and now for some professional ballroom dancing (and headed to VA)

... featuring my friends Jean Paul and Lana Rossi, who were also featured in the movie The Silver Linings Playbook. Sometimes I even dance with Jean. I don't dance anything like that.

I'm off to Alexandria, VA, to Hooray for Books, to talk about truth and fiction with Debbie Levy, whose new book, The Imperfect Spiral, just arrived here last night. I've read the first twenty-five pages this morning and I'd do anything to stick around and finish. It's just that good. I'll write of it when I can.

Alexandria, VA, marks the first time I will see the Small Damages paperback and Handling the Truth in a store. My niece Claire will join us. It will be a special day.

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Get your feet off the floor

I know that it doesn't make much sense to go ballroom dancing with a smashed-up toe, but I've skipped Zumba this week and taken funny, peg-legged walks, and I just couldn't help myself, so I went—climbed the stairs to DanceSport, opened the door, donned my un-girly shoes, and risked it.

I don't think there are enough words for dancing. The ones we use are too often used, and they are rather stultifying. Swirl and twirl—like two bad-hair day sisters. Sashay—if you are doing that, are you really dancing? Twist and roll—sounds painful. Gliding—a fine bit of self-puffery, me thinks.

Maybe all it is (for me) is that I'm being myself—that I'm being happy and not necessarily useful and nobody stops me. Yeah, sure, so maybe Jean rolls his eyes at my spastic reprieves, and maybe somewhere deep inside his elegant Belarussian self he's thinking, Lord, this is some way to make a living. But if this is the case, he doesn't let on—doesn't make me feel old, ugly shoed, sleep deprived, disappointing, academic, too intense, over-the-hill, or elsewise. For those 45 minutes, I'm dancing, and that's the only word there is.

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Boy among Girls

Oh, to be this boy among girls. To have access to their riffling suspicions, their percussive dreams. To know when they mean what they say, and also what they would say, if only asked. At the dance studio last week, Jean claimed, "Every story a woman tells about a man is the same."

"Can't be," I said.

"Oh, yes. Believe me."

(And I pictured this ballroom dance instructor day after day, hour after hour, women in the hold of his cha-cha, his rumba, confessing and declaiming and wanting and hoping.)

"Every. Single. Story. The same?"

"One story," he said.

"So what is the story?"

"The story is simple. The story is this: Men and women are two separate species."

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Jean and Iryna Paulovich

Last night we drove to New Jersey to see our favorite professional ballroom dance couple, Jean and Iryna Paulovich. I've written of them here before. Of Jean, who has taught me to take it slow in salsa, to be late in rumba, to soften the knees in the paso, who says—not often, but enough to keep my hopes alive—"Yes, Beth, this is it." Of Iryna, who sometimes teaches with Jean, who can walk you all around a song and explain, "Now you are on a corner waiting. Now you notice the guy. Now you walk toward him, lazy, not that interested. Now you agree to dance with him. You sigh."

They held a party last night—for their students, for themselves. They extended roses; they danced. But more than anything they exemplified what a marriage can be—so full of passion for an art; so full of respect, one for the other; so happy for the chance to create, to yield a good something together.

We watch ballroom all the time on TV—those forced seductions, those assembled two-minute passion tales. What a grand thing it is, then, to see two people who deeply love each other, dancing through and for that love. To see dance the way dance is meant to be.

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Imperfect

I am beginning to think that I've taken ballroom dancing on so that I might walk around in the rest of my life in awe of talents that will never be mine. Sure, it takes nothing to settle a hip when the cha-cha music plays slow, but pick up the tempo and I look (I fear) like a wind-up doll. And I can go 60 seconds inside the dream of a bolero before I lose my angles and scrape my heel. I dance with a rising star champion who is half my age and infinitely wiser about all things motion and song. I waltz a waltz with a mid-westerner and feel the impoverishment of my east-coast ways. I slouch sometimes. My chin pushes forward. You are paper, my teacher tells me. And with this dance we need rock.

I want to be good at dancing, shamefully I want this, just as I want to write the one perfect book, the one perfect line, and I'm never in the end satisfied. Equilibrium eludes me most days. Urgency brands me.

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