Sherman - or Sly as he is most frequently known - is the epitomal tango bachelor. He fills every floor, always smelling sweetly, and equipped with mints. His flings may be the ultimate condensation of a weekend of passion into a single tanda. If he were any less gentle or sweet, he might come across as the unsavory side of player, but there is a vulnerable honest quality that defeats this image. He owns more shoes than I did even at the height of my obsession, including an utterly divine pair of comme il fauts (4 inch stilettos he uses for following sometimes). His home is littered of photographs of him embracing beautiful women and you're apt to find him walking arm in arm with a different one nearly every night of the week.
Every night of the week, incidentally, is about how often you'll find him on one tango floor or another. He stays out and up routinely late, as is more or less demanded on the tango night life. Since he keeps a day job, this usually results in five hour sleeps, something he is convinced he has learned to handle, but which still seems to result in an hour long battle of snooze button skirmishes with the alarm clock in the morning and having been late to work a fair enough amount of time that his officially start time was pushed back by an hour.
He eats a lot. And I say this as the fiance of the human garbage disposal that is Andrew Gelfand Wright. They are at least on par. I'm guessing he rarely eats at home, since this is about what his fridge looked like:
And his freezer:
The bachelor pad also functions as a bit of a tango hostel for a rotating cast of characters coming through town. When I arrived, he was already hosting an Argentine couple who were stopping by San Francisco during a teaching tour of the US.Upon locating me at the BART station, he swept me off to a milonga and was ready to keep dancing when we returned just around 1:00 a.m. I had passed out on a cushion in the living room while he finished off the second dinner he'd bought on the way home.
As a female friend a ways off, I don't necessarily hear about the serious romantic entanglements that punctuate the nightly tanda flings in a more than peripheral manner, but I suspect they are sentimental, sweet and eventually at odds with the greater mistress that is tango in its naked possibility. I also suspect the energy stirred in those flings is recycled through and back into the dance, which takes on an even deeper sigh at each pregnant pause.
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| the Comme Il Fauts |
Now, Dan... Dan is in many regards the yang to Sly's yin.. He is not exactly a bachelor, having been in a serious relationship for a few years now, I believe. But he does embrace certain aspects of inveterate bachelorhood. We lived together for a while in our twenties, and have made our share of inter- and intra- national trips together. We've seen each other through depressions and stupidities, and a million or so terrible movies.
As the dust settles, I suppose it can be weird to see a friend with that much history - as they carry remnants of your older self with them to any meeting and you do the same for them. I will always see the glint of a prickly and discomforted twenty-something still mixing her fears and bitterness with an affect to beat them both back instead of admitting that they could merely be let go. I'll admit, in some regards, I was a funnier person and I wrote far more interesting stories- albeit painfully self indulgent - by feeding from that internal turmoil, but I also tend to think it wasn't worth it. I think Dan agrees, but to a lesser degree I think he also sometimes misses that bit of misguided youth in me. For the very least, because I've slowly adapted to my version of certain social norms (marriage, kids), that still taste of mortality and defeat to him.
He has a big bushy beard now (I've known him since I was thirteen, so I still don't necessarily picture him as such) and - while gentler and more understanding - he remains fast in his general manner. After I left Massachusetts to finish school and law school, he landed in Romania with the Peace Corps, and eventually re-alit in Northampton while enduring the relentlessly unproductive application process for the Foreign Service. Two years of being wait-listed (this is after the entire process was completed, including a visit with a security agent for me at school to vouch for him), and he gave up and worked in a somewhat techie position involving videos and internet and distribution of some sort. His boyfriend is a talented artist who makes side money at conventions and smaller shows, while working at Whole Foods and maybe some extra pastry cheffing on the other side.
Despite Dan's apparent contempt for all things traditional, they actually have fallen into one of the more traditional relationship dynamics I've seen, but for Dan's current unemployment after the move. Of course, as is commonly the case, he spent some time rather fervently trying to convince me not to have children. This was not some greater world-population thing, but an observation that people with children impose rudely on others, babies are less worthy of the attribution of sentience than dogs, and a connection to his own personal experience. Since he also believes that it should not be a crime - theoretically at least - to kill children until they can write a basic essay saying why we should not kill them (I pointed out this may cause many adults to be eligible for killing, which he counted as a side benefit), I don't often spend much time trying to argue into common ground on the issue.
I'm far less gooey about children than many, but seem to balance the imposition with some beneficial side effects of being around them. I rather get along with kids at times, for one. He also said he was coming to my wedding but did not know why I needed to have one at all and petulantly referred to our Save the Date cards with the Dr. Seuss saying as "some cutesy crap." He was less than thrilled that we would not be providing alcohol.
All this said, he has a genuinely good heart and cares about his friends (if not their theoretical babies) more deeply than the average person, which is probably why I've not taken offense much at any of the things he tends to say (or the gory and sacrilegious books he tends to write - yeah he's a writer of course, although I don't know if he still produces much or considers him such). Unlike Sly, he keeps a fairly moderate stable of attire, but I will say, his mom knits all of his socks for him and they are pretty snazzy:
I'll be seeing Dan and his significant other one more time today. He called this morning an hour or two earlier than I'd expected to let me know that they'd crashed in the city, passed out on an awful air mattress and was still hung over, so where did I want to meet up. Ah, youth. Or something. I'm also seeing Sly again, who has figured out the bus system to drop by the engagement party (Dan made it clear that I was not to even invite him on pain of glare). Sly hopes there will be dancing and that he can steal a tango with me before jetting off to a milonga across town. Dan hopes to never hear anything more about it I suspect.
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