To Nadtochi, social dancing was of supreme importance. “Where have you been going?” he demanded. I answered Lafayette. He clicked his tongue. “You mean you haven’t been to La Nacional?”
I confessed I hadn’t. La Nacional was one of the more intimidating, populous milongas in the weekly calendar. It happened every Thursday night, in the performance space above the Spanish Benevolent Society on Fourteenth Street while, downstairs, men with hard-shell paunches forked up garlic shrimp from clay dishes, downed rioja and espresso, and screamed at live-stream fútbol games. The milonga cost a whopping fourteen dollars—nearly three times the cost of weekend prácticas—which gave you access to a room, a bar, a tin of Altoids, and, occasionally, an Oreo cookie from a small basket by the cashbox. When you left, long after midnight, one of the two men who ran it handed you a rose.
I steeled myself and went one Thursday night after a work event. It was almost eleven, and the joint was full. I found an empty chair along the wall, and stuffed my things between its legs, shoving my purse among three other purses, out of foot reach. I surveyed the crowd for Enzo, as I often did, but he had vanished. Nadtochi nodded at me, pleased. “Good to see you!” he said an hour later, after throwing me his cabeceo. “You have come to the right place.” We danced a set, and thanked each other. It was easy to lose track of hours at a milonga. By the time I took my rose to go power walking east on Fourteenth to the subway, it was nearly two. The Queens trains were running too sporadically to wait, so I took the first of many overly expensive late-night taxi rides across the bridge, slept short and sweet, and spent a good part of my Friday workday fighting off fatigue.
Under Nadtochi’s counsel, I started venturing beyond my comfort zone. There was so much more I hadn’t seen. On any given night, there was at least one place to dance; some nights, there were three. There was trendy tango, traditionalist tango, tango for the aged and aging, tango for students, queer tango, tango to live music, outdoor tango, and alternative tango. I picked my timid way through each, surveying the topography of options. My old studio and the Lafayette milonga were both C-list, geared toward an older, less ambitious crowd (had I but known), but friendlier. Mondays at Lafayette were better attended—more like La Nacional, with its loyal cadre of transplanted porteños mingling gaily with their Fernet-Branca and their warm saludos. On Mondays there was also Luna, a warmly mixed crowd at a midtown studio, gently shepherded by the enchanted, spider-legged Rebecca Shulman. She half-led a práctica in the adjoining room, which many devoted dancers never missed.
Tuesday nights (and Friday and Saturday afternoons), the better older dancers went to TriANGulO, the only tango-only studio in New York, so named for its original triangular location. TriANGulO had a mural painted on its back wall depicting the city tango scene from 2007. Rebecca, Mariela, Robin Thomas—even, I suspect, Svengali—were pictured there in evening gear, plus a host of dancers I had never met, but would be nonetheless surprised to recognize there, months and years later, peering out.
The in crowd—the students and the semi-pros, the tango bums, the teachers, and their hangers-on—spent their Tuesdays at Robin Thomas’s Sangria Practica, so named for the communal stockpot of sangria swigged from plastic children’s mugs. That same crowd spent Wednesday nights at Tango Café—above a porn shop and an Irish pub on Eighth Avenue, just past the stately post office—which offered alternative music, wine-by-the-box, grapes, and brie.
La Nacional on Thursdays drew a mixed crowd, different every week, depending on the DJ’s skill to unify. And on Friday nights, the Ukrainian East Village Restaurant, referred to by the tango cognoscenti as “The Uke,” opened up its backroom door. A waiter stood behind a makeshift bar and overcharged for weak mixed drinks and tangy wine, looking bored and mildly offended in his uniform; tango dancers rarely risked upsetting balance with excessive drink. Besides, the ancient floor was pocked and sloped, riddled with sticky patches, and required the full wits of one’s feet.
Saturdays rotated monthly. On the first Saturday, Mala Leche, the weekend edition of Tango Café, with an extra room for Twister, gossip, blues. On the second Saturday, the All-Night Milonga, a behemoth that ran through five in the morning and had a designated room for neo-tango electronica. On the third Saturday, Robin Thomas’s Nocturne—and I’d begun to notice the pervasiveness of his name brand—the jewel in his New York tango crown, which drew dancers from several states. On the fourth Saturday, finally, a gathering called Practilonga, a relaxed BYOB affair.
Sundays were for the South Street Seaport or the homey, Argentinist “Milonguita” La Ideal. Sometimes a group would congregate outside on the Christopher Street Pier, and pass the hat to cover the cost of potluck snacks and portable speakers. It was best on hot days, when the wind swirled up the boardwalk, or at sunset, when the smog above the Hudson River blazed fuchsia and Jersey City started twinkling in the dark.
I still had no idea about the cliques and sub-cliques of the city’s tango scene, or the disparate social strata. I bumbled from milonga to milonga, varying my attendance week by week, avoiding weekend evenings, high-stakes venues, nontraditional music, and the phantom young and hip. But here was an undiscovered country gaping at my feet. A whole wide world in which no one knew me, or my early missteps, and where Svengali was irrelevant. Forgettable. Ignored.
Sometimes I sat for hours, watching without dancing. Sometimes I said yes to strangers, though their leads left much to be desired. Pleased to find myself no longer on the bottom rung of competence, I would thank them after one tanda and sit again. Sometimes I said yes out of kindness. Sometimes because I’d learned never to judge a leader by appearance. A frail older gentleman, even one whose suit coat smelled of mothballs, might embrace me with such tender respect, it wouldn’t matter if he only paused and walked and paused. He would have tango in him, dignified and deep. Or a new favorite might appear out of nowhere—a stranger with a clear, exhilarating lead—and we would dance so hard we’d collapse laughing, having to catch our breath after each song.
I commuted to work and tango from the last stop on the Astoria line. I went straight home after the drudgery of whirring Xeroxes, the hours wasted in redundant meetings, and when most of my peers were headed out to dinner, I went dancing. I passed Greek patriarchs sipping ouzo and Pellegrino outside corner stores, listening to their wives call children off their bikes and into bed. I ate mostly sandwiches, something small to keep from feeling sluggish on the floor. My purse bulged with my shoes, a book, a canteen full of water. Well after midnight, I’d return by train or taxi, my purse reeking of foot musk and my hair gone limp.
We were on an Old World alley plan, and our apartment had a back balcony that overlooked the balconies of all our neighbors. It was my very own arrabal: two-story single-family dwellings packed with generations, porches lined up fence to fence, and ancient mutts slumped in the corners. It had a different feel in the early hours—in that sweet spot between dancing and the morning drudge. All was quiet except the Amtraks rumbling across the ivy-covered Hell Gate Bridge that dwarfed us from above. A bakery on Twenty-seventh Avenue fired its raisin loaves in the wee hours, so the neighborhood would smell of cinnamon and rising yeast. I turned my key in one lock, then the next.
Though I lived there and only there, Peter often preferred to stay at his family’s place in midtown. I was alone most of that autumn. I reaccustomed myself to coming home to silent dark, the wall of it, just inside the apartment door, and welcoming the moment when the deadbolt clicked behind me and there was nothing but the hum of power through the wall sockets. The muffled hiss of white noise from the city just beyond the cheap glass of the windowpanes. Sometimes it felt menacing, oppressive. Sometimes a relief.
But I had lived alone once, and remembered how I’d liked it. I’d leave the windows open, pull the curtains shut. I thought of a Billy Collins poem, the one to Plutarch; it is a sonnet about sonnets. Laura says take off those crazy tights / and come at last to bed. There was no one telling me to take off min
e. I’d set an alarm for early morning and my dreams were disconnected molinetes, ill-formed turns.
Tango was becoming my life, to the neglect of all else. Mere months before, I’d felt my loneliest sleeping beside a man who loved me, differently but deeply, with all the semblances of normal early adult life. Now I slept alone. I’d stopped attending acting class entirely, stopped seeing friends for drinks or dinner, stopped thinking much past my next dance. At a milonga, I never had to talk about myself. Never had to explain my failures, my abandoned acting project, my strange relationship, my “archetypal father complex,” or my childhood. Conversations between tandas were rudimentary, and not required. I live here. I work there. I’m sort of from New England. I could be anonymous and enigmatic. I could surrender to the music, let it blur my edges, wash myself anew. The men were dance partners; the women were removed. We passed one another with the occasional nod of solidarity. It wasn’t the music that connected us, I thought; it was this silent communion. And though I often went whole evenings without speaking to another person, I was not alone.
Chapter Eleven
that fall, I found my tango niche. A new Sunday milonga christened RoKo by Robin Thomas and his fellow DJ Ko Tanaka. The space was big, the floor was good, the room was friendly, brightly lit. Its Herald Square location made it easily accessible from outer boroughs and New Jersey. Within a month, it was the largest and most popular weekly milonga in the United States. Grand Central Station for the New York tango scene. It made room for everyone, from every crowd, and gave you a sense of end-of-week conclusion, coming home. It gave the city what its tango wheel had lacked: a hub for all its wanton spokes.
The bare “ballroom” had been transformed by long magenta drapes of bulk-bought silk and battery-powered votive candles by the dozen. Patrons ranged in age from eighteen to over eighty, and in economic class from those who volunteered to clean up in exchange for free admission to those who splurged on ten-day tango tours to Buenos Aires. Weak coffee burned all night in a pot next to a plate of thumbprint sandwiches and wafer cookies. Under the warm lights, tango stars in civvies mingled and sometimes even danced with plebes. RoKo was democratic. The tango wolves were tamed. In this upstairs enclave of a midtown dead zone, every Sunday night, people took other, often very different people in their arms and moved to music. Hours disappeared as the lead-footed minute hand spun the clock above the door. There was no posing. No agenda. No drama and no disco balls. Nothing creepy whatsoever. It was ideal, and nothing like a sex club. It was somewhere I could take my mom.
I went to RoKo every week, like church. To get there, I walked north through Herald Square, all converging avenues and neon noise, into the verdant bandage that was Greeley Square. I passed eight-foot billboard beauties in their underclothes, shuttered fast food eateries, and the blond brick behemoth of Macy’s flagship store. I navigated the green metal folding chairs and the homeless men and women who had claimed them with their lumping mounds of shopping bags. No matter the temperature, the sidewalks would be wet with spills. I hugged Sixth as it ascended, thinking city life was city life, whether in 1919 Buenos Aires or 2009 New York. There were haves and have-nots. Constant longing, upward striving. Discrimination, poverty, unfairness—so very little ever changed. Some Old World was always vanishing around us.
The turn onto Thirty-sixth Street wasn’t special. The corner smelled of pizza and accumulated trash. Businesses and delis were all closed, their metal gates pulled down and padlocked for the night. Outside a historic B-list chophouse, backwaiters and barmen leaned against the brass-handled door and smoked their mid-shift cigarettes, their sullied aprons hanging to their shoes.
Crosstown traffic was always slow that time of night. Vehicles passed in steady eastward waves. From a certain patch of sidewalk, a mere few meters of concrete, it was possible to discern faint strains of tango music from above. If there weren’t too many blaring horns, or cars swishing through rain, I’d stop to listen, wondering just how many passed this way each Sunday night, not knowing to look up at building number 29, where on the second floor, six flat glass windows were postered over with an unobtrusive sign, black lettered onto white: Manhattan Ballroom Dance. A website and a phone number were printed underneath the silhouettes of waltzing couples. A string of twinkle lights was draped like bunting. How many never noticed the ornately carved façade, its cornices and crests and cornucopia, the unknown birds and urns? Who would bother looking up?
The security guard knew tangueras by their shoe bags or their harem pants tucked into boots. He sometimes catnapped on the job, his head propped on his palm. I passed him, called the elevator, rode up, and, when the doors ratcheted wide, stepped into a mass of oscillating dancers bobbing past in counterclockwise lanes. Here, finally, was a secret world worthy of the name.
To Robin, tango was a community—not just an activity that lonely people did together without speaking. He would have been horrified to know how isolated I had been in my first half year of dancing. At RoKo, I began to feel embarrassed by my lack of tango friends. In that great, glowing room, no one else looked quite so unattached. Dancers sat in chatty clumps, made conversation at the snack table. Friends passed around bottles of wine and plastic cups. There was laughter on the floor. For the first time, I entered a milonga and felt invigorated, felt like racing in. Apart from Edward, I had yet to make a single friend. But when I saw the tango block party of RoKo, and the rosy, boisterous crowd, I wanted to be part of it; I wanted to be part of them.
I once asked Robin what he thought brought all of us to tango, and what kept us there. His answer was simple: we all just wanted to be held. I thought: that couldn’t be. The close embrace had been an obstacle for me, as though it asked for more than I could give. I’d made it this far, hadn’t I, in spite of being held? I couldn’t believe all the occult mysteries of tango boiled down to a cheap feel. He was quick to qualify, and to agree with me; the tango embrace wasn’t sexual. Which was not to say the two don’t overlap occasionally. It’s like the office water cooler: “After a while,” he said, “when you dance tango a lot, you end up having only (or mostly) tango dancers as your friends. So who else are you going to hook up with?” Rock climbing, he added, was far worse for giving rise to hanky-panky. “You’re actually tied to each other,” he said, “by rope.”
Being held is not the point of tango, but the close embrace is what makes the dance so special. You press your torso against another person’s torso; you move together or you do not move at all. The dance won’t work without that physical connection, that soldering of sternums, that collusion. To dance well, you must reconcile yourself to this. No matter how your partner holds you, there is that bald fact of being held. The tango embrace is ineluctable—from the Latin in-, “not,” and eluctari, “struggle out.” It takes a little getting used to, training yourself to touch and be touched at close range—and to resist the eroticism or revulsion that touch might conjure up. But it will come to feel as comfortable and familiar as a favorite chair, or maybe the embrace of an old lover—warm, and almost drained of pleasure.
Robin Thomas makes a living out of this. “It’s really beautiful,” he told me, “to see this scientist or physicist who works in a lab all day embrace a woman slowly, sensually, and start moving together . . . to see them finally understand that that exists inside them.” And though it may seem overly dramatic: “Not just touching other people. Talking to other people. That’s the thing these physicists and chemists learn to do. They learn to talk to women.” Robin believes through social dancing we are socialized. I wondered for a moment what he thought of me. Tango, to him, was just another method for communicating with one another. “They could be doing something else,” he says. “This physicist could swim with the biologist and it would probably be just as good for them—maybe.” But tango was the community he helped create, and one I suddenly longed to be a part of: a water cooler for the many splendid social misfits of the city of New York.
I looked around and saw that he
was right. Besides the physicists and engineers and me, there were artists, professors, students, decorators, architects, attorneys, bankers, realtors, and radicals, all mashing themselves together comfortably. Presumably some of us had not been capable of that before we took to tango. And most of us, whether from being held or not, had been irrevocably changed.
A crew of photographers skirted the room taking action shots. Their photos, once uploaded, would spread through social media like a winter cold. People who’d danced together only once would strike up online friendships. Non-dancers had the chance to see their friend or colleague temple-to-temple with someone from a different corner of the world. My dad would call me at my desk midweek when the photos hit, if I’d been tagged in any. “It’s awfully cool, Meg,” he’d say, then cycle through the other crucial topics in our conversation repertoire: the weather, daily tedium, or how I’d fared with the Sunday puzzle in the New York Times.
Maybe it was as simple as Robin said. Maybe all of us were missing something in our outside lives. The scientists and financiers needed a creative outlet. The frustrated artists needed release. The lonely people needed only to be a part of something. You didn’t have to broadcast what you lacked. You just had to show up, embrace someone, and dance.
Tango Lessons_A Memoir Page 10
