The Unexpected Waltz

by Kim Wright

  Carolina had said many times she wanted to see my red dress, so yesterday I came straight from the studio to hospice with it, but when I got to her room she was asleep. Months ago, she’d asked me to promise her consciousness without pain, a gift no one can give, and when I’d seen her there in that deep, hopeless sleep, I knew that I’d failed her. I said her name but she didn’t stir. Right now she can’t stand to feel anything, I know that. She can’t stand to open her eyes and find herself back in this place where Christmas is being carted away in boxes, where angels are being taped into bubble wrap and trees are leaning against the curb. I touched her but there still was no reaction, and I wondered for a second if she was choosing the slow suicide so many hospice patients opt for, if she was so eager to blot out the sadness that she was willing to blot out everything else too. But I looked at her kids on the bedside table and figured that I was just being melodramatic. I hung the dress on the hook of her door and unzipped the bag. It sprang out in all directions and I left it there, a message for when she woke up.

  Some days this place just sucks you down. Each bed holds a different story and each story ends the same. Now I stand in the hall, looking one way and then the other, and finally decide not to go straight to Carolina’s room. One of the other volunteers is spending a couple of weeks with her daughter in California over the holidays and she has asked me to keep an eye on her client, a ninety-four-year-old woman named Miss Eula who is confused, sweet, docile, and apparently utterly alone in the world. No one came to see her over Christmas and New Year’s except a choir from a nearby church that makes an annual trek of coming on Christmas Eve, walking the halls by candlelight and singing “Silent Night.” It’s beautiful, I guess, but also a little creepy. The nurse on duty said Miss Eula had opened her eyes when the choir walked by. She hasn’t spoken in weeks, so it’s impossible to tell how much of it registered, but according to her file she had once played the organ in a Baptist church.

  “She was employed by a church?” I said to the nurse. “Where the hell are those people? Why don’t her former choir mates come to see her?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess she outlived them all.” And a little chill had run across me, light and quick like a mouse. When I look at someone like Miss Eula who has come to the end without a spouse or children, I see myself in that lonely bed. I’ve always assumed that Elyse will be the one to truly grow old with me. We joke about it in a not totally joking way—how we’ll move in together, take care of each other. Make big pots of stew with nourishing root vegetables, move to Scotland, watch our movies all day long. But the joking hides a truth that neither of us wants to face—that unless we pull a Thelma and Louise, we’re highly unlikely to die on the same day. One of us will outlive the other and become Miss Eula.

  In most ways Miss Eula is easier than Carolina because she doesn’t seem to understand what’s happening. She is motionless when I come into the room, except for the gentle rise and fall of her chest, and I sit down beside her bed. I wonder if she can hear. They have said she’s down to the final days, but I have always suspected that hearing is the last sense to go. I don’t know why I believe this, but I talk to people as long as I can, until my tongue goes numb and rubbery and the stories I’m telling no longer make sense. I read to them from library books—children’s stories seem the most appropriate and best—but I have no book today and I don’t really know enough about this woman to guess at what sort of story she might want me to tell.

  “Silent night,” I say. “Holy night.”

  She doesn’t move.

  “All is calm,” I say. “All is bright.” It’s not my favorite Christmas carol, but I do like that line. It’s nice to picture heaven—or whatever word people assign to whatever comes next—as calm and bright. I could sing, I suppose, but I have a terrible voice and I don’t want this poor woman, assuming she can indeed still hear, to go out on a wave of my discordant notes. “Round yon virgin,” I say. “Holy and mild?”

  It’s surprisingly hard to remember the lyrics of songs without singing them, so finally I do begin to sing softly, just to get myself back in the groove of remembering. I mumble my way through “Silent Night” and “Joy to the World” and “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” and Miss Eula does not move. It’s not the first time I have half sung to a patient, although it always feels a bit awkward at first. I finish up my little recital with “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” and stand up. Ease my way from her bedside as if she were a sleeping child, even though I know I could probably upend every piece of furniture in the room without disturbing this woman.

  Carolina’s door is open but she’s still asleep. I could take the dress off the hook and go home but I’m not sure if she’s been conscious during the last twenty-four hours, if she’s even opened her eyes long enough to see it. I stand again in the hall, turning, indecisive. A young man leaves the room across from Carolina’s. His T-shirt says “Love Your Enemy,” but he is one of those angry boys, charging from some relative’s bedside as if it were a bar where he’d been insulted. Maybe the phrase is meant ironically, a punk message. Maybe Love Your Enemy is the name of a band. I wander down to the lounge area. Some of the clients are sitting there, watching the disintegration of Christmas, and I wander back.

  This time, her eyes are open. She presses a button and raises her bed a little. “Were you just here?”

  “Yeah. Did I wake you?”

  She looks at me vaguely. “You brought your dress.”

  “That was yesterday. I left it here last night so you could see it.”

  She nods, slowly. “I’ve been thinking about what your friend Elyse said.”

  “You’re going to have to be more specific. Elyse says lots of things.”

  She grins and for a minute there’s a flash of the old Carolina. “She asked me if I’d ever been in love. But I didn’t really answer her.”

  I sit down. “You want to talk about it?”

  “Not all of it. I’m tired. But he . . . a long time ago, he made me mad.” She swallows. I pick up the glass of water off the table but she shakes her head. “He made me mad and I stayed mad and then after a while he wanted to come back and see me and I said no.”

  “It’s okay to say no.”

  “So you think I was right?”

  Do I think she was right? She hasn’t given me much to go on.

  “I guess,” I say, “it depends on what he did to make you mad in the first place.” But the minute it’s out of my mouth I think that I’m not at all sure that’s what it depends on. “Did he want you to get back with him or just talk to him?”

  “I didn’t ask,” she says, swallowing again. “But maybe if he had something he wanted to say to me, I should have at least sat there and listened. Heard him out, even if I didn’t like it.”

  We sit for a moment, both motionless. I can’t think of a single helpful response, unless maybe she wants me to sing “Silent Night” to her.

  “Maybe I can find him on Facebook,” I finally say. Carolina shifts her head and looks at me like I’m crazy.

  “You don’t need to find him on Facebook,” she says. “I know where he is.”

  We sit for a moment, both of us thinking, neither of us talking.

  “There’s always one,” I finally say. “That we can’t quite get out of our heads.”

  “He turned my life,” she says, a simple and beautiful phrase.

  “Some of them do.” This morning, just after breakfast, I’d clicked on my computer and there it was. His response to my picture came back, in the form of a single question: “Are you still you?”

  I didn’t reply. Instead I opened a Facebook page and studied it. Not Daniel’s, but once again that of his wife. Because even though I never met the lady, I trust her version of events more than his. Her status read “Separated.” No longer “It’s complicated” but now “Separated.” So I guess Christmas defeated them, as
it so often seems to do.

  “You can’t undo what’s done,” Carolina says. “It would be like starting one of your sad movies over and being dumb enough to think it really is going to end different this time.”

  And then there’s a shift in the air. The rapid patter of footsteps down the hall, the sound of a door slamming, some words I can’t understand. They don’t resuscitate or prolong at hospice, but death nonetheless does carry with it the sense of an emergency. It’s a constant surprise, even here. I move to shut the door, glancing out into the hall as I do so, and yeah, the nurse is going toward the room I would have guessed. Miss Eula is leaving, maybe already gone.

  I come back to the seat but Carolina is lying with her arms rigidly at her side, staring straight up at the clouds on the ceiling. It’s impossible to pretend we didn’t hear it, or that it could be anything other than what it was. My red dress undulates gently on the back of the door where I’ve hurried to shut it and the crystals shimmer with the movement, even in this faint light.

  “I shouldn’t have bought it,” I say, or do I mean “I shouldn’t have brought it”? It’s obscene, swaying back and forth in this solemn room. Too bright against the white door, like a blot of blood on the snow. Carolina turns her head again and we consider the red dress, all of its beads and spangles and floats. A thing of the ego, of the transient world, so out of place there in the threshold. There is another soft thud from the hall and Carolina raises herself on one elbow.

  “Help me up,” she says. “I want to try it on.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  NIK HAS TAKEN his new whale to Miami, a woman who has just transferred over from another studio and who is prepared to compete every month, no matter where they have to fly. The word gets out that something truly amazing is happening. Anatoly is going to teach the group class. When I get there the place is full, with more of the feeling of a party than is typical on a Wednesday night. Anatoly never teaches group and in honor of the occasion, some students have shown up that would never ordinarily take a group class. A handful of the Gold and Silver dancers.

  “God knows what he’s going to put you guys through,” Quinn says as I pause at the desk to sign the roster. “He’s been running around with those nutty posters all afternoon. But Nik is flying back in tonight and he’ll be able to calm him down. He’s the only one who can even begin to cope with Anatoly.”

  “What’s going on?” I whisper.

  She whispers back, “We found out today just how much the rent is going up. And it’s a lot.” And then she turns back to the door, where another group of women I hardly know are coming in, and I walk over to the couch where the usual gang is sitting, putting on their shoes.

  “We’ve been overrun with newbies,” Steve observes, as I wedge myself in beside him. Behind his head, three posters are clumsily taped on the mirror:

  I would only believe in a God that knows how to dance

  —Friedrich Nietzsche

  Never give a sword to a man who can’t dance

  —Confucius

  Wives are people who feel they don’t dance enough

  —Groucho Marx

  “That’s three weird people to quote,” I say, although I’m actually amused, especially by the Groucho one. “I guess Anatoly’s trying to inspire us.”

  “You want to practice our tango routine?”

  “What? Okay, sure.” Steve and I walk to the only halfway-empty corner of the crowded room. We go through the sequence a couple of times and I gradually become aware that I’m a little uneasy. I don’t know why. The room is bright and full of people and he and I have partnered many times over the last few months. But tonight it seems he’s taking the routine seriously. We’re on the verge of actually dancing. Over his shoulder I can see the ladies’ room door open and Jane come out in a white ball gown. She’s shopping early for the Star Ball, but maybe she has to. Jane is so tall that I don’t imagine many gowns fit her. This one is lovely—an off-the-shoulder drape with layers of chiffon. She seems embarrassed to step out in it with so many people around, but there’s not a full-length mirror in the ladies’ room. She turns toward her lover, Margaret, who’s sitting on one of the bar stools, and Margaret picks up a camera and quickly snaps a picture. Smart, I think. Jane is a pro at renting dresses. She has them sent to the studio where she can try on several and she has Margaret take pictures so she can study them later, at her leisure. I try to catch her eye, to signal that I think it’s a beautiful dress, but Steve has taken me into a series of swivels.

  When I’d heard Nik wouldn’t be back from Miami in time to teach, I almost hadn’t come. The last week at hospice has been especially bad, but now I feel myself moving with Steve in an easy, open way and I’m glad I’m here, among the crowd and music and bright colors. It’s often like this, that your best days of dancing come on the worst days of everything else. Sometimes the very act of overcoming your resistance, of opening the car door and putting one foot after the other across the pavement, the simple act of willing yourself to walk into the studio is enough to cure whatever’s ailing you. Jane is standing in front of the mirror, staring at her reflection. She holds up the diaphanous overskirt of the ball gown and pulls it to her face as if it might be possible to inhale whatever it is she’s feeling.

  Anatoly steps into the middle of the room and claps for our attention. Group is beginning and there are probably thirty of us, maybe more. He tells us that we are going to have a special treat tonight. We’re going to do an exercise that will break all the rules. That will help us come out of ourselves and travel new emotional ground as dancers.

  Reaction to this announcement is, at best, mixed. The Gold and Silver dancers exchange uneasy glances. They have come to dominate, not to travel new emotional ground, and no one is quite sure what Anatoly is talking about. I catch Valentina’s face in the mirror and we smile. We regulars, the people who take group every night and have learned how to float with anything, we may do okay.

  Anatoly’s big idea is that we’re going to dance to the wrong music. When he says “wrong music” he makes quotation marks in the air. We’re not to worry about steps; we are to try to interpret the spirit of the dance in a new way. He puts on “Wicked Game”—Isabel perks up—and says, “Let’s jive.”

  You cannot jive to “Wicked Game.” But we try, and later we tango to “Bring in the Clowns” and foxtrot to “Zoot Suit Riot.” It’s bedlam. Anatoly cuts off the lights to help us be less self-conscious, and then walks among us, waving his big albatross arms and saying “Release.” Those of us I think of as the Performers—Harry, Isabel, Valentina, Lucas, and myself—are galvanized into action. We’ve suffered through enough of the technique lessons where we’ve spent forty-five minutes trying to perfect a single step and we’re happy to be in a class where it is impossible to do anything right and ergo equally impossible to do anything wrong. The serious dancers, the Competitors, are having a harder time, hiding in corners, rocking back and forth.

  Anatoly grabs me at one point and begins whirling me around. I go with it as long as I can until I get dizzy and he says, “Afraid to fall, aren’t you? I can tell.” I nod crazily at him and he moves on to Valentina. Everyone is afraid to fall, I think. What sort of observation is that? We gallop, we flop, we stomp, and we twirl—it’s like one of those kindergarten classes at a progressive school where everyone tries to be an earthworm or a thunderstorm. When he cuts the lights back on at the end, we’re all flushed and sweaty. People are either saying it’s the best class they’ve ever been to or the worst. Anatoly finishes with a little speech. He says you need both elements in dance, both passion and technique, both abandon and control, but hardly any personality has room for both. And yet, he says, we must keep trying, working to find a balance. “Dance is,” he announces, in his best James Earl Jones voice, “an art in which everyone will ultimately fail.”

  We applaud. He bows. And as the noise dies down I
hear Quinn’s voice from the corner saying, “You look beautiful.”

  Jane has apparently been trying on dresses for the entirety of the last forty-five minutes. She is standing now in a sunshine-yellow ball gown, a thousand shades of gold and orange in the skirt. The cut is old-fashioned—most of the newer gowns begin to flare when they reach the woman’s hips, and the most fashionable of all do not widen until they are at her knees. This is a cotillion-style dress, almost a hoop skirt, but Quinn is right. Jane looks beautiful.

  Maybe it’s the word that throws her. “Beautiful” is a description we rarely allow ourselves. Or maybe she was just surprised to find all of us looking at her, the lights suddenly on and the dancers, who had been so preoccupied with the music, now turned and staring. She seems stunned, as if she’s been hit on the head with a basketball. She says, “It’s not the right color.”

  “Yes it is,” Isabel says.

  “Anybody up for a drink?” Harry asks loudly, and we all nod and begin to collect our things. We need one more than usual tonight. I stop by to use the bathroom before I go and just as I get to the door Jane is there too.

  “Come on,” she says. “We can share.” It’s like this a lot—one bathroom for all these dancers, and I have likely at some point or another peed in front of every woman who comes to the studio. We go in together and I help her get her zipper started down before I lift my own skirt and sit on the toilet.

  “Isabel’s right,” I tell her. “That color works on you.”

  Jane lets the dress puddle around her feet and steps out of it. “Why did Quinn have to say ‘beautiful’?”

  “I know. It’s a scary word to hear.”

  “I mean, I’m not.”

  I pull on the toilet paper. “I think that’s the dress you should rent and I think you and Margaret should come with us to Esmerelda’s. We’ve all had a hell of a night.”