The Unexpected Waltz

by Kim Wright

  But if he goes to Canada, I’ll never waltz again.

  As he slumps here before me now, staring at the table, fiddling with the wrapper of his straw, he has never looked younger or more scared. Elyse accused me of making him the son I never had and women my age idolize their sons, this I know without question. I have heard them tell themselves a variation of this new fairy tale over and over. His father may have failed me, but my son never will. The world may be going to hell but my boy—my Joshua or Eli or Jordan or Andrew—he is perfect. He will be with me to the end.

  It gives me an idea. “If your mother was here,” I ask him, “what do you think she would tell you to do?”

  It’s unfair to play the mother card, but I’m desperate. I know how much he loves her, worries about her, the look that comes across his face when he tells me about leaving his village so long ago. If she were here, she’d tell him to get his butt to Canada and we both know it.

  “This is my fate,” he says. What he means is “Pamela is my fate.”

  “People can change their fates.”

  He shakes his head. “It is not your problem,” he says, and his voice is devoid of an accent. It’s just like when Isabel said Anatoly’s voice changed when he told Builder Bob he could suck his cock. I guess anger makes people sound like Americans.

  “Not all affairs end well,” I say. “You know that just as well as I do.”

  He stands up and pulls out his wallet. Carefully counts out two ones and leaves them on the table for the Sprite.

  “Yes,” he says. “These things you say. I know them all.”

  But when he leaves he takes the envelope.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  I JERK AWAKE. IT wasn’t a bad dream, just one of the vague ones, and it’s slipping from me even as I open my eyes. I try to lie very still and think about the ocean. Maybe if one wave of sleep carried me into wakefulness, another one will carry me back.

  But the clock says 4:00 a.m., that impossible point where you’ve been in bed too long to go back to sleep. This is all going to catch up to me this afternoon. Exhaustion will undoubtedly hit me at the worst possible time, twelve hours from now, when I’m due to meet Daniel in Charleston. After a few minutes of indecision, I rise and pull an afghan over my shoulders like a shawl, then wander down the stairs and out the French doors leading to the garden.

  The night is still remarkably warm, and the moist soil promises an early spring. I feel among the bushes for buds, but they’re not quite there, not yet. The night that Mark died had been very much like this one, another large low moon. I’d jerked awake then too, and had known at once that something was wrong. I’d put my head on his chest but there was no movement within, no heartbeat. And so I’d done what I always do when there’s trouble. I called Elyse.

  It was even more the middle of the night in Arizona and she had been, of course, disoriented by the ringing phone. It had taken her a while to understand what I was saying. She seemed to think that Mark and I had a fight, and when I said that he was cold and I couldn’t get him to talk to me, she started giving me her usual bad advice about men, and when I kept saying no, not that, she finally said, “Are you telling me you’re going to divorce him?” and I said, “Elyse, I’m telling you that I think he’s dead.” We’ve never discussed that night, never laughed about that ridiculous conversation, although I suspect there is something sickly funny in the story. But when I said the word “dead,” she gave this little scream and her scream scared me, woke me out of my trance, and I finally started to cry. She asked me if I had called 911.

  Of course I hadn’t. I had called her. But then I remembered that I should’ve called 911 so Elyse and I hung up and I did. While I was standing at the bedroom window waiting, looking down the driveway toward the road, I saw not the ambulance I expected but rather a whole line of golf carts, coming toward me one after another, in the growing daylight. Because within this self-contained community almost all of our neighbors had abandoned their cars for golf carts, and one of the women already had a jug of iced tea on her lap. It seems the 911 dispatcher had called the security guard at the gatehouse, who had, in turn, lit up the prayer chain, whose efficiency was so remarkable that my neighbors, experts in the rituals of southern death, had beaten the ambulance to my house.

  The garden is beautiful by moonlight. The air is sweet and soft and the wind doesn’t really blow as much as it breathes. The trees arch above me and for the hundredth time I feel guilty that I haven’t mourned Mark more. He deserves to be mourned. In the dream I think we were on some beach. He was calling out to me from the dunes and his face seemed terribly sad, but I can’t remember what he was saying.

  I sigh. Look up at the moon. I should climb back into bed and catch a couple of more hours of sleep. Maybe I would even remember whatever it was Mark was trying so hard to tell me. Some people claim they can do this. Elyse keeps a notebook on her bedside table to record her nocturnal impressions, as if the gods of Arizona are talking to her by day and by night.

  But I’ve never been particularly good at recapturing dreams.

  "SO YOU'RE REALLY GOING?"

  “Yeah,” I say to Carolina. “I’m already on the interstate.”

  “Are you excited?”

  “Mostly scared.”

  “Of what?”

  “He might not be like I remember.”

  Across the phone line I can hear the creak of Carolina shifting in her hospital bed, and a cough. She’s getting another cold. I wore a surgical mask the last time I was in to see her and she made fun of me. But we can’t be too careful. “I’ve never been to Charleston,” she says.

  “Someday we’ll go.”

  A hollow promise, and she makes no comment. “What’s it like?”

  “Old. Pretty. Kinda touristy. One time Elyse and I took Tory when she was a little girl and we all went on one of those candlelight cemetery tours where the guides dress up like southern belle ghosts. They painted their skin real white and had cobwebs hanging off their straw hats and our guide called herself Scarlett O’Scara. I don’t know why we thought that was a good idea. Tory was only about seven and I think we scared the crap out of her.”

  Carolina laughs. Talking about tombstones and cemeteries never seems to bother her. In fact, on our last movie night she requested the theme be “ghosts” and we’d watched Portrait of Jennie and Blithe Spirit. I believe she’s studying up on how to haunt someone but I’m not sure whom.

  “Does Elyse know you’re meeting Daniel?”

  “Oh yeah, and she’s thrilled about it. Thinks it’s a swell idea. But I’ve spent my whole life letting Elyse talk me in and out of things and that’s got to stop. And besides, she started coming around a little when I got into the details of the trip and I was asking her about what makes a hotel a good place to meet a lover. She loves trysts.”

  “Twists?”

  “Trysts.” I spell it for her. “That’s Elyse’s word for meeting a man in some fabulous place.” I’ve come dangerously close to letting it slip that it was I and not Daniel who planned this meeting. That I was the one who called the hotel and read out the sixteen digits of my credit card number. A credit card still in the name of Kelly Madison and maybe that’s why I dreamed about Mark last night. He’s paying for all this from beyond the grave, which is terribly wrong when you stop to think of it. No wonder he was yelling at me to get out of the water, because it’s coming back to me now, that I was in the water and Mark was in the dunes and he was waving like he saw some sort of danger coming up behind me, a shark or a powerboat or a tsunami. But this is something that I have to do, whether anyone else understands it or not. It’s like I’m taking the grand tour of my old life and I’ve got to see Daniel the way Elyse had to see David in the Accademia. I need to see him just so I can say I have.

  “My sister Virginia got back with an old boyfriend one time,” Carolina says. Her voice is a little b
reathless, and I realize she’s on her cell and walking.

  “How’d that play out for her?”

  “She’s living with me, ain’t she? Okay, here we go. Tryst. I got the dictionary off the nurse’s desk.” Carolina’s breathing is really quite ragged. She must have walked the entire length of the hall. “It means ‘a secret meeting between lovers.’ Well, shoot, we already knew that. Can be a noun or a verb. Here’s an example in a sentence: ‘Both lovers had to hurry to keep their noontime tryst in the park.’ Rhymes with cyst, fist, grist, mist, twist, and wrist.”

  “I had to twist his wrist to make him tryst,” I say.

  Carolina ignores me. “Okay, listen to this: It might come from the Middle English word for ‘trust’ or it might come from the Old French for ‘to lie in wait,’ like where hunters used to hide in the bushes until the deer came by. Well that’s two weird things to get confused, isn’t it? I mean are you supposed to trust them, or are they gonna shoot you? It seems like they would have to know what words mean better than that before they put them in the dictionary.”

  “That’s all very interesting,” I say, although the truth is that part about lying in wait creeps me out a little. “What are you going to do today?”

  “Nothing as exciting as what you’re fixing to do. I guess I’ll watch a movie, since you left me about a million of them. Maybe that Elizabeth Taylor one your friend Elyse thinks is so great.”

  “Suddenly, Last Summer? You need to wait until I’m back for that one. Trust me, it’s intense.”

  “Wait a minute,” she says sharply. “It’s Friday. If you’re already in the car you must have canceled your lesson with Nik. I didn’t think anything would make you cancel a lesson with Nik. Does he know where you’re going?”

  “Of course not,” I say. “Nobody knows but you and Elyse.”

  I PULL MY CAR around the circular cobblestone driveway and park it beside a moss-covered fountain. The lobby is very small and quiet. A young man looks up from behind the counter and greets me by name. I’m expected, he tells me. My room is ready.

  The spell of the place grips me at once. I leave my car keys on the countertop along with my sunglasses and the young man has to pick them up for me. He seems used to it. Used to picking up after people who are drunk or weeping or high on the fumes of romance. I follow him down the hall to my room, which has a name and not a number. Like hospice, I think fleetingly. Elyse has told me each room is a tribute to a different impressionist, that this is the theme of the inn, but it’s subtle, not overdone at all, and I should ask for the Manet. “Manet, not Monet,” she’d said. “They’re two different painters.” I told her I knew they were two different painters. Despite what everyone thinks, I am not an idiot.

  As the young man opens the door the first thing I see is a large white bed, high and placed in the dead center of the room. It’s covered with pillows in the faintest tints of pink and blue, so subtle that you think at first you’ve imagined the colors, that it’s some sort of trick of the sunlight.

  “I hope this meets with your approval,” he says.

  I murmur something noncommittal and walk past him into the room.

  “Do you need help with your bags?” he says.

  I shake my head. There’s no need to dissemble or pretend I have any luggage beyond this one small satchel. This young man knows what I’m about. After all, this inn is painfully expensive, on a back street, close to nothing, on the way to nowhere. People only came here for one reason.

  He opens the French doors leading out to a balcony that overlooks the garden, then places my car keys and sunglasses on an antique desk. “Here you are,” he tells me.

  Here I am.

  I’m grateful to have an hour before Daniel is due to arrive. A time of transition, a chance to settle in. There is, per my request, a bottle of champagne cooling in a tall pewter bucket. I pull it out, shake off the slivers of ice, and look at the label. Another of Elyse’s ideas, a château and a vintage that she claims are something special. I’m pretty sure they drank champagne in Love in the Afternoon or maybe even The Apartment. In the old movies, corks were popping all over the place, and I must have mentioned this to Elyse because she had said “Absolutely, champagne” and that we should get this certain kind. “It’s like you’ve stepped into a painting by Monet,” she had told me. “Monet, not Manet. It feels like you’re drinking flowers.”

  I look at the bottle. I know that it costs $140 and that the wine inside will be very pale, with flavors as subtle as the colors of these pillows. That it will have an elegant sort of restraint, because I’m already beginning to understand that when you come to a place like this, what you’re paying for is the absence of something. I look around the room. Pull off my clothes, fold them, and put them in a drawer. I run a tub of water and pour in bubbles but then I change my mind and pull the plug. I climb up the step stool and dive into the rapturous duvet on the tall white bed. It is so high and so fluffy that it invites—perhaps demands—comparisons to clouds. This is what I wanted all those years ago, I think. This is how a man treats his true mistress. He sits her on clouds. There are cheeses and fruits on a tray but I ignore them. It seems that a real mistress would not eat, that she would be like those ferns called maidenhair, the kind they claim are capable of existing solely on air. I pull the bottle from the bucket again and walk out to the balcony. Consider the roses below and the dignified drone of the fountains. Lift the champagne to the light and try to find the oceans of foam that Elyse had promised were tumbling inside it.

  I am moving slowly, being careful. I have remembered to wipe the bottle off with the white linen towel. So on this early-spring afternoon in an expensive inn four hours from Charlotte I have no explanation for why the champagne slips from my hands. No explanation for why it falls like a unit, perfectly, descending toward the balcony floor so slowly that for a minute I imagine I might actually be able to pluck it from midair. No explanation for why the wine explodes in all directions, dampening my feet and sending a thousand shards of glass skidding across the flat gray stones. A minute later Daniel finds me just like this. On the balcony, splashed to the knees, afraid to move.

  Why, he asks, why am I weeping in such a beautiful place? It is the first thing he has said to me in over twenty years. He tells me he can always call down and order another bottle. Of course they will have another.

  So I am not Audrey Hepburn, or Shirley MacLaine. I am not even Elyse and when I tell her this story tomorrow, she will claim that she never described the champagne as drinking flowers. She’ll say that’s tacky and that she could not imagine ever saying such a thing. But it had to be her. Who else knew I was going to meet Daniel, who else would have ever thought to compare a wine to a painting? And then she will say “But you got another bottle, right?” because Elyse has a talent for infidelity. She has that recessive mistress gene, the one that allows her to stand back and tilt her head critically, to wait for the man to prove himself worthy, to wait for the man to come to her. Elyse can lift a bottle to the sunlight and see a whole world inside of it, so she would remember the name of a wine that pleased her, and she would not hesitate to ask for it again. Some women exist to cause men trouble just as some women exist to make life easier, and men like the first kind better. There’s no justice in it, but it’s true. All my life I have made the same mistake with men over and over: I have been convenient.

  When he finds me there on the balcony, wet and weeping, Daniel walks across the patio, the glass crunching beneath his shoes with every step. He picks me up. He carries me through the double French doors and stretches me across the fluffy pastel bed. Of course they have another bottle, he says, amused at my tears, and my excessive guilt. He will call down to the desk. They will bring it right up.

  And when the champagne comes, it is lovely.

  But, for the record, it does not remind me of flowers.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

 
I DON'T KNOW WHY they use the phrase “bed of roses” to mean a good thing. Even if you get rid of all the thorns, even if you strip the flowers down and make a cushion of petals, as some poor maid must have done last night while Daniel and I were out at dinner, the scent becomes overwhelming after a while. In fact, the next morning, it’s the smell of the roses that wakes me. I open my eyes and my first thought isn’t that Daniel is beside me or that this is, in our long and complicated history, the first time we’ve slept together. Slept together in the most literal sense of the words, as in “lay down in the same bed and went to sleep.” My first thought is that I have a headache. Petals are in my hair and sticking to my skin. They trail behind me as I slip carefully from under the sheets and walk to the bathroom, little dots of red and pink dropping to the hardwood floor.

  The clock says 8:55 and Daniel lies motionless in what my grandmother used to call the sleep of the dead. He doesn’t stir as I fumble for pants and a sweater, and when I whisper “I’m going for a walk,” he makes no response. I pull the door closed, then slip down the staircase and past the dining room, where a few people have drifted in for breakfast. Out through the lobby and into the street.

  The city feels empty, like a bowl. I start down toward the bay and when I am almost there, I turn for no reason and double back. Charleston does this to me. Makes me weave and meander. I walk without pattern through the sun-splashed streets, nodding at the runners, the people walking their prancy little city dogs, at the elderly lady who shuffles out onto her porch to pick up her paper. “Mornin’, ma’am,” I call, aware that my voice is absurdly southern, that the moment I drove over the bridge and into the city my accent began to thicken. She lifts one arm in an arthritic salute.

  A horse-drawn carriage plops by. The driver is a young black man dressed in a bright blue shirt and khakis. He probably goes to the College of Charleston. Probably is a history major. I wonder what he thinks about as he drives these streets, pointing out churches and cemeteries with a whip he rarely otherwise uses. Because they make this same loop and tell the same stories every day, this horse and this young man and their cartload of Yankee tourists who stare out from the carriage in a kind of stupor, listening to his singsong voice.