Tango Lessons_A Memoir

by Meghan Flaherty

  That afternoon I danced with as many leaders as would have me, apologizing for my rustiness, reminding everyone I hadn’t danced in weeks. They all just shook their heads as if to say, Shh, we’re dancing now. You’re fine. Three hours passed; the sun began to sink, casting the campus into pale autumn evening grey.

  Marty and his new attempt at ABC let me borrow their hotel room shower, where I steamed myself to lobster pink and changed for the milonga. The three of us went for an Italian dinner. One glass of red for courage—por las dudas. One bowl of hot tomato soup with bread. Marty ordered half the seafood menu: grilled octopus, a crab cake, cioppino, pizza with fra diavolo shrimp. We drank strong espresso, and passed around a tin of mints. I decanted ice water into a bottle in my purse. We went for thick, rich cocoa at a shoebox ice cream store and walked to the milonga, past well-coiffed Princeton kids in Top-Siders and salmon chinos who ignored the strains of violin wafting from the Mathey College common room. Perhaps they never heard them. Inside, the vault was filled with tango, up to its darkest ogives. The chandeliers were lit above a hundred couples twisting in a reassuring loop.

  When the Mogul entered, Marty and I were dancing to Caló, something quiet and sustained. “He’s here,” said Marty, and my heart began to beat so hard that Marty asked if I should sit. “I’m fine,” I said, battening my eyelids down and re-draping my arm across his shoulders. But I wasn’t fine. I was agitated. I was angry. Half of me thought that if I saw him, everything would turn brittle and clear. The other half was keen to punch him in the sculpted chin. He was not the shining knight of Marty’s romantic imagination; he never had been. He was just another selfish man who didn’t want me, but who’d tricked me somehow into wanting him, and left me with a wound.

  He shuffled over in his parachutist’s pants.

  “Dance?” he mumbled. I nodded meekly in return, but it was awkward, strained. Our balance never intersected; our beats were off by half a blink. I was so mad at him—and more so at myself for dancing with him. We slumped across the floor, walking, turning, like two wagon wheels out of sync. In the cortina, I waited silently, eyes right at him, for the contrition I thought I was owed.

  The lights came up for the performance. We took seats atop a giant carpet roll and waited as the featured dancers did their encores. The Mogul neither looked at me nor spoke. It took me one more tanda, three more songs, to understand I didn’t trust him—not even to lead. Our connection snapped. I didn’t want him. I didn’t even want to dance with him. His skill was not enough now, given everything he lacked. I had mistaken shallowness for sweetness. Substance for some semblance of style. And he was just another empty, pretty face, the pool reflecting up and him reflecting down.

  The crowd thinned and relocated to some darkened residential lounge for after-hours dancing. I perched on a wooden table, watching like an anthropologist: Marty and his partner. The Mogul and the pretty girls of Providence and Princeton. The younger teachers who’d been kind enough to sway with me around the room that night. The divas and the tango witches with their long and feathered earrings, their Crayola-painted toes. In my clearance rack black dress and (now battered) Comme il Fauts, I felt as if the world were Technicolor and I was stuck in black and white.

  I sat for hours, watching the line of dance go by, converting the Mogul into caricature. I was all alone and stuck in central Jersey—no train home, no home. I wanted that to make me stronger. But I did not feel strong; I felt small and frightened. Disconnected. Like an embarrassed schoolgirl in detention, dangling my feet beneath the hardwood desk and waiting out the clock.

  The DJ played a really tricky Pugliese/Piazzolla tanda, to flummox anyone left dancing at that hour. It began deceptively with “Orlando Goñi” and “Adiós Nonino,” as relentless as a leaden heartbeat, then spiraled down the late-night drain into the instrumental version of “Balada para un loco,” which begins with thirteen seconds of the most poignant descending bass you’ve ever heard, before the strings encroach and come at you like ocean tides accelerated in a silent film. The bandoneones are hushed but lapping at the síncopas precisely, erupting just before the minute mark, where everything devolves into an instrumental fight, with solo fragments pleading: First piano, plaintive. Then the bandoneones, mimicking a single sinking leaf that falls in whole and halftone lilting. The strings come back up weeping, the mood goes bright for but a moment, then the dissonance begins, the strings fusing together at their highest pitch, sustaining softly and unbearably as all the other instruments ebb out and march away—until they fade into suppressed arpeggio, a major resolution immediately broken by a wall of horror strings ascending, for twelve seconds, through the end. It’s like a manic lover’s wail, blown backwards into hell. It kills the reverie the song creates with a violence that is almost comical.

  The dancers brave enough to still be on their feet were caught mid-step in antic and unwieldy poses. Pugliese’s signature chan chan resounded, hitting the first beat and muting the second into an echo of itself. The dancers groaned and cursed the DJ, a friend of mine who winked at me from across the room. This was later Pugliese, 1970, in his stint as Piazzolla’s bandleader. He called “Balada” not a tango but a “super-tango.” Tango nostalgic for itself. Tango more in vals tempo than tango tempo. Tango so tough it made me tired. I left and wandered up two sets of stairs to find a ladies’ room, a private stall in case I had to cry. In case I’d made another irredeemable mistake in coming back. For this.

  But I had not. I stared myself down in the mirror, strains of music coming through the floor. Vení, tango said to me. Volá. Sentí. Come. Fly. Feel. My step was steady; no tears came. When I reemerged downstairs, the Mogul offered me a ride. A few compatriots and I crammed into his car. I sat in the backseat with my eyes closed, pretending to be asleep until we’d cleared the empty Holland Tunnel. I wasn’t happy, but I was relieved.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  for two months, I let my life get very small. I pared it down to almost nothing, going without the cardboard cartons full of clothes and books and furniture and memories in storage. I left them to must and rot, forgotten, as I built myself again from scratch. I went back to therapy for the first time since my adolescence. I no longer believed that I could outrun who I had been. I found a merciful psychologist with a background in early childhood trauma who cheered me through the rockier parts of my transition and charged me next to nothing.

  To avoid employment in an office or a bar, I started cleaning house for Peter’s mom. Her housekeeper had flown to Lisbon for a month or two to care for her sick mother, and I was helping her. Or she was helping me. I stayed holed up in the guest room until the family had finished their morning routine, then slinked down and, for the next four hours, cleaned and disinfected surfaces and toilets, did the grocery shopping, sent out dry cleaning, and kept the liquor cabinets full. I vacuumed, dusted, polished things, sent rugs away to be repaired, and put books back on the shelves. I did this with no small amount of love. It was meant to be temporary—just a few weeks or a month—but I would work there for a year.

  Weekday mornings, listening to Baroque music on the kitchen stereo, I drifted through her huge and ornate space. Sometimes I’d catch myself in mirrors, holding a toilet brush, and think I’d lost my mind. I’d gone from liberal arts school honors graduate with the world at her feet to this, a technically homeless substitute housekeeper with half an STD. But it was honest work, and I was grateful for it. It felt tangible, productive; frank. My afternoons were free for writing, teasing stories further from my childhood vaults. I had nothing left to lose, I thought, and watched the city pass the window of whatever coffee shop I happened to be stationed in. I put a fevered stream of honest words to paper, and hoped that they might be enough to buy a future.

  I woke most days in panic, and ended several in tears, sure that I’d been wrong to think that I could live out of a suitcase, impose further on Peter’s family, continue as their borrowed daughter, beat the system in this audacious way. The hi
ghs and lows began to wear on me. I could either make it or I couldn’t. I belonged there or I did not belong. I was stronger than I thought I was, or weaker, so much weaker. I needed to find the fulcrum. Neutral. And I needed to do it on my own.

  I took a second job, somewhat humiliatingly, working for the Mogul. Though we both seemed willing to ignore everything that had passed between us, he’d offered me part-time clerical projects in his meat plant—and I needed money, so I took it. Three days a week, I took a subway to a commuter rail to a taxi to a bleak landscape of industry—all loading docks and barbed-wire gates—and strode into his office as if immune to his indifference. I projected steely poise and spent some memorable afternoons on the phone with the Food and Drug Administration, trying to nail down the number of sodium nitrite parts per million to be added to kosher deli meat for a shelf life of ninety days.

  I saved enough to move from my spare bed in midtown to a sublet room in Washington Heights. It was important that I pay my way again. I wanted to stop asking favors, stop accumulating debts. I took on yet another part-time job, collected transcripts, drafted admissions essays. I danced, but not as much as I’d assumed I would. Everything felt temporary, out of time, but tango was my rock. Bailá. Vení. Volá. Dance, come, fly.

  One night I went out when I knew I shouldn’t have. I was broken down, fighting a flu I’d caught for lack of outerwear, and doing it the cavalier way—with orange juice and vitamins in lieu of rest. I was sweating—and not because the room was packed and overwarm; it was a fever flush, clammy and brittle, and I danced through it as the whole place blinked and buzzed. The next morning, I was cured—as if tango had drained and purified my blood. I woke up to a wash of almost-winter rain outside my spartan room, and—for the first time, honestly and truly—it felt good to be alone.

  I took a rare night off from tango to meet a friend and her boyfriend at a West Side Irish bar for scotch. Mostly to prove to her that I was not imploding up there in the nosebleed section of Manhattan by myself, when all my friends had moved to Brooklyn. We claimed our stools and ordered drinks.

  “Well? What happened with Gatsby?” the boyfriend asked.

  I cringed. This had been everyone’s first question since I’d been back. And that, I realized, was my fault. I’d quit adulthood as I knew it, forfeited my possessions, the apartment, newspaper subscription, the big-girl nine-to-five, and left, flipping a sparked match over my shoulder as I did. But since I’d hopped the graveyard freighter into transience, and come back to New York the way I came the first time, with nothing but a suitcase and a prayer, all anyone could think to ask me was whether or not things had worked out with some man. This, too—the sores besides—was a pattern in dire need of breaking; I should add up to more than whether some or other man had touched me lately, and what he did or didn’t want.

  “I’m having a hard time remembering what I saw in him,” I said, belting back a dram of liquid flame, and tried to change the subject. “How about those Yankees?”

  He narrowed his eyes. I looked away, took one more sip. When I looked back, he was still squinting at me, in assessment. “You know what?” he said. “I release you.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I release you from the idea that you don’t deserve better,” he said. “You’re a good-looking girl. You’re smart. But you’re attracting only douchebags.”

  I nodded. My mother could not have said it with more piquancy or pith.

  My father’s girlfriend said the same thing, only gentler. She’d taken to hosting me on her balcony once every other month for chilled Sancerre among her potted flowers. Her city was not my city. It lay before us, in manageable blocks, beneath a swath of sky, steadied by the secret tolling of a steeple bell across the street. From up there, everything was clean and made a kind of cordial sense. Whether it was the white woven tablecloth, the careful dish of salted nuts, or just the compassion she showed that lost young lady on her porch, I felt calmer when I left. More capable. More like the fish who didn’t need a bicycle. More like I might make it after all.

  I learned to relish being undecided. And when that uncertainty grew overwhelming, I withdrew to tango. Every tanda was an act of reinvention, and when the dance was over, I immersed myself within the rich, albeit rather superficial, social scene—the conversations carried from milonga to milonga, as if across a series of Victorian village balls. I sipped more cheap wine from plastic cups. This was my society, floating on the effervescent riffs of stately valses, carnival milonga tunes, sweet and brassy hummingbird renditions of “El esquinazo” and “El torito.” These buoyed me even if I could barely dance to them, they were so fast.

  It was time to chase the joy. I craned my ears for ebullient Biagi, for sweet-footed Caló, and beamed with every froth of violin. There were no rules in life, but there were rules in tango. There was an etiquette to follow, a code of dress, a social protocol, and that was comforting. I let that steady me.

  When the time came, I closed the chapter on the Mogul in a single conversation. He’d asked me, after several weeks of silence, to join him at an Ethiopian restaurant on Tenth. He kept me waiting nearly thirty minutes and avoided eye contact as we sponged up pungent stews with handfuls of injera. He drove me to a Saturday milonga, circling a while before he pulled up to a meter several blocks away. Only when he put us into park did he explain: he was embarrassed; he was sorry; he was hung up on his ex. He never imagined anything like this could happen; he couldn’t look at me or at himself. I steeled myself against the chest constriction that usually accompanies rejection, but it didn’t come. He kept explaining. I was lovely, I was innocent, and he had been enchanted; he couldn’t promise anything or offer anything, but maybe we could play it cool and unattached a while and wait and see? He just couldn’t shoulder the responsibility of a relationship. I watched him struggle, make excuses, push his lacquered curls from his face. If he is over forty and has not been married yet . . .

  “You know,” I said. “I’m tired.” If I was going to love someone, I wanted someone who was sure about me, without audition or condition. I wanted to be sure. I wanted to be sure. Solitude, with dignity, was preferable to this. I mumbled something about being better friends.

  He fiddled with the gearshift, fiddled with his keys, flipped the toggle switch between “performance mode” and normal mode. And then I knew exactly what to say.

  “Sometimes you just have to say no,” I said. “I’m saying no.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  i quit the meat processing plant and moved again, to Brooklyn, to a room no bigger than a double bed, with a door that latched just like an outhouse, in a five-bedroom Park Slope tango flophouse. Adam, the ginger-haired co-proprietor of Tango Café, ran the place. He lived there with his father and his father’s girlfriend, a retired tanguera, plus a rotating host of tango dancers as they came and went from town. On any given night, there might be seven of us there, plus one or two or three itinerant tangueros on the couch. My room was the smallest, just outside the shared bathroom along the slender hallway from the living room to the galley kitchen. It cost four hundred dollars a month, and I was very happy there. I slept on a twin mattress on the floor with a view into the airshaft between our building and a pizzeria. The tiny window caught a hint of naked treetop from the back garden next door. I hung my clothes on wire hangers from a rod above the dresser and tucked my shoes beneath a metal folding chair, wedged into the only empty corner. When I closed the slide latch, locking myself in, I felt I had just room enough to breathe. I handwrote a line of Emily Dickinson and taped it on the wall. I was making my own prairie, out of nothing but my clover and my reverie. The revery alone will do, I wrote, if bees are few.

  This was my second tango autumn, and how far off course I’d veered. It was grey; the days were getting darker. I wallowed a little in that gloom. Some nights, when everyone else went out to the milongas, I stayed home. I made myself dinner in the kitchen, if any of my groceries had survived the constant pilfering. I
left Adam’s father to his privacy, noodling on his guitar behind the curtain that delimited his alcove bedroom. I took my plate into my room and latched the door. Dim light shone through in a strip, but that was all that touched me there. An odd lick or two of folk music. Water running, or a toilet flush. The whoosh of city bus brakes at the corner. A teenage whoop outside the pizza place. I slept, and was awoken almost every time by troops returning before dawn. The lock, the footsteps, and the chatter. The open-shut of the refrigerator door. The smell of toast. Hushed giggles or full-throated conversation. Occasionally a shhhhh. But that was all beyond my door, and couldn’t touch me. It was all part of the rhythm, the boardinghouse feel of the place. Sometimes, after all, the late-night toilet flush and toast making was me. No one cared when I came or went, or what I ate, or where I worked. If I slunk in late or in the wee hours, I would often have to pick my way past bodies on the floor, a stockinged foot protruding from beneath a blanket on a couch. Piles of shoes, still-belted pants. Sometimes I chatted with the tango goddess in the adjoining room. We’d stand in each other’s doorframes or the tiny kitchen, sipping from our mugs of tea.

  Already, I suspected that my gamble had paid off. I’d started spending free hours at the Lincoln Center library, in the crypt quiet of the media room. Listening to Pugliese on headphones—Ausencia on repeat. Writing down the memories I’d never fully owned. The birth mother. The uncles. The cruel schoolyard taunts of youth. Some days I sat there, slumped into a swivel chair and staring at my laptop screen, stuck between imagined worlds. But I kept going back.

  It got colder and colder. I shoved my hands deep in my pockets. I readied myself for winter, sealing off my doubts like window cracks. I called my parents every afternoon, walking to a train or a milonga. Mum had forgiven me for leaving her, and was so relieved that I had started writing, finally, about my past that she ignored her skepticism toward the rest. Dad was glad to have me back on neutral ground. We met for lunch and coffee at a midtown salad bar each Friday afternoon he was in town. He asked so little of me. Bought my lunch. Quizzed me about my applications. Said attagirl and tripped uptown to his girlfriend’s place. I found the steady dates, the gentle monitoring a comfort. He bought a shin-length red down coat for me, as an early birthday present, to make sure I kept warm.