Hold Me Tight and Tango Me Home (10 page)

I had said things like that when I was twenty-three — repeatedly — to my religious parents.

On my twenty-first birthday, my grandmother rather cryptically said to me, “This is a great age. You still think that you can do anything.” I’m sure I did.

Maybe that’s why we go after the young ones in our pain; we want the time when we thought of ourselves as 100 percent right and unconquerable.

Later the missionaries’ son and I ended up making out. The kissing morphed into full-on necking in the corner. He wanted
to come home with me, but eventually I made a break for it. I located the girlfriend I had come with and we ran outside and jumped into a cab.

The next morning I noticed that he had sent me seven text messages overnight, begging to come over.

I smiled at these and called Amy.

“Do you think they know we’re doing this because we’re angry and hurt?” she asked.

“Do you think they care?” I answered.

“The thing with the young ones is that I’m afraid of the moment of disillusionment,” she said. “When they see your thighs in the full light of day and realize how old you really are.”

“You can have chunky thighs at any age,” I said. “I think it’s when they see you writing text messages, poking at your cell phone with your index finger, that the Oedipal nature of the relationship becomes clear to them.”

Another friend, a scientist with a very rational approach to the irrational, advised me, “You should probably keep making out with the twenty-three year olds for as long as you can. Your days are limited.”

I brought my attention back to class. Graciela walked around us, speaking in her musical way, as if she were orating an epic poem; she snapped her fingers to the beat and gave us suggestions as we danced.

“There are only three steps in tango: forward, backward, and to the side. With every step,” she said, “there must be clarity of intention.”

We then got into pairs and practiced sacadas. S
acar
, in Spanish,
means to “take out” or “remove.” In tango it’s a physical “displacement”: Your partner takes your axis by stepping between your feet. Usually the leader is the intruder and the follower’s leg is interrupted when he brushes her weightless leg. The intention is to take her spot; her displaced leg flares back, grazing the floor behind her. She has to move on and find a new axis. By the time they are facing each other, he has her old space, but her new axis is all hers; if he wants it, he’ll have to physically take it.

I kept moving my leg before the leader brushed it. This is known as “anticipating” the lead. It can cause problems, as the dynamic between the follower and the leader is created by his boldness and her surrender. If the follower anticipates too much, she’s pretty much dancing by herself. I had to learn to wait and not to move out of my leader’s way before he brushed against me. If the follower doesn’t wait, there’s no tension and no dynamic.

Graciela yelled, “Stop leading yourself. Just let it happen. When you let the weight go, momentum will take your leg.”

We switched partners and I tried not to flinch as I let the next man displace me with a sacada. It started to feel good in the melancholy sense of resigning yourself to what is, accepting the present situation, and then moving on.

After class, students milled about in the lobby: A short man with wide shoulders and a barrel chest spoke Spanish into his cell phone; a woman in a taupe business suit nervously tapped her foot; a man wearing a white turban buffed his dance shoes. They were all waiting for their lessons to begin, and there was no telling into which room they’d disappear — ballroom, tango, hustle, or salsa.

Two people practiced swing dancing in one of the studios: A middle-aged black man and a small, young Latina bopped and twirled honky-tonk. Salsa music poured out of another room, and I saw a few lips moving, counting the steps, then pursed in concentration as people tried to step in time to the music and execute their turns. It reminded me of the line by H. G. Wells, “Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.” That’s how I felt watching adults learn to dance. There’s such a childlike earnestness to the process.

An instructor started roaming the hallway, recruiting followers for her American tango class. Usually there were more women than men for classes, but this time it went the other way. I had an hour before my practica started.

“I’ll help out, but I’m an Argentine tango student,” I explained.

“That’s fine,” she said. “It’s a basic class and we’re going to work on the promenade. You’ll have no problem.

“We have a few Argentine tango followers here,” the instructor announced. “The embrace in ballroom tango is different, in the sense that you lean slightly back and look over your partner’s shoulders, not at them. It’s meant for show.”

Then she giggled and said, “Blame Arthur Murray.”

Arthur Murray is at the center of the success story of American dance. Born Moses Teichman to European immigrants, as a young man in New York City he wanted to overcome his shyness by learning to dance. He advanced quickly and began working as a dance instructor. In order to make more money, he studied business and marketing. In the 1920s Murray found a way to capitalize on the dance craze sweeping the United States:
He started advertising mail-order dance lessons. For a nickel, he would send off a footstep diagram of the latest dance. There were fourteen lessons in all. He then started opening dance studios and coined the simple but effective motto “Be Popular, Learn to Dance.”

The Arthur Murray dance studios were the first franchise in the United States. At the request of a hotel chain, he sent instructors out to teach dance lessons. When the hotel no longer needed them, the dancers didn’t return to New York City but stayed put in each town, and Murray helped them start dance studios. He then managed the advertising nationally in exchange for a percentage of the gross profits. By the time he retired in 1964, he had 350 franchised studios that grossed $25 million a year.

Murray realized that he was cashing in on loneliness. In a 1934 profile of the dance entrepreneur in
The New Yorker
, Milton Mackaye wrote, “Murray didn’t choose instructors for their beauty, but for background and personality. There is a sound reason for this. The average man who learns to dance is afraid of beauties; what he seeks is sympathy and understanding, and not a biological bonfire.”

Arthur Murray married one of his students, Kathryn, and she became his dance partner as well. Their weekly television show began with the catch phrase “Put a little fun in your life, try dancing.”

In the American tango class we walked quick, quick, slow and then rotated partners and continued promenading around the room. This class seemed more humorous to me than groups
learning the Argentine tango, in part because American, also called international or ballroom tango, has such a persona of grandeur, which just didn’t fit this motley group dressed in their work clothes.

The differences between American and Argentine tango reveal fundamental differences in the cultures. The American promenade is a mostly competitive dance, set to predetermined steps. It is about being seen, about projecting yourself as graceful to an audience. The leader’s responsibility to his partner is to make her look good to the audience and judges. Dancers do not hold each other in tight embraces; rather, they keep their torsos at a distance. They do not look at each other, but rather out at the audience. The musical tempo is upbeat, and overall, it’s a sweet, innocent dance that radiates optimism.

The Argentine tango, on the other hand, is full of pathos. Couples close in tightly, feeling each other’s pulse, each other’s pain. They press their foreheads together, like lips in an endless kiss. It’s a dance that revels in the drama of suffering, one that says that failure binds us together much more closely than does success.

As a culture, Americans despise failure. The gym in my high school had slogans painted on the walls in huge letters: A
MERICAN ENDS IN
“I C
AN
” and F
AILURE IS NOT AN OPTION
. We carry this mentality with us. Failure makes you a “loser.” It doesn’t matter how many entrepreneurs reveal their early flops, or how many first marriages end in disasters that lead to better second marriages. Reflection, nostalgia, and melancholy, along
with the spectrum of emotions encompassing pain, sorrow, and regret, are acceptable only in country music, the blues, and on occasion other types of music. We may even study failure: In
Hamlet
, Ophelia loses her mind and then dies of a broken heart. The narrator in Song of Solomon suffers unabashedly. Her love psalm is familiar to scorned women: “I opened to my beloved; but my beloved had withdrawn himself, and was gone: my soul failed when he spake: I sought him, but I could not find him; I called him, but he gave me no answer.” But not today, not us. We’re supposed to hide our mistakes and keep our sorrow secret. Nothing feels more like failure than publicly declaring your love and intention to be together forever in front of family and friends and then crying into your divorce lawyer’s answering machine late at night.

This promenade of the American tango was giving everyone something: a change, a way to meet people, a persona to try on. We stepped, quick, quick, slow, looking past each other’s shoulders with a smile. But I wanted the other tango, the one for the heartbroken.

Later that night at the practica, I plopped down in the folding chair next to Claire and we gossiped about the other dancers. I spotted Irish Guy, who had gone back to avoiding me by shifting the top half of his body in the opposite direction, as if he were executing an advanced yoga move.

I told Claire what he’d said to me, about my being terrible. “And even though he said I’d improved, he still ignores me. I feel like I failed a test.”

“When I first started,” Claire said, “some old guy quit after
one dance and told me that dancing with me was like trying to move cement around the floor.”

“What a bastard,” I said.

“It was probably true,” Claire said. “But I was devastated.”

“The problem with Irish Guy is that he’s everywhere,” I said. “He doesn’t miss a practica, and he says that he goes to a milonga every night of the week.”

It was if I had this little beacon of rejection that was always there, whispering “You suck!” There was nothing that got my attention more than a person who didn’t like me. I’d brush past admirers or pleasant conversationalists to win over the one who ignored me no matter how odious I might find him or her. It didn’t matter if it was a woman who was rude to me at a party or a guy whom I wouldn’t under other circumstances think twice about. I had to make them all like me. I recognized that this need was a huge waste of time and energy, but I couldn’t help myself. Now Irish Guy had brought it all back to me. There was nothing particularly attractive about him except that he didn’t want to dance with me.

“And he’s Irish American — my people,” I said to Claire. “They usually like me.”

Claire laughed. “Maybe he has a crush on you.”

“Maybe he’s gay,” I said.

“I’m going to die alone,” Claire said. “I had a date last night and just blew it.”

Claire had been trying not to emasculate her dates. She frequently opened doors for both of them, decided what they would do, where they would eat, and insisted on paying half the bill.

“Not only did I split the check,” she said. “I decided the tip he left wasn’t adequate and added more. Right in front of him.”

“Well, at least you’re aware that you’re doing it,” I said. “That means you can stop, right?”

“I don’t seem to be able to. I think I want a guy who can take charge, and then I don’t allow it.”

Allen arrived and sat down next to us. We all watched an old man in a veteran’s cap bounce around the dance floor.

“I wonder what war he fought in,” I commented. “Or maybe it’s just a look . . . sort of a ‘proud to be conservative’ thing.”

“I used to be a Young Republican,” Allen said. “I converted to Christianity about that time.”

“How’d your Jewish parents like that?” I asked.

“My dad just said, ‘Sure, you’re a Christian.’ But it got a rise out of my mother. She cried a few times.”

“That’s a sweet story,” Claire said. “I just did it again, didn’t I? I didn’t mean to say sweet. Maybe cute. No, not that either. I don’t know what I mean. Let’s dance, Allen.”

As they settled into the embrace, I mouthed at her, “Let him lead.”

Claire laughed.

I watched Allen and Claire start into the basic. Earlier Claire had revealed that her father had left her family when she was about a year old. Her mother struggled to raise her and her sister on food stamps. Her distrust of men started long before her ex-boyfriend cheated on her.

Just then Peter, dressed in faded jeans and a muted aqua blue
T-shirt that set off his eyes, walked in. He had an expressive way of entering the room, and he always seemed to be carrying bags — sometimes filled with clothes and dance shoes, along with his laptop and, usually, food. He ate continuously. When he spotted someone he knew, he’d scurry toward them on his tiptoes, laughing. Today, though, he just headed straight for the corner and changed his clothes in a flurry. We caught each other’s eyes and smiled.

A couple approached him and I overheard him talking about his film. “Making a film” is a loose term. Peter had completed a short trailer, but as far as I could tell, he spent his days in coffee shops, laptop open, hoping a movie star or rich producer would walk by and offer to fund his project. There was some multitasking involved, as he simultaneously waited for friends of friends and cousins of uncles who knew somebody who wanted to make a film on gay tango and would collaborate with him. This meant they would pony up the money.

When he was done talking, Peter came and sat down next to me.

“Potential film funders?” I asked.

“No, or most likely not,” he said. “I don’t know why, but each time I have to tell someone that the movie is about gay tango, I cringe a little while I wait for their response.”