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The Ugly Tango Dancer |
by Rosanne Griffeth
Mirabelle walked past the Arthur Murray Dance Studio on Broughton Street so she could glance nonchalantly through the wide plate glass windows. He moved like a violent poem written by a half-mad artist living in a squat eating beans and fucking on top of pizza boxes. It depended on who danced with him, of course, but Mirabelle had never been with him that way.
The tango dancer was an ugly man and therefore the perfect desire. His face, pitted as the surface of the moon, had a weak chin, unremarkable nose, and his hair clung to his skull like paint. When Mirabelle heard he played cello, she sighed. An ugly man who played cello and danced tango promised unplumbed depths. In her dream, he smelled of Old Spice, and when she looked up at him through her lashes, blurring her vision, his features arranged themselves into a pleasant blob. An ugly man could be the perfect faceless lover if only one's eyesight were poor enough. An ugly man could never break your heart.
She saw him dance with a schoolgirl, almost as ugly as the man himself. But Mirabelle knew the girl would grow out of her ugliness with careful applications of cash -- orthodontia already wrapped her smile in steel. She would grow out whereas tango man had grown into the homeliness wrapping his erect movement in a soft, sliding skin of unattractive.
He stiff-armed the teenager across the floor, leading forcefully. The girl's eyes glued themselves to the floor and when the ugly tango dancer chucked her chin up so she looked him in the eye, her saddle-shod foot landed on his instep. She tripped and they broke contact. He flexed his metatarsal, perhaps the only beautiful part of him, and winced. Mirabelle walked on that day, smiling to herself.
She learned his name the day he danced with the fat lady. It's true what they say. The fat lady floated across the floor like a wraith, her big bones melting in the tango dancer's rigid embrace. Mirabelle's eyes narrowed. Despite the open abrazo, the fat lady overflowed into the ugly tango dancer's space, her undulations jostling his hips, his abdomen, stealing caresses. They broke apart abruptly and the fat lady thanked him for the lesson.
Mirabelle reclined in a tangle of sheets that night, her fingers sank knuckle deep in her sex, shuddering. She looked not at all like Giorgione's The Sleeping Venus, or Titian's Venus of Urbino, or any other tasteful nude painted of women masturbating. She was not relaxed, her face distorting with a warrior's grimace as though she would bite if disturbed. At the brink of her orgasm, she shouted his name twice. The utterances drove her over the edge.
Tomorrow, perhaps, she would finally do it. Walk into the dance studio with smoldering eyes and demand her free lesson. Perhaps she would hook her leg around his waist, toe pointed, and let him drag her across the dance floor, his bad teeth inches away from her ear.
Rosanne Griffeth's work has been published by MsLexia, The Potomac, Now and Then, Pank, Night Train, Keyhole Magazine, Smokelong Quarterly, Thieves Jargon and Six Little Things among other places. She lives on the verge of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and spends her time writing, raising goats, and documenting Appalachian culture.
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