Tango Lessons_A Memoir

by Meghan Flaherty

  I stretched out, channeled all the power in my limbs. I danced frustration, longing, my impatience with myself and with the world. I dove headfirst into my forward steps. I was an engine, several-cylindered, expensive. My foot was on the gas. He merely steered.

  It was the closest I had ever come to open conversation with an adult man. And there were no words spoken. There are things, I danced. Things that I feel, things that I need. I needed him to hold me, but not so tight that I would not be free. I needed him to take my hand, my waist, my weight. I needed to close my eyes and feel my way through what existed nowhere else but in that dark, blind dark. I needed trust, for him to keep me safe for those three minutes. I needed him to listen, move me where I wanted to be moved. To talk to me in terms that I could understand, in limbs, in sound. I needed him to be a vessel. I needed our tanda, our embrace, to bear the weight of all my longing, all my pain. My strange and winding route to sureness. My betrayals and my broken loves. It is a conversation, Cesar said. He could say anything he wanted in return, and I would listen. But what was said we’d keep, each to ourselves; our secrets were too personal to specify. I do not know yours and you will not know mine.

  In the third song of the tanda, the strings kicked in, tough and taut. My feet were bloodied, calloused, and my legs leaden and sore. My body was impossibly fatigued, but I belonged inside it, and inside that dance. He was archetype and effigy; he could have been anyone. He led, which is to say proposed, and I accepted, answering back—loud like I had never been with Enzo. I slowed our pace to pivot, grimacing, as the orchestra drew out a dissonance, suspending resolution, and I held us there. Parada. I had complete dominion as I waited to release us with my forward step. I felt a sudden rush of blood; he felt it too. He adjusted, reinforced his arm around my back. He held on tighter than he needed to, but not too tight. That was the boundary I claimed. Another silly mmm escaped his lips. I could have whispered anything I wanted into his deaf ear.

  This is here in me, I said. This too. Watching Chicho and Juana had taught me how to say this in movement, how to find it with the song. And Silvina had taught me to aspire to power.

  Chapter Twenty

  we drove home through the night and I mourned every darkened mile that dragged me back to dawn, the city skyline, and the imminence of endings—the festival, the summer, my endeavor in New York. I slept through most of Monday, hoping I might wake up back in Baltimore instead, with time permanently paused. I had only ten days left.

  I wandered through midtown as if on shore leave, trying to elude the feeling of finality and vertigo. I danced because it was the only thing that mattered, the only thing my heavy limbs could understand. I had no responsibilities, to anyone. It was the kind of life my mother called “fantasy land,” but Baltimore had shown me just how deep that fantasy could delve. There was no end to the rabbit hole. If I let it, tango could replace all other solace and eclipse the unlived future. I had the sudden and deranged desire to dive still deeper, to train until my body could approximate even a fraction of the perfection I had witnessed at the festival. I wanted to know what it would feel like to need nothing else.

  At the Mogul’s urging, I was added to the guest list of a summer tango ball in a penthouse overlooking Central Park. He did not ask if I would be his date, but wrote to tell me when I should arrive and, please, to save him the Varela tanda, “Historia de un amor.”

  I showed up in a backless cotton jersey dress—a bold cielo blue—and white high heels I’d worn once in a play and left at Peter’s place. I drank champagne. The Mogul and I air-kissed, then made awkward conversation, overlooking all the oaks and elms and horse-drawn carriages below. I tried to pretend that this was not my first penthouse soirée. When we weren’t dancing, we did not have much to say.

  Marty was there; we shared a vals or two, and remarked upon the white-tailed waiters and the bankers and the models on the terrace. To Marty, the Mogul was the Gatsby of the tango world—even though the penthouse we were in belonged to someone else. He found the opulence worthy of awe, as though it must contain a riddle.

  I was no Daisy; I only dreamt of being loved that way. And if I were, I would disdain the more pragmatic choice of wiser women. I was the kind of girl who stayed in Mississippi, as Dylan sang, a day too long. But I looked hard at the Mogul through that champagne lens and dared to wish.

  I’m not sure what I was even wishing for. When one is unattached in tango, the heat sometimes goes haywire and the what if sparks: What if this make-believe were real? It can infuse the dance with urgent, artificial longing. But, with the possible exception of Gustavo and Giselle, tango partnerships, romantic and professional, broke up as frequently as not. Hence my ABCs—or, as Marty called them, the Code of the Kid—and all my attempts to demagnetize the dance. I’d long since closed myself to the what if. But maybe with the Mogul, I was giving in.

  The dark wood ballroom was unfinished for occasions such as this. There were tea lights along the windowsill, and one long bench with velvet cushions. The plate glass wall looked down onto the black heart of the park, Manhattan twinkling at the edges. And when Varela played—because he had made sure to play it—the Mogul came to claim his dance. This, despite the lavish setting and the awkward small talk, was the same.

  The party dwindled, packing up around us. When we left, he put his jacket around my shoulders and walked me back to Peter’s parents’ building. He led me chastely to a café on the corner. We chattered, then we kissed. For the second time that year, I felt the cool of shop windows against my back. I remember feeling vindicated; this man did want me—at least enough to pin me up against Café Europa in the wee hours of a Friday. I cannot remember how it felt—lips, a vague curtain of hair? What there was between us wasn’t courtship; it was one long game of who-would-touch-the-other-first, and I had won. I said good night and went upstairs alone.

  I sat down on my borrowed bed, clicked on the light, kicked off the heels. I had nothing to say. No lines of other people’s pretty words, and none of mine. He had given me no fever. I liked my body just as well when it was here, by itself, as when with his. A fire flickered somewhere, but it hadn’t touched me. I was alone—the door closed and the walls impassive. I didn’t want him there.

  Marty, however, was convinced it was the romance of the century. A proper tango fairy tale progressing through each stage of courtly love.

  “Kid,” he said. “I’ve never seen him quite like this. I predict a Christmas wedding at the Plaza! A ring from Tiffany! You won’t have long to wait for a surprise in that little teal blue box.” In another life, perhaps, I might have been Marty’s Daisy, not the Mogul’s. Even so, the former assumed that everything the latter built must be for me.

  It was a pleasant fantasy. And though I’d found my footing on the dance floor, I was otherwise still lonely, still so passive, and I didn’t know enough to know better. I was still keen to have my choices made for me, and keener still to be in love. Befuddled by my contradictory desires. The Mogul was a man straight from the pages of a glossy magazine. I couldn’t imagine why I shouldn’t want him. He was suave and self-assured and seemed like an adult. He liked curry, Canaro, sailing, art. He could wear a linen shirt unironically. He looked tanned even in winter. And if he found me sexy, then that must mean I was.

  He gave me confidence when I needed confidence. Boldness when I needed boldness. I was penniless and scared. A flop of an actress and an adult with some Hail Mary wish to be a writer. New York had bested me, but I still didn’t want to quit. I needed a reason, besides tango, to want to stay—and Marty’s fantasy of Gatsby gave me one. If the Mogul wanted me, then that meant someone did. I just had to want him back.

  Mum arrived the following afternoon, her Hyundai loaded to the rearview mirror with all her summer kit. I’d come to her with everything—skinned knees, Sapphic love tales, socialist ideals, the string of men who wouldn’t touch me, the few who had. Now this: my confusion over a man some twenty years my senior.

  “
I think maybe I am in love with him?” I asked.

  “Oh, you are not,” she answered. “Trust me, Meghan. He is a mirage.” If a man is over forty and has not been married yet, there’s something wrong with him. “Don’t waste your heart.”

  I begged her to stay the weekend before taking me away; she agreed. We called it our farewell celebration tour. We drank fizzy wine, took photographs in dusky parks. Saturday night, the Mogul took us out to dinner: thirty-dollar fish on Madison Avenue with cold white wine and panna cotta. We sat out on the sidewalk in the path of limousines and downtown buses, in a hot cloud of exhaust. I played the role of grown-up woman deftly, as I had with Peter—toying with my stem glass, ankles crossed, proper fork in proper hand. He asked permission to take me dancing after dinner. Mum agreed.

  At the milonga, we danced three tandas before he told me he was tired. “Will you stay with me tonight?” he asked. It felt like victory. And so he took me home—back to his cavernous apartment with the pillared sculptures and the cat door for an ex’s long-gone pet. I tiptoed across his precious rug. I still didn’t know that I could simply ask: What do you want from me? Why are we here?

  We kissed again, this time for hours, until our lips were chapped. There was no music. Lights were on. I didn’t know that I could say: I changed my mind. Please take me home. He removed my dress, my underthings. My nakedness was gradual, and faraway. I’d gone somehow numb. It didn’t feel as good as dancing with him had. It didn’t feel like any kind of dream. It was gratifying, perhaps, to be touched, but I was limp in all but brain. I wanted him. I maybe didn’t want him. Still, I let him unwrap me anyway, in the darkness that was not so dark because New York at night is never quite.

  I lay there on white sheets, among white pillows, a beige platform in the middle of what felt like emptiness. Naked in a circle of lemony light, the vents and workings of the building humming, desolate, inside the night. The wheeze of city noise outside. It felt like pretend, going through the motions. Stretching limbs and easing out of garments, feigning an eagerness I didn’t feel. He began to kiss me, and the little noises of that effort echoed, silly, against bare walls. I tried to fake the shiver I had felt with Enzo, how his mouth had branded me wherever he had touched. But I felt cool here, like fish flesh, in the open. Damp wherever he had kissed me. Clammy under central air. Aware, perhaps, of my own silence. I was thinking, spiraling; I wasn’t dancing back.

  We didn’t speak. Time contorted, too far between the shores of day and dawn. My mouth and throat went dry. I wanted to stop, or sleep, or ask for water. He moaned every now and then, which seemed to magnify my silence. We were tentative with each other, sluggish and restrained. He mumbled something about how beautiful this was, and I saw that he was reveling, that he was pleased.

  I had not forgotten what it felt like to be touched. I’d simply never learned. It was easy, too easy, to confuse the proximity of close embrace with real intimacy, to mistake sex for substance. And because the Mogul seemed like such a gentleman, I fell for it. With Enzo I had known at least that I was prey; the Mogul lured me into thinking that we stalked each other. I misinterpreted his practiced caution, his big display of trust, for real feeling. But his game had simply been to wait, to taunt his quarry, to delay the kill. In “unsexing” my tango, I’d stifled my desires—along with the notion that I might even have such things. But here they’d flared and spiked and reared themselves under the false pretense of real affection. All for some fantasy of being greatly loved.

  And here I was: a body, skin stretched over bones, being kissed in full and hollow places. Anesthetic. I had to force myself to stay in focus, not to float away. He stared into my eyes with such intensity I almost laughed. His gaze was glassy, shallow—tidewater. Had I seduced him? Or had he merely let me think I had, so the responsibility would be mine to bear? You asked for this, I thought. Either way, it all felt drained of meaning. It was sweaty and a little sour and, in the morning, we were nothing but two naked strangers, emptied of surprise.

  He took me for lunch. I stumbled through the heat of midday Sunday, moving slowly, as if through a wall of dense fatigue. I still did not know how he felt. Nor did I ask. The food was crisp and tasteless. I wanted to get back, to ask my mother why I couldn’t feel. Why his face across the table seemed so unappealing, unfamiliar. And yet how much I needed him to reach for me, to keep up the display of care, the chivalry, the charade of our closeness. He did not. I knew this wasn’t eye-shut love, but I was too embarrassed to admit it. I couldn’t reconcile what little I felt with what I thought I’d wanted, what was here chewing before me. The man I thought he was, the man he seemed to be.

  “How was it?” Mum asked when I returned.

  I lied. I still don’t quite know why. She would, of course, have understood, and freed me of him. “So wonderful,” I said instead. “We kissed for hours.”

  If she sensed my emptiness, she didn’t press. She repacked her overnight bag. I gathered my pile of possessions, shut them in a suitcase. We ate one last pricey midtown meal, sitting out on Seventh Avenue sipping our Sangiovese without speaking.

  “You’re not really going out again?” she asked as I tucked her into my guest room bed and dressed for one last RoKo.

  “Of course I am!” I chirped, shoe bag in hand.

  She couldn’t understand how one more milonga could be so damned important. Hadn’t I danced all weekend? Hadn’t I had enough?

  “It’s RoKo,” I pleaded.

  “You’d better be ready to leave at eight a.m.”

  “Of course!” I chirped again, and not without with a pang of guilt. Trying to outrun the sinking, used-up feeling from the night before.

  “I know you love it, Beanie,” she said, as she watched me go. She said again what she’d been telling me for months: “But you need more than that to make a life.”

  RoKo had a rueful glow that night. The songs were sweeter, the bulk-bought cookies fresher. People with whom I’d barely spoken suddenly were abandoned friends. I did not know whether I would see the Mogul; I had left that up to chance. “I’ll only bother going if you will be there,” he’d said, “probably late.” I hadn’t bothered to confirm. Those hours were mine. I danced long and hard and lost myself in the embrace of leaders who were no longer strangers. That practice went much deeper than anything the night before. I knew now how their arms felt, how their limbs moved, the precise pressure of their palms. I knew who I was with each of them. Or at least, I knew the version of myself I played for the duration of each song. My feet pointed and flexed. I stood on one leg as the other whipped around me like a windsock. Free. My heart lurched at the end of every tanda, as if the dance itself were unwilling to let me leave. Tango was kudzu, and tsunami, the quiet center of my storm. I thought: how peaceful it might be to stay, to drown.

  With each dance, the time before me dwindled. A year in Florida became six months, became a month or two. “I’m coming back,” I said to anyone who’d listen. “I won’t be gone that long.”

  When the Mogul arrived, late and harried, he barely had time to hang his leather jacket on the rack before Robin cried out, “Last tanda!” and the dancers scrambled into pairs.

  “You’re not really going,” he murmured in my ear.

  “I’m coming back,” I said, again. For my own benefit as much as his.

  “Good,” he whispered, and we danced, but it was nothing special. I was tired; he had not warmed up. We got better as the relentless tanda powered on. There weren’t many dancers left, and volunteers were already switching off the plastic votives, stacking them in boxes. We found a rhythm, slatting together in our habitual embrace. It was less fraught, less electric than it had been before. But there remained the satisfying stretch, the push and pull, the dynamic surging through our steps. This was still the something I would leave behind, I thought, the thing worth coming back to, tepid as it felt.

  “La cumparsita” tolled its awful bells. That night, I believe it was Rodríguez whose little parade would m
arch me home. I felt, in panic, the weight of that last song. My final anthem. It wasn’t what I might have wished for; Rodríguez’s version clocks in at a mere two minutes and forty-five seconds, and moves fast—too fast for someone wishing the milonga would go on forever. It tripped merrily along with splashes of piano, surging choruses of strings, and, always, that constant threat of ending. Of conclusion. I wanted to leave everything I felt there on the half-empty floor—the confusion and the doubts—but the song would not be overstuffed. It came choking to a halt and that was that. Chan chan. Lights flipped and magenta curtains pulled. The Mogul lingered like a valet while I said goodbyes and put away my shoes, then drove me the twenty blocks I would have preferred to walk. I felt like screaming. This was a mistake—him, not him. Leaving, staying. Everything.

  “Don’t be long,” he said, and bussed me chastely on the corner of my mouth.

  I slipped upstairs and into bed beside my mother, snoring quietly, her alarm set for seven. I couldn’t sleep, so I watched her. She’d laid her traveling clothes out on a chair beside our bags, ready to take me south, to sanctuary, to a place I might consider home.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  we hit the highway, a stretch of tar that faded across two days’ drive to grey, then flattened out under the stretched Florida sky—parched seashell, dried-up-starfish white. I brooded in the front seat, overwhelmed and unaccustomed to the lack of jagged skyline. When we pulled into her condominium complex, a hulking apartment building on the Intracoastal Waterway, I expected to feel different. I did not.