Hold Me Tight and Tango Me Home (18 page)

“I’ve been thinking about it,” he said. “I’m heading to Chile soon, and I think I’ll try it.”

Our steaks finally came, and as we ate, Josh looked directly into my eyes and said, “I feel like dancing some tango tonight.”
We went to a milonga at Salon Canning, a venue with lots of light, colorful paintings of couples dancing, and a large dance floor made of blond wood. Inwardly I groaned. We would be seen by everyone under the bright lights. Just then a group of “alpha” tango dancers arrived. They were dressed in black silk and satin, the men in polished dance shoes, the women in high heels with iridescent bands of gold and silver running through them. With their erect posture and haughty demeanor, they hit the dance floor and put on a show for the small crowd. They embellished the simplest of steps, snapped their legs when they pivoted, dragged their feet over the ground when they stepped.

“You ready?” Josh asked.

I took a deep breath. “Why not,” I said.

We went onto the floor, and I had to admit, Josh’s embrace had improved. He no longer pumped his arms wildly. I felt a little more secure following him, but just a little. As we started the basic I thought he was moving me into a forward ocho, but he wasn’t. So we bumped knees. Then we tried again and tangled feet. I didn’t want everyone watching this, so I pulled him off the floor.

“Hey, what are you doing?” he asked.

“Let’s work this out,” I said. “I’m not sure what you’re leading.”

“Just let me lead and it will be fine,” he said. “You need to surrender.”

“Okay,” I agreed.

We went back onto the dance floor.

“I think that was our first fight,” Josh said. “It was cute.”

“Let’s just stick with the basic,” I said.

We made our way around the dance floor, and I noticed that the alpha dancers had taken their seats. A chef had just stepped out of the kitchen and was dancing with a plump, elderly lady. It must have been slow back in the kitchen. I hoped they drew the attention sufficiently away from us.

“You need to stop worrying about what people think,” Josh said. “In fact, as soon as we get in front of that table, I’m going to bust out my fanciest move.” He motioned to the table occupied by the dancers.

“Please, no,” I said. I pictured a moment of extreme humiliation. This was my perfect nightmare — appearing very bad at something right in front of people who were excellent at it. They would know just how inadequate I was.

“Oh yeah, you’re in for a real surprise,” he said.

I burst out in nervous laughter. He smiled back at me — not backing down, ready to teach me something. Ready to sponsor me in surrender.

I panicked as we moved toward the alphas and I glimpsed their stilettos, their perfect hair, the gleam of their black clothing. Oh, God, no, I thought. And then mercifully the song ended before Josh attempted any fancy moves.

When we left the place, a warm breeze was blowing outside. Josh wanted me to stand out of the wind while he waved down a taxi. We tucked ourselves into a storefront, and he kissed me — not a peck but a full lingering one on my lips. It was my
first kiss since my husband left. I had wondered about this moment. Would I cry? Would I miss him? Would it be too soon? Josh’s lips felt thin as he pressed them against mine. It wasn’t a generous, life-altering kiss, but it was nice. And I didn’t feel sad or miss my husband. Not right then, not at all.

We decided to go to another milonga, this one outdoors, because I wanted to see as much as I could for the article. At La Calesita tangueros danced around a central palm tree illuminated with strings of colorful lights. The smell of grilling meat filled the air, and people sitting around tables shared bottles of red wine. Josh and I bumped our way around the dance floor. I had decided that spending time with him was more important than a good dancing experience. I closed my eyes — rather tightly so I didn’t have to witness the faces of the dancers we bumped into — and let him lead.

After a few songs we found a table. Josh bought me a glass of wine and himself sparkling water. “Look, the Southern Cross,” he said, pointing to the sky.

By looking up at the stars just then, I felt a synesthesia: all the senses experiencing different things — the smell of fire, the tang of red wine, the blur of distant constellations, the feel of Josh’s skin as we held hands, and the sounds of tango music — yet coming together to create a singular sensation. Gently squeezing Josh’s hand, I realized that this was mufarse, the shiver of pleasure, the gentle melancholy. I had survived heartbreak.

O
N THE OUTSKIRTS
of Montevideo, bright sprays of magenta bougainvillea cascaded over garden walls. Toward the city center, colonial buildings with wrought-iron balconies and French doors flanked the steep and winding cobblestone streets that led to a long promenade separating the city from the Río de la Plata. People gathered and played soccer, strolled, sat and visited, or whispered and kissed one another along the promenade wall.

My friend Siobhan and I decided to go running to try and work off the dulce de leche we had been eating. We joked about finding dates to the wedding while we were out.

“I’m so tired of being at the singles table,” Siobhan complained.

“I don’t even want to think about it,” I said.

“How’d you leave it with Josh?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “He just started his year of traveling in Latin America. And I can’t join him, so I guess we’re going to let it go and see what happens.”

“Hey, look, a soccer game. Should we take them on?”

“If they lost to a couple of gringas they’d have to turn in their Uruguayan passports.”

“We could blackmail them into being our dates tonight.”

But we continued jogging along the river, then the color of weak coffee; crisp winds blew from the south, but the sun shone and the air had a dry crackle to it.

I had noticed, we had all noticed, in fact, that the bride, Katherine, was pregnant. In the hotel lobby, she stood with a hand on her belly and smiled when our gaze hesitated at her stomach.

“We didn’t want to tell anyone until we were safely past three months,” she said.

As we jogged, Siobhan mentioned the pregnancy and we picked up our pace. We weren’t exactly jealous of the marriage or child, but it did make us feel left behind. Like other women who found themselves single and nearing forty, we just kind of wondered how our lives had turned out like this. A family was something we had just assumed would happen.

My grandparents didn’t divorce. In heated moments my parents still threaten each other with it, but they would never divorce. Statistically speaking, I should have had a much more successful marriage because of that. Though I certainly wasn’t the first person in my extended family to divorce. On my mother’s side, two of my aunts and one uncle divorced. My mother’s
family was stoic and didn’t discuss personal matters, so I didn’t really know the particulars when they happened. Later I learned that my aunt’s husband had been cheating on her when she was pregnant, and she had left him. Another aunt married at the age of eighteen to get out of her house; years later she became a feminist, found a better-paying job, divorced her husband, and put herself through college.

My uncle was an emotionally volatile Vietnam vet. A few years after his divorce he got drunk at a Thanksgiving dinner and yelled at me, “A writer? You’ll never be a writer! You know what it’s like to shoot a pregnant woman? A soldier remembers.” I could just imagine why that marriage ended. But women’s liberation and the upheaval of war never really changed my mother — she loved the conservative 1950s.

She used to tell my siblings and me that as a child she had wanted to be a Mouseketeer or a nun. When she was in a good mood and singing, she related the Mouseketeer dream to us; when she was angry with us, she started muttering about how she should have been a nun. While she claimed to dream of being a housewife and staying at home to raise her five unruly children, in reality she taught full time and went to school at night to get her master’s degree and then sixty hours toward her Ph.D. She handled the family’s finances and gave my father a weekly allowance. An overachiever, she implemented progressive reading programs in the troubled Kansas City public school system. All the while, she talked — without irony — about how she hoped I would marry a Catholic doctor and live the life of a housewife.

“Doctors’ wives even have nice maternity clothes,” she once told me. Quite an enticement for a high school girl.

In fact, she knew of a Catholic college in Nebraska that was attached to a medical school. All I had to do was get accepted to the school, go to the Christian gatherings, and stay a virgin until my wedding night. I defied my mother by going to a public university and paying my own way by working as a waitress so she couldn’t do anything about it. Back then I dated guys in alternative rock ’n’ roll bands; then I took off for Alaska, where I shacked up with a mountain climber for six years. I left Alaska — and the relationship — for graduate school in New York City.

Over the years, my mother and I came to forgive each other, and by the time I married she was so thrilled that she and my father went out and took salsa-dancing lessons for the wedding reception.

My parents knew how to dance. They didn’t dress up and go out ballroom dancing, but they surprised the family at times. Every year on St. Patrick’s Day our mostly Irish American parish had a party that included an Irish jig competition, and my parents frequently won. The prize was a live piglet — a hold over, I guess, from the old country. They brought it home and let us chase it around the backyard for a few days before selling it to a farm. At father-daughter high school dances, my father took me on the floor and spun and twirled me all night. I loved it.

I didn’t know the origins of my father’s dancing prowess until one night when we were watching the film
Dirty Dancing
on television. Patrick Swayze plays a dance instructor at a Catskills
resort and demonstrates the dark art of Latin dance to the privileged clientele. After hours the employees shimmy, shake, and sweat all over each other. “Baby,” the daughter of a guest, falls in love with this forbidden dancing, and also with the hunky bad boy, Swayze. For the big finale, Swayze pulls her out of the crowd and makes her show her stuff to the audience of her parents and their friends, with the now famous line “Nobody puts Baby in a corner.” My father cried during this scene. He has wept during many films, but
Dirty Dancing
?

We finally pried the reason out of him. When working as a caddy at a golf course over his summer vacations, part of my father’s duties was to dance with the clients’ daughters. So every night he had to scrub up and swing or square dance with the rich girls.

“Holy crap. Dad was a taxi dancer,” I remember commenting.

“Dad was Patrick Swayze,” my sister added.

The wedding was held just outside of town at an old estancia. Palm trees surrounded a swimming pool and open lawn area, where a stage had been set up for the ceremony. Katherine looked beautiful in a Christian Dior dress and a retro hairstyle of tight waves against her head. Marcus looked handsome in his suit, but he was a shy person and the fear in his eyes betrayed discomfort over getting this sort of attention. The ritual itself passed quickly. Though Katherine was baptized Catholic, she had agreed to a Jewish wedding for Marcus’s sake. A rabbi sang much of the ceremony. My heels sank into the soft ground, and I arched my neck to see the stage.

Immediately following the ceremony, wine was served. We paced ourselves because we heard rumors that the reception would go until morning. As we negotiated the seating, a chorus of “singles table” comments erupted. One woman, from Los Angeles, was also going through a divorce.

“So why aren’t you at the singles table?” I asked her. “Is there a special table for those whose divorces aren’t final yet? Technically, I am just separated.”

“Why am I not at your table?” another guest asked. “I’m not married.”

“You’re at the long-term-committed-relationship table,” I said.

“No, more like the afraid-of-commitment table,” she answered.

Despite the stigma, everyone wanted to be seated with us because my single “sisters,” Nola and Siobhan, danced. Really danced. And that’s what creates the epicenter of a good party. Nola and Siobhan have been known to take on whole armies of young girls in dance competitions at weddings, going move for move with the youngsters and emerging victorious. That was to seventies music. When songs from the eighties started, people just stepped back. As for Latin rhythms, I could keep the party going.

That night everyone danced. The men gathered around Marcus and bounced in a football-like huddle. I led Katherine in a salsa, then danced with some of her mother’s friends while the crowd jostled and jumped in celebration. As is the custom in Uruguay, the guests dance for a set before the first course was served. Then more music and dancing, followed by another
course. No beef appeared on the menu at all. Marcus explained: “We eat meat every day. This a special occasion, so we have chicken.”

We had one especially charming man at our table, and Siobhan and I joked that Katherine and Marcus had rented him for the evening. He engaged us all in conversation, made sure we had plenty of water and wine, and at one point reached over for a bug making its way to a woman’s plate, saying, “Oh, excuse me, but this is mine.” He picked it up, examined it, then tossed it from the table.

When it came time to throw the bridal bouquet, Katherine begged me to get Siobhan and Nola out there on the floor.

“Didn’t you ask them already?” I asked.

“They won’t budge,” she said.

So I rallied them, and eventually, amid comments like “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” we all marched out. We stood toward the back, feet planted and arms dangling at our sides. Some young Uruguayan women lurched forward, and after a tussle, one caught the flowers. She tapped a little victory dance and waved them at her boyfriend.