danceislove

A very young woman, black dress, lots of blonde hair in her face, crossed in front of me toward the sushi table.  Then she turned to me, black slouchy bag in her hand.  “Where did you put your stuff?”

“Over there.”  I gestured toward a little couch piled high with bags and coats.

Meanwhile the gal at one of the end chairs was looking up helplessly from where her seaweed-enveloped roll was beginning to fall apart.  Taj went over to her.  He laughed magnanimously.  “That’s ok.  You can do it again. I’ll start you off.”

While I waited for the contained frenzy to dissipate from the environs of the sushi-making table, I walked toward the doorway near the stairs and began chatting with someone’s dad.  He was visiting from somewhere in England.  “I have to say, I am envious of you,” he told me.  “I wish I could just pick up and come to Spain.”

“You can,” I pointed out.

“I know, my kids are grown and everything, and I’m divorced, but I have a good job, and a retirement plan -”

“Then I guess it doesn’t make sense for you to leave, does it?  So you can be happy where you are.  Sounds like you have a lot going for you.”

“Yes, but all of you here are so - vibrant! so alive! I think it’s great you are dancing and writing a novel.”

“Thanks.  Anyone can do it if they really want to.”

When it was finally my turn to make sushi I made sure I rolled it tight, but not too tight, glancing up at Taj as I began.

“I think that’s perfect,” he said.

“Ta-da!”  I beamed.  “Now I have to cut it.”

“Want me to do it?”

“Actually, sure.  You’ll do a much better job than me.”

“I’m good with a knife.”

Incredibly, despite the multicolored, seaweed-wrapped rounds of rice and buttery fish and vegetables piling enormously on a nearby table, the directors of our former school absolutely forbade anyone to start eating.  I went upstairs.

Taj found me and told me that one of the directors had asked him to walk to her house and bring some more ingredients.  He had her keys.  I went with him.  It was a nice place, decorated mainly in red, with upholstered cubes - my favorite - in the living room.  She and her husband don’t have a kid.  Before Taj and I left he kissed me for a while by the door.

That morning after my first class I had gone to Al Campo, the huge cheap combination supermarket home goods hardware clothing store, and bought a couple of white towels, some white sheets and a pillowcase to match.  I cleared out the bottom of the middle cabinet of my armoire, as well as one of my shelves in the bathroom.  He hadn’t been to my house yet and I wanted to make space for him first.  He had captured my heart and passed all my tests, so it was time.  I would tell him tomorrow.

At long last we were allowed to eat the sushi.  We claimed a corner of the large table in the middle room upstairs in Pedro’s bar, stuffed a few rounds in our own mouths before feeding each other a couple of morsels.  Then it was time to grab Poppy and Roy, who had shown up, and go for some drinks in Sol.

Taj said goodbye to me at the metro station at the end of the night.  He didn’t walk me home this time.

“So there’s a bus at 10 o’clock tomorrow.”

“OK,” I said.

“We should meet at my place at -”

“Eight-thirty?”

“Perfect.” Then he kissed me and was gone.

He was going to take me somewhere, he said, out of the city, but I didn’t know where.

By Friday things were getting ridiculous.  But Taj was calm as ever.  At least it appeared that way.

(Months later, he said, “It sucked that you kept making me walk all the way back to my house at three-thirty in the morning.”  My comeback:  “As I recall, you were the one who always insisted on walking me home.”  His reply, “I’m a gentleman.”)

After bachata class I cleaned myself up and rode the metro to Estrecho.  There, I only had to ask once for the directions to the address of Pedro’s Bar.

It was full to the gills, opposite of my stomach.  While I talked with a former classmate - a charming gal, originally from Thailand, lived in New Zealand, where she married a successful business man who was transferred to Madrid - I wondered when we would start the sushi.  Also I tried not to wonder where Taj was.  My girlfriends in the states had worked too hard to train me to be the cool woman - you never go to him, you let him find you.  I’d been practicing and now it was time for the show.

Buzzed on half a glass of wine, I extricated myself from conversation with my friend and the knot of men who had gathered to watch us.  She’s the tiny Asian type that men love, and the two of us tend to indulge in gushy, flowery conversations with an undercurrent of sarcasm.  I imagine that these things make us a mildly entertaining spectacle.

Nevertheless I said, “I’m going to go check out the environs.”

The front of the place was so narrow that one line of people at the bar and another line of people at the windows almost merged into one.  I elbowed my way through, separating them temporarily.  It was especially difficult at the big flashing lotto machine.

Past that and up a couple of stairs I emerged into a bigger room with a black floor, ringed with chairs.

“Hey, beautiful.”  Off to my left there was Taj, and he welcomed me into his arms.  Jesus Christ he smelled so good.  I still don’t know how he does that.

“Do you know where the sushi is?” I said.

“Downstairs.  They’re about to start making it.”

“This should be interesting.”

“Believe me, it is.”

Every month, usually on a Friday, the school that Taj and I both attended for our English teaching certification holds a graduation gathering at Pedro’s Bar.  I watched the directors flurry about, calling everyone darling and honeybun and giving them kisses, softening the crowd’s noise with their Australian and British accents, respectively.

These two gals also teach the classes, do all the marketing for the school, set up the new students with cell phones, insurance, bank accounts, serve as career counselors for the graduates.  They’re also remarkably successful.  Disorganized, over-enthusiastic, ungrounded, but adorable, magnetic, and on balance quite effective.  Fucked up yet getting things done.  In a haphazard way.  Sort of like me.

They’re also, unsurprisingly, part of Taj’s fan club, whose large dimensions I was at that point just beginning to grasp.

“The middle place is open.  Someone else can go in there.”  Taj addressed the group of yammering Americans and British in the downstairs room of Pedro’s Bar.  He was pointing to the second in a trio of seats against the wall, behind a long table swathed in plastic.  On top of that lay scattered bowls of rice, little pots of wasabi, paper plates stacked with dried seaweed, and myriad dishes of raw salmon, tuna, avocado, cucumber, eel, and other sushi niblets.  At each rolling station lay a wooden sushi mat.

Starving as I was, I didn’t want to jump at the spot.  It had something to do with the fact that the guy I had just started dating seemed to slide without ceremony into a position of sushi-making orchestration.  By now it was clear that his participation was part of a tacit agreement among the three of them.

Taj
I want to see you tonight.  When are you done?

My mind tailspun. Entering a relationship is scary.  The question here:  what if I gave up too much of my precious time, let him distract me from my goals?  It was more complicated than that, though.  This was not a zero-sum proposition.  When Taj and I are not together, I’m distracted anyway, thinking about him.  At the same time, I don’t seem to need as much sleep.  The energy fuels my writing, makes me happier, less negatively obsessive.

After meditating, I texted back:  “I know a good place near my house.  Meet me in Plaza Anton Martin, 22h?”  Since I planned to be home by 9 this gave me plenty of time to recalibrate.

He smelled great and his lips were soft and warm.  Also there is something about the feel of his curls between my fingers.

I asked, “Can we walk first?  I haven’t been running or dancing enough lately and I need to move around.”

We started down Atocha, toward Paseo del Prado.  The air was not too cold. It reverberated with light.  There was the pink and blue neon of the big sex shop, its deep paved entranceway reminding me of a movie theater.  Yellow and green health food store signs gave way to the the red and white Alimentation outside convenience stores further down the hill, and at the bottom, McDonald’s, its white beacons muddling motor and pedestrian traffic alike.  We also passed the usual locutorios, bazaars, bodegas, cafeterias, and a corseteria or two.

“Hey,” Taj said, “you’re not in a hurry anymore.  You can slow down.”  He took my hand.

We turned left on the Prado, at McDonald’s.  Taj told me stories from his childhood, which, as far as I can tell, was full of adventures in the Florida swamps and mischief with friends around the neighborhood.  I like to listen when he tells me these things.  I certainly can’t match them with anything from my overly-obedient past.

I wanted to take him to the mojito bar I’d been to with Claire on that crazy night with the crazy waiter and the silly discotheque, but it was closed.

“Let’s go to that place I like,” Taj said.

“Lamiak.  OK.”

Inside it was warm and smoky.  Mellow hip hop caressed the deep red walls and the framed jazz festival posters.  I’d walked in here with Alexander two or three times but we always left because there was never a seat.  Stupid.  Lamiak has everything.  It’s worth standing up for a little while if necessary.  Maybe Alexander is so uptight that I can’t bear to hang out with him without a civilized pair of chairs on either side of a table.  Maybe I will never hang out with Alexander again.

Dance Is Love is the true story concerning three years in the life of a Liz Miller, a professional swing dancer based in Boston.
Synopsis for Dance Is Love by Liz Miller
When my husband, a handsome former navy pilot, says he is too busy to help me teach a beginner swing dance class, I decide to replace him with a new young dancer whose talent has begun to revitalize the Boston scene.  Kendall wants to do more than just teach a beginner class, though, and soon I am working as his partner in performances and competitions.  I stop watching movies at home with my husband and forget to arrange double-dates with co-workers.  I make a commitment to working as an artist.  Kendall’s charismatic charms affect me profoundly, but instead of pursuing a romantic liaison I train and diet as hard as I can to be the best possible dance partner.  Simultaneously, I know that to Kendall I’m only a stepping stone, and that he will soon leave Boston for the more visible and lucrative international scene.  Now will I keep dancing, or choose to save my marriage?

I realized why I hadn’t been following.  I didn’t trust him to stop.  I had to be tense and alert and put the brakes on.  But I don’t have to do that because he understands that I want to wait and he doesn’t pressure me.  I never thought a man like that existed.  I never thought anyone like that existed.

During our second blues lesson he asked me again about leading and following.  And maybe I had been looking in the wrong places, but it had been so long since someone let me begin this idea, talk about it fully, without interrupting me.

I told him that I think leading and following is like West-meets-East.  In the West, we value initiative, decision-making, planning ahead, putting things in motion. That’s what the leader does.  Eastern philosophy - well, I’m not an expert but I think it has to do with staying open and grounded, not thinking of past or future, only the present.  When you do that you can have the perfect, spontaneous response to whatever comes your way.  That’s why we have to train as followers.  We want to be physically able and mentally open enough to manifest the most agile and appropriate illustration of the moment.

“Which one is harder?” Taj asked.

“They’re the same level, even though they require very different skills.”

We were at Lamiak one week after my birthday, a Sunday night.  I had a rueda and my favorite pintxo while telling him some things on my mind.  He let me have the one available bar stool while he stood and sipped his tinto.

“I’m a lot older than you,” I began.  “I mean, I’m ok with it if you are.”

“I’m ok with it,” he said.

I remembered an early Facebook message: “we’re having a party sat. night so you should come over and bring a friend.”  He wrote like Kendall.  We belonged to different generations.  Kendall would have said something like that if he were flirting with me, which he rarely did and then only if drunk.

I didn’t make it to that “sat. night” party.  I hadn’t a friend to bring.  That morning I’d texted Willow but she was in Barcelona with Joe.  After a thoroughly boring gathering at the apartment of one of my classmates I wandered around Chueca, bought a six-Euro bucket of iced diet coke, and then went home to sleep.

When a table opened up at the front corner of Lamiak, we went for it.  Taj brought us more drinks.

I said, “I don’t know if you usually date different girls at the same time -”

“I don’t,” he said.

“I’m not interested in dating more than one person at a time either.  I’m not built that way.”

“I don’t really like this table between us,” he said.

Picking up my slouchy black purse off the floor I scooted 90 degrees around the table.  “Better?”

For answer, he reached out, took my face gently in both his hands, kissed me.  Then he kissed the backs of my fingers and pressed my palm to his heart.

He’s a killer, I thought.  But I have to be sure he understands that this is no casual thing.  That if he gets me, there are strings, there are expectations.

So we sat at the front corner of Lamiak.  His fingers traced slowly down my neck as he kissed me.  People walked in and out, passing our table, undisturbed, because this is Spain.

My mind is like a helium balloon, constantly drifting.  I succeed in anchoring is only briefly, using the basics.  The air is cold.  Oh look, the sidewalk has little squares.  I am going into the metro, ball of one foot then the other, against the grabby, reflective yellow stripe on each stair.

It’s raining people.  A sheet of them come down the broad stairs as I ascend toward the Linea 1 platform.

“You have to let me kiss you until the elevator comes,” Taj said last night.  That was all right with me.

He slid into the corner between the apartment door and the elevator, pulling me into him.  Then he said, “You never let me just kiss you.”

“OK,” I said, meaning I would.  I relaxed all the tension in my body.  I let him lead.

He moved away from the wall, backed me into the elevator door.  “Oh well, now you have to wait again,” he said, reaching across my shoulder to hit the button.

Let me be clear about Spanish elevators.  Generally, they are small, the width of a normal doorway.  When the elevator arrives at your floor, you manually pull open the door to get on.  When the elevator is not there, this door is locked.

Taj took my face in both his hands and kissed me slowly.  When he pulled back a little and we were looking at each other, I managed hoarsely, “Did I follow better?”

“You’re learning,” he said.

I opened the door.  “We’ll talk.”

“OK.”

“Bye.”

He is breaking me down in a serious way.  Guys, if you want to get with a girl, kiss her well, hold her tight, massage her hands, stroke her hair.  Don’t start groping, and save your propositions.

Robert used to proposition me, ostensibly joking.  The day he moved to that other European country I went to his place to help him bring his stuff to the airport.  Joe and I took some things from the kitchen, tossing them or reserving them to take home.  I went to the bathroom and when I came back down the hall I heard Robert call from the bedroom, “We have five minutes, if you want to get in bed.”

“That’s really attractive,” I said, before I could stop myself.  It was a mean thing to say but I’d had enough.  It was like the time Benny from New York said, “OK, look, you can come over.  I have condoms.”  What could be less sexy than a condom?

Caressing my hand in a cab, backing me into a door just to kiss me:  that is hot.  I mean, why do you think girls love that glove scene in The Titanic?

We stopped at the bar near Taj’s house that has Belgian beer, red Christmas lights over black tables, and gorgeous old-school jazz on the speakers.

“Have you been to El Tigre?” Taj asked me as we stood in the corner sipping our drinks.  I didn’t feel up to a whole beer so I had some Rueda (white wine) while he drank his Rochefort 8.

“No,” I answered.

“OK, I have to take you there.  You’ll love it.  You have to go early, you’ll see why, at like eight o’clock.  It gets really crowded in there.  It’s such a cool place.  They have all this stuff on the walls, animal heads -”

“Like deer?”

“Yeah.  Well maybe you don’t like that.”

“Depends on the context.”

“A lot of people think hunting is wrong.”

“Well, if you’re going to eat it, I don’t think it’s wrong, and I mean, no one eats chicken heads or cow heads, so I guess they don’t eat deer heads, so what’s the problem with putting them on the wall?”

“Don’t some people eat cow brains?”

“Oh yeah, I guess.”

“And over here they eat every part of the pig -”

“I see pig toes sticking out of dumpsters around my neighborhood.  It’s kind of funny.”

After our drinks we walked further into the center of Madrid, back to the place where the party had begun.  It’s a shared flat in the Malasaña district.  Roy and Poppy live there, and Taj’s good friend whom everyone calls The Specialist.  I asked him what his real name was.  He said, “The Specialist.  Because I specialize in everything.”

When Taj and I arrived at the apartment building, two young guys in skinny jeans and hair cut short with the exception of a couple of tiny dreadlocks in the back were carefully applying silver spraypaint to the front door.  “Perdona,” they said, clearly embarrassed, moving aside to let Taj buzz.

“It’s Taj,” he said into the intercom.

“What? Who is it?”  I think it was The Specialist’s voice coming through the speaker.

“Open the door!”

“Taj who? I can’t hear you!”

“Motherfucker!” shouted Taj.

That seemed to be the magic word, as instantly the door buzzed.

“Hello Liz.”  The Specialist greeted me in traditional Spanish style.  Then he said, “Hey guys, we’re gonna play Shithead.  Get yourself some wine and have a seat.”

“Is there any sweet potato pie left?” said Taj.

“I don’t know, I think Eric ate it,” said the Specialist.  He’s taller than the average American, which makes him much taller than the average person in Spain, and his sweetly gruff voice gives subtly more southern-US pronunciation to his speech than, say, Taj’s or Brad’s or Eric’s.  Poppy and Roy, on the other hand, sound at least as southern as The Specialist.

“That pie was so good, Liz,” said Eric from the couch.

“I have to make sure I get the plates and the shopping bags,” I said.  “My roommates hate it when I don’t bring stuff back.”

Taj followed me into the kitchen. “I wonder where Poppy is,” I said to him.

“She and Roy usually go to bed early,” he explained.

“I think it’s time for me to go home.  I don’t know what this Shithead thing is and there’s only guys now.”

“Oh, it’s just a card game,” Taj said.

We started making out.  After a couple of minutes Eric walked in.  “Sorry,” he said blandly.

“No, it’s OK, I was just leaving,” I said.

“I’ll walk you home,” said Taj.

“That doesn’t make any sense for you.”  I figured he’d want to hang out with the guys, then walk the ten minutes back to his house.  My place was thirty minutes in the opposite direction, the metro had closed down hours ago, and I wasn’t going to spring for a cab.  Also, Madrid is the best city for a woman to walk at night.  At four in the morning the streets are full of laughing singing drunk silly people, and everything is well-lit, and the worst kind of crime that can happen is silver spraypaint on your door.

“I’ll walk you home,” Taj repeated.

“It must have been written music.”

“Yup.  The music companies bought the rights to the catchiest tunes.  When radio and records first exploded, the sheet music industry was still big.  So musicians had incentive to both write the best music possible and record the best performances.  That happened around the 1920’s and 30’s.  And they just don’t write ‘em like that anymore.”

Roy and Jenny bailed around 1:30.  Taj and I left shortly thereafter, walking briskly south, “toward my place and toward your place,” he assured me. He told me that his grandfather had taught him to navigate by the stars, something he’d had to do a lot, in the woods and swamps near his home.

“Also I can tell what time it is, while I’m surfing,” he added.  “You look at the horizon and then you measure the space up to the sun.”  He squinted ahead and stacked the fingers of one hand ahead of him.  I imagined he was picturing the sun in the sky above the water.

“This place is awesome,” he said, pointing at a storefront off the main drag.  “They sell maps.  I’ve been in there a lot.”

“Do you just look or do you buy?”

“Just look.  They’re pretty expensive.  I would love to be a cartographer.”

“What would that take?  Would you have to get a masters or - what?”

“I don’t really know.  What would you do if you went back to the States?  I mean, where would you go?”

“New York.  Or San Francisco.  How about you?”

“Wyoming.  Montana.  That was the best winter, the one I spent in Wyoming, teaching snowboarding.  I was working in the bar there, too, Friday through Sunday.  I’d work from six to two, and the slopes would close at 4, so I’d bring all my gear to the restaurant and change there.  My friend and I were both there.  We lived in a hotel.  It was really cheap, like $130 a week.”

“And you got your room cleaned every day, and fresh towels -?”

“The only bad part was we had to go outside to get to the hot tub, going through the snow in our bathing suits.”

We walked on for a while, talking about pasts, possibilities, people we admired.  I suppose this is the natural thing to do.

“I have this aunt, she lives in Italy,” Taj said.  “She told me I should forget about the nine-to-five crap and move to Italy and be a tour guide.  So I thought, I’d much rather learn Spanish.”

“That’s why you came here?”

“Yeah.  I told Brad, hey, we’re going to Spain, and he was like, OK.”

“Then a bunch of  your other friends followed you?  Eric, Roy, Jenny -”

“They figured if I’m doing it, it must be a good idea.”

“And what about the other guy you told me about, the one with the 16-bedroom mansion?”

“I think he has a lot of reasons to stay in Florida,” Taj said.

I found them at the wall opposite the crowded bar.  “There you are,” Taj said.

“I had to dance to a couple of songs first,” I explained.

“Do you want a drink?”

“I don’t know.  Wait, it’s definitely my turn.  What do you want?”

He pulled me to him and began kissing me.

Who needs drinks?

The band was decent, not great.  There were no seats available.  Patrons and staff alike kept ejecting us from places where we blocked someone’s view of the stage.  Finally we found a pillar to lean against.

“You OK?” Taj said.  His arm was around me.

I was uncomfortable but I didn’t want him to move away so I said, “Yes.”

During the break Ella Fitzgerald music played over the speakers so I started talking to Taj about it.  “I’ve never heard her do this particular version of ‘I Can’t Get Started.’”  It was both groovy and energetic and I wondered why I’d never heard a DJ spin it.

Taj wanted to know what I meant by “version” so I started by telling him about the Great American Song Book and Tin Pan Alley.

“So before YouTube, before iTunes, before CDs and before even records, how did people know which songs were the most popular?”

“Radio?” Taj said.

“Before radio.  How did they know?”

Usually I don’t ask people where they are from but on the Saturday after Thanksgiving at a gathering of Taj’s friends I didn’t have to anyway.  They were all pre-partying for the Florida State - University of Florida game.  First Thanksgiving in Spain and I would be watching American football.

After their homemade pizza, my homemade pie and an ample amount of wine, the 15 or so of us walked along the broad avenues, newly looped over with elaborate electrical light displays of red and green gift boxes, bells, stars, other Christmasy-type things.  I marveled at the wattage. Next to me walked a depressed-seeming young woman that was crashing with a few of Taj’s friends for the time being.  She told me she was trying to be a writer.  I said I knew it could be tough to find your feet in a foreign city but she could call on me if she felt like it.  “Use me,” I said.  I guess I was feeling strong.

We were to watch the game in, what else, an Irish bar.  The boys prevailed upon the bartender to tune the big-screen to the relevant channel and the group of us then settled into the whole front section of the bar.  I didn’t know what to expect from Taj among his friends, whether I was just a girl or the current girl or the girl; most likely no one knew yet.  He was gentlemanly, bought my drink, sat next to me.  He seemed to take great pleasure in ribbing his friends since he was the only one rooting for the Gators; apparently the others had all gone to Florida State but their team had no chance.

Afterwards we got in a cab with Jenny and Roy to go to the jazz club.  “Girls in the middle,” I announced, forgetting that Spanish cabs are half the size of American ones.  Jenny got in the front, her blond ponytail swishing above the collar of her bright red wool coat as she accepted the club brochure Taj was handing her.

“The address is on the top left,” Taj said.  “Top left.  Top left.”

In between the two front seats we could see the cabbie’s wizened head bend close to Jenny’s sleek tresses as her index finger slowly crawled up the glossy half page to, at last, indicate the relevant line of text.

“Vale,” said the cabbie.  Then he pointed across Jenny, toward her right, saying something else.

“Oh!  Seatbelt,” Jenny registered.  Pulling on it and turning toward us, she grinned.  “Click it or ticket, motherfuckers.”

“Not for us,” Taj said, putting his right arm around me.

“Cinturón,” I said, repeating the cabbie’s word.  “Like ‘cintura.’”

“‘Cintura,’ what’s that?” Taj asked.

“Waist.  When you take dance classes in Spanish you get to learn body parts.”

He kissed my cheek and my forehead, squeezed me in a little tighter.  I leaned into him.  Jenny was making an effort to bond with the cabbie.  While Roy tried to help her wrest smalltalk from her horrible Spanish, Taj began weaving his fingers through mine, then gently massaging my palm, then grazing his fingertips over the back of my hand.  I squeezed my eyes shut.  I thought, you can have me right now.  Thankfully we were in a moving vehicle with other people.  It was entirely too soon.