Hold Me Tight and Tango Me Home (7 page)

He laughed, I laughed, and we danced some more together until we started chatting.

“I’ve been dancing almost two years,” he told me. “Okay, relax
your foot right there on the floor and let me just drag it over with mine.”

He slid my foot a few feet away, I shifted my weight over to it, and we stepped to the side basic.

“Why did you start tango?” I asked.

“I’m a modern dancer, but when I was in Buenos Aires I met this whole tango community and it felt like a family,” he said. “Now I’m making a film about gay tango in Buenos Aires.”

Handsome and friendly. Of course he was gay!

“A documentary or feature?” I asked.

“A feature,” he said. The practica ended, so we stopped dancing and stepped into the hallway to talk about his film. “I have the trailer shot and I’m using it to try and raise funds to make the rest of the film,” he said. “But I really have to work on the script.”

“I’m a writer,” I told him. “I could take a look at it.”

“That would be great,” he said.

As I punched his name, Peter, along with his number, into my cell phone, we noticed that students from a performance workshop had entered a dance room and were standing at attention, ready to rehearse a routine that Dario had choreographed. Dario had studied ballet before tango, and he incorporated this into his creations. A few pirouettelike turns happened between the ochos, then a pas de deux bled into a standard tango; then the dancers extended their legs behind their bodies, a hybrid of the ballet arabesque and the tango
boleo.
Dario’s vision might have been pushing the tradition of tango, but in France, some claim the ballet primed the masses for the tango.

The Parisians, those cosmopolitan trendsetters, with their penchant for the sensual, made tango vogue in Europe. The dance was first performed at the Paris World’s Fair in 1878, and Argentinean tango musicians went there to record in 1907; but these brief introductions were mere tremors of the quake that was about to hit.

According to British author Artemis Cooper in an essay in the book
Tango!
it was the Ballets Russes under Sergei Diaghilev and the “explosion of talent, sensuality, vibrant music and exotic colour, which left its mark on almost every branch of fashion and the arts.” This ballet company created a craving for the exotic, the foreign, and the previously forbidden. By 1913 tango was the favorite pastime of Parisians: tango trains, charity tangos, outdoor tangos, and champagne tangos proliferated. The craze manifested itself most fiercely in the tango teas. In Paris, no hostess would invite friends over for tea without clearing a space and hiring a piano player and dance instructors. In London, society people invited tango teachers to their country homes to facilitate tango teas, and tango became
the
dance at seasonal balls.

In 1915 the Englishwoman Gladys Beattie Crozier published the book
The Tango and How to Do It
. Her slim book is filled with gems on various ways to arrange tango teas in your own home. She advises scheduling the tea between 3:30 and 7:30 and having it on a Saturday so that men can attend. One should choose a room in the house and clear it out — if the dancing room is too small for serving tea, set up small tables in an adjoining
room. In the introduction Crozier writes, “Fashions, like waves, sweep over continents. Sometimes it will be a dance, sometimes a food, sometimes a song, sometimes a freak of fashion, sometimes a game; but the year of 1913 might be called ‘The Tango Year,’ for the dance has provoked more conversation and evoked more clothes and teas and music than anything else.”

At one point, publishers in London blamed poor book sales on tango teas; however, they claimed that poetry sales went up in that same period. Maybe dancing tango readies people for poetry? When the craze hit Berlin, one of the city’s largest department stores started offering tango teas to draw in shoppers. Tango teas were held in the Prussian parliament, and the king of Denmark sent dispatches to Berlin, asking for the music from the operetta
The Tango Princess
before it had even been performed.

Peter and I went in to watch Dario’s workshop. When the students began dancing their second number, Peter leaned over, pointed at the Hipster, and whispered to me, “You think he’d like to dance gay tango with me?”

I laughed and said, “Don’t count on it.”

“Oh, I bet he would,” Peter said.

We got shushed and then slipped out into the hallway. We watched the rest of the performance through the windows, whispering to each other about the men we thought were cute. Along with the Hipster there was the Martial Artist, a man who took up tango because his sensei told him that he was too heavy and needed to find more levity. With dark hair and dark eyes,
he was handsome, and he danced and spoke in a measured, deliberate way. He didn’t seem to have transformed his gravity, but rather he had translated it into his tango style.

“Maybe I’ll cast him, too,” Peter said.

We left together and went to a Spanish bar nearby and ordered olives and glasses of Rioja. Peter told me the protagonist in his film was a journalist who goes to Buenos Aires to report a story. His mother has just died; he and his father were always distant. He starts taking tango lessons at a gay guesthouse. From there, the romance and intrigue begin.

The love life of the main character was suspiciously similar to his own and the description of his film dovetailed with personal details of his life, and I learned about the man he had been with in Buenos Aires. “Marco stopped seeing me, stopped returning my calls,” Peter said. “I tried to get an explanation, but he said, ‘You are leaving, going home, why bother?’”

“Were you leaving?” I asked.

“Yes, but I was coming back,” Peter said. “And then he accused me of sleeping with everyone I cast in my film trailer.”

“And?” I asked.

“Well, not everyone,” he said. “Besides, it was before I met him.” Peter had become enmeshed in the gay tango scene, and he confessed that he didn’t want to be promiscuous. He swore that finding sex was easy, but he wanted a boyfriend.

I told him about my upcoming trip to my friend’s wedding in Montevideo. I was set to spend a week in Buenos Aires beforehand with friends.

“You have to go to the gay milonga,” he said. “It’s the best in town. And take lessons with Marco.”

I added his suggestions to my list, which was starting to grow as I told people about the trip. There existed a network among tango dancers: I found out where to dance, the best places to buy shoes, and which instructors to seek out. Peter and I paid our bill and found our way to the nearest subway, where we parted. It was an odd moment, as if we had just gone on a first could-be-a-new-gay-friend date. He leaned over and gave me a peck on the cheek.

“Are you going to the milonga at the studio this Saturday?” I asked him.

“No, I go to gay two-stepping on Saturdays,” he said. “I’m going to start teaching gay tango classes here and I need to go recruit dancers.”

“Okay, good luck,” I said, and kissed him on the cheek, then went down the steps to the subway tracks. While I waited for the train, I thought about the ocho and how those “beautiful moments” in life, when two people meld into a seamless one, could be so hard earned at times and at other times so natural.

T
HE LIVELY DANCE
known as milonga requires couples to step in a crisp staccato, marking each beat. Milonga the social gathering takes place anywhere: a park, a port, a dance studio with lights dimmed, a Greek restaurant on a slow night, or an old warehouse. You just need a floor that’s more or less level, some music, and dancers.

The official difference between a practica and milonga is that a practica is usually held after class at a dance studio and the dancers can correct each other. During these sessions partners work out steps in preparation for the milonga. At a milonga it’s bad manners to give suggestions or introduce a new step in the middle of the floor; although some leaders like to do this, it is wrong, wrong, wrong. But really, the most striking contrast between these two dance gatherings is the way people dress. People frequently dance in jeans and T-shirts at practicas, but
at the milongas, especially ones held on Saturday nights, they dress more formally.

I knew I had to start pulling together an outfit and that the look was totally different from salsa clothing, which tended toward tight, casual tank tops and pants with some stretch and give. For tango, women wore dresses and hose. So I rifled through my hosiery drawer and tossed potentials onto my bed. The black, opaque winter-wear tights wouldn’t work; my one pair of fishnets had a large hole, and I discovered the other stockings had runs, too. My dresses were just as dismal. An old, too-tight black halter-top sheath was the best I could come up with; when I yanked a loose thread, the entire bust bunched. Limping into my first milonga dressed in ratty hose and a dress with dangling threads, I would not have looked like an Argentinean prostitute with a heart of gold, the prevailing tango fashion for women.

I fingered my wedding dress, the exquisite chenille silk, cut tea length so we could dance salsa at our wedding. I wondered if I should one day hem it up and dye it black or green and use it for tango; this I envisioned when I was doing “my forget-my-husband exercises.”

I had bought a self-help book called
How to Mend a Broken Heart
, which I briefly considered reading on the subway to see if people wanted to tell me their stories or would instead move as far away as possible. But I kept it private and read it at home. It included exercises like “The Calm Anchor Technique” and “Return to Sender.” In one, the book instructed visualization of only the bad times with your former love. When you get a
clear picture, make it go blurry and then bleach it out like an overexposed photograph. Finally, visualize moving down a hallway, away from the present, toward a happy future. The author encouraged readers to make it vivid, in color, and to try not just to see it but to feel it, as well.

I pictured myself in an emerald green cocktail dress, heading to a stone patio and dancing tango with a handsome man who loved me. Sometimes the dress was black, and sometimes the patio had a fountain, but the fantasy varied little — I put my faith in the persistence of this vision. I painted in details: trees rustled in the nighttime breeze and the faint smell of sweet water perfumed the air. This Hollywood version of love, or at least of romance, was silly; I had nothing to lose. Sometimes, when I missed my husband, I closed my eyes and erased, overexposed, deleted, and shredded him.

To prepare for my first milonga, I went to a discount department store in Lower Manhattan and bought hosiery, sheer onyx thigh highs, fishnets, side-floral sheers, and midnight black with zigzag-stiched back seams so I had plenty of options; then I went to the dress department and bumped right into Claire.

“I’m looking for tango clothes, too,” she admitted.

We decided we should stick with basic black — a splash of red or gold would draw too much attention to our beginner’s fumbling. Forget about my emerald green dress. Also, we agreed to remain with our modest shoes for the time being.

“Yeah, I’m staying low until my balance is more certain,” I said. Shoes give away the level of a woman’s dancing. Practical
black with thick, sturdy heels, sometimes called a “granny shoe” in dance circles, means that you’re a beginner. As your dancing improves, the heel gets higher and thinner. You have to upgrade. It’s like playing a video game — you take your heels up a level and it keeps getting harder, faster, higher. As you advance, the shoes themselves get flashier too: Silver and rhinestones, red satin, gold lamé on 3½-inch stiletto heels send a signal to potential dance partners: “I dance and you’d better, too.”

Claire and I agreed to brave our first milonga together. We also convinced Allen to go so we’d have someone to dance with.

O
N A
S
ATURDAY
night, clean, pressed, modestly shod, and dressed in somber black, we paid to enter the milonga, and then the three of us stood at the entrance to the dance floor and watched. “When I arrived, these little old ladies were inching their way up the steps,” Allen said. “I almost offered to help them. But look at them now.” He pointed out a couple of gray-haired women who were working the dance floor in saucy evening dresses and spiky heels.

When tango was in its heyday in New York City, it dictated women’s fashion. In a
New York Times
article published in 1913, one fashion writer stated, “Well, call it as we will, this new and accepted kind of dancing influenced all the clothes we wear. Gowns are short because of this fashion. Not too short. Their continued narrowness keeps them from being a nuisance . . . It is a waste of time for any person to say at the present moment
that she will not need a certain gown for dancing. No gown is free from such usage. Dancing is now a side attraction to every form of pleasure and exercise. You step a measure while you eat and during many hours when you should be asleep.”

In Paris, gowns were created for the tango teas. The “tango frock” was a simple gown with a short skirt that might also have a brief train falling down the back.

At this first milonga, belle époch styles meshed with those of Old World Argentinean prostitutes and street roughs. It was mostly charming, though some outfits were so age inappropriate I had to do double takes, as was the case when I spotted a tiny senior citizen in a faux python bodysuit. Irish Guy was gussied up like a spry pimp in a bright fire-engine-red hat with matching red suit, black vest, and white dress shirt, and he gilded the lily with shiny two-tone black-and-white perforated leather shoes. Martial Artist had a subdued melancholy ruffian look in a black suit, white shirt, and black tie; some men wore rakish hats and ascots; others waxed more elegant in their pinstripe suits and buffed black ballroom-dancing shoes. Hipster wore cotton cargo pants, a retro dress shirt with an oversize collar, and a cotton bandana around his head, presumably to catch the sweat, but it made him look like a Caucasian sushi chef.