To the Cruise Ship Dancer
I spotted you walking past our table. You were with a friend, both holding graffitied skateboards and wearing cuffed pants and Vans. We locked eyes for a moment. You walked to the counter to order coffee. I offered to order for my friends, a strategic move for a chance to talk to you.
I stood behind you in line and you turned to me. “I like your…” you said, then made dots on your face with a pointer finger, indicating my freckles. It was almost too easy. I asked if you spoke Spanish. We switched to that language, the one we’d both grown up speaking in different parts of the world: you in Argentina, me in Philly. You pointed to a giant cruise ship docked on the water, a monster of white clogging up the port.
“That’s where I live,” you said.
I was a month out of an emotionally turbulent relationship with my ex-girlfriend: my first relationship and my first queer relationship, at once. I was traveling in Portugal on vacation from a teaching gig in France; two friends had flown out to meet me. We’d spent the morning burning our legs up the steep hills, roasting under the sun that blazed with an anger that felt targeted. Lush bougainvillea exploded in clusters on the corners of buildings; laundry fluttered on balconies, infusing the cobblestone corridors with the scent of cleanliness. We loved the laundry most of all: the sheets, the fuzzy purple baby clothes, the enormous men’s underwear. We had stopped at an umbrella-shaded table with an ocean view for an espresso and a rest.
You were a dancer, you explained as we balanced our trays of espresso-brimming cups and went over to our respective friends. A cruise ship ballroom dancer. You gave nightly salsa performances in a banquet hall for overdressed passengers who sipped mojitos at round tables and watched.
“That sounds tiring,” I said.
“It can be.”
I’d noticed your body: compact, sinewy, alert. Seeing you now in your backwards cap and your penny board, it was hard to imagine you on that ship, zipped up into a shimmery red leotard, white teeth beaming into a false smile. You said the cruise had sailed through the Mediterranean and docked in Lisbon for the day. You had the day off, had to be back on the boat by 8 p.m. Already, we were short on time.
*
I was out of practice with all this: men, strangers, flirting. The past year in France, I’d spent tortured nights on FaceTime with my ex until 2 a.m., battling through miscommunications and tear-filled arguments. My body was in Lyon—teaching, strolling along the Saône, sweating through ballet class, spilling beers at the bar where my friends worked––but my spirit was across the world, on the phone with a person who demanded everything from me, who said nobody had ever loved anybody the way she loved me, and I couldn’t leave her because everybody left her. The only solace I could give was that promise—I’m not going anywhere.
I spent my savings flying across the Atlantic to visit her on my vacations, missing out on nights with friends and trips to Kraków. There was a lightness to my life in Lyon, the new people I met, the lights dancing on the river, the shiny wooden floors of my studio apartment that glittered as I made my morning coffee and listened to the university students gathering outside for a mid-morning cigarette. And there was loneliness, too, moving alone and fumbling my way into an international life. But I couldn’t be open to the loneliness, could not enjoy the novelty. Nights that I spent with friends, she would be waiting for me to call. I’d hurry home, panicked, extricating myself from an evening of pleasure only to be met with accusations of having fun while she was unhappy. The dissonance in my life tortured me, and I couldn’t see my way out of it.
When I finally ended it, the afternoon of St. Patrick’s Day, I hadn’t planned to; it just came out. I had told myself I would stick it out longer, that things would change, because after every fight she promised they would. But the weather in Lyon was getting warmer, the flowers were blooming on the trees, she had told me I had to be available whenever she was available because she was busier than I was and her work took precedence. My patience was thinning, and she heard it. We were on FaceTime in the afternoon after my work day, and finally, when she asked if I was okay, I said no, I wasn’t, I wasn’t happy and I hadn’t been, and I couldn’t keep going. As the words came out, I knew there was no going back; I was doing the thing I didn’t think I was capable of doing—leaving her.
We hung up and I thought: it’s done. And I thought: I’m so proud of myself. My friends came over with scones. We went to the Irish pub and got pissed. I double-fisted pints of Guinness and got onstage to sing with the band. The air outside was warm and hopeful. I drank it in.
*
Over coffee in Lisbon, we all chatted in Spanish about the places we’d traveled. You had us beat: weeks in Saudi, stops in Japan and Thailand and Madagascar, day trips docked in Athens, in Marseille, in Oslo. You counted the cities on your fingers.
“Do you ever stay overnight?”
“Sometimes,” you said. “But usually it’s just for a day, or an afternoon.”
“We went to the Irish pub and got pissed. I double-fisted pints of Guinness and got onstage to sing with the band. The air outside was warm and hopeful. I drank it in.”
You seemed proud of the places you’d been, and they were all places I’d dreamed of going; but I was hurting for you. The ticking clock at each harbor. Each minute, precious, and you were sitting here with us.
We swapped numbers. Walking back down toward Praça do Rossio to our Airbnb, my friends moved on to other conversations, but I ignored them, thinking about you. The crowds had thinned in the late afternoon and I smiled at the old men sitting in the sun selling hats. You texted me: …I think it would be a mistake not to see each other again.
We made plans to meet at the Praça do Comércio, by the statue King José I. The Praça was at the bottom of Lisbon’s steep hill, right beside the water. As my friends napped in the drowsy heat of our one-bedroom, I flounced down the hill in a blue crop top. I hoped everybody was looking at me. It felt, for a time, that they were, and it was okay; anybody could look at me and nothing bad would happen from it. I walked past Zara storefronts with bored boyfriends lingering outside on their phones, past little girls blowing bubbles that floated up toward the balconies where leather-skinned women leaned out, smoking.
This fluttering feeling—this was what I’d been missing. I’d spent a year squishing any excitement within myself, turning away from people who opened up to me. I lived in fear of being found attractive; a thirsty unsolicited Instagram DM from a stranger was enough to make my ex think I’d been unfaithful. Now, I had met you: I didn’t know you, but it had been so easy, already so easy, and I had nothing to fear.
I arrived first at the statue and sat on the stoop surrounding it. German tourists beside me unwrapped sandwiches and squinted into the sun. You rolled up on your skateboard and took me by the hand. We walked together down to the water, sitting on the rocks among other couples and families who had gathered to watch the ocean.
By the water, we fell silent. You responded to my questions monosyllabically, you didn’t look at me. I tried to be okay with it. I stopped asking questions and wondered instead what had happened to that initial feeling that made you turn around and talk to me. It might have been better, I thought, to have left it at that first meeting. It had been so long since I’d felt this part, too: the desperate wish to find a spark with someone, and the slow leaking as soon as the space between you closed.
To those who didn’t know us, we looked like a nice young couple, enjoying a moment of quiet together. I asked about life on the cruise ship. It was intense work, you said. It paid little. Did you get along with the others aboard? Yes, your co-workers were fine. “You’re looking for drama,” you said.
I was stunned. “I’m just making conversation.”
I wanted to understand your life on the ship. Who did you dance with? What did you feel when you dipped your partner back and pulled your hips together? What did you wonder about at night as you rocked in your bed in the middle of the ocean?
And then, apropos of absolutely nothing, you leaned forward and kissed my knee. Just that: a little kiss. I felt it through my jeans.
“What are you thinking?” I asked, the question I would ask my ex when she fell silent, roiling in anger I didn’t understand.
“That I want to kiss you naked.”
I almost laughed. You were looking at me so seriously. The silences, I saw now, were your nerves, your lust: I imagined the calculations running through your mind, the time ticking away, nowhere for us to go. I was on a different wavelength. Nothing about sitting there with you on the rocks made me want to kiss you naked. But you did. You wanted something from me, and I wanted something different from you, and neither of us could communicate this to the other.
You pulled out your phone and started typing away on it. “What are you doing on there?” I asked.
“Looking for an Airbnb.”
This time I did laugh. “You have to go in an hour,” I said.
“Let me try one thing.” You dialed a number and talked into your phone: you were asking your brother-in-law to transfer money into your account because you didn’t have enough for a room.
“Let’s leave it,” I said, putting a hand on your arm. Part of me feared that your desperation would infect me and, out of sheer pity, I’d find myself mashed against a dirty bed with you for fifteen minutes. “I don’t think that’s in the cards for us. Let’s just go for a walk.”
“You snaked your arms behind my back, inside my jacket but above my t-shirt, and held me tight there. Without meaning to, my hands went up to the back of your head, cupping your neck, which was warm and coppery from the sun.”
We stood and I followed you away from the water, around a corner, up a set of steps, until we were in a little alley, three feet wide, with creamy orange walls. Far enough from the street that everything was quiet. I leaned back against the wall and you looked at me.
Close up, I saw that you were not in your late-twenties as I had initially thought. Your skin was lined and weathered. You transformed in front of me, and I saw you as you were: a guy in his late thirties, still chasing skateboards and young girls, set afloat, reaching out for denimed knees to kiss.
Fear pricked up inside me. You were a stranger and I had let us get away from everyone. I felt that you had tricked me somehow, though of course this wasn’t the case. I had followed you. You could put your hands around my throat and strangle me. You could do terrible things to me.
You pushed against me, touching my cheek with a warm, dirty hand. I braced myself for a high school-style makeout: your tongue in my mouth, your body pressing against mine, your hands up and down my body. Instead, you leaned your forehead against mine. Our noses touched. And you just stayed there, breathing.
Part of me wanted to burst out laughing. I had no idea what was happening. You snaked your arms behind my back, inside my jacket but above my t-shirt, and held me tight there. Without meaning to, my hands went up to the back of your head, cupping your neck, which was warm and coppery from the sun. It was a gesture of love, the sort of thing you do to a person whose body you know so well it’s as if it belongs to you. My body knew love’s gestures—I had learned them from her.
When you finally kissed me, your breath was sour, your lips thin and dry. I wanted to pull away. I felt you hard against my body and I recoiled from it. You wanted my body and I didn’t want yours. Your hands rose to my neck and there was that fear again, another aspect of freedom I had forgotten: its dangers. Strangle me, I wanted to say. Do it.
You didn’t, of course. You squeezed my shoulders and took a long inhale. I checked my watch: you had twenty minutes to get on your boat. “I think you have to go,” I said. You leaned back against the opposite wall, overdramatizing your frustration.
We walked back down the alley, around the corner, down the steps. We said goodbye as if we were longtime lovers. I held you tight in a warm, familiar hug. And then you looked at me close, placed your fingertip in my dimple, and said: “Qué bonita sonrisa, chica de la fila.” The girl from the line.
I wondered, as I walked away from you in the warm, late-evening light, how I would explain this to my friends, when the events of our interaction sounded on paper so unpleasant. I knew it couldn’t last, I didn’t want it to. But I saw how far a person will go to feel that brief coincidence of hearts, even when everything else is all wrong. I recalled all the turmoil and strife I’d endured in my last relationship for a few moments of tenderness. I had clung onto those moments for dear life, willing to overlook everything for them, fearing I’d never find that again. And I did, with you.
I imagine you out there, on that enormous cruise ship, performing night after night with that toothy smile. I imagine you docking in cities and finding young women in café lines and bars and skate shops. You feed them the perfect compliment and place your forehead against theirs. Maybe, some days, you do book a hotel room for an afternoon. Embarking and disembarking and embarking once more. Closing the space between you and a stranger for an hour before you both sail away, back to the loneliness of being two separate people in the world.
About the Author
Sara Luzuriaga is a British-Ecuadorian fiction writer and educator currently based in Iowa City. Her work has appeared in The Sun Magazine, Soft Punk Magazine, and The Harvard Advocate. She is currently working on a novel about an Ecuadorian-American couple who return to Ecuador after the birth of their first child.
Read Sara’s “Behind the Essay” interview in our newsletter.
Header photo by Chris Stein.
Edited by Aube Rey Lescure.
