All Over the Map (18 page)

We go daily to the Confitería Ideal, a grand old ballroom with tarnished mirrors, worn tablecloths, and white-jacketed waiters, for afternoon milongas. We wait on the sideline with the other women, nervously sipping water, for men to ask us to dance with a glance from across the room. The
porteños
—B.A. natives—are friendly, and the dapper, aging men give me courtly advice as we dance, calling me “bambina,” or “little girl.” I dance with perhaps fifty men at the classes, each two-minute dance like a one-night stand—physically close but emotionally distant. Only such strict indifference allows people to rub their chests close and intertwine their legs, moving across the floor like caressing skin.

Since Claudia and I both speak Italian, we are in demand by a couple of gentlemen visiting from Florence. Otherwise, aside from the classes, I sit out a lot of dances. Tango is a real meritocracy: men choose women not for their beauty or youth but for their ability to close their eyes and meld into the man’s lead. The woman who gets the most dances, bless her, is a short, stout señora in her seventies with a sparkling blouse and a skirt slit to the knee.

Discouraged on the dance floor, I try to find a regular partner, someone I can relax with and work on a few steps. I go on Match.com, saying I am seeking a man who can show me the tango scene for an article. Many men contact me—being a relatively blond American seems to hold a certain allure in B.A.—sending me virtual
besos
, but most want quick
sexo
. I chat with a couple by phone but violate some cultural rule by brazenly suggesting coffee; men, it seems, do all the inviting in Argentina. It’s a tango thing. One man wants to take me to an Argentine ranch but won’t meet me for coffee first, and I am not about to set out for the distant pampas alone with him.

Then Juan Miguel, a fifty-year-old, cueball-pated architect who also teaches yoga, contacts me. He invites me out to a trendy Middle Eastern restaurant in Palermo Viejo, reaches for my hand over dessert, and makes poetic comments about my appearance.
“Piel como terciopelo.”
Skin like velvet.
“Ojos como topacio.”
Eyes like topaz. He correctly guesses my astrological sign—“You’re such a free-spirited woman, you must be Aquarius”—which makes him think we might be fated for each other.

But it is not to be. After dinner, we go to a crowded milonga, where Juan Miguel drives me around the dance floor like a
bumper car, crashing into other couples, whose female partners adroitly jab me with their spiked heels. No one, including Juan Miguel, has a sense of humor about things. In fact, tango and Argentina in general seem to lack a spirit of fun.
No más
.

Back home in San Francisco, the tango scene is less inviting than in B.A. In Argentina, the men understand that the point of dancing with a woman is to make her look beautiful, to dance well together, so they lead at your level. With a strong leader who has nothing to prove, even if all you can do is a basic step and a few forward
ochos
, you look and feel graceful, transcending the steps and sliding into a subtle sense of rhythm, connection, and, for small, restrained moments, passion. Not so in San Francisco, where men tend to learn complicated routines in classes and force you to stumble through them without establishing a basic connection, then slowly leading you to something a little trickier. There’s also an atmosphere of formality and strictness at the milongas and an emphasis on technique that isn’t quite suited to my personality.

As much as I love the elegance and glamour of tango, as well as the tragic romance of the music, I start leaving my tango shoes in the back of the closet. I’ve learned something about letting go of control, holding on to my space, and making myself receptive to a man’s lead, but I’ve also learned that tango really isn’t my dance. For me, dancing is an expression of joy, music entering your body like spirits, releasing them through movement. Tango is too restrained for me and not enough fun; any dance where you aren’t supposed to shake your ass is clearly made for someone else’s body.

Instead, I think, I’ll sign up for salsa lessons.

A
T HOME
, E
VAN
calls to invite me to a baseball game. I walk to the ballpark under a clear San Francisco sky, watching people happily making their way from downtown offices to the stadium by the bay. Evan meets me with Mardi Gras beads in the Giants’ colors to wear and takes my hand to lead me to the bleachers. I love the crowd’s good-hearted cheering, stomping, and booing and the friendly way everyone in the bleachers chats with one another. I spread out a little tablecloth on the bleachers and surprise Evan with a picnic: Australian wine, Italian prosciutto, pecorino, and olives. He turns from the ball game, takes a few bites, and groans with home-run enthusiasm. “I love you,” he says, which I take to mean “I love this picnic,” and he kisses me on the lips.

Later, walking toward the Muni bus, the Bay Bridge glittering in the background, Evan puts his arms around my soft, custom-made Argentine leather jacket. “I would love to go traveling with you,” he says. “Where in the whole world would you like to go?”

I put my hands in his pockets. Nepal? The Seychelles? Back to those Sicilian islands? I rest my head on his shoulder, still jet-lagged, and he strokes my hair.

“How about dinner at my house?” I say, and he gives me another kiss.

I
decide to stay at home for a while to see how things develop in my personal life, if given a chance. I sort through my closet as a vicarious way of rummaging through my personal issues, creating some order in my life. I feel the need to toss out old stuff, pare down to things that are really important to me, let go of things I’ve been hanging on to, like jeans I bought ten years ago, hoping I’d lose fifteen pounds. Maybe I should figure out how to do this process internally, but for now I’m just cleaning my closet.

I come across my old wedding dress, a simple, tea-length chiffony frock that doesn’t scream “bride;” I wore it to my friend Cecilia’s fiftieth birthday party at a winery with a big garden hat and flip-flops and no one had the slightest clue about its former, now-tattered glory. Eyeing my pile of clothes to give away, I have to acknowledge that floaty, off-white dresses in general have limited use but am reluctant to part with it. In the spirit of renewal, I have the bright idea of dyeing my old wedding dress to wear to a party. This strikes me as a good idea, like when I swapped the stones in my wedding ring, added a few more bands to symbolize
more happy relationships in my life, and shifted them to my right hand as divorce rings.

So I run to the fabric store, pick out the first color that catches my eye, ignore the directions, and throw the dye in the wash with the dress. When it comes out a splotchy Halloween orange instead of the pretty coral on the box, I cry—for my ruined dress, my stupidity, and my relationships that have failed partly due to my darned impatience. I wished I could start over: undye the dress, take back what I said, and look before I leaped.

I guess I’ve always had mild issues with what psychologists call impulse control. I know I’m not the person to rely upon to say “no” to things, whether it’s another glass of wine, late-night dancing at a dive club, or a five-day trip into the Sinai Desert with Bedouins I just met a few hours ago. I rarely stop to weigh pros and cons, risks and benefits, long-term costs, and, worst of all, more sensitive people’s reactions. I like to do things fast, and do them now. It’s hard for me to resist my urges—to buy cobalt blue shoes, book a trip to Italy, or tell someone off. This does me no good: If I’m upset with a friend or colleague, I’ll whip off a scathing e-mail. I jump into flirtations with men I barely know and then get furiously hurt when they aren’t in love with me. I always say what’s on my mind, even when my mind isn’t fully engaged. My actions are immediate, but the consequences—embarrassment, burned bridges, badly fitting boots—are lasting. Basically, I could use a pause button.

Not long after I leave my former wedding dress in a free box on the sidewalk in the Haight for a homeless person to wear, a magazine editor calls to ask what my worst trait is. “Impulsiveness,”
I immediately reply. When she then suggests I go see a woman named Sharon Salzberg for some help and then write about it, I instantly agree. It isn’t until I’m on the plane, reading the blurb on one of her books,
Lovingkindness
, that I discover that Salzberg is one of the country’s leading meditation teachers. I’ve done it again! By not thinking things through, I’ve landed in a disastrous situation. The last thing I am capable of doing is sitting still to meditate. I’ll do it wrong, fail to write the story, and, the way things are going, end up waiting tables. I am an idiot, but there’s no turning back.

I arrive at the hotel where Sharon is staying, expecting to meet an ethereal, remote woman in flowing robes and maybe a shaved head. But when she opens the door to her room, she is casual, sharp, and funny—with a New York accent—and somehow makes me feel as if I’ve known her for years.

I dive right in, explaining that I suspect I act rashly because I can’t bear to sit with uncomfortable feelings. I’m always booking plane tickets to run away from them, I say. In the past, I managed my emotions by the mouthful, using food to stuff down pangs of loneliness, rejection, unworthiness, or failure. When I was younger, the fact that I had such little impulse control led to some seriously chaotic eating problems, which I eventually overcame. But even after I learned to eat more mindfully, savoring every taste and smell, my impulsiveness just spun out in new directions: shooting off my mouth, cutting my own bangs, getting overly invested and upset about a guy whose profile I first read on Match.com the morning before, and making a general mess of my life.

Sharon seems both amused and sympathetic and observes
that my impulsiveness isn’t all bad—it’s a quality that’s related to being spontaneous, vivid, and generous. It’s true: I’m happy to throw a spur-of-the-moment dinner party, I’m quick with a retort, and I never have to return to a boutique to discover that the dress I wanted is gone. I even have a few friends left. Sharon tells me I shouldn’t be so hard on myself for my impulsiveness but learn to make my temperament work for my benefit. “You can prize that adventurous spirit and become more mindful of times when you’re hurting yourself or others,” she says. What I need is to slow down my speed and momentum, take time to investigate my feelings, and create a private sense of pause. Then my reactions would be a choice, not a compulsion.

Fine, but can she fix me? Now?

Sharon suggests that I begin, as I did with my eating problems, by tuning in to pure sensation. The pace of our lives is so fast, she says, that we scarcely notice what’s going on around us. We get so caught up in achieving our desires and avoiding our discomforts; we’re preoccupied with plans, distracted with wondering what other people think about us. But something as simple as concentrating on the cool, soothing sensations of washing my hands, the taste and smell of hot tea, or the rhythm of my breath could bring me back to an awareness of the present.

That all sounds lovely,
but I am impatient
. “What I need,” I say, “is an emergency pause button.”

Sharon smiles and contemplates that. First, she suggests, I could get into the habit of saving my e-mails as drafts before hitting “Send.” Just that, I agree, could have prevented some serious professional and romantic embarrassment. And when a strong
emotion bubbles up, I could stop to check in with my physical sensations: is my stomach clenched, heart pumping, brow sweating? That inventory might delay me long enough not to swear at a traffic cop or hang up on my sister. Given a few moments and deep breaths, I might see that those physical sensations subside and realize that anger, fear, and disappointment aren’t as solid and immovable as they seem. Fierce emotions don’t always have to be shoved away; they can be like a storm that passes.

I like the idea of being still in a tempest, not always buffeted about, feeling compelled to react. Now that I have a couple of tools for emergencies, maybe I could leave. But Sharon makes it clear that developing a habit of tuning in to myself, of being mindful, is going to take some practice. That practice, she says, is called meditation.