The Tango Doctor: Chapter One (cont.)

Author's note: I abandoned this project but I noticed a lot of interest in it so I am releasing the rest of what I've written. I think those of you on your own tango journey may find it whets your insatiable appetite for more information about this incredibly addicting dance even if it's sub-par insight from a mediocre writer like me.
Enjoy.

She looked good sitting there in her pink jacket and tight skirt, her stockings gleaming, barely illuminated by the glow of a distant streetlamp. The skirt played to her best asset but I thought the jacket was a little too prudish for tango dancing where slutty was en vogue.

           She had asked to carpool with me to the dance and I wasn’t looking for anything more from her than half the gas money, not that I needed it, a cardiologist’s salary easily covered my financial needs; it was the affairs of the emotional heart that I found expensive in ways I could not afford. I had no intention of making a play for her but I can’t say that I wasn’t being tempted.  Fooling around with a married woman was not something that was on my bucket list.  

           I had never heard of a dance called Argentine Tango before but someone told me that anyone who can walk can do it as long as that person has a partner. I had zero dance training up to this point in my life but I decided to give it a shot. What did I have to lose?

           Tango is often associated with danger, gangsters and spies but I didn’t let its shady reputation deter me from finding a gathering; maybe that’s what attracted me to it in the first place. I reassured myself that I’d be okay if I stayed sober but soon discovered that I’d need something more than sobriety if I was going to survive; I’d need a moral compass, keen wits and lots of luck.

           There was something about the shoes; the brightly-colored high-heels the women wore that changed the way they walked. Just watching them move around the dance floor was as addicting as heroine, especially for a man in a state of involuntary celibacy. The shoes kept me coming back for more like Toulouse-Lautrec to a brothel.

           Sitting there in the van, waiting for her to exit, I felt kind of foolish. Maybe she would introduce me to some of her girlfriends. I could sense her agitation but I told myself her problems were not mine. This was not a date and I was simply being frugal. Yet something told me to stay, that she needed me, that she was on my life-path for a reason.

           The laser light worried me. I was finally making contact with the opposite sex and it was going to get me killed without me even getting one kiss. I shouldn’t be doing this, I told myself. I need to be a respectable doctor, not a headline in the local paper: MAN SHOT BY JEALOUS HUSBAND.

           After seven years of involuntary celibacy I’d given up on dating, resigning myself to the idea that a curse had been placed on me, consigning me to a life of unwanted chastity.

           I met Ruth at a ballroom dance studio. I never would have guessed that she was a professor of dance when she joined me for a rumba because her efforts were quite amateurish. It seems she had studied every kind of dance except the social ones practiced here in the good old USA.

           I ran into her again a few months later at a practica, the place where tango dancers meet to work on their technique. The tango scene was much different that ballroom. The community was very Bohemian and the people were quite mysterious, seemingly by choice. After several months I knew almost nothing about the people I was dancing with other than that they were very dedicated to the dance.

Going to practica is a big part of the culture surrounding this dance. It can be a difficult discipline to master and milongueros, people who are avid tango dancers, work on their movements before they go to the milonga, a place where only tango dance styles are performed.

           Two weeks prior, one of the couples in our troupe, a pair of French expatriates, introduced us to another tango community that hosted a weekly milonga on Thursday nights. Seven of us all rode together in one car. It was a long, cramped drive, especially for a weeknight.

           The next week, after our second group trip to the milonga, I opted out of the carpool. I grew up in a large family, seven brothers and sisters, a grandmother and a dog. My life as a sardine ended when I left high school.

           Ruth asked if she could join me. I was kind of leery about the prospect of being alone with such a beautiful woman but I felt confident that I could be a gentleman because I had come to believe in my curse with utter conviction.  In rationalizing the reasons why I poured so much effort into this quest, I resolved not to do anything that would shame my daughters, such as a becoming involved with a married woman.

           You couldn’t tell Ruth that she wasn’t happy, of course she was happy. She had it all: tenure, a bright child and a loving husband. Everything she’d read in the magazines for sophisticated women confirmed what she truly wanted to believe.

           She and her husband bought a nice home in a gated community within walking distance of a fancy supermarket and the college where they both worked as professors. If she drove at all, she used her silver Prius.  Her husband preferred a heavy duty pickup truck and he drove it everywhere.

           Ruth always acted pretentious and flirty around me. It seemed forced, as if she’d been keeping something bottled up inside of her and that she had to let it out or it would kill her. I guess she was tired of being perfect and needed to throw a little paint on the canvas to ruin the picture.

           A college campus, she said to me as we made the long drive to the milonga earlier that night, was a gilded world, a place where the lawn is always mowed and the snow is always shoveled; where there’s a bathroom on every floor and everything gets scrubbed down during the night as if by magic fairies.

           She acknowledged that she was a fortunate child but consoled herself with the thought that she was also hard-working and thrifty; after all, she had paid her dues with all those years in that God-forsaken place called Kansas. Her father had been a professor at a large southern university when she was growing up and she always knew that is what she wanted to be.

           If she was happy, then why were we here in her driveway?  And what is up with that laser light and why isn’t she getting out right now!?

           People come to this dance wounded; not physically but mentally, emotionally and/or spiritually. Ruth Jones was no exception.

           I always wonder at the ability of the tango to draw in woman like Ruth. She was completely helpless against its siren call. Is it the shoes? The music? Or is it the seductive excitement in the tone of the announcer’s voice on TV when he introduces it on the popular dance shows?

           Earlier in the week we made arrangements to meet at a gas station minimart close to the interstate before driving to the milonga. I pulled up behind a large, customized pickup truck with hyper-extended suspension, huge, knobby tires and a Rush Limbaugh sticker on the bumper.  It looked like a monster.

           The passenger door opened and Ruth slipped out.  It seemed to me as if the creature that was the truck had allowed her to escape, like King Kong opening his giant palm to release poor Ann Darrow. Her outfit didn’t match the vehicle; she seemed so frilly and delicate and the truck was a mobile fortress.

           I made a joke as she climbed into my van, something about a respectable woman leaving her husband and child to dance tango with a stranger.

           “I do declare,” she said, laying on the Southern accent extra thick like biscuits and gravy, “a scandal! It will be in all the papers!”

           We both laughed. If I hadn’t been cursed with celibacy, I would have thought that we were on the road to sin. I should have been worried for a host of reasons but I was not. If I could have seen into the future, I would have realized that it was still not too late to find another way to meet nice women.

           Ruth loved to dance. She’d even written a book about it.  She’d spent the last twenty years studying ballet and fifty other cultural dances, yet she had never been out for a weekend dancing just for the fun of it. She told me that was because her husband didn’t share her passion.

           In her heart of hearts she knew that she was not a dancer. There was an empty space inside her that felt awful on top of everything else.

Somehow I knew what she thought she wanted and what she needed.

To put it bluntly, she thought she needed to get fucked. Laid would be a nicer word but that’s not the kind of sex she had in mind. She wanted some guy to break through all her barriers and shove himself inside her any way he could. She didn’t care what lies he had to tell her, she would believe them all.

It would have been the easy way out.

The reason I say ‘fucked’ and not ‘laid’ is because ‘fucked’ intones violence, maybe even criminality. She wanted wanted an outlaw but what she needed was me; a man to be with her as she pushed at the edges of her comfort zones so that she could make a rational decision about what to do with the monster that was tearing her up inside.

She was desperate but the deed needed to be done in such a way that she could deny culpability, so she could say to her friends, “…and y’know, I tried to say ‘no’ but I just couldn’t.”

I’d been down that road before and I knew that’s how trouble started. If she wasn’t brave enough to violate her own moral code then calamity was bound to happen. Her husband might find out. Maybe her suitor would fall in love with her, something she definitely did not want but how was he to know? When a man has sex with a woman, he feels compelled to do something more after the act has been accomplished. That ‘something more’ usually ends up being a big mistake in some form or another.

           But Ruth couldn’t lie to tango. This dance exposes the truth no matter what the consequences and for her, they were devastating. She was sick, broken, rotting internally and she was in denial. The reality of her existence was eating her up inside. Her life was a struggle to present a calm exterior that had become a campaign to maintain control of her sanity. It was a battle that she was losing until she met me.

I found her vulnerability arousing. Just being near her made me dizzy, my thoughts clouded and I was constantly having to convince myself that making a pass at her was wrong. It was as if she was giving off an odor and it affected me like a drug.

I struggled for reason and to maintain control of my urges. Reason told me that she needed me to be a gentleman, to respect her and to travel down the road with her for awhile until she found the courage to do what she needed to do.

My urges were nothing more than primal sexual impulses.

       I stepped on the gas and we peeled out of the parking lot like Clyde making a getaway with Bonnie. We both laughed again.  She exhaled with a great sigh of relief as we sped down the entrance ramp to the freeway.

           I glanced at her periodically as the scenery changed from an urban landscape to the rural countryside. She looked good, petite and frail she looked more like a student than a professor. Her jacket said she was going to a lecture but her skirt was definitely saying, “party!”

Conversation with her was always risqué and flirtatious. Somehow I knew that’s as far as it was supposed to go. She wanted to pretend to be that kind of woman and I was just playing along.

           She didn’t know about the curse but I think she could sense that she was safe with me no matter how she acted. She trusted me like a patient with her doctor.

           It was with Ruth that I first began to feel as if I was part of someone else’s therapeutic process, not just my own. Maybe it was the lack of sex or maybe I was rationalizing my inability to attract a partner in spite of all my efforts. It was my lot in life to be the escort for this lady and many more on their journeys to define and to attempt to treat their afflictions.

           I was at the beginning of a long and dangerous journey through a part of America that I never knew, or even cared, existed. The Sexual Revolution had changed the landscape and it was littered with casualties. Women entered the workforce en masse and left behind something they didn’t know they had: happiness. They spent an entire generation trying to find themselves and wound up even more lost than when they started. Freedom and independence, they found, were not stepping stones on the road to happiness, in fact, for a woman, they led in the opposite direction.

As much as these women hated to admit it, a man was once again the answer to all their problems. They didn’t need a man to protect them or provide for them; they needed a man to desire them and to treat them with respect but not be too respectful. They needed to shed their pretensions, to be naked in his mind and not feel ashamed. They wanted to be told what to do in a way that didn’t make them feel like a victim.

Tango gave them all this and more. For most it was overwhelming and liberating. It was a liberation from their liberation. They wanted freedom from their freedom. They desired to be a slave once more but their enslavement came with conditions and it was the negotiation of those conditions with themselves and the men they encountered that made their road to recovery the arduous journey that it needed to be.

           Ruth was sick and tango was the cure. I was the doctor administering the medicine. My patients didn’t come to me, I found them. I was like the weather, a force of nature. I had no choice where I went; I only knew that tango was at the destination.  I felt a part of a chain reaction of cosmic dominoes that planted me on her metaphorical and actual doorstep.

I had become a medic in the war zone of the Battle of the Sexes. I was the Tango Doctor. 

          

        The traffic thinned out and I put a CD into the music player. “Don’t Know Much About History” by Sam Cooke was on the first track.  It was late summer and we were passing bright green fields of corn. I took a big sip of my drink and spied her looking at me out of the corner of my eye.

           “Y’know, Henry,” she said, a playful twinkle in her eyes, “you look kind of look like Harrison Ford with those glasses on.”

           I replied, “Oh, ah, thank you.”

           The compliment made me nervous. I recalled many discussions with friends of mine who were considering divorce. They always began with a flattering remark and then hit me with both barrels of a diatribe about their failing marriages.

           A vision flashed in my mind of Ruth and me dancing. I glanced to my right and caught a glimpse of her exposed thigh. I began to get aroused and I think I broke a sweat as we passed a sign indicating a rest area one mile ahead.

           My van had a makeshift bed in the back behind the first row of passenger seats. If I was too tired or too drunk to drive, I could always pull over and rest. There was a sleeping bag and pillows back there.

I took a deep breath and focused on the road ahead.

           The word tango is synonymous with danger. Physical danger is implied but the real threat is to the social fabric of a person’s life. Those who are new to the tango culture can see their world turned on end, tossed by a storm of events and be left in psychological tatters.

           It is an easy dance to start but extremely difficult to master. After a year and a half I realized that I didn’t know how to walk or even to maintain my own balance while standing on one foot. It took me three years just to learn how to hold a woman. I never knew it was such a complicated task!

This was such an epiphany for me that I wondered why there weren’t classes on this. As I considered the ramifications of such an education I conceded that American culture is too firmly rooted in its Puritan past to even attempt such a feat.

           After five years of practicas, weekend milongas and tango workshops, a tango dancer is merely an advanced beginner. Pursuit of proficiency is akin to a quest to master Tai Chi or achieving Nirvana through meditation. A person able to dance tango skillfully and with grace is deserving of respect for their accomplishment.

                   Tango is all about the connection between two dancers called the tango embrace. This is more than a physical union. It is a unique bond between two people that is difficult to explain to the lay person. It’s kind of like a Vulcan mind-meld with the participants joined at the heart. It is through the tango embrace that cosmic, primordial forces are released. Thus entwined the couple must move with each partner maintaining their own balance while spontaneously choreographing their movements to the music.

           There are no dance patterns in tango. Each step is unique; it is a collaboration between two dancers as they each come to agreement on how to proceed. This is why people say that tango is an illusion because the observer witnesses a fluid performance and is unaware of the intricate negotiations that are occurring at the speed of thought.

           Bodily contact has a therapeutic effect. We crave it as a species and will seek it out if it is missing in our lives. This is not something that is taught in school but it is recognized by almost all politicians, charlatans and used car dealers. It was something that Ruth desperately needed and she was willing to risk everything to satisfy her need.

           I wasn’t aware of Ruth’s condition when I first met her. I imagined that an attractive woman who was also a professor of dance would be in constant contact with other people. I thought I was the only person in the world of dance who was uncomfortable with strangers being inside my personal space.

           At the milonga, I dropped my companion off at the front door and drove around the block looking for a parking space.

           The dance was held in the banquet hall of an old Fire Station. Inside, there is an anteroom leading to a larger room with picnic tables and a bar with a fully equipped kitchen behind it. Beyond the bar is the dancer’s hall. It is an open space with an oak floor and a row of chairs lining the entire area. 

           There were at least thirty couples on the dance floor when I walked into the room. They moved as two separate groups each in their own lane of travel going counter-clockwise around the room. As is usual at a milonga, the dancers did not switch tracks and the couples did not pass the slower couples in front of them; they waited for them to move forward and then filled in that space like cars merging into slow-moving traffic.

           The crowd pulsed with regularity like blood flowing through a vein. As a pair of dancers vacated a space, it was immediately filled by the couple behind them. This was repeated throughout the circle.

           I danced with a few women but kept an eye out for Ruth in case she was not getting enough invitations. This is a big problem for ladies at a dance and I did not want to get the silent treatment on the long ride home. We weren’t on a date but I could sense that her southern upbringing imbued her with expectations of what a man’s social obligations were in such a situation.

           A dance engagement in tango lasts for an entire tanda. A tanda is a group of songs all in the same genre; it can be three or four songs in length and it ends when the cortina is played. The cortina is a short piece of non-tango music, usually about thirty seconds long.

           As I travelled around the room with a delightful heavy-set woman in my arms, I noticed Ruth sitting on one of the chairs against the wall. Her hands were folded on her lap and she was sitting bolt upright, appearing to be patiently waiting to be asked to dance but I knew that was not the case. She looked calm but in her mind she was going a million miles an hour, trying to figure out why everyone else was dancing and she wasn’t. This was in spite of the fact that she’d been dancing most of the evening.

           When the tanda ended I went over to her and asked her to dance. I made light of the offer, pretending to have been waiting forever for her dance card to be cleared for me. She smiled politely and we entered the tango embrace as the music began to play.

           There was a big difference between Ruth and my last partner. The former filled my arms with her plumpness. Her rounded features packed the void that was between us. She was jovial and relaxed and moved easily on her own balance. Our dance was like being in a bed with lots of pillows while the music encouraged pleasant dreams.

           My skinny companion was nervous and uptight. She maintained her own axis like a ballerina but our chests barely touched. The connection between our bodies was very sparse even though we were remarkably close to each other.

           Tango is a spontaneous dance with no patterns. Each step has only six possibilities: a step frontwards, sidewards, backwards or in place, a pivot or a pause. The passion is in the pauses and it is what makes this dance unlike any other.

           If we had more contact between our torsos, we could move with greater synchronicity. Outwardly, we appeared to move in concert because of her dance training and lightning quick reflexes. Inwardly, I felt off-balance and out-of-control yet I sensed that she was still very pleased and as relaxed she’d ever been when we danced.

           I tried my best to remain pleasant and this was more than enough for her. Apparently, as I would discover later, any effort by a man to be accommodating and respectful went a long way with her.

           When we embraced, I could see into her. It was like stepping into a room; her emotions and thoughts came to me like blowing breezes.

           Twenty years of ballet and she still felt like something was missing in her dance, like it was all gymnastics unless performed with a partner. Tango was filling that hole in her life, I was filling that hole.  She was overwhelmed; all her features flushed. I didn’t need to be touching her to see that; it was evident in her cheeks and in her lips.

           Someone ran into us and words were exchanged. I apologized though it was not my fault. The perpetrator was being stupid and said something rude.

           Suddenly, Ruth’s entire mindscape changed. A dark cloud descended upon it and I could no longer see inside her. We were now dancing without connection. She had kicked me out.

The ride home was a long one. She was quiet most of the way until it started raining.

She made a comment about politics and I began to rant about the way I thought things should be. The road was winding and traffic was heavy. We were moving too fast for the conditions. I was tense and she must have felt it.

I had a chance to look at her for an instant as I checked the mirror on her side of the van. We made eye contact and she smiled politely. There was a gentle warmth in her expression and I could sense it even as I kept my eyes glued to the highway.

I could almost feel her hand touching me on the shoulder when I looked her way again. We were illuminated by the headlights of the oncoming cars. She was leaning almost out of her seat, her arm stretched out towards me. The palm of her hand was open.

The image froze in my mind. It was almost surreal and I couldn’t believe what I just saw. I had to keep my eyes on the road and I didn’t turn her way until we turned off the main highway after the tollbooth. When I did, she was putting on her hat, a perfect little smile on her face, her posture straight and proper.

Now I didn’t know what to think so I forgot about it until we pulled into her driveway and she let herself out of the van. Much to my relief there were no shots fired and she entered her home as silent as a mouse. It wasn’t until I was half a block away that I allowed myself to think about the incident once more.

I was certain that it wasn’t my imagination. Maybe, I told myself, I was taking this all out of context. Maybe she was reaching back to grab her hat or something else from the back seat. She was so good at being quiet. By the time I got back on the interstate, I had convinced myself that it was nothing.

I breathed a heavy sigh of relief. The sexual tension was almost too much for me to bear. I told myself that my celibacy was causing my imagination to run away with me. I had to be more aware of my condition if I was going to see my way through to a normal relationship.

The moonless night made the highway feel dark and lonely. Mine was the only vehicle on the road for many miles until I noticed a pair of headlights far behind me on a long straightaway. I kept looking at all my mirrors to keep myself awake. The cup of coffee I had gotten at the quickmart had done nothing to make me more alert.

When I glanced in the rearview mirror again, I thought it strange that the headlights were now almost right behind me even though I had been going ten miles an hour above the speed limit.

The soup-up pickup truck passed me doing ninety and then slowed down drastically. At first I thought there was a state trooper and a speed trap but then the monster truck decreased its speed below the speed limit and I recognized the driver: it was Ruth’s husband.

I pulled into the passing lane and tried to pass but he sped up to pull in front of me once again. Pulling back into the other lane, I grabbed my cellphone and put it to my ear so he to make him think I was on the line to 9-1-1. He slowed down so that his truck was next to my van. I guessed that he was going to try and run me off the road.

I continued to decelerate, trying to think of what to do. I was shaking like a leaf. Adrenaline coursed through my veins, chasing away my sleepiness. I was now wide awake and fending for my life. Was he armed? I know I wasn’t.

He slowed to match my speed and I could see he was screaming at me from within his decked-out ride. I sped up not knowing what else to do, keeping an eye on the road ahead and the other eye on the madman careening down the highway next to me.

The road made a sharp jog to the right. If I could keep his attention on me maybe he wouldn’t see it. Pressing a button on my phone the time shone in large bright numbers: 01:38 AM. I held it up to the window, as we passed the bend. I continue to drive straight even as my vehicle passed into the passing lane, turning just before I went off the road with him.

Success!

The pickup went right into the wet grass on the median and spun around several times before I could no longer see him. I hit the gas and kept looking in my rear view for any sign of pursuit.

I was trembling. Sweat beaded on my forehead and I was breathing heavily. Turning on the cruise control, I set a safe speed and allowed my right leg to vibrate like a sewing machine.

Twenty miles later a few miles from my exit, I allowed myself to believe he was gone. I wondered what happened. Did his truck rollover? Did he just give up? Was it really Ruth’s husband? Maybe, I told myself, it was just another lunatic who looked like him. Where I lived in the mountains, lots of men with beards owned monster trucks. It was late and I was tired. I’ll tell Ruth about it next time I see her.

After her fifth milonga, Ruth left her husband, abdicated custody of their sole child to him, got a small apartment downtown and bought a slew of fancy hats.

           I guess tango was the pin-prick that burst the balloon she had been filling with hot air. She’d done everything she’d been told by the prevailing wisdom and yet her bliss eluded her. I was here to meet members of the opposite sex but that is not why ladies take up this sport.

Hey, check out this book about witches and zombies that dance tango: