The Unexpected Waltz (29 page)

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

N
IK 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.”

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.