Tango had barely crossed Max’s mind until he met Dolores, an Argentine post-doctoral scholar who had sent an email to graduate faculty looking for an instrument to transfect her cultured cells with foreign genes. Max had just the thing in his lab, packed in its original box and rarely used. He replied at once, and after discussing some technicalities of transfection, they agreed to meet the next day for a drink. Somehow wires got crossed, and while Dolores sipped a lonely Pinot Grigio at Fuel, Max was still at the BioScience Center, tapping anxious queries into his phone. They got together at last, and sitting at a table inlaid with a maple and ebony chessboard below framed prints of Left Bank demi-monde, they regarded each other with interest. Dolores was fair-complexioned, with abundant blond curls framing her face and a mature, lithe dancer’s body. Her eyes caught his in a hypnotic grip.
Dolores said that her father had taught her how to play, and that she’d once earned the title of Best Unrated Player in a chess tournament in Phoenix. In the final round, her opponent had sat convulsing in a wheelchair, a powerful strategy when the chips are down. Her trophy, a kitschy simulacrum of victory gained in defiance of common wisdom, had languished for years in a closet. Well into his second beer and transfixed by her calm gaze, Max perceived an opening into deeper connection with Dolores. He said a University chess club would be marvelous, and as his mind darted over the logistics, Dolores said Tuesdays were out; Tuesday was Tango night.
She explained that she was obsessed with Argentine tango, which spun physical and psychic tendrils that entangled the unwary. The image of Dolores dancing tango nudged Max into hectic overdrive. He had glancing experience with tango. Some years before, a Romanian student in his lab, tilted in a tight mini-skirt over a light-box, had thrilled him with glimpses of panty as she observed proteins migrating through agar gels. She too was interested in tango, and had urged him to come to tango class. Tantalizing prospects had nibbled provocatively but unproductively on the farther fringes of his mind. Now, fueled by Dolores’s earnest advocacy, the distant prospects came into sharper focus.
“So tango offers euphoric fusion of body and soul that ends conclusively with each tanda?” Max said. “Surely that’s a betrayal of feelings that may go further.”
“Feelings are dime-a-dozen,” she said, “love is elusive and redemptive. Tango guides calm reflection on the forces shaping our lives. Let me show you”
She drew Max to his feet, tapped her iPod once or twice, and offered him an earbud. As a Di Sarli waltz swelled silently between them, she tucked an errant curl behind her ear and led Max into a tango. Later that night, she filled his flash drive with all of her tango. The foreign melodies snaked effortlessly into the unfathomed cells of his soul, navigating ubiquitous shoals of death or redemption in the relentless pursuit of love.