in. They arrived on the scene like Valkyries hovering over the battlefield in search of corpses.”
“I’m terribly sorry to hear this.”
“At a difficult time in your life, Doctor, I offered you companionship and sexual healing.”
“What can I do? Medication is my line, but I don’t think that’s what you’re looking for.”
“I plan to stay here, and I’ll have to start looking for work. I hope you’ll recommend me.”
I reached for a pen, poised to join the millions who have made their way out of a difficult spot by providing a letter of recommendation. But Tessa said, “Not now. I’ll let you know.”
That, more or less, was the end of our appointment. She seemed happy with my response, taking my hand in both of hers. I suppose that she was just checking to see whether I was still on her side.
Tessa went downhill fast. Within two years, she had spells of homelessness, punctuated by temporary jobs, none of which became permanent because of her imperious nature, her contempt for owners and bosses. She never left a job—she stormed out of it. She took over the homes where she was briefly a guest. Even as her fortunes fell, Tessa didn’t lose her rakish airs, though they began to seem just a bit automatic as she strode around town in worn clothes.
I was one of several people who helped in little ways, but I rarely saw Tessa. By this time, I had established the small-town practice that would not make me rich, though it might make me happy. Hoxey had long ago returned to California in powder form, leaving nothing behind. Those years seemed to have allowed me to awaken from my own background and, without boasting, I can say that I had become somewhat less of a fool, though I was constantly aware that my foolishness could recur at any time, like a virus that lies dormant at the base of the spine. I can’t say that I saw Tessa as my responsibility; nor can I claim to have quite gotten her out of my mind.
The December night on which I was celebrating my fortieth birthday with a cake in the emergency room, an ambulance arrived with Tessa: into her abdomen she had plunged a serrated bread knife, an item she continued to clutch on the gurney that conveyed her. I took it from her hand and, feeling on me the heat of her eyes, I quickly began dealing with her wound. I knew that if she were admitted to the clinic itself she would be subjected to what I viewed as diagnostic imprudence—laparotomy and other explorations that experience had led me to associate with increased morbidity. Though I would later have a chance to review these judgments, I honestly feel that they didn’t alter the way things turned out. In effect, I was keeping Tessa to myself. I had hoped that this was only a cry-for-help injury—the timing, during my shift, aroused my suspicions—but the knife, it turned out, had pierced the skin, the subcutaneous layer, the linea alba, and the peritoneum; I could only hope that it had gone no farther—that is, into the viscera. Over the next four days, attending Tessa around the clock while she stared at me without speaking, I failed to contain the major spillage, the uncontrolled peritoneal contamination, the necrosis, and an infection that laughed off antibiotics in a general cascade. She was looking right through me when she slipped away.
Aren’t there things that your parents should tell you? After my mother died, I’d gone to my childhood house and found her reading glasses. I’d sat on our old sofa by the window overlooking a stunted row of odorless roses, still knowing, after all those years, which part of the sofa I could sit on without feeling the springs. I put my mother’s glasses on. The earpieces were too short for me, and I had to press them down on my nose uncomfortably. It didn’t matter: I could barely see through them.
THE DRIVER
Mrs. Quantrill lived in a beautiful old prairie-style house built in the twenties, which she’d restored to its original splendor with Mr. Quantrill, a patent attorney attached to the burgeoning natural-gas industry. She’d then raised all kinds of hell getting it listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The Quantrills were known for their philanthropy and their elegant parties, featuring such high jinks as horses in the living room and mock gunfights on the lawn. Hereditary landowners, they no longer lived on their land but plied it for energy leases. They did hang on to their cattle brands long after the last cow had gone down the road, beautiful single iron brands from Territorial days. When their son, Spencer, inherited the house many years later, he demolished it and replaced it with storage units. Even these fell into disrepair, and it was hard to know if they produced any income when Spencer, who had temporarily lived in one of the units, eventually moved away.
Such was her standing that Mrs. Quantrill’s appearance in the grade-school principal’s office, with nine-year-old Spencer in tow, required a bit of fanfare, which she provided with an abrupt doffing of her coat and the slower removal, a finger at a time, of her lovely gloves. Back then, before such people took to concealing their station, it was not unusual to dress up even for minor occasions. Mrs. Quantrill was the tallest in the room and very thin, with unblinking blue eyes. Spencer hovered beside her as Mr. Cooper, the principal, in a tan suit and referee’s whistle, directed them to two chairs, before sidling behind his desk to sit down, fingers laced under his chin.
“Hi, Spencer.”
“Hi.”
“Thank you for coming, Mrs. Quantrill. Spencer’s struggling. Aren’t you, Spencer?”
“I guess so.”
Spencer sat with his tennis shoes one atop the other and pushed his hair across his forehead. He seemed not to know what to do with his feet, his eyes, or his hands.
“Struggling how?” Mrs. Quantrill asked sharply.
“You describe it, Spencer.”
“Can’t pay attention?” He looked to his mother to see if that was the correct answer.
“What’s the whistle for?” she asked the principal.
Mr. Cooper picked up the whistle as though seeing it for the first time and declined to answer. “I think Spencer wants to participate and be a part of things, but he often seems…stunned.”
“Stunned?” Mrs. Quantrill said. “Hardly.” Spencer restacked his tennis shoes, this time with the left foot on top of the right.
“Anyway, I think it might be in Spencer’s best interest to let him enjoy a spell in special ed—get the pressure off him a bit and let him spread his wings.”
“Special ed?” Mrs. Quantrill got to her feet, eyes flashing, plucked her coat from the bac
k of her chair, and said, “Over my dead body.”
“I see. What do you think is best?”
“I’ll raise his standards in my own way. I have tickets to Bayreuth and I shall take Spencer with me this year. No one leaves Wagner unimproved.”
“Where?”
“Wagner!”
“Ah.”
* * *
—
In the car, Mrs. Quantrill spoke nonstop. She glanced down Main Street and remarked, “What a hole.” It was nearly dark and most of the small-business owners were closing up shop. “Mr. Cooper means well, Spencer. He wants to help you and he’s correct in noticing that your grades are not as they should be…That wretched waterbed outlet is finally going out of business!…But we all develop at different speeds, and though I was tall and strong and popular at your age, your father was small and fearful, and just look how he turned out. The mighty oak, little acorn, and so forth. Oh, my angel, you’re going to love Bayreuth, this year especially, because we will see Parsifal and you’ll find out why Mommy calls you that, and you will be strengthened and return to school with something new that will be felt by everyone—students, teachers, and even nice Mr. Cooper, with that dopey whistle, who thought you should be in special ed. So, let’s break the news to Daddy: we’re off to Bavaria. Look, Spencer, there’s where Daddy bought those Italian snow tires. Why do you suppose he thought Italians would know about making snow tires? Well, when he slid off the road in front of the airport you can bet he found out how much they know! You probably think I was pretty rude to the principal, what’s his name, but no, Spencer, I was only being direct. I’m not a mean person. I simply thought the faster he knew my feelings the better. I’m just going to let this policeman pass me. I don’t like being followed, no matter who it is. Spencer, you’re too quiet, it makes me feel judged. Are you asleep back there?”
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