danceislove

The mattress felt thin, as though a board underneath it could not be too far away.  Alexander’s arms were flung out in the light from his bedside lamp.  He looked flattened.  Business school brought an avalanche of work, and for the past three weeks he’d been battling a respiratory infection.

From the airport I’d typed on g-chat, “I’ve never known you to be sick this long.”

He’d answered, “Me neither.”

When I got on the bed he killed the light, then turned a little to put an arm loosely over me.  He seemed to fall asleep instantly.  There was more tossing and turning, though.  When he was turned away from me I put my thumb against the middle of his back, to the right of his spine, and swept it up toward his neck.  I anchored my fingers against his shoulder-blade and kept tracing my thumb over his trapezius, pushing into nearby spots after that.  With my fingertips I gently grasped the muscles to the side of his neck toward the front of his body, pulled a little, then released.  Alexander sighed.

There are three activities in the world that I can do indefinitely, without any sort of depletion.  One is reading really good writing.  Another is writing, myself.  The third is massaging Alexander’s back.  In all of these I surrender naturally to my intuition, shut off specific linear thinking and hence become, I believe, more effective than when my mind is switched on, so to speak.

Tonight there seemed to be less to massage than usual, as if he had deflated.  The same tight spots were there, though: I recognized them after the pads of my thumbs had already found them, and I knew what to do.  He needed gentleness.  At length my mind hit upon the idea to massage his right hip, since I happen to know that it hurts in practically the same spots that my right hip hurts.  I started at his sacrum - by now he had flipped to his belly - and pushed laterally over to the hip flexor.  after spending some time here I went to the left hip, because it only seemed fair, but by now I was thinking too much and at one point pushed just a little too hard.  I could feel it.  i took a deep breath and returned to sweeping my hands up his back, locating the tight spots again, finishing with light pressure along the back of his neck.

Alexander mumbled, “You’ve turned me into a pile of mush.  Generally he says either that, or, “You’ve turned me into a puddle of liquid,” which is what he said in the middle of the night on the Saturday before Valentine’s Day, the year 2000.  All I’d done was rub the back of his neck as we sat on his couch and Dave Matthews played on his stereo.

Now we are far from New England.  I have invited myself here, and I have turned him into a pile of mush, again.

“Success,” I whispered, stretching, fully on my side of the bed.

“I’m exhausted.”

“So sleep.”  I wondered, half-interestedly, if I would.

I must have, because suddenly the air seemed less hot, and Alexander was loosely curled around me, his fingers through mine.

“Wow, you’ve never let yourself squish your arms before, huh?”  I cry.  My student, let’s call her Amalia, has just triple-stepped in a wide semi-circle around our hand connection.  “It’s so much more fun if you squish.  Here.  Let’s do this one.”

I take both her hands and stand opposite her.  Obediently Amalia closes her eyes, the better to follow my weight shifts.  “Nice,” I say.  Then I add a little energy, a little back step.  The arms stretch with a lovely spring, giving her the momentum to triple-step forward into the four-hand connection.  “Yes, that’s the squish, remember?”  I look in the mirror, on my left side, so I can see how much she is allowing her elbows to bend.  “Squish more, more more more!  Make me say, ‘Amalia, you’re squishing your arms too much.’ I really want to say that.  See, isn’t it fun?”

Amalia is smaller than me, with a dark pixie-cut and an adorable little figure.  She has on a skirt today, and patterned stockings, because after our lesson a friend of hers will be taking her to lunch.  “Your outfit is awesome,” I said earlier when we met in Sala 2 in Nacho’s Estudio de Baile, located around the corner from my house.  “You look even more gorgeous than usual.”

Now that I’ve gotten her used to squishing again, I bring her to side-by-side position, lead her out in front of me.  “Let it squish!” I cry as I lead her back to my side.  This time her right arm bends.  She tracks straight toward me and neatly rotates her body, rather than wasting energy in tension and excessive displacement.

“Hey!” she says.

“I know, isn’t it fun?  You can feel the energy, right?”

We try it another couple of times, exclaiming rapturously over the exhilarating feelings of connection.  Then unfortunately it’s time to end the lesson.  Someone is knocking on the door to the studio.

“Entré!” I say, being silly, because I think that’s probably a French word.  “Como se dice en Español?” I ask Amalia.

“‘Se puede entrar,’” she answers.

I repeat the translation, practicing, as we change our shoes and put on our coats.

“Hablas poco español, ah?” she says sympathetically.

“Sí,” I sigh.  “Pero anoche he hablado español.  Estaba divertido.  Tengo que practicar mas!”

We open the door to go outside.  It’s raining.

“Otra vez!” I exclaim.*

Amalia says, in Spanish, that she’s annoyed that she hasn’t brought her umbrella, but anyway she doesn’t like carrying it around.  I try to explain to her my fear of walking down the narrow sidewalks of Madrid when it’s raining.  She does an admirable dramatization of being hit in the eye with an open umbrella.

Then she is nice enough to ask me how my book is going.  I manage to explain that it is practically done, as I have finished the first third, which has been the most difficult part.  The rest is also done, except perhaps for the very end, but that will be easy to add.

“When you lived in the States,” she begins again, “did you do only dance, or did you work at something else too?”

I adore Amalia and she has no way of knowing that these are the kinds of questions I hate.  In my mind I begin substituting.  Let’s see.  What if I had been an accountant?  “Did you do only accounting or did you work another job?”  Or how about IT?  “Was doing IT enough to support you?”

“Sí y sí,” I laugh.

“Doing just dance is difficult,” she says in English.

“Well, remember how I told you that I’m a very strange person?  For me, doing anything I don’t want to do, no matter how easy, is much more difficult than doing what I want to do.  Actually, it’s impossible.  I can only do what I want to do.  I’m old now, but when I was young lot of people were always telling me that what I wanted was too difficult, and I was silly enough to think that they were right.  So I wasted a lot of years, and tens of thousands of dollars, trying to study and work at more practical things. I am so strange that doing the impractical things are more practical.”

We have arrived at the metro, and I don’t want to make her late for her lunch date.  She has suffered my speech long enough.  Nevertheless I continue: “It’s funny because if you ask anyone whether they think someone should follow their dreams, they’ll say, ‘Oh yes, absolutely!’ Then if you tell them you want to be an artist, a singer or dancer or writer or whatever, they’ll say, ‘Oh, that’s very difficult.  How are you going to make a living?’  So, I don’t know.  Anyway, I’ll let you go.  Sorry to have bothered you with this.”

“Oh, no, I’m glad you told me,” Amalia says charitably.  “Happy New Year.” We kiss on the cheeks.

“Hey,” I call after her,  “we are going to La Negra Tomasa tonight, so if you get free and want to join us, that would be great.”

She waves one more time and disappears down the steps.

My building is a scant block away.  As I walk there I feel joy in my heart. It’s not true that I am old.  I felt bad about giving Amalia my speech but apparently not bad enough to keep from doing it, so to make up for that I decided to be self-effacing.  In truth I’m young as anything, because I’m starting over, and that’s all that matters.

And today I only have one more appointment, but plenty of time for a nap and lunch first.  This evening I’m going to see my guy.  Friday we’re going to Granada for a long weekend.  I’ve saved up a bunch of private-lesson Euros for that.  It’s going to be my first vacation since I moved here.  I’m young and an artist and living in an exciting city that never sleeps, and I can still dance and write and do whatever I want.

Maybe in the future when I’m tempted to make a speech I should just take a deep breath and remember what’s important.

__________________

Translations:

“How do you say that in Spanish?”

“You can enter.”  “You only speak a little Spanish, huh?”

“Yes.  But last night I spoke Spanish.  It was fun.  I need to practice more!” (when I see that it’s raining:) “Again!”

After disembarking at Avenida de la Paz, I hopped up the stairs and saw Alexander off to the left, his head bent downward.  He was talking softly.  He’d gone to his apartment and brought the dog, of course, who barked as I approached but calmed down when I reached out to pet her head.  This action was made more difficult than usual by a clear plastic lampshade-shaped object around her neck and projecting forward.  She’d recently had some surgery on her ear, and something else taken out of her back, which displayed a small shaven rectangle bisected by a row of stitches.  Apparently the lampshade prevented her from biting and scratching.

“Hi sweetie,” I said to the dog, gently scratching her snout.

“Look who it is!” Alexander cried.

The three of us crossed a broad intersection, passing in the process a bricked circular island full of frondy plants.  We walked up a hill a few paces, then up a flight of cement stairs leading to a parking lot enclosed on three sides by large apartment buildings.

“This is you already?” I said.

I found it strange that after Alexander undid the locks to his apartment door and let us in he didn’t turn on any lights.  It was pitch black but I could feel the narrowness of the rooms.  Possibly he was keeping us in the dark because of his roommate; from Alexander’s previous communication with me I gathered that she had some sensitivities that demanded respect.  I wondered if they precluded the inconvenience of a too-frequent overnight visitor.

Alexander went for the bathroom first.  In the meantime I took off my cute outfit, under which i sported another, even cuter outfit, consisting of a black balconet bra and shiny, high-waisted panties with a dark purple bow at the belly button and small ruffles over the cheeks.  Alexander came back into the bedroom - where he had, by the way, flicked on the light - as I was extracting my toothbrush from my bag.  I straightened up and looked at him, his body, his face, both of which registered as neutral.  I edged past him and smiled.  Still nothing.

Whenever I’m with Alexander I rush in the bathroom.  I don’t want him to fall asleep before I get to the bed.  Upon a moment’s reflection, though, I realize there isn’t any reason to rush.  If he is asleep, he won’t be for long.  He always wakes up early.  The real issue is that I’m nervous about the situation between us.  This has been the case almost every single time we have slept together, except for January and February of 2001, and, coincidentally, January and February of 2009.  Perhaps December of 2008 as well.

Actually, when have we slept together, during warm weather?  A few times, summer of 2000.

Almost nine years later, in Madrid, it was quite hot.  I crept onto the bed between the wall and his side.

We turned right onto Boylston and soon settled on The Globe Bar.

“Have you ever been here before?” Alexander asked.

I said no.  I haven’t been back, either, so whenever I think about that place, I remember what happened on March 28th, 2009.

Alexander and I sat in a booth and looked at the hot-drink menu, glossy under the warm track lighting.

“What are you gonna get?” I asked.

“Peppermint Patty,” he answered, giving me his best cat-that-ate-the-canary smile.

“Oh,” I sighed, jealous.  The dairy and sugar would do me in.

A tall, ponytailed waitress appeared, framed from my perspective by the enormous ceiling, its blond wood beams like matchsticks joining at angles over the lights.

I asked for a Pumpkin Spice, whose description included hot cider.

“The manager put these drinks with cider on the menu, but we never actually got the cider,” said the waitress.

Disappointed, I ordered a sangria-influenced cocktail, necessarily cold.  When our drinks arrived I indulged in a sip of Alexander’s.

Suddenly he tilted his body toward the right and pulled out his blackberry.  “Hello! - Yeah.” (Laughter.) “Yeah.  It’s okay.  We’re just getting a drink.  We’ll be there in a few.”

He put his blackberry back into his pocket.  “Hey Liz, have you ever heard of Grub Street Writers?”

“Yes.  They’ve been recommended to me before.”  I sighed and skipped straight to the truth.  “I know they have workshops, and experts that can help someone improve their writing.  To be honest, I’ve been scared to try them.  What if i go to them and they tell me I suck, that I should go back to square one?”

Alexander looked at me.  “Well, wouldn’t you want to know that?  don’t you want to get better?”

And with those words, he changed the course of my life.

Now I stood with him and Carlos, in Rosa and Carlos’s ballroom and lindy hop studio on the eastern edge of Madrid.  Alexander did not seem to be exploding from having eaten canned tuna.  Instead he nodded and occasionally commented during Carlos’s chatter.  I did not understand what was going on.  When at last Carlos let up, Alexander got his bike from the porch.  I went to Rosa and kissed her on both cheeks.

“Feliz cumpleaños,” I managed.  Her students had formed a comfortable little knot seated around the table of chips and canned clams, sliced ham and sandwiches of cold cuts on white bread.

It was midnight, very early for Spaniards, and it seemed wrong to leave.

Alexander walked me up the hill to the Suances metro stop, wheeling his bike.  “One strange thing about this city,” he said, “it’s totally safe, anywhere you go, any time of night.  I mean, people are out there who want to steal your wallet.  There are pickpockets.  But there’s no violence.”

At the entrance to the metro we kissed briefly and he got on his bike.  I had to go a couple of stops on each of two trains.  The signs to the second train, Linea 4, pointed me through a long underground walkway.  It felt symbolic.  It felt like limbo.  I was by myself, floating one foot in front of the other.   Then I thought I could hear my train.  I ran, through the rest of the tunnel and up a flight of steps.  I made the platform just in time.

What Really Happened When I Arrived In Madrid

Chapter 1:  Canned Tuna

Alexander shows up to Rosa’s birthday party at the studio at 10:30 on Friday, near the close of my first day in Madrid.  In the early part of the evening I trained myself not to look up each time the studio door buzzed.  Instead I immersed myself in the Spanish experience among Rosa and Carlos’s students.  Two beats after I hear Rosa exclaim, “Hola, Alexander!” I look up and he’s in the doorway, wheeling his bike, carrying his helmet, wearing the olive green Mike Doughty T-shirt.  Carefully I make my way over to him, through the small crowd of snack-munching dance students.

We squeeze each other, and there’s a kiss, very brief: he is stepping back to look at me, saying, “How are you?”

Most people say, “How are you?” when they haven’t seen each other in a while.  Alexander says, always says, “How are you?”

I answer him, somehow.

The gal Luz, one of Rosa and Carlos’s students, is beside us, apparently having recognized Alexander from previous dance classes.  I think she is saying it is fortunate Alexander has shown up because now he and I can communicate in English.

“Gracias,” I say, giving her the biggest smile I can manage.  She is standing to my right.  Her cute top screams pink against the white floor and pale mirrors.

Rosa wants Alexander to wheel his bike through to the patio.  The crowd makes way for him.  I meet him at the back and we chat.  He wants to now how the last couple of months have been for me.  I can never sum up such things, so I decide to tell him about my lindy hop students.  Then I talk about my blog.

“I’m sorry I haven’t read much of your blog.”

“Don’t be sorry.  I know you have a TON of stuff to read.”

“Those thick packets I showed you when we talked on Skype - that didn’t even include the textbook reading.”

“I know.  They were just the case studies.”

“I’m gonna celebrate at the end of the term on July 4th,” Alexander declares.  Then he looks at me again and says, “Jet lagged?”

I shrug.  Sometimes it’s hard for me to figure things out while standing next to him.  This is one of those times.

“You look tired.”

“I do?” I say, with alarm.

Carlos appears with Rosa’s camera in his hand.  I put an arm around Alexander but he reels me in with such aplomb that I am glad when the camera doesn’t work right away.  The top of my head slants against his cheek, the muscles in my side feel the muscles in his side.

At last the camera clicks and we relax apart.  I say, “I know you are exhausted.”
“I’m really exhausted.”

“We don’t have to stay here.  We can go somewhere else.”

“Like where?”

“Your place?”

“Do you have a bag here?” he asks.  “Like, stuff to crash?”

It’s a little while before we go because first Alexander eats some ham slices.  I’m glad, because he looks thinner even than usual.  Then one of the dance students hands him a cracker spread with something.

“I just ate tuna from a can,” Alexander reports, half-smiling.

“Oh my god.  Are you gonna die? Or explode?”

“Maybe.”

Canned tuna is the one food Alexander will not go near.  One night in Boston we walked by cans of tuna stacked inexplicably on top of a light box.  “Someone knew you were coming,” I joked.

That was a bitterly cold night late in March, the last Saturday night before Alexander’s departure.  We waited outside the building where his friend Veronica lived in the Back Bay.  Despite the glamour of the facade - smooth steep stone steps, beveled glass refracting soft overhead light from the vestibule - the buzzer did not seem to work.  Veronica did not answer the phone and neither did Karen, another close friend of Alexander’s.  We stood there on the narrow top step, facing each other, on either side of the heavy glass and wood door.  I laughed a little.  He had no jacket on.

“Sorry,” he said sheepishly, from beneath his eyebrows.

“I don’t mind,” I smiled, even though my toes were numb in their chunky high heeled boots.  Truly, I didn’t mind.  I could stand there and look at Alexander.  I started with his shoes, black matte leather, square-toed.  My eyes moved up over his slim hips and barrel chest.  A recurring complaint of his involves the difficulty of finding shirts and jackets that fit his narrow waist and are long enough for his arms.  I reflected that some of my dimensions were analogous to his, with my ample chest and long waist and small butt.  We’re both lean, he more than I, yet each of us have put on a pound or two recently, and when I’ve felt around to his stomach in bed, noticed just a little softness there over the otherwise hard abs.  My belly feels similar: the new weight has gone to the analogous place.

Alexander called the gals again.  Neither answered.

“We could go up to Boylston for a drink,” I suggested.

Down the steps we came, and two blocks in the opposite direction from the river.  At the median of Comm Ave we encountered the light box with three cans of tuna stacked on top, and I made my joke and we kept moving.  It was good to keep moving in the cold.

Yesterday I had a great conversation with someone I respect and admire.  He was very generous in listening to me.  At the time I had just taught one of my private English students.  Here is what I said:

“I had a really good class.  Because this guy’s English level is so high, we just talk about interesting things.  We started discussing political correctness, about the idea that certain ways of speaking should be controlled and even legislated.  I believe that language is in fact powerful, and I think it’s really interesting to understand the origins and meanings inherent in how we express ourselves.  Language shapes thought, and it reflects culture in a way that I think is really fascinating.  However, I don’t think it’s effective to shame people, to try to make people use certain words and not others.  Actually I think it’s destructive.  Of course my student was also opposed to legislating ways of speaking and writing.

“Then, I suddenly remembered something I read years ago, by Gloria Steinem.  She satirized Freud’s ideas.  It was hilarious to read because it sounded so ridiculous.  She wrote about things like “womb envy,” and about how obvious it was that men wanted to be abused by women. She was being satirical of course.  To me her essay suggested that we needed to take Freud’s ideas with a grain of salt.  I like what she did a lot, because instead of telling people not to use sexist language, she wrote something brilliant and funny that inspired me to think.  Then I realized that, of course, it is always so much better to do something good than to try to make people change.  Light a candle, right? instead of cursing the darkness.  Do something good and that will make people want to be like you.  I mean, you did that.  You came to Spain and your friends decided to follow you.”

This morning, I had an online chat with another friend of mine.  I hadn’t seen him in a while and I offered to introduce him to some of my friends.  I realized that all of them were from the same part of the US and he would probably love to meet them.  I typed, “I’ll cook up a plan and let you know the specifics.”

He wrote, “OK.  Just don’t make the whole night about dancing.”

I felt hurt that he thought me so naive and self-centered.  “It was the last thing on my mind,” I typed defensively.  “I know that my love of dancing is very abnormal!”

It still makes me sad how strange (and even scary) most people think I am for loving dance.  It still makes me sad that even here, in open-minded Europe, most men think that dancing means you’re either female or gay.

Then I remembered what I said yesterday.  Instead of getting negative, I merely have to do something good.  This should not be so difficult.  Instead of focusing on how hurt I feel, all I have to do is move on and do what inspires me.  (More information about that is everywhere on this blog, for example here.)

The total of those experiences made me feel happier and more positive and more hopeful about life, and about dancing.  So I just wanted to share them with all of you.