He reached over me to replace the Theroux on the shelf above his bed. I shivered. Then he gently took the book I held away. Gently uncrossed my legs. Tilted my chin up with his meat slab hand and kissed me. Morning was becoming blue; light filtered down on us through windows from the street, through dried flower vases, hand-blown glass, all filmed with dust. He laid me on his patchwork bed.
We kissed under the buttered glare of his reading lamp. I sank beneath his weight, into the stable, into ocean weeds. He switched off the lamp. We kicked our feet free of our boots, tangled our legs.
“Is this okay?” he asked, and peeled away each layer of my clothing. My sweater dress, my woolen socks. I nodded.
“And this?” My leggings. Nod.
“This?” He slid cotton straps from either shoulder, buried his stubbled cheek into my neck. I found my body, magnetized, arched upwardly to his. He was a perfect gentleman, almost archival, as though I were wrapped in vellum. I toyed open buttons, freed arms from his sleeves. He pulled his cotton undershirt over his head, pushed off his socks.
“This?” The camisole, over my head. One earring, then the other. He looked down at me, in black lace and a bra, and breathed, “God damn.” I’d never heard that tone in a man’s voice before. My skin was blushing late-night-television blue. If I was afraid of what came next, I didn’t want to be.
I touched his smooth and olive skin, and felt my naked arms against the hollow of his back. I helped him with his belt buckle, but didn’t dare grope further. I did not know how. I lay there as he undressed, unhooked my bra, and spread across me—his chest, the wide trunks of his legs, the softened leather of his hands. I shivered slightly everywhere we touched.
“Probably too much,” he said, his hand beneath a patch of lace, the very last. It was a question.
I mumbled yes, probably so, then nodded my assent and rolled beneath the weight of him—nearly rent in two by my desire to be taken. I closed my eyes. In that vast darkness there was only fullness. I wanted to melt into his skin and to be opened wider, wider, until I became the sea that swallowed him. That held him in my weeds. I wrapped my arms around his neck and tried to match his breathing as it rose and crested, as we panted ourselves, finally, to sleep.
We woke on Sunday afternoon, beneath the overhang of books. He got up, made coffee, sliced a pear. We didn’t then and never would know how to talk together. We traded furtive glances, awkward smiles. The sky outside was bright as icicles, but his room was dark. He stood there in his underpants and made us breakfast: English muffins soaked in honey, over-ripened fruit. I sat with a musty sheet wound around my breasts and stared at him with wild eyes and hair. I felt strangely beautiful, naked, in that light, and terribly self-conscious. I made a show of studying the shelf and mumbling my approval when I came to well-worn loves of mine—the Brontës, Abbey, Thoreau, Hesse, Bukowski. He dressed. I dressed. He turned on a hiss of old-time jazz. Come back to bed, I wanted to say. Stay here with me in this cave of quiet. Read to me again. But we had promises to keep. I smoothed the coverlets over his bed and gathered up my things.
We took the train together. Walked there, through cold and concrete Journal Square, glaring like a sheet of ice. Waited on the platform, shifting our weight from foot to foot. We were waiting for the train . . . I noted with a smirk. I tried to affect a cool ease with him I didn’t feel. We bantered emptily, and sat together watching people read their newspapers or stare into their laps. I hoped that he might hold my hand, but didn’t reach for his. Just before my stop he asked my number, which I recited at him over-shoulder as I exited, certain he would never call.
I transferred from the PATH train, sat still and quiet on the N in last night’s leggings and my grey wool coat, catching glimpses of myself in the windows, pale and underslept. Daylit Queens went rattling past. The world was vivid, crisp—my body too. I was lit up with something like a fever. A huge camellia, in the words of Plath. Hot and dissolving, like old whore petticoats / to Paradise. My flesh felt heady and electrified; there was a current thumping in my blood. Flashbacks to the night before lit up my spine, sent scrambled text and flesh and poetry into my brain. Black lace, blue blush of skin, the way he’d put his hot mouth on my neck, and how my edges had dissolved beneath him, the feel of him against a place too deep to name.
If only it had ended there. One night of dancing and a one-night stand. One blue-lit basement scene. A story I told Peter as I turned up, late, and sat beside him at the birthday dinner for a friend. “Did you come home last night, Biscuit?” he asked. “No,” I said. “Did you?” He grinned. We passed a heavy plate of spaghetti pomodoro back and forth between us and told each other where we’d woken up that morning.
“I had a one-night stand,” I whispered to him. “Me.”
He bumped my fist under the table.
I knew even then. Enzo would never be my boyfriend. He was pushing forty, undermotivated, half-employed. He rented the basement studio in Jersey City, and often left his morning coffee in the pot to rot for days. He drank too much. He was emotionally recondite. And I would come to find—too late—he was a conscience-sick Narcissus, reflected only in his women, and both delighted and repulsed by the results. I was too naïve to see, at first, that he had probably bedded half the New York tango scene, and that he blamed his string of women for his every flaw. I wish I’d understood then what he did and didn’t have to give. What I could and couldn’t ask him for. Back then, I looked at him and saw every last cliché of the uncageable: the lone wolf whose eyes are always blazing for the exit, the man no single woman could contain. It did not occur to me to try.
He called on Monday. He said, Thanks for being in my dream.
I took his lead. I met him at La Nacional that week—snuck in and started dancing, waiting for him to notice me, to say hello. When he asked me, I tried to follow evenly, and failed—too stuck in my own head and wondering whether he would ask me home. He did. I nodded meekly, and we rode the PATH train back toward his mismatched sheets, where I tried once more to follow evenly, and fumbled for his flesh. I waited for him to touch me first. Undress me first. I stared at him, wide-eyed and silent. I waited for his cues. I spoke when spoken to, but otherwise made a beeline for his bed and perched there, tightly geared. I pulled books down off his shelves and flipped through pages. Hoping he would take them from my hands as he had done before. I wanted nothing but to pin him to the sheets and read to him as I undressed him. Read to him and lick his ear. Whisper fragments as I switched off the reading light. These actions seemed impossible to me. My voice felt strangled, and my body roiled, tensed and outwardly inanimate.
We lurched on this way for weeks. I waited for him; he called. We met in darkened wine bars, deserted ones and crowded ones in which we were afraid to talk or had to shout into each other’s ear. He asked me to milongas, to which he showed up late. I would pretend he wasn’t there at first, and he would have to corner me to say hello. He asked me to dance; we danced. He sometimes did and sometimes didn’t ask me home. No matter where we were, he touched me first. And then he disappeared, for days.
That Christmas, Mum was working. It was high season at the country club, and they couldn’t spare her. Dad was with his girlfriend and her kids. In the crush of parties, workdays, and late tango nights, I hadn’t dwelled much on the season—except to ponder every so often how it used to feel. I’d spent the last three Christmases with Peter’s family, the bustle of their company distracting me from feeling anything but merriment. This year, somewhat estranged, I spent so many evenings by myself, walking in the dark between the parties and milongas, work and work events, and listening to a constant stream of mournful choral standards on my headphones, on repeat. Missing my family, but not sure, really, if two parents who never spoke still counted as one. Or whether I was lamely missing something that had simply ceased to be. I lay in bed on Sunday afternoons and watched the planes take off, one by one, out of LaGuardia. Then got up and went to RoKo, where the emptiness was easy to defeat. Eve
rything in that bleak midwinter felt encased in ice, but still too beautiful to break.
I went stag to Peter’s family Christmas dinner and found myself, hours later, alone and sober on his parents’ couch, full of a feast I’d helped to cook and trying not to feel peripheral. Peter had long since fallen asleep beside me on the couch, next to a three-quarters-empty glass of scotch. His parents’ tree glowed white and gold and glinted in the windowpanes. I’d overstayed my welcome, but had nowhere else to go; his family had been my family for so long and I didn’t want to give them up. Still, I watched Peter’s breathing rise and fall and felt like an intruder. I showed myself out into the streets and walked downtown. It was Friday night and yet the city was deserted. There was only one milonga open, so that was where I went. Forty-nine blocks south, and six avenues east. I wasn’t sure what I was doing at the Uke, picking my way past families celebrating over borscht and blintzes in the dining room, but I paid my entrance to the back, where tango played inapposite to Christmas. My thick wool tights slipped in my shoes, which made me wobble, but it didn’t matter. Edward was there. We danced—badly; I was too warm in my turtleneck and couldn’t seem to find the flow. After an hour, I went home.
My dancing had somehow gotten tangled up with Enzo—as if he’d taken too much of my weight and robbed the love out of my hips, and I was stuck again inside the tiptoed girl I’d been months before, jittery and passive on the floor.
I was trapped in his milongas first, and then the ones he never made it to—when he pled too tired, too weary, or too bored. I watched for him everywhere I went, scanning the entrance, the benches, the leaders prowling the perimeter of the floor. The sight of him emerging from the elevator set off cymbals in my chest. It was a game of wounded predator and skittish, fatalistic prey: awful if he wasn’t there, worse when he was. The only power I could claim was to ignore him, but if he was anywhere in sight, I couldn’t concentrate, let alone lose myself and dance.
The word canyengue came from a Ki-Kongo verb that means “to melt.” Kanienge (from mu nyenga) is the imperative: “Melt into the music!” Melt! As if, from the very heat of it, one could dissolve into the dance. That’s how it first had felt. Now I almost dreaded dancing with him. We were not matched in level, and whatever witchery had hummed between us died. I lost my confidence. He was image conscious and impatient, crouched too far down into himself to see the harm his frustration with my beginner weaknesses had wrought. I felt beholden—as if I owed improvement to him, as if two tandas were his grudging gift to me, a gift I squandered in my missteps and my nervous lack of ease. Sorry, I continually whimpered, miserably, into his ear. I fluttered when we moved, a moth half-tachycardic with the terror. My feet barely touched the ground. Still, I persisted, naïve enough to think that if we only touched our torsos close enough together, we might melt back into that dream.
For months this wore on. We never once discussed the poems we’d sent each other when I was in France, the simmering flirtation we’d stored up for a winter such as this. I never warned him about the drought that came before him, and the damage—how I was not yet the woman he expected me to be. I meant to ask him to be gentle with me, as you would a gift that tumbled, so much more fragile than expected, from its paper wrappings. I rehearsed the words that I would use. Just be patient, I would tell him. And explain. Tell him how he made me feel like a hothouse tomato, ripening and red. Tell him other things that I rehearsed, but never said out loud.
It wasn’t just the fever stuff. I liked him. I liked his skulking boyish weirdness. I liked his brain. The way he read, with reverence, as though words—all words, when read by him—were holy. How he never left the house without a book. How he was alive to art. I liked the music he played—loud and at all hours in his studio. I liked his taste, and how we both tended to dress like paperboys, in corduroys and woolen hats. I liked his adolescent, navel-gazing scowl. I liked the drama of his solitude. The strange and feral, stilted fact of him. He looked like he’d been deeply hurt. I wish I’d asked him how.
The best we ever did was books. We traded war memoirs, modernist tomes, Hemingway, Nicholson Baker, E. B. White. Our solvent currency was this. On New Year’s Eve, after we’d managed to meet and kiss at midnight in a special midtown warehouse dance, we missed a PATH by seconds and sat there for an hour on the soiled concrete reading Breakfast at Tiffany’s from the slim volume in his coat pocket. We sipped from a split of fine champagne until the transit police saw and confiscated it. We didn’t care. We sprawled, our legs before us, reading together at the tunnel’s maw, warm even in winter.
But when the book was shut, I lost my nerve. I kept my distance at milongas, dancing half a floor away from him and shooting furtive glances I did not expect to see returned. When seated across a table from him, I would fiddle with my wineglass, or a coffee cup, looking anywhere but himwards. It was the most confounded lust I’d ever felt; my heart mush thrummed just at the thought of him.
By the time he took my hand, and I his massive shoulder blade, I was transparent. He asked for my weight, for me to sink, solar plexus into hips, and show the love I’d bottled up. But I felt weightless, insubstantial, as if I couldn’t access my own force. I was a linen curtain; he was atmospheric pressure. I let myself be flapped and waved. I let him fray me at the hem. Sometimes it felt like he was lunging extra-violently, just to see if I would blow away.
The sex was not much different.
He was as didactic in the bedroom as on the dance floor, but I needed teaching. He was a grown man, at least in form, and he had grown man needs I didn’t know enough to meet. I had never really learned to touch a naked male, and I was too consumed with being touched by him to try and learn to touch him back. He never said he was unsatisfied, but then, he didn’t have to. We hardly ever spoke. He simply placed my hand on him and sighed.
My mother, libertine that she was, almost approved of the affair—she even used that word, as if to steel me for the inexorable end. She was having her post-divorce liaisons with unbefitting men—why shouldn’t I? I told her how he challenged me; how I read faster now to match his pace. How he texted me in prose. But he was just another clown to her, not worthy of my heart.
“Meg. If a man is over forty and has never been married, then there’s something wrong with him,” she said.
“But, Mum, he isn’t forty yet.”
“Close enough,” she said. I told her she was wrong; it was a generation thing.
“Oh, sweetie, I’m not wrong,” she said. “I’m glad he wants to pork you, though. I hate to say that’s progress, but it is.”
Still, I went to his milongas. Sometimes he was there. We danced wide arcs around each other until the dance floor thinned too much for us to keep pretending we weren’t waiting for each other. Sometimes he stood me up. Sometimes I sat alone at home in my pajamas and realized I smelled of him. Which is to say of Lever 2000 soap and garlic, musty paperbacks. I confessed to Edward one night, in the back of a shared cab. He was more shocked than I’d expected, given my behavior at the All-Night. “You’re talking about Enzo?” he demanded. “You actually slept with that guy?”
“I know,” I said, then added lamely, “You wouldn’t understand. I don’t even understand.”
I couldn’t stop. I’d folded two compulsions into one. Enzo was tango; tango, Enzo. And I was losing both. I kept trying to find my stride, which happened only in Nadtochi’s studio, in the stolen sunlight of the workday. But even there, I wasn’t dancing back. I kept forgetting to embellish. “Dále, mujer!” he goaded. More than once, he asked if I was tired. It’s possible he knew, though he referred to Enzo only once, as “that friend of yours.” I’d like to think he’d given me the benefit of the doubt. I didn’t disabuse him of it.
Enzo was the secret that I danced.
He simmered underneath the last two shows I ever did: an encore reprise performance of the cabaret, and a play Peter and I produced together. Against Her Better Judgment was our low-budget swan song. He handled the fu
nding and I wrote the script, adapting six Dorothy Parker short stories, punctuated by a dozen of her poems. I’d grown up on these, reciting even the most caustic barbs at dinner parties so that I might prove a credit to my parents with my nascent erudition. I’d learned a few things from Ms. Parker’s playbook about spitefulness and snobbery, what men wanted, and what women never got. The former were a pack of brutes, the latter either hellions or simpering fools. What I’d read with bemused delight in childhood now struck me as sickeningly resonant: Social trappings. Humor awash with bitterness and booze. Predatory or buffoonish men against the sharp-tongued heroines who loved them. There were lessons to be revisited, relearned in her work. A frightening clap of honesty in the droll dynamic she’d exposed. The characters were more gussied up, perhaps, their speeches florid and precise, but not much else had changed since 1931. I, for one, was still waiting by a telephone, bargaining with God and with myself that some or other man might call. Please, God, let him telephone me now. That simply wouldn’t do.
There were six of us onstage—three women and three men. I found the work discomfiting and personal, the rehearsal process demanding that I pumice over wounds so new I had no strategy to hide them. And see, in stark relief, the ways in which I (often) skirted the pathetic in the name of love. How much I’d given up, and for how little. My costars felt the same. Good god, I absolutely do this, we found ourselves lamenting after particularly trying scenes. Cackling, This idiot is me. We set ourselves the task of rendering these biting portraits of the sexes both absolutely true and absolutely wrong. For me, at least, it was an act of exorcism. I went into rehearsals raw, to reenact injustices Enzo, or any other cad, had done. Ready to purge myself of my most pitiable behaviors, to bare the blight and kill it off with laughter and applause.
Tango Lessons_A Memoir Page 13
