Three Deaths and a Tango

THREE DEATHE AND A TANGO - SYNOPSIS

For two years Philip Rose, trained in a Zen monastery and now a principal in an architectural firm, woke each morning to face the horror that his wife Susan was dying of breast cancer. When she does die in his arms there is nothing in the thirty years of loving her that prepared him for the vast, cavernous loneliness that engulfed him. With much of his life still to live, he realizes quickly there is no guide to what he must do next. He is alone and he on his own. The Tantra of Tango is a meditation on emerging from this grief.

A friend of his wife nags Philip into taking tango lessons. "This is what Susan would have wanted," she tells him. At night he begins to attend classes. The sheer physical activity of the dance provides the first small relief from his grief. His body loves the distraction.

Engaged by a lawyer friend, Bert Stein as an architectural expert in a lawsuit over the death of a child killed by falling ice, Philip researches the unfortunate story of the child's death. He finds evidence of the greed he expected but also traces of massive money laundering.. He is confronted by the vast indifference of a society sinking deeper and deeper into criminality and delusion.

During the day Philip researches architectural misdeeds. At night he goes dancing. Argentine tango, notoriously addicting, sets its hook deep. Subbornness keeps Philip returning to the dance hall in spite of the humiliation and rejection he suffers Gradually, his skills improve. He begins each night to search for that one dance that will quiet the dogs of loneliness. Relationships bloom and fade like tango lyrics. He falls in love and is then rejected by the beautiful Emily Savage. He dallies with the wonderful dancer, Camela. Still, he is alone.

Then in one, unforgettable moment, during a single tanda of tango at a seedy dance venue in Sausalito, the threads of his Zen training, his experience as an architect, the web of tango and the dark secret of a love affair, produce an epiphany and change the trajectory of the lawsuit and the lives of the characters of this story.