All Over the Map - Laura Fraser [56]
THE TANGO LESSONS seem to work a little magic when I have my first date with Evan, a college friend of a friend I meet at a dinner party. I let him decide where to eat, even though, in picking restaurants and ordering dishes, I’m usually what my friend Anne calls a “restaurant top.” Instead, I try what he suggests—the Korean barbecue is wonderful—listen to him and respond, and squelch the impulse to take over the conversation, to tell stories and entertain him, which is what I always do when I’m uncomfortable. He takes me to his favorite bar in Oakland, Cafe Van Cleef, which is my favorite bar in that town, too. It’s the kind of place where, after a couple of drinks, you can show someone how to hold you in a tango embrace and no one glances your way. His goatee tickles me. “I like that,” he says, his hand lingering on my waist. “We should go dancing sometime.”
But I am actually leaving in a couple days to go to Buenos Aires to study tango and its feminine wiles more seriously. That news seems to lend some urgency to our date. On the way back to the car, Evan pulls me into an alcove on a deserted downtown street and kisses me.
“You’re so pretty,” he tells me. “Do people always tell you that?”
“Not always,” I say with a little smile. Like maybe not since the Reagan administration.
We go back to his house and play on his couch for a while, but when he wants to have sex—“Why not, do you think we’re going to get married or something?” is a revealing comment—I have the good tangoish sense to insist on going home after a little more kissing and general appreciation of my body. “Here’s to full-bodied people,” he says, as if we are just that much more full of life. I move to get up from the couch, and he holds me down with his beefy arms, looking me straight in the eyes with his bright blues. I have a leap of feeling and for a moment think it’s fear or panic. Then I close my eyes and breathe; I remember this feeling, it’s not fear, it’s excitement; it’s feeling hot.
“Open your eyes,” he says. “I want you to think about this in Buenos Aires. This is exactly how I’m going to fuck you when you get home.”
That leaves quite an impression on me, but I have a plane ticket and am on a mission. Never mind that I seem to have a habit of meeting promising men and then leaving on a trip; I am on a campaign to learn how to be better in a relationship. Plus I’ve landed an assignment writing about being a turista tanguera in Buenos Aires, so it’s a work gig.
WHEN I STEP out of the taxi in Buenos Aires, I am infatuated. The town is a faded beauty, with elegant, decaying European architecture wearily trying to ignore the brash new concrete neighbors. Intellectual, poetic Argentines have weathered unspeakable political and economic tragedy, which partly explains why there are more psychologists per capita than in Manhattan. Buenos Aires is sexy and the one place where I can speak my combination of Italian and Spanish and everyone will understand me. It could even be a perfect place to find a man who has read Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, backward and forward, has a nice cellar full of Malbec, and can sweep me off my feet dancing tango.
I stay at the Tango Academy in San Telmo, the neighborhood where the dance was born—in its brothels, as a kind of foreplay, before it became more respectable and stylized—and still thrives in late-night corner bars. I want to take lessons and slide right into the scene. The hotel proprietors make me feel at home amid the worn velvet drapes, spiral staircases, wrought-iron balconies, and high chandeliers, and I love the cheap glamour of the place.
The first evening, I go to a tango lesson at the hotel, where I meet other turistas tangueras (many of them American couples whose wives aren’t thrilled to have their husbands trading partners) and locals who are willing to twirl a beginner around the floor. Anders, a handsome Swede, though too young for me (barely drinking age), is a perfect partner, leading me assuredly