Black Swans, page 12
(As you get older, it turns out that the combination of sex, drugs, and rock and roll becomes more like sex and/or drugs and rock and roll—you can’t have both sex and drugs. And if you asked me, I could take or leave rock and roll for the most part these days, though Renzo did have this soft spot for the Beastie Boys, which I thought was his only flaw.)
(The only things I actually listen to willingly are Aaron Neville and Paul Simon, which goes to show how old-fashioned I am.)
“Where’s that tango place you used to go to?” Renzo asked, once we had found a place in Ojai to eat and were having mango iced tea and avocado salads and he had read to me aloud from the New York Times about some play a friend of ours had written.
“I hope my tango friends still go there,” I said, “I haven’t been back in so long. I hear they do.”
“No?” he said. “Well, still, let’s go.”
“What about tomorrow night,” I said, “it’s Friday.”
“Wear something with a slash up the thigh,” he ordered.
“Oh,” I said, “well, maybe.”
LOOKING AT MYSELF in the mirror, wearing this incredible black skirt with a slit up the side so tango-y it made my legs actually look long, with high heels, black stockings, my latest incredible black top, which had baroque lace in the front where you could see through to my cleavage, of which there was a lot, what with these new bras they have now that undo in front, my white-blond hair tousled around my face, tons of eye makeup on my dark eyes, and this matte ruby lipstick that practically glowed in the dark and made me look too tragique for words—I had to admit, I looked like tango was my game.
“Wow,” Renzo said, “hubba hubba!”
He bit my neck and I felt goose bumps down my back to my ankles, but I said, “If we don’t go, we’ll never get out of here.”
“Maybe it doesn’t matter,” he said, having never seen this blouse before.
“We’re late. . . .” I said.
We drove in his rented car, a navy-blue Buick, out of the Château parking lot, and turning left on Sunset, he said, “You know, in New York there’s a place called La Milonga that’s supposed to be for tango, but I’ve never seen anyone inside. Except once this band playing.”
“Well,” I said, “in L.A. there’s this lunatic fringe that is more into tango than even people in Buenos Aires. I mean, Robert Duvall takes a portable dance floor with him on locations, he’s so nuts.”
(I had seen Duvall dance once and he was great.)
It was ten o’clock, Friday night, when we pulled up to Norah’s in North Hollywood, which looked so innocuous from the outside, calling itself a Bolivian restaurant, you’d never know Bolivia was the least of it inside. There were so many cars already parked, we had to park a block away—which we did. And the closer we got to Norah’s, the more eager I became. Outside in a glass case was a photograph of Orlando, my old teacher, dancing with Loreen, his last partner.
Orlando had gone back to Argentina, which was one of the reasons I had stopped going to Norah’s. Even though sometimes I’d go to a class at the Studio of Performing Arts in West Hollywood and watch Michael Walker and Lauren, his divine partner, just to remember how tango could be. They moved like something out of a tragic Visconti movie—rich and baroque. Smoldering, dangerous, and vivid. But never quite Orlando, even so.
(Every time I took a class and got to dance with Michael Walker, I felt as if we were going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, it was so exciting and scary.)
But the real trouble with tango was I had no partner to practice with every day—and the thing about the dance world was, men who could dance couldn’t talk, and men who could talk, hated dancing. Which put me at a grave disadvantage.
We opened the door to Norah’s just as the salsa band was playing everyone’s favorite song, “El Caballo Viejo” (which the Gipsy Kings turned into “Bamboleo”). The place was packed, smoky, and wild; the dance floor was jammed with seductive couples moving in that marvelous Latin motion it took me two years to figure out how to do and then was so easy. The woman at the door said, “Too full. No seats. You leave.”
“Oh, please,” I said.
Then she recognized me, changed her mind, and said, “I find seat.”
She put us at a back table with another couple, a man from Buenos Aires and his girlfriend from Chile. They didn’t mind; it was one of those nights. And Renzo was, I could tell, loving this whole thing; the place was so alive with being another country.
“This isn’t like Miami at all,” he said, his only other reference to Latin magic, “but it’s great, it’s wild.”
I looked around for the usual table full of my tango friends, but there weren’t any there. I had heard that they all went to Michael Walker’s class on Fridays, but that afterward they’d drop by here—except none had yet.
The salsa band now played a slow song, a bolero, and Renzo and I danced, and I have to say that he could lead and knew how, but then, Italians get paid for this gigolo sort of thing, and Renzo was nothing if not Italian. He even dipped me at the end with a flourish.
If all I had in life was someone who loved dancing slow, I’d be happy, really—there’s something about dancing slow in a crowded place; it’s like having sex in public.
We left the floor, the salsa band got off the small stage, and the tango duet came on with the bandoneon player I remembered from the old days, and soon a Carlos Gardel melody filled the air, “Las Campasitas.”
But the floor was empty; no one danced. It was sad.
Anyway, just as I was sure all was lost and no one would dance at all, my old friend Hector arrived, whom I had danced with and taken classes with (he was wearing his same old black boots, black pants, and red shirt he always wore, and his silly glasses and silly mustache, but Hector was from Madrid and men from Madrid are positive being silly doesn’t matter) and he was looking for action.
But there wasn’t any, just me.
When he realized that no one else but me was there, he came straight to our table, bowed, and said, “Will you dance?”
“Oh, but . . .” I said we’d be the only ones.
“Go on,” Renzo said, “I’ll stand by the bar and watch.”
The place was jammed, but the dance floor was empty as Hector led me to the middle of all-eyes-upon-us and he said, “You haven’t been to tango lately, where you been?”
“Don’t do anything hard,” I said.
I put my left hand on his arm, my right hand into his left one, and, remembering to offer resistance, which is everything in tango and in life, I was off and right away in the middle of total magic. Luckily, Hector was one of the few men capable of thinking tango was funny and able to pause, every now and then, just enough to build momentum. And after all, he was so great at leading, one girl said, “He could make a donkey going up Mount Everest look elegant.”
Plus when I, once at the beginning, forgot to resist, he hissed, “I need you.”
My body was just humming in the thicket of the dance, and Hector grew more and more confident, leading me into wilder and more gorgeous improvisations—and being onstage in front of everyone was coursing through our blood so that we were, body and soul, every tango there ever was. Or ever would be.
As it was ending, Hector pulled me to him, dropped to one knee, and left me the star, one foot pointing out through my exposed thigh slit, and, really, Orlando would have been amazed.
The entire place burst into applause.
At the end of our second tango, they not only applauded, they shouted “Bravo, brava!”
I mean, talk about a happy ending.
Then, though, the tango students from Michael’s class arrived looking for action, and I went back to our table where the guy from Buenos Aires was still applauding with tears in his eyes, crying, “What grace, what a dancer you are—what art! We don’t have this tango at home, you marvelous!”
He kissed my hand; he was so overwhelmed.
And Renzo was stunned.
“I’m not leaving L.A.,” he whispered in my ear, “until I can do that!”
“But it might take years,” I said, sitting down, tango still coursing through my blood enough to offer resistance with real conviction. “You don’t mean it, you’ll chicken out.”
“You think so?” he said. “I’ve got nothing better to do. Except write. We could do both.”
“You mean,” I said, “you’d move to L.A. to do tango?”
“Only if you dance with me,” he said.
I couldn’t believe it. Someone who could talk and tango; really it was a combination you could forgive anything for, even the Beastie Boys. And maybe he wouldn’t chicken out; he had, after all, not given up on Ashtanga yoga, and that was a lot more humiliating and ghastly than trying to learn tango.
Maybe by comparison, tango might seem to him heaven.
We left Norah’s when the salsa band came back on and played cumbias and went out into the cool night, and I thought, for once, I’d pulled someone into L.A. instead of watched helplessly as they left. Even in this awful time L.A. was having, with the civic unrest, Renzo didn’t care.
“I like all this action in L.A. right now,” he said, “and besides, I’m not leaving you to dance with Hector, that mustache of his is suspicious.”
“Well,” I said, “if you stay you might regret it.”
“If I leave, though, you might wind up with Hector.”
I wasn’t about to disagree, so I said, “We don’t have to do tango; dancing slow is enough.”
I suppose I hadn’t been in love with his books all these years because we had nothing in common. And the pictures of him on the back, really, in real life he was even more charming. Even more charming than on the first one, where he was wearing a navy pea coat, his white skin, the black hair, those eyelashes—really, he was a tango vampire in every way even back then. But in the flesh, now with him letting me into his car, he was a real man.
“Let’s start next week,” he said, “we’ll try.”
He put his arms around me, kissed me, and I saw stars.
Of course, I know there’s no such thing as a happy ending, but this did seem like a nice change. And since change is all anyone can count on, nice ones are a prize above rubies.
Nowadays, especially, after the years of living dangerously.
“I WANT YOU to live with me,” he said.
“No, no, no,” I said, “you’re allergic to cats.”
“Not your cats,” he said.
“We’ll see,” I said.
We drove back through the valley, down to Ventura Boulevard, and over the hills to Hollywood and then west to the Château Marmont, waiting like Tangiers for strangers to find happiness. The land of self-enchantment had, once more, upheld its end of the deal—to be there for those willing to stay.
By then, the jacaranda flowers had all fallen and squashed onto the streets in sticky mush, no longer turning the town lavender with clouds, but still they’d be there again next May and so would I. Just so long as I continued to resist, to push against turning to sticky mush myself, Renzo might be here too. But then, self-enchantment isn’t as easy as it looks.
Weird August
This is a year of strange weather.
The heat this summer is either nonexistent or else, more recently, ratty.
It’s mean heat, heat a friend of mine said, “It’s like Miami. Like heat in a foreign country, a foreign language—that’s the kind of heat it is.”
We were sitting in my friend Paul’s backyard, under the shade of patio-furniture umbrellas, everybody reading New Yorkers, Esquires, New York Times Sunday things, and we were all older and wiser survivors of the sixties, seventies, and even the eighties, and now it was the nineties, and here we all sat, in the valley—Studio City to be exact—facing this huge darkly painted pool designed to look great at night, but now in daylight the clouds reflecting in the black water looked weird, to say nothing of the gladioli planted against the fence, which were red, reflecting too; I mean, weird was the only word for it all.
I was eating a mango, which went with the ratty weather, although I thought about the barbecue I’d been invited to. I could have gone, but the trouble with barbecues is that they always say “Don’t eat, don’t eat, there’s going to be tons of food”—so you don’t eat and then you arrive and by the time you get anything to eat, it’s overcarcinogenated, overcooked, or undercooked, and it’s too greasy, too fattening, and too much, too late. Unless you eat a really fine meal right before you go and take along a stash of trail food and apples to sneak eating in bathrooms, you’re going to hate yourself for ever saying yes to a barbecue—you get there at five, and by nine, you’re all sticky, bloated, and drear.
The kind of thing I like to go to on Sunday is called brunch, and everything is already out by the time you get there, buffets of nice salads, scrambled eggs, cute little rolls from the La Brea bakery—with crusts so tough, my two front teeth have both chipped—but even these things this summer, it’s been too overcast or too viciously hot to endure.
Too weird for brunch—mangos are all anyone with any sense of propriety would suffer gladly.
Perhaps the weather’s being so weird is why this is the first year in all my born days that I haven’t felt on the prowl. For sexy romance, that is. Luckily, I have some brilliant friends who explain this phenomenon in themselves as that “it would be in poor taste to be out for sex all the time when everything is such a tragedy, really.” Whereas I just think it’s because we’re finally too old.
The only one of my friends who ever admitted he was too old was a man who actually is, but he’s from New York and used to a word like “old.” And he’s younger than Elizabeth Taylor, who doesn’t think she’s too old and never will. Unlike someone such as Doris Day, who, in a more seemly fashion, turned in her recent years to protecting dogs, which are, in my opinion, a lot cuter than Larry whatever-his-name-is, who Liz married.
The thing about me and my friends, though, is that we are the types who are such gluttons for narcissistic fantasies (being, most of us, born with that kind of charismatic shimmer that attracts a lot of what we used to call “fun,” before fun became in poor taste) that we began our lives knowing that sinking into gracious old age, being happy about grandchildren, planning family dinners, being proud we put children through college or had children not in jail—these are not the things we meant by “life” when we started. I mean, they may have happened, but not on purpose.
I myself personally was too lazy.
Even for it to happen by mistake.
I look at my friends with children, holidays, days crammed with remembering the names of kids’ toys, and though I can admit the charismatic shimmer of children and think they are excruciatingly beautiful—I have still always preferred other people’s to being cornered by my own. I mean, I’ve had cats who committed suicide and left notes that it was my fault; I’m not about to do it to people who could write public exposés—and mine would write, genetically it’s unavoidable. My grandfather edited the Yiddish L.A. paper, the Jewish Voice; my father wrote a music column in the musician’s union magazine and nasty musicological articles about how everyone playing Bach in his day was playing it wrong (and they were, too); all his letters to the Los Angeles Times were published. I was raised listening to either Bach on the violin or the sound of typing, and though I’ve always wanted to be an artist and paint, nobody who sees my art says anything but “You should write.”
Although the weather is so weird this August, it makes me wonder if I did the right thing. This rainy overcast L.A. is ripe for watercolors.
Anyway, yesterday I went to meet two men for lunch—one at 11:00 a.m., the other at 2:00 p.m.
The one I went to meet at eleven was a gay man I know from San Francisco who came to L.A. for a month or so “Because things are just too dreary up there; there’s no shine, no sparkle, no glamour.”
“So you came here?” I asked. I couldn’t believe yet another person was coming to L.A. to be disillusioned. Will they never stop? People have been coming to L.A. since maybe 1914, and they’re not going to stop just because you can’t pick up a single piece of twentieth-century literature and not see in black and white that happiness—especially in L.A.—is an illusion. Maybe they should go to Hawaii.
Jed, my old friend from San Francisco, was once a little prince who went to school with friends of mine, before he discovered he was gay, and not only was he gay, but what he preferred were mean-looking black men. In New York, where he lived for a long time, his reputation had one of those Oscar Wilde-y tinges—it was as though whenever you heard anything about certain flamboyant elements behind back doors and down dark alleys and through anonymous clubs, Jed’s name came up. I was surprised because he was such a doll, and our relationship was so intense whenever we met, it was as though we could fly to the moon talking about clothes, art, the looks of things, and boys. (He thought my taste was white bread and I didn’t know what to think about his taste, because he never brought anything he ever tasted out in public.)
In the early days, he had a sort of Tyrone Power razor’s edge to him, spiritually pronounced and divine, but over the years this had thickened into his devotion to The Gym, and his shoulders and chest and legs had expanded so he now looked like one large Errol Flynn of beauty—he smelled like men smelled in the forties who were friends of my father. He wore wonderful English tailoring and great French shirts; he was way too much, really, for poor San Francisco, though he had a magnificent penthouse apartment there, which was filled with luxurious furniture—all because some older society woman took it into her head to bestow things on him, and all he had to do was take her to the opera and theater.
The idea of coming to L.A. had occurred to him when a man he knew, who had a taste for the same type of guys, offered to let him stay in his little Echo Park house and left for a month’s vacation. “The first thing I did,” Jed told me on the phone, “was find a gym. I was going to go to the Sports Connection because I heard it was fabulous, but I went there and all I saw were guys you’d probably like, those Adonis actor types. I like a rougher trade, my dear, and not your dandies.”
