The Tami Tango Tournament

Let me start by saying my wife Tami is twenty-eight, I'm thirty-one, and neither one of us can dance. That matters for the rest of this story, so keep it in mind.

We were in Playa del Secreto, Mexico, at this little resort town where Tami had talked me into a two-week vacation. She's a travel blogger, so she sells these trips to me like a lawyer, which is funny since I'm the one who works at a law firm. Paralegal, not lawyer. Same thing after eight years, or so my boss tells me every raise season.

The third night there we wandered into a dance hall two blocks off the beach. It had a sagging stage, a bar that smelled like spilled beer and salt, and a sign taped to the door that said TANGO DE FUEGO, ANNUAL, ALL COUPLES WELCOME. The air was so humid my shirt stuck to my back before we even sat down.

"Tami, honey, that sign says annual," I told her as we found a table near the floor. "Annual means they've been practicing all year. We've been married four years and our wedding dance was basically hugging to music."

"We took that class," she said. "The one at the community center."

"We took three classes and you stepped on my foot so hard I limped for a week."

She grinned at me over the candle on the table. She had that tan going and her hair was all loose and she looked, I have to say it, incredible. Four years of marriage and I still got that little jolt when she smiled at me.

"One dance," she said. "For fun. Nobody here knows us."

That's the argument that ruins me every time. Nobody here knows us.

So the band was playing this slow tango thing and we got out there on the floor and I tried to do the move I remembered, the one where the guy sweeps the girl around and back. I got the sweep half right. The back half I got very wrong. My heel caught the leg of a table by the floor, the little round one, and over it went. Two margaritas, a beer, somebody's plate of what I think was flautas, all of it spread across the boards.

The band didn't even stop. That kind of town.

And Tami, my loving wife, she laughed. Not a polite giggle. A full, head-back, hand-on-my-arm laugh that went on way too long while I stood there holding a wet napkin some waiter had thrown at me.

"It's not funny," I said.

"Benny, you knocked a grown man's beer into his own lap."

"He can dry off."

"He's still drying off."

She was right, the guy was still dabbing at his jeans, but he was smiling about it, so the damage was mostly to my pride. Which was already in rough shape because a woman had stopped at our ruined table and was looking at me like I was something she'd scraped off her shoe.

I knew her face. Mattie Jamison, from my office. She was staying at the same resort with her husband, some guy named Doug who I'd met exactly once at a Christmas party. Mattie was thirty, sharp as a tack, and had been competing with me for the same promotions since 2019.

"Well, well," she said, pulling out a chair at our table like she owned it. "The famous Benny Tillman. I heard you were here, I didn't believe it. Now I do."

"Mattie. This is my wife, Tami. Tami, this is Mattie, she works two desks down from me and has beaten me on every review cycle for three years."

"Not every cycle," Mattie said.

"Every cycle."

Tami stuck out her hand and they did the whole nice-to-meet-you thing while I mopped the last of the beer off the wood.

"So you dance," Mattie said to me, looking at the wreckage.

"That was dancing. Aggressive dancing."

"I'll say." She looked over at the floor, where a couple was moving around doing actual tango steps, real ones, the kind with sharp little pauses. "They're holding a couples contest here Saturday. Robert Bannister is judging. You know who that is?"

I didn't, and said so.

"Only the guy who won some European championship back in the day. My grandmother used to watch him on television. He lives here now, half retired. He judges this thing every year." She turned back to me and I saw the gleam in her eye, the same one she got in the office when she found out I wanted a case she wanted. "You and Tami should enter."

"Mattie, I just destroyed a table."

"Exactly. Comedy act. You'd be memorable." She took a sip of the drink the waiter had replaced for free, which was nice of him. "Tell you what. Doug and I are entering. You enter too. Losers buy the winners dinner at the fancy place up the beach, and the winners get to bring it up at every staff meeting until somebody retires."

"That's the dumbest bet I've ever heard," I said.

"Bragging rights, Benny. Think about it. You'd get to walk past my desk every Monday for a year knowing you out-danced me."

And here's the part where I admit something. My job is reading contracts in a gray cubicle farm while Mattie gets the interesting assignments, and the last year of my life had gone home, dinner, television, bed, repeat, until Tami and I were basically roommates who shared a bank account. I wanted something to happen. Anything.

"Babe," I said to Tami. "Should we?"

She was already nodding. She had that look she gets, the one from our second date when she talked me into the roller coaster.

"We should absolutely do it," she said. "We'll be terrible and it will be the most fun we've had in months."

"That's the spirit," Mattie said, and stuck out her hand, and I shook it, and the matter was settled. Witnessed by a waiter and a man with beer on his jeans.

Then a guy came out of the back room. Fifties, maybe older, silver hair combed straight back, wearing a black shirt buttoned to the throat in that heat. He walked like the floor owed him money.

"Robert Bannister," Mattie said quietly. "He's here early."

He got up on the sagging stage without any introduction and the band quieted down on their own.

"Saturday night," he said. He had an accent, English of some kind. "Couples compete, I judge, one couple wins. The prize is a private master class with me, all night, here in this hall after close. I teach you things nobody teaches tourists." He paused and looked around the room. "The runners-up also get something. They get one hour with me the following week, to learn what the winners learned, slower."

Beside me, Tami went very still.

"All night?" she said. "A whole night of private lessons?"

"From an actual champion," I said, and honestly the competitive part of my brain had already lit up. Beat Mattie, win the class, come home with a party trick. "Babe, we could actually be good at one thing by the time we fly home."

Tami wasn't listening to me anymore, though. She was watching Bannister on the stage, and her eyes had that shine they get when she finds some hidden beach on her blog that she knows will blow up.

"Benny," she said softly, not looking at me. "I want to win this."

"Then we win it."

I had no idea yet what that night would turn into. But that comes later.

We had three days to get ready and exactly one practice space, which was our hotel room. It had two queen beds pushed close together and about six feet of floor between them, and that six feet became our dance studio. I moved the lamp. I unplugged the mini fridge so we had room to spin. Tami put on a YouTube tutorial by a woman named Claire who barked instructions like a drill sergeant, and we tried to follow along with our shoes off on the tile.

"Benny, you're leading with your shoulder again," Tami said for maybe the fourth time. "It's chest. Chest and hips."

"I don't have a chest, I have a very attractive sweater."

"Stop joking, I'm trying to learn the ocho."

"What's an ocho?"

"It's the figure eight thing with the hips. Were you even listening?"

I was, mostly, but I kept getting distracted, and here's why. Tami was wearing the little green shorts she sleeps in and an old t-shirt from a winery, and every time she did the ocho her hips did this thing that made me forget what a shoulder was. I told her this.

"Then stop looking at my hips."

"I physically cannot. You married me, this is your problem now."

She laughed and swatted me with the dish towel she'd been using to wipe sweat, and then she got this look