Hold Me Tight and Tango Me Home (12 page)

In language, what places you in time and space are verbs (passive or active), participles, and gerunds. In dance it’s rhythm that moves you: tempo, accent, meter, and flow. It has often been said that dance is more similar to poetry than to prose. (Hence the upsurge in poetry sales in 1913 London.)

Dances, the two-step, hustle, salsa, swing, all have their own
rules, which are understood by those who know the “language.” To communicate, you learn the steps, build them into patterns, and commit them to memory. You must be part of the group to participate. The natural world requires this as well.

Each honeybee hive has its own dance, its own language, so bees can communicate to one another where the flowers with the most nectar are to be found. They dance the direction and the distance to the flowers on the honeycomb, making a map. German bees dance a different language from Italian and Egyptian bees. Each hive has its own dialect and creates its own scent. If a bee does not carry this scent or does not know the language of a hive it tries to enter, the guard bees kill it.

Dance classes are ways to learn a common language. But even with a shared vocabulary, some gaps in communication remain. How do you attract men you want to dance with but not those whom you don’t? What do you do with your hands? Hands on hips means aggression. Hand to cheek signifies evaluation. Pulling or tugging at ears indicates indecision. Rubbing the eyes is doubt. What gesture means “I’d like to be asked to dance by a preintermediate guy who smells okay?”

I sucked in my stomach and softened my face muscles — not a smile, not a frown. A man looked toward me, and I maintained eye contact. He approached.

“I’m Dave,” he said. “I’m a little tall for you, so just rest your hand on my shoulder.”

Keeping open embrace was considerate. When a tall man pulled me into a close embrace, I had to stretch out, strain my
legs upward to match the man’s height, then extend them as far as I could so we wouldn’t bump legs and I could meet his stride. Dave knew I was a beginner and tailored his dancing to me. But I still let my mind wander, missed a step, and apologized.

“Listen,” he said. “Don’t say you’re sorry. There are only two things a man wants when he dances with you. He wants you to want to dance with him more than any other man. He wants to impress you. You don’t have to do anything. I once had a tango instructor who would just stop dancing if she didn’t understand something. She didn’t apologize for not knowing how to follow; rather, she’d demand to be led clearly.”

I met my first Internet date, M., at an Italian wine bar in my neighborhood. Amy used to take her dates there, and if she liked them, they would go to a darker bar a few blocks away to make out. (Isaac was still angry that he was taken on this “pony trot.”) I waited for M. at a corner table where candlelight flickered off the exposed-brick walls. Wood beams ran along the ceiling. He arrived and apologized for being late. Along with physical gestures, there are also social codes in dating: His traveling to my neighborhood was a good sign, but for a woman to sit alone in a bar or restaurant waiting for her date to arrive is a bad beginning. The problem is, not everyone shares these codes. He might have thought this made him look fashionable. I thought it made him seem rude.

Once M. was seated, we ordered two glasses of wine and decided to share a cheese plate. The conversation moved comfortably enough. He looked like the picture in his profile and
appeared not to have lied about his age, but something kept him from being handsome. I thought it was around his jaw, an overbite maybe. Soon I realized it was his lack of confidence. He seemed uncomfortable in his own skin, and his posture at the table was slightly defensive. On paper he was fine: belonged to a natural-food co-op, was passionate about cooking, and had a job he didn’t like that paid well. He expressed envy that I worked as a writer.

“Well, aren’t you lucky,” he said. “I guess that requires a trust fund.”

I was a little taken aback at the snarkiness.

“No,” I answered. “I’ve been doing it for some time now. And I teach off and on.”

“Oh, really, like grade school?” he asked.

“College” I said. “But lately I’ve had enough assignments to stop teaching for a little while.”

There was no spark. In fact, I found the wedges of mild sheep cheese dotted with black truffles and the chunks of sharp Romano far more exciting than my date. I started thinking about how I would extract myself from this politely. In tango, you dance three to five songs to learn about each other. The first can be a little awkward, the second better, the third lets the connection meld. Of course, sometimes you wanted to run away from him after the first song: He’s off the beat, has bad breath, pushes you with his hand instead of inviting you with his chest. Women bolder than I do this; they politely beg off after one song, saying they need a drink of water. Men had done it to me, but I
couldn’t do it. I still blamed myself for any bad dancing and worried too much about hurting other people’s feelings.

While pondering polite ways to tell this man there wouldn’t be a second date, I realized that he wasn’t even a bit interested in me. This didn’t seem acceptable. Why wouldn’t he be? What was wrong with me? The urge to win him over welled up, and while I told myself that I wasn’t interested in this angry, insecure man, another part of me — the desperate part that needs to be liked by everyone — clicked in, and I caught myself tilting my head, an invitation in the body-language world to “come closer.” I made eye contact and smiled.

Stop it, I told myself. You don’t even want to see him again.

With a force of will, I straightened my head and started tapping a foot and cut off any type of physical coquettishness.

When the bill came, he flipped it over and said, “So, should we split this?”

A
CAGEY CROWD
surrounded the dancers gathered in the Chelsea Market. A thin rope had been strung to create a makeshift dance floor and keep the tango dancers separate from the shoppers and the young women giving away gelato samples. This Saturday-afternoon milonga had attracted close to a hundred dancers. As evening approached and the shops closed, the lines were taken down and the dancers spread out through the mall, dancing in front of the seafood shop and bakery. I waited on the sidelines until a man shaped like a pumpkin invited me to dance. My chin hovered just above his thin white hair, and I
took in his sweet, musky smell. That old, round guy moved like butter, and we glided around the floor. Seamless and silky, he pulled me inside the music and it felt so good.

He led me through a basic crossover and then a subtle, gentle gancho, and we ended standing parallel. Before the second song he said, “Move more slowly, wait for me. I want to make you look beautiful. That’s my job.”

In partner dancing and dating, chemistry is the central component. This small, rotund man was not someone I would want to go on a date with. I knew little of his personality except what I learned from dancing with him. He had nice manners, but that’s not physical attractiveness. I felt chemistry with him anyway, though, a warm connection like a soft hum between us that created an almost narcotic flush. We can all have chemistry with people who are not appropriate mates and then have no chemistry with those who might be good matches. A few of the dating websites have hired experts to break it down and try to define it so people can make better matches.

The anthropologist Helen Fischer was hired by an Internet dating service to help match prospective singles. She believes that women are unconsciously attracted to men with a different immune system, which they sort out through the sense of scent. According to Fischer, this would produce offspring who are genetically more varied, which is good for our evolution. She believes that the four basic chemical systems, dopamine, serotonin, estrogen, and testosterone, are associated with Plato’s
temperaments: the Artist, the Guardian, the Idealist, and the Rationalist.

While estrogen and testosterone are hormones, some scientists believe they may act as pheromones. These are signals that enter the brain, possibly through scent, that can trigger the libido, as well as stimulating fear and aggression. (Honeybees release pheromones to communicate to their swarm.) Another chemical transaction associated with love and sex involves the neurotransmitter dopamine. But why does one particular person, and not the next, set off a certain chemical reaction?

Fischer gave 1.6 million men and women a questionnaire. She created her own categories based on Plato’s: The explorers were risk takers, which is associated with dopamine. The builders tend to be social and follow rules; they had dominant serotonin pathways. Verbally skilled negotiators were heavy on estrogen. Directors, outwardly competitive and direct, were in the testosterone category (surprise, surprise). She found that people with lots of serotonin were attracted to people who are heavy on dopamine. I imagine the same could apply for estrogen and testosterone. In Internet dating, when men claim they want “a woman who looks good in jeans as well as an evening dress” and women say they want “honesty and no games,” what they really want is someone who doesn’t smell like them.

My line on the Internet dating site was getting some bites, and I agreed to go on a date with W., a Brazilian who worked at the United Nations. He seemed polite and worldly. He invited
me to the nicest
churrascaria
, or Brazilian steakhouse, in town. I trusted that he would pay; I had never been out with a Latin man who hadn’t. He was there waiting for me. He held my chair and insisted I order first. I love good manners.

The waiters came by with skewers of filet mignon, chorizo, and prime rib. And then the side dishes started arriving: grated yucca flowers, onion rings flecked with herbs, and deep-fried bananas that I relished in small, sweet bursts between nibbles of salty meat. The waiter poured us glasses of Cabernet Sauvignon. It was all perfect until the luxury was interrupted by the very sad story of this man’s life.

His parents divorced when he was five, and his father fought to get full custody of his children. He accused his wife of having an affair. The judge ruled that she was an adulteress. Years later, on the one occasion when he saw his mother, she would explain that the judge blackmailed her by saying that he would award her custody of her children if she slept with him. So she did, thereby proving to the judge that she was in fact unfaithful. The judge awarded the children to her husband. Ill equipped to handle children on his own, W.’s father parceled W. and his sister out to relatives. By the age of fifteen, he was living on his own.

I felt so sorry for his mother and those children that I lost my appetite.

After dinner we caught a taxicab and headed downtown to a club where a Cuban group was playing. W. confessed that this was his first date since his divorce. While it wasn’t my first, it
was the first time I’d gone out to dance salsa since my separation. This might not have been such a great idea. Watching W. jumping around, his stiff, small torso boxlike in his business suit, made me miss dancing with my husband, the smooth hips, the sexy shoulder shakes, the firm hand on my back. W. bounced toward me and tried to cop a quick, unwelcomed kiss, but I backed up and he missed. I knew there wouldn’t be a second date with him. Sympathy isn’t attraction. And I didn’t feel guilty. He had his first date since his divorce and it wasn’t bad, and sometimes what we need is to relearn this stuff one small step at a time.

So it was back to the dance floor to try and become wiser about dating. Dancing is something you can learn, but attraction is a big unknown. At one practica I danced with a man who had started learning tango at the same time I had. He was originally from Turkey, where tango has been wildly popular since the early 1900s. He had wonderful posture, keeping his chest forward, wide and generous, so that I could stay connected to him. He smelled slightly of aftershave, earthy and floral at the same time. He held me close but gave me room to move when he led a back ocho. We mostly just tango walked, but a good caminita can feel wonderful. As we moved through the second and third song, I realized that something between us didn’t connect. The problem was not our timing and not our strides, but that he was nervous. He exhaled in short clips and our pulses, our breathing never aligned. Graciela had warned about this: If you aren’t relaxed, the connection can’t happen.

By the second song of the tanda he exhaled, and at the third, we breathed in sync as we walked, bringing about that magical melding. When the set ended, we parted. I sat on the side and fanned myself for a moment, thinking that I danced best with men closest to my height. At first I thought it was simply compatible leg length, but then I began to understand that when our chests were evenly aligned, I could feel my own heart. Chemistry with another person can also mean becoming acquainted with what is best about yourself. Though this critical organ should be familiar to us, the gentle, inexplicable sensation of actually experiencing it is anything but. To feel the other person’s heartbeat mingle with your own — that’s a pleasure that’s hard to leave. St. Augustine wrote, “The hairs of his head are easier by far to count than his feeling, the movements of his heart.” Scientists can locate the chemicals, but what the heart craves remains a mystery.

Dating can be like a tanda that allows a second, third, even fourth song so that a couple can find the connection when dancing. So I made a second date with L. Our first date had been at a small wine bar in the East Village. He worked with computers but had a graduate degree in English, so he had a steady paycheck and was well read. We talked about books we liked and former colleagues of mine with whom he had studied. L. had kind hazel eyes flecked with green, prematurely gray hair, and ears that stuck out. We laughed a lot through the evening. He had bought the wine, to me a signal that he liked me. Later, through e-mails, we agreed to meet a second time.

The second date, like dancing the second song in a tanda,
is very telling. Any doubts you had during the first one would be either confirmed or dispelled. And I did have a few doubts about L. He had spent a rather long time telling me about his ex-girlfriend, who “had a great heart but some emotional problems.” She screamed and yelled and threw things. She took lots of antidepressants but still had an eating disorder and had never recovered from the abuse of her alcoholic father. She swung between rage and depression. He said that he finally couldn’t take it. I wondered why he was telling me all this on a first date.