The Unexpected Waltz (20 page)

There’s no way I’m going back to sleep. In fact, my heart is pounding. I debate taking a Lexapro, something I haven’t done since Mark died, but then I look again at the clock: 6:35. It’s still dark outside and it feels like I’ve been up all day or maybe like it’s somehow still the night before. Valentina’s warmed up by now and the first heats have just begun. She’s in number nine, she said, and at two minutes a heat that means she’ll dance soon. Maybe it’s the old cheerleader in me, but I feel guilty. If I get up and hurry, I can be down in time to watch her dance.

I pull my clothes back on and follow Isabel’s glitter trail to the elevator. The ballroom is bright and loud when I get there, and full enough that it takes me a while to find the table with our studio’s name. My timing is perfect, since they’re just wrapping up the sixth heat. People of all ages are leaving the floor, from children to the elderly, and I can see Valentina in the corner of the ballroom, practicing her Viennese waltz with Nik. Since she couldn’t afford many private lessons, she decided to only compete in one dance for all ten of her heats—the Viennese waltz, her favorite. The heats before hers blow by fast and Valentina and Nik line up at the corner of the stage. When the music starts it’s “My Favorite Things,” the classic Viennese waltz tune, the first one on the iPod shuffle at our studio, and her face splits into a wide smile of recognition.

Somehow I thought watching a ballroom competition would be like going to the opera, a sedate affair, but I soon learn that all the tables hoot and holler for their dancers, and it’s really more like NASCAR. Valentina’s nervous, taking small steps and making tight little turns, but she’s smiling as they spin past us, the painfully young Internet bride and her dance instructor. Her husband is taking pictures, but it’s hard to say whether he’s getting Valentina in any of the shots. He doesn’t stand up—maybe he can’t—and he is aiming his camera toward the dance floor in an unsteady fashion. He seems more like a father watching a daughter go off to the prom than a husband, and it’s both sweet and kind of sobering. Did Mark and I ever look like that?

As her last heat concludes, Nik escorts Valentina back to the table, where we all stand and cheer, and then he immediately goes to warm up Isabel in the corner. I almost didn’t recognize him when he came in, stained dark as coffee with his hair slicked back and knotted at the nape of his neck like a vampire’s. Quinn and Steve are coming up in eleven heats. How could I have thought of sleeping through this? It’s fascinating, it’s fabulous, it’s like reality on steroids. I wonder what Elyse would think if she were here, if she’d think I was nuts to be sitting among all these feathers and tiaras at seven o’clock on a Saturday morning in a two-star hotel on the outskirts of Atlanta. But Elyse would probably treat the ballroom dancers like the Hopi or Navajo, just one more aboriginal tribe for her to study, with their own brand of ritual and adornment. Or I wonder what Mark would say about so much silliness—if he would consider it a noble kind of silliness, or if it would just look to him like an ostentation that’s found a whole new way to spend their husbands’ money. If he would consider these men no more than gigolos, paid to fuss and flatter. Paid to prop up sagging marriages the way a buttress shores up the wall of a house.

Jane has pulled her chair beside mine. She’s got the program open in her lap and is panicking because she’s just realized that Nik has put her into heats that have six or seven dancers in her age group. This couldn’t have been by accident—we’ve seen him carrying around the entry forms for weeks—so she and I both know he’s testing her. Her lover, Margaret, hasn’t come to Atlanta, something about a sick dog back home, and that might be one reason why Jane seems so agitated. I can’t say I’m surprised Nik has pulled something like this. He’s ambitious for his dancers. Not competitive—I don’t think trophies or ribbons mean anything to him and he isn’t like Anatoly, a compulsive point counter, determined to push the studio higher in the rankings. Nik would rather one of his dancers come last in a hard heat than win an easy one. He has said as much to me, that you only improve through that sort of pressure, so it makes sense that he’s loaded Jane into crowded heats. He doesn’t want her to just be the first of one.

“Oh God,” she says, flipping through the program. “There are seven women in my tango and six in waltz. I don’t care about being first. I’d be thrilled with fourth or fifth. I just don’t want to be last.”

“Nik won’t let you be last,” I say, although that’s exactly what I’d have been thinking if I were in her shoes.

“Who are these women?” she says fretfully, peering at the listings through her reading glasses. “Shit, two of them are from California.”

“That doesn’t mean they’re any better than you.”

“If you weren’t good, why would you bother coming all that way?”

She has a point, so I turn my attention back to the dancers and leave her to worry her way through the book. It’s easy for me to think this, since I’m not the one whose ass is on the line, but I’m proud of Nik for not stacking the deck and I agree with him that placing his students in hard heats will make them better dancers. A lot of things are becoming clear to me as I watch the competition, in fact, because everything Nik’s ever said is being acted out before my eyes. He’s always telling me to put power in my steps from the start. This goes against my natural inclination, and probably everyone’s natural inclination. When something is new and you’re uncertain, you want to keep it controlled and careful, at least until you’re sure you’ve memorized the sequence. Nik won’t let me do this. He says things like “We go across room in five steps,” without telling me what those five steps are going to be. And when I beg him to let me learn the routine before I put in the power, he shakes his head.

Power first, then finesse. If you don’t have energy from the very start, then it’s hard to put it in later. By that time you’re proud of your pretty little steps. You don’t want to mess them up or change something that seems to be working, and so you stay small, and now, here before me, all over this ballroom, I can see the truth of what he’s been saying. People who started out careful and never figured out how to get bigger. Their form is correct. Their timing is accurate. They don’t make any obvious mistakes. They’re trying hard not to come in last. But they aren’t really dancing.

Quinn swoops in and says, “Time for round two.” She’s finished dancing with Steve so we’re going back upstairs to get Pamela ready for the Silver heats. Word is she’s even doing a few Gold and I respect her for it, a bit grudgingly.

“I’ve got to go help Quinn,” I tell Jane. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I’ll get back in time to see you dance.”

“Good,” she says, still staring into the program, her pink highlighter in her hand. “I don’t want anybody to see me. I don’t know why I ever agreed to do any of this. I’m in hell.”

PAMELA, NEEDLESS TO SAY,
owns her gown. It is stunning, heavily stoned, a bright red chiffon with a low back that reaches almost to the dimples of her butt cheeks. The sort of thing a woman wears when she is no longer afraid of being noticed.

“It’s amazing,” I tell her.

She shrugs. Pamela and I have only had one conversation in our entire lives, that night in the Esmerelda’s bathroom when she tried to warn me off Nik. I wonder if she even knows I’m the one who walked in on her that day in the instructor’s lounge. “I’m thinking of getting rid of it,” she says.

“Really?” Quinn says. “I’d take it off your hands, but I’m too fat.”

“It might fit you,” Pamela says. It takes me a second to realize she’s talking to me.

Quinn has Pamela in the chair, putting up her hair, and I walk over to the dress hanging on the door. It’s a Doré, which is one of the best. The price of ball gowns seems ridiculous until you learn how much engineering goes into them and then the price still seems ridiculous, but a little less so. They’re sewn together over a skeleton of girdles and bras so that nothing ever slips, even if the dancer does lifts and splits. Looking inside one of these dresses is like opening the hood of a sports car. You see at once where the money went.

“It’s a professional dress,” Pamela tells me, which, thanks to Quinn, I know means that it’s superconstructed, even by ball gown standards. “I saw someone wearing it last year and pitched such a fit that Bob got it for me for Christmas.” She laughs, a high, tinkly sound like a bell you’d ring for a maid.

“Pamela’s husband,” Quinn says, so many bobby pins in her mouth that I can barely understand her, “owns the shopping center the studio is in.”

“Canterbury Commons is one of his properties,” Pamela says primly, a note of correction in her voice.

“Really?” I say. “That’s very cozy.” And then I lift the hanger off the doorframe and nearly drop the dress. Between the beading and the interior construction, it’s much heavier than I would have figured and I’ve been carrying ball gowns around all morning. If you were to put this dress in the corner, it would probably be able to stand there a minute on its own.

“It weighs sixteen pounds,” Pamela says, as if reading my mind. “Do you want to try it on?”

“There isn’t time,” I say, but I hold it up to myself in the mirror and for a second my reflected image gives me pause.

“Red on a blonde is unexpected,” Quinn says. “I’ve never thought about it before, but you two look a little bit alike. You’re both about the same height, I mean. And the hair.”

This is an observation that probably doesn’t please either one of us, but Pamela shifts a little in the chair so that she can see me in the mirror. No one wears dresses like this at the Newcomer level, or even the Bronze, where most of the dancers are still renting or making their own. A dress like this is a statement, a demand for attention, a sign the dancer takes herself seriously. Maybe a little too seriously.

“I’ll let it go for three thousand,” Pamela says.

“Think of it as an early Christmas gift to yourself,” Quinn says, spinning her around in the chair so that she can face the mirror at last. “I bet it would look great on you.”

“And there’s room to let out the seams if it’s tight in the hips,” Pamela says. She is frowning at her reflection and when Quinn hands her the smaller mirror so that Pamela can scrutinize the back of her hair, she catches my eye. She mouths the word “bitch” and I hang the dress back on the door.

PAMELA MAY BE A
bitch but the artistry of her dancing astounds me. She and Anatoly begin their quickstep with a running leap into a slide—very tricky, but their timing is perfect. Pamela’s dress flares like a Chinese fan when she leaps.

It’s late in the day, the last heats of the afternoon, and Pamela and Anatoly clearly have it in the bag. The rest of us sit around the table in various states of disrepair. One of Isabel’s eyelashes has come off and the other is still on. Jane stares straight ahead in a kind of stupor. Wilhemina has gone to her room to take a nap and Valentina and her husband have left to drive back to North Carolina. Which is a shame, since Nik just learned she got a first and three seconds. I believe that going up to the judges’ table to get her ribbons would have pleased Valentina very much.

The mood of the ballroom has changed throughout the day, become more businesslike as we’ve moved on to the Silver and Gold heats. People have stopped cheering or lining the floor to take snapshots of their family and friends and started drinking instead. The moves on the floor are getting harder, much more athletic, and at Quinn’s direction, I have brought down a Styrofoam cooler filled with ziplock bags of ice. The pros are exhausted. They are icing themselves every time they come off the floor. Everyone on this level has competed many times, and they’ve met everyone else in their divisions. They seem to know the circuit almost too well, and who is supposed to beat whom. A woman from another studio has just walked by our table in tears, talking loudly into a cell phone. “Tricia took two of my tangos,” she was sobbing to whoever was on the line.

“Well, this is just a great big bucketload of drama,” Isabel says. “Every direction you look. What do you think that woman’s dress cost? Probably more than my car.” I laugh, a little guiltily. Isabel’s gown looks especially shabby in this company, now that most of the newcomers have begun packing and leaving and only the whales remain in the room. “Seriously,” she goes on, “if I’m going to keep doing this, I’m going to have to find a civilian partner. Paying for the heats is one thing but when you add on the instructor fees, it’s killing me.”