Black Swans, page 11
You know, it occurs to me occasionally that perhaps I might take a foreign language or something to improve my mind, but when it comes to getting obsessed, I never improve my mind. I only learn anything through my body.
“I’m going right tomorrow,” I told my friend.
It took about a month for me to screw up my courage to go back, but one night I drove alone to the valley in the bitter cold, when any sane person would have been home with loved ones. I stepped out of my car with my tango shoes (the bows had fallen off the first night I wore them) and opened the front door to find Norah’s empty except for a table near the front, where people were gathered for the class.
At the table that night were about fifteen people, some of them beginners like me waiting for 6:30 when the 6:00 p.m. class would begin, others advanced, whose class began later. Orlando sat there, smoking Gauloises, sipping an espresso, speaking his Argentine Spanish to a man he had helping him teach who spoke English better, Ramon.
And finally the beginner’s class—which consisted of another couple, a man who liked to waltz, and me—sort of assembled with an advanced couple.
Taking Nina, a gorgeous Russian woman from the advanced class in his arms, Orlando said, “You watch first step.”
The “step” was really a sequence of eleven steps that anyone with twenty-six years of rigorous ballet training could do in a week. I watched in rapt disbelief as the woman moved with such limp abandon that it seemed as though it was happening to her rather than something she did herself. Ending with her ankles crossed, neatly, as though anyone could figure out how they got that way.
“You watch again,” Orlando said, repeating this mesmerizing impossibility with Nina.
My problem was that I couldn’t see Orlando move without being riveted. I was paralyzed.
Two more times, he showed us a beautiful cluster of steps that had one extra quality of impossibility; unlike anything Americans did with their bodies, instead of trying to avoid touching the man as in the fox-trot or the waltz, in Orlando’s tango you actually leaned into him—your upper body crushed into his upper body, giving the effect of the Eiffel Tower, with four feet at the bottom, the man’s and the woman’s, to hold this edifice up.
“Now you try,” Orlando said, taking me in his arms, which were a shock, because from afar Orlando just looked like an ordinary man, slightly out of shape perhaps because his stomach wasn’t flat as an ironing board, but in his arms, Orlando was nothing but dance muscles.
Orlando put my left hand onto the top of his right arm and showed me how the woman was supposed to sag into the man’s side, diagonally pressing her whole body into his right torso. It was also a shock being held this closely by a man after so long, with no bed to fall backward across, but there I was, at tango class, and this, apparently, was how you did it if you wanted to look great.
Plus I was overwhelmed by his perfume (which I learned was one of the hazards of tango—so many men, so much perfume).
“Here,” he said, “you press. . . .” He meant my right hand, which he was holding in his left one, which even in normal ballroom dancing, I had often forgotten to keep solid. In tango this hand is of the essence because in tango all is balance.
Anyway, when Orlando finally got me in the right pose, he said, “Okay, we go now.”
In the background, I suddenly noticed, was a scratchy 1930s tango playing on a nonstereo cassette, but so softly you could barely hear. To me, the whole point of ballroom dancing was to wait for the beat and then follow the man. In this tango, it is so emotional and interpretive that there was no beat, no exact time your feet are supposed to hit the floor. This drives some people crazy, including me. To know when the man is going to move is impossible.
“You wait,” Orlando said. “We go slow.”
Well “we” could go as slow as he wanted; I wasn’t going anywhere but back to the drawing board. Unlike other ballroom dances, which start with the woman moving her left foot, this began with the woman moving her right back, then her left, then her right—and then it became too complicated as far as my body was concerned.
How could Nina just do that and look like it wasn’t her idea? (She had been a dance instructor for years, it turned out—she ran a dance studio.)
“We go again,” Orlando laughed.
The trouble with tango is you cannot do it alone, the dance takes two, it’s about being two—but if one person can’t do it, nobody’s going anywhere. . . .
You have to find someone willing to practice with you for two or three years—long enough to catch on, I realized. (Oh, maybe five years.) Luckily classes were only five dollars. Nothing about it was familiar to me—especially not shutting up and waiting to be asked to dance. I actually had to learn to say to men as I came into dance clubs at night, “I hope we get one dance tonight.”
I had to learn to look into a man’s eyes invitingly. It was really embarrassing, the things I didn’t know.
At that time, when I came to Norah’s, the huge fad in L.A. of two hundred people taking tango classes had passed, and now only a handful, maybe fifty truly devoted maniacs, were still drifting around the edges, and I was lucky I came in while Orlando was still offering classes, or I might have missed the last tangos in Burbank.
(Or Burbank adjacent.)
Orlando, seeing my plight—i.e., that I had no eye-to-foot coordination whatsoever—handed me over to his assistant, a man sitting at the table in the middle of dinner, who rose to his feet, midtrout, and said, “This time I show.”
“What’s your name?” I asked, wanting to at least know the name of the man whose perfume was about to overcome me.
“Ramon,” he said, “you lean me.”
He must have been almost sixty. He had a kind of drooping joie de vivre and the sad brown eyes that Marcello Mastroianni gets paid so much money for.
In Orlando’s arms I felt I was embracing a dancer. With Ramon, all I felt was a man.
I went limp.
“Your hand!” he said, about my right hand, which had turned to mush. “You resist here.”
Of course I didn’t want to resist.
All my life I thought there were only two courses of action life had to offer; now, here in the valley on a rainy night, in Ramon’s arms, I discovered there was something else I had never considered—plan C—don’t turn to mush, don’t leave, stay and resist.
Tango’s entire point.
No wonder the dance seemed to have secrets just for me.
In Ramon’s arms, I got the distinct impression, too, that the point of tango was for each person to try to get to the opposite side of the room through their partner’s body. (That part he exaggerated, but it was more or less true.)
Later on that night, Ramon’s real partner came—this luscious youngish woman named Celeste, who had long dark hair past her waist and who, like me, had seen Tango Argentino and been unable to rest until she could do it too. She approached dancing with Ramon as though it were the most serious possibility life had to offer, and the contrast between her and Ramon was divine—he was so jaded and depraved and she was such a virginal force, even in black, even in Charles Jourdan–type high heels, which made all the other women in their regular ballroom-dancing shoes look orthopedic.
She moved five times faster than I ever, in my wildest dreams, could imagine moving.
And I realized that that was another thing about tango. If the woman was led, it was up to her how fast or slow she responded to what the man wanted her to do. The music had nothing to do with it; the music was just something you may or may not notice coming out of some speaker somewhere.
Except the music had to be tango and it had to be Carlos Gardel.
(I quickly learned that Astor Piazzolla was not countenanced here either; Orlando said, “He no tango.”)
After two months of concerted effort, going to Norah’s about four times a week, taking classes from Orlando in bars in L.A., thinking about it all the time, the first steps began to sink into my unwilling flesh, due to my spirit’s force. There were a couple of guys in the advanced class willing to put up with me, and by sheer mulish determination, these eleven steps sank in. (I now knew what the nuclear physicist so adept at Arthur Murray meant by “too hard.”)
In fact, by the middle of the second month, I realized two things. One was that though this dance looked like a sacrament to the demented, it was actually much too hard when you did it to remember what had driven you to do it in the first place. And two, I knew I would have to take private lessons with Orlando if life were to go on (i.e., if Ramon was ever going to voluntarily ask me to dance some night).
Now the idea of paying a man thirty dollars to teach you to tango in a nightclub at 6:00 p.m. when the sun was still shining outside and all the waiters and beer-delivery guys were watching may not be some people’s idea of getting on with their life, but I was grateful Orlando condescended to teach me, because otherwise I would be paralyzed with fear. I was paralyzed with fear anyway—at least whenever I tried to dance with Ramon. It got so bad, being paralyzed around Ramon, that I’d forget which foot the dance started with.
Even with Orlando, I was often paralyzed with fear; it was almost as though my body had stage fright—and then, with a dance so complicated, with no beat, where you’re just getting signals beamed in from the way his hand is on your back, or the way his thigh moves against yours. And on top of this, though from afar it looks like nothing but sex, from close up it is more like being trapped in a straitjacket and trying to turn that into art.
A “good marriage” in other words.
One afternoon, I arrived for a private lesson, unsure of whether or not Orlando would actually show up, his English was so desultory, but there he was, exactly on time.
(“He’s always on time for private lessons,” one woman told me, “it’s just his classes he totally ignores.”)
Orlando was sitting at the corner table where he always sat, writing a letter to Argentina where his family was and where he was always insisting he’d go if we didn’t improve. I sat down and ordered an espresso. He finished his letter and put on a scratchy cassette of Gardel, put his ever-present lit cigarette on the edge of the ashtray, and he said, “Okay, we make one tango.”
He took my right hand and taught me everything I missed—how to make my feet look like his and Nina’s, how to lean—and he went through the first step and two others, until I got them perfectly, but once I did, because I knew what we were doing, he decided to do new things I somehow, at least for the moment, could do. These steps were flirtations with the bigger picture—that if I spent my life with him, I would be unfurling in ever more beautiful variations of tango, which I and I alone inspired him to create.
Most men in tango, the ones who’ve done it all their lives, only do their own steps and never invent new ones, but Orlando was always inventing new ones and naming them after students. He was a dream.
I knew, that first time alone, what all the women meant when they said, “Oh, to be in Orlando’s arms.”
It was like exploring kaleidoscopic voluptuousness.
“You much better,” he said, at the end of an hour.
ONE NIGHT, I stayed so late at Norah’s that the only people left were the waiters and I and Ramon—Ramon who never tried dancing with me anymore because still, after months, I was such an inert handful.
Suddenly, he stood beside me and said, “Come.”
“Oh, no!” I cried. I was just about to leave.
“You come,” he said, taking my hand and leading me to the empty floor. Only the waiters were watching.
Outside it was raining and windy, so windy that earlier that night during the advanced class all the lights in Burbank had gone down when a tree broke on the electrical wiring. But inside people did tango by candlelight—without music—undeterred by mere acts of God.
Now the lights were back on, the cassette was playing some long-ago sad song about a man whose tango partner died and who wished she would come back and stop haunting his dreams like a green mermaid, and Ramon and I stood in the middle of the empty floor, and he said, “Lean me.”
And so I leaned. All I could think of was “Don’t lead, don’t lead. Don’t even move, but at least don’t do it first.”
His strong arms squashed me into his torso, I sort of relaxed—a combination of the letting go but holding firm one needs for a dance like this—offering resistance with my right hand. And I waited.
He didn’t move.
But neither did I.
Then, slowly, he led me into that first step—and, magically, I waited long enough to follow. I took my time.
If with tango it takes two, then if this testosterone type wanted to dance with me, he was going to have to slow down; that was all there was to it. He might have been used to Celeste moving five times more eagerly to follow him, but with me, he’d just have to eat it and go slow.
If he wanted to tango with me.
In Arlene Croce’s New Yorker piece on the tango show, she says “. . . as an image of destiny, it is tragic rather than poignant, a dance in which we confront our mortality, luxuriate in it, but do not transcend it.” And I knew from watching it myself, that that was what tango looks like—but as Ramon liquefied me into the dance, I felt myself go up in internal combustion, getting warmer and warmer, pouring myself against his body on the one hand, while resisting on the other. For me, suddenly we confronted mortality—but did transcend it. We were immortal. Once I was following Ramon, mere death—like no electricity—couldn’t hold a candle.
We could have flown around the world in tango.
It was like sex, only from long ago and far away.
“Very good, very good,” Ramon said as we were finally As One with the music, which I at last understood to be, you danced to the melody, not the beat.
Letting someone take over my body completely, I felt as though we could go on forever, but then, alas, I got so disheveled morally, I forgot this was a dance; my right hand turned to mush, and down we both came with a whimper.
“You must resist me,” he said, “or I lose balance.”
We tried again, but the truth was, as I later figured out after nine thousand dollars’ worth of lessons and two years of thinking about nothing but one more tango, I wasn’t a dancer.
Oh, I could imagine myself into it for little snippets of transcendence now and then, but real dancers positively delight in being onstage; performance was their life’s blood, whereas all I wanted to be was a background extra. Or else real dancers are so great, like Orlando, that all else pales around them and becomes background in slow motion.
Orlando decided, finally, to return to Argentina. He gave everyone advance warning and didn’t dump us before we could get over him, like some people we know. His last night at Norah’s, on a Sunday when almost no one was there, he danced his last tango with a student who wore a cerise silk dress that opened like a rose in the steps they did, her white legs in black stockings, pivoting on silver high heels, his silver head and slinky feet—just one more time—carrying the dance below sea level into mermaid time and space, down into deepest darkest tangoland.
Epilogue
“WHAT HAPPENED,” I asked Renzo, “I thought you were only staying a week.”
He’d been in L.A. for so long, he was actually tan (he and I had been out helping them clean down on Crenshaw where the worst of it was—and I got tanner too, though you don’t want to get so tan you’re mistaken for the wrong sort and beaten over the head by the L.A.P.D., Daryl Gates still, at that time, being “in charge”). He was, with a tan, even more seductive, Italian, and smoldering than a girl ought to have to resist, although I was, of course, pretending he wasn’t that hot.
“I knew you were one of those girls who get turned on by my old favorite line,” he said, “so I used it on you.”
“What’s your favorite line?” I wondered.
“It’s ‘I’m leaving on a plane tomorrow,’” he said.
Well, it’s true, just writing it down still makes me feel weak in the knees (among other places). It was one of my favorite things about when I was a groupie; they were always leaving on planes the next day.
I know I should have asked, but I just assumed he had come out for one week to meet this producer, and, like everyone else, he’d leave. But now, it turned out, he’d been in town for much longer, and we’d been knocking around the city—or what was left of it—for almost three weeks.
That day, we were driving up to Santa Barbara and had gotten sidetracked into Ojai, where everything was so green that it looked, as someone had described things in the old days, as if “it could come off in your hands.”
“The reason it’s all so green,” I told him, “is because of the floods. We’ve had a pretty apocalyptic year—earthquakes, floods, that thing my friend Jack Thibeau called ‘the rumble’ in L.A. . . .”
“I like things apocalyptic,” he said, “it’s bracing.”
Italians are always making the best of things.
With a tan, his light eyes seemed lighter. We’d been to Nickodell’s, which he loved not for the food but for the naked lady paintings in the ancient bar; he loved Musso’s, which I was so glad was still standing, and he really loved my favorite restaurant, Mario Cooks for Friends, which was on Beverly and Gardner and had the most decadent caramel custard since time began and grilled eggplant with Granapadana Parmesan cheese roughly grated on top, which could make you expire from happiness. Renzo was the same kind of vegetarian as me, which meant he set out each morning to eat only raw foods and, as the day progressed, grew more and more corrupt—never degenerating into anything truly fatal like French fries or actual meat, but still . . .
Plus he didn’t drink or take opium or other drugs anymore, although he hadn’t come to this from hitting bottom like me and everyone else in L.A. these days, flooding the twelve-step programs. He’d come to it through sex; he said, “I’d rather do sex than drugs any day.”
