Hold Me Tight and Tango Me Home (5 page)

Encouraged by my new shoes and by setting the divorce in motion, I decided to start throwing out my old stuff the next day. Clothes and shoes I no longer wore, I packed into bags and
took to the Salvation Army. I hauled boxes of books that didn’t interest me out of my bedroom and set them in the hallway near my front door to take to a used-book store. I emptied an enormous file cabinet that had been in the corner of our bedroom, then disassembled it and took it outside drawer by drawer and left it on the curb. Pictures of our life together — the wedding, trips to seashores and holidays with families, fixing up our apartment together — I put into albums. One for me to tuck away deep in a closet, and another for him — to give him one day in hopes he’d regret his betrayal. I started rearranging the pictures on my walls, but then I took down most of them, leaving the walls bare. As if that would erase memories.

Later I headed into Manhattan to a tango practica, where I sat down next to Claire, and right away we started commenting on the dancers.

“That guy looks like he’d rather be dancing alone,” I said, nodding toward a man who syncopated his steps with little stomps, each one seeming to signify impatience with his partner and an effort to prove he was a superior dancer.

“Yeah, the woman just happens to be there,” Claire said. “Almost an inconvenience.”

Allen, joining us, agreed. “He hasn’t let go of ego yet.” He shook his head as he watched the guy march around, oblivious to his partner. He and I slipped onto the floor, finding a space among the couples weaving a line of dance.

Followers usually walk backward. Sometimes the leader’s steps are short and shallow, at other times they’re long and sweeping,
depending on his interpretation of the music. Or you might start walking and then the leader pulls you into a rock step, back and forth, back and forth. This often means he’s stuck behind other dancers and can’t go forward. But sometimes it’s just a hesitation or a syncopation in the walk. When we hesitated, I could feel my ankle throb from my fall the day before, and despair would start to creep in. I could hold it at bay by dancing.

I partnered with an elderly man who had graying hair and was wearing a blue cardigan sweater; and then a slight man with closely cropped hair; next, a tall man who was so thin his veins webbed his forearms like road maps. They could have been anyone you sat next to on the subway or stood behind at the grocery store. But they were right there and I needed this anonymous closeness, the comfort of a stranger’s touch. I wanted to cling to these men the way a drowning person would to a life raft, to be comforted, so their warmth would stop the throbbing of my strained ankle, the dead weight in my heart, and the sickness in my stomach.

When you feel a connection with another person, the dance is never bad. Sometimes, though, it can feel bad. There’s the man with viscous hair gel; the really short man who doesn’t dance with petite women and gets his face suspiciously close to your breasts (I dubbed this type the breast nester); and the man whose sweater smells like the stuff the school janitors sprinkle over vomit. (How the hell did he get that scent on a sweater?) Worst of all are the men who take advantage of a beginner’s insecurity, blaming their partners for their own mistakes. But the connection, the “tango” feeling, is almost always good.

“I love this,” Claire said during a break.

“Yeah, I had a rough day, but this has made it better,” I told her.

“What happened?”

“Had to see my divorce lawyer,” I told her.

We both looked straight ahead. Two advanced dancers were practicing
ganchos
, or hooks; he bent his knee, she swung her leg through it with a quick kick. He spun, thrust a lower leg through hers; they stepped, flicked again.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Do you mind my asking what happened?”

“He was cheating,” I said.

“How long ago did you find out?” she asked.

“Not long,” I said. “I started tango right then. Maybe a month ago.”

Then she told me that her boyfriend had been cheating on her for two years before she found out. “I didn’t want to break up,” she said. “I asked him to just not bring anyone to our home. The place I worked so hard to make nice for the two of us. I guess I told him exactly how to end things with me for good. He started bringing them home. It finally forced me to leave.”

We watched couples tango by, many of the women with their eyes closed and a dreamy look on their faces while the men navigated the dance floor. The song “Que Te Importa Que Te Llore” (You Don’t Care that I’m Crying) played and we stood quietly, absorbing the music, noticing the way the emotional language of dancers changed with the tempo. The song ended with the line “
Si no puede ser aquel ayer de la ilusion
/
dejame así, llorando
nuestro amor
.” (If I cannot have the illusions of yesterday, / then leave me to cry for our love.)

“You’re learning how to trust again,” I said to her. “That’s why you needed the Argentine tango.”

Just before I left, I danced with Marcel. The classic “La Noche Que Te Fuiste” (The Night You Left), rolled out a steady, clear beat. When the violins started their crescendos, he pulled me to his chest, his right leg lined up alongside my left, and we walked. I stretched my legs back, matching his stride. Chest to chest, legs mirroring each other, I felt his energy solidly against me; the connection formed between us, warmth washed through me, and I could have walked to Massachusetts like that. Marcel quietly sang along, “
Mis sueños y mi juventud cayeron muertos con tu adios
.” (My dreams and my youth fell dead with your goodbye.) Then, at a slight pause in the rhythm, Marcel stopped me and stepped backward, still holding me to him but pulling me so I had to put weight against him.

“You can lean on me right now,” he said. “Put all your weight on me. I’m not going to let you fall.”

I allowed him to pull me off my axis and hesitantly rested against him, my rib cage up, my neck and head reaching vertically, my back and legs perfectly straight, abdominals engaged and feet pressing into the ground. I hung on to him and, despite the rigor of the position, let myself relax. I breathed and felt my shoulder against his and the firmness of his foot pressing against the floor. With another inhalation I felt his ribs against mine, his warm, sweet breath on my neck. Then my full weight finally hinged on him and he pulled me even closer.

“That’s it, perfect,” he said. We stayed there for a moment and the tango singer belted out, “
La noche que te fuiste, se fue mi corazon
.” (The night you left, so did my heart.)

Then Marcel shifted his balance, pushed me back onto my axis, and we began to walk together.

“B
E
-YU-T
I
-F
UL
M
OMENT
!” D
ARIO
yelled out each time we pivoted. He had created his own style of vocabulary, a sort of fusion of basic English terms spiced with his Argentine accent. One of his favorite terms was “Be-yu-ti-ful Moment,” which he emphasized in a variety of ways. He shouted this now, as we kept our feet planted but twisted at the waist, keeping our chests aligned with our partners’. Then the leader steps back while turning his shoulders, indicating to the follower to step to his side. She does this, pivots, and then steps back in front of him. This move is the essence of the
ocho
, or figure eight. The term comes from a time when women danced in long skirts and kept their legs covered; the quality of their step was evaluated by the figure eight their hem left in the dirt.

I tried to forget the nastiness of my week so far and concentrate on these beautiful moments in class. I had visited my
divorce lawyer and was told the bleak conditions of divorce in the state of New York. The clean and easy “irreconcilable differences” cannot be used. You can divorce someone in New York for cruel and inhumane treatment, abandonment for one or more years, imprisonment for three or more years, or adultery. The only other ways are one year of living apart under a separation judgment granted by a court or under a separation agreement signed by the parties.

I had told my lawyer, “Adultery. I can prove it. The idiot’s e-mail is on my computer.”

“It’s not that easy,” she explained. “A third party has to witness it. The actual
act
of adultery.”

“Oh, like a private detective snooping with a telephoto lens,” I said.

“Even then, adultery is actually a crime in New York, so nobody admits to it,” she said. “This is a remnant from the old days. It was the only way you could get a divorce, so some desperate people staged scenes of them in bed with someone besides their spouse and had it photographed to get out of a marriage. Just forget about using that one. There is a bit of a loophole, though . . .”

She told me that if we had not had physical contact in a year, then I could claim abandonment. If not, we’d have to live separately but stay married for a year. I thought about all the yelling into the phone, the clumsy, outraged text messages we sent back and forth. The phone company had called me to see if I’d like to change my plan to include unlimited texting: We had sent more
than three hundred text messages to each other in a week. My ineptness in tapping out words on my tiny cell phone reduced me to sending him one- or two-word messages. “Why lie?” I asked. “I didn’t want to hurt you,” he texted back. “Didn’t work,” I wrote. “I’m sorry,” he wrote. I couldn’t stand calling anymore because I once thought that I heard the woman’s voice in the background and I wanted to hurt her, in a twenty-five-years-to-life sort of way. I couldn’t live like this for an entire year.

“Okay, where do I sign to say we haven’t had sex for a year?” I asked. That lie was worth untangling my life from his and moving on.

My lawyer instructed me not to call my husband during the proceedings. “You want him to think we’re on his side,” she said. “Call me and vent all your anger. We keep a really long tape rolling on the answering machine at night, so you can talk into the early hours about all the things he did wrong.”

“That’s how you start every day?” I asked. “Listening to those tapes? That must be kind of interesting. Maybe you should do a one-woman play about it.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s just ugly. Good people behave very badly during these times.”

I decided then that I wasn’t going to let this divorce define my life. I wasn’t going to be bitter. Tango could help me do this. Pivoting past the leader’s open chest in the ocho class, I kept this in mind. I would learn the ocho as a lesson to make peace with men, to find balance.

Because the follower has a moment of autonomy during her
pivot, she has the opportunity to add embellishments and show her personality. She can kick a leg back in the air, tap her toe, drag a foot on the ground, but she’s still not independent — she still has to respect the dynamics of the “us,” the partnership.

The origins of the ocho have been traced to Africa. In his book
Tango: The Art History of Love
, Robert Farris Thompson wrote of the tango’s African roots. He claims the ocho evolved from a figure-eight dance pattern in the Congo they called
zinga ngodi
, which literally means “enlacing two circles.” He writes that “dancing two circles represents ‘two ways of seeing.’” He believes the ocho is similar to this Kongo emblem of balance.

“The women of Argentina are strong,” Dario said. “They are not waiting for the man. This is a struggle, they defend their territory. It is a give and take.”

He had us partner up and stand in our practice circle.

My first partner was a good-natured senior citizen with a ring of wispy white hair around his shiny pink skull. The bridge of his nose came to my shoulder, and though our height disparity may have contributed to the awkwardness, he also didn’t seem to know the basic.

“I’ve been taking lessons for two years,” he told me. “I just have a hard time remembering the steps.”

“Switch partners,” Dario yelled. “And remember to respect the beautiful moment.”

More women than men had shown up for class, as usual, so we staggered ourselves between leaders and danced the step alone until we rotated.

“In Spanish the lead is called
la marca
, or the mark,” Dario explained to the class. “It is less macho than your word ‘lead.’ It is a signal, an invitation.” He took a student and demonstrated, opening his chest so she could pass. “You don’t push her with your hand; instead you invite her with your chest. Okay, change partners and practice.”

As for my next leader, it seemed quite possible that this was his first attempt to dance in his entire life. He didn’t seem to hear the music but blustered along in ungainly steps. At times, for no apparent reason, he would stop dead in his tracks as if listening to a distant call. Dancing with him was worse than having no partner, and this made me despair — not just about the class, but about my prospects in general. I was returning in my late thirties to the masses of single women in New York City. This was a man’s market: Depressing statistics churned out by magazines stated that there were at least 3.5 single women for every single man in the metro area. The imbalance was even worse in the city proper. Some articles blamed this on the plethora of liberal arts colleges on the East Coast; there were more women than men attending them, and the women especially migrated to the big city. Every year a fresh crop of beautiful, slim, well-educated women moved to New York City for jobs. It was grim for those of us who had been there awhile and had suffered through breakups and divorces. We were like the old fish that had hooks and scrapes on them, still circling the farmer’s pond. I didn’t want to start all over again. Not in my love life or in my dancing.

After I had finished college in the Midwest, I had moved to
Alaska. I spent several years working there and traveling most winters. Then I moved to New York City for graduate school. I had expected to miss the smell and roar of the Pacific Ocean. I had taken picture after picture of the sandhill cranes that gathered near my cabin every spring, and I would never forget the feeling of walking through the wildflowers that grew taller than my head by late summer. These things I expected to miss, but once I was in New York, I found that I also longed for the social interaction of the small town I had left. In Alaska I had once locked my keys in my truck and so many people came out to help — challenging each other and placing bets on who would unlock it the fastest — that it had started to resemble a block party. Here, I was on my own. Another contrast to Alaska was the daunting challenge of meeting men in the anonymous swarm of the city. So after a few years of trying to figure out how people met here, I signed up for a salsa dancing class, hoping at least to find a sort of community.