She has a shawl wrapped around her shoulders and is leaning back comfortably with one elbow propped on the table, watching the dancers with the look of someone sitting at an Italian pavement café, regarding the passersby with detached interest. Her knees are covered by one of her characteristically demure skirts and her platinum hair, as always, is loosely piled into a bun, fifties-style. She is classic, elegant, mysterious, seductive: a Soviet spy, a Bond girl, a Hitchcock blonde. I glance down beneath the table and see, to my delight, a pair of sparkly flat jazz shoes. It is late in the night. The dark Oregon sky is fading into a cloudy, rain-scented dawn. Are her feet just tired? Or do her flat shoes mean she will lead me?
Rodriguez. The pulse is simple, regular, square. One three, one three. But each phrase ends with the pianist’s fingers running over the keys: light but clear in the silence of the break. I am a shadow for you, Moreno sings and the piano responds: an echo, a thinner, more unsubstantial, solo voice trailing after the orchestra, an auditory shadow, a sad tinkling of keys squeezed in between phrases, an afterthought, a child at the end of the crocodile of schoolkids, with no one to link arms with, solo. Wait for me: I’m coming. I don’t know why I love you, the tango insists, merciless in its staccato repetitions. I don’t know why I believe in you. I don’t know how to laugh; I don’t know how to dream. I don’t know. It’s the voice of deep frustration at the meaningless of love, suffering, longing and regret.
The pared-down quality of the music suits her, matches the dark sombre colours she favours, her striking features clean of make up, the elegant simplicity of her manner. In the embrace, she is an unobtrusive presence. I am scarcely aware of her, listening instead to the music and enjoying the sensation of my own body, its structure, its position, its internal architecture: the chunky vertebrae in their narrow S, the balls of femurs turning in the hip sockets, the flat triangle of my sacrum pointing straight down to the backs of my heels in their rosy ankle straps. At every step I feel I reach axis fully and completely, my weight settling comfortably over the arch of my foot, the pressure evenly divided between toes and heel — not pushing, just resting. Her leading gives me a wonderful sense of security. I feel suddenly as slender and statuesque as her, upright as a column, poised. My feet would not have been throbbing with pain within their Alanis sandals had I danced with her all night, I know. I can feel the smooth wood of the floor beneath my felt soles, soft as a caress. I am grounded, rooted and yet mobile, confident, touching base. I feel free — free to stipple the wood with tiny taps of my free foot along with the melancholy piano. Free to listen to the sad message Moreno is singing. Free to snuggle in her arms. Not compensating, not searching for balance, not letting my tender feet struggle for their place on the floor. Every place we travel to, I feel as though I have lived in forever — an Ent, sucking moisture from the earth through xylem and phloem and then, when I want to, running free.
