Arctic Book Club

The book club was supposed to start at seven. By ten past seven, four people were sitting in the common room of the station, and not one of them had read the book.

Noel knew this because he had asked each of them. He was thirty-two, he ran the station's logistics and auctions of surplus gear, and he had one month left before he flew south to a new job he had already signed for. Asking about the book was easier than thinking about that.

"Did anyone get past chapter three?" he asked.

"I got past the cover," said Monica, the glaciologist. She was peeling an orange with a knife she probably should not have been using for that.

"I read the back," offered Dmitri. "Twice. Very thorough back."

"You're all hopeless," said Noel. "I put that book in the supply crate myself. Eight copies. I carried them off the plane."

"And we thank you for your service," Monica said. She held out a segment of orange toward him. He took it.

The door banged open and the cold came in with it, along with Brenda. She was the surf coach, which was a strange thing to be at a research station, but she was doing a short stint studying wave dynamics or something along those lines, and nobody had fully understood the paperwork. She was thirty-four, built like somebody who spent her life pushing other adults off surfboards, and she was the only person at the station who had ever asked Noel to dance.

Well. Not asked yet. But she had mentioned it.

She stomped snow off her boots, dropped her parka on a supply crate, and looked around the room.

"Let me guess," she said. "Nobody read it."

"Chapter three," said Monica, at the same time Dmitri said, "the back, twice."

"Unbelievable." Brenda dropped into a chair and put her boots up on a crate of frozen food. "We are in the middle of nowhere. There is nothing to do here. Nothing. And you all still managed to not read a two-hundred-page book about lighthouse keepers."

"It was very boring," said Dmitri.

"It was about lighthouse keepers. What did you expect, car chases?"

"There was one storm," Noel said. "Chapter six. A wave takes out the boat."

"Spoilers," Monica said, pointing the orange knife at him.

"The book failed us," Brenda announced. "That's the official finding of the Arctic Book Club, second meeting. The book failed and we must now do something else. Something better."

"There's a documentary about penguins in the media room," Dmitri offered.

"We've seen it. Twice."

"There's cards," Monica said.

"We played cards for four hours on Tuesday. I know things about you now, Monica. Things I can't unknow."

Noel laughed, and Brenda turned her chair to face him, the way she sometimes did, like the rest of the room was scenery.

"What about you, auctioneer? You organized this. What's your pitch for saving the evening?"

"I don't have one," Noel admitted. "I figured if I got everyone in a room with a book, shame would do the rest."

"Shame doesn't work on scientists. They publish their shame." She leaned back. "Okay. My pitch, then. Since the book is dead and penguins are exhausted, I say we do something with our bodies instead of our minds."

Monica made a face. "Please finish that sentence carefully!"

"Dancing," Brenda said. "Tango. We have a cello player, sort of, in that Lori said she'd play if we ever got around to it, and I have been dying to teach somebody here the tango since I got off the plane in November."

"You know tango?" Noel asked.

"I know tango. Learned it in Buenos Aires when I was twenty-six. There was a man named Rodrigo and four months of my life I still think about. Mostly the dancing." She grinned. "Mostly."

"And you want to teach it. Here. In a room full of supply crates and a floor that's basically metal."

"It's a challenge. I like challenges. Come on. All of you. It's either this or penguins."

Dmitri raised a hand. "I will watch the tango. I will not do the tango."

"Noted. Monica?"

"I'll do it if there's wine involved."

"There's the bottle Noel has been hoarding since December," Brenda said.

"It's not hoarding," Noel said. "It's inventory management."

"So we drink Noel's wine and Noel learns to tango. Deal." Brenda stood up and clapped her hands once. "Lori! We need you and the cello!"

From somewhere down the corridor, a voice called back, "I said maybe."

"You said maybe, which means yes in every language I speak."

Noel stayed in his chair while the room rearranged itself around him. Monica went for her wine glasses, the plastic ones that survived the flights. Dmitri dragged crates away from the middle of the floor, making a sort of clearing, a small plaza of scuffed metal with a rug nobody remembered buying thrown over the worst of it.

Brenda, meanwhile, had crouched down next to Noel's chair.

"You're doing that thing," she said.

"What thing?"

"The thing where you look like a man doing math about all the reasons to say no. You've been doing it all week. Every time somebody mentions your new job, your face goes sort of gray and you do the math again."

"I don't do that."

"You absolutely do that. I coach people for a living. I watch people's faces when their bodies tell them the truth. Yours has been telling the truth for weeks." She sat down on the crate beside his chair. "So. Last month at the top of the world. New job waiting way down south. You're allowed to have one night where you're not doing math."

"Tango is math," Noel said. "It's steps. It's counting."

"Tango is the opposite of math. You count for the first week and then you stop and it's just two people paying very close attention to each other." She said it lightly, but she was watching his face when she said it.

Lori came in with the cello case, looking as though she had lost a negotiation. "One song. Then I'm eating dinner."

"Two songs. You're a hero. Monica, wine."

Monica poured. Brenda took her own glass and held it out and Noel clinked his against hers, and the wine was terrible in the way everything flown in was terrible, and it helped anyway.

"Okay. Basics." Brenda kicked off her boots and stood on the rug in wool socks. "Tango is a walk. That is the entire secret. You walk, I walk, we walk together. If you can walk to the mess hall without bumping into anyone, you can tango."

"That is genuinely untrue," said Monica.

"It is genuinely true and I'm the teacher. Noel. Up. Stand here. Hand goes on my shoulder blade, my hand goes on your arm, and this hand, right here, that is the entire conversation. Everything I want you to do, I tell you through this hand. Everything you want to do, you tell me through yours. No talking needed after tonight."

Noel stood. His hand hovered near her shoulder blade for a second, doing one last bit of math.

"Is this alright?" he asked.

"It's my idea, so yes. Ask me again whenever you want, though. I like being asked." She set her hand on his arm and waited. He settled his palm against her back, and she nodded, satisfied, like something had finally been arranged correctly in a room full of crates.

"Now step back. No, other foot. There. Again. You're counting, stop counting. Fine, count for now. One, two, three. Again."

Lori began to play, badly at first and then less badly, a low line of notes that didn't sound much like Buenos Aires but sounded, Noel had to admit, like something.

"Better," Brenda said. "Again. And stop looking at your feet, they're attached to you, they'll come along."

"I'm going to step on you."

"Everyone steps on me the first night. Rodrigo stepped on me so many times I bruised in a shape I still think of as his left boot." She adjusted his frame with two small pushes of her hands. "Again. Walk."

He walked. She walked. Somewhere behind them, Monica refilled the wine and Dmitri watched with the expression of a man attending a lecture, and the music wobbled on, and for about ninety seconds Noel forgot about the new job entirely.

"There," Brenda said quietly. "That. Whatever that just was, keep doing that."

They turned the small rug twice more, and then Noel's sock landed square on Brenda's arch.

"Sorry. Sorry, that's, I told you I'd do that."

"You did. Full marks for follow-through." She shook her foot out and reset her grip. "Again. And Noel, relax the shoulder. You're holding it up here like it's a coat rack."

"Maybe I'm holding you up."

"You are not holding me up. I have carried men twice your size off a sandbar. You're holding up yourself, badly." She nudged his elbow down half an inch. "There. Now you're dancing and not defending."

He stepped back, she stepped forward, and it worked, more or less, for four counts.

"Who taught you this?" he asked. "Whoever it was must've had patience."

"Me, mostly. Rodrigo had opinions, but the patience was mine." She turned them through the corner of the rug. "I was twenty-six, living in Buenos Aires for a season, and I decided I was going to learn tango the way I decide everything, loudly."

"And did you?"

"Loudly. Badly for a while. Then one night it just opened up and I understood what the whole thing is for." Her hand squeezed his arm once. "You'll get there. You're less of a disaster than you think."

"That is a low bar and I would like it noted that I cleared it."

"Noted. Monica, is he clearing it?"

"He is clearing it," Monica called from the crates. "Barely. Drink more wine."

The song ended and Lori, who had been pretending not to watch, started into another one without being asked.

"That was two songs," Brenda said over her shoulder.

"It was one and a half. The middle doesn't count."

"Musician math," Dmitri said, and Brenda laughed and pulled Noel back into frame.

* * *

By the middle of the second song something had shifted, and Noel couldn't say exactly when. The counting had dropped away the way she promised it would, and now it was just the pressure of her hand against his arm and the slow pull of her palm on his back, telling him things. He found he was doing what it told him.

"Better," Brenda said. "Much better. You stop narrating when you stop thinking."

"I'm not narrating."

"You were narrating out loud for the first ten minutes. Now you're quiet. Quiet is good."

They turned again. Her hip brushed his and neither of them moved away from it. Then on the next turn it happened again, stayed a half second longer, and Noel's hand on her shoulder blade slid an inch, not on purpose, or on purpose in a way he hadn't admitted to himself yet.

Brenda looked up at him. She was close enough now that he could see the wine had put a little color in her face.

"Okay," she said. "Full stop. Honest question, and you can answer honestly because the room is full of crates and glaciologists pretending to look elsewhere. Was that an accident?"

"No," Noel said. It came out steadier than he expected. "No, it wasn't."

"Good. Because I was going to feel weird about it otherwise." She didn't step back. If anything the space between them got smaller. "You're standing very close, Noel."

"You're standing very close too."

"I'm the teacher. I'm allowed." Her thumb moved once along the inside of his arm, a small absent thing that did not feel absent. "You've got one month left here."

"Twenty-nine days. I did the math."

"There it is. The math face." She was smiling, though. "Twenty-nine days. And in twenty-nine days you fly south to a job you already signed for, and you never have to stand on this rug again. So I'm going to ask you something, and I want you to hear the whole question before you do the math."

"Okay."

"Do you want to keep dancing, or do you want to stop dancing?"

Noel looked at her hand on his arm. Then at the window, where the dark outside was total and had been for weeks, then back at her.

"Keep dancing," he said. "But not, I think, the way we've been dancing."

"Well," Brenda said. "There it is."

At the crates, Monica had developed an intense interest in the bottom of her plastic wine glass. Dmitri looked directly at the ceiling. Lori played on, either not listening or being extremely kind.

"Can I say something before you answer?" Noel asked.

"Say it."