Black Swans by Eve Babitz

Author:Eve Babitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2018-05-05T04:00:00+00:00

ONE NIGHT, I stayed so late at Norah’s that the only people left were the waiters and I and Ramon—Ramon who never tried dancing with me anymore because still, after months, I was such an inert handful.

Suddenly, he stood beside me and said, “Come.”

“Oh, no!” I cried. I was just about to leave.

“You come,” he said, taking my hand and leading me to the empty floor. Only the waiters were watching.

Outside it was raining and windy, so windy that earlier that night during the advanced class all the lights in Burbank had gone down when a tree broke on the electrical wiring. But inside people did tango by candlelight—without music—undeterred by mere acts of God.

Now the lights were back on, the cassette was playing some long-ago sad song about a man whose tango partner died and who wished she would come back and stop haunting his dreams like a green mermaid, and Ramon and I stood in the middle of the empty floor, and he said, “Lean me.”

And so I leaned. All I could think of was “Don’t lead, don’t lead. Don’t even move, but at least don’t do it first.”

His strong arms squashed me into his torso, I sort of relaxed—a combination of the letting go but holding firm one needs for a dance like this—offering resistance with my right hand. And I waited.

He didn’t move.

But neither did I.

Then, slowly, he led me into that first step—and, magically, I waited long enough to follow. I took my time.

If with tango it takes two, then if this testosterone type wanted to dance with me, he was going to have to slow down; that was all there was to it. He might have been used to Celeste moving five times more eagerly to follow him, but with me, he’d just have to eat it and go slow.

If he wanted to tango with me.

In Arlene Croce’s New Yorker piece on the tango show, she says “. . . as an image of destiny, it is tragic rather than poignant, a dance in which we confront our mortality, luxuriate in it, but do not transcend it.” And I knew from watching it myself, that that was what tango looks like—but as Ramon liquefied me into the dance, I felt myself go up in internal combustion, getting warmer and warmer, pouring myself against his body on the one hand, while resisting on the other. For me, suddenly we confronted mortality—but did transcend it. We were immortal. Once I was following Ramon, mere death—like no electricity—couldn’t hold a candle.

We could have flown around the world in tango.

It was like sex, only from long ago and far away.

“Very good, very good,” Ramon said as we were finally As One with the music, which I at last understood to be, you danced to the melody, not the beat.

Letting someone take over my body completely, I felt as though we could go on forever, but then, alas, I got so disheveled morally, I forgot this was a dance; my right hand turned to mush, and down we both came with a whimper.

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