Guilty Tango

Guilt was never far from Max’s mind as his hand alighted on her cool naked skin, his fingers settling into the subtle notches of her backbone. He held her lightly, keenly aware of her close embrace and the easy play of her body against his, both deftly aligned with the musical lilt of “Desde el Alma” flowing from a bandoneon, violin and piano trio by the bar. She, like Max, was in the grip of ideal Tango. Thoughts of the everyday, of the life they lived before and after Tango, remained unthought. And then the tanda ended, and he brought her back to her little table with its scented candle and moist black bottle of Prosecco. He returned to the bar and asked Ignatio for a glass of his finest Malbec.

As he contemplated the women casually deployed along one side of the parquet dance floor, their reflections animating the mirrored wall opposite, he sensed the shadow of guilt flitting across his mind. He always told his wife about the occasional Tango classes on Tuesday nights, and about workshops or even weekend milongas that came up every now and again, when he would inevitably come home late and silently switch off the murmuring radio at her bedside. Once, years ago, off to an afternoon milonga, clutching his effete black baggie with its felt-soled dance shoes, she’d hurled a glass of red wine over him and the white-upholstered sofa next to the fireplace. Nowadays, the sofa stains, never banished, veiled beneath an inoffensive macassar, bore witness to her mercurial antipathy towards his strange Tango obsession.

She, unlike Max, was not entranced by Tango, neither by the music nor by the dance. She said he was completely bereft of musical or rhythmic sensibility, a truth confirmed every time he lost his lead and muddled his steps and smiled apologetically at the angelic, forgiving, closed eyes of the woman cradled in his arms, his ticket to ideal Tango. And so, caught in the grip of music that melds bodies and souls, Max forever sought to square the circle of marriage with the inexorable call of the wild side. Meanwhile, the DJ sent out rhythmic D’Arienzo songs, inflaming probing cabeceos and graceful consents over by the little candlelit tables. Max drained his Malbec, shrugged off for now the flitting shadow, and gave in once again to Tango’s seductive allure.

Chess Tanguera

You know me. I’m the guy haunting the chess table in the Library. Lunch-time, I munch egg rolls from the Filipino food truck at Sabin and Ashley. Later, waiting for a game, I’m often deeply immersed in the latest New York Review of Books. Not so deeply, however, that I’m oblivious to the glances of comely but indifferent women flitting from class to class. One day, no-one has turned up to play, and by two I’m ready to leave when I’m surprised by a clicking of high heels and a shadow that falls across my board. I look round.

“Is this a chess club? I haven’t played in years. Would you like a game?”

Her face, framed by a blue silk scarf, straight out of Vermeer, reminds me of a Renaissance Madonna. Tiny silver-mounted pearls highlight the whorled secret precincts of her ears. An emerald pendant on a fine gold chain adorns her throat. She regards me intently, a cabeceo in all but name.

“They all say that,” I reply, “and then they rip me apart.” Metaphorically, of course. But the truth is, Chess, the fabled meeting of minds, is a brazen affirmation of the killer instinct, a cat’s pitiless pursuit of a mouse, culminating in bloody dismemberment. There are few concessions or draws in this drama, only relentless search and destroy.

I offer her the choice of pawns hidden in outstretched hands. Without hesitation, she snags White, sits down, and opens with a classical Spanish. I’m familiar with the major lines, and so between moves I contemplate her elegant thoughtful poise, her eyes darting to and fro across the board, and her fingers confidently moving men into unassailable position. Now and again as I make my routine moves, her searching eyes catch mine, and I’m held momentarily hostage on the brink of deep reflecting pools.

I’m roused from my reverie by her murmured “Check”. I see at a glance that my position, while not dire, calls for serious thought, not for meandering fantasies of connection with this beautiful apparition, who leans back in her chair, a modest smile gracing her lips. Long moments pass while I fashion a defense that masks a lethal attack. Abruptly, with a resounding thwack, designed to startle and intimidate, I block her check with a sacrificial Knight, at the same time threatening mate in three on her back rank. Her smile, like the Cheshire cat’s, is unwavering, even as cold analytical eyes rove over her men, and her fingers drum a muffled requiem on the edge of the board. Finally she looks up, a ghost of a frown hovering between her eyebrows. No longer smiling, she says, “Draw?”

I don’t utter a word. She’s seen my threat, and I exult. But she’s also caught the disdainful look that crosses my face, for she resumes her study of the board, absently fingering her emerald pendant, and then stroking my captured Black Bishop. Again, long moments pass. Suddenly, reviewing yet again my deployment of forces on the board, rehearsing my imminent onslaught, I realize with a shock that I’ve overlooked a deadly White Pawn advancing on my left flank. I have allowed body to muddle my mind, a terminal blunder in chess.

And so, body takes over, and iron jaws seize my neck. I’m wrenched out of my chair, violently shaken, and razor-like claws rake the skin of my arms and legs. Blood spurts from a torn artery in my throat. The jaws release their grip on my neck, and clamp down on my temples, mindlessly ripping my head from my body. Madonna’s narrowed eyes bore into mine, implacable and fierce. Numbly, I focus through dimming eyes on her tiny pearl earring, even as my limbs convulse in terminal agony, and my heels drum against the floor. My King falls prostrate before her Queen.

She smiles perfunctorily, comments briefly on my robust but useless defence, and is gone, heels clicking in her wake. Cowed and trembling but still intoxicated by the thrill of the chase, I return day after day to haunt my outpost of mental combat, my field of blood, sweat and tears. Occasionally I dispatch in short order impertinent lesser challengers, tolerantly waving away embarrassed explanations of failure. And always, poised to pounce, I lie in wait for my next encounter with my Machiavellian tanguera.


Tattoo Tango

Eyes closed, I lay back on the couch and inhaled the aroma of a Nag Champa incense stick balanced on a carved Maori tray with red ochre highlights over by the window. I held in my mind an image of Queequeg, South Seas cannibal and harpoonist, Ishmaels’s alter ego on the Pequod, in search of the great white whale. Queequeg’s tattooed whorls had inspired my visit to the King Crimson Tattoo Parlor. I wasn’t thinking of anything extravagant, just one or two navy blue spirals on the anterior aspect of my left forearm, where my tangueras’ gazes would focus as I led them into perfect molinetes. I did not exclude a more secretive titbit that might occasionally peek from my collarbone, inciting more fevered interest.

The sound system was playing mood electronica, and so I fired up my iPhone. I was lost in Miguel Calo’s  “El Vals Sonador” when I felt a soft touch, almost a caress, on my arm. A quiet voice insinuated itself into the mesmeric flow of the waltz. “Hi, my name is Esmerelda. What can I do for you?” Eyes open, adjusting to the glare of overhead fluorescents, like a hostage in a dentist’s chair, I beheld the perfect face of my guide to body ink, framed in a halo of blonde curls.  “A bald eagle, perhaps, or Botticelli’s Venus on a half-shell, or just Semper Fi?” My lips must have curled, because she frowned, and she leaned towards me and said, “Anything you like.”

“Queequeg”, I said. “Maori tattoo. One or two, here and there,” and I gestured towards my left forearm and chest. “Certainly,” she replied, with a knowing look that spoke of familiarity not necessarily with Melville, but with the imaginings of those seeking order in chaos. “The swirls of Maori tattoos reflect the dance of life and love. Are you Queequeg, or just a friend?” I smiled, and she smiled back, a radiant smile that encompassed us both, and then she busied herself with a design portfolio, vials of colored inks, cotton swabs and a buzzing electric needle. I drifted off to Calo’s “Al Compas del Corazon”. After a while, I emerged a new man, adorned with nuanced tattoos, eager to engage on the competitive piste of Tango milongas, always alert for the elusive perfect quarry. I thanked Esmerelda, and mentioned my Tuesday night Tango class and practica. “Queequeg,” she murmured, “You may call me when your tattoo fades.”

Dimly-Lit Tango Connection

In the bright antiseptic lobby of the Amorous Dance Pole Studio, Max changed into his felt-soled dance shoes, stuffed his wallet, cell phone and keys into his backpack, and pushed it under a chair. A cat lay back there, a coal black tom, curled up, regarding him sleepily. Di Sarli’s strutting El Amanecer greeted Max as he entered the dimly-lit studio. Couples embraced in varying degrees of intimacy passed before him, some barely moving, swaying slowly in time with the music. Others, more balletic, executed ochos and paradas. Everyone navigated the crepuscular dance floor with eyes closed, guided by a sixth sense that integrated the mandates of the song into their Tango connection.

Max ventured further into the studio and paused in a corner to study a woman sitting alone at a bistro table graced with a softly flickering electric candle and a half-empty wine-glass. She, unlike the cat, sat upright, and gazed intently at the flow of dancers. She toyed idly with an emerald pendant at her throat. Once or twice, in the half-gloom, he thought that her glance caught his and then seemed to dart off, like a songbird startled by a prowling tom. In this dimly-lit milonga, which muddled the clarity of traditional cabeceos, Max found himself at  her table, tongue-tied at the conventional “Would you like to dance?” Instead, he made a courtly half-bow, held out his hand, and gestured towards the dance floor. She regarded him levelly, tucked the glowing pendant into her blouse, and took his hand.

Max marveled, not for the first time, at Tango’s defiance of societal norms that allowed him to gather into his arms, with her consent, in a dimly-lit room, a strange beautiful woman, and then to establish with her, abetted by music expressly composed to this end, a tango connection that was just a beat or two short of the emotional and physical entanglement that heralds the consummation of marital, or merely infatuated, love.

Too soon, La Cumparsita signaled the last song. Their reverie slowly surfaced into everyday reality, the lights came up, blindingly, and his compliant consort, no longer a stranger, smiled as she adjusted the emerald at her throat, and returned to her table, guided lightly by his fingertips on the cool of her back. The tango salon, no longer dimly-lit, as antiseptic as the bright lobby where people now fumbled for their odds and ends, revealed itself as a bit-player in a fundamentally ersatz but compelling drama of human connection. Max knew that this was where he wanted to be. The coal black tom emerged from his comfortable nook. He prowled among the departing dancers, shrugging off perfunctory pats, seeking a dimly-lit cranny, far removed from heartfelt farewells and charged invitations.

Rooftop Milonga

The sunset milonga on Maria’s rooftop overlooking the Stono River would begin about eight. I left home early and got some sushi at Publix to go with champagne I had grabbed from the fridge on my way out. While there, I stopped by their pharmacy for an overdue pneumonia shot. I waited by the pharmacy counter in a chair next to a small table. A smiling portly pharmacist, armed with alcohol swabs and a syringe, sat companionably on the table. As he asked me to bare my bicep, the table collapsed with complex splintering, spilling him and his accoutrements onto the floor. Somehow, amidst mutual embarrassment and abject apology, I got my shot, signed some paperwork, and was back on the road lickety-split.

Crossing the salt marshes to the mainland, time still on my hands and with queasy twinges needling my bicep, I paused at the trailhead of a nearby county park. The sun was still high but sinking fast. The intertidal landscape of shallow ponds bounded by expanses of shimmering sea-grass reflected a cloudless blue sky. Egrets, seagulls and a great blue heron foraged on crab-pocked mudflats exposed by the ebbing tide. I walked along a causeway, binoculars at the ready. A commotion in the distance caught my eye. A red-tailed hawk was dive-bombing a bald eagle perched on a tree stump, highlighted in constitutional splendor by the setting sun. The eagle repeatedly lifted off its perch, twisted in mid-air, and then settled back. The hawk’s last dive dislodged the eagle and forced its retreat into the sea-marsh, where I lost sight of it.

In Carl Jung’s synchronicity, concurrent unrelated events create meaning that enriches the unconscious. But I wasn’t thinking along these lines when I arrived at the milonga for my sunset tango with Maria. Champagne in hand and snacking on sushi and pizza, we toasted the transient magnificence of a sky criss-crossed with orange jet contrails, a sky transformed from uniform blue to a cloud-flecked palette of lavender and deep red. We took selfies against the backdrop of the setting sun, then waltzed across her rooftop to the ecstatic strains of Pugliese’s “Desde el Alma.”

I was unprepared for what happened next. A concussive crash, a shattering of wine glasses, and alarmed cries disrupted my seductive immersion in Tango. One of our number, portly and unsmiling, renowned for his commitment to milonga etiquette, was sprawled on the floor by the drinks table. He was gasping, like a fat spot-tail bass threshing helplessly in the scuppers of a jon boat trolling the salt marsh. We helped him up, of course, while he gesticulated at the splintered remnants of the chair that had let him down. His mortification was extreme, and I quietly overlooked his piqued Facebook comments next day about etiquette infractions he’d experienced at Maria’s rooftop milonga.

As a metaphor of things gone wrong, any kind of collapse fits the bill. I wondered why these particular metaphors had been visited upon me. After all, at each of them, I had simply been an unwitting witness of scripts I hadn’t written. I decided that Carl Jung merited further study. Meanwhile, I contemplated the rooftop milonga, which was illuminated by candles ranged along the parapet, and suffused with melodic invitations to closer connection. I refined my discreet nuanced cabeceos. My unconscious, by definition a closed book, forged ahead, reveling in the joyful buzz of Tango when invited eyes said yes, open to whatever came next.

Tango Scream, or El Cielo en Tus Ojos

The sun was sinking rapidly as I crossed the lawn, headed for the dock. Settled into the weathered bench at the pierhead, facing west, front row center at this daily celestial spectacle, I called up video on my phone. Holding it steady, I panned slowly clockwise, starting at the boardwalk, with Rushland in the background, and progressing through darkening woods towards complex many-colored clouds accumulating on the horizon where the sun had just set. I posted the video on Tango, typed “Hi, Maria… just keeping in touch”, attached Edvard Munch’s “Scream”, and clicked Send. Tantalizing moments passed. A chirp alerted me to incoming text. “In tango class; wish you were here… Maria.

I watched the tide infiltrating the mudflats before me. I figured within an hour I’d be able to navigate my kayak down Murray Creek to the Stono River, cross over with rapid determined strokes, and finally float into the little creek that petered out at the bottom of Maria’s garden. She’d be back from class by then, nursing chilled vinho verde on her rooftop and listening to Carlos di Sarli. However, by the time I translated thought into action, gliding towards the river as a blood red moon rose behind me, a light mist had settled over the sea marsh. Poor visibility and the rising tide conspired to mislead me. Somehow I missed the turn into Maria’s creek, and was back-paddling along a palisade of marsh grass when I felt a light bump near the stern and then a more solid impediment that stopped me dead in the water.

I peered over the side, and saw an ice-chest caught between the kayak and the sea grass. The lid was dangling from a single hinge. Reaching into the chest, I pulled out a black bottle of gold-labeled champagne. More bottles were in there, wedged in place by baggies swollen with white powder. Fighting down a shrill adrenaline scream, I scanned the river and marsh around me. The river mist had dissipated. I saw no sinister blacked-out motor-yacht, only a placid expanse of salt grass, the river’s shifting moonlit surface, and the regular red blinks of a distant microwave tower. I considered my options, which boiled down to salvaging the chest, or leaving it behind, bobbing in my wake. Opportunity overruled caution. I stashed the bottles and baggies in the kayak’s bow, found my way into Maria’s creek, and moored a few minutes later at her dock to the strains of Osvaldo Fresedo’s “El Once” drifting down from her rooftop.

El Once” reminded me of the last, eleventh celebration of the annual Gran Baile del Internado in Buenos Aires in 1924, where an innocent prank had provoked the gunning down of a medical student named Ernesto O’Farrell. Civic outrage over the killing was fueled by its association with scandalous Tango. And here was I, seeking solace in Tango, in possession of apparent contraband, possibly risking death if tracked down by whoever was missing an ice-chest. More thoughtful now, safely ensconced in Maria’s hidden creek, my heartbeat back to normal, I reconsidered my options. Best was to report at once my discovery to 911, but I was wary of involving Maria. Not to mention explaining a questionable nocturnal kayak crossing of a river where just recently two men had drowned in a freak thunderstorm while fishing on an ebb-tide for spot-tail bass. Second-best was simply to return the champagne and baggies to the ice-chest, and to get on with my life, questionable though it might be.

As I loosened the kayak’s line and reached for the paddle, the final bars of “El Once” played out. The ensuing silence was broken by the low rumble of an outboard motor and I saw the red and green bow light of a small boat nosing its way up the creek. I muted my phone and held my breath. Maria had doused the candles ranged around her rooftop, and her silhouette leaning on the parapet was etched against racing clouds. And now came the first somber chords of “First Kill”, from the movie “Assassination Tango”. Instantly, the motor and the running light shut down. I crept incognito beneath the dock. I marveled at Maria’s sixth sense that had intuitively caught and sound-tracked the drama being enacted at the bottom of her garden. All I could see were dark shadows fringed in moonlight filtering down through the water oaks and conifers that lined the creek. An owl called from distant woods, bull-frogs croaked occasionally from the marsh, and fireflies flashed here and there.

The motor-boat bumped gently into my kayak, and a flash-light swept briefly over it and the deserted dock. Minutes ticked off as someone stepped silently ashore, paused, and then set off at a crouch towards the house. I messaged Maria, “Lock the doors, don’t open them to anyone…”  Matters were quickly getting out of hand. I could return my stash to the ice-chest, if I could find it, but first I’d have to disable the motor-boat to avoid pursuit. That would mean leaving Maria to deal with whoever was prowling around her home. Going to her rescue, a white knight on a charger, was laudable but useless, given that I was unarmed and that my martial triumphs happened only on chess-boards, and then infrequently. More and more, a call to 911 was mandatory. While dialling, rehearsing my story, I heard a cacophony of dog barks, a stifled scream, and someone stumbling in a frenzy back to the dock. I ducked out of sight. The moon re-emerged from a bank of clouds. “First Kill” seguéd easily into “El Cielo en Tus Ojos”.

Curses and a snarling hound interrupted Roberto Rufino’s anguished cry that he was disoriented, that his faith was broken, and that he saw the sky in the eyes of his beloved. I lay low, even as a 911 dispatcher asked what service I required, and what was the address? I whispered, “Police,” blanked on Maria’s address, added “Never mind”, and switched off. Next thing I knew, the outboard fired up, and the motorboat backed off from my kayak with grinding concussions, wheeled around, and sped off towards the river. The hound paced the dock, snuffling in frustration. It paused to sniff at a seam in the boards just above my cowering head, poured forth a paroxysm of barks, and then slouched off towards the house. My phone buzzed. “Max? Is that you down there?” A flashlight danced along the path from Maria’s house. Di Sarli’s orchestration embroidered Rufino’s refrain, “The sky in your eyes gives me courage, and increases my crazy desire to live.

Maria emerged from the shadows. She paused at the step onto the dock, one pale hand at her breast, and the other fingering the hem of her tango skirt. Botticelli’s Venus flashed before my eyes. Under the passionate spell of her crystalline soul, my hell in Eden was transformed. But all that had to wait. I embraced her silently, and nuzzled the pearled precinct of her ear. “I’ll be back,” I murmured, “I’ll explain later.” I untied the kayak, settled in, and paddled swiftly towards the river and the lost ice-chest. I soon left the shadowy confines of the creek, and found myself in open water. The moon was higher now in a clear star-studded sky. The fireflies had disappeared, and the bullfrogs’ choruses had died down.

As I made for the protective cover of sea-grass, hoping to blend into invisibility, I felt water sloshing around my flip-flops, and loose bottles of champagne and fat baggies of white powder shifting around in the bow. And then I noticed that the kayak was lower in the water than usual, and that paddling was now more strenuous. No doubt about it: I was sinking. The churning propeller of the motorboat must have torn a hole in the kayak. Waves began to slop over the gunwhale when I was still a hundred yards from the palisade of rushes where I’d found the ice-chest. Within seconds I was chest-deep in cold water, and the kayak was slipping out from under me, headed for the bottom. My struggle to get free was greeted by the raucous scream of a night-hawk, swooping low over the moonlit river.

Dragged down, kicking frantically free of the kayak, I drowned a scream by gulping a mouthful of water and swam for the surface, my eyes reaching for the distant starry sky. I was disoriented, my faith broken. In the awful loneliness of my ordeal, Maria was like a sun illuminating my eternal darkness and I lived again, her crystal soul sweetening my bitter cup. I was channeling the lyrics of the tango “El Cielo en Tus Ojos”, of course, but that simple recitation brought me back up, spluttering, treading water, and moments later found me swimming for the shelter of the marsh, where I found soft purchase in pluff mud, lay down shivering and breathless swaddled in sea grass, and wondered what next.

My kayak and the incriminating salvaged contraband were gone. All I had to do was get home, reassure Maria, and forget the whole story. I must have dropped off for a while, my thoughts revolving inexorably, as dreams tend to do, around swimming four hundred yards in twelve minutes to qualify as a volunteer scuba diver in the South Carolina Aquarium. I woke, chilled, thinking that the Stono River was no wider, that the current was slack at high tide, and that twelve minutes hence I could be back home. By the time I translated thought into action, Roberto Rufino’s tango vals assertion that the sky in his lover’s eyes gave him courage and chased away his suffering was beginning to sound hollow. An eternity later, I dragged myself, arms aching, onto my dock.

As I crossed the lawn towards my house, I noted that Sootie, the black bronze nude of Catalonian provenance reclining by the marshfront water-oaks, was smiling as always, non-committally. My phone, marinated in the brackish reality of low country waterways, and normally a dependable connection to all things relevant or otherwise, was dead. Maria would have to wait. I poured myself a gin and tonic and tuned into Budapest Radio’s classical tango stream. With timeliness worthy of Carl Jung’s synchronicity, “El Cielo en Tus Ojos” soothed the scream still echoing in my ears. Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.






Terminal Tango

En route to my office in rush-hour traffic, I was caught in interminable gridlock behind the lowered red and white-striped barriers of a draw-bridge. The steel lattice of the bridge rose before me in slow motion, and a tall-masted schooner slid by, a snowbird departing, southward bound on the Intracoastal Waterway. Impatient and irritated, I calmed myself listening to classical tangos on Pandora, seeing myself and a svelte tanguera gliding in close embrace across polished parquet. I sighed, checked my phone, and saw a text from TerminalTango.

“Have Heels, Will Travel. My flight doesn’t leave until seven. Go Tigers at Gate A1”

Fantasy was about to be usurped by reality. A random brief encounter, all five senses on high alert, perfectly isolated from the everyday. I couldn’t conceive a more pristine metaphor of Tango’s allure. As if galvanized by the thought, the bridge began its descent to the roadway while bells rang and lights flashed. I stepped on the gas all the way to the airport, parked in a distant surface lot, and made a beeline for the terminal. Under the watchful eyes of security, I consigned my laptop and phone, jacket and shoes, and watch and wallet to a conveyer belt. I strolled through a full body scanner, pausing only to feign surrender, hands over my head. On a monitor I watched my things yield their colorful metallic secrets to the X-rays. Cleared at last for departure, I collected myself and marched at the double to Gate A1.

Sitting at a Starbucks across from the gate, I sipped a Peppermint Mocha and savored the caffeinated chocolate on my tongue. A Raul Beron song I recognized as “El Vals Soñador” flowed from a tiny Jambox propped against a pillar. A stylish couple danced in easy synchrony across the gleaming terracotta floor. She wore an apricot silk blouse and a cerulean pencil skirt and turquoise suede stiletto heels. She was in full flight, eyes closed, her body swaying with his,
and I caught the intimate fragrance of her perfume as they swept by. Her steps were economical and precise, and now and then, when her partner paused, her heels traced crisp radial arcs that closed in time for the next musical phrase. He waited patiently for those instants, poised and erect, his hand tracing delicate patterns of touch-and-go across her back, and then he would dip into a long step forward, moving into her space with intent. Tango!

The waltz ended. They chatted for a moment or two, he tapped something into his phone, and then he was gone. She settled into a chair, tucked an errant russet curl behind her ear, and looked around. I was uncertain about TerminalTango etiquette, this being my first time, but within seconds our eyes met and held, as if a milonga were calling. She smiled and nodded, and touched
the obsidian surface of her phone. Di Sarli’s graceful “El Amanecer” filled the concourse around Gate A1 and I rose to my feet. She awaited my imminent arrival and her next full flight.

Bells rang, lights flashed, and the irate, insistent blare of a car-horn startled me into the here-and-now. My svelte tanguera, even as she invited me into close embrace, evaporated into wisps that dissipated in an instant. Cars streamed past me, left and right, and a blue pennant atop the tall-masted schooner fluttered gaily before disappearing beyond a distant bend in the river. Clouds moved in from the west, and raindrops spotted my windshield. Static from flickers of lightning broke up my music feed, but as I accelerated back into traffic, I caught a snippet of song: “Give your soul to the rhythm of the tango.

Love In The Time Of Trump

Dejected and seeking relief, I slipped some accessories into my pocket and headed for the creek. A compact flashlight lit my way through bog myrtles and pines, for I was  mindful of a rattlesnake coiled incognito in the shadows.  I settled into a weathered seat at the edge of the marsh, inhaled the wafted fragrance of cattails, and watched a full moon rise. Coltrane was playing on my cellphone and his fluid tenor sax set the stage for a rare conjunction of Venus and Mars. The tide was up and faithfully reflected the starlit trajectories of flashing jets, five-miles high. Bats dipped and swerved over the marsh. A chirping text interrupted my reverie: a post-doc was looking for an instrument to transfect her cultured cells with foreign genes. I had just the thing in my lab, packed in its original box and rarely used. I replied at once.

The next day, Julieta knocked on my door. She was olive-complexioned, with refined features and a lithe dancer’s body. Her eyes caught mine in a hypnotic grip. After discussing some technicalities of transfection, we agreed to meet later for a drink in the Cafe Fuel. Below prints of Left Bank demi-monde, we regarded each other with interest across a table inlaid with an elegant maple and ebony chessboard. Julieta said that her father had taught her how to play, and that she’d once placed first in a chess tournament in Phoenix. In the final round, her opponent  had sat in a wheelchair, a powerful strategy when the chips are down. Her trophy, a kitschy simulacrum of victory gained in defiance of common wisdom, had languished for years in a closet.

Well into my third glass of beer and transfixed by her calm gaze, I glimpsed an opportunity for closer connection. I said wouldn’t a chess club be great, and as my mind darted over the logistics, Julieta said Tuesdays were out; Tuesday was Tango night. She explained that she was obsessed with Argentine tango, which spun physical and psychic tendrils that entangled the unwary. She told me about a painting she’d seen in a gallery opening that showed a defiant vulture perched over a blood-spattered banner advertising a masked ball held by medical interns in 1920s Buenos Aires. Back then, she said, Tango was the lingua franca of the dance halls, and the music, the dance, and cheap Malbec all conspired to fuel indiscretion, and worse. I was skeptical, but listened attentively.

Julieta said that the interns used to terrify the ladies with body parts spirited from the anatomy labs. No excess was considered excessive. The tender embrace of a lady’s waist by a dessicated skeletal arm was fair game, as were more intimate caresses by a rigid leathery hand. Things came to a head when a guileless intern sought to trump all previous excess while dancing with the dazzling wife of the Orquestra’s manager. Consumed with passion and bravado, the intern swept off his cape and revealed the severed, formalin-stretched head of a cadaver. The grimacing skull nuzzled her silken throat to the strains of “La Cumparsita”. She was flamboyantly indignant, enjoying the attention accrued by such an outrageous stunt. Her husband, portly and enraged, confronted the couple out on the dance floor. The intern was amused but solicitous, waving a bamboo fan over the wife’s beautiful brow. He turned in surprise when challenged by the husband, who had drawn a pearl-handled Derringer from his waistcoat.

The interval between one bar of “La Cumparsita” and the next was marked by a single sharp crack and a second of shocked silence. The intern collapsed without a sound, a pool of blood over his heart, a smile still engraved on his face and his eyes just beginning to startle. The macabre head followed him to the floor and seemed to kiss his cheek as his colleagues rushed to administer fruitless first aid. The poor intern, his bravado, and his passionate love bled out in a matter of moments, and he and the masked ball were never revived.

For a moment, Julieta was silent, and I wondered if the prospect of love trumped the certainty of death. Then she laughed, drew me to my feet, tapped her cellphone once or twice, and gave me an earbud. As a Di Sarli waltz swelled silently between us, she tucked an errant curl behind her ear and led me into my first tango. Later that night, she filled my flash drive with all of her tango. The foreign melodies snaked effortlessly into the unfathomed cells of my soul, navigating ubiquitous shoals of death or redemption in the relentless pursuit of love.


Snacking on brie, cherries and Cotes du Rhone, I watched the sun set over the Coatings Institute of America and surfed the Tango offerings that night in Washington DC. Parda Practica announced its presence from eight until whenever at Ozio’s, which Google identified as a bar and grill ten minutes stroll from the DoubleTree. Approaching Ozio’s an hour later, recapitulating my circumspect review of Freedom Plaza the night before, I saw across the street a deserted sidewalk patio and behind glass windows a low-lit restaurant and a lone bartender studying his phone. Tango music flowed from an upper floor, and I could see shadows of dancers on the curtained windows.

I recalled my first vertiginous contact with Tango, back when I pushed open the black-lacquered door of the Hotel Fakir and stepped into a parallel world with only tenuous connection to the one I knew. Then, the music and a red-head in silver stilettos had turned my head; now, crossing over to Ozio’s, I felt the same adrenaline-fueled anticipation. I knew from numerous encounters since then, in cities from Orlando to Lvov to San Diego, that the women I’d meet that night, and the music I’d hear, would reset me into default mode; at home in my brain stem, open to input and responsive to simple impulse.

Engrossed in some digital encounter, the bartender barely nodded as I made for the stairs at the back of the bar. At the top, I stepped into a facsimile of the Hotel Fakir. Before me stretched a polished floor flanked on one side with mirrors and discreet tables, and on the other with a long zinc bar. Women, their legs crossed and long, sat there sipping crimson cocktails, tended by one or two men. Couples waltzed the length of the polished floor, in perfect synchrony with Pugliese’s “Desde el Alma”. And there, suddenly in front of me, before I could properly orient myself, was Fairouz. She wore a simple yellow dress and silver stilettos, and her hennaed curls and rosewater scent engulfed me as she kissed me on both cheeks. “Welcome to Ozio’s, Max,” she said, “We’d be on the rooftop, but the builders haven’t finished there yet!”