Traditionalists sneered; they called him el payaso. Clown. But he was building on this noble tradition. Decrypting the vast creative possibility in tango, and finding a way to teach it to new generations. Gustavo made it so that every student, once she understood the string, could wire her own pearls as she pleased.
Chapter Sixteen
while I was honing my balance on the dance floor, the rest of my life was seesaw-tipping into flux. I’d made my cautious peace with theatre, leaving behind the moldy black boxes, the constant threat of flopping. I missed the bond, the sense of purpose, more than I missed performing. I felt the emptiness of no rehearsal schedule, all those weeknight evenings gaping free. I danced to fill the hole.
I caught an early summer cold from lack of sleep but didn’t take a sick day. I hadn’t taken one in months; we didn’t get many to take. That morning, my snide supervisor stormed into my cubicle and demanded, “What is wrong with you? I feel like you’re always getting sick.”
That may have been true. I was perpetually run down by stress—mostly of my own invention. I found myself swallowing the apology that would have been my usual response. The I know! I’m so sorry! I can assure you that my work won’t suffer. I couldn’t bring myself to say the words. I looked up at her from my juiced kale and shrugged.
“Clearly you need to start taking better care of yourself,” she simpered.
I thought I was. So my staple diet of cheese crackers and PB&J was supplemented only on non-tango nights. So I ran on five hours of sleep or less, and sat through work undead. So every spare cent went to tango. It was physical—exercise!—and therefore must be good for me. It was also mostly sober, so abstemious. And other people were present, so it qualified as socializing, too. I did not miss acting. I did not miss sex. I rarely saw my family, and I barely kept up with my friends. Tango had me by the hair.
Mum came to visit, likely to check up on me, after the melting of that winter. And though I couldn’t get her to RoKo, I managed to drag her to La Nacional, for a laugh. We went in and paid our fee. I introduced her to the organizers, offered her an Oreo, which she declined. We sat at the bar, with flutes of cheap prosecco, and I watched her watch the social underworld that had consumed her daughter.
“Which one is Enzo?” she hissed.
“Shhh!” I said. “He’s not here.”
“Too bad,” she said.
We swiveled on our stools so she could see the dancing. I thought, for a second, that she might finally understand—this secret world of mine. The thing that had untamed me, that was to blame for my anomalous behavior, not to mention my affair with a man eleven years my senior. I thought all this would make her proud; she might say I’d finally found the savage playground of my twenties, where she was sure all young women belonged.
“Well, what do you think?” I asked, hoping she would relish all these people, from different classes, different countries, doing this enchanting thing together on a Thursday night. She crossed her legs and clutched her bag and pursed her lips. She stared at the concentric wheels of the line of dance, at the sea of drab New Yorkers, as she called them, bobbing around the room in black.
“It’s all very dreary.”
“But less creepy than you thought?” I asked.
“Meghan,” she said. “Honestly.” And rolled her eyes.
I looked around, and tried to see it her way. The median age was probably north of fifty. Everyone was sober. No one smiled. And no one, I noticed, was particularly good. I thought tango was this delicious thing I did, this wild, narcotic enterprise. But I also saw how old and staid and stilted it must seem to an outsider. It didn’t look like any fun. There was something beautiful and universal that anyone could grasp, but—to look at it—there was also something equally preposterous, and deeply weird. A bunch of unsmiling people with their eyes closed in a bright room looking sad.
Marty was there. In an effort to normalize the evening for her, I introduced them. I could see her sizing up his G-Star jeans and Lycra shirt, his vaguely skunk-like coif. He smiled like a caricature of himself.
“I take it back, Meghan,” she said when he’d been lassoed by a lady’s cabeceo. “This would be a very sad sex club indeed.”
Nadtochi arrived, and greeted us, and asked if he could borrow me for a dance. I followed him into the mêlée, started swirling, shut my eyes. This, I thought. This, at least, she’ll see. Nadtochi, of course, danced beautifully. When the song had ended, and I opened my eyes, I looked to her for approbation and found she wasn’t on her barstool where I’d left her. I did a quick scan of the café tables, but she wasn’t sitting anywhere.
Marty. He’d swooped in, led her to the floor for a penny lesson, and was just then bent over, doing something to her feet. I cringed. My mother was not cut out to follow anything, least of all him. And there she was, in the middle of the line of dance, with Marty trying to strong-arm her into ceding control of either leg. Stiletto heels went lashing past her shins. Clumsy leaders knocked into the pair of them, mid-floor. Marty was trying to show her his version of waiting for the bus. I finished the tanda with half an eye on her, in case she tripped him. When it was over, she wince-smiled, shook Marty’s hand, and glared at me until we gathered up our bags and left. As if on cue, an arm shot through her path, holding a rose. She took it with a snort.
“Look at you!” I said, safely in a cab. “A dance with Marty!”
“He’s very nice,” she said, turning to me, “but I will not be dancing tango with him. Or anybody else. Ever again.”
I gave up forcing her to try to see what I saw in the dance. She didn’t have to get it. No one did. I didn’t need approval anymore. Or benediction. My dance was not the dance she saw. It was the unseen cambium and sap that grew the tree; all she could know was bark and branches. She saw the outward flagrancy of touch; I saw something simpler, and good. Borges wrote, “What was once orgiastic devilry is now just another way of walking.” It had become as natural to me as air, and every bit as clean. With Marty, I unsexed my tango. The whole enterprise was pure again. He called me “the Kid.” He’d rattle on to me as though he’d only just discovered speaking—about women, tango, vitamins. It hardly mattered; I just rattled back. We spoke or wrote each other daily. I made a rule he dubbed “the Flaherty,” or “the Code of the Kid,” in which there were three kinds of tango partners: A’s for social dancing, B’s for romance, and C’s for practicing. A C could be an A sometimes, but not a B. And B’s made lousy C’s; the mere attempt would ruin A and B both. One must not conflate the three. It was a very elaborate, emotionally stunted way of saying, Marty, dear, avuncular . . . please don’t blur these lines. And, ever respectful of my wishes, he never did.
We remained a solid A and C. After Enzo, the sex morass of tango was now so obvious to me. I opened my eyes over my protector’s shoulder and saw the couplings I’d so studiously ignored: the pairings-off, the sharky men who angled toward the lonely women. I had told myself, my mother, and anyone else who’d listen that tango wasn’t like that. Now I had perfect evidence that it was. I was perfect evidence that it was. I confessed to Marty, archbishop of my tango, how I had broken my own rules. He was less concerned with the fact of my transgression than with my poor taste in transgressors.
“You did what with whom?” he demanded.
We were having a post-practice snack: a tuna wrap for him, a pack of cookies and a cardboard-carton milk for me. “Have you had these juice smoothies?” he interrupted—pulling one off a refrigerated shelf. “All fruit, very good for you.
“Te absolvo,” he said. “It happens to the best of us. Remind me to tell you a story sometime . . .” He chose a smoothie from the case and made his way toward the cash register. I followed. We paid and stepped into the summer night.
“But seriously, kid, Enzo?”
I nodded and hung my head, contrite.
Marty and I met at Robin’s every week, making perfect asses of ourselves. We stretched like athletes, spotted each other, tried so
ltada sequences with gravity-defying ganchos we’d witnessed only on the Internet. To pull off what he asked of me, all I needed was an axis. To stand still and sturdy on my own two unsupplanted feet. The rest was brain play: I turned off what Enzo had turned on and danced, my thighs together and my intellect engaged. We spoke in shorthand—parried, sparred. As my footing improved, I challenged him as often as I could—to lead better, stretch further—until we were very nearly tango equals. Until his quest became my quest. Until he was as true as Galahad—and I as clean of heart.
Marty worked harder at his dancing than any leader in New York—five to seven nights a week. He danced for hours without stopping. He made agendas for his practice sessions, studied up beforehand, crammed an overflowing list of skills to master into every hour. “Let’s get this Gustavo back sacada, then we’ll try it to the other side!” he’d say. Somewhere along the way, I had become his only practice partner, which made me feel more valued than any employer ever had. He sent me daily emails, with links to videos. Look at the amazing over-rotated ocho into her front step at 1:14–1:29. You should watch her feet in the cadena sequence starting at 2:41. He anatomized each millisecond for me: Okay, at :04–:06, he does left/right/left as quick-quick-slow. The left gives an impulse intention that differs slightly from the prior causal lefts that pivot . . . and on, and on.
He planned elaborate and expensive engagements for us with his holy trinity: Okay, now I’m going lunatico. Absolutely freaking out. While I was away Gustavo opened Registration for Fest part 2—seminar in Boulder limited to 25 couples, September 7–12, and posted dates for NYC!!! YIKES!!! We can spend a week in Boulder and learn to do GyG colgadas!!! 16 hours of colgadas and volcadas! Building them step by step, inside out, backwards and forwards, both sides, every attack angle, upside down. He works them into phrases. And then the weekend with MORE workshops with GyG and the next generation. Everything is 10% off if we register by August. How is your credit card balance doing? Let’s break the bank wide open!
Our execution often fell short of our eagerness. In the interest of mastery, I suffered bruises, stubs, and bony knee wounds to the shin—a product of his exuberance. A gancho gone wrong, after all, is really just a kick. But we were an unlikely team, loyal to each other and committed to the craft. Together we postulated, theorized; we built a creed. And we took care of each other, made each other optimistic—as though dancing could erase whatever ailed us in the world.
By midsummer we were lifelong friends. His constant emails weren’t always about tango; sometimes he’d send me treatises on relationships, on his sons’ achievements or his mother’s failing health. More often I got rants of varying length on the seafood he’d consumed that weekend, or the date he went on with an out-of-towner, or his effusive sentiments regarding Springsteen and Neil Young. I wrote him about my horrid boss, my fluorescent dungeon of an office, my disintegrated family. We earned each other’s friendship. Talking about dancing made it possible to talk about everything else. He sent me what he thought was a George Eliot quotation once, but was in fact from Dinah Maria Mulock Craik: Oh the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness blow the rest away. I declined to correct him. We were each other’s faithful hand.
Marty is a good soul, through and through. If there is a tango heaven, he has already secured a berth. There is a purity to his quest. He spends a lot of time alone, content to pace the room until he finds a partner. When we met, all I wanted was to be as strong in solitude as he was, as steadfast in my searching. I wanted to be a milonguera with a day job, just like him. And Marty is fearless—a little stiff sometimes, but always in pursuit of greatness.
He listens to his partner, to the music. Sometimes one (or both) will get the better of him, and he’ll go schoolboy bounding down the line of dance, driving his partner up and down in harried three-point turns. I once heard someone call him Foghorn Leghorn. He does have a bit of the stretched rooster about him: tall and beaky, always lanking about knee-first, scouting the yard for followers, but—whatever points we lost in coolness for our partnership were well worth losing. He steered me straight, looked after me. He told me whom to emulate, whom to avoid. He kept one eye on me, no matter where he stood or danced (he never sat), ready to swoop in at a moment’s notice to save me from a backbreaker, or an overly effusive older gent who liked to dance with me because his height precisely matched that of my breasts. Marty would defend me from the clutchers and the cruel. If I said, “Marty, I need to dance,” he’d be there.
“Anything for the Kid,” he’d say.
Chapter Seventeen
i might have been content to live that way for years—trudging through life, living through dance. Coming home to an empty place that wasn’t quite my own. Wasting daylight hours at an unsatisfying job, and nights in hot pursuit of tango. Pressing my body into male bodies by the dozens; touching, yes, but never being forced to feel. And hiding, boldly, in oblivion.
But I was weary—from lack of sleep, from sweet surrender, and from a total want of drive for anything but dancing. My job had the potential to be bearable, but wasn’t. I’d twice been promoted out of the cold-calling pits, and most of what I did was project-oriented or creative. My overall purpose was to raise money to help people. But any satisfaction was negated by the megalomaniacs running the place, who gave me responsibility—far beyond my pay—but no authority. Who said, “You are the help. The help move boxes. You don’t make decisions.” And then expected me to put out fires. Their fires. My boss routinely threatened her employees’ jobs, including mine, as we were leaving every other Friday afternoon because she liked reminding us she could. I’d run out of ambition. I got through daily projects, but spent the remainder of my workdays writing back and forth with Marty about tango theory—and scratching slyly in my journal.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” my mother asked. “Because it’s getting a little late to start figuring that out.”
“I have no idea,” I said, which wasn’t true. I did know; I was just too timorous to admit wanting to write. I’d wanted that since I was small, and found no better solace than in books, but was perennially convinced I wasn’t good enough. That still seemed true. Besides, I thought a person was allotted only one pipe dream per life, and I had used mine up with acting.
At home, Peter’s girlfriend launched a doomed campaign to rid me from his life. It wouldn’t be successful, but it kept him occupied and anxious. We saw each other less and less. At this point I lived alone, and he paid half the rent. I didn’t sleep. I’d come home after work at six sometimes and nap. When I awoke, sheet-printed and disoriented, I’d make myself a sandwich, then set off into the dark with dancing shoes wedged in my purse.
New York had gotten summer hot and loud. I tramped daily through the exhaust breath of buses and the heavy scent of summer sewage and of pee. Sometimes it was electrifying. Like living in the center of the world. Other times it was too much, and the city was a huge hand pressing on my chest. Rattling home over the bridge one night, my taxi speeding down the luge-like outer lane, I felt calamitously alive, and young, and possible, but also like I might careen into the black water below and not be missed. I was tired, maybe, of the anonymity. Of the riot-paced unknown.
My mother intervened. She’d seen me charge off to New York City full of dreams, squeak out a living waiting tables, and eventually give up everything but tango. The city was a dream destroyer, she said. She didn’t want to watch me sink.
“Come to Florida,” she said. I heard the offer: quit the job, relinquish the apartment you cannot afford alone, stop living in the shadow of your absent ex. “Come live with me.” Restart. Live somewhere where daily life is not so insurmountable. Sip cocktails on the Intracoastal. Put your tired feet into the tepid pool.
“It doesn’t have to be so hard,” she said. We could help each other. We could make it easier.
Divorce had been her dream destroyer. She’d always thought she’d have a family when she grew up, and that’s what she had lost. But she had made her way back into the workforce, back into the dating pool. She’d lost weight, dyed her hair seashell blond, painted her nails. She was still divorced, and broke, and by herself; not much could change those facts. She still woke in choking panic in the middle of the night. She was the happiest she’d been in years, but it was effortful, and she was not immune to loneliness. Neither was I, no matter what I told myself or how often I danced.
I was standing outside the New York Public Library branch on Mulberry Street, an iced coffee melting in one hand, my cell phone in the other. I was overdue back at my desk. The humid breeze that slid across me felt like something she had sent, a different kind of warmth than the exhaust from SoHo’s glossy cars. I’d given New York five labored years. Maybe it was time to let her go.
Tango Lessons Page 16
