The Unexpected Waltz (14 page)

“I guess you know you’ve got me over a barrel.”

She gives a little hiccup laugh. “Don’t they have a competition at Christmas?”

“That’s way too soon,” I say.

“Isn’t there one in March?”

Does the woman take notes on everything I say? “Yeah,” I admit. “The regional qualifier is in March.”

“I want to see you there. In a fancy dress. Come on. You might not have as much time as you think you do.”

“I can’t believe how much better you sound than you did this afternoon.”

Carolina begins to chatter that they might even let her go to the older boy’s football game next week and I lean back in the seat and shut my eyes. My head is tilted sideways, my cheek against the cool glass of the window. Maybe that waltz truly was like sex, I think, for I am totally relaxed, my body loose and open in a way it rarely is. Is this what women feel like after orgasms? What they call afterglow? If so, I understand why you’d do almost anything to have it. After sex I used to get restless. I’d get up for water or to pee or get something to eat or check the locks. Sometimes, once I was sure Mark was sleeping, I would move to one of the other bedrooms and read. There was always some sense of unfinished business, the need to move and do something, but tonight . . . tonight I feel as if there is nowhere else to go, nothing to do, no other way I want to be.

The cadence of Carolina’s voice rises and falls. I’m half listening and I know that I would not change anything about my dance with Anatoly. I would not change the music or the setting or the faces of any of the people who had stood and watched me. And I know that when it comes my time to die, that this is one of the nights that will make it easier to let go. That I’ll be able to say to myself “But you know, there was that one night, a long time ago, when I waltzed” and this thought will be a comfort. To know that there were times when I got it. When, at least for a few seconds, my life was not entirely wasted on me.

CHAPTER
TEN

B
Y NOVEMBER I
am indeed taking a private lesson each Tuesday and Friday and dancing group five days a week—six if they have a party on Saturday. I come to every class on the schedule, no matter who’s teaching. Even on the nights when they bring in one of the local college dance majors to teach, even on the nights when they’re doing something cheesy like the mambo or hustle. Any kind of practice is good, I tell myself. Every single movement brings you closer. Closer to what, I can’t yet say, but I try especially hard to make the most of my individual lessons with Nik. And in order to squeeze every ounce of progress out of every hour, I decide that I must concentrate on the dances where I actually have some potential.

Talking to Nik about this won’t be easy. The Russians are not big on conversation. If you ask them their opinion about anything, they grow wary, because they know if they give it, there’s a chance you might say something else in response and then they’re trapped. They speak primarily to convey information—it is not a culture of chitchat, and I suspect that at times Nik and Anatoly must feel as if the whole studio is spinning in a vortex of words.

AT MY PRIVATE LESSON
the next Tuesday Nik leans back and asks me, “Who is leading dance?”

I’m ready for this one. “You are,” I say. “You’re the man.”

“To dance is to create space and to fill space,” he says. “When lady steps back, she makes space man steps into. He cannot be bigger than she will let him be. So who is leading dance, the one who makes space or the one who steps into it?”

He gets like this sometimes, kind of wonkily philosophical. It reminds me of those SAT questions from back in high school, the kind that go “If one train leaves Moscow traveling west at 100 miles an hour and another train leaves Paris traveling east at 80 miles an hour, which foot should you have your weight on?” Well, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but Nik does make everything harder than it needs to be. And ever since I did that waltz with Anatoly, I get the feeling he’s been trying to take me down a peg or two.

“I guess the one who creates the space is leading,” I say.

“Wrong. Is trick. Man always leads.”

“Screw you,” I say, and he smiles, pleased with himself. Pamela is in the center of the ballroom floor. She’s dancing with Anatoly today, and they’re working on cha-cha. Her Latin clothes are sexy, even her practicewear, and it suddenly hits me that this is why Nik and I started with tango today, instead of warming up with the waltz like we usually do. There is a pecking order at the studio, one based more on finances than talent, and the sheer amount of money Pamela spends here in a week means that whatever she happens to be dancing at the moment determines what kind of music is coming out of the speakers. Pamela is doing cha-cha so the whole studio is pulsing with Los Lobos, and in turn I am doing tango because it is possible to do tango to the same beat as cha-cha. We all literally dance to the tune of the whales.

“Thrust the girls to the sky, darling,” Anatoly says, and Pamela obligingly lifts her chest. Sometimes I wonder if he’s gay. He supposedly slept with all his professional partners back in Russia, one right after another, but he makes outrageous statements to the women in the studio. The kinds of things only gay guys get away with. Or maybe this is all some sort of game Anatoly plays with Nik, hard to say. Flirting with his lover right before his eyes, but with this sort of tease-flirting that doesn’t really have any teeth.

The music is fast, too fast for a tango, at least a tango at my level, and I know that I’m compensating by collapsing my frame. Just a little, but of course Nik has noticed. My legs are slightly apart, like a skier on the bunny slope, like someone who expects to topple at any minute. “Why do you sloop?” Nik asks me, with the exasperated tone of someone who’s never fallen down once in his whole life. “I want you to stand like queen. Be the big lady.” There’s no good way to explain to him that American women don’t want to be big, that we recoil from the word like a gunshot.

“Look at our girl,” Anatoly says, right on the verge of a squeal, and Nik and I pause, still in tango hold, and watch him lead Pamela through a complicated set of swivels. All steps I haven’t learned yet.

“Isn’t she something?” Anatoly says.

“Very good,” Nik says.

Pamela puts her hand to her chest and drops her head with a sort of exaggerated false modesty. Anatoly goes over to the stereo to start the same song again.

“I want to learn that step sequence,” I whisper to Nik through gritted teeth.

“Later,” he says.

“You don’t think I can learn that sequence?”

“You learn later.”

I sigh. He sighs too—loudly, as if he’s mocking me—and we begin again, inching our way around the dance floor and all the time keeping an eye on Anatoly and Pamela. This whole lesson has been annoying. Nik’s new thing lately is making sure that I’m always, at any point in the dance, balanced within myself and not leaning on him. He tests this by releasing me when I least expect it. Already today he has stepped back from me twice, letting me go in midspin and asking “Are you on your feet?” Quinn came in at some point and called out “Good job.” Her compliments always feel a little random and today I was literally stumbling out of a turn when she said it.

I’d rolled my eyes and she’d said, “No, really. You’re in the zone where people learn. Where you’re uncomfortable with what you’re doing but not so uncomfortable that you can’t move at all. We call it optimal frustration.”

Nik says, “We pivot again.”

“God,” I say. “You’re relentless.” He drops his palm from my shoulder blade and goes over to his little phone. He picks it up and looks at me expectantly.

“Re-lent-less,” I repeat. “I bet if you try, you can figure out what it means.”

“I love dancing with you,” Anatoly coos to Pamela. All throaty, like some sort of porn star. “Does Nik ever tell you how good you are?”

I bet I know the answer to that. Nik never tells anyone she’s good. I doubt he would even apply the word to the pros, because he knows dance is a slippery summit. You get your rumba almost perfected, but by the time you’ve done that, you’ve forgotten your waltz. So you work on that for a week but by then you’ve lost the foxtrot. And there is always someone younger, stronger, and prettier nipping at your heels. I suppose that’s what makes dance addictive. This idea that you’re moving toward something but never quite arriving. Of course they don’t tell you any of this when you sign up. If you knew how hard it was going to be, you’d never have the heart to begin. “It costs too much,” Isabel says as she gets out her credit card, literally crossing her fingers as Quinn slides it through the machine, and I nod, although the truth is, it’s costing all of us different things.

Pamela’s music starts yet again. She and Anatoly have reclaimed the center of the dance floor while Nik and I have been exiled to the Siberia of the far corner. The opening step of her competition cha-cha routine is flashy, a little impressive. But not, at least to my mind, all that hard. I could do that, I think, and my mind is drifting so that when Nik lets me go at the end of my pivot I’m not expecting it. I almost fall. I roll clumsily to a stop and look back at him, furious that he let me make such a rookie mistake in front of Anatoly and Pamela. He is standing with his legs apart and his arms folded over his chest.

“Dance your dance,” he says. “Not hers.”

“I could do that step,” I whisper, even though I know they’re not listening.

“Is Silver.”

“What difference does that make? I already told you I’m not going to compete.”

“You should. You know all Bronze steps.”

“If I ever did compete, which I’m not going to, it would be in Newcomer.”

He shrugs. “Is under you. And this,” he adds, inclining his sleek, dark head in the direction of the spinning forms of Pamela and Anatoly, “is above you.”

He’s playing with me. He knows that today I am pissed about it all—about the incessant cha-cha music when I am paying to dance the tango. About the way Anatoly flatters Pamela and he does not flatter me—about the fact he almost dropped me, let me come out of that turn all a mess in front of a man I like and a woman I don’t.

“I should compete on the Newcomer level,” I say. “That’s what I am.”

“It is not supposed to be easy. You go up, you go down. Is your choice. Problems either way.”

What he means is that Newcomers are only allowed to compete with a few very basic steps, which they do over and over again, and dumbing it down would frustrate me. And the bitch of the matter is, he’s probably right. I do know all the Bronze steps—it was a Bronze level pivot that I fell out of just a minute ago—but to dance Bronze is to risk competing against women who have been dancing much longer than I have, women who I know going in are far better than me. The competitions are stacked with dancers who have taken lessons for years, who should have long since advanced to the Silver level with Pamela and such. Yet they hang back in Bronze, at the expense of people like me, and if I try to dance Bronze, Nik and I both know that these women will eat my lunch. They’re nothing but a bunch of praise whores, I think, and I pull myself a little higher as Nik takes me back into hold, as we try that damn pivot yet once again. He’s right about it all. Do I really want to dance Newcomer when I know I’m better than that? Or am I prepared to have my ass kicked by the Pamelas of the world?

“We need to talk,” I say.

“Because of her?” he says. He is worried that I’m going to try to analyze the situation. To draw him into some discussion of the fact I know they’re lovers.

“No,” I said. “I wanted to talk anyway. Please. Just for a minute.”

He hesitates. Last week when I had invited him for coffee he said no, that it was “improper,” and I realized that he must have been quoting Anatoly. Evidently the instructors aren’t just forbidden to go drinking with the students—they can’t see us outside of class at all. Even if it’s just a matter of walking across the parking lot to the Starbucks, even if the whole purpose of the meeting is to discuss a student’s future in dance.

“We can just stay here and talk for five minutes,” I say. “Please.” Anatoly and Pamela have finished. He has walked her to the door and is holding it open for her and they are laughing about something.

“Okay,” Nik says. “For minute.” We cross the room and sit down at one of the small tables and I begin unbuckling my shoes. I persuade him to get his snack from the fridge and he comes back with an athlete’s lunch—a banana, a tuna sandwich, and a ziplock bag with walnuts. I wait for him to unpack everything and take a gulp of water. Finally he looks up at me.

“You’re talking about me competing,” I say, “and we both know I’m not ready, but if I were, what should I be working on?”

“Everything,” he says, an answer that makes me want to smack him. An answer that makes me want to weep. He glances around the empty room. Anatoly has also gone, presumably to lunch.

“Okay,” I say. “Answer me this. What’s my best dance?”

“You dance them all well,” he says. “But there is house for improvement.”