Tango Lessons_A Memoir

by Meghan Flaherty

  It’s not always reciprocal. I felt this sometimes with a dancer I’ll call L.K., a poet of a leader—though who knows what he felt with me. L.K. was a DJ with a lover’s ear, tuned always to sweetness. He milked legato strings in a sinewed way that made me want to cease existing. For me, he always played the sweet stuff, the sad old songs with simple, candied melodies and sparkling pace. I couldn’t name exactly what he did that made him different. But every so often, I would feel the magic saline tides lap at my chest. Dancing with him made me feel immortal, balanced, in firm possession of my axis and my faculties, and yet utterly lost in every song. I melted into him and he would melt right back. The room faded to white behind closed eyes.

  L.K. was steady, understated, concerned only with my comfort. He had a musician’s sensitivity to rhythmic texture underfoot, always leaving room to let me stretch, or to ad-lib with my heels against the floor. He listened for my interpretation of the song, for what I had to say, and gave me time. He helped me break my fear of dancing to milonga music, which often came up for our second tanda. “But I’m terrible at milonga,” I cringed into his ear, remembering the jerky romp in Jupiter and how mortified I’d felt by my own lack of grace. He smiled and led me steadily through each bacchic labyrinth of beats. I stopped tripping, and came to love the intricacy of the syncopation, the precision of the footwork, and the fun. The “sass and the celerity.” Nothing can change the energy of a room quite like milonga. A hundred tango grimaces soften as the frolicsome, pants-rustling engine of the habanera bass, the whisper of candombe drums, dare you not to smile. Milonga, pre-dater and precursor to tango, is Angolan for “argument” or “issue,” Ki-Kongo for “circling lines of dancers,” and the medium that syncretized the many cultures compromising at the time of tango’s birth. How all the pieces fit together in conversant play. It was sparring, mischievous. See, Mum? I thought. It’s not all angst and emotionally stunted men.

  I had come full circle, from a beginner’s first exhilaration with complicated sequences to the minimalism of maturity. The most thrilling moments of connection were the smallest. Henri Bergson once said that one giro, or molinete, told him more about the soul of a woman than ten volumes of Shakespeare. L.K.’s gift was listening for that.

  Tango, I was beginning to understand, is something that you are, not something you do. At best, tango is the closest two people come to Plato’s double being—joined at the navel, a four-armed, four-legged, round, revolving entity of soul satisfaction and sexual perfection. Form is irrelevant. Manner is what matters. The Dinzels claimed this came from two things: technique and tangüedad. Technique is necessary to control the body, to turn movement into dance, but tangüedad makes tango. José Gobello, a tango and Lunfardo scholar who passed away in 2013, called it “that which, if it were missing from tango, tango would not be tango.” Tangüedad is the secret kernel at the center of the whole thing.

  A simple walk across the floor is timeless, worth all the ganchos in the world. Even Chicho, glorious Chicho, tango’s greatest improviser, took his dancing to the farthest boundaries of nuevo possibility, then retracted it, refined it, and went back to the stately bosom of the close embrace. He rebelled against the milonguero dogmatists, only to return to purity once he sensed that what he calls the valor of the dance had been endangered. He wanted to protect his art against the loss of the ineffable, the loss of the connection. To Chicho, the essence of tango was in el abrazo y el otro, the embrace and the other; between the two, we find ourselves.

  I’d thought that tango was just another form of acting. It reminded me how it used to feel to lose myself onstage, and then to feel the audience’s concentration—all their held breath in my hand. When the lines I spoke were both my own and someone else’s, when I moved with someone else’s limbs. The deeper I fell into character, into that half possession, the deeper was the pleasure and the power. It was perfect, boundless, crystalline. I’d always assumed that dancing was the same; the more control I gave up, the more control I’d feel. Together, very quietly, a leader and I would blur together, moving like one puppet without strings.

  That feeling was connection. But it wasn’t about being someone else. It was being perfectly myself in the moment when the lines of lead and follow melted, when technique was so well remembered as to be forgotten, when my eyes closed between two states of consciousness. And that, I decided finally, was tango. The fusion of our intellect and physicality and creativity—our relationship to our bodies, other bodies, and ourselves. It was impossible, in that place, not to be honest. And that’s what I was after now: finding the manner beyond form. Not in order to be held, or turn blind circles in the dark, or disappear, but to find a way, in all of it, to be sincere.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  i take the granite blocks in five-foot strides. It’s twenty-nine degrees at Lincoln Center, and I am charging through the plaza, past the library and the elevated lawn, past the winter-drained reflecting pool. My heels clack and my scarf flaps in the air behind me as I run. My date has been standing by the fountain for three-quarters of an hour, waiting to escort me to the opera. And I’ve been underground, stalled on an uptown C train, one car length into Canal Street—seventy blocks and over four miles south—at rush hour.

  I was making an exception. His name was Barry Maguire and we had already danced and talked and gone for pints of Guinness in a Thirty-first Street Irish pub. He had already kissed me, twice. And I’d already told Mum about him, how he was kind and green-eyed, gentle, and how I dared to dream. He’d asked me formally to be his date to Pelléas et Mélisande, and I was forty-seven minutes late.

  I sat there, helpless, on the hard, flat subway bench. Wearing my black cotton birthday dress, with heels and tights to match. The conductor garbled something unintelligible. We hadn’t moved in half an hour. I crossed, recrossed my legs. I read and reread ads for hair loss remedies and bunion treatments and medical malpractice lawyers, staring at the useless cell phone in my lap. Even if I could have dialed out, my date was curiously old-fangled and didn’t have a phone.

  The woman next to me struck up a conversation. I told her I was late for my first proper date with a man I thought was really wonderful and I was supposed to meet him at the Met at seven just like Moonstruck Cher and I couldn’t call him and what if he thought I stood him up and he left and—I took a breath.

  Six or seven boorish men began to wrench apart the sliding doors, heaving and slapping until one side snapped back and we all belched forth into the station—one line, single file, polite—before the transit police could intervene.

  It was after seven thirty by the time I sprinted up the stairs and onto Sixth, which was glutted with a four-lane mass of bumpers, taillights shining red and stretching all the way uptown. I scanned the intersection, the crowd, the stand of Christmas trees across the street.

  “Split a cab?”

  I nodded gratefully to the woman from the train. We found a vacant one by hand of providence and hurled ourselves into the back. I told the driver he should spare no speed in getting us to Lincoln Center. We had twenty minutes, tops, before the lights would blink and the lobby gong chime for the impending curtain rise.

  “No way, lady,” he said. “It’s a parking lot.”

  I locked eyes with my taxi-mate. “What about the West Side Highway?”

  “At this hour? Are you nuts?”

  “Very possibly.”

  “Fine, but you ain’t getting anywhere in twenty minutes.”

  “We don’t appreciate your negativity,” my new ally said.

  The cabbie nosed his way toward the highway entrance, and my new friend fired up her BlackBerry, calling Lincoln Center bars.

  “Hi, this is a strange request, but my friend here needs some help . . . . No we don’t have a reservation.” She tried half a dozen businesses. “His name is Barry and if you could just send someone to locate him at the fountain and tell him she’ll be late . . . . It’s their first date! We were stuck underground. There was police
activity.”

  When no one would help, and eight o’clock kept yawning closer, I called Peter. He was the only one I knew in walking distance.

  “Sure, Biscuit,” he said, and started north from Fifty-seventh Street.

  Our battered yellow taxi found a window in the gridlock. The speedometer began to climb. Street signs bled behind us and, within minutes, we were pulling to the curb in front of Juilliard. I started ferreting in my purse for cash.

  “It’s on me,” my new friend said, and handed me her business card. “Just tell me how it went.” I started to articulate my thanks. She cut me off. “Go!” she cried. “Good luck!”

  That’s when I ran. It was important that I run. He was important. And he’d been waiting for an hour. I rounded the corner, skittering into the plaza. I raced toward the fountain, which was warm and iridescent in the winter dark. He was there, and pacing, both hands in the pockets of his overcoat. I saw him first and then he must have heard my heels because he stopped. He stood still and squinted at me through his lenses—a monument of tweed, a flash of red felt scarf.

  I vaulted into his arms. “I’m so sorry!” I wailed into his hair. He held me back and murmured how it was no bother, how he thought it added certain glamour to the enterprise. Over his shoulder I spotted Peter, approaching the plaza fountain from the east. I smiled wide and gave the thumbs-up over my suitor’s shoulder. Peter waved, I winked; he turned around and left.

  We held hands and joined the line of dinner jackets wafting up the stairs. We sat in the orchestra, and leaned our limbs together to the stark and somber strains of Debussy. First intermission, we stood out on the red plush carpet of the mezzanine to survey the marble lobby underneath. We shared the half-squashed cucumber and tomato sandwich he had smuggled in his pocket wrapped in foil, gazing at women in elaborate hats. Second intermission, we tapped the rims of two plastic champagne flutes. We kissed again—just once, but in a manner wholly inappropriate to our surroundings. I opened my eyes and everything was red, velvet and twinkling beneath the crystal chandeliers.

  We’d met in tango just a few months after I had sworn off men—a month or two before the opera. The first time we danced, we almost didn’t. Which is to say, we chatted for half an hour, and only halfway through “La cumparsita” did he ask me to the floor. He trembled, a fact that he attributed to over-caffeination, and I believed him, as he was three Styrofoam cups deep into the RoKo coffee dregs. I cozied into his sandpaper stubble, against his sprinting rabbit heart. We stood together, forming a single lame and wingless bird, quivering between our steps. And then the night was done.

  I asked him to partner me for the next month’s FeralTango lab. It was an easy invitation, innocent. We were a match of height and practice ethics and we made each other laugh. We met to practice our “homework” at Mariela’s práctica Saturday mornings and stood chatting between bouts of drills. He kept drinking coffee. I kept trying not to linger too long in his embrace.

  I met my dad for brunch one of these Saturdays. As we sat at the counter, tucked in to our omelets, he asked what I’d been up to all that morning.

  “Practicing.”

  “Tango?” he asked, salting his eggs. “With whom?”

  Salting mine, as casually as I could muster, I told him it wasn’t what he thought. I’d sworn myself to solitude, plus I was sure Barry had mentioned he was seeing someone. My father raised a knowing eyebrow.

  “So what if he’s a little dreamy,” I admitted.

  Barry Maguire was a shaggy and unshaven academic, roughly six feet tall. He wore third-hand baggy trousers, spectacles, and faded T-shirts often a size too small. He was manly and robust: wide-stanced, decisive in his movements, with kind eyes that held attention. He had a stomach condition that required him to take breaks from dancing to eat frequent sandwiches and bananas. Sometimes he got gussied up for tango in a rumpled collared shirt, half-unbuttoned to reveal a superfluity of auburn frizzle on his chest. He whistled, swaggered, and otherwise behaved as though he’d just dis-horsed and come out striding from the oeuvre of Austen.

  He was finishing his doctorate in metaethics, working on his dissertation. He was also Scottish, so he explained this all to me in brogue. I remember chatting with him one evening at Nocturne, standing in the doorway to the DanceSport fishbowl. His hands behind his back, he scanned the floor for followers. I leaned against the door beside him—wide-eyed and slightly sweaty from a dance. We made sotto voce conversation about poetry. I said that every poem was a love poem. He disagreed. He had a Celtic sense of irony, every other word in jest, but was extremely literal where I was not. The philosopher and the artist. We bantered there, our backs against the dance floor door. I can’t even remember if we danced. I do remember that his eyes looked seaglass green against his pinkish tattoo tee. Later, he would send a silly limerick and ask if it was not, definitively, an anti-love poem. Rather not, I wrote. I rest my case.

  I knew he lived in Bushwick and commuted back and forth to Princeton twice a week. He knew I lived in Adam’s closet in Park Slope. I was writing, cleaning toilets. He was wrapping up his Ph.D. We talked about his work, my applications. We both liked rainy weather, tacos, Yeats. I wanted him more for his conversation than for tango. He was a lovely fellow—hale, well met. Occasionally we danced, and it was thrilling, easy, the ideal marriage of hilarity and heat. I danced back with him, active and expressive. We felt good together, giggling, dancing, pausing for a moment when the music asked us to, then, perhaps a little shyly, rejoining our hands. I ignored the way he made me feel, on the floor and off. I still didn’t want to think of anyone that way.

  Not surprisingly, our first kiss was a surprise. It was a Tuesday night, and blustery, with windchill in the single digits, and we were coming out of tango class. He slung an arm around my shoulders and tried to talk me into going to Sangria Practica, steering me downtown in roughly that direction. I had laryngitis and a plane to catch to Florida in seven hours; I should have been in bed, but I liked walking with him too much. It calmed me—our long-limbed gait, the light weight of his arm, wool at my neck. We paused together at a traffic light. He raised a wire-brush eyebrow, and drummed his fingers on my shoulder.

  He nodded toward an Irish pub. “Fancy it?” he asked.

  I assented and we lurched across the street into the bar. We unwound our scarves and ordered pints of Guinness. We took our stools and sat down, knees overlapping, and we talked, which is to say, he talked. I parried hoarsely. I was conscious of not trying to impress him. He was good, and charming, and I hoped we might be friends.

  He took a great gulp of his Guinness, put the glass down on the bar, and slapped his knees. “So!” he volleyed, upbeat and looking right at me. “Tell me your deal.”

  “My deal?” I asked, taken aback.

  “You know.” He flapped his arms and shrugged. “Your life.” I took a sip from my own frothy stout to hide the flush, the panic, and then stole a glance at his wide-open face. The human version of an animal with ears cocked and a wagging tail. I nearly fell back from the force of his good-natured curiosity. He had no interest in making small talk, about tango or otherwise. “You’re a writer. What do you have to write about?”

  “Well,” I said, and started formulating a deflective yarn.

  He didn’t want deflection, didn’t want a rehearsed tragicomedy routine. He was trying to figure what, if anything, I had to say about myself at twenty-seven. He thought all writers should aspire to novels, like the modernists, and was flummoxed by the whole mad enterprise of memoir.

  “Erm, well,” I stammered, feeble from the head cold, off my guard. “I had a fairly screwed-up childhood.”

  I tried then to change the subject, laugh it off. I fought the urge to crouch beneath my barstool. But he just squinted at me, asked me to say more. I saw my usual path through: the self-deprecating joke, the misdirection, a quick trip to the bathroom—timed just right—and, on return, a brand-new conversation. People didn’t usually press. Then again, I h
ad been writing it for weeks, typing steadily from my twin bed in the tango flop apartment. I’d woven details into sample essays for admission—still anonymous, addressed to strangers. If I could type it, if I could put it on the page and put my name there with it, then why not start saying it out loud?

  I took a breath and told the truth. Not for him. Not even because of him, exactly. At that point, he was still a stranger—dreaminess notwithstanding. I did it for me. I didn’t tell him everything, but I set the bones. He put his beer down, shone his full attention on me. Asked questions to which I gave unguarded answers. The truth tumbled out: a handful of plain sentences, alien and quick.

  He was still there when I finished—this man who heard me, saw me, took another sip of beer and then, with genuine compassion, had the good sense to make me laugh. “I turned out okay?” I offered.

  “We’ll see.” He grinned. Never once did he say I was “well adjusted.” Possibly I wasn’t. Possibly he could tell. Possibly everybody could—with any insight. It didn’t matter. But there was Barry, still perched on his barstool, eyes still smiling and his knees still leaned to mine. The way he looked at me—unflinching and unhesitating—hadn’t changed. We cheersed to my resilience.

  The conversation shifted naturally, but something in the air between us shifted too. I relaxed. I made dark jokes I don’t usually get to make for years into a friendship, and he laughed at them, sincere. We talked about our work, our travels, art. I tried to explain my undergraduate thesis about the cult of Dionysos. He tried to explain a few finer points of his research. We laughed easily, swatting each other’s legs and arms for emphasis. He continued being debonair and I continued croaking back retorts, almost as good as the old black-and-whites, and blushing every time I thought I caught a twinkle in his seaside eyes.