A Halloween Tango Story

               Desmond looked at his watch again. It was past 4 a.m. and she was late. Dr. Marta Van Vorst was always late. He had no choice but to wait and not complain. The moist night air of the old wooden dock smelled oddly of fresh-baked pastries.

               Ten long minutes later, her small, green, hybrid car rolled silently onto the wharf by the Hudson River in lower Manhattan, where he waited.

               He speculated that she appeared much too calm for a woman who had such a disturbing effect on his libido. 

               He’d met her two weeks ago at a tango gathering called a milonga, a place where tango, and only tango, is danced all night long and often until nearly dawn.

               He'd found her absolutely captivating ever since their first encounter and entertained thoughts that she had magical, bewitching powers over him. There was something about her that he found intoxicating and as addictive as a drug. He felt it oddly strange that he was so attracted to her.

               They had been dancing together less than an hour ago at a milonga when she asked him to meet her here.

               He stood mesmerized as her long legs slid out of her tiny vehicle. It was late October and the chilly night air had become cold enough to fog her breath. Tango music emanated through the open window of her ride.

               “You didn’t stop for coffee, I hope,” Marta said as she stood before him, dressed in a long leather coat, stockings and high heels.

               “No,” Desmond replied, regretting that it hadn’t occurred to him. He was very tired and could have used a cup of joe right about now. He’d been dancing all night and his brain was getting numb when she invited him to this eerie place beside the water.

               She was a professor of quantum physics at Columbia University and he was surprised that she would be interested in someone like him, an electrician who never finished college.

               “Are you tired?” She asked.

               Somewhat puzzled, he answered instinctively, thinking it would be a turnoff for her if he actually admitted that he was tired.

               “No, not really,” he lied.

               Her voice could not hide her disappointment. “You need to be almost ready to sleep for you to see her. How old are you? Don’t you smell the pies?”

               He found her line of questioning bizarre and frustrating. His temper started to rise. It was extremely late and he was beat. He didn’t want to be playing these games. She was a good-looking woman; it should be obvious to her why he agreed to come down to the docks at four in the morning.

               “Yes,” he responded, curtly, “I smell pastries or something, and yes, I am tired. I’m forty-three and too old to be looking for cookies at four a.m. on a wharf in New York City. Is someone else coming?”

               She looked at him directly with her deep, dark eyes and he was back under her spell. When he saw her thick brown hair and dark red lips, his anger dissipated.

               He took her in with his gaze.  When he spied her long, stocking-clad legs extending from inside her coat, he remembered the short skirt she was wearing at the milonga; the wolf inside him began to stir with a hunger for her body.

               Another woman was coming? He had never been in a ménage a trois before; maybe tonight was the night. Was he ready? She said, “she,” right?

               “Don’t worry,” Marta assured him, “and get your mind out of the gutter.” 

                Her eyes glanced down at the erection in his pants and he blushed heavily. 

                “We can take care of that later,” she said, as if this wasn't the most embarrassing thing in the world.

               When she smiled and winked at him, his anxiety disappeared. Knowing this was not all in vain gave him the strength to control the animal inside of him. It was a good thing he was older, he thought, if he’d been a young man, he never would have had the will power to keep his hands off of her.

               It was an incredibly sensual moment for him: the dim light, the sound of the river mixing with the tango music from her car; this seductive woman with whom he’d been dancing with all night. This was not a game for boys to play.

               “It’s time!” she exclaimed. Unzipping her coat, she invited him to embrace her. “Let’s dance and then you will see her.”

               He was too tired and too infatuated with her to wonder about who this other woman was. Once he saw her short black skirt and her breasts pushing against her black cashmere sweater, he simply obeyed and moved to join her.

               “Just walk to the music,” she whispered in his ear.

               The wind from her words brushed his ear and he nearly climaxed. He was tired and was struggling the subdue the animal inside of him. He needed to move to the melody. She relaxed into his embrace as their torsos united, her soft bosom melting into his chest. He could feel his brain going numb.

               He tried to convince himself that this was enough. If this was all that came of their relationship, then he would be satisfied. The wolf retreated back to its lair.

               He lost himself in her scent. She smelled of milk and grapes and other sweet things. Her silky, soft hair pressed against his cheek as he thought he must be falling asleep.

               Her head nearly blocked his vision. With his left eye he could see her ear and the back of her skull as they moved to the songs in a tango trance. 

               Beyond, he could see a single, dim light illuminating the end of the wooden pier and a white figure rising up from the river in the form of a stout, old woman. She was carrying what seemed like a large basket. The smell of fresh baked pastries was stronger now than it had been since he arrived. 

               The apparition stood at the end of the wharf for a long time.

               The image of the elderly lady was so white that she did not seem real to him. When he realized that she was not real, the hair stood up on the back of his neck. Adrenaline shot through all his limbs like lightning from the clouds. 

               He was electrified!

               Marta knew what was happening and asked, “You see her, don’t you?”

               Desmond didn’t answer. He couldn’t answer. Every cell in his body was quivering. He stopped dancing and stared at the spirit. Her form seemed to be fluid, and, even though she was standing still, she seemed to be floating.

               For a moment, he thought he must be dreaming. He seemed to be in that place he went to just before drifting off to sleep. He knew he was not asleep because he had heard Marta speak. When he convinced himself that he was indeed awake and staring at, what he could only describe as a ghost, that is when it suddenly disappeared.

               Marta felt his body spasm and said, “She’s gone, isn’t she? You saw her, didn’t you? I am not crazy.”

               They left the pier and met at her loft not far away. The apartment was cluttered with papers and clothes. She cleared a space on a large white sofa and they sat together, his arm slung over her shoulders as she snuggled into his chest.

               “The woman you saw on the dock was the first one I’d discovered on purpose,” Dr. Van Vorst explained as she played with the buttons on his shirt.

               “I stumbled upon the phenomenon accidentally," she said,  "nearly five years ago, at the milonga where we met. I was nearly falling asleep on the dance floor when I first saw them. It was right around Halloween, about this time of the year. At three in the morning, I was suddenly surrounded by all these white, flowing figures of couples dancing the tango.

               For the first time in my life I had decaffeinated and gotten it all out of my system. It was a struggle to keep dancing without my usual coffee crutch. I came back the next night, after a good night’s sleep but I didn’t see them again. I returned the next three nights in a row. Finally, on the third night, I saw them again. I was extremely drained and it was nearly dawn.

               It seems that the caffeine in my system was depressing some sort of intuitive ability of mine that enables me to see these, these…things, these people from the past.

               Once I had deduced that I wasn’t seeing things, they disappeared and I didn’t see them again for another year. I nearly went crazy trying to find them again.

               “Wow,” Desmond said as he breathed out a sigh, “that’s quite a story. How’d you learn about the woman on the dock?”

               She replied, with more than a hint of pride in her voice, “That was just some good old-fashioned scientific process.”

               She smiled and looked up at him.

               For the first time since he’d known her, he noticed that there were dark circles beneath her eyes. For a brief moment, he worried that she might be psychotic and have homicidal tendencies. He looked around the room for telltale signs of coffins, zombies and weapons of mass destruction. When she lay her head back down on his chest, his fears dissolved.

               “For the next four years,” she continued, sounding as if she was recanting a confession, “I set about establishing exactly when the apparitions would materialize. I found that I could only observe them if I was on the verge of falling asleep or in that trance-like state you get into when you’ve been dancing tango all night with a dreamy partner…like you.”

               She smiled and nuzzled her head into his frame with those last words and continued, “I’m certain they only become visible during the week of Samhain, right around Halloween. Samhain is the Celtic word for the end of the harvest season, when, in the middle latitudes, there is more darkness in the day than sunlight.

               Desmond, what we are seeing are not ghosts, rather, we are looking through a window into the past. As we travel through time, we somehow leave a trail of our passage. When we are in the right state of mind and the earth is at the proper point in its orbit, the…., I’ll call them echos, the echos of our ancestors are revealed to us.

               The universe is constantly expanding. It is my belief that one end of the cosmos is illuminated and spewing forth matter. The other end is dark and drawing in all the light and the matter into itself.   

               I think that, when the Earth is at a particular point in its revolution around the Sun, the illumination from the beginning of the universe shines on these apparitions and we are able to see them, if we are in the proper state of mind.

               Not all echos have the same staying power, nor are they able to be viewed by everybody. We have to be connected in some way to the people who created these echos in the first place.

               That woman we saw tonight, I believe she is my great-great-great Aunt Tula.

               In the early 1700s, she baked meat pies on the family farm in, what would become, Jersey City. Twice a week, she would paddle across the Hudson River to sell her pies and pastries in New York City, when it was still a small town on the Hudson River.

               I found a pencil drawing in the Van Vorst family library of her wearing the same scarf as the old woman we saw tonight. There is an inscription on it that reads Tula.

               It took me two years to realize the conditions for a sighting were only ripe during the week of Samhain.  

               That first week of discovery, I didn’t see the echos anywhere else but here. I took a wild guess and hypothesized that I must be drawn to this place for some other reason than my love of tango. I wondered if they didn’t show up at other places where I loved to dance.

               I went to all of them. It was on the last night of the cycle that I found Tula at the wharf where people sometimes held impromptu milongas. 

               I smelled the pies and thought it strange because there were no bakeries nearby. Then I saw her. I burned her image into my brain and had a therapist help me recall the memory while an artist was present. We were able to create a drawing of her and that’s how I found out her name.”

               Marta lifted her head and nodded toward the far wall where a large charcoal drawing of a woman was framed beneath a cover of glass.

               She placed her head back on Desmond's torso and began where she had left off, “The story of Tula’s pie-selling business has been handed down in my family for generations. She and I share the same DNA. I think that is why I was drawn to that particular dock. It is where she crossed the river, over three hundred years ago!”

               As she finished her last sentence, the sun began to rise and its light reflected off the buildings of the Jersey City waterfront.

               Marta fell asleep on Desmond's lap.  

               It seemed as if his eyelids had just closed when she was suddenly shaking him.

               “Get up,” she said, slightly agitated, “we must not be too rested or we’ll fail to achieve the proper meditative state. No coffee! No caffeine! No chocolate! We’ve got to be ready.”

               His nerves were shot. He looked down and noticed he had a huge erection.

               She saw it, too.

               “That’s going to be a distraction,” she stated nonchalantly, “we’ll have to make sure this doesn’t pop up at the wrong time or will miss them.”

               She was now wearing a bright red bathrobe. She loosened the belt and allowed it to slip off her shoulders to the ground.       

               Grabbing him by the hand, she led him to the bedroom and said, “I guess I know what we’re going to be doing for the next few hours.”

              

               They spent the rest of the day in bed and had a late dinner. She suggested that they take a long walk before the dance, to increase their fatigue, she said. He assured her that he would be plenty tired when 3 a.m. rolled around, especially after their vigorous love-making session.

               She conceded that point with a smile and the pair made their way to the milonga.

               He hardly felt like dancing but the women that night were persistent and wouldn’t let him stay seated for any length of time. Once, he almost fell over sideways but Marta caught him and escorted him onto the dance floor.

               When the music was playing and he held her in his arms, he was surprised to find that he had the stamina to navigate the crowd successfully.

               On the back wall of the dance studio was a large mural that covered it completely. It was a painting of a tango gathering and he guessed that all the people depicted in it were famous dancers.

               The normal length of a tango engagement between two people consists of a series of songs called a tanda. There can be three, four or five songs in a tanda. The end of the tanda comes when a short clip of non-tango music is played. This music is called the cortina, or curtain, because it separates the tandas.

               Normally, at a milonga, the couples separate when the cortina is play but Marta insisted they keep dancing. 

               The time was coming near, she whispered, obviously exhausted.

               Thirty minutes later, he could barely stand. His calves felt like bricks. If it wasn’t for the music, the scent of her hair and the softness of her breasts pressing into him, he felt certain he’d fall asleep standing up.

               He was fixating on the mural of the dancers on the wall when he saw them. All of a sudden the room was filled with a crowd of shimmering pale tango dancers, dressed in the fancy styles of yesteryear.

               Every hair on his body stood up as they had the night before. He could see the white phantoms all so very clearly.

               This time he was not jolted out of his trance-like condition. He could sense that Marta saw them, too. He tried to dance around them but they were everywhere. The real dancers moved right through them.

               “I…I see them, Marta,” he said, timidly.

               She replied, “Me, too, Desmond. Me, too.”

               She pushed her head against his and shut her eyes as she trusted him to guide her around the room.

               “Do you see us?” she asked.

               Puzzled, he began to look at the couples individually. A pair of phantoms moved right through him and Marta which made his body shiver. He felt her shudder, too.  As the forms traveled through the space occupied by their bodies, he came eye-to-eye with a spirit that looked just like him. Except for its ashen color, it was the mirror image of him.

               Oblivious to his presence, it looked right through him. The specter-Desmond spun around in a fancy tango maneuver and he noticed that his counterpart was dancing with a woman who looked just like Marta.

               “Marta,” he said, shakily, “I see them. I see us. I don’t know how…..but that’s us.”

               She stopped him, saying, “That’s how I knew to pick you, Desmond. It seems that we’ve always danced together; back then, now and I guess we always will………….but the next time you have to find me.”

The End