The Unexpected Waltz

by Kim Wright

  The dress is trouble. The Spanx even more so. But I get them off and my black Lycra practicewear on, exhaling for the first time, it seems, all evening. Pull off the heavy earrings and put them in a side zipper compartment in my duffel bag. Leave the stall and wash my face, then take down my hair. Finally I drape the dress and the Spanx over one of the stuffed embroidered chairs in the lobby part of the restroom, with the matching shoes beneath it, and I leave the little jeweled bag in the lap of the dress. Maybe someone will want them. It looks like the woman wearing these clothes must have been teleported somewhere, like we’re in one of those movies where the aliens come and take some humans but not others. It will confuse the hotel maids, just as it will confuse Mark’s lawyer and the others when I do not return to their table.

  But life, after all, is an extraordinarily confusing thing. They’ll get over it.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  NIK MAKES ONE more attempt to persuade me to compete at the Holiday Classic, but I promise him I’ll dance at the Star Ball in March instead. It’s in Charlotte, it’s easier, and I’ll be more ready. For the Classic, I’ll just be Quinn’s helper, a sort of all-purpose handmaiden to the other dancers. He warns me I’ll be sorry. When I get there, I’ll get the fever and wish I were out on the dance floor too. He might be right, because I’ve already begun to curse my lack of nerve. The studio has been nuts for weeks, with people booking double lessons to get ready, and the female students modeling their newly rented dresses.

  We pack Quinn’s ancient little VW bug and drive to Atlanta on Friday afternoon. Or Hotlanta, as Isabel keeps insisting on calling it from the backseat, until I for one am about ready to scream. The studio has gotten us a block of rooms on the same floor of the hotel and Anatoly has laid down strict orders that there will be no drinking until after the competition is over. It’s my first hint that while this road trip is considered a vacation by the students—they’re spending anywhere between six hundred and six thousand dollars depending on how many heats they’re dancing—as far as Anatoly is concerned, it’s nothing but business.

  We’re barely in the room and unpacked before Quinn begins spray tanning the teenage girls who are doing Latin. They get in our bathtub one at a time and stand there, grimly nude, with their eyes squeezed shut, while Quinn goes up and down their bodies with a sputtering little machine. Judging from the shrieks and yelps coming from the bathroom, it’s a miserable process—cold and sticky—and after each one is finished, she walks around the room Frankenstein-style, with her arms and legs splayed out, waiting for her armpits and inner thighs to dry. When the girls are finished, Quinn packs up her machine and heads out to do the boys in their own bathtubs.

  My task is relatively simple: to go from room to room among our block collecting coffeepots so we can keep a steady supply of caffeine flowing tomorrow morning. Quinn is doing several people’s hair and makeup, which I gather is a significant source of extra income for her, and she has them stacked up to arrive in the order they’ll be competing. Valentina, who is dancing in the Newcomer division, has to be down at the ballroom at six thirty in the morning and she’s coming to our room at five. Holiday Classic is a one-day event, meaning it’s an absolute marathon of competition with heats scheduled every two minutes. I carry the coffeepots back to our bathroom, which has brown outlines of human body parts all over the shower stall, and fill them with the Starbucks Breakfast Blend I brought from home. I get Quinn’s sewing kit and thread a needle with each color we might conceivably need, sticking them all in an orange from the welcome basket. Then, even though Quinn isn’t back yet, I get into bed and try to sleep.

  Evidently I succeed, because the next thing I’m aware of is an alarm going off and the sound of Quinn cursing and crashing to her feet. I roll over in the darkness. The clock glows 4:30. “Rise and shine,” Quinn mumbles, then she goes down the line of coffeemakers, flipping each switch before she gets into the shower. The room begins to gurgle like an aquarium.

  I pull on yoga pants and a T-shirt that says “It’s not a mistake, it’s a variation” and go down to the buffet to bring back plates of food. The entire hotel has been taken over by the competition, and because of the insane start times, our welcome brochure said they’d begin putting out a continental breakfast at four o’clock. No one is actually sitting and eating, but there are a fair number of people in line, scavenging like me. I pile fruit and toast on a plate, put five containers of yogurt in a plastic bag, and, when no one is looking, snatch an entire gallon of orange juice. It’s cumbersome in my arms but when I get back to the elevator, a man in a tux pushes the button for me. I ride up with women swathed in feathers and sequins and lace, all giggling like schoolgirls, and when I turn the corner of our hall I see Valentina is already there.

  Quinn has instructed the women to dry their hair with as much mousse as they can handle and Valentina has evidently taken her seriously, because she is knocking gently on our door with a halo of wild, witchlike hair. She’s wearing the hotel bathrobe, fishnet hose, and large red fuzzy slippers and is carrying a little sack in her hand that I assume holds her hair accessories. For months before the competition the dancers have been collecting jeweled barrettes and sparkly combs and even little tiaras. “I am very scared,” she whispers, as Quinn opens the door and lets us both in.

  Quinn and I discussed it on the drive down. She’s going to show me how to put the foundation on with a sponge so that when the women begin arriving in droves we can get a production line going. Quinn carries all her stage makeup in a big fishing tackle box, which is open on the bed. She watches while I practice with Valentina, slathering her with the dark brown liquid. It seems like a ridiculous amount of gunk on poor Valentina’s pretty face, but when I finish, Quinn immediately says, “She needs more.”

  “Are you serious?” I’m more worried about the obvious line of demarcation where the makeup stops an inch under Valentina’s chin, but Quinn brushes aside my concerns.

  “Don’t worry,” she says. “When we get the bronzer on her it will blend right in.”

  “She’s doing ballroom. I thought only the Latin dancers had to be brown.”

  “Only Latin dancers have to spray tan, but everybody has to be brown. Look at her. She has that fair Russian skin and she’s going to wash right out under the lights.”

  Valentina is sitting trustingly, with her back to the mirror. There’s a knock at the door and Quinn lets Isabel in, with Jane right behind her.

  “Hurry it up,” Quinn tells me. “Another layer on Valentina and Isabel goes next.” Jane takes a banana from the welcome basket and stretches out on the bed, and Isabel is chattering wildly. They have the same stiff hair, the same bedroom slippers and fishnet hose. I appear to be the only one concerned about the weird color of Valentina’s skin.

  We get into a certain pattern. Coffee, yogurt, bananas, foundation with me, and then hair with Quinn. Then a pee and back to me for cheeks and mouth. Quinn is amazingly fast, so if I want to keep up with her, I can’t be so cautious with the makeup. She takes one side of their hair and pulls it back slick to their heads, then does the same with the other side and forms a little French twist. I can see from across the room that these hairdos are too hard and tight to move, not even if the women turn cartwheels or run through fountains. Another knock at the door and a gaggle of teenagers spill in. I didn’t know Quinn had agreed to do them too. Big clouds of hair spray periodically fill the air, until we’re all choking and even the orange juice tastes like Final Net. If the woman has short hair, like Jane, Quinn has come prepared with hairpieces and she’s turning them over at a rate of seventeen minutes per dancer. I’m managing to keep up with her, painting every nationality in the studio a uniform shade of adobe brown. At one point Wilhemina arrives, fully dressed in her gown, and everyone moves over to give her the best chair.

  Quinn trusts me to do the foundation, blush, and lipstick, but she brings them back to her chair for the eyes. She appli
es a long swoop of black gel eyeliner with a remarkably steady hand, followed by big arcs of shadow and then the false eyelashes. Huge spiky things like sea creatures and some of them have small crystals or glitter attached to the ends or even bits of fur. Quinn runs the glue line along the base of the woman’s existing lashes, places the false lashes on top and then tells her to hold them there until it all dries so she can start on the next lady. When Jane stands up from the makeup table, she is completely unrecognizable.

  “It’s a costume,” she says, to no one in particular. “We’re all just characters in a play.”

  For the last step, the woman stands up and I brush bronzer all over her neck, back, and shoulders. Most have brought their dresses with them, so that I can bronze them all the way down to wherever the fabric starts. The dresses are low either in the front or back or both, so it’s a challenge to cover all that skin. To stop in the middle is to risk making it uneven or clumpy, so I soon learn that I must brush them in long strokes, as if their flesh were the wall of a house. Others return to their rooms to dress and then come back to us for the final touches, a few more dabs of bronzer around their cleavage or the hollow of their backs. The room begins to fill with swirls of color. The bright fuchsia of Valentina’s gown, the midnight blue of Wilhemina’s, the lavender of Isabel’s, the mint green of Jane’s.

  The protocol is obvious. Valentina and Jane rented their dresses, which is not as good as owning, but Isabel is trying to do it even more on the cheap, so she bought a prom dress at a consignment shop and had Quinn stone it for her with a glue gun. Swarovski crystals are apparently the ticket—both Valentina’s and Jane’s dresses have a few scattered across the bodice and shirt. If you add enough of them, the crystals alone can up the price of a gown by a thousand dollars. But Isabel’s are Korean crystals and while I would have laughed at this designation weeks ago, something about the thin little flecks of light on her gown now break my heart. They are already falling off as she moves about the room. Crystals are on the bed and scattered around the toilet. It doesn’t seem to bother her. This is her first competition, and Isabel is literally trembling with anticipation. “Quinn,” she calls from the bathroom. “Do I need more lip gloss?”

  “Listen up, ladies,” Quinn calls back. “In ballroom, the answer to do I need more of anything is always yes. If even a part of your brain considers asking that question, you need more.”

  The women are too nervous to think for themselves, so I find myself barking orders. Sit there, bring me this, inhale. If you have to drink coffee, at least drink it through a straw. Quinn tells me I’m a good assistant, and I know I am, but Nik was right. The women look bizarre and unnatural but somehow they are beautiful too and I’m a little jealous. The room is full of Cinderellas who have just put down their brooms and laundry. Their dresses are due back when the clock strikes midnight and there’s something frantic just beneath the surface of their giddiness, a desire to squeeze as much glamour out of the day as they can.

  When the last woman is finally finished and back out in the hall, Quinn begins getting ready for her own dances with Steve, who, despite three years of private lessons, is still competing on the Newcomer level. Although no one really ever sits you down and explains these things, I’m beginning to understand how it works. It’s not just a matter of the people who “dance down,” competing on levels beneath them in order to guarantee they’ll place well. It’s also the fact that instructors try to load their students into heats where no one else in their gender or age group is dancing, so that although there may be other couples on the floor at the same time, the student is in essence competing with no one. An uncontested win still counts as a win, and I gather this is what Quinn has carefully engineered for Steve. A bit of store-bought glory, the ego stroke of being called up at the awards banquet tonight for a handful of ribbons, not to mention guaranteed points for the studio. Anatoly has been talking about it for weeks. We brought down a large contingent and the whales are dancing lots of heats; Pamela alone, I believe, is doing eighty. If our people place well—as they can hardly fail to do considering the way all our instructors have been poring over the heat sheets, looking for the perfect slot in which to place them—we have a shot at Studio of the Year. And evidently that matters too.

  Quinn’s gown suits her, although it’s a bit renaissance fair, with large patches of pink and purple, and she has attached a nest of braids to the top of her head. I help her cover her tattoos with the thickest makeup we’ve used yet, something she digs out of the bottom of the tackle box that comes in a medicinal-looking tube and that she says was developed in France after World War I to cover the scars of burned veterans. She dashes out of the room, her heels in her hands, and I strip naked and collapse back onto the bed.

  I’m exhausted, but I can’t rest. I keep looking at the clock. If I had the guts to dance, I’d probably be dancing about now. I wonder how much competition I would have, how many people would be in my division. It seems that being both in your fifties and a Newcomer would be a bad combination, that I might be teetering on the edge of the ridiculous. Yet, Wilhemina is thirty years older than I am and she’s down there giving it a shot. Her hair was so thin that Quinn whispered it would have broken if she’d tried to pull it back, so instead she’d given her a strange little wig with bangs and a flip, similar to the one she must have been wearing the first day I came into the studio. Quinn had almost glued Wilhemina’s eyelids shut with her weighty lashes and had drawn her eyebrows into the high arch of permanent surprise. But her gown was covered in crystals, more than all the other dresses in the room combined, and when she had stood to go, Wilhemina’s face had been as excited as those of the teenage girls.

  There’s no way I’m going back to sleep. In fact, my heart is pounding. I debate taking a Lexapro, something I haven’t done since Mark died, but then I look again at the clock: 6:35. It’s still dark outside and it feels like I’ve been up all day or maybe like it’s somehow still the night before. Valentina’s warmed up by now and the first heats have just begun. She’s in number nine, she said, and at two minutes a heat that means she’ll dance soon. Maybe it’s the old cheerleader in me, but I feel guilty. If I get up and hurry, I can be down in time to watch her dance.

  I pull my clothes back on and follow Isabel’s glitter trail to the elevator. The ballroom is bright and loud when I get there, and full enough that it takes me a while to find the table with our studio’s name. My timing is perfect, since they’re just wrapping up the sixth heat. People of all ages are leaving the floor, from children to the elderly, and I can see Valentina in the corner of the ballroom, practicing her Viennese waltz with Nik. Since she couldn’t afford many private lessons, she decided to only compete in one dance for all ten of her heats—the Viennese waltz, her favorite. The heats before hers blow by fast and Valentina and Nik line up at the corner of the stage. When the music starts it’s “My Favorite Things,” the classic Viennese waltz tune, the first one on the iPod shuffle at our studio, and her face splits into a wide smile of recognition.

  Somehow I thought watching a ballroom competition would be like going to the opera, a sedate affair, but I soon learn that all the tables hoot and holler for their dancers, and it’s really more like ­NASCAR. Valentina’s nervous, taking small steps and making tight little turns, but she’s smiling as they spin past us, the painfully young Internet bride and her dance instructor. Her husband is taking pictures, but it’s hard to say whether he’s getting Valentina in any of the shots. He doesn’t stand up—maybe he can’t—and he is aiming his camera toward the dance floor in an unsteady fashion. He seems more like a father watching a daughter go off to the prom than a husband, and it’s both sweet and kind of sobering. Did Mark and I ever look like that?

  As her last heat concludes, Nik escorts Valentina back to the table, where we all stand and cheer, and then he immediately goes to warm up Isabel in the corner. I almost didn’t recognize him when he came in, stained dark as coffe
e with his hair slicked back and knotted at the nape of his neck like a vampire’s. Quinn and Steve are coming up in eleven heats. How could I have thought of sleeping through this? It’s fascinating, it’s fabulous, it’s like reality on steroids. I wonder what Elyse would think if she were here, if she’d think I was nuts to be sitting among all these feathers and tiaras at seven o’clock on a Saturday morning in a two-star hotel on the outskirts of Atlanta. But Elyse would probably treat the ballroom dancers like the Hopi or Navajo, just one more aboriginal tribe for her to study, with their own brand of ritual and adornment. Or I wonder what Mark would say about so much silliness—if he would consider it a noble kind of silliness, or if it would just look to him like an ostentation that’s found a whole new way to spend their husbands’ money. If he would consider these men no more than gigolos, paid to fuss and flatter. Paid to prop up sagging marriages the way a buttress shores up the wall of a house.

  Jane has pulled her chair beside mine. She’s got the program open in her lap and is panicking because she’s just realized that Nik has put her into heats that have six or seven dancers in her age group. This couldn’t have been by accident—we’ve seen him carrying around the entry forms for weeks—so she and I both know he’s testing her. Her lover, Margaret, hasn’t come to Atlanta, something about a sick dog back home, and that might be one reason why Jane seems so agitated. I can’t say I’m surprised Nik has pulled something like this. He’s ambitious for his dancers. Not competitive—I don’t think trophies or ribbons mean anything to him and he isn’t like Anatoly, a compulsive point counter, determined to push the studio higher in the rankings. Nik would rather one of his dancers come last in a hard heat than win an easy one. He has said as much to me, that you only improve through that sort of pressure, so it makes sense that he’s loaded Jane into crowded heats. He doesn’t want her to just be the first of one.