Hold Me Tight and Tango Me Home (9 page)

When I threw my husband out, my dad called.

“Well, make sure you get plenty of sleep,” he said. “How’s your diet?”

This infuriated me. I didn’t want food or sleep. I wanted my father to go kick my husband’s ass, but my dad’s not that kind of guy. He’s a laid-back, make-the-best-of-a-bad-situation sort of person. My mother didn’t get involved at all.

“Tell him that he broke my heart as well,” she said.

When I finally fessed up to the man who owned the local bodega, Mohammed, why my husband wasn’t coming in anymore, he was shocked.

“Why would a man ever cheat on you?” he asked. “You are one in a hundred women — no, make that a thousand.”

Tears started welling up in my eyes. People glanced at me as they bought their toilet paper and cigarettes and shook out change for a lightbulb or a mousetrap. Then they hurried away.

“I don’t know why,” I said.

“If I see him again, I’ll kill him with my bare hands,” Mohammed told me. He raised his fists into the air and then slammed them down on the counter.

“Thank you,” I replied, and sniffed. “I’d appreciate that.”

“You need some baklava,” he said, tucking a slice in some wax paper and pushing it toward me. “You’re getting too skinny.”

In the tango crowd I was a beginner with no past, and that suited me fine. The
tangueros
had chosen to live the metaphor: the intrigues, romances, rejections, and slights were not real. I had no intention of meeting a man dancing tango, and Claire fully rejected the idea. “My ex-boyfriend and I did judo together,” she told me. “When we broke up, I felt ostracized from the community. I’m not going to make that mistake by dating someone in tango.” But I found a haven here. I didn’t have to tell anybody what happened or answer painful questions or listen to commentary. And dancing boosts your spirits. Any exercise that gets your blood pumping lifts your mood. As the heart rate increases, the brain starts to stimulate the neurotransmitters dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine, all of which work to shake depression. These feel-bad battlers also encourage your body to create endorphins, which make pain go away and replace it with euphoria. If you do a computer search on these chemical reactions, what frequently pops up is cocaine and heroine addiction. The highs people experience from narcotics come from the release of neurotransmitters. With dancing you add music, socializing, and touching. Human touch, our first language, breaks through our isolation and relaxes us — our pulse slows and muscle tension softens. When civilians, or nondancers, can’t quite understand why some people want to dance every night, my explanation is that dance is highly addictive, and tango especially so. Physiologically, dancing tango is kind of like
mainlining heroine. Only, you don’t rob from family members or nod out in public.

I
RISH
G
UY
,
WHO
usually crossed to the other side of the room when I entered, chatted with me and told me that he had only been dancing for two years.

“But I dance every single night,” he said. “By the way, you look nice. Most redheads are too pale for black, but you pull it off.”

“The alabaster skin,” I said. “Another curse of the Irish.”

“Bad skin and bad teeth,” he said.

“And bone spurs,” I added.

“We have strong livers,” he answered.

“Good literature, bad food,” I said.

“And a sense of humor,” he said. “You want to dance?”

We went onto the floor, and within the first minute, he said, “Oh my God, you have improved.”

“Last time I danced with you it was my first day,” I explained.

“You were just terrible,” he said.

“That was two months and many lessons ago,” I said.

“My back hurt afterward,” he said.

“Oh, I wasn’t that bad,” I answered.

This ornery guy could dance. He crossed his legs behind himself, bumping my leg in a displacement as we walked, which I would later learn is called the
sacada
.

“Relax,” he said. “Don’t move your leg until I touch it.” He
tried it again. Then on a basic crossover he said: “Slow, you don’t have to please me. Do it in your own time.”

So I tried to slow down when I crossed my legs on the basic.

“Slower,” he said.

I dragged a leg across the floor.

“Good,” he responded.

When the song ended, I marveled at how my first dance with him had been such a good experience for me and so awful for him.

To enjoy a social dance and make the evening worthwhile, you need only three good dance partners. I missed my new friend Peter that night. With Peter, Allen, and Marcel I felt like I could learn; I could make mistakes and be forgiven. I wasn’t so sure that was the case with many other people — if they had a bad experience with me, they would never, ever ask me to dance again. And I hated to think that while I was enjoying myself, my partner was miserable. I remembered when I had asked my husband, through sobs, why he started up with that other woman. Hadn’t he been happy?

“It’s not like that,” he had said.

My eyes started to tear up at the milonga, so I forced myself to stop thinking about my ex-husband. “Visualize,” I commanded myself. I erased, shredded, and banished him from my thoughts and tried to picture myself in the emerald dress, making my way down a hallway and into the arms of a handsome man. Unfortunately, the only images that came to mind were of little old men dressed as pimps and gauchos.

At 3 o’clock the milonga came to a close with “La Cumparsita.” That was always the last song — playing anything else would bring bad luck. The story goes that the title comes from a slang term in Buenos Aires,
comparsa
, that means to go to a carnival dressed in costume, usually wearing a mask. In 1920s Paris, when people requested tango they got the song “La Cumparsita,” and from there it spread. Gardel crooned the sad lyrics, “the masked parade of endless miseries promenades . . .,” and this became synonymous with tango. Around the world, milongas now end with this song, this sentiment; then coats are donned over formal wear, feet slip out of high heels, aching arches are rubbed for just a moment before stepping into street shoes; people metamorphose back into receptionists and mothers and scientists and technicians and schoolteachers and administrators as they catch trains home in Tokyo, shuffle through snow in Scandinavia, walk into the worn nighttime air of Rome, or follow the flow of the Seine out of the heart of Paris.

Now we, too, spilled out into the streets, hailing cabs and disappearing into New York’s subway stations. Allen walked Claire and me to our subway stop. He seemed to have a spring in his step.

“I think the first milonga went well,” he said. “Considering.”

“I have to improve,” Claire sighed.

“It takes time,” I said, “though I feel desperate to improve also. I hate apologizing before every dance.”

“Every night,” Claire said. “I’m going to dance every night.”

We reached our subway and parted from Allen.

“See you soon,” I told him.

“Tomorrow in class, in fact,” he said.

On the way home, my neurotransmitters slowed down. The serotonin and dopamine stopped pulsing and the endorphins subsided, leaving a vacuum that created a crash. This is how the dance addiction gets started. When I got home I lit a cigarette but felt nauseous. I threw it out, along with the rest of the pack. I was done with that. A stomachache hit me and knocked me onto the couch, where I rested for a while. Then I hobbled into the bathroom and drew a hot bath and soaked until the throbbing in my feet stopped and the twisting in my stomach subsided. By the time the water cooled off, I realized that I was hungry, starving, in fact. I craved baklava and bacon.

I
STUDIED
G
RACIELA
. Her pants were rolled up, revealing her long, shapely legs, which were accentuated by sparkling blue stilettos; her obsidian hair was haphazardly pulled off her face with rhinestone-studded clips. She walked around the classroom, snapping her fingers and encouraging us to walk in time to the music: “Remember mus-i-cali-ty,” she enunciated. “Breave,” Graciela yelled at us in an Argentine accent heavy with Italian intonations. A few people looked around.

“Breathe,” someone said.

“You have to breave to feel the music,” Graciela said. “You have to feel the music to dance tango. And when you make that connection with your partner, it is a pleasure you will never want to leave.”

She told us to pair up, explaining that this was an exercise in trust. To demonstrate, she chose a woman from the group and
told her to close her eyes. Then that woman’s partner took her by the hand and led her. He walked in circles and bent at the knees. She would get so close to the floor that she could brush it with her fingertips. Then he would turn her in a slow spin.

“Learn to trust,” Graciela said. “You are never alone in tango. You must trust your partner.”

With my eyes shut I felt a moment of panic, but I loosened my clenched jaw and tried not to think. I concentrated on the music as my partner bent down and I squatted to follow; he put my hand on the dance floor and I felt the grain of the wood, barely discernible under the polish. When we stood up, I sensed the nearness of the wall by an increase in coolness; he put my hand on the smooth surface, and through it I could feel the vibrations of traffic outside. He led me in slow, deliberate circles. Then my partner stopped and turned, and we began walking in a different direction; I started to feel more comfortable and stopped worrying about navigating; I had heard the music, but now I began really listening.

“The tango will change you in ways you can’t imagine,” Graciela said. “I recently had an actor study with me because he was in a play where his character dies. He wanted to learn the tango so that he could die convincingly.”

Surrender is what a follower learns in tango — the dance term is
entregarme
. It’s a reflexive verb and means “I surrender myself.” So it’s not defeat; rather, it’s a choice to give over one’s will. The follower surrenders herself to the lead, to the music, to the experience. It’s remarkably difficult to let go of all sense of control
and to trust so completely. Despite all my women’s studies classes in college, my strong beliefs in feminism, I knew that I needed this right now. I wasn’t going to be able to get through this breakup without it.

I thought about the night last week when my friend Amy had come over to my apartment. She set Brie cheese and bread on my kitchen table and started sautéing chicken breasts. I watched her from my chair, overwhelmed with gratitude. I was going to get to eat and it required no thought or effort on my part.

“This is exactly what I need,” I said.

What I didn’t add was “how did you know?” Amy’s husband of seven years had cheated on her with a woman she had considered her friend. While Amy’s father was dying of cancer, her husband had served her with divorce papers and then moved in with his girlfriend.

We cut into the chicken, sipped white wine. This was our communion of sorts; we both knew that, at first, there’s really nothing that takes away the pain. It’s just a matter of staying alive until you find your way out of the darkness. Until then you dead reckon your way around daily life. People who’d been betrayed — left by a spouse, abandoned by a parent — were my preferred company.

“It’s a form of insanity, this horrible feeling, isn’t it?” I asked Amy.

“I’m so sorry you have to go through this,” she said. “But you can grow from it. Think of this as cleaning house so that true joy can come into your life.”

Amy had just become engaged to a wonderful man, Isaac; she called him “the lion heart.” He was a native New Yorker, but he wasn’t jaded. In fact, he was the kind of man who always crossed the street to carry a neighbor’s groceries, patted a dog on the head, or helped a woman take her baby carriage up the subway steps. He adored Amy and was a much better person than her ex-husband would ever be. She was living proof of a happy ending.

But it had taken her a while. Amy told me that you get only a year, during or just after your divorce, to behave badly, sometimes even dangerously. Newspapers and local news stations constantly reported crimes that were acts of passion during breakups and divorces, the homicides by people whose neighbors swear they aren’t capable of murder, the attempted suicides, the setting fire to homes. A friend of mine called me constantly when his partner, the mother of his child, left him. One day he sounded a little sheepish.

“I saw her new boyfriend today,” he said. “He was riding his bike as I drove by.”

“I’m sorry,” I told him. “Are you okay.”

“I tried to run him over,” he told me.

“You can’t do that,” I said.

“I couldn’t help it,” he answered. “Fortunately he jumped out of the way in time.”

While I searched the Internet obsessively for information on my husband’s girlfriend, actual stalking was unappealing. This was mostly due to proximity, or rather the lack of it, since I’d heard they were in New Jersey. And we’d made a deal: I got
Brooklyn, he got New Jersey. I considered this about the best exchange since the U.S. bought Alaska for 1.9 cents an acre from Russia, and I wasn’t going to blow it.

And people talked me down a lot.

“Every time you ask him why, it will be fresh wound,” Amy told me.

When Amy was going through her divorce, she’d had an affair with her nineteen-year-old intern in the office of the Catholic charity where she worked as a fund-raiser.

“Didn’t you have to evaluate his job performance?” I asked.

“Yep,” she said. “I started with ‘Clearly this is awkward.’”

“That must have been one popular internship,” I told her.

One night when I felt particularly bad, I met a twenty-three-year-old guy at the club I used to go to with my husband. We met while waiting in line for the bathrooms. I learned that he had been born in Venezuela and raised in Turkey. His parents were Christian missionaries, and he was the fifth of ten children.

“Religion is for the scared and ignorant,” he declared.