The Unexpected Waltz

by Kim Wright

  CAROLINA GETS TIRED DURING the party. I can see it on her face. I tell her I’ll walk her back to her room and she protests. It’s my night, she says. I should stay and mingle.

  But I’m pretty much mingled out by that point and eventually she succumbs to her exhaustion and lets me lead her back down the long unlit hall, the Christmas music fading as we walk. I help her pull off her clothes, noting that her body is even thinner than it was the last time I saw it, and button up her nightgown. I take the rose from my hair and float it in a glass of water on her bureau. Then I lie down beside her, just for a minute, because now that the juice of the dance is fading, I’m tired too.

  “Go back,” she mumbles. “It’s your night.”

  “I’m more comfortable here,” I say, which is true.

  Elyse finds us an hour later, shoulder to shoulder in the hospital bed, both dozing, me in my silver dancewear and Carolina in her nightgown. She shakes my arm, and I swim from my shallow nap back to the shore of consciousness, looking up into her worried face.

  “Come on, baby,” she says. “It’s time for us to go home.”

  “Did you like my dance?” I ask her. “Do you understand why I do it now?”

  “Kelly, if I could do that . . .” Elyse hesitates and for a moment I think she’s going to cry. “If I could do what you did in there, if I could be graceful like that or I had that kind of courage . . . well, it would be all I ever did. I’d say to hell with the rest of the world and waltz all day long.”

  I roll over and look at her, surprised. Elyse doesn’t think she has my kind of courage? Her life has always been the bigger one, painted with great slashes of color against a broad landscape, while I have kept myself smaller, more careful and finely realized, a still life. But her face in the shadowy room is serious, her expression tinged with appreciation and even a bit of envy. It scares me. What happens if I outgrow her?

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I WANT YOU TO tell me all about him, this guy you thought you saw in the grocery,” Tory says, spreading the towels across the counter and draping one over my shoulders. She’s convinced me to let her color my hair. I’m not sure why it means so much to her, but I suspect I’ve changed noticeably since she’s seen me last and that my obvious aging has frightened her somehow, maybe made her think about the mortality of her own mother. “Hmm,” she adds, looking down, “your towels are way too nice to get stained. Do you have at least one crappy one that we can use to wrap around your head?”

  “I can get one of Mark’s old golf towels out of the mudroom,” I say.

  “No, I’ll do it,” she says. “You just sit here and think because I want the whole story.” She dashes out of the room and I can hear the soft thud of her feet going down the staircase, the pause and louder thud as she skips the last step and lands in the foyer with a little hop. Tory has descended staircases exactly the same way her whole life. I stare at my reflection with my hair brushed straight back and the towel clipped around my neck. She doesn’t want the whole story. She just thinks she does.

  “So he sent you letters,” Tory says, back with the crappy towel and a plastic grocery bag besides. “I know that much because Mom says she kept them for you all those years, like you asked her to do. But why were you and this man writing so many letters? Did he live in another city?” She twists the caps and lids off a collection of little bottles and, without consulting the directions, begins to mix them. I can only hope she knows what she’s doing.

  “No, back then he lived in Charlotte too,” I said. “The letters were just his way of courting me. Daniel was a great letter writer. And I gave them to your mother because they were the only proof that any of it really happened.”

  Our eyes meet in the mirror. “I guess he was married,” she says.

  “I guess he was.” It feels funny talking to Tory about it, but there’s no point in being coy. She’s twenty, goes to a big school. I doubt I could say anything to shock her.

  “It started in Italy thirty years ago,” I tell her, pulling off my jewelry as she begins to squirt her cold, gelatinous concoction across my hairline. “You know that picture downstairs? The one with me and your mother and the statue of David but you can’t see David?” She nods. “Daniel’s the one who took the picture. We met him in Florence and we were all together for a few days and then—well, it was the middle of August, almost time for school. He went back to Georgia and we came back here.”

  “But you knew there was something special about him even then?”

  “I have the feeling this story is going to disappoint you. I mean, if my affair with Daniel were a movie, it would be on a channel with a high number. If you happened to stumble across it late some night, you’d pick up the remote and keep looking for something better. It wouldn’t star somebody like Bette Davis or Elizabeth Taylor. I’d be played by, you know . . . one of Charlie’s lesser angels.”

  “I’m not expecting Dr. Zhivago,” she says, then flushes a little. Elyse and I have been teasing her about Nik ever since the dance. “I’m not a child. In fact, I’m probably the same age you were that summer in Italy.”

  “Come to think of it, you are. Well, okay then, no, I didn’t think he was so special when I first met him. He was cute and he was nice but it didn’t really all start until maybe ten years later. He got transferred to Charlotte and he remembered your mom and I lived here and looked us up.”

  “Both of you?”

  I try to shake my head, which is almost impossible with all the towels and hair clips. “Elyse had forgotten he’d ever existed. There were a lot of boys back in those days, Tory, there was a lot to keep straight in your head. I don’t think she would have even remembered that day if I hadn’t shown her the picture. He’s in it, or at least he sort of is. You can see his shadow.”

  Tory sets the timer on her iPhone and pulls the vanity chair next to mine. “That’s the only picture you had of him?”

  I nod. Strange but true.

  “So you met him in Italy and then, ten years later, you meet him again,” Tory prompts.

  “Right. By the time he gets to Charlotte we’re all just past thirty and he’s been married five years or more to a woman he knew from college. We were just going to have breakfast and chat up old times but the minute I saw him . . . I don’t know what it was. We were at a stupid restaurant. I think it was an IHOP and I got there early because you know what a nerd I am. Twenty minutes early for everything. I remember sitting there in the booth looking out the window and wondering if I’d even recognize him and then I saw a man get out of his car and . . .”

  “And you recognized him,” she says.

  “There wasn’t any doubt. One look and boom, I was gone, just like that. Maybe I should write a country song. ‘I Lost My Heart in an International House of Pancakes.’”

  “Has that ever happened to you since?”

  “Nope. Never before and never since.”

  “And because you’d known him before, it was like you were back in that earlier time. It probably didn’t even seem to you like he was married. You couldn’t picture it, so it was easy to just act like it wasn’t true. Like nothing had changed and you were just that same girl and guy back in Italy all over again.”

  “That’s a very generous interpretation of events, Tory. Let’s go with that.”

  “And he seduced you gradually, wore you down with the letters.”

  Actually he had seduced me in a nanosecond. Arousal has never been my problem. Arousal’s the easy part, and on that day in the IHOP, I don’t think we even finished our pancakes before we were scrambling out to his car. The letters came much later and perhaps that’s why I really kept them all those years. Because they’d proven that Daniel had continued to want me even after he’d had me. That I wasn’t just a fling or a conquest, but someone worthy of romance.

  Tory mistakes my silence for agreement.

  “So w
here did you guys . . . meet?”

  “The first year we would go to all sorts of places. The country sometimes. You know the hiking trails at Kings Mountain? They’re pretty much deserted on weekday mornings. That was where we were the first time, on a picnic table, which sounds ridiculous, but at the time it felt kind of wild and glorious. I had never made love outside. He would do little things . . . he brought a kite one time and marshmallows, like we were kids. We went to a planetarium, if you can believe it, and just made out during the show. And another time we drove all the way to the beach in the middle of the night. I remember that we found this catamaran, sitting on the sand, and we stayed there on that wet canvas until the sun came up.”

  She digests this in silence, her head tilted thoughtfully to the side. She’s made that gesture ever since she was a little girl. “All this happened the first year? How long did the affair last?”

  “Three years. But by the end he wasn’t planning things as much. It wasn’t quite so romantic. We mostly met in his car.”

  “His car? Really? That’s kind of cool. I mean in a different way, kind of retro.”

  “You think?” It wasn’t a car, it was a minivan. The sort of vehicle a man drives when he has two kids under the age of five. I have a sudden flash of myself lying in the back of that van, tangled in a nest of jumper cables and children’s toys.

  I pick up the timer. “Are you sure we should leave this on the whole time? I only want to cover the gray.”

  “Give it five more minutes. Why didn’t you go to hotels? That’s what Mom and Uncle Gerry used to do when they had their affair. In fact, even now that they’ve both been single a million years, they still do it. He comes to Tucson and half the time they still end up going to hotels because her pottery dust makes him sneeze and she says it’s easier to be sexual when you’re not in your own bed.”

  That sounds like something Elyse would say. She’s always liked hotels. She has a million bathrobes she’s snitched from Marriotts and Hyatts all over the country. “No, we talked about going to one of those pretty little inns they have in Charleston but we never made it. Daniel and I weren’t anything like your mother and Gerry. They’ve made an art form out of trysting, but we never seemed to have that much time.” Or money. Daniel was terrified of having to explain away credit card charges or missing cash.

  The bell dings. Tory indicates I should bend my head and I do, tilting my forehead down into the sink so she can run warm water down my neck and all over my scalp, her slim hands separating the strands of hair to make sure all the dye washes out. She pats my hair dry with Mark’s golf towel and dabs on conditioner. It doesn’t look much lighter, which is good. I don’t want to get kidded at the studio. There’s nothing more pathetic than a woman who’s trying to be what she’s not. Unless it’s a woman who’s trying to be what she used to be.

  “So it was all really impetuous,” Tory says.

  “More like frantic. The big thing I remember is that it was important that I was always ready. I shaved my legs twice a day, I wore my good bra even to the library because I never knew when he would get a free moment. I used to take my phone with me into the bathroom, and balance it on the side of the tub in case he called.”

  “Lunch in five minutes,” Elyse yells up the stairs.

  “Watch how much oil you put in it,” I yell back. “I’ve got a size-four red dress I have to fit my size-eight butt into.”

  “It’s olive oil,” she hollers. “It keeps you from having heart attacks or going senile.”

  “Maybe so, but it’s still a hundred calories a tablespoon,” I shout for the final time, and then I say to Tory’s reflection, “Your mother has a heavy hand with the oil. Her food is suspiciously shiny.”

  “Rinse.”

  “What?”

  “The conditioner needs to come out.”

  “Oh.” I bend my head again and let the water run. Why did I even start this story? It isn’t my job to warn her that there are heartless men in the world. Men who throw women back like shots of liquor, getting bolder and meaner with each one they take.

  “How did it end?” she asks when my head is back up.

  “He dumped me.”

  “In his car?”

  “In a bathroom of an Exxon station at the corner of Providence and Rama. Go ahead, your mom’s lunch is almost ready so we have to hurry. Blow me out.”

  She picks up the hair dryer and I close my eyes as the hot hair blasts around my ears. Even after twenty years I can still feel exactly what it was like to be perched on the edge of that Exxon station sink, with one foot crammed against the toilet seat for balance and one hand reaching behind to clutch the soap dispenser. My angle is awkward. I’m slipping. I look at myself in the mirror, the dirty men’s room behind me. The urinal—that nasty thing no woman ever wants to see, that sign you must have somehow somewhere made a wrong turn. My eyes lock on it. Something inside of me is already beginning to suspect that it isn’t the man I love, but the attention. I’ve always needed to be noticed and Daniel understands this. Uses the fact against me. He knows that I crave attention so bad that I will agree to meet him in the men’s room of an Exxon station on my lunch hour. Each time Daniel thrusts into me, pale pink suds squirt into my palm. Foam runs between my fingers and drips onto the cuffs of my silk blouse. I’ve lost a button. How am I going to go back to work now?

  My eye falls on my purse, precariously dangling from the broken towel dispenser so I wouldn’t have to set it on the sticky floor. A manila envelope is poking out the top. It is late in our affair, at the point where you have to make some decisions, have to push things one way or another. He’d been talking about interviewing for another job. He and I could go somewhere else, he said. His wife was a lunatic. Cold and harsh and there was a good chance, he thought, that he and I could get the kids. He wouldn’t leave them with her, couldn’t live with himself if he did, but maybe we could try Winston-Salem. That was all it had taken and I had set to work researching Winston-Salem. The best school districts, the average price of houses, job openings in our fields. I had put it all in that manila envelope, God help me, and brought it when I’d gone to meet him in the Exxon station.

  When it was time to go I’d handed him the envelope and told him everything we needed to start was inside. He thanked me. He said, “Not just for today, but for everything,” and then he slipped out the door. A rather formal departure and unlike him. That should have told me something right then and there. His leaving first was our pattern, and I would slip out a minute later. I always hated this part, standing alone all by myself in a men’s room, giving him time to get into his car and drive away. I had asked him once why we couldn’t at least use the women’s room because it was cleaner, and he’d been shocked. He couldn’t go into a women’s bathroom, he said. I must be kidding. But he could leave me standing here, smoothing down my skirt, looking for my lost button, a little queasy from the combined odors of urine and cigarette smoke and diesel fumes.

  Tory gently pushes my head down toward my knees and begins to blow the back of my hair dry, flipping it around her hand with an expert touch. I shouldn’t have told her so much. Or maybe I should have told her more.

  That afternoon was the last time I saw Daniel. I waited a couple of minutes and wrenched open the bathroom door and boom, there was a woman standing right in front of me. I almost screamed. She’d pulled her car around the back of the gas station to put air in her tires and she had turned when she heard the door open. Saw me coming out of the men’s bathroom, me in my suit with my little heels, and she’d known what I was up to in a split second. I could tell by her face. I must have flushed with shame, and she froze for a minute, just gaping, before she turned away. Went back to putting air in the tires of her minivan, where her children were squirming around, poking their fingers out the windows and talking to her over the glass, asking if they could get out and get a Coke.

  Tory c
licks off the dryer and I raise my head.

  “It looks great,” she says.

  Jesus. I am way too blond. My hair is as light as hers, uniformly golden. “Oh God, honey,” I say. “This is more than I expected. I’m so—”

  “Pretty,” she says. “What you are is pretty and that’s okay, Aunt Kelly. We’ve got about a minute to finish your story before Mom starts screaming again. What happened to Daniel?”

  “He packed up his wife and his kids and he left.”

  Tory’s eyes narrow. “You never tried to find out where he went?”

  “Someday you’ll understand. Everybody’s got a story like this. Mine’s nothing special.”

  Another head tilt. “And that’s really all there is to it?”

  That’s all there is to it. He left. I waited for him to contact me and tell me where he was and when to follow, but that call never came. I drove by his house after the first awful month and saw the “For Sale” sign in the yard, the empty garage, the curtainless windows staring out at me. Staring blankly, just like the woman who’d been putting air in her tires. What would Elyse think of me talking to Tory like this? I have barely managed to stop short of telling her the true end of the story—that it had been Elyse who drove me to the abortion clinic two months later when the sum total of my stupidity had finally been tallied. Tory had been about six months old and napping in the back of the car. I don’t tell her how on the way home she’d started to cry and Elyse had said to please dig in the diaper bag and find her pacifier, and that when the time came to turn in my seat and put the pacifier in her mouth, I had been unable to do it. She’d been too perfect, too perfectly formed and human, and I didn’t think I could touch her. I had started to cry myself and Elyse had been forced to pull off the road and take care of both of us.