The Unexpected Waltz

by Kim Wright

  “Promise me,” Carolina says again. “You’ll make them keep me in my right head as long as they can.”

  “We’ll try,” I say, even though the nurses don’t listen to the volunteers and the doctors don’t listen to the nurses and the true trajectory of her care falls to the rarely seen supervising physician. This last round of chemo has left Carolina more morose than I’ve ever seen her.

  “Virginia brings the boys by on Monday, Thursday, and Saturday,” she says. I nod. I’ve seen them. Carolina psyches herself up for these visits. She begins tapering her medication the night before so that she can greet her sons sitting up, sometimes standing. The boys are boys. Two tall, embarrassed-looking teenagers, seemingly unaware of what these visits cost her. They poke each other’s arms and complain about things at school, the way their aunt cooks, or about the A-hole coach that benched them. The minute they’re gone she’s flat on her back again, gripping the sheet with both fists, ready for the shot.

  The nurses are for the most part sympathetic people, many of them with kids of their own, and they try to help her with the pain cycles. They know she wants to stay lucid for her boys, but experience has taught them to err on the side of overmedication. They’ve all been called from their stations by patients awakening in a sea of agony, drowning in it, screaming for someone to throw them a rope. I didn’t know it would be this bad. Help me, help me. God damn you, help me, please.

  And when things get that far out of hand there’s nothing left but large doses, enough medicine to drop a horse. No option except to get them through this night and hope that in the morning some sort of equilibrium can be reestablished, that someone on staff can figure out the right combination. The sweet spot, the fulcrum of the seesaw, that elusive perfect dosage that will allow people to be present in a world full of pain without hurting. The dosage that will allow them to survive another day of being alive.

  “Everyone here knows what you’re up against,” I say, although that’s a damn lie. Nobody knows what anybody else is up against. The machines around the bed monitor every modulation of her body, counting breaths and measuring her urine, until the only thing in her life that’s still private is the level of her pain. But Carolina has dozed off again and I sit there, picking at her quesadilla and thinking that maybe I really am better suited for hosting banquets and fund-raisers. I am promising this woman things I have no right to promise and I wonder, whether it’s a month or a season or longer, if I will have what it takes to see this case to its end.

  WHEN I FINALLY LEAVE hospice, I’m drained. I decide to run by the grocery for wine and even, who knows, something sugary and soft. Anything to help me forget this hell of a day.

  I pull into the parking lot and sit looking at the studio door. I could walk by like I always do, glance in and maybe wave, but things have shifted now. God knows, I’m in no position to judge Nik, or Pamela either, but I feel oddly complicit, as if by agreeing to keep their secret I have become secretive again myself.

  Secretive is the last thing I want to be. My hands are resting against the steering wheel and I glance down at my wedding ring. When I put it on years ago I made a pact with myself to never again sneak around and I didn’t, not really, not in any way that counted. I never cheated on Mark and my lies were only the lies of omission: the things I didn’t say, those avoidances of truth that might even pass for kindness, especially once he got sick.

  After a minute I go into the grocery, arcing all the way across the parking lot, weaving my way through the cars, doing anything I can do to avoid passing the studio. But when I come out, a few minutes later, I’ve decided I’m being ridiculous. If I want to keep dancing with Nik, and I do, I’ll have to eventually go back in and face him. I decide to walk by the ballroom and wave as usual, to send a clear signal that finding him with Pamela in the instructor’s lounge was no big deal.

  But they’re still in there. Dancing, just the two of them. The fact that I walked in on them did not compel her to flee, which surprises me. When I was having my affair with Daniel I was nervous and jumpy all the time, a woman who startled with every ringing doorbell or honking car.

  They’re doing the tango. I stand on the sidewalk, in the afternoon heat, and watch them through the smudged glass. Both have their eyes closed. The music sounds like a heartbeat, coming dimly through the walls of the studio, synchronizing with the rise and fall of my own chest. He holds her closely, in the Argentine fashion, and their feet weave, his among hers and then hers among his. Her head is on his chest and his arms are loose, embracing. He’s lost his frame, I think, somewhat irrelevantly. He has let her give him her weight.

  But this is not normal dancing. I am watching sex. It’s what I gave up and what I gave up on, what I turned away from years ago. On one level they are dressed and in public and doing no more than a proper Argentine tango, and yet on another level, this is more raw and passionate than anything I might have witnessed in that curtained-off room, probably as sexual as anything they do in bed. He advances toward her. She pulls away. Only a little, like the quivering string of a violin. It is a slow and protracted sort of chase, for what one person wants, the other doesn’t, at least not at the same moment. They take turns being the hunter and the prey. She comes up from behind him, slipping her hand beneath his armpit until it emerges, star-shaped and demanding, in the middle of his chest. He waits. Teases her, forces her to dangle in a split second of worry and then reacts swiftly, all at once. He whips around, pulls her in, dips her, and her legs buckle. She sinks all the way to the floor—limp, contrite, tossed aside. And then he flexes his shoulders and she springs, light and effortless, back into his arms.

  I have stopped breathing. I am holding my breath, and my groceries, standing on the hot pavement, watching him drop to his knees. She bends back, a long unbroken stretch of feminine flesh, leaning over his waiting thigh. Drapes herself over him, bowed back until her head rests against the wooden dance floor. Extends one leg, slowly, toward the sky. He puts his hand behind her knee and turns his head as if to kiss her, but before he can, she has pulled up and away. God, I think. She’s strong. That takes so much power, so much control, to be back on your feet in one fluid motion and moving away from the man. Her eyes are open now. She is walking toward herself in the mirror and she is smiling.

  The waltz is rapturous. The foxtrot is playful and the cha-cha is flirtatious and Argentine tango is the dance of perpetually thwarted desire. It is the dance of a couple willing to forgo their individual balance and to lean into each other until they risk falling . . . until one or both of them ends up on the floor. This is a dance with no happy ending and I am stunned by the level of risk Nik and Pamela are taking, so much like the sort of risks Daniel and I took at the end. On some unconscious level they must want to be caught. They are tangoing here before this broad window, bragging of their passion to any stranger who happens to pass, slipping their true feelings inside the safe envelope of dance. Watching makes me feel things I don’t want to feel, things I haven’t felt in years. The appeal of the doomed affair. That strange beauty that comes when something is dying, the smell that roses give off in October. The freedom that comes from having nothing left to lose.

  WHEN I GET HOME, I pour myself a glass of wine, sit down at the computer, and begin to look for Daniel.

  There was a time when it was hard to find people. You lost them and they stayed gone. Elyse and I had shared a single afternoon with Daniel in Florence and he had kissed me good-bye at the station just before he hopped the train to Venice. A sweet kiss, memorable only because it was our first and our last.

  Or so I thought. It had surprised me when he’d called twelve years later, announcing that he was moving to Charlotte. He said he’d gone to tremendous pains to track me down through my parents, aided only by the few casual facts that I’d mentioned in passing, including the fact that my father owned an insurance company.

  “I’m surprised you even remembered my
full name, much less that I told you what my dad did,” I said on the phone. No one had seemed to have a last name the summer Elyse and I went through Europe.

  “Kelly,” he said. “I remember everything you said to me. That day I spent with you was the best one of my whole trip.”

  It was? There was a split moment, I suppose, just then, when I was the one who held the power. He appeared to remember me far better than I remembered him. My kiss must have resonated profoundly, because I could hear something in his voice. Some tremor of nerves. He wanted something. I wasn’t sure what. He had already made it clear that he would be accompanied on his move to Charlotte by a wife and children, and he suggested we meet at an IHOP near the airport. That sounded innocent enough. There’s a limited amount of trouble a woman can get into at an IHOP.

  “You’ll never guess who just called me,” I said to Elyse. I’d phoned her the minute that Daniel and I hung up and I was aware that my voice had already taken on the same tone as his—that I was struggling to sound casual and not quite making it. “The guy we met in Italy.”

  She was married by that time. Maybe even pregnant with Tory.

  “We met a lot of guys in Italy,” she said.

  Maybe so, but I was already rewriting history in my mind, already making that single afternoon in Florence more than it had been. Telling myself it was indeed the best day of the whole summer, that I too had known with a single kiss that there was something special about this guy.

  “The one we met in Florence,” I said.

  “Oh yeah. David.”

  “His name is Daniel.”

  “But we met him at the statue of David. He took our picture.”

  “Right. That’s the one.”

  “What does he want after all this time?”

  What did he want? What do we all want? I got to the IHOP early, as I always do. Sat by the window and saw him get out of his Jeep Cherokee and walk across the pavement.

  “It was so hard to find you,” he said as he slid into the booth. “It was like you had just fallen off the earth. But I kept looking.”

  I have spent years analyzing my affair with Daniel, but I’ve never come anywhere close to understanding why he had such a hold on me. There was that sliver of time, so brief, in which he wanted me more than I wanted him, in which I was the valued one, the pursued. But I gave the power away as fast as I could, tilted the seesaw in his favor, and it seems that all women have a story like this—the smart, the dumb, those of us in between. We choose some random guy and we put him on a pedestal. Imbue him with godlike powers. Our friends can see he’s not worth it, but we can’t. We can’t see he’s just a man, a man getting out of a Jeep at an IHOP, a man walking across a parking lot. We keep thinking of him years after the fact, even after we know the depths of his betrayal. We compare other men to him, and find even the kinder, better ones somehow lacking. And thus he stalks our life. The man who got away becomes the man we can’t get away from.

  THERE MAY HAVE BEEN a time when it was easy to lose people, but not anymore. I google Daniel, search on Facebook, and there he is. A picture on the steps of what looks to be a church with his wife and his grown kids. For some reason I click on her profile first and from there it’s easy to see her history, her likes and dislikes, the minutiae of her eerily relatable suburban life. We watch a couple of the same TV shows. She’s a vegan. One of their kids is at Princeton. And yet, in the midst of all this middle-aged, middle-class domesticity, she has declared her relationship status to be “It’s complicated.”

  So Daniel is struggling in his marriage. Possibly separated. I look down. My glass is still half-full, so at some point in the search I must have poured more wine without thinking. I have to be more careful. Nik is teaching group class tonight so I don’t want to miss it, and I have a sweet spot of my own when it comes to wine, a place where the anxiety blurs but I’m still in control of my senses. I glance over at the pile of mail on the desk. Catalogs, bills, a statement from the lawyer. I should open it, but I don’t.

  Does Daniel look the same? I squint at the gallery of pictures but it’s hard to say. More than two decades have passed since I’ve seen him and whenever I’ve allowed myself to think about what happened between us, I’ve never had much luck conjuring up his face.

  The only thing that surprises me is that he’s returned to the South. He always said he hated the South, that it was backward and slow, that people always tried to act like they were nicer than they were. But here he is, living in Charleston.

  And that’s entirely too close.

  CHAPTER NINE

  EVERYONE'S THERE WHEN I arrive at group. As I walk by Nik to take my place in line he says, “You have had good day?”

  “No,” I say, “horrible.”

  He nods. “Me also.”

  He has come to the front of the room without turning on the music. This is a bad sign, an indication that he intends to torture us tonight with technique. The students are lined up before the mirror and Nik walks up and down the row like a sergeant, frowning, displeased in some way none of us can understand or fix. Valentina timidly asks if we can have music and Nik snaps back at her in Russian, then thinks better of it and translates. Apparently there’s an old adage in their language: “When you learn how to swim better, then we will put water in the pool.”

  So, no water in the pool tonight. No music. Just Nik standing before us, slowly shifting from one leg to the other. The rumba can be fluid and sensual but when you break it down, it can also become a nightmarish sequence of micromovements, which are much harder to do slow than fast. You slide your weight to the left side of your body, then let it settle. As the weight settles, the hip releases. Shift, settle, release. And then you start all over again on the right.

  We stare at our reflections, we bite our lips. It shouldn’t be so hard. Shift on the first beat and then, on the half beat, release—just a little, just enough to allow the hip a slight swing to the side. It is subtle and when Nik does it, we can all see that it’s beautiful. “It took me million tries to get right,” he says. “Maybe a million one. Again. You are all too fast.” The men are having more trouble than the women. They swing unevenly back and forth like a line of worn-out windshield wipers and Nik goes behind the group, putting his hands on each man’s hips, trying to guide him into the rhythm of the dance. “Shift,” he says. “Shift and then release. Is two separate moves. Again.”

  My mind wanders. In the mirror I can see that three men wearing business suits have come into the studio and are talking to Quinn. After a second, Quinn goes to get Anatoly, who emerges from the back room with a spring in his step and his hand already outstretched. Evidently the men are here to spend some major money. Because Nik has refused to put on music, I can overhear snatches of the conversation, enough to gather that they are with a French Canadian company. Come to talk about group lessons or some sort of incentive for their employees or maybe renting the studio out for a company party. Anatoly needs these sorts of people, the kind who can write big checks because the studio is barely breaking even. I know all this because of Isabel, who fills me full of dancing gossip that I can’t understand, and who seems nearly as smitten with Anatoly as with Nik. She says she danced once with Anatoly at a Christmas party and it was the best experience of her life. Not just the best dance experience. The best experience, period. Better than sex.

  “Kelly,” Nik says sharply, and I snap my attention back to the rumba. He is either satisfied with the group’s mastery of the shift and release or he’s given up—hard to tell by his facial expression—and we’re now moving on to the forward step. The key is to keep your knee locked, your toe pointed slightly out, and to shift all your weight onto the front foot in the instant that you step. Very crisp. Very clean. Can we manage to do that?

  It’s a forward step. Surely we can all make a forward step. The very fact that we’re here, in the studio, should be evidence that we are i
n fact capable of taking a sequence of forward steps—otherwise, we’d still be in the parking lot, trapped in our cars. But the skill seems to have deserted us all. Stepping onto a locked knee proves surprisingly difficult and to compensate I tend to turn my toe in. All wrong. Valentina’s toe is beautifully turned out but Nik immediately sees that she’s dividing her weight equally between both feet, another rumba no-no. Lucas has nice form, but he’s moving too fast. Jane is so wobbly that she’s flapping her hands to keep her balance. Steve refuses to try at all and checks his phone, and Harry steps forward confidently and then sways wildly to his left, almost falling off his feet and taking the whole domino line down with him.

  “Again,” Nik says. “A million more times. Which foot are you on? You say right? Prove it. Lift your left.”

  I’m so preoccupied with the intricacies of the forward step that I don’t notice Anatoly walking across the room.

  I don’t notice him at all until I feel his hand on the small of my back. When I look up he is standing behind me with his ramrod-straight posture.

  And he says, “Kelly, will you help me demonstrate the waltz?”

  I am balanced on one foot as it is, and for a second, I nearly buckle. I’ve never danced with Anatoly. Lessons with him cost more than those with Nik. His own students are afraid of him. Why doesn’t he demonstrate with Pamela? She’s right there in the corner and everyone knows she waltzes like an angel. But perhaps he’s trying to show the French Canadians what an amateur can do, what they could hope to achieve in a few weeks.