The Unexpected Waltz

by Kim Wright

  “We need to talk,” I say.

  “Because of her?” he says. He is worried that I’m going to try to analyze the situation. To draw him into some discussion of the fact I know they’re lovers.

  “No,” I said. “I wanted to talk anyway. Please. Just for a minute.”

  He hesitates. Last week when I had invited him for coffee he said no, that it was “improper,” and I realized that he must have been quoting Anatoly. Evidently the instructors aren’t just forbidden to go drinking with the students—they can’t see us outside of class at all. Even if it’s just a matter of walking across the parking lot to the Starbucks, even if the whole purpose of the meeting is to discuss a student’s future in dance.

  “We can just stay here and talk for five minutes,” I say. “Please.” Anatoly and Pamela have finished. He has walked her to the door and is holding it open for her and they are laughing about something.

  “Okay,” Nik says. “For minute.” We cross the room and sit down at one of the small tables and I begin unbuckling my shoes. I persuade him to get his snack from the fridge and he comes back with an athlete’s lunch—a banana, a tuna sandwich, and a ziplock bag with walnuts. I wait for him to unpack everything and take a gulp of water. Finally he looks up at me.

  “You’re talking about me competing,” I say, “and we both know I’m not ready, but if I were, what should I be working on?”

  “Everything,” he says, an answer that makes me want to smack him. An answer that makes me want to weep. He glances around the empty room. Anatoly has also gone, presumably to lunch.

  “Okay,” I say. “Answer me this. What’s my best dance?”

  “You dance them all well,” he says. “But there is house for improvement.”

  “I know there’s room for improvement,” I say. “There’s always room for improvement. But I want to focus on the dances where I have potential. Come on. Level with me.” I reach across the table and squeeze Nik’s wrist. He jumps.

  We touch all the time on the dance floor. The pivot that we do in tango requires me to press my right thigh between both of his, and the crispness of the spin depends almost totally on how closely we press our hips together, how well we merge into a single point. It’s a matter of physics. He has put a lot of pivots in my routine, because he knows I’m not shy about pushing my leg between his and Nik’s not shy about accepting it. But here, off the floor and sitting at one of the tables, my hand on his wrist makes him jump.

  “I know I can’t be good at everything,” I say. “There’s not enough time, so I need you to tell me where the time I do have would best be spent.”

  He looks at me strangely. Where Nik came from, things were often harsh but always clear. There was a narrow window of opportunity to prove yourself in his childhood dance academy and if your chance passed, you were, as he says, “fooked.” He has told me that many nights he had returned to his cot in the dorm with aching muscles and bleeding feet but it had never occurred to him to question one of his teachers. He danced for years without anyone telling him he was good; you knew you were good if they didn’t send you home. And thus he struggles, as they all do, to remember that things are different here, that Americans dance for different reasons. There’s no equivalent of the bored suburban housewife where Nik comes from. There’s no Russian word for “hobby.” I have seen a picture of Nik’s mother. She is younger than I am but looks older and I suspect he finds us absurd, all of us overfed, overcoddled middle-aged women who do an offbeat underarm turn and expect wild applause. He is probably thinking that one of the failures of democracy is that a three-month student, a woman whose frame is dreadful, feels free to grab his wrist and question the methodology of his teaching. He knows I expect some sort of answer but still, part of him is hurt.

  “All of my students are good at all of their dances,” he says carefully and stiffly, putting in every conjunction for once. And then he looks down as if even he recognizes that this careful tone of voice is not completely his own.

  “That’s bullshit,” I say sharply, and even though he knows it’s bullshit, he looks at me as if I’ve slapped him.

  I’m aware that my heart is pounding. This conversation may be painful for Nik but it does not come easily for me either. I am trying to tell a man what I want, what I really want, rather than what other people expect me to want, and it’s like being thrown fully dressed into a swimming pool.

  We sit for a moment in silence and then I try again.

  “I’m not Pamela,” I say. “I don’t have fifteen years of experience under my belt. And I’m not the teenagers who compete, or Quinn either. I’m not one of those girls who are young and perfect and can bend and extend. My time is limited . . .” I glance at him to make sure he understands, but Nik is still gazing gloomily down at the table, as if I’m describing his limitations and not my own.

  “I want to get better,” I say. “I want you to tell me how to get better. I need to . . .” Here I bring my hands to my face and point them in front as if my nose were a beak. “I know I need to focus. That’s the only way I’ll improve. So tell me, I’m begging you. If I could only dance two or three dances, what would they be?”

  More silence. From the back room we can hear the faint sounds of samba music. “You do not need to shake your ass,” he finally says. “You need to stand straight and open your arms and be . . . the big lady. I would say waltz. Foxtrot. And tango.”

  For a minute I’m stung. He’s telling me I shouldn’t do Latin. That I’m better suited for the old-lady dances, the fat-lady dances, the last ones you give up before you retire, or die.

  “What about cha-cha?” I ask. Pamela is close to my age, maybe a few years below, but not that much. And she competes in cha-cha.

  “Not cha-cha,” he says, nodding as he often does when he tells me no.

  My face is hot. I know without looking in the mirror that I’ve gone all splotched. “You’re saying I shouldn’t cha-cha,” I say. “Which is pretty damn interesting considering that when I came in for my free lesson the very first dance we did was the cha-cha and I got the lock step on the first try and you said that was great and you told me, the very last thing you told me before I got out my checkbook, was that the cha-cha was my dance.”

  “I did not know you then,” he says simply.

  “And now we’ve danced together maybe three months and you know exactly what I need.”

  “Yes. That is right.”

  I’ve asked him a question and he’s answered it . . . so why am I angry, so irrationally hurt? I’ve done this before, now that I think of it. I’ve assured men that I wanted the truth and then, when they tried to give it to me, I’ve started to cry. I’ve upset him too, but Nik, to his credit, for once is looking me right in the eyes. “You already have rhythm,” he finally says. “You come here to get something else.”

  “What else?” I ask, although a dim part of my mind sees what he’s getting at. When I was young I shook my ass a lot and I’d been pretty good at it. When I was young, then yes, it had been my go-to mode, what I did when I couldn’t think of what else to do. But how could Nik know this? How could he know that while he was a little boy in that militaristic dancing school somewhere in the eternal night of Siberia, obeying his teachers and trying so hard to be good, that I had been shaking my ass for any number of inconsequential men?

  “I’m pretty good at the cha-cha,” I say again, for emphasis, even though I know this is no longer the point.

  “So yes,” says Nik. “Yes, yippee, we say. Kelly can shake her ass and some women cannot do this and so they must start there. Women must know that they can shake their ass before they know that they do not have to shake their ass, but you already have shaked your ass and it is over. Put it down on the floor. Now you must—”

  “Stand up straight and be a big lady.”

  My tone of voice is petulant but he ignores this. He puts his hands
to his nose and points them, fingertips together, in a parody of my earlier gesture. “We will, yes, focus,” he says. “First on how to enter and take the floor because you . . .” He stops again, searching for the words, but I understand his meaning. The fact that I had known, almost by instinct, how to do the steps of the cha-cha had been a sure sign that it was not my destiny to do the cha-cha. People do not come to the dance floor to learn what they already know.

  “Because I have to get okay with people seeing all of me, not just my ass.”

  And then in that moment, we both laugh. We are fond of each other, despite it all. I could keep talking, try to push for more understanding, a wordier and more American-style meeting of the minds. But he has answered my question completely. And so I will waltz, and foxtrot and tango and possibly talk him into the quickstep. My fate is the romantic dances. My fate is to be the big lady.

  He slides my folder toward me and I sign my name.

  “This was a difficult lesson,” I say.

  He nods. “Hardest yet.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE LAST ROUND of chemo appears to have done the trick. They agree to let Carolina go home for Thanksgiving and possibly Christmas. They’re very careful with the words. They never say “cure” and they don’t say “remission.” They say “a few weeks.” They say “We’ll keep checking in.”

  So much of her hair has come out that she makes the same decision a lot of cancer patients do—to shave her head. There’s something defiant about baldness, especially in a woman, the implication that you have chosen your fate and not had it thrust upon you.

  Hospice keeps a variety of clippers and razors just for this purpose and I help Carolina with them on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. I have brought her every scarf I could find in my house, then picked up a few more at Target. The nurses and other volunteers all stop by to wish her well, and to make predictable comments about her having a lot to be thankful for this year. She looks better bald than most women do, since she doesn’t have any of those lumps or ridges most people have in their scalp.

  “You have a very symmetrical head,” I tell her.

  “Just one more thing to be thankful for,” chirps a volunteer, and Carolina makes a face at me in the mirror.

  After that there is nothing left to do but pack her bag and drive her home. We have timed it so she will arrive just after lunch, giving her a chance to rest before the boys get home from school. She lives in a neat little tract house with perfectly round boxwoods lined up around the front, and the first thing I see when I push open the screen door is one of those plaques that say AS FOR ME AND MY HOUSE, WE WILL SERVE THE LORD. It surprises me a little. I’ve never heard her mention God.

  Virginia has fixed lunch and, despite the fact we ate at hospice, we eat again. There are pictures of Ritchie and Josh all over the breakfast nook—in baseball uniforms, Boy Scout uniforms, football uniforms. I always thought they were just embarrassed when their aunt forced them to come to hospice, but now I see that embarrassment is their natural facial expression, captured in a whole line of photographs, starting from birth. On the refrigerator, Virginia has drawn herself a chart marking their team practices and school functions in different colors of ink, each color meaning, I presume, something significant to her. She seems to be managing all this as well as she can. She’s a shorter, harsher version of her sister, with a face lined from cigarette smoke and direct sunlight and God knows how many disappointments. Other pictures in the room are further proof that Carolina was always the pretty one—an overly bright Olan Mills shot of the three girls when they were little shows Carolina on the end, the youngest and possibly the most favored, since she is the only one with a bow in her hair and the only one in the picture who is smiling.

  There have been times when I’ve thought that Virginia was jealous of my closeness with her sister and now, when Carolina starts to droop in exhaustion, Virginia is quick to say she’ll help her to bed. She jumps up, pushing her chair back with a scrape, and escorts Carolina down the dark hall, as if the woman doesn’t know the way through her own house. I hear the soft sounds of their fading conversation and put my fork down. While we were eating, another thing caught my eye, a folder stuck on the refrigerator door along with the boys’ schedule calendar. It’s marked with the word MAIL in big black Magic Marker letters, but I suspect MAIL means BILLS. I walk over to the folder and pull out the envelopes inside. Something from the bank, from the electric company, water, cable, a dentist office, and the used-car lot we passed on the drive over here.

  “I’m going to take these,” I tell Virginia when she gets back into the kitchen.

  She looks at the envelopes in my hand and then away. “Carolina . . .” she says. I wait, but she doesn’t finish.

  “She might not even ask about them,” I say.

  “Did anybody tell her . . .”

  “They didn’t tell her anything. They don’t know. Just to keep her away from germs. I realize that’s hard with the kids coming and going, but her white blood cell count—we need to make sure she doesn’t catch a flu bug, anything like that.”

  Virginia nods, sighs, and looks back at the folder in my hands. “I guess this is the part,” she says, “when I’m supposed to thank you.”

  "NOW DON'T FREAK OUT, but I found Daniel,” I tell Elyse. “I looked him up on Facebook.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t do something like that a long time ago.”

  “You don’t think it’s pathetic?”

  “You’re talking to a woman who never lets go of anybody,” she says with a laugh. Elyse has been having an affair with the same guy on and off for years and she takes a sick sort of pride in the fact she’s close friends with her ex-husband.

  “But considering the way things were left . . .”

  “Oh, he was a right bastard, no doubt about it.”

  “He’s in Charleston.”

  Now that gives her pause.

  “That’s too close,” she finally says. “You’re not tempted to go down there, are you? Hide behind one of those Civil War statues and jump out at him? Because that would be a huge mistake.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Maybe you want to show him how wonderful you ended up.”

  “I don’t think I ended up all that wonderful. You’re still coming at Christmas, right? And bringing Tory?” When she hesitates with her answer I feel a moment of panic rush in. “I know she probably thinks she should stay with her dad, but tell her I’m counting on you both being here. What’s the point of having six bedrooms if nobody ever comes to your house?”

  “You could move, you know. That neighborhood was always full of Mark’s friends, not yours. Get a little condo or something. Decorate it however you want.”

  “I’m not ready.”

  “I’m just saying that as long as you’re in that house—”

  “Have you eaten dinner?”

  “Yeah. A couple of hours ago.”

  “It seems like it’s been a long time since we’ve had dinner together on the phone.”

  She pauses. “You’ve been taking group lessons almost every night and then going out for drinks with your new friends afterward. You’re a lot busier than you used to be. And that’s a good thing.”

  “Is it? Sometimes I feel like dance has eaten up my whole life.” Now it’s my turn to pause. There’s something wrong in that sentence but I’m not sure exactly what. “You were always the one who was too busy for me,” I finally finish lamely.

  “Kelly, it’s fine,” she says with a laugh. “As it should be.”

  “You don’t think we’re growing apart?”

  “Don’t be silly. We don’t have to talk every night just to prove we’re friends. We’re not in high school anymore.”

  “But you’re still coming at Christmas, right?”

  “Of course I am. You’re my home. Alway
s have been, always will.”

  I HANG UP THE phone unsettled and craving a taco salad. They were one of my private indulgences during my marriage, one of the things I would sneak out to eat when Mark was playing golf. Now all of a sudden I want the whole guilty thing, with the jalapeño ranch dressing and the sour cream and tortilla chips and dark meaty chili with cinnamon and garlic.

  I’ve never gotten the hang of asking for a table for one, so I just take a seat at Esmerelda’s bar, wedged between a young girl who keeps tossing her hair on me and a sour-faced man who never looks up from his food. Happy hour has started and the speaker above my head is pumping out music with such force that the whole bar is vibrating. They have one of those big glass containers on the corner of the bar that’s approximately the size and shape of a beehive but instead of honey it holds vodka and many wedges of pineapple, intricately stacked. It’s all lit from below so that it looks like it’s glowing and I noticed it the first night I came in with the group class. Alcohol as art, I guess.

  “What do you call that drink?” I ask the bartender. “The one with the vodka and pineapple juice?”

  “Vodka and pineapple juice.”