by Kim Wright
Jane has her jeans and T-shirt back on. “Where was Pamela?”
“I heard she has some kind of stomach problem.”
“From making herself puke?”
“She makes herself puke?”
She shrugs. “That’s the rumor.”
“I’ve heard something too.”
“That Builder Bob is trying to run Nik out of town?”
“Yeah. He’s raised the rent on Anatoly.”
“Damn,” she says. “It sounds like the gang needs a plan.”
AT FIRST WE LAUGH like fools at Esmerelda’s, making fun of all the Silver and Gold dancers, how they’d been so stiff and self-conscious with Anatoly’s little game. We split big quesadillas like they were pizzas and then at some point the conversation turns more serious, falls to speculation. Someone says that Nik found a note on his car. He crumpled it before anyone could see what it said. He might have to leave the country for a while and wait a certain number of weeks, then apply for a new student visa and reenter. It’s all some sort of complex diplomatic game. Where do they go while they wait? Canada mostly. Toronto has a big Russian community with boardinghouses and attorneys. Practically a whole cottage industry just to shuttle people back and forth across the border.
So he’ll be gone . . . what? A month? Six?
No one seems to know. Long enough to lose your students and your studio, if you have one. Long enough that everything you’ve worked for falls apart like a sand castle and when you come back you must start from scratch. Apparently student visas work whether you are teaching or studying, and Anatoly has tried to get Nik a job with the local branch of the state university, leading workshops in modern dance. Nik would even do it for free, just to be able to renew his visa. But it hasn’t worked out. Other Russians in town are offering the school the same deal, or better.
So what’s left?
Leaving and reentering is pretty much his only option. We all sit for a minute in silence. There’s no doubt that Bob is prepared to escalate. Part of me feels sorry for him. His world must seem to be unraveling. He owns great blocks of property at a time when land values are dropping. He rents storefronts in areas where storefronts stand empty. And now his younger wife has taken an even younger lover, a man who must seem to Bob as if he’s been genetically engineered specifically to torment him, to mock him with his muscular thighs, regal bearing, and unlined skin.
But still . . . the latest word is that Bob braced a chair against a door and tried to trap Pamela in the bathroom while she was taking a shower. No one is exactly sure why a man would attempt to barricade his wife in a shower, and the story varies about what happened next. Over the last few months, bank accounts have been closed, credit cards have gone missing, and glass has been broken—the small workaday vandalisms of a marriage falling apart. She refuses to leave the house and so does he, so they are living on different levels, coming and going through separate doors. A court date has been set and there are those who believe a private investigator is watching the studio.
Does Pamela love Nik?
Ah, that’s the real question, isn’t it? We suck on our straws, stare into space, reach for another chip.
Her husband’s rich, someone says, and I shut my eyes. No way does a woman walk out on all that, says someone else, and there is murmuring all around. Some voices agreeing, some demurring. I think of Elyse assuming that my first impulse would be to write a check and solve the problem, and what irks me most is that she was right. But I sit quietly now, taking it all in. I spent the first half of my life thinking that if anybody liked me, it was because I was pretty. I’ll be damned if I spend the last half thinking that people only like me because I’m rich.
Nik needs to get away no matter what, someone says. It doesn’t matter who said it because we’re all saying the same things, over and over, like a tragic chorus.
That’s right. Let it cool off for a while. He can always come back.
But it’s very complicated to talk to Nik. He’s hard. Not hard in the heart or hard in the head, but hard like a puzzle.
True. Just the same, someone needs to tell him to be careful.
Danger might be part of the eroticism. Sometimes the yearning is all that keeps it going.
Yeah. Exactly. When people actually find a way to be together, half the time it turns out they don’t even want each other. Sometimes you’re chasing so hard you forget what you’re chasing.
“Seriously, Kelly, you’ve got to get him alone and find out what he’s thinking,” Steve finally says, turning his whole chair to me with a clatter, and everyone else starts nodding. “If he’ll talk to anyone, it will be you.”
When it’s time to leave, Steve insists on walking me back to my car. We get as far as the studio door before I remember that I left my dance shoes in the bathroom. I convince him I can make it to my car without an escort—what’s up with him tonight, anyway?—and dash in. Lucas is in the corner and I know he does this sometimes, stays after class while the rest of us go drinking so that he can practice an hour more. The sight of him dancing with his own reflection, so serious about it, both ashamed and kind of proud, has always moved me. Anatoly and Quinn are both doing their last private lessons of the night and Nik’s duffel bag is over by the bar. Good, I think, he’s back from Miami. But I don’t see him anywhere, so I go into the bathroom and grab my shoes, which are lying just where I left them, beside the toilet. Then I slip back out.
There’d been so many people at the group class that I hadn’t been able to park in my usual spot near the door. I’d driven around for a while looking and ended up several rows back, near the grocery loading dock, almost beside the Dumpster. Another of Builder Bob’s little punishments has been to cut the number of parking spaces designated for the ballroom, so the instructors park out here, among the bits of rotting produce and the crushed cardboard cartons. It’s dark in this part of the parking lot and most of the stores have closed. For a moment I regret not letting Steve wait for me but I flick my autoentry and the car responds, lighting up and blinking, and I walk toward it fast.
There’s another car right beside me, parked so tight that I have to turn sideways to squeeze through to my door. There’s a movement inside the car and I do a dumb thing. I freeze just when I should hurry. But it’s just a movement, a person sitting there. No, two people sitting there. I open my front door, slip inside, and start the car as fast as I can. Hit the door lock button and throw it into reverse.
I’m being silly, I think. Silly and jumpy. So there were two people sitting in a parked car. What of it? But as I wait at the first stoplight, I can’t shake the feeling that the car behind me has some intent. Am I being followed? It makes no sense. I try to remember if I’ve seen it before, but I’m a typical girl, not particularly good at identifying cars by their make or model, and besides, it was dark. I’m pretty sure that the car behind me now, the car that continues to stay in the same lane as me, which seems to be following just a fraction too close to my bumper, is not the same car that was parked beside me back in the lot. That car had been big. One of those monster SUVs you see all over this part of town. An Escapade, or maybe a Suburban.
The kind of car Pamela drives.
Which . . . once again means nothing. Half the women on my street drive Suburbans.
Good, the second light is turning yellow as I approach it. A chance to verify my suspicions. I slide through just as the yellow light turns red and the car behind me does too—a fact that, while still quite possibly incidental, makes my heart pound a little more. Don’t overreact, I think. A car is driving through town and another car happens to be behind it. Nothing noteworthy in that. But it has been such a strange night and I try to sort through the seemingly unrelated facts. Nik’s bag was in the studio but I didn’t see him. So okay, he was in the back. Or he and Anatoly were going out for something to eat, a chance to discuss the rent situation. Lucas had been embarr
assed that I had seen him, dancing by himself. When I waved, he had not waved back, but that means nothing either, does it? The preacher had been dancing as if he were in a trance, swaying back and forth in a way that was strangely private, and then, then there was the matter of those two people sitting in a parked car in the dark. But there was no reason to think that they might have been Nik and Pamela.
Yes, he’s been gone for a couple of days and yes, she might have been tempted to slip away and meet him upon his return. But would she meet him in the parking lot of the studio? Unlikely. That’s way too risky—but, once again, very much like the things Daniel and I used to do. Toward the end this is how it gets, I think, my eyes darting back and forth between the road and the rearview mirror. You’ll do all kinds of crazy shit—you meet in a men’s room, or beside a Dumpster. And you don’t even care if it’s degrading because part of you believes you deserve the degradation. You’re desperate for a conclusion, even a tragic one, so sometimes you force the issue. Make a move that, for better or worse, will knock you off dead center.
And if this car is truly following me, why? Even if Pamela had felt she had to see Nik, even if they had been mindless enough to meet in the dark parking lot outside the dance studio . . . that still doesn’t produce any reason why a stranger would be tailing me now. It’s my imagination, I think, the result of an unusual day. Death and desertion and dancing to the wrong songs—and Steve, the way he pulled me into hold when we tangoed. And then I think of that whole ugly wall of guns over Bob Hart’s shoulder as he leaned in his doorframe with an empty glass in his hand and appraised me. Appraised me and found me wanting, just an older, doughier, grayer version of his wife.
I turn left. So does the car behind me.
There’s only one more light before the entrance to my neighborhood.
Maybe I’m jumpy due to the simple fact that Steve put his hand on my back in that particular way. Not just that he was flirting, because everyone at the studio flirts with everyone else. The problem was that when he touched me, for just a minute, I felt something. I don’t want to feel something. I don’t want to open the door that leads back into the room of men.
The last light is red. I roll to a stop and watch the car behind me move into the right-hand lane and turn. I sit alone, the only car within sight, and wait for my heartbeat to slow. I’m losing it, I think. I’ve gotten so paranoid that I can no longer be trusted to interpret the events of my own life. I count my breaths until they slow.
It’s natural to tell ourselves stories about the past, but the trouble is, they’re simplified stories. We leave out the contradictions, the inconsistencies, the inconvenient emotions. When I told Tory about the time I met Daniel in the Exxon restroom, I chose the most dreadful story I could think of, one that shows him at his worst and guarantees I will not become nostalgic. But there are other stories I might have shared, such as that first time on the picnic table at the park, the sun so high and bright, the trees forming a low canopy above the table. He had undressed fully, which surprised me, and I had been struck mute by his beauty—the pale, marble-like quality of his shoulders and chest, his upper arms. My reaction was disturbing—here I had spent a lifetime resenting men who only approached me because of the way I looked, but perhaps I was no better. What if I only wanted him because he was so perfectly formed, his smile so slow and sleepy, his hair so wild and thick? I remembered a line from a Yeats poem, something some man had quoted to me once, thinking I would like it. Something about how only God could love you for yourself alone, and not your yellow hair.
And I had bristled when he said it, of course I had. I wanted to be loved for more than my yellow hair and yet . . . I was on a picnic table in a deserted park, on the verge of sinning more deeply than I ever had sinned. Because Daniel was married, taken, a father of two, and yet all I could think about were the divots on his shoulders, how much I wanted to slide my hands across them, how much I wanted to hold on and ride and see where this pretty animal would ultimately take me.
I was not naked. Mostly so, but I had tied my shirt around my hips. He pulled at it.
“Please,” he said. “I want to see.”
“Don’t look at me there. Anywhere but there,” I said.
On the way home, after it seemed the sex was over, he had sat at another stoplight, just like this one, waiting to turn left. Daniel had taken my hand and turned it over, palm to the sky, and begun to flick his tongue down the length of my lifeline. That was all there was to it, that was all it took. Just his tongue on my palm was enough to set off a trip line of shudders and jolts and my back arched forward and my right foot shot out as if I were the one who was driving. As if I were trying to stop something, my foot pumping the air, looking for the brake on a runaway car. This is the thing that no one gets about women like me. We are ripe for obsession. For not only do we get aroused, we stay aroused. In us, the desire never ends.
“You’re so easy,” Daniel murmured, my palm pressed against his lips. He used to tell me that I was the easiest woman he’d ever met.
I KNOW IT WILL backfire if I just flat-out tell Nik what to do. So instead, I introduce the idea of an exit strategy.
“Exit strategy,” like “hobby,” turns out to be one of those terms that don’t translate well into Russian. It’s taken a lot of persuading for me to convince Nik even to leave the studio. He’s acting like I’m kidnapping him as he follows me four storefronts down to the pizzeria, and once we get here he refuses to eat. He orders a Sprite.
“Lunch is on me,” I say. “That means I’ll pay for it.”
But he shakes his head. It feels like the first day of spring, surprisingly warm and breezy, and they’ve seated us on the patio beside big half-barrel planters of impatiens and ferns. What does he think when he looks upon this world, I wonder, and I remember he told me that the only time his mother ever came to America she walked around shading her eyes and saying, “Too bright, too bright.” Does he let Pamela pay for things when they go out? Assuming, that is, they ever go out. He’s so young and she’s so loaded that you’d think it was clear who would pick up the check. But Nik has his strange old-fashioned ideas about men and women. It’s entirely possible that he does not let his lover even buy him a Sprite.
“Anatoly doesn’t need this,” Isabel had said last week at Esmerelda’s. “Nik’s going to have to face facts and go to Canada for a while. Wait it out and then reenter.”
“Otherwise he’ll take down the whole studio with him,” Steve had agreed. “He’s smart. Anatoly is like a brother to him, and Nik isn’t going to let him ruin his business trying to protect him.”
But, looking at the man-boy who sits before me now, staring down at the table and sullenly fiddling with a plastic straw, I’m not so sure. Love, or at least the idea of love, stupefies us all, and it’s ironic, to say the least, that I’m the one they’ve elected to talk to him. Two things have happened in the last twenty-four hours. I’ve learned that I have slightly over nine million dollars in the bank and I’ve agreed to meet Daniel in Charleston. He asked me an impossible question—“Are you still you?”—and I had written back, “You’re the only one who can tell me.”
“Come to Charleston,” he replied.
He pointed out that we always talked about going there and that now, at last, there are no impediments in our way. At least that’s what I think he meant to say. He miswrote, used the word “implements” instead, as if twenty years ago we had been in constant danger of stepping on a rake. When Elyse found out I agreed to meet Daniel, she exploded. She used words like “self-destructive” and “masochistic,” words I might use now too if I thought Nik would understand them.
So here I sit on the patio of a pizzeria, the supreme hypocrite of the planet Earth, come to tell this boy he needs to do all the things I can’t seem to do myself. I’ve gathered every sort of document Nik might possibly need and put them in—what else?—a manila envelope. The number o
f a bank account in both our names, set up as tenants in common, as if we were business partners. Either of us can make deposits to this account and either of us can make withdrawals. It’s not much. Not much in the face of what I own. A couple of months’ worth of allowance for me can buy a whole new life for someone like Nik. And there’s a one-way plane ticket that was expensive because the date was left open, and contact information for an attorney in Toronto. I slide the envelope across the table.
“I’m going to insist that you take this,” I say.
He opens the envelope. Sees the contents. He knows what it all means at a glance and he pushes the papers back in, his face flushing, as if I’ve brought him to this pizzeria patio and shown him porn.
“No one has to know about this except for the two of us,” I say, which is true. All the Esmerelda’s crowd expected me to give him was advice.
He shakes his head, slides the envelope across the table toward me.
“I’m going to insist that you take it,” I repeat. “It’s up to you what you do with it once you’re out of my sight, but we’re not leaving this table without that envelope in your hands. You’re always telling me to trust you, and I do. But it works both ways.”
“I am fine,” he says. There is a slight tremor in his voice. I wonder how long it has been since he slept eight consecutive hours.
I love this boy, I think, and the realization comes to me with a shock. It is, needless to say, a different kind of love and yet I know I could make the same mistake with Nik that I made with Daniel. I could so easily convince myself that he has some special magic. Put him on the pedestal that has stood vacant for so long. I already half believe I can’t dance without him, that the world of the ballroom is something he has given me, something I couldn’t have found with anyone else. When they were all talking at Esmerelda’s about how he had to go to Canada, I had known that they were right and yet one thought had snuck in, a splash of selfishness among all the altruism.