Eventually, I Had to Lead: On Learning the Dance (and Writing the Book) That Scared Me

Tango is not a thing that can be done halfway. Neither, I learned, is memoir. You’re either all in, or you’re dishonest.

I hadn’t danced in months. I’d hurt my back helping to lay a dance floor, then enrolled in writing school. Now I spent my late nights at my laptop, and any spare time reading—on the subway or in chiropractic waiting rooms. Tango lingered in the background, exerting, as ever, its persistent pull. I missed the music, missed the movement. I missed the way it made me feel.

It did not occur to me to write about it—not until I found myself in need of a subject for a required research seminar. I lobbed a dozen far-fetched pitches at my professor who swatted each one down and asked instead: “What do you know best? Where might you have an in?” When I told her I danced tango, she gave me a decisive nod and that was that: my topic set.

Tango was as deep a well as any I could dig, riveting and rich, but I felt woefully unqualified—both as a writer and a dancer—to describe the dance in all its sumptuous complexity and contradiction. I felt I’d be a fraud on both possible counts. Then again, delving into it would be a joy. Writing about tango could keep me in the dance when time and injury conspired to keep me out.

Researching my own addiction felt like cheating, but it was only my tuition money squandered, my own enormous debt. The time was mine to waste. I dove in, spending hours spelunking in the marble library for tango scholarship. I read articles and Master’s theses in English, Spanish, and some labored French. I read impassioned blogs, self-published memoirs, website archives, online fora, magazine articles, criticism, books. I watched video clips of dancers and listened to gravelly gramophone recordings of tango songs on repeat. I lurked like an ethnographer in Facebook comment threads. I interviewed tangueros, asking them to articulate the tango thoughts and theories they preferred to leave ineffable. I went dancing and called it homework. I wrote pages by the dozen about cultural appropriation, export, and exploitation. I wrote about tango subcultures in Finland and Japan. I wrote about the controversy of soltadas, spins borrowed from other dances that violate the sanctity of tango’s close embrace.

I wanted to know what tango was, at heart, and how much could be changed before it broke. I thought I was onto something major: the fundamental questions at the core of the dance. I was spellbound by the esoterica that I was dredging up, but all attempts to shape a narrative kept failing. I was looking for one story, and missing the real one thrumming underneath.

*

When I first started dancing, it had been very much the same: I was young, naïve, and unsure of myself. I wasn’t present in my body. And I was terribly afraid of sex, having somehow managed to avoid having any for most of my adult life. I had a dozen perfectly intelligible reasons for choosing to learn tango, and none of them motivated by my own desire to understand desire. But, like a pregnant woman craving nutrients, I went after something I didn’t even realize I needed.

I showed up to my first tango social in a glorified gymnasium on the second floor of a midtown office building. It was a dim and humid room, tarted up with twinkle lights and tablecloths. Hundreds of strangers were locked together, dancing, in salacious closeness. Their eyes were shut, their arms snaked around each other’s torsos, their legs twining and untwining in turn. I mimicked what they did; I shut my eyes and snaked my arms around a stranger, my legs wrapping and unwrapping, too. His body was so much less solid than it looked; it seemed to yield to mine, make space between the surface and the bones of him for me to nestle. I remember trying not to yield in return, to rest my body lightly, fleetingly on his. Impermanent. I remember trying to hold back, as one touches still water, without breaking through. Doing everything I could to follow well, but with the barest minimum of physical surrender. My borders felt conspicuous, and fevered. I remember concentrating on the movement, and my feet, and trying not to feel the closeness of our connection.

I told myself that it was all about the dancing, which was punishingly complex. Dancing with the live flesh of other—male—people was just the unavoidable byproduct of this purely intellectual pursuit. I concentrated on technique, on following the rules. On following in general, which gave me the freedom to say I wasn’t choosing what I’d chosen. Which is to say: I submitted to an intensive intimacy on the dance floor that I could not fumble towards anywhere else. I never went all in.

For the first few months, this tactic of evasion worked. The effort of coordinated improvisation was tricky enough to hold my full attention. I squeezed my eyes shut and pretended I wasn’t surrendering my body to anything other than the music and the movement. I still wanted to pretend I didn’t even have a body, let alone one that melted into others’ bodies in any tangible, tactile way. The result was not the chaste and cryptic sport I had envisioned, athletic, antiseptic, out-of-body; the result was, well, bad dancing. I followed as though startled by the lead. A partner moved toward me, his sternum like a ship’s hull butting against mine, and I knocked backward, wooden, hoping to be swept up in the tides. I could feel the magnetism of him, and the heat we made, but I tried to ice the burn. I let my body fuse to his, but kept my brain at a distrustful distance.

The first time I let go, it was an accident. A slackening of vigilance. I don’t remember who it was that I was dancing with, but I remember feeling liquid, borderless. The movement, too. My partner and I were no longer like two boats knocking together. We were the water, the swells; we moved as one. It was as though my outlines had dissolved, my frame into his. I remember thinking I couldn’t tell where his skin stopped and mine began. But then the song ended, and my palms were definite and mine again—and no worse for the wear. I found my feet—and several other body parts besides. I found that I enjoyed the closeness; the humanity; yes, even the heat.

Once I grew comfortable with that proximity to other bodies—the arms and chests and sweaty necks and stubbled jowls of (mostly) men—I began also to understand the contours of my own, the way I wanted to be moved, the way I moved myself. In the arms of dozens of strangers, I began also to understand the fact of being held, the way I (never knew I’d always) wanted to be touched. I learned how not to feel ashamed. Dancing taught me how to be sensual, how to feel with my full body.

*

When I brought my pile of research back to that grad school class, I was gearing up to write a geekily ambitious tome about the sociology of dance, the metaphysics of improvisation, the history of touch. My classmates and professor nodded along with me, polite, until their eyes began to glaze. “But what does that look like?” someone asked. “What does that even mean?”

I shifted tack, and tried to tell them. What it looked like, how it felt. Beyond the theory: what I’d learned by touch—through my own dancing. Each week, they wanted more of this. How it felt to learn, to dance. The characters I’d met. The narrative, the scene. They wanted more and more of me, the person dragging them into this uncharted territory. A tour guide they could trust.

I realized that I’d been hiding, deferring to the experts and relying on quotation. To the extent that I had any authority at all on the subject of Argentine tango as a nearly-thirty-year-old white woman of diffuse Irish descent, it was as a novice dancer—a know-nothing, a rube. It was only as myself. I had to start from that meager authority, and write the only story I could tell.

The arc was clear enough: how tango dancing helped me learn how to be a woman and a person in the world. Still, it would take another couple of years to reconcile myself to those parameters. Those years were far from graceful. I fought—with readers, with myself—to take a backseat to the research. To drop in the occasional “I” while letting tango lead. But each draft kept drifting closer to the center, so very close to home, and I was forced to take a hard look at the story I was telling—and turn the chisel on myself. Once I relented and let the memoir clamor forth, the story almost told itself. The hardest thing was to let it.

*

Tango is not a thing that can be done halfway. Neither, I learned, is memoir. You’re either all in, or you’re dishonest.

I wanted so much to keep the exercise of each cerebral; to think my way through the wilderness, avoiding problem copses. I wanted a controlled burn. I could dance without it being all about my stupid, scary body. I could write about myself without delving too far into my stupid, scary heart. This only worked in theory. In practice, I found I could not do either without a kind of radical commitment to dragging my whole self to the floor—flesh and warts and all.

If nobody wanted read my geeky tome about tango, for damn sure nobody wanted to read a memoir that skipped along the surface. A few anecdotes and character sketches weren’t going to cut it. I needed to let go and let gravity. And once I did—once I wrote about my fear of being touched, the buried shame that motivated all that fear, and the total mess I made untangling the two—the book became a book (albeit one that was much harder to write).

The old saw says: Write what you know. A teacher once amended this and told me: Write what you don’t know you know. Tell the story you didn’t think was yours until you came to claim it. When I started dancing tango, I was a stranger to myself—a doe-eyed heroine without a plot. When I finished writing my memoir, I was not. Writing the book, it seems, was the last of all my tango lessons: It taught me how to feel, also, on the page.