The Unexpected Waltz (32 page)

“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.

I could go back, I think. Daniel is probably waking up now.

Instead I buy a latte from a Starbucks and sit down on a bench.

When Elyse and I brought her here, all these years ago, Tory was scared of the ghost belles. At first, when we had begun the tour in broad daylight, on the sidewalk, she’d thought it was a grand adventure. She’d wanted to have her pictures taken with all of them, even Scarlett O’Scara. But later, when darkness had begun to fall and we were deep among the gravestones, her nerve had faltered. She had said “mommymommymommy” in that fretful droning way she had. She still has it. She still calls for her mother exactly like that whenever she’s sad or frightened. And Elyse had stooped and carried her, even though she was seven. Tory’s legs had locked around her mother’s waist and Elyse must have become exhausted almost immediately. I volunteered several times to take her, but Tory wouldn’t have anyone but her mother that night. She didn’t want to leave the tour, even though we suggested it, but neither would she release Elyse and thus we had stumbled along behind the group in the darkness, always on the verge of getting left. I knew Elyse was moving as fast as she could but even so, I was a little frightened too. We’d wandered so long that I was no longer entirely sure where we were or which direction would lead us back to the street. Each time I would reach for Tory she would shake her head and clutch her mother even tighter.

This is just one more thing I’ve lost, the right to be clutched by a child with such fierce certainty. As many times as I’ve heard Elyse and Tory snap at each other through the years, I have just as often heard that anger fade into laughter and I know that no amount of distance or disappointments can ever truly dissolve the bond between a mother and her child. I don’t have this and never will. I’m the end of a line.

A church bell rings ten and there’s more life in the streets now. People at café tables eating pancakes, families, a young man alone on a park bench singing along with his iPhone, slapping his hands on his knees. I pause before the window of an art gallery and stare at my reflection in the glass, flicking a final rose petal from the side of my hair. The galleries are all full of pictures of Charleston—watercolors of the bay, pastels of the houses, oils of the gardens. It’s a little self-congratulatory, like a beautiful woman who keeps portraits of herself all through her house, but in this particular shop window my eye falls on a collection of pottery that seems out of place among the landscapes. There’s a small, squat bowl in the middle, and inside the bowl there’s a kachina, with a picture of the artist propped above it all. Elyse, looking startled, as if she has just turned, or more likely the photographer had told her not to blink, because I know Elyse. I know how often she has ruined photographs by shutting her eyes at the last minute. So he said “Don’t blink,” and here she is, looking surprised to find herself in Charleston, in this window. The prices on the card shock me. I keep forgetting that Elyse is a real artist, that people pay money for her strange little gods.

I stretch my arms over my head and turn back toward the inn. Why am I out wandering the streets when Daniel is just blocks from here, probably stretching too right now and rolling over, facing my side of the bed? He won’t know where I am or when I’ll be back. He won’t know if he should go down to breakfast. I have waited for him so many times. This may be the first time he has ever waited for me.