Five Things I Can't Live Without (26 page)

But he sure could fuck. That’s all it was between Peter and me. We didn’t even get together until at least eleven at night, which circumvented the pesky problem of having to talk to each other. Our tryst/dalliance/affair/whatever it was ended right after Christmas. I’d decided not to go back East for the holidays, none of my local friends were around, and I figured it was better to be with him on Christmas than to be alone. At the very least, I’d get good sex. But I didn’t even get that. On Christmas Day, we’d decided to make Cornish game hens, and thoroughly sloshed, we got into a fight about how to tie their little legs together. He was so verbally savage that I ended up calling Kathy, sobbing, from his bathroom. After listening for a while, she said sagely, “You know, it’s not really about the game hens,” which made us laugh forever after.

When I came across Peter’s profile, I had been back from my New York trip for about a week. I didn’t go looking for Peter. Thinking I might be rusty after my hiatus, I’d innocently gone online to read some profiles and there he was.

My response to seeing him was complicated. On the one hand, I felt embarrassed that I’d ever known such a person, let alone had sex with him (a lot). He was proof that I did not want to be back out in the dating world, trawling infested waters. I had Dan, and my trip had confirmed that was where I wanted to stay. But remembering how voracious I’d been with Peter—well, like I said, it was complicated.

I should make clear, however, that my homecoming with Dan couldn’t have been better. We were thrilled to see each other, we devoured each other the minute we got in the front door, and he even called in sick on Monday to spend the day with me. But within the week, we were back to our old selves, with our old routines.
All
of our old routines.

“We have to talk,” I said, sitting down next to Dan on the couch.

He lowered his book. “I’m in the middle of a chapter. Can you wait until I get to the end of it?”

“How about until you get to a section break?”

“Fine.” He exhaled loudly. Several minutes later, he set the book aside. “Fire away.”

“I know you think we’ve been coasting, but I think our car might be in a ditch.” I meant it to be funny, but Dan could not have been less amused. “What I mean is, we need to pull out of our rut.”

“How did it go from coasting to a rut?” he asked, with thinly veiled annoyance.

“In a way, we’re saying the same thing. It’s just different terminology.”

“No. We’re saying entirely different things. You’re saying we’re stuck; I’m saying we’re in neutral, but we’re still moving. We’re still rolling forward.” He did a hand gesture to illustrate the downhill progress of our car. “We’re coasting.”

“Well, if one person thinks things are fine, and the other person thinks they’re not, you kind of have to yield to the person who says they’re not, right?”

“No.”

“No?” I repeated, surprised by the matter-of-factness of his response.

“No.”

“Aren’t we in this relationship together?”

“We are, but that doesn’t mean we need to see things your way. We have a lot of good times together. There’s nothing wrong with our relationship. You’re just getting stuck in your head again.” He stopped looking at me and stared obstinately ahead.

I was sorry to find us in such polarized positions: me wanting things to either go back to the way they had been in the beginning or to go forward toward something deeper, Dan insisting we were fine as we were. It was true; I was a bad coaster. But this time, I had a plan. I tried again. “What I was really trying to say is, we should take salsa lessons.”

At that, he stared directly at me. “Salsa lessons?” he repeated incredulously.

“Maybe I should have led with the salsa lessons. Let me start over,” I said, holding the bright yellow flyer up in the air. “Salsa lessons! It’ll be fun!”

“You think we’re in trouble, and your answer is salsa lessons.”

“No, I didn’t say trouble. I said we were in a rut, and salsa lessons would be a fun way to start pulling out of it.” I put a conciliatory hand on his leg. “I’m sorry this conversation has gone so badly. I really just wanted us to try something new and fun together. The first class is this Monday.” I paused, waiting for him to say something. “Please? We could just go to one class, and if you hate it, we don’t have to go back.”

He took the flyer and read it with a furrowed brow. “If I try the one class and hate it, you can’t try to convince me to go back. That’s the end.”

“I promise.” I held up two fingers in what I thought was a gesture of Scout’s honor. I knew that if Dan went once, he’d be determined to master it. There was no way he’d allow himself to be thwarted by salsa dancing. It was the safest deal I could make.

“You’ve got that all wrong,” he said, starting to smile as he repositioned my fingers. “Now I’ve got your word.”

On Monday night, we showed up for our first salsa class. I’d been expecting an intimate space and maybe ten other couples who—in my fantasy—were the same general age, proficiency, and comfort level as us. Instead, the class was being held in a room nearly the size of a gymnasium, but with the hardwood floors and mirrored walls of a dance studio, and we were surrounded by what appeared to be about sixty college students. There were no other couples except for Dan and me. It hadn’t even occurred to me until I saw them that the class was in a Y across the street from a college; we had apparently stumbled into a university mating ritual.

“What do you want to do?” I asked Dan as I surveyed the scene. “We only paid for the one class. I guess we could leave.”

“We should at least give it a try,” he said. He was scanning the crowd, too. I couldn’t help noticing that there were significantly more women in the room than men. Even though Dan didn’t seem to be looking at any of them in particular, I felt a little self-conscious being in a room full of nubile eighteen-to-twenty-one-year-olds, many in spaghetti straps. I wished I’d worn something other than an old T-shirt and yoga pants.

“We can find another class. This was just the one closest to the house.”

He rubbed my shoulder. “Relax. We haven’t even started yet.”

Just then, Roxy trotted to the center of the room. She was wearing a headset with a microphone so that we could all hear her. She was a trim Latina woman of about forty, wearing jeans. The jeans surprised me. I’d pictured some sort of leotard, or a skirt that fanned. Her partner was an Asian man named Thiep, which was also unexpected. She introduced herself and him, but he wasn’t miked, so it was clear who ran the show. She arranged us into five long horizontal lines, and she faced us while we faced the mirror.

“We’re going to start with the basic step,” she said. She illustrated it while counting off the beats.

Dan and I smiled encouragingly at each other before following along: back on the right foot, hold a beat, feet together, left foot forward, feet together. When we were both able to successfully execute the most straightforward dance step in history, we smiled at each other again, this time in congratulation. So far, so good. Roxy had us do it four more times.

“That’s the follower’s basic step. So that would usually be the woman,” Roxy explained with a smile. “But not necessarily in San Francisco.” People tittered at her canned joke. Dan rolled his eyes at me. That was the one good thing about a class this size: we could have honest reactions without getting caught. “Now here’s the leader’s step, usually the man.” She showed us the same step with reverse footwork, and we practiced that one four times.

For the next twenty minutes, we did variations on that theme. We progressed from the basic step, to the side basic. She showed us what she called “hairbrushes,” where we took one arm and moved it around our heads like a halo. Dan and I exchanged sheepish glances in the mirror during our hairbrushes.

“Don’t put the hip in it!” Roxy cautioned. “Right now, we just want everything to be smooth. We go forward, we go backward. We go side to side. Don’t get sexy.” She did an imitation of a gringo getting too enthusiastic, and all the undergrads laughed. I couldn’t fault her; she knew what her audience liked. But because I had been trying to throw my hips into it, I felt a little foolish.

“I liked when you got sexy,” Dan whispered to me.

“It’s time for partner work!” Roxy sang out. “I need a row of leaders facing a row of followers. That means men facing the mirror, women facing the men. I see there are some extra women here tonight, so those of you who are comfortable can be leaders.”

There were murmurs and laughter as people scrambled for their places. Dan and I took our positions facing each other.

“Now we’re going to learn closed position,” Roxy said. Thiep, who had been off to one side, now came front and center. Thiep took hold of Roxy in what seemed a fairly traditional couples-dance pose. Then he released her. “That was closed position. I’d like you all to try it.”

Dan and I got into closed position. “This isn’t so bad, right?” I asked.

“I’m not commenting until it’s all over,” he said, but he smiled.

“Now we’re going to do our basics. That is, the follower will be starting with her right foot moving backward, and the leader will be moving his left foot forward. Watch.” She and Thiep demonstrated. “Now it’s your turn. When I get to five, you’ll begin.” She clapped her hands and counted off.

On five, Dan and I did our basic. Or rather, we both did the follower step. When Dan realized it was his mistake, he seemed embarrassed and muttered, “Sorry.”

“It’s all for fun,” I said.

He nodded, looking slightly preoccupied.

Our next two attempts went better, and then Roxy explained the twist. We were going to switch partners. That is, the follower was going to move down the row to the next partner. Undoubtedly, this was to give our classmates ample chance to hit on each other.

“Well, I guess I’m off,” I said, and dutifully moved down to the next leader.

“Hi, I’m Marty,” he said, thrusting his hand out to shake. He looked all of nineteen.

“Nora.” I smiled as he pumped my hand enthusiastically.

“Closed position!” Roxy trilled. “And on the five, go into your basic!”

I moved backward, Marty moved forward, and it seemed interminable. I didn’t know how much eye contact to maintain with this clammy-handed child.

“Now rotate!” Roxy said, indicating the switch to the new partner.

It continued that way for the rest of the class: Roxy’s command, introductions, closed position, clear signal of disinterest from me, basic step. Mostly I didn’t need to bother with the signal, though it seemed that one of the boys liked the idea that I was an older woman who’d come to debauch him. He kept trying to catch my eye and made suggestive small talk. A few men were substantially older, and they seemed more uncomfortable than I did, though they might just have been disappointed that I wasn’t one of the coeds they’d come to hunt. Or maybe they’d really come just for the lesson. Who knew?

It was still so strange to realize that forty-year-old men were in my dating pool. Sometimes I forgot I was almost thirty, since I didn’t know half the things I’d expected to know, and I wasn’t half as settled as I’d expected to be. Sometimes when I was riding the train, a man of about forty or forty-five would obviously be looking at me, and I’d instinctively think, “Pervert,” having forgotten my age completely and reacting as I would have when I was in high school.

I glanced down the row and saw Dan in midbasic. He didn’t seem to be having the eye contact problem at all. In fact, he looked pretty animated. His partner was laughing in what seemed an overly coquettish way, though I couldn’t fault her for that. She didn’t know he’d come there with his girlfriend; she probably thought it was a free-for-all.

I tried to see Dan through her eyes. I imagined that in a room full of old perverts and nervous boys, Dan was a fantastic catch. I mean, he was always a good catch, as far as I was concerned, but in this company, he was a shining star. I was painfully aware that the same could not be said for me.

Finally class ended. Dan immediately looked for me and we moved toward each other. His smile was definitely bigger than mine.

“Hey, you,” he said.

“Hey.”

“What did you think?” he asked.

“No. You first. You’re the vote that matters.” Even though a substantial part of me wanted to leave and never return, my pride wouldn’t let me say that. Dan would have to be the one to veto the idea.

Before he could answer, I felt a light hand on my arm. I turned, and it was Roxy.

“I just wanted to see how you liked the class,” she said, with a friendly smile.

“It was good.” I wondered if I sounded convincing.

“It was really good,” Dan echoed, seeming sincere.

“You might have noticed that I don’t get a lot of couples in this class. The one I teach in the city, there are a lot more couples.”

“I did notice that,” I said.

“I just wanted to let you know that it’s okay for you to stay together. If you’d like to,” she added hastily.

“We’d like to stay together,” I said quickly. I glanced at Dan to see if he was in agreement. His face was inscrutable.

“Then next week, when I say rotate,” Roxy said, “instead of moving on to the next partner, you’ll stay together.”