A few months later, our dog died of sudden cancer in her arms, on the lawn. We were each of us, again, alone. She sold the house and moved to Florida. He went back out on the road. I finished school and moved to New York City, where people go when they can’t think of somewhere else, and did what people do there when they want to make it in the theatre: I wasted half a decade waiting tables.
I pretended to be sexually well adjusted, sexually adept—even, and especially, to Mum. I’d been trying to impress her since the day the ink dried on the adoption papers, and felt that I, that we—our family—had failed her. Now she’d hauled herself to Florida and started over, found a two-bedroom rental condo and a job. She was a one-woman revival, suntanned to leather, with a closet full of rhinestone sandals and a dance card full of beaus. And she spoke fluent sex—never cringing at the clinical, always celebrating appetite. She’d model, say, her haul of clearance pink-feather-and-leopard underpants for me on Skype. I rolled my eyes, but deep down I was awestruck. Sex came so easily to her—and she was good at it, virtuosic. I know because we were that close, perhaps too close; part of our mother-daughter bargain had always been to share the truth and bear it jointly. But despite my trying, and despite her expert ease, I remained a disappointment, a knot that no one could untie.
By the time I came to tango, I’d turned all of my romantic failures into punch lines—three men in a row who wouldn’t touch me! The Hobbit, Non-Date Guy, now Peter Pan—the joke that I was somehow cursed. They each had their own excuses. What remained constant was me: wanting so much to be desired, and to desire in return, but feeling impotent, off-putting and off-put. Despite my mother’s best attempts to make the act of human coupling seem beautiful, it never felt that way to me. The mechanical effort of it pumped me dry of tears. I was too embarrassed, too daunted by the flesh, the sweat, the squeaking springs, and all that dreadful vocal indecorum. Being cursed, I thought, was better than being undesirable. Not loving anybody fully was preferable to being left—and not being touched much easier than weathering the aftershocks of shame. I was disappointed when I failed to live up to my mother’s hopes for me, but more than that, I was relieved.
When I say Peter wouldn’t touch me, I mean that literally. His feelings for me weren’t physical. I don’t just mean that we did not have sex. I mean that he would bristle when I tried to take his arm. If he took my hand to hold it walking down the street, he would extricate himself in seconds. He would hug me sometimes, earnestly, but back away abruptly—so abruptly that I’d fall forward into vacant space and have to catch myself from falling farther. He meant no malice with his lack of physical affection. I assumed the fault was mine.
There were some men who wanted me, but turned my stomach. There were others whom I wanted, but they turned their backs. I chose the ones who didn’t want me—at least not in that way. For someone who had never fathomed how it ought to feel, giving up was no great sacrifice. My relationship with Peter gave me all the comfort of companionship without the challenge of unknotting my most twisted parts. Deep down, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be touched at all.
Still, I chose tango. You might ask why, given the state of me—and I have no cogent answer. So I tell that story about Argentina, about being sixteen and in a foreign place. About bravery, or about trust. But it’s more about the fact that sixteen-year-old me, the girl who fell in love with this staid dance half a world away, was an accomplished little obfuscator, and I wanted her to win. That pretty story could have been her story, were it not for what had come before. Maybe, somehow, now it is. Or maybe it’s as simple as: I steered into the wind.
Chapter Three
i blinked and three years had unraveled. I wasn’t acting much, and when I was, I somehow always ended up in leaking church basements on Ninth Avenue, performing poorly written one-acts in my underwear. Real roles were ever out of reach. Casting bulletins called for crones or cartoon women, manic pixies or “model types” in sexpot catsuits. Still, I tried. I spent all the money I’d accumulated serving steaks and vodka tonics to the business class on headshots, self-promotion seminars, and postcards advertising shows no one would see. My odds of “making it” had long expired, but I held on to the memory of dropping into character, scratching art out of a dark and empty theatre. Standing center stage in front of strangers, disappearing in plain sight.
I worked double shifts and spent late evenings in an Irish pub across the street, drowning in pop music and beer. Peter sat at my bar some nights; I served him scallops, twenty-dollar drinks, and sped through sidework to accept his cab ride home. Frustrated fellow servers came and went, booking shows only to come back three months later, mortified and broke. An alarming number turned to teaching yoga. Eventually, for health insurance, I took an entry-level desk job in nonprofit marketing, doing work that made me miserable (asking rich people for money), but was better perhaps than failing to land auditions and smelling perpetually of restaurant, which is to say, of steak and bleach and raw onions. Helping recovering homeless men and women transition from sobriety to employment was work, at least, that mattered. I lived paycheck to paycheck in a studio apartment in Astoria, still shelling out for acting classes, just in case. I put on pumps and tried to feign being a grown-up, which was sometimes acting job enough.
While I furrowed my brow and wondered where my life had stalled, Dad took up with his high school sweetheart, and Mum was in the throes of midlife renaissance. It was, ostensibly, the happiest either one of them had been in years. I seemed to be the rotten egg. I’d done this gutsy, foolish thing, and moved to the big city by myself to try and earn a living doing art. But I was still the same scared, melancholy girl, always a little quiet, even when performing, always a little ill at ease. I wore grey and read books and tried to fade into the background, best I could.
My life was functional, but ordinary. I got promoted beyond the pool of cold callers, but my boss was borderline psychotic and the office left me feeling empty. Part of me missed the hustle and the flexibility of slinging oyster platters and martinis, the constant crises, the sore-footed dance of customer appeasement. Now I sat all day in a six-by-six-foot office cubby, unjamming staplers and redrafting press releases, listening to tango records in hopes that they might bring me closer to the hologram of me, a younger, better self. I counted down the minutes spent arranging donor databases until lunch bought me an hour of freedom to eat my salad on the greasy metal stairs of SoHo loading docks. Nights and weekends Peter and I went out to dinners I could afford only because he always paid. I learned the luxury of well-made food consumed at normal mealtimes, which felt good after years of trough-style afternoon employee meals. Every evening felt elaborate, like an unearned treat, a holiday from lives we were not living. We went to shows and films, and tried to will ourselves onscreen. We watched pickup softball matches in the park. We enjoyed the consolation of each other’s company—the joking ease, the tacit understanding—but we were filling time.
Peter was also in a rut. Too often, I forgot about his quiet desperation in attending to my own. He wasn’t performing either; he too had a pile of expensive card-stock headshots. He too cringed each time he kicked them farther underneath his bed. He drank too much, to drown the harpies of his own self-loathing. And, maybe to avoid the ambush of his own depression, he was at the gym six days a week, alternating between training others, which made him miserable, and slogging from weight machine to weight machine, torturing himself. As if his fitness level marked his barest minimum of pride. He and I were both big-hearted, wide open to the world like wounds, and unremittingly frustrated with ourselves. We lived in privilege and plenty—mine borrowed, his bequeathed—yet we were merely plodding through. Not ungrateful, but rather contrite. And conscious always of our opiate inattention to our dreams.
Tango felt like insurrection. As if those fifty minutes once a week, however tedious, could burn the whole thing down. The following Tuesday, a week after that first class, I went back to the studio and stood again behind the maes
tro in my unfortunate Flabellas. The same song looped. The same group stared down at their feet. The same winter seeped in through the windowpanes. We stood and shifted, and continued our martial stalking, back and forth across the room. Any delusions I had harbored of being good at this were duly quashed, but I surrendered. My mother, after all, had raised me to be braver than I felt. She’d always warned me against the fear of looking stupid. How else do you learn, she’d say, and throw me out into the deep ends of new languages and schools and singing solo. She was not afraid of looking foolish, nor of starting over. In her world, there were always second chances: for motherhood, for daughterhood, for post-marital romance, and—I hoped—for being twenty-five. All I had to do was let myself look just a little stupid.
In tango class, for a beginner, this was easily achieved. Beginners learn with other beginners, in a quarantine of skill. For the first few classes, you dance by yourself, changing your weight in place from foot to foot, plodding back and forth between two mirrored walls, and—on special occasions—doing shadow exercises with a stranger standing several feet away, matching his footing and the way he moves his legs, and staring at him so hard he becomes your own reflection and you forget who’s imitating whom.
Eventually, you’re deemed ready for the practice hold. A leader holds his arms out and you, the follower, place your hands onto his elbow crooks. You attempt to walk together, toe-first, dragging your legs across the floor pedantically on every downbeat whump. For followers, this is almost always backwards. And both of you are almost always looking down.
After the technique of toe-first walking and the practice hold, you learn the cross, or la cruzada, where one foot hooks across the other. I’d learned this move as “position five,” but it is infinitely versatile. The leader uses it to change direction, or to steer the follower to change which foot walks first. You shift your weight onto the crossed foot, slightly lift your heel, then scoot your back foot free. The cross moves the couple from two shared ski tracks to three, from parallel legs to opposite, where the dance is like a graceful version of a three-legged race. It is the punctuation of the tango sentence. The pause in the momentum of the walk. For a few weeks at least, we practiced pausing. Walking. Pausing.
Pause. Walk. Pause.
Thinking back, retracing steps and milestones, I’ve tried to put my finger on precisely when addiction claimed me, precisely when pursuit became preoccupation. Because, despite the Sisyphean labor, I became obsessed. Walking, breathing, thinking, sleeping tango. I became tedious to anyone willing to listen. I practiced with the pillar in the break room at the office, while the coffee brewed. I drilled footwork at the copy machine, to the rhythm of the stapling and collating, startling to a halt whenever I saw someone pass the printing room. I bought a pair of red suede T-straps from a dance outlet in Chelsea, and stuffed them into my purse to carry with me everywhere. Por las dudas.
I called my mother with momentous news of my new hobby. At first she was relieved. “Oh, good,” she said, no doubt remembering me, at sixteen, trying to demonstrate what José and I had learned when we returned from Argentina. Dance itself meant little to her; her most advanced move was the disco bump. But she was on a whole renascent tear. She’d changed all of her passwords to “freedom,” shed thirty pounds, and had recently spent a Saturday afternoon tailgating at a country concert with champagne in plastic flutes. “You need to live more, Meg,” she said.
She was thrilled about the shoes. The rest of it confused her. “No one speaks?” she asked, when I explained that I knew nothing about the classmates whose elbows I clasped every Tuesday night. As a talker, she was immediately wary of a social scene where people touched, but no one spoke. “I thought you said it was a social dance.”
“It is, Mum. It’s just a quiet one.”
“Jesus, Meghan.” If she’d been fretting about my lack of purpose, she hadn’t really said. Not beyond a comment here and there about dreams and distraction. But tango was just too dreary, and impossible for her to comprehend. Sometimes, I think, so was I.
Mum was certain tango men were closet perverts. To her, the class was really just a covert sex club, and I was too naïve or too polite to notice. She also assumed that any able-bodied of-age man must want to sleep with me; that I had managed to unearth three consecutive specimens who didn’t only made her worry more. Men just don’t seem to want me that way, Mum, I’d say. But she was sure that I was not, in fact, defective as an object of desire. Just, perhaps, defective in my taste. And understandably confused. I wanted to be wanted. I was afraid of what that meant. There’s nothing wrong with you, she’d say; though there was surely something wrong with them. Her best guess was that they preyed upon some deep ambivalence in me.
My father, however, was tickled by tango. Well, good for you, he said. He thought it was a healthy outlet, something constructive I could do, all by myself, to get my city legs back underneath me. Whether or not he found the thing salacious, he withheld. But tango wasn’t like that—at least not until Pre-Intermediate. And that was months away.
Tango came of age in tenement or conventillo courtyards and in dance halls called academias. Its unsavory reputation probably stemmed from the array of tough guys—malevos, malandrinos, compadritos—and loose women who frequented those halls. But sex was not the game. Among the louts were good, God-fearing patrons wanting nothing more than to move to music. Porteños, criollos. Immigrants—three million men in twenty years—who’d left everything behind and garrisoned themselves upon the citizens of Buenos Aires and Montevideo.
Argentina, ever bigoted and vain, built herself in Europe’s image. Her seventh president, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, and his aspiring statesman friends penned xenophobic rants against his country’s people—those of mixed, indigenous, and Afro-Argentine descent. This distinctively “American race,” as he considered it, was idle, muddy, and unfit to constitute a country. And so began the great whitewashing of Argentina, the state-sponsored culling of black populations. Sarmiento and his cohort, the Generación del ’37, championed the salvation of Argentina through the aggressive solicitation of “more civilized” European labor. These workers came in droves—Italian, Spanish, Polish, Russian, French, German, Austrian—descending on the booming city, which was then more margins than metropolis. By the 1914 census, the capital was well over 40 percent foreign-born. Outer barrios and slums spilled into countryside to accommodate the newcomers. In a crush of castes, the poorest were pushed into the arrabales, poor quarters on the edge of town.
Joining them on the periphery were gauchos: nomad hunters, cattle herders among the rural populations; also a mingling of Spanish, Amerindian, and African descent. You might call them “cowboys” or vaqueros, these horse-master dwellers of the pampas, the vast, impossible green plains of the interior. As commercial cattle ranching interests drove the gauchos closer to the city borders, the upper classes pushed the ever-growing wave of immigrants against them. The arrabales overflowed to form a labile band around the bustling city. Tango’s breeding ground.
In Spanish, there is a neat word for this, choque—crash, or clash, or shock. Crash, for the collision of cultures thrashing their great plates together underground. Clash, for conflict: discrimination, poverty, and the vanishing Old World. And shock, for the tectonic blast of it. The dance that shook the globe.
Tango, at least at first, was the dance of the unwanted classes. Pastime of dreamers—foreign, forgotten, poor, and unattached—herded to the edges of a city run by oligarchs. A home in music for the home-deprived. As a member of New York City’s artist caste—the servers, clerks, and child minders who couldn’t quite afford the life there, but who shuttled daily to and from the city proper to their homes in outer boroughs, at all hours, with folk from everyplace around the world—I found the richness of this history compelling. Here I was, the daughter of divorce, in my own port city made by immigrants—in my own country built by slaves. Adrift, and seeking thrills. Traveling from squat, three-story Astoria into
a midtown labyrinth of shining glass. Feeling ever in awe of all the industry around me, ever a little dingy, ever on the edge. It wasn’t Buenos Aires on the eve of a new century, but there were certain legacies these cities shared, for good or ill. A history of corruption, longing, striving, cruelty. Present excess, endless want. The abiding quiet of street corners late at night.
Still, I was no porteño; I was a college-educated white girl, poor perhaps largely by choice, deluded when it came to my ability to make a living doing art. And there were no academias here. No neighborhood centers teeming with tango life. Only the studio with its fluorescent light strips and its soporific atmosphere.
As if either to nullify or reinforce my mum’s sex club cliché, my classmates were mostly single, taciturn, and middle-aged. After nearly a dozen classes, we still hadn’t learned one another’s names. Most of the men had concave chests and sweaty palms, and either grabbed too hard, held on too tight, or barely touched my arms. Some had breath that reeked of pungent meals; this I forgave. Neither looks nor halitosis made much difference under those fluorescent lights. We were generous with one another. We rotated partners, touched forearms, and agreed to bob together, back and forth across the floor.
Tango Lessons Page 3
