Tango Lessons_A Memoir

by Meghan Flaherty

  She’d tried as best as she could to replicate our former home, hanging pictures as she’d always hung them, arranging knickknacks on the shelves. My room was her storage room, where all abandoned paperbacks and projects were crammed in with orphaned electronics and the family photos she found too difficult to see. All my grade-school yearbooks and journals were there, too, staring at me from the bookshelf. In my continual desire to reinvent myself over the years, I had torn out nearly all the pages. What my mother could preserve, she did: evidence of little lonely me trying very hard to seem like someone else. The full force of my newest failure settled in. I was just another twenty-something moving back in with a parent because she couldn’t make it on her own.

  As if that weren’t bad enough, I noted a gradual inflammation in my nether parts. When this became unbearable, I asked my mother for an appointment with her gynecologist. I’m sure it’s nothing, we both said, but it was not. I’d never had a cold sore, but apparently the Mogul had, and I’d contracted his. There’d been no symptoms; he’d had no idea that sun blisters from years ago lay dormant in the skin inside his mouth. Yet there I was in Florida, a few days later, furious and terrified in a paper gown.

  I cried for one week straight.

  First of all, it hurt like hell and lasted days. Then came the avalanche of shame. Even my mother started crying, mourning my little unspoiled perfect body. She stroked my hair and ferried me to the pharmacy for medication, called in sick to work. She installed me on the couch in her pajamas and we drank echinacea tea and went through television series after television series.

  I ranted bitterly. It wasn’t fair. I’d been so careful. I’d had so few affairs, it seemed impossible to have ended up with this affliction in so ladylike a place. Worse still, I’d held in me the thought of being tainted all my life, a certainty I carried, like an inward graft. Now, here was the proof, the wound made visible, the flaming sore.

  “My poor baby,” she repeated and repeated, even as she reassured me it was not my fault, and—just as she had said when I was seven—that I’d done nothing wrong. “So what,” she said. “This happened and the world won’t end.” But I was unconvinced. The shame I’d felt for years had flared—irrevocable, conspicuous—between my legs. I could no longer mask it, damp it down. Everything I’d ever feared about myself was coming true.

  I felt a bowel-deep chill, though I was in the tropics, reading novels poolside, drinking wine in palm frond gardens with my mother and her friends. It was coming into Season in the biosphere; a steady stream of transplants flew in from New Jersey, Boston, and New York. Old white people, rich and middle class, arrived in droves, filling the air-conditioned eateries, the outdoor tiki bars, the parking lots and indoor shopping malls. This was my break from all I’d left behind. This slow and shallow pace. No strings attached, just time to write, to breathe, to wear bright-colored sundresses, hibiscus flowers in my hair. My mother had done so much to give me this Room of My Own to turn my life around, and I was wasting it. I’d given up. I had nothing to say.

  I lost whole days on the Internet, convincing myself of ghastly complications. I had a couple of awful conversations with the Mogul—all his ardor gone—who tried for days to tell me I must be mistaken, that there was no way I had ended up with cold sores on my undercarriage because of him. “You must have been with someone else,” he said. I hadn’t. “It must be you,” he said. It wasn’t. I had to call him twice for final confirmation of his hastily procured results, just to be sure. “Oh, right, yes,” he said. “As it appears, I did have that.”

  My mother thought that this development, and the Mogul’s absurd apathy, would make me change my mind and stay forever. His “please come back soon, please come back now” refrain faded to silence. The bare fact of my lesions had rocked something in him he could not confront. I came to hate him for this, for his lack of character. He was not worth returning for, and yet, if I was sullied now, then so was he—and who would have me now if he would not? I throbbed with indecision. The emptiness I felt, and the infection, were too much to bear if both had been for nothing. I’d ruined everything, I thought, and had to set things right.

  I called my dad. I’m not sure why; this was not the sort of thing a daughter was supposed to share with her father, but he’d called me twice without response and we were close enough for him to know before I told him when something was wrong. I knew I couldn’t face his voice without confessing. Without blurting out, through tears, the sorry state of me. “Just tell him,” my mother said. “It will be just fine. You’ll see.”

  “But what if he doesn’t want me anymore either?” I’d been trying for so long to be his perfect little girl—squeaky clean in atonement for the stain of my first childhood. This new defilement felt like punishment deferred. The uncles catching up to me, the icy speculums of state examiners, the past clawing me back. We had avoided mention of my tender parts for years. We both preferred to think of me pristine. What if this time, this truth, made me too ugly to keep?

  “Oh, Meg, that’s all?” he asked. “You had me really worried.”

  “So you don’t love me less?” I sobbed.

  “I will never love you any less,” he said. And then, to cheer me up, “Look on the bright side. At least that rat bastard Nixon is still dead.”

  I cried a few days more, and then resolved to face my situation with a sense of humor. At this I was sometimes more and sometimes less successful. I started cracking jokes at my anatomy’s expense. So did my mother. Every conversation was an opportunity for puns. I was so thankful for her then. We made a batch of margaritas, and we laughed and clutched our sides and cried. “Well, Meg,” she concluded—and we howled over this one—“Marty was right. The Mogul did give you a surprise present in a box. It just wasn’t from Tiffany!”

  We fell into a routine. I drove her to work at seven every morning, in my bathrobe, then came back to brew coffee in her two-cup pot and sit out on her balcony, looking across the water as it heated with the day. I sat there, staring at my laptop, until it got too hot, then went inside, down to the pool, or to the supermarket. I stared dumbly at the pages of my GRE math study guide, overwhelmed by all the algebra I had forgotten, the precalculus I’d never learned. Each afternoon when Mum came home, she asked about my progress.

  “Get much writing done?” she’d say, and flick on a reality television show she’d previously recorded. I’d mumble something about process and the muse, knowing I was fooling no one, least of all myself. This dream felt just as silly as the others had. I started dropping hints about returning to New York. She wasn’t pleased. We were supposed to take these months to help each other. She didn’t understand what could have changed my mind—the Mogul (now non grata in her house), or the dance, or maybe just the city with its talons deeply dug. I didn’t understand it either, but I’d already decided to abandon her. I’d already decided to go back.

  I should get a job, she said. People were hiring for the Season. She said it every other day, and every other day made me repeat: I wasn’t staying through the winter.

  “You’re really going back for that clown?” she would ask.

  “It has nothing to do with him,” I’d spit. I couldn’t say for sure what it did have to do with, but being there, with her, felt cowardly.

  My body stung and ached and itched in hidden places and the shame muddled my head. When I couldn’t write or stand to feel—when I didn’t know what to make of this or that, or him, or me—(which was most of the time), I cooked. Dinner was an unmade thing that could be made, something I could get right, and a way to show my gratitude. I crafted sprigs of herbs and fish fillets into something finite, which saved me chasing question marks around the room. Or dwelling on the hot stab of my humiliation. We ate most nights on the balcony, listening to the frogs. And almost every night, I fell asleep into disaster dreams: helicopters crashing overhead and buses falling from the sky. A semi driving off a building to erupt in flames below. I ran from fires and billowing explosion
s, sprinting atop a train that moved too slowly to outrun the burning city at my back. I dreamt of perils and projectiles. Sailboats crashing into pontoon planes. And lovers who left me howling in the hallways while they danced with everyone but me.

  Two weeks passed. I started doing intense vinyasa yoga, curling my legs under my hips, stretching my bones. The studio was half a mile from my mother’s place. I sped there in her car, her Leonard Cohen CD blasting, just to catch an hour of movement. It was a sorry substitute for tango, but in that world of parking lots and manmade lakes, the torpor threatened. I could sit on her balcony and turn to concrete, like the rest of Florida, or I could move. Whether to keep tethered to my body, to relieve the pain, or to shake loose the stubborn words lodged in my head, I chose to move. I filled my pockets full of prana. I became a pigeon queen.

  Weekends, we went out. We put on eye shadow and sandals, painted nails, and drove around through nights of outsized restaurants and uplit water features. She knew everyone. She’d rebuilt her life here. I had demolished mine. I felt that all my hopes were spoiling in her fruit basket.

  How absurdly passive I was then, and how I seemed to strive in all the wrong directions. It had to do with acting, maybe. I had been real onstage, the most myself when playing someone else. Offstage, I’d been acting all my life—playing the well-adjusted woman, sexually assured. Playing the girlfriend, young professional. The city girl. Playing all the parts I feared I wasn’t, and everything I wanted to be. Playing tanguera. Maybe if I stopped trying to be normal, trying to be everybody else, I might be capable of saying something true. What was it I was constantly escaping from, into tango, into theatre? My notebook began to fill, and not with what I’d planned to write—a series of acerbic anecdotes of waitressing, in hopes that those six years were not a total waste—but with childhood scenes. My tone shifted, from snarky affect to bewildered girl. The sores began to heal. I’d write, then drive to yoga, where the room was dark and warm, and through a haze of sweat and incense, find myself sobbing quietly onto my mat. We’d cycle into natarajasana. Dancer’s pose. I’d kick my leg behind me, up and back and up, and feel honest. Like a dancer. Inviolable, as I reached forward into air.

  Mum drove me one evening, charitably, to the Jupiter School of Ballroom Dance for a milonga tucked into a strip mall on West Indiantown Road. There were seven people left when we arrived, at an hour I’d assumed was fashionable. They didn’t charge an entrance fee. Mum sat beside me in one of the many empty seats along the floor, her purse on her lap, as I took my Comme il Fauts out of their silken sack. Buckling the straps, I wobbled like a five-year-old on Mommy’s heels. I hadn’t danced in weeks.

  I sat shyly, chatting with her, my face turned out of cabeceo range.

  “Well?” Mum asked, jiggling her foot.

  “Well what?”

  “Shouldn’t you get to it?”

  I wasn’t sure why I was there. Except perhaps to test myself: to dunk my toe back in the open sea and listen for its call. Maybe the dance had lost its magic; I needed to know.

  A milonga tanda started, and a lanky Cuban boy approached. Stuck out his open palm. I nodded and stood up. We started moving. He could have burped or stepped on me or galloped across my exposed toes and I would not have cared. I heard the DUM bah dum bum thump of the milonga bass line and my body whirred back into equilibrium. He was not advanced, but I was rusty and he wanted to fly, to pivot fast and viborita, twisting down the dance floor like a drunken snake. He sped us down the empty stretch of room along the mirrors. I thrust my disassociated hips and cheated into turns, all technique gone.

  Mum sat and watched, legs crossed, hands folded on her purse, making conversation with the dwindlers.

  “That’s my daughter,” I heard her say. “She tango dances in New York.”

  They called last tanda, and the boy and I hauled each other through three slow, sappy tangos. Our dance was awful, but I grinned into his cheek and knew that she could see. We made it through the Di Sarli “cumparsita” before I undid my buckles and went home.

  I got back that night to an email from Marty, eagerly anticipating my return. Everything’s gonna be alright, kid, he wrote. You’ll see. For him, there was still a green light blinking in the dark across the sound. But I did not agree. If there were indeed a beacon on the pier, that beacon was the dance itself, which made no promises of ever moving within reach, but which was always there, beckoning and beautiful. Whatever deficits there were in me, I could disown them. Even in that unsatisfying backroom dance, I knew this was the missing link.

  One afternoon, while Mum was still at work, I bought my one-way ticket back—exactly one month to the day. I knew that it would break her heart. I knew that it was selfish of me. She needed company, support. It was wrong to go, but also wrong to stay. I was too unsettled, too humiliated. I’d been beaten. Flunked my life and run away. Here was my second chance. Besides that, it was autumn. I couldn’t think in all that heat, in all that ferny green and postcard blue, when elsewhere everything was dying.

  I had three hundred dollars to my name, a suitcase full of summer clothes, two pairs of jeans, my ratty tango shoes. A laptop and a pair of yoga pants. A notebook and a coffee mug. Everything else was locked in storage and I could not afford a place to put it, or a truck to get it out. I needed nothing else. I’d been propped up by so much kindness—from Peter, Marty, from my mother—I wasn’t sure how I would ever pay it back.

  But I had chosen this. This quilombo—Argentine slang for a hot, holy mess—that needed fixing. I wanted Marty to be right, and was resolved. I could be autonomous. I could be brave. The city would do her worst, but I could try again—this time with no attachments. With a heart empty to all but tango. I would use the very thing that had dismantled me to patch myself together. This time not with the abandon of addiction, but intent.

  Mum was my ballast—I leaned against her. But there, I was a barnacle on her life. I couldn’t see myself except through her. She was too close. It didn’t matter whether she was right or wrong. I had to stop pretending to be anybody else.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  at five o’clock on a Friday night, the first day of October, my plane descended through a layer of clouds like dunes of sugar over East Islip into the airport, grey and blustery. I had checked one bag. I rode a shuttle bus into Manhattan, watching outer Queens fade into inner Queens, watching dark descend as we drove into midtown, watching all the windows light up, yellow against black. The city was indifferent to me and my return. I hit the pavement, matching pace, determined to be equally indifferent. I never wanted to own anything or risk loving anyone ever again.

  Peter’s doorman greeted me. Everyone was out. I piled my things back in the corner of the guest room I’d abandoned one month earlier, laid my toothbrush on the lip of the same sink, then went to meet a friend for dinner in a bistro in Hell’s Kitchen.

  “What am I doing here?” I asked her.

  She asked about my plan. I answered, “Strictly speaking, I don’t have one yet.”

  We finished our pommes frites and our wine.

  “It’s on me,” she said, snatching the leather wallet of the check away. “You’re unemployed.”

  Strictly speaking, I had no money, no apartment, no job, and no plan. But the night was warm for early autumn. The steady traffic crawling up Eighth Avenue, a blur of white fading to red, and all the sounds and smells combined to soothe me after weeks of quiet, uplit palms, and stately strip malls. There were no other voices in my head. Not Mum. Not anyone. I loved New York for making me anonymous again. For being loud and open late. I walked along the south edge of the park to take my laptop in for servicing well after midnight, then back with a hot chocolate in a paper cup that I had bought from a bodega and that had burned my tongue.

  I slept deeply in my borrowed bed, and in the morning stuffed a dress and heels into my purse to catch the commuter rail from Penn Station to New Jersey. It was day two of the Princeton Tango Festival. Marty would be there. Th
e Mogul would be there. A whole host of friends and strangers were there already, dancing without me. It didn’t matter that the last train back that night left well before the milonga would be over, and the first one Sunday morning not for hours afterward. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t danced all month, not since that one night in Jupiter. I put on my Elvis earrings and rattled across the river with a bagel in my lap.

  The sky was day-after-a-disaster blue, and even the industrial ugliness of Newark sparkled underneath it. Everything had crashed around me, except tango. After the Plague of Locusts and the Plague of Boils, as I had come to call the bedbugs and the sores, respectively, dancing was the thing no one could take away from me. The thing I couldn’t lose or break or make a mess of.

  The afternoon práctica was held on the Princeton campus in a big-windowed room, the kind with dust motes filtering through long shafts of light: spacious, sunny, and as warm a reintroduction to tango as I could have hoped for. I greeted acquaintances, then sat cross-legged chatting near the DJ table, nursing a coffee and pulling my hair back into pigtails. I accepted someone’s cabeceo. I was rusty and he didn’t mind. He took me gently through remembered movements, to familiar sleepy practice tunes. I bobbed between leaders, limbs creaking, until Marty turned up. “Kid!” he cried, and dropped his backpack to the floor beside his black leather sneakers. We embraced. We were no longer practice partners. He’d wanted to search out the holy grail of tango, his Giselle—the woman who’d be game for all of it, A, B, and C—and I had realized that practicing with one person only was no way to discover how I wanted to dance. But I hugged his taut and bony torso gratefully. I stretched up to meet him on my tiptoes and we waltzed. With Marty and me it was always valses; the rhythm and the whimsy touched us both so deeply, we could dance like that for hours.