Hold Me Tight and Tango Me Home (21 page)

An instructor, Carlos D., originally from Buenos Aires, asked me to dance. I was intimidated. I thought I might freeze up out of nervousness. He started to press the crook of his arm against my back, and in a slow, deliberate gesture he folded me into the embrace. I made a corresponding motion, pulling him to me with my arm pressing slowly across his shoulders. The song “Poema” (Poem) by Francisco Canaro was playing. Despite the mournful lyrics, the melody is cheerful. “
Fué un ensueño de dulce amor / horas de dicha y de querer. / Fué el poema de ayer
.” (It was a dream of sweet love / hours of happiness and loving. / It was the poem of yesterday.)

The dance started well before our feet began to move. I tilted my head down to touch Carlos’s forehead. I noticed the pale freckles speckling his bald spot, felt the bulge of his stomach against me. He pulled me to him and held me as though our contours were meant to match — hip meeting hip like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, chests united as if halves of a whole. Then he worked magic with his feet. He didn’t have to travel far. He swept one of my feet in front of the other one, then deftly,
smoothly moved the other behind it so they crossed. Then he brought me out with a sweeping step forward and immediately pulled me around him in a tight molinete.

It was challenging and lively but also certain and gentle, with lots of ingenuity. There were no sharp turns or surprises. He never left me wondering, never left me alone. He humbled me, yet made me feel good about it. A follower to the leader, but the leader has to respect his responsibility to the follower. Those realizations, that contract between two people, is where the genders can meet. The argument between men and women blurs in this moment and becomes a truce, then an agreement. This is bliss, and it is why, despite feeling betrayed and bruised, we lick our wounds and then try again at love.

After we stopped dancing, Carlos stepped back and told me, “You can dance tango because you don’t fear the embrace. Anything else, steps and techniques, can be learned. But not the embrace. You have that.”

I didn’t always understand the embrace. I thought about my smudged piece of paper at home, my official divorce. This was my paradox — I had learned the embrace by having my heart broken.

T
O PREPARE FOR
my birthday party, I had purchased boxes of empanadas from an Uruguayan bakery in Queens, then picked up chorizo and chimichurri sauce from an Argentinean butcher. I found fried
churros
filled with dulce de leche that I planned on serving in lieu of a birthday cake. I bought bottles of hearty Argentine Malbec wine and chilled the white Torrontés I’d brought back from Buenos Aires. A friend who lived in a loft offered to host the party, so we decorated her place with strings of glittering white lights.

Peter had agreed to teach the gathering a tango class, so about half an hour before midnight, we sprang it on the guests. “Thank you all for coming tonight,” I announced. “For a present, I would really appreciate it if everyone danced one tango.”

First Peter and I demonstrated a dance to the song “Queremos Paz” (We Want Peace), a nuevo tango by the Gotan Project.
Peter, the veteran dance performer, had no problems, but I was so terrified that the thumping of my heart echoed in my ears. He led me through the moves we had practiced during our Friday nights at Triangulo. We stepped together, and he pulled me into a volcada and I swept my foot through the empty space; then he pivoted me into a back ocho and from there he spun me. He turned and I ganchoed through his legs. Then he pulled me against his chest and we returned to a basic. I tried to feel the floor through his shoulder, but it was his heartbeat that calmed my nerves. I rested there for a brief moment, letting my pulse cool down. Then he swept my foot, pulled me against him, and we went back to our basic to finish.

After the song ended, everyone clapped.

“That felt great,” Peter said.

I nodded, still a little shaky, and then we herded my friends into pairs.

Grumbles and giggles came out of the group. Some men were following, with women leading. I matched Claire with a friend who was tall enough not to be scared of her long legs, and Allen with a sweet single woman a little older than him. I scanned the room and looked at my friends in the haphazard couplings. They negotiated the embrace, some pulling each other close, others keeping a safe distance. Unlike the tango crowd, I knew intimate details about their lives. The hearts broken by death and divorce, the childhood traumas that continued to haunt, the infertility treatments, miscarriages, cancer diagnoses, disappointments, and fears. And I knew about their happiness: the
falling in love, the career switches, the babies conceived, the apartments bought, the new nieces and nephews.

Now I stood in the circle they created, teaching them the embrace, trying to pass on to them some of what I had learned from it.

“Men can pair with men, women with women, it doesn’t matter here,” Peter said. “But with mixed couples, men, you’re the leaders.”

“Hey, why do men get to lead?” a friend yelled.

“Okay, you decide who’s leading,” Peter said. “As you embrace, keep your frame, your upper body straight. Don’t hold so tightly that you constrict your partner, but don’t be so loose they don’t know you’re there. Stay solid and steady in your frame.”

He pulled me to him. I let my hand gently fall onto his arm.

“This is open embrace,” I said. “You maintain the connection through your chests. Keep them parallel.” Then I leaned into Peter, wrapping my arm around his back, resting my hand on his far shoulder. “And this is close embrace, your chests pressed together.”

“But let’s start with practice embrace,” Peter said. We demonstrated a basic weight shift, one foot, the other. Then Peter instructed everyone to walk. But the circle was too tight, and nobody could budge. “Okay, we need a circle on the inside,” Peter said.

The two lines of dancers moved in parallel circles. Some were bumping, some laughing, some looking into the other’s eyes, others nervously avoiding each other. Whether the embrace and
walking feels good or awkward and whether it’s a song of heartbreak or joy, reason or passion, dancing teaches us to be in it fully.

After the lesson ended, Peter played more tango music, and some couples stayed to practice, while others drifted off. I left the dancing to visit with guests. Katherine and Marcus, the couple who had married in Uruguay, were there. They had recently asked me to be godmother to the baby boy they were expecting.

“I want him not to fear women,” Marcus told me. “Take him and teach him the tango.”

“I’ll get him dancing before he even knows what’s going on,” I promised.

Katherine then pulled me aside and told me some gossip Marcus had heard about my ex. “Supposedly his girlfriend is very jealous,” she said. “So jealous he’s had to fly home from business trips to assure her he’s not having an affair.”

I repeated this story to Amy, who also once had a philandering husband.

“This is the fun part,” she said. “He’s going to cheat on her, too. Guaranteed.”

That past week I had gone with Amy to look at wedding dresses. She already knew exactly which one she wanted but tried on a few others first. Then she came to the one, a champagne-gold layered skirt with a slender, corsetlike top. She looked gorgeous in it.

“That’s your dress,” I had told her. “Stop there or you’ll just confuse yourself.”

Now Amy looked at the churros on the table, “Just one. The dress will still fit. Right?”

I laughed and went into the kitchen to check on the food and wine. Just then a man with dark hair and sparkling brown eyes arrived at the party by himself. He handed me a bottle of wine to add to the table, but I also noticed he clutched a bouquet of flowers.

“Hi, I’m Xavier,” he said. “Is Claire here?” We found her and he presented her with the flowers.

“Umm, thanks,” she said.

We learned later that Xavier had been looking for Claire since they’d met and had also dropped hints to their mutual friend. He’d even headed out to a comedy club in the freezing cold while fighting a fever in hopes that Claire would be there, as the comedian was a friend of Claire’s.

“There were about four people in the audience,” he told me. “The comedian thanked me for my support. I didn’t have the nerve to ask about Claire.”

So for almost a year, they missed each other; both were too shy to ask their friend directly about the other. Or, as Claire suggested later, maybe the timing just wasn’t right yet. The night of my party, Xavier had been settling in to watch a boxing match on television. He had just popped open a beer and decided to check his e-mails one last time before the fight started. He saw the invitation, which had arrived circuitously through a friend of a friend. He quickly showered and changed, stopped for wine and flowers, and headed to the party. But we didn’t learn all
this until the two of them became a couple. That night Claire didn’t even recognize him at first. He had shaved his beard since they’d met, and the party was already chaotic. People bumped into each other as they made their way from the dance floor to the kitchen. One brash young woman was making quite a stir. I had never met her and I never actually interacted with her, but friends kept coming up to me and exclaiming something along the lines of “How do you know her? She’s horrible.”

Peter approached, miffed. “She told me I don’t know anything about dancing the tango. How dare she?”

She smoked pungent, foreign cigarettes and drank straight shots of Patron tequila while she held court, insulting people in the small kitchen. Soon we saw Allen gather up his jacket and the two of them began to leave together.

“Oh, no,” Claire said. “Sweet Allen is leaving with that rude woman.”

I pulled him aside, “Allen, are you going to be okay?”

“Call us a cab,” she demanded. “We’re going out now. East Village.”

“Don’t do it, Allen,” Peter said. “It could never be worth it.”

“I can take care of myself,” he said, and the two of them left, with concerned clucking and comments following them out the door.

“Well, he seems to have lost his fear of women,” I said to Peter. “Though, at times, a little fear can be a good thing.”

“This would be one of those times,” Peter said.

In fact, there were several more hookups that night. One
couple, a Uruguayan man and Jamaican woman who met at the party, became engaged in less than a year. A fellow tanguero shared a ride home with a civilian friend. Later they traveled to Mexico together, fell for each other, and within a few months had a bitter break-up. Such is the nature of the embrace.

Peter and I sat down and took a break.

“I don’t know where I want to be,” he moaned. “This city wears me down.”

I had heard this musing, his complaints and financial worries, so many times.

“My heart’s in Buenos Aires,” he said.

“Then you should go,” I said.

“You think?” he asked.

“You keep talking about it,” I said. “I’ll miss you, but you may as well try.”

As guests trickled out, the volume of the music went up and we danced to disco. Peter had brought a Donna Summer CD, and he started spinning on the dance floor. Someone challenged his sovereignty, so Peter spun, jumped into the air, then landed in a split and bounced while the other dancer dropped to his stomach and wiggled across the floor like an earthworm. We played songs from the
Grease
soundtrack, then more disco, including that old standby, “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor.

I broke away from the dancing and started gathering cups with dregs of wine in the bottom, rumpled napkins, plates sticky with dulce de leche. The party had been a success.

T
HAT SPRING
I took landscape design courses at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx. I bartered with friends: In exchange for my help writing a grant, one designed my business cards; I wrote ad copy for another in exchange for a simple business website. I visited gardens around the city and snapped photos of my favorite plant combinations; I picked the brains of gardeners and designers I knew and applied for a business license.

Between meetings with my own clients, I worked for other gardeners. Many evenings I returned home so filthy and exhausted all I could do was shower and collapse. I was juggling the garden business with writing assignments and still traveled frequently. When I was on the road, I always sought out milongas.

On a chilly night in Helsinki, Finland, I escaped from the
chill blowing off the harbor by slipping into a club where couples wearing plaid flannel shirts clung to each other and danced tango to a polkalike rhythm. Their particular type of tango was a little American ballroom, a little Argentine, with a polka hop and somehow a distinct Finnish flair.

In Phoenix, Arizona, I found a practica going on in a dance studio tucked back into a mini-mall. Despite the searing summer temperatures, one leader wore full leather, both jacket and pants. I feared he had put them on in early spring and hadn’t been able to get them off. I avoided him and danced with a man wearing a white cotton guayabera shirt. He held me so, so gently, perhaps he thought I might dissolve if he embraced me too tightly.

In the Mission District of San Francisco, I made my way past the taquerias where teenage boys and girls clustered around tables, arguing in Spanish and laughing. Older punk rockers traipsed by, prostitutes tugged at their tiny skirts, and the nighttime buzz of the city started to accelerate. The art center in the Mission was a cavernous space that made the crowd seem sparse even though it wasn’t. It had the ubiquitous snack table: some pretzels, bags of cookies, plastic cups for water, and, against the wall, the familiar piles of shoes, jackets, and bags heaped under the seats. At first all the leads avoided eye contact with me, assuming I was a beginner, since they had never seen me before. So I sat down and rotated my ankle, one then the other, pretending to stretch them out, when in reality I was showing off my Comme Il Faut shoes, hoping someone would notice that I’d been to Buenos Aires.