Piano and Weekend

Weekend. What did I do? It seemed to have disappeared again. I am in the train now. Not much time to write down everything, no time to write down the thoughts. The Metro-North train is racing and rocking like crazy toward the City. I am hungry. I am going to meet up with the only guest I have left from this past week. We will meet in the West Village, maybe catch a bit of the sunset, maybe not. Some food. I should be home, resting, or cooking. But it's the last evening I can hang out with her. Tomorrow I have kung fu again, and then maybe tango. I am so sleepy. I don't know how I am surviving.

Friday night was rain rain and more rain. The sky had fallen, or better metaphor, the sky was the bottom of a big bowl of water and it cracked open. I was supposed to meet the pianist. My Turkish guest, the one I am meeting in half an hour, wanted to come with me because she was still afraid of the subway (still is a bit, I think). We climbed up to the train station after braving the torrential rain, and then I saw the previous train still at the next stop. I knew something was wrong. So I got us to go back down to get a taxi. Luckily, one came within 5 minutes.

I was late. The pianist was having her rehearsal (which I misunderstood to be a recital.) I was a little nervous. I didn't like being late. My brain, of course, didn't consider canceling the meet. Of course not.

Being the gentleman, I let my Turkish guest have the taxi once we reached the East Side. I got another one fairly quickly and got to the place where she was doing her rehearsal. She was surprised to see me. She thought I was crazy. She herself got caught in the torrent that broke out just before the sun smiled brilliantly on New York. She didn't think I would come. And I came with a big umbrella, knowing she didn't believe in umbrellas.

Then we went to a nearby restaurant and we started talking. We talked for five hours that spanned the path from the restaurant on the Upper East Side, through the Park, and up the Upper West Side. I had never walked along the Avenue of the Museums at night. So beautiful. So many details you don't notice in the day with the sun, the noises, the tourists, and your own foggy head. Now, in this cool night after the torrent stopped, I walked before the giants that house so much of humanity's art. And all the while, we talked.

And through the Park. I had my umbrella and one-month's worth of kung fu. But more importantly, I had company who made me feel safe, not physically safe, but in the soul. It was nice to be with someone who didn't make me feel judged at any moment. I don't know how she does it. I found myself telling her things I normally would wait a long while with someone. And up we kept walking between the expensive luxurious high rises of the UWS and the dark, quiet forest of western Central Park. All the way to its northern edge where Harlem was in sight. I was tired. I was ready to finish the night with a hug.

Live the moment. It somehow gets harder when each moment becomes more beautiful. Whenever I think maybe there's a future, however uncertain, however short or short-lived, a future with someone, everything becomes scary. What are the rules? What did I learn from the disasters of previous "interactions" (since none were really "relationships"). Don't go too fast. Don't give everything away so soon. Don't show your feelings too quickly. Make her come to you, too. Make her wait. Make her desire you. How? Oh, but every person is different, damn it! In the end, every one of them will just say "No."

I should have at least taken the train with her to the next express stop and take the train back to my home from there. No. I was tired. Sleepy. And scared. In the Park I confessed to her that although I had once really wanted to have a little girl, like the one my sister has, or the one my Korean-German friend has, cute little half-and-half girl, or whatever she is. But I said I had given up thinking about. Not because I didn't think it would ever happen to me, but rather that it was such a useless thing to think about.

Another rule: don't get too sentimental.

I can hear my Italian friend's voice now; she's the one reinforcing all the cruel rules I learned from the women of the past two three years.

But then I wouldn't be too free with her, and this pianist made me feel safe. The worst that could happen, I guess, is ending up yet again another friend.

We danced a lot the next night. I was so tired beforehand I almost didn't go, but I promised her I would be there. She said she felt the same. And we danced the final hour. After that we went for some dinner. More talking. And more talking when I made her accept my invitation to take a taxi all the way up north to her piano apartment on Washington Heights. After that, I had some time to close the night alone in the same taxi back to Queens.

I do crazy things for someone I like. And when it ends the same way, the same let's-be-friend way, I get upset, hurt, and then move on to someone else, hoping to learn from the previous lessons and not repeat mistakes. But something always repeats itself; what makes the difference, I suppose, is what that something is.

Live the moment. It gets harder. It is almost impossible not to hope. But I've been hurt so many times the past two years that it's becoming easier to look away from hope. Too dangerous.

Another reason I didn't completely want to go dancing Saturday was what she told me earlier in the day on Saturday. I went to Washington Heights under the pretense of attending a housewarming party I was invited to. I only stayed there for a little under an hour. Though I was a little tipsy from two sips of sparkling wine. I couldn't wait to go to her part of Washington Heights. I was early. She was still practicing. So I walked around. I have heard of this place. It was my second time here; previous time was also to meet up with her, but that time I was just stopping by for a quick dinner and then go, yes, dancing. This time we would hang out. Not sure what. No plans. Live the moment. I had some time to walk around the neighborhood. Very hilly. I had just finished reading that book about New York, and its ending was in Inwood, the next and final neighborhood if you go further north in Manhattan. All these places had until I met the pianist just names of far-away neighborhoods. Now they mean something to me. I was here, waiting for another chance to be happy, another risk to be hurt.

She took me to the park near her piano apartment. I had been to the museum in the park; it's the Cloisters, part of the Metropolitan. But I didn't walk around the park then. We were talking all the time. Non stop.

Except one moment.

Between the glistening Hudson on our left and the giant granite formation on our right, she told me, not sure how she weaseled her way through our nice conversation, that she would never date anyone from tango. I guess she figured out (not something that hard to figure out) that I was interested. I was quiet for a bit. She felt bad. She said she didn't like making nice people feel bad.

Yet, the conversation then continued. I didn't become angry, self-pitying. I remembered at that moment very clearly my ultimatum to the French girl or the India girl, the ultimatum of either we date or we never talk again. Something moved, and the dynamo of that ultimatum became cold that late afternoon over the Hudson River, across from where my Grandmother was resting, no doubt. The dynamo died not because I was ready to be friends. On the contrary, I was defiant. I would not let ultimatums or rules or anything tell me what the future held for me. Yes, I was a little upset. She invited me to dinner at her place, and I told her I had to go home first. I didn't want to yes to someone who said no to me, even though the topics were different and unrelated. She was sad. She did manage to invite me to her apartment. There she played the pieces she knew or that she was trying to learn.

There, standing there watching her dance with her beautiful piano reminded me of the first time I noticed her, first time I liked her a lot. That first time I admired her was when I went to a recital given by a friend of hers but which she also participated in. That was a few months ago, the last time I stayed in a hotel in New York for the monthly Nocturne milonga. It was March. I remember because February I was in a hotel too, with the French girl. That was the last time with her. I have already written about it, so I will leave it at that. That March weekend was when I lost my beautiful blue tango shoes. I left work earlier to catch the recital. I saw her dance the beautiful dance with the piano. Afterward I told her I had never seen someone dance with a piano. She was touched. She told me later that weekend how grateful she was for my compliment. But I didn't do much more with my admiration for her. We had dinner together with other friends of hers, including this man who claimed to have gone to my high school. He was all over her. I assumed he was her boyfriend.

Now, five months later, I was listening to her play the piano again, watching her fuse with the instrument. Later she would tell me what a passion she had for playing the piano. Nothing in the world made her feel so happy in that way. And I watched her, listened to the union of her presence and that of the piano. Then she invited me to tea, trying to convince me to stay for dinner. We talked more, but not about that happened between the Hudson and the granite formations.

I wasn't sad or devastated going home. Mostly because I hadn't given up. She's a very traditional woman in the sense that she wants to be pursued, she wants to be treated like a lady, she wants a man to open the door for her, to pay for her dinner, to be a gentleman to her, to make her feel like a lady. This despite being single much of her life, and she's about my married sister's age. She comes from a world made of mostly piano and music, and the traveling that came with that. She is simple in that sense, and that's one of the draws. I am tired of complicated women who instead of becoming more perspicacious with the years only become stronger and better wall builders. Simple and wise.

It is with this lack of resentment and the persistence of hope that I danced with her that night, till the end. It is a little ironic, in a bitter way, that one of the things that bind us is tango, but it is tango that has given her the mortar to build a wall against me. I am not sure how much more tango I can do with her. I enjoy already our talks, our connections, and the memories of walking through all these places.

When other people build walls against you, the worst thing you can do is copy them, build walls, around yourself. When you live the moment, you don't need to build walls. Walls are for precautions against the future.

We went out to a quick bite again Sunday night after the milonga, where I didn't get to dance with her because of a long line of men waiting to dance with her. She told me later she wish I had asked her. I smiled and said the line was too long. But we talked. And then I walked her to her subway stop before I hopped on a taxi to get to my apartment for a new week. The unpleasant topic came up. I couldn't help it. It wasn't discussed for long. But she reminded me of what she said on Saturday: rules have exceptions, can be broken. She claimed she'd been hurt too many times to just jump into anything quickly.

As much as I criticize rules, walls, accusing sometimes their owners as cowards, I know they are normal. They are what everyone uses to survive, to keep emotional pain and barbs at bay. What I need to do is not let my own rules, my own walls, get in the way of being happy, of enjoying the moment. I see patterns. I get fearful that despite her hint that her rule about not dating tango people might one day not apply to me, part of me saw lots of patterns, pattern of indecisive women who ultimately hurt me a lot with their indecisiveness. If I think others are cowards, then I need to be a hero to myself to make any accusations. To be a hero to yourself is to remove the barricades, break down the rules.

I'll see her tonight, late. I hope I can be a hero.