The Unexpected Waltz (12 page)

“Virginia brings the boys by on Monday, Thursday, and Saturday,” she says. I nod. I’ve seen them. Carolina psyches herself up for these visits. She begins tapering her medication the night before so that she can greet her sons sitting up, sometimes standing. The boys are boys. Two tall, embarrassed-looking teenagers, seemingly unaware of what these visits cost her. They poke each other’s arms and complain about things at school, the way their aunt cooks, or about the A-hole coach that benched them. The minute they’re gone she’s flat on her back again, gripping the sheet with both fists, ready for the shot.

The nurses are for the most part sympathetic people, many of them with kids of their own, and they try to help her with the pain cycles. They know she wants to stay lucid for her boys, but experience has taught them to err on the side of overmedication. They’ve all been called from their stations by patients awakening in a sea of agony, drowning in it, screaming for someone to throw them a rope. I didn’t know it would be this bad. Help me, help me. God damn you, help me, please.

And when things get that far out of hand there’s nothing left but large doses, enough medicine to drop a horse. No option except to get them through this night and hope that in the morning some sort of equilibrium can be reestablished, that someone on staff can figure out the right combination. The sweet spot, the fulcrum of the seesaw, that elusive perfect dosage that will allow people to be present in a world full of pain without hurting. The dosage that will allow them to survive another day of being alive.

“Everyone here knows what you’re up against,” I say, although that’s a damn lie. Nobody knows what anybody else is up against. The machines around the bed monitor every modulation of her body, counting breaths and measuring her urine, until the only thing in her life that’s still private is the level of her pain. But Carolina has dozed off again and I sit there, picking at her quesadilla and thinking that maybe I really am better suited for hosting banquets and fund-raisers. I am promising this woman things I have no right to promise and I wonder, whether it’s a month or a season or longer, if I will have what it takes to see this case to its end.

WHEN I FINALLY LEAVE
hospice, I’m drained. I decide to run by the grocery for wine and even, who knows, something sugary and soft. Anything to help me forget this hell of a day.

I pull into the parking lot and sit looking at the studio door. I could walk by like I always do, glance in and maybe wave, but things have shifted now. God knows, I’m in no position to judge Nik, or Pamela either, but I feel oddly complicit, as if by agreeing to keep their secret I have become secretive again myself.

Secretive is the last thing I want to be. My hands are resting against the steering wheel and I glance down at my wedding ring. When I put it on years ago I made a pact with myself to never again sneak around and I didn’t, not really, not in any way that counted. I never cheated on Mark and my lies were only the lies of omission: the things I didn’t say, those avoidances of truth that might even pass for kindness, especially once he got sick.

After a minute I go into the grocery, arcing all the way across the parking lot, weaving my way through the cars, doing anything I can do to avoid passing the studio. But when I come out, a few minutes later, I’ve decided I’m being ridiculous. If I want to keep dancing with Nik, and I do, I’ll have to eventually go back in and face him. I decide to walk by the ballroom and wave as usual, to send a clear signal that finding him with Pamela in the instructor’s lounge was no big deal.

But they’re still in there. Dancing, just the two of them. The fact that I walked in on them did not compel her to flee, which surprises me. When I was having my affair with Daniel I was nervous and jumpy all the time, a woman who startled with every ringing doorbell or honking car.

They’re doing the tango. I stand on the sidewalk, in the afternoon heat, and watch them through the smudged glass. Both have their eyes closed. The music sounds like a heartbeat, coming dimly through the walls of the studio, synchronizing with the rise and fall of my own chest. He holds her closely, in the Argentine fashion, and their feet weave, his among hers and then hers among his. Her head is on his chest and his arms are loose, embracing. He’s lost his frame, I think, somewhat irrelevantly. He has let her give him her weight.

But this is not normal dancing. I am watching sex. It’s what I gave up and what I gave up on, what I turned away from years ago. On one level they are dressed and in public and doing no more than a proper Argentine tango, and yet on another level, this is more raw and passionate than anything I might have witnessed in that curtained-off room, probably as sexual as anything they do in bed. He advances toward her. She pulls away. Only a little, like the quivering string of a violin. It is a slow and protracted sort of chase, for what one person wants, the other doesn’t, at least not at the same moment. They take turns being the hunter and the prey. She comes up from behind him, slipping her hand beneath his armpit until it emerges, star-shaped and demanding, in the middle of his chest. He waits. Teases her, forces her to dangle in a split second of worry and then reacts swiftly, all at once. He whips around, pulls her in, dips her, and her legs buckle. She sinks all the way to the floor—limp, contrite, tossed aside. And then he flexes his shoulders and she springs, light and effortless, back into his arms.

I have stopped breathing. I am holding my breath, and my groceries, standing on the hot pavement, watching him drop to his knees. She bends back, a long unbroken stretch of feminine flesh, leaning over his waiting thigh. Drapes herself over him, bowed back until her head rests against the wooden dance floor. Extends one leg, slowly, toward the sky. He puts his hand behind her knee and turns his head as if to kiss her, but before he can, she has pulled up and away. God, I think. She’s strong. That takes so much power, so much control, to be back on your feet in one fluid motion and moving away from the man. Her eyes are open now. She is walking toward herself in the mirror and she is smiling.

The waltz is rapturous. The foxtrot is playful and the cha-cha is flirtatious and Argentine tango is the dance of perpetually thwarted desire. It is the dance of a couple willing to forgo their individual balance and to lean into each other until they risk falling . . . until one or both of them ends up on the floor. This is a dance with no happy ending and I am stunned by the level of risk Nik and Pamela are taking, so much like the sort of risks Daniel and I took at the end. On some unconscious level they must want to be caught. They are tangoing here before this broad window, bragging of their passion to any stranger who happens to pass, slipping their true feelings inside the safe envelope of dance. Watching makes me feel things I don’t want to feel, things I haven’t felt in years. The appeal of the doomed affair. That strange beauty that comes when something is dying, the smell that roses give off in October. The freedom that comes from having nothing left to lose.

WHEN I GET HOME,
I pour myself a glass of wine, sit down at the computer, and begin to look for Daniel.

There was a time when it was hard to find people. You lost them and they stayed gone. Elyse and I had shared a single afternoon with Daniel in Florence and he had kissed me good-bye at the station just before he hopped the train to Venice. A sweet kiss, memorable only because it was our first and our last.

Or so I thought. It had surprised me when he’d called twelve years later, announcing that he was moving to Charlotte. He said he’d gone to tremendous pains to track me down through my parents, aided only by the few casual facts that I’d mentioned in passing, including the fact that my father owned an insurance company.

“I’m surprised you even remembered my full name, much less that I told you what my dad did,” I said on the phone. No one had seemed to have a last name the summer Elyse and I went through Europe.

“Kelly,” he said. “I remember everything you said to me. That day I spent with you was the best one of my whole trip.”

It was? There was a split moment, I suppose, just then, when I was the one who held the power. He appeared to remember me far better than I remembered him. My kiss must have resonated profoundly, because I could hear something in his voice. Some tremor of nerves. He wanted something. I wasn’t sure what. He had already made it clear that he would be accompanied on his move to Charlotte by a wife and children, and he suggested we meet at an IHOP near the airport. That sounded innocent enough. There’s a limited amount of trouble a woman can get into at an IHOP.

“You’ll never guess who just called me,” I said to Elyse. I’d phoned her the minute that Daniel and I hung up and I was aware that my voice had already taken on the same tone as his—that I was struggling to sound casual and not quite making it. “The guy we met in Italy.”

She was married by that time. Maybe even pregnant with Tory.

“We met a lot of guys in Italy,” she said.

Maybe so, but I was already rewriting history in my mind, already making that single afternoon in Florence more than it had been. Telling myself it was indeed the best day of the whole summer, that I too had known with a single kiss that there was something special about this guy.

“The one we met in Florence,” I said.

“Oh yeah. David.”

“His name is Daniel.”

“But we met him at the statue of David. He took our picture.”

“Right. That’s the one.”

“What does he want after all this time?”

What did he want? What do we all want? I got to the IHOP early, as I always do. Sat by the window and saw him get out of his Jeep Cherokee and walk across the pavement.

“It was so hard to find you,” he said as he slid into the booth. “It was like you had just fallen off the earth. But I kept looking.”

I have spent years analyzing my affair with Daniel, but I’ve never come anywhere close to understanding why he had such a hold on me. There was that sliver of time, so brief, in which he wanted me more than I wanted him, in which I was the valued one, the pursued. But I gave the power away as fast as I could, tilted the seesaw in his favor, and it seems that all women have a story like this—the smart, the dumb, those of us in between. We choose some random guy and we put him on a pedestal. Imbue him with godlike powers. Our friends can see he’s not worth it, but we can’t. We can’t see he’s just a man, a man getting out of a Jeep at an IHOP, a man walking across a parking lot. We keep thinking of him years after the fact, even after we know the depths of his betrayal. We compare other men to him, and find even the kinder, better ones somehow lacking. And thus he stalks our life. The man who got away becomes the man we can’t get away from.

THERE MAY HAVE BEEN
a time when it was easy to lose people, but not anymore. I google Daniel, search on Facebook, and there he is. A picture on the steps of what looks to be a church with his wife and his grown kids. For some reason I click on her profile first and from there it’s easy to see her history, her likes and dislikes, the minutiae of her eerily relatable suburban life. We watch a couple of the same TV shows. She’s a vegan. One of their kids is at Princeton. And yet, in the midst of all this middle-aged, middle-class domesticity, she has declared her relationship status to be “It’s complicated.”