Hold Me Tight and Tango Me Home (8 page)

I spotted Marcel, looking a little like a maître d’ in a crisp white shirt and black pants. But my attention immediately shifted to a woman pressing seventy who wore a miniskirt, thigh-high stockings with tiny black bows on them, and a black corset that thrust her bust forward and her butt out, giving her
the semblance of a pigeon. A dapper old man in a black wool vest with a pocket watch asked her to dance.

“Well, this is it, guys,” Allen said. “Our new social crowd.” We all nodded, smiles spreading across our faces. Then Allen and I embraced, close but still keeping a distance between our stiff bodies. Barely daring to breath, we joined the dancers circling across the floor. We moved into the basic, terrified but dancing, more or less.

Close embrace dancing is also known as salon style. The steps are small and subtle, and couples stay joined together as much as possible. It’s said that this form evolved from crowded milongas in Buenos Aires. If you took big steps or made wide turns on your ochos, you could bang ankles or slam into one another. So couples clutched each other and moved in tight circles around the dance floor. After Allen and I had made it through a few tandas, we stood around at the snack table in a side room, pouring wine into plastic cups. Potato chips, popcorn, and crudités had been set out by the event organizer. A photograph of the great singer Carlos Gardel was pinned over the table of uninspired snacks. This all seemed a gesture to make the milonga less pastiche and more authentic, more Buenos Aires. But, actually, tango has long been part of New York City culture.

The craze sweeping Europe hit the United States in 1913. Tango was so popular in New York that theater owners found their tickets sales lagging. Managers started incorporating tango into the shows and hosting dances during intermissions. People preferred tango to dining, and in order for cafés and restaurants
to make money, they invented the “cocktail,” selling drinks during the dances and stretching out predinner activities.

“The Girl of To-Day,” as coined by a
New York Times
writer, was described this way: “Her gowns, her tango teas, her votes for women, her wild exultation in the so-called freedom — all have had an influence upon her. And out of this, or in spite of it, has come a new American type.” Many of these “girls” were also suffragists. During this time, Margaret Sanger was teaching women about birth control and Anthony Comstock was nipping at her heels with his Society for the Suppression of Vice.

Leaders of the temperance movement fought for women’s right to vote in order to aid their battle against liquor consumption. They figured that if women voted, they would all be against legal alcohol. But when it came to dancing, suffragists and preachers were not allies. The Reverend G. L. Morrill, pastor of The People’s Church, preached, “The tango is popular because it is depraved.” And then, not mincing words, he added that it is the “dance of death” and “its step in time slides to hell.”

Another advocate of prohibition of alcohol also railed against the dance craze. In a sermon delivered at Calvary Baptist Church in 1920, Dr. John Roach Straton warned: “The plea that these dancing masters make that they desire to ‘purify the dance’ and make it safe, is idle and entirely beside the mark. You cannot make a rattlesnake respectable and reliable. The only thing to do with a rattlesnake is to chop off its head, and the only thing to do with the entire dancing mania, which has done more to corrupt the morals of this age than any other single force, is to destroy it, root and branch.”

Dancing not only encouraged women’s independence, but it also connected high society to new colonies and developing countries throughout the world. In self-defense, British dancers debated the origins of tango to distance themselves from the “primitive.” By studying postures of figures on vases and statues in museums, they determined that the stances and moves of tango came from Greco-Roman times. In fact, they announced, tango was once a war dance of the Ancient Thebans. They knew it came from Argentina but were certain that it couldn’t have anything to do with the Indians, the cowboys, and especially the Africans. Still, the backlash from the top of the social hierarchies was fierce.

Queen Mary announced that tango must be banned from any society affairs that she attended. Kaiser Wilhelm officially forbade the tango; officers in the army or navy would be dismissed if they were even seen in places where the tango was danced. The pope weighed in and expressed the official disapproval of the Vatican, and the archbishop of Paris outlawed the dance.

Despite this, the masses continued to dance and the tango flourished. As an editorial writer during that time pointed out, “Tango teas are a symptom of a common complaint, namely — the need for more happiness and more individual expression in life.” Tango was popular with older, wealthy women whose husbands worked late or traveled out of town, so New York establishments started hiring accomplished male dancers to entertain them. These young men were designated “gigolos,” the most famous being a tall, dark, and handsome immigrant from Italy, Rudolph Valentino, who originally wanted to be a gardener.
Valentino was having a hard time finding work in New York City, so he started dancing professionally. He worked his way from New York to Hollywood as a tango escort and teacher (still hoping to be a landscaper), and then started working as an extra in silent films. He was cast as an Argentinean who danced tango in the movie
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
(1921), which not only made him a star but helped fan the tango craze internationally. This created the fantasy — or stereotype — of the Latin Lover.

I kept hearing that tango was now on the rise around the world. A popular television show,
Dancing with the Stars
, matched famous and quasifamous people with professional dancers. They competed in ballroom and Latin dance. I cringed when I watched the show, though, admittedly, I rarely missed it. Sometimes I had to call Claire and lament, “Dear God, Wayne Newton is dancing something they’re calling the tango. It’s terrible, but I can’t seem to avert my eyes.”

“What’s a Wayne Newton?” she asked.

“He’s a singer, I think,” I answered.

Then I’d get upset when the professional dancer gave a completely inaccurate history of the tango. Once, the professional dancer informed millions of viewers that you keep your back straight in tango because that’s the way Argentinean cowboys ride horses. I’d yell, “No! You’re so wrong,” at the television set. It was a highly emotional hour for me. But apparently this show has more and more Americans out there learning the waltz, chacha, and tango.

In New York City you could find at least one milonga every night of the week, and this subculture didn’t seem to have much influence on the mainstream. At a milonga I attended one night, couples left the dance floor and made their way toward a card table laden with stale cookies and crackers and malleable potato chips; Breast Nester, the man who liked to dance with tall women so he was at eye level with their cleavage, came to the table and helped himself to a saltine and a squirt of wine out of the box. This didn’t really feel like a glamorous craze — it was more like a random club.

Allen and I helped ourselves to some snacks.

“Hey, how did your date go the other day?” I asked Allen.

“Really well,” he said. “We’ve gone out once since then and I think we’ll see each other again. She’s really interesting.”

“What’s that mean?” I asked.

“You know, it was good. She was interesting.” He blushed a little.

“Interesting in a good way, hmm,” I said. “So there was chemistry?”

“Yep,” he said. And I thought I saw him smile a little. Then he blushed, “At least, I think so,” he added.

Allen asked Marcel, who had joined us, about what he did for a living. He wanted to make conversation but almost immediately knew that this was a faux pas. People were here dressed in ersatz clothing to take on a fantasy persona. Claire and I had nicknamed Marcel Ambassador, as he welcomed all the new people to tango, helped women who were learning, dj’d the
practices, and greeted everyone warmly by first name. His day job was entirely, utterly, beside the point.

“I work for Verizon,” he said. He paused for a moment. “I’m a technician.”

After an awkward silence, the conversation turned back to tango. Allen tried to redeem himself by asking Marcel for tango advice, and then the little old ladies found Allen and pulled him out to the dance floor. He disappeared into the crowd. I watched the couples slowly circling, embracing one another. I was grateful for the anonymity. I hated running into people I knew. I wore big sunglasses and took back streets in my neighborhood. But every once in a while I’d hear my name, and some casual acquaintance I hadn’t seen in months would be standing there, shoulders squared, ready to greet me.

“How are you?”

“Okay,” I’d say. Then I’d adjust my glasses over my red, swollen eyes.

“How’s your husband?”

This question — meant to be polite, and normal under most circumstances — felt like a sucker punch. What could I tell them? So I figured it was best to get it over with.

“We’re divorcing,” I’d say.

The “I’m sorry” was almost always followed by a “why?” And I usually told people that he was having an affair. I needed to make clear that I wasn’t at fault; I suppose that made me feel more like a victim than just a failure.

“Well, you look great. Have you lost weight?” they’d say.

“Yeah, thanks. I’m smoking again.”

I contemplated sending out a holiday greeting card with an image of my divorce lawyer and me on it, along with a note: “Well, this year held a lot of surprises . . .”

But really, I felt deeply ashamed. When I told my mother, she begged me not to divorce him. She wanted me to call a friend of mine, a priest, and ask him for counsel, believing he’d talk me out of it. My mother, a devout Catholic, considered divorce a sin — and although adultery is also a sin, he committed it, not me. (You learn this sort of logic when you grow up Catholic.) I did speak to my friend the priest, and his response was, “You deserve better.” When I told the pastor at my Episcopalian church, he commented, “He’s an idiot.” But I stopped going to church after that. I couldn’t control my sobbing when I was sitting at mass, and when I tried to pray, my thoughts streamed out as foul-mouthed invectives aimed at God. I just bowed out of the whole thing.

I had hoped for my parents — or at least my mother — to be fiercer. But in our society divorce is also failure, and she was ashamed to tell people in the Midwest. She also didn’t want me to be single. In her circles, singleness was social doom for a woman.

My parents had married young, in their early twenties. A lifetime together is tough for anyone. There were times when my parents might have divorced if they hadn’t had five children, if they hadn’t been so Catholic, if my mother hadn’t been so terrified of being alone. They stayed together, forming each other over time, the way rivers and rocks form canyons — my mother
a high-strung perfectionist, my father a man who can nap anywhere, anytime and whose e-mails are hard to decipher through all the misspellings. I got a bit of both of them — overextended and a lousy speller.

One time in high school I was stood up on a date. I waited and waited, until I finally called his house and one of his brothers said he was out with friends. I was crushed. I didn’t want to cry, so instead I got angry and began throwing things around the room, not hard, just pillows against the couch and a tennis ball against the wall. Then I sat down at the bottom of the stairs. Our dog came over and put his head on my knees, and I scratched around his ears and cried anyway.

My mother came downstairs. She had rolled up her hair in large blue plastic curlers and wore a long kimono and her heavy, black-rimmed reading glasses. “Why are you home?” she asked. “You had a date.”

“He didn’t show up,” I said, blowing my nose.

“He stood you up?” she asked. Without pausing for a response, she said it again, as a statement this time, not a question. “He stood you up. That little son of a bitch.”

She stormed into the kitchen, where my father was drinking beer and listening to the K.C. Royals game on the radio.

I heard clattering.

“You want to know what I’m doing with the meat cleaver?” she yelled. “I’m going over there and I’m gonna kill the bastard. Don’t tell me to calm down.”

(My mother will totally deny the meat cleaver, and perhaps I
just picture this now to make the story more dramatic. Besides, our cutlery and cooking utensils were usually so dull they wouldn’t draw blood. But I remember her as armed and dangerous.)

She appeared in the hallway.

“What’s his address?” she yelled at me, holding the cleaver up. “Tell me his address, ’cause I’m going over there and he’s gonna be sorry.”

She stormed out the front door, her kimono flapping. She got in the station wagon and turned the key, but the engine wouldn’t start. She held down the gas pedal and kept cranking. A few curlers had fallen out, and coils of black hair fell around her face. She was so angry that her eyes were flickering behind the thick lenses of her reading glasses. The car started with a roar and she yelled, “Tell me his address.”

“Please come back inside, Mom,” I said.

Then I started laughing. “It’s okay, Mom,” I told her. “Please come back inside.”

The car engine sputtered for a few moments, but she didn’t know which way to go, so she finally turned it off. We went back into the kitchen. My mother put the cleaver away, muttering the whole time, “He was never good enough for you.”

My father was frying bacon. There’s nothing, he believed, that couldn’t be solved with a good night’s sleep or a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich.

“Who are the Royals playing?” I asked.

“Milwaukee Brewers,” he said.

He sliced tomatoes, washed lettuce, spread mayonnaise on
bread (not evenly, but I was too depleted to point this out to him), and started layering everything. He cut one sandwich in half and placed it in front of me, and then made one for himself. We both sat and ate without speaking as we listened to the ball game on the radio.