Confessions of a Librarian Read online

  We coil legs around each other

  Slithering flesh to flesh

  Quick as rattlers, our tongues

  Dart in and out

  Kisses scorch our eyelashes

  Sheathed in black silk

  Bones and sinews crackle

  Bewitched by a rippling bandoneon,

  breathing quickly

  My spine vibrates

  In his velvet palms

  The beat quickens

  So does my pulse

  Suddenly, my sleek caballero

  vanishes

  I tumble into an abyss of sobs

  To awake shivering.

  “Wow,” sighed Candy. “That guy really pressed your buttons. Speaking of pressing, Jorge knows exactly where to touch me. Not like those fumblers I’ve met who couldn’t find a woman’s G spot if she shined it in their eyes like a traffic light.”

  “Does Jorge tango?” I asked.

  “Do bats eat insects? Jorge’s promised to take me to this Milonga on West Fourteenth Street above some Spanish restaurant.”

  “I’ve been there many times,” I responded. “I’m amazed it still exists.” I remembered trying not to stumble in front of the intense crew of rapturous tango dancers.

  “Milonga, a tango dance thing, right? Just across town. I’d like to go,” piped in Marilyn, ready to put on her dancing shoes.

  “Think I ate paella in that restaurant once,” added Chloe. “Casa something or other.” She pulled out her BlackBerry to check if she included it on her recommended restaurant list.

  “I bought these ‘fuck me’ shoes for the Milonga at one of those stores selling sex paraphernalia. Like them?” Candy kicked off her shoes and wiggled her toenails, polished ruby red. “Watch the step Jorge taught me last week.”

  Candy did a jerky box step. Instead of holding her upper body straight according to tango dancing protocol, it bent like a flower stalk in the wind. The opposite of elegant and mysterious, Candy improvised as though with a rock band. Demeter the cat twisted and curled her fore legs trying to keep time with Candy’s gyrations.

  As Candy thrust herself about, I imagined myself on the dance floor with Roberto again, now and then executing a barrida or a gando, gliding counter-clockwise to the intense beat.

  “Say girls,” I butted in, “I’ve got a story about tango and me. Want to hear it?”

  “Go ahead!” they all chimed in.

  NINE: BLAME IT ON THE TANGO

  Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  How did I manage to meet Roberto at a mixer largely populated by Jewish men of means whose tummies bulged almost as noticeably as their wallets? So what if some were balding and a bit creaky. Am I Elizabeth Taylor to be such a fuss puss? Treat the evening as an experiment, I lectured myself. These gatherings, held in different Manhattan clubs, and advertised in New York Magazine, attracted overflow crowds keyed up to meet “the one,” or connect on some level.

  During my twenties, a nice Jewish girl manqué, I attended such affairs at the Concord, a hotel for marriage minded singles. Back in the Catskills again, I heard mother’s voice, wafting out from the grave, “Find a good provider, makes life a lot easier!” A dyed in the wool bohemian I didn’t fit then. Nor did I feel any less awkward decades later.

  Still a stranger in this strange land I had rejected long ago by marrying an artist to live in Greenwich Village, I hesitated on the threshold of Club Charmaine. My entrance fee gave me a license to hawk my physical assets alongside a gaggle of female competitors. Complacently, I allowed myself to be herded inside a cavernous space so dimly lit one might easily break a leg. Was this cattle-call, or an auction of meat on the hoof?

  Buyers and sellers eyed each other with a shopkeeper’s acumen. Being in an open marriage gave me the leeway to act on a whim. The last thing I wanted was to make a big change that would involve fitting into a bourgeois, predictable routine. Against all odds, maybe a reincarnation of Rudolph Valentino would materialize from this miasma to whirl me around the floor until I could no longer tell the sun from the moon. Above all, I yearned to dance, dance, dance!

  The bordello-red interior complemented plush pseudo-velvet walls creating the intimacy of a giant padded cell. Flexing my boobs, jutting out from a bustier that made breathing difficult, I adopted a come-hither attitude. Too lazy to head for the ladies room, I sat down on a comfortable couch behind a pillar in to readjust my scratchy, black fishnet stockings.

  At ten P.M., the music blared Sixties favorites mixed with Latin standards. Couples were drinking at the bar, while others paired off—some embracing in dark corners. Snatches of banal conversation about apartment rents, corny films and computer misadventures drifted over. If a man approached me, after a sample of my clumsy attempt at idle chatter, he probably would disappear pronto. Terminally artistic, I grew more and more uncomfortable. What demon had provoked me to subject myself to this commercial venture where romance played no part.

  “Dance with Roberto, please. Do me the honor,” requested a dark-haired man. Had he dropped from the ceiling, decorated with silver stars? Bowing, he extended his hand as gracefully as a ballet dancer. What politesse! Had he wandered in by mistake? My body responded to the sensuous yet disdainful way he regarded the clatter around us. Even his eyelids drooped seductively.

  “Why not?” I replied to the figure before me, who spoke accented English. This tall, debonair apparition was dressed in black other than a sparkling white shirt. His shiny hair curled over a broad forehead in a feminine way. Wide shoulders tapering down to a narrow waist set him apart from this crowd.

  Despite the loud music and high-decibel conversations, his soothing voice massaged my ears. His touch spoke more eloquently than words. Gradually, as we danced, I became one with the gyrating multitudes, let their energy flow through me. Was I pasted to this sexy beast who pressed me so tight my nose became entangled in his long hair?

  “Where do you live?” Not in the wilds of suburbia, I hoped.

  I was still married, so hanky panky chez moi was out. The apartment I shared with my husband had evolved into our offices, for lack of other space. Computers, books and papers were strewn everywhere. Friends complained about the clutter that they could not find a clear space to sit down. Thus, I hoped to meet an available lover with a Manhattan apartment—as hard to find as a rock band playing Wagner.

  “I’m a nuclear engineer. We’re like gypsies, moving wherever there’s a job. Reactors start burping, we nurse ’em back to health rapidamente—quickly, in English. Now I’m based in....” He mentioned a southern New Jersey town, at least two hours away from Manhattan. How inconvenient! Picturing myself visiting this blight on the map perfumed by oil refineries, I sighed. Trying not to show any disappointment, I simpered: “Are you located near Atlantic City? I spent childhood vacations there. It’s very lively these days.” Goodbye practical considerations, hello adventure. If I let this charmer go, I would kick myself into the next life.

  Roberto guided me over to the bar. “What’ll you have?” he whispered, kissing my earlobe. His hand, touching the back of my neck, made me wriggle as though silk worms were crawling down my spine.

  You, on the rocks, I thought, while aloud ordering “Red wine.”

  “Let’s go somewhere else!” he announced. Automatically, my feet followed him to the coat check and out the door onto a midtown Manhattan street that clattered from morn to night. Delighted, I let him take over.

  As Roberto raised his hand to hail a taxi, I asked another pertinent question. “Where are you from? Puerto Rico, Mexico, Spain, Venezuela?”

  “Argentina, but born in Recife, Brazil ’cause poppy worked as an engineer in opal mines. At six, they moved me to Buenos Aires—an international capital, like New York. Plenty of Germans, Italians, English, Jewish. Do you know it?”

  “Buenos Aires! I’ve always wanted to go there to watch the elegant Portenos stroll the wide boulevar
ds like those in Paris.” To show off, I dropped the word Portenos, inhabitants of Buenos Aires. “Don’t the shops on Florida Street sell designer clothes really cheap and stay open later than in New York?” Roberto’s face turned as white as raw dough. His body tensed.

  “For you maybe, with U.S. dollars. Not my family, being ruined by the falling peso. Another devaluation will push them over the edge. Prosperous people, some doctors and lawyers, now rummage in garbage cans.”

  “How thoughtless of me, blabbering on. You must think I’m a callous, materialistic American.”

  “You’re so guapa—good looking—I forgive you. Perhaps someday we shall visit my hometown together?”

  “Since college, when I read Jorge Luis Borges, I’ve dreamed of visiting his neighborhood to gain insight into the labyrinth of his fascinating mind. That would be my main reason for going to Buenos Aires.” I confessed a fanatical admiration for Borges to show the serious side of my character to redeem myself in Roberto’s eyes. Did I feel so close to Borges because he was a fellow librarian?

  “Ahhhh Borges, my favorite writer, called Buenos Aires the ‘city of cities.’ When I am home, I walk on calle Serrano, Borges’ street of birth. In New Jersey, I keep a book of his poemas. Several novellas and essays are waiting on a table near my bed. Reading Borges, I am less homesick.”

  Transfixed, I could not believe that a lover of literature had materialized out of that tacky crowd. No need to coax me into anything, Roberto, I mused to myself. Lead me anywhere in the universe. In a cab, as we weaved through traffic down the West Side Highway. I imagined myself floating in a spaceship to the planet Venus.

  As Roberto’s lips glided toward mine, I held his tongue hostage, confident the rest of his body would follow before long. Hands flying, we fumbled with each other’s clothes, pawing at buttons and zippers. The more I fondled his firm flesh, the more I became ravenous to continue my explorations between sweet smelling sheets in a snug bedroom where we could shut out the world.

  The taxi driver, his eyes glued to the rear view mirror, jolted to a stop, and I asked in a dazed voice, “Where are we?”

  “Downtown,” Roberto murmured, “In this quiet place, we shall be alone to get to know each other.” Pushing back his curly black forelock, which tumbled over his forehead, Roberto stripped off his silk tie. This provocation made me want to rip off the rest of his clothes.

  My infatuated eyes recognized a dilapidated building that I had jogged by along the river promenade during the day. It would have fitted perfectly in a Buenos Aires slum. A small, crooked sign identified the dump as a hotel. In a lobby that cried out for a dust buster, Roberto registered “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.” The desk clerk paid no attention.

  At one A.M. this flophouse did a lively business with transients and hookers. So did nearby gay bars, catering to “rough trade,” filled with noisy men cruising. How could Roberto, a devotee of Borges, be so insensitive? I almost ran home—only a few blocks away.

  Mustering my bravado, I ignored the rancid smells emanating from rooms with doors ajar. What if, for some reason something went wrong and, desperate to escape, I screamed? Help from the desk clerk, who probably had covered up a murder or two, was unlikely. Three giggling transvestites—blonde wigs askew, tickling each other—clumped up the stairs in huge, gold platform heels. One turned around to purse gigantic red, kissy-lips in my direction.

  Was I appearing in a porn video set in a waterfront dive? If only there were a security guard or a burly bouncer in sight. Did a mouse scoot by? I had imagined that our communion would occur in a charming spot after we clicked champagne flutes, romantic music in the background. Yet, as Roberto guided me toward our room, I followed submissively. Under his spell, I had been lured this far and would have entered the door if Hades were on the other side.

  Once inside Roberto hurled me on the bed, then leaped on my startled body. He slowly spread my legs to let his scorching tongue travel along my moist corridor of joy. Each flicker of his tongue caused a pulsing beneath my skin, causing my legs to flutter like the wings of a soaring bird. Massaging my throbbing clitoris, Roberto whispered endearments in Spanish.

  Flexing, writhing and arching, I expected to tear the thin, grayish sheets permeated with the scent of past revelers. I kept my eyes shut to avoid seeing the frayed wallpaper and tattered chair. Caught up in a rhythmic flow that halted then moved sinuously like a tango, my imagination constructed a fantasy to escape the squalor:

  I rode all night on horseback in the Pampas along grassy plains with a gaucho. We headed into a sunrise that flooded the sky with a palette of intense colors into a pink-armed dawn that cradled our spent bodies. As the sun rose to its full strength, its rays pierced my skin. A series of explosions culminated in a single burst of blinding light. Its voltage made me leap off the horse straight up into the sun.

  I opened my eyes to stare at the same stuffy room with a cracked ceiling, its walls yellowed as though clients had pissed on them. Now it was bathed in a warm orange glow, casting over it an otherworldly patina. My tongue moved inch by inch, downward from Roberto’s lips—still damp from my wetness—to his muscular neck, circling his nipples as pink as a young girl’s, to explore the depressions under his arms, and to the crook of his elbows, to the soft skin between his legs and burrowed deep into the folds of his cock. Roberto’s dormant cock, which had played no part in the love feast he bestowed on me, woke up. My experienced mouth gave him equal pleasure.

  Afterward, with a satisfied grunt, Roberto rolled to the other side of the bed and closed his eyes. A few moments later, he stood up on the sagging bed, pulled me up and pressed me tight to his torso as though to crush the life out of me. His brown eyes flashed mischievously.

  “Lucky girl, you’re going to learn tango from a master, a student of Herrera nicknamed El muchacho. Mi amour, you’ve got temperamento and sabor—flavor. Did you know tango comes from tangere, to touch?”

  Channeling my high school Spanish, still in a stupor from our caresses, I shouted, “maravilloso!” Motivated by the doleful laments of the legendary singer Carlos Gardel, I had signed up for a few tango lessons. But it was money wasted on crowded classes that flew through the fundamentals. Now a tango teacher with my kisses branded on his flesh would give me private lessons.

  Playfully Roberto nipped at me with perfect white teeth, causing my face to burn as if it had been slapped. I could hear my pulse throbbing. As I dug my fingers into Roberto’s scalp and neck, his mouth seemed to be everywhere at once. My G-spot migrated from my crotch to my fingers, toes, elbows, eyes, and soul. Would I leave this crummy hotel with wits intact or forever undulate to the tango beat?

  Tango became the glue that cemented our relationship. Twice a month, a phone call from the pampas of New Jersey jolted me out of my academic routine. “I’m crazy to see you, honey,” Roberto would murmur in a steamy voice that conjured up images of him naked, a towel round his neck after a shower. Like a dog drying off, he would shake water from his luxuriant black hair.

  “Wear that lacy red underwear. I can’t wait to rip it off and ravish you.” Ravish he did, especially with his tongue. However, not until we accomplished the steps in our choreographic routine. The sight of his Thunderbird, which looked as though it had been driven nonstop from BA, started my motor running. Invariably he wore a black silk suit and, around his neck, a white cashmere scarf. Often, he presented me with gifts of Borges’ poems or short stories, particular ones marked that he suggested I read. Since Borges’ work already inspired my own poetry, I suspected that Roberto might be psychic.

  We dined at a trendy Argentine steak house in the Fifties, tearing into rare meat with the gusto of cavemen after a long famine. Our eyes, like daggers as we anticipated the night ahead, mentally stripped the clothes from each other’s bodies. Then we went to a tango club, the prelude to our intimate sensual dance that we choreographed anew each meeting.

  Roberto started me out with baby steps, then patiently supplied pointers to perfect my
technique. Guiding me round the dance floor, my instructor rubbed my crotch along the sinews of his thighs, subtly fondled my breasts with his highly developed pectoral muscles. Such pressure—slow, fast, urgent—induced mini orgasms causing me to clasp my lips in order not to moan in public. Advances, retreats, dips and back bends—I absorbed the fundamental principles of tango while anticipating the follow up in private later at night.

  At Roberto’s favorite milonga, held in a funky dive on West Fourteenth Street, we wove up skinny spiral stairs, past faded pictures of tango heavies. In the lobby, we avoided a rickety chandelier that could have crashed down any minute. As we joined dreamlike figures gliding round the room, I reeled from cloying perfume, watched mature women in fantasy makeup display breasts that were testimonies to the surgeons’ art. Men wore skin-tight trousers outlining what, for some, was their lone asset. They had a miraculous ability to maneuver partners at high speed around a packed floor without grazing another couples’ ankles.

  The dancers pressed into each other’s vitals, raising the temperature in the room to boiling. Indeed these aficionados—some went to a different milonga every night of the week—made their moves with a religious intensity as though rendering libations to a god. Were they in a club, a cathedral, or in a brothel?

  At last, after hours of flirting, nuzzling, tantalizing one another, we headed for a motel along the Jersey turnpike. A couple of times we drove, our lips locked together, with our eyes on each other and not the road. Luckily, other cars steered clear of two creatures pawing each other. Dunkin Doughnuts, Howard Johnsons, dim gas stations, and seedy truck stops were shining beacons on our path. Checking into Motel Six at two A.M., we turned on a porn channel to chortle at the huffing and puffing.

  Our underwear flew, lips were bitten, bleeding. In anticipation of familiar stimulation, my nipples tingled as though a thousand minuscule feathers were trickling down on them. Finally, my tango master’s moist tongue slithered down my body head to toe, improvising new moves in our ongoing dance. If we woke early, we plunged into the lavender-scented water of a king-sized tub. Frisky fish, we nibbled each other’s toes. As tango music from Roberto’s CD player wafted into the deliciously scented bathroom, we rubbed each other dry with fluffy towels. Checkout time had crept up on us.