The Princess Tango

Excerpt from To Gether Tales, a bittersweet comedy and romance, with touches of tragedy and magic. The narrator, in the midst of the pandemic, remembers a seven-day cruise, on which eight people shared a dinner table and swapped stories.

Alex and Laurel got engaged before their first date. His best friend and her best friend got married. They were both in the wedding party. He gave her a ride home. She invited him in. He proposed immediately, and she accepted without hesitation. They went on a Caribbean cruise for their honeymoon, on the Princess ship that was the set for The Love Boat TV series.

They were deliriously happy together. Neither of them had danced much before the cruise, but they wound up going to free dance lessons in the afternoon and then dancing from dinner to midnight, every night.

The dance instructor and his wife were Chinese. He claimed that he had taught finance at Harvard Business School and that this was his retirement−cruising around the world with his wife, who was his dance partner, and passing on to others these steps that for them had led to marital harmony and bliss. ‘Happy wife, happy life,’ he said proudly.

He was rigid in his teaching style: ‘One, two, three, four. One, two, three four. This is how it is done in the cha cha… this is how it is done in the merengue… this is how it is done in the tango… this is the way. This is the sequence of moves and steps and no other. If you and your partner each learn that and do that, you will be in sync with one another and will experience the joy of dance and the joy of marital harmony.’

At first, Alex and Laurel rigidly followed his instructions. But they soon found that their bodies moved together naturally, even when they forgot the instructions, even when they unintentionally used a cha cha move in a foxtrot, even when they mimicked other experienced dancers and added unorthodox side steps and hand-over-hand twirls. By day four, they stopped going to the lessons but still danced until midnight, and their repertoire expanded. They felt the music in their bodies, and they anticipated one another’s moves with no effort at all. Soon their dancing evolved to a set of moves that they could, with minor modifications, use to any music from waltz to tango.

There was one routine they chanced upon that they hadn’t seen anyone else do−one, two to the left, overhead twirl with handholding, twirl back again, side left, side right, then walk straight ahead with arms joined behind their backs. They were proud of that move and did it smoothly. Other couples would stop and watch when they did it, and then would try to imitate it.

That cruise, that magical moment, ended all too soon.

They flew back to Philadelphia, picked up their car at the airport, and drove toward their home in Huntingdon Valley. It was a clear moonlit night in June. They were holding hands and listening to a radio station playing The Tennessee Waltz, which they had danced to as the ship sailed away from St. Martin, when a tractor-trailer coming toward them on the other side of the road lost control and jackknifed into them.

When Alex woke up in the hospital, he was told that Laurel had died in the crash. At first, in his confusion, he didn’t know who Laurel was. His parents and his sister helped fill in the gaps in his memory, but he couldn’t help but feel that he was dreaming now−that this was a nightmare that he would wake up from, or that he had dreamt meeting Laurel and falling in love with her and had dreamt their cruise-ship honeymoon. Nothing felt real−not the past, not the present.

Eventually, he went on with his life. He married again. They had two kids. They divorced. He married again and had another kid and divorced. His memories of Laurel and their time together faded.

When he retired, forty years after the accident, he treated himself to a Caribbean cruise, alone.

Retirement was a downer. Living alone was a downer. His kids were grown and married with kids of their own and were scattered, living hundreds of miles from Philadelphia. He saw them once, sometimes twice a year. And, aside from his kids, he had little to look back on with pride, and nothing to look forward to. The routine of going to work and doing what was expected of him was over. He was no longer part of the work-related web of expectation, recognition, and camaraderie. When he jogged or used a treadmill at the gym, as his doctor recommended, he couldn’t help but feel that all the activity of his life had been like this−going in circles or going nowhere, accomplishing nothing that would last. When he died, aside from his kids, he would have left nothing behind, no sign of his existence. He might just as well have never lived.

Going down to dinner on day two of the cruise, as they were sailing away from Princess Cay in the Bahamas, a band in the Piazza was playing The Tennessee Waltz and a dozen couples were dancing. He overheard two couples talking about an unusual dance move that one couple had done on day one and that nearly all the experienced dancers had picked up. It resembled a tango move, but they used it in the cha cha, the merengue, and even the waltz, like now. They called it the Princess Tango Step. There was a legend that had been passed down through the years about a young couple on their honeymoon who had first done it and done it so well that others copied it and others copied them. People called it a meme, a piece of human culture that perpetuates itself, an echo of that time long ago and of the love of that couple who first danced it. As if the love of two people in harmony with one another found natural expression in these very moves, and as long as there was love in the world, there would be the Princess Tango.

YouTube video of the author reading this story.

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