Helena

We met in France. We were both tango dancers, Argentine tango dancers, and we were touring. Nothing big, no large venues, simply high school gymnasiums and private castles in small towns that dotted the principal Route Napoléon that ran south of Paris, our tour ending in Toulouse. The other six members of the troupe, three women and three men, had danced together on other tours. Helena and I were replacements for members of the troupe who had other commitments.

Helena was tall, especially in six-inch stilettos of which she must have brought at least a dozen pairs with her. She wore her raven hair streaked in multiple rainbow colors, which I found alluring. I thought we made a decidedly handsome couple on the dance floor.

The first night, when Helena and I were performing to Carlos Di Sarli’s “El Once” in the vaulted cellars of Château des Bories, a 15th century François 1er castle in the Dordogne, she told me she was a psychiatric nurse.

“Where?” I asked, as I gancho’d between her mile-long legs that were enmeshed in black fishnet stockings.

“Yale, in Connecticut,” she replied, lifting her left leg and placing an enganche around my waist, swiftly turning and boleo’ing this way and that—unled.

“That’s not far from where I live,” I said, stopping her and placing my foot against her standing foot.

“True,” and Helena, taking my lead as I bent my leg, dragged my foot.

“Nice barrida,” I told her, as I reciprocated and dragged her foot. We were now standing chest to chest.

“We could meet—” she was doing a series of boleos, front and back, again unled, “—in Montreal.”

We did—but not in Montreal, at least, not right away—and became close. It helped that when we were in Toulouse, and I was having tea in the lobby of our hotel with a dachshund breeder from whom I had bought several over the years, I heard Helena scream, “I want one,” as she jeté’ed down the staircase. She had previously told me that in her youth she had wanted to be a ballerina.

The breeders had brought two pups with them.

“But, Helena, they’re not mine,” I explained.

“I don’t care,” she panted, holding one of the pups fast in her arms.

That night I fell asleep, the image of Helena jeté’ing in my head. I heard strains of violins playing Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. The room was lit only by the moon and the stars above.

From the shadows a figure emerges, a swan, dressed all in white, wings fluttering, on tiny staccato steps. It approaches, jeté’ing across the room. A head, a face, emerge from the white cloud enveloping the swan. It’s Helena.

She twirls, gesturing with wing-like arms for me to follow. I am fascinated, but follow her with my eyes only. She bends and sways, her wings moving up and down, preparing for flight. As she dances closer, I see: Helena is clothed in roses—white roses, long-stemmed white roses, masses of long-stemmed white roses, a mosaic of long-stemmed white roses. The music swells and ebbs, her arabesques graceful, beckoning me to join her.

Together we dance a pas de deux, the slow strains of Tchaikovsky lifting Helena as light as the roses that envelop her. The musical phrases repeat themselves as Helena is lifted up and down, my arms firm on her waist. Helena pirouettes away and, taking a rose from her bodice, throws it…. It lands at my feet. I watch, transfixed by the fluttering of her arms and hands, the movement of her head. Between grand jetés she tosses me more roses from the white cloak that hides her from me.

On her toes, her right leg moves up to touch her left knee, then it lowers. Up, down, up, down, all the time throwing me roses from the mosaic that envelops her. The white-headed roses gather at my feet, a bouquet.

Moving up and down, Helena twirls in circles around and around, peeling off more and more roses. They land, more roses than I have ever seen, all white, blanketing me like snow.

Helena gestures, invites. I approach. She throws me her last rose. Our eyes meet. There is nothing. Helena is….

I awoke with a start, drenched in sweat, my sheets and pillows soaking. Where was I? Then I heard the church bells of the cathedral. I fell back on my pillows and closed my eyes. What a beautiful white swan, jeté’ing and pirouetting, throwing me roses.

Needless to say, I brought both pups back with me—one for Helena, and the second, for myself.

~

When she came to northern Vermont to pick up her dachshund, who she named Léopold, I suggested we dance at my restaurant, the one I owned and managed when I was not writing nor tangoing. I asked Dave, my bartender, to play some tango nuevo, and led Helena to the space my waitstaff had cleared.

“I’ve decided that working for a university sucks,” she said, as she wrapped her left hand in amongst the strands of my recently-coiffed hair.

“Why?” I asked, leading her into cross basic.

“Politics,” she replied, leaning against my right shoulder in preparation. I understood without further explanation, having once been Vice Dean of my faculty at the University of Ottawa.

“Where will you practice?” I turned her and, bending my left leg, I placed it between hers.

“Veterans Affairs,” she said, her gancho almost hitting my chest.

After dancing two more tangos, we left, returning home to Léopold and his sister, Gwendolyn, and to my cat, Rosie.

We spoke every few days, Helena telling me all about her work, mainly about her colleagues who, to me, resembled those she had left at Yale.

“They’re the same…and they’re not,” she told me.

I wasn’t sure if I was following the thread of her logic, which changed direction like dancing the molinete.

“Do you regret having left Yale?” I asked.

“I do…and I don’t,” she replied.

I was about to suggest she take a course in logic, but reversed myself and instead asked, “What about returning to Yale?”

“I might…and I might not. Do you want to meet in New Haven?” she quickly added.

New Haven held milongas where we could tango the first Saturday of every month, except when there were national holidays, making planning a logistical headache.

When we met in New Haven, Helena was wearing a pair of stilettos that sparkled every time she lifted her legs—meaning, all the time—and gave a popping sound similar to the sparklers we used to light on Queen Victoria’s birthday.

“Have things settled down at the VA?” I asked when we came to a stop at the cross.

“Somewhat,” she said, and began a molinete, while I displaced her trailing foot with sacadas.

“So, you’ve decided not to change and return to Yale?” After two clockwise molinetes I turned her and led her into a counterclockwise molinete.

“Sorta,” she answered, placing both her arms around my neck.

To me, “sorta” meant maybe yes, maybe no; perhaps; I’m thinking about it; and I don’t want to talk about it now—so I changed the subject. It was time for a salida.

Helena left the VA, but didn’t return to Yale. Instead, she joined three other nurse practitioners who had an established psychiatric practice in her hometown. When she suggested we meet there and that I should bring Gwendolyn so that she could play with Léopold, I drove down.

~

While we were tangoing at the local YMCA gym, Helena, wearing a simply ravishing creation that revealed everything (and nothing), told me, “I think private practice isn’t for me.”

I prepared a morida, placing one of my feet on the side of her right foot, but her announcement that private practice wasn’t her thing caused me to pause.

“Don’t you get along with your colleagues?” I stepped back with my left foot, bent my right leg, and dragged her foot, and we continued tangoing.

“They’re okay…I guess.”

She seemed distracted. Perhaps Helena wasn’t in the mood to tango, so I led her to a nearby table and ordered a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. The gym was set up like an Argentinian café—romantic, low-lighted, and crowded, with Malbecs and French champagnes circling the tables.

“What is it then?”

“I need a change.”

The following day, I put Gwendolyn in my car and we drove back home. A few days later Helena called.

“You’ll never guess,” she opened.

“You’re right, so tell me.”

“I’m moving…”

“Moving? Where?”

“I was just going to tell you. Minnesota.”

“Minnesota? Who lives in Minnesota?”

“Well, next week, I will be. The university there is short-staffed, so I thought, why not? I told you I needed a change.”

“And Minnesota is a change?” I was getting all worked up. “Helena, are you crazy?” but then I remembered, Helena was a psychiatric nurse.

Helena moved to Minnesota, and by luck, a museum in Minneapolis—the Weisman Art Museum—was planning an exhibition of Bror Julius Olsson Nordfeldt’s paintings and requested my “Portrait of Miss Randolph,” one of several Nordfeldt’s, among other 19th and 20th century paintings by American artists I’d collected over the years. As the Weisman Art Museum building had been designed by Frank Gehry—whose work I found fascinating—I agreed with Helena’s choice for “a change.”

Minneapolis is not a city I would choose to visit, but now I had a dual purpose.

We were tangoing, actually dancing a tango waltz, in a Uruguayan cafe when Helena declared, “I’ve taken up yoga.”

“Does yoga fit in with your schedule at the university?” I asked, trying to maintain the waltz rhythm with Helena’s news.

“Well, you know, it takes at least a couple of months before I’ll be a practicing yoga instructor.”

I stumbled, missing a beat.

“Yoga instructor? But Helena, you’re a psychiatric nurse.”

“It’s the latest thing, you know.”

“No, Helena, I don’t know. What’s the latest thing?” How could I concentrate on tangoing 1…—2…3, 1…—2…3….

“Combining the two. Practicing yoga moves will calm my patients, making it easier for me to treat them.”

At this point, Helena made a half circle and rested with her back against my chest.

I left Minneapolis before the snowstorm hit, my flight back to New York was the last to leave the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport. When I reached home in northern Vermont three days later, I had a landline message from Helena:

“Hi, sweetie. I’m glad you were able to get out of here; I wish I had been with you. It’s still snowing and I’ve missed three yoga classes, so I’m considering giving up on yoga. Speak to you soon.”

I planned to return to Minneapolis, as the Nordfeldt show at the Weisman had been so popular that the director asked if the museum could keep my portrait for an additional three months, but Helena called before I reserved my flights to tell me she planned to transfer from the university there to one in Los Angeles. I think she said University of California Irvine.

“That snowstorm did it,” she said as we were tangoing at a milonga held in the university auditorium.

I was placing lápises while leading her in a series of molinetes. Helena stopped, but I continued rotating, leaving her behind.

“You know, sweetie, winters in Minnesota get old fast.” She then continued to molinete around me.

“But you hadn’t been in Minneapolis an entire winter, only several weeks,” I reminded her, as we tangoed to the cross.

“In Minnesota a few weeks can seem like a few years,” and while I held her, Helena wrapped, first her left leg, then her right leg, around my middle, repeating this, alternating legs. I began to feel that I was being prepared for Christmas.

In my dreams that night, we were dancing to Juan d’Arienzo, tangos sensual, with a marked beat. Helena had decided that enganches were her way of expressing her feelings.

“They make me feel…I don’t know, but I like the way….” I feel her left leg wrap around my middle, then quickly release, then wrap me, then release. She quickly reverses, and I feel her right leg perform an enganche reverso, bringing me to her, her back brushing the hairs of my chest like a mid-summer breeze.

“Your enganches are….” I couldn’t continue. Helena’s mile-long left leg is enganche’ing and we are chest-to-chest in the closest of close embraces. I feel her breasts heave. I am dizzy from their sweet smell.

We continue tangoing, Helena enganche’ing, d’Arienzo marking the beat. Suddenly, her enganche is like the tentacles of an octopus. I’m gasping to breathe….

I woke up, half leaning over the side of my bed, tangled up in the bed sheets that won’t release me. And then I remembered. I was dancing with Helena.

During the ensuing month I heard the raptures of being back in an academic milieu where individual freedom came ahead of group therapy. She’d never been happier, nor had she been given more opportunities to deal with her patients with little interference from her superiors.

~

I returned to Los Angeles as my Nordfeldt portrait was now part of the loan exhibition at the Getty Museum. While we were tangoing to a particularly slow Osvaldo Pugliese, Helena asked in a rhetorical fashion, “What would you say if I moved over to the VA? You know, they have an opening and appear dying to get me.”

Helena hadn’t told me that she had had any communication with the VA office in LA, so her confiding in me on the dance floor caused me to ask, “Honey, when did all this come about?”

“Oh, I’ve been thinking about it for a while,” which told me a lot…and not much at all.

Helena accepted the offer from the VA office. At least she didn’t have to move, as the apartment she was living in with Léopold was equidistant from both her former office at UC-Irvine and the VA office.

I was back home when Helena called.

“Hi, sweetie. Busy?”

“Hi Helena. No, not really, just sending out query submissions to a couple hundred literary agents.”

“Wanna meet me in Hawaii?”

It seemed that the VA had an amazing opportunity in Maui, which Helena just couldn’t pass up.

“When will you be going?” I asked, realizing that at this point in our relationship such an opportunity doesn’t happen often in Helena’s life and that she would be jumping at the offer.

“Oh, I’m already here with Léopold.”

A couple of JetBlue flights and I was dancing with Helena at a beach club on the island of Maui.

“I simply love it here,” she swooned as I led her to perform boleos, her hula skirt swishing this way and that, showing off Helena’s legs. She wasn’t wearing stilettos. “I wanted to be totally au naturelle,” she said, the leis around her neck kept hitting me in my face, forcing me to duck each time she boleo’d.

Being in Hawaii with Helena was pleasant. The hotel prepared an asado one of the nights, but they roasted a suckling pig, which I passed up as I was raised in a Kosher household. I decided on the fruit and vegetable platter.

Back in northern Vermont, I continued writing and querying literary agents, and Helena, I assumed, was adjusting to the VA office in Maui.

But when I slept, I dreamed.

We are in Buenos Aires, dancing at Club Gricel. The milonga is crowded and I hold Helena close, with her head resting on my chest, her arm casually draped around my neck. I place a foot between hers and lead her to gently step over mine, into a cross. I ask for ochos—nothing big, just slender—no stretching, tiny.

The music—a medley of tangos from the big orchestras of the ’70s and ’80s—carries us.

“Enjoying yourself?” I ask as I bring her closer.

“This is what I like best, sweetie.”

We walk to the cross, and stop. Helena looks up at me. Both of her arms are around my neck. She reaches up. I bend down. Our lips….

I awoke with a start. Rosie, my young cat, was stretched out on my stomach, her mouth touching my lips.

“Good morning, Rosie.”

~

Then, one evening, Helena called.

“I just received a message from my superior that they’re closing the office.”

“Where does that leave you?” I asked.

“Oh, I’ll be doing my work at home, via the computer.”

A week later, during which I had written the first chapter of a new book, Helena called.

“It’s depressing.”

“Well, I thought, being a psychiatric nurse, depression is right up your alley.”

“You know, I wasn’t made to be alone,” she said, ignoring my observation, “and Maui is, well, very quiet. I think I’ll transfer to O’ahu.”

“Honolulu?”

“Yes, I think so. The VA has an office there.”

I decided: Helena needed me, so I made reservations for two more JetBlue flights, and once more we were tangoing on the beach, but this time it was in front of the Hilton Hawaiian Village Resort, and Helena was wearing her sparkling six-inch stilettos and had abandoned her hula skirt and lei for a more conventional mini-skirt and a necklace of seashells.

“You know, sweetie, because I now have to teladoc—”

“What is teladoc?” I asked, bringing her to a complete stop with my right foot.

“It’s what you do now. Clients ring me up or contact me on my computer. But I can do that anywhere, so I was thinking….” Helena moved her left leg, and I placed a gancho, “What would you say if I moved to Seattle? I can teladoc from the VA office there?” We were now in close embrace, with Helena’s right shoulder against my chest.

“Helena, when we met in Paris, you told me you were a psychiatric nurse, but you didn’t explain what exactly you do?” I moved slightly to her left, so that she could place a backward gancho.

“I have a specialty. I advise my clients on stability.”

I led her into cross basic….

“Many people, especially vets, feel they can’t sit still, and so they move, never staying in one place long enough to really make it their home—and that includes their jobs.”

…where we danced mirror-image ochos….

“Therefore, they’re forever switching, from one employer to another.”

…and then we paused.

“Well, it’s my job—and I’m particularly good at it—to advise them on how to remain in one place and stick to one job and not move around.”

I closed my eyes. I could hear George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

Helena looks terrific. She ochos, then boleos, her skirt flying this way and that, reminding me of Marilyn Monroe standing over a subway grate, her dress bellowing up over her head, in The Seven Year Itch. I catch Helena’s foot and perform a morida. Then, stepping back and to the side, I lead her to mirror my move. Bending at the knee, I slide her foot, Helena’s mile-long leg rises, her skirt twisting around her waist. Coming down into an ocho, I lift her. Helena splits the air, her skirt fanning her upper body. I lower her and fold her in an embrace. Her smile tells me she’s happy. I’m happy too, dancing with Helena.