The Unexpected Waltz (9 page)

Now we’re ready to try it together. Quinn puts on “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” but slows it down so much that it sounds like Freddie Mercury has gargled glue. Each man is paired with a woman and Quinn directs me toward the dapper black man, who says his name is Lucas. There are a couple of women left over, which I suspect is typical, and for this round they dance alone. I envy them. Lucas and I go into Latin position, my hand at the base of his neck, his hand low on my hip. Quinn counts us down.

We get through it surprisingly well. Surprising considering this is the first time I’ve danced with anyone other than Nik, and I feel a surge of adrenaline when Lucas and I manage to finish facing the right direction, each on the correct foot.

“Good,” says Quinn. “Rotate.”

We slip down a man and the ladies who were solo now dance with a partner. I’m alone through this cycle, which gives me the chance to sharpen up my timing a little and watch the others. The tall lesbian named Jane is very good, I notice, very precise. But she keeps her steps small and her body tightly reined in. Isabel, who’s a foot shorter, covers more ground.

Quinn moves us down the line of men again, so I am now with Harry. I soon realize that his need to vocalize is not limited to the demonstrations. He stutters out the name of each step as he makes it, which would be fine except I have to remember that he’s calling out the man’s part, so when he says “left” I have to go right and when he says “back” I should step forward. It’s a little disconcerting but we make it through. Rotate.

Surprisingly, it’s fun. The clock already says seven thirty. In one corner Anatoly is with Wilhelmena, the old lady from the first day I came into the studio, and in the other corner Nik is with a woman I’ve never seen, who’s dressed as if she’s come straight from work. There are people sitting at the bar in the back, drinking wine and talking. The studio is a hive of activity after dark, I think, a little ashamed of myself for being so reluctant to come at night. Carolina’s right. I’m a snob.

Quinn gives us a couple of tips about what we’re supposed to be doing with our heads and hands, which of course gives everyone a bit more to think about, and then I rotate down to Steve and it all falls apart.

I don’t have the words to sufficiently describe the horror of dancing with this man. He is Jell-O. Soft in his arms, in his hips, in his whole frame. His hand on my back is so ineffectual that I quickly flash back to Mark, after the first heart attack, trying to have sex without getting too excited, the frightening feel of a frightened man in your arms. He does not turn me. I turn myself but he is slow in his own turn so we clang our shoulders together when we try to go into the sweetheart pose and I rock back before him, almost pulling him off his feet. He looks down his patrician nose at me.

“Don’t rush it,” he says. “You were early on the rock step.”

Don’t rush it? I’m flooded with rage. I was completely on the beat. He was slow. He wouldn’t have gotten into the closing position at all if I hadn’t practically yanked him there and then he tells me not to rush it?

“Just one more thing tonight,” Quinn says. She’s been dancing her way down the line, switching between taking the male and female roles, and her forehead has a slight glow of moisture. I’m suddenly conscious that I’m sweating too. She shows us how to roll out of the sweetheart pose and back into basic and then we try the whole thing a couple of more times. Luckily, I’m once again at the point in the cycle where I just dance by myself.

“Next time we’ll crank up the tempo and start on open kicks,” she says. “By the end of the month we’ll have a nice little routine.”

I’m humming as I go back over to my stuff and begin to unbuckle my shoes. “We all go down to Esmerelda’s for the five-dollar margaritas after class,” Isabel says. “Want to come?”

“Sure,” I say. “Everybody?”

“Well, everybody except Lucas. He’s a Southern Baptist preacher and they’d have his head on a platter if they even knew he came here to dance, much less drink. And the instructors don’t come. Anatoly doesn’t think they should fraternize with the students. You know, got to keep their distance and all that. But the rest of us, sure.”

“I’m in,” I say, and we all change shoes and step out into the night. I love this time of year, when you know fall is coming. Jane’s lover has pushed her way out from the couch to join us and to my surprise Steve and Pamela are both tagging along too.

“What’s your favorite dance?” I ask Harry, who’s beside me.

“Tango,” he says, and to prove it he does a big jerky promenade down the sidewalk in front of the grocery.

“Bye, Lucas,” Isabel calls out, and the preacher waves before climbing into his sagging gray car. “He’s a good person,” she says. “I don’t know what sort of God would try to make a man ashamed to dance.”

Esmerelda’s is the kind of strip-center Mexican where they have sombreros and silver-framed mirrors on the wall and the chips and salsa on the table before you halfway sit down. “How long did you say you’ve been dancing?” Isabel asks me, as we wait to be seated.

“Six weeks maybe. No, more like eight.”

“So was it a shock when the price went up?”

I roll my eyes.

“Yeah,” she says with a giggle, interpreting the eye roll exactly as I hoped she would. “Here’s the thing. Ballroom is cocaine and Anatoly knows it. He gives it to you free at first, then fairly cheap, and once he knows they have you completely hooked, that’s when the price begins to climb.”

“If my husband were here, he’d say we’re all paying good money just to be flattered.”

Isabel snorts. Not a play snort but an actual honk, like she’s blown her nose. “Flattered?” she says. “Maybe the whales are flattered. The rest of us are paying good money—rent money, car payment money, or at least Time Warner Cable bill money—just so we can fail at something.”

Before I can ask her what she means by that a voice at my shoulder says, “That’s a gorgeous ring.”

Pamela has come out of nowhere to stand on the other side of me and has apparently managed to appraise my diamond ring at a glance. I don’t know why I didn’t take it off before I came to class.

“It’s a family heirloom,” I blurt out. “My mother’s.”

Why did I go and say that? I’m a terrible liar. I never can manage to keep the details straight. Now I’ve got to remember to pretend my mother is dead. Isabel makes a little tsk-tsk sound of consolation but Pamela isn’t fooled in the least, and why should she be? One trophy wife can spot another at a hundred paces.

The server gestures that she’s finally pushed together enough two-tops to make a table for eight, and we all start to file toward the back of the restaurant.

“I’m grubby,” I say. “Where’s the bathroom?”

“You always have to wash your hands thoroughly after group,” says Pamela. I’m not sure how she knows this, since apparently she’s never done group. “The women scare the men so bad their hands sweat. Come on, I’ll show you.”

She leads me down a dark-paneled wall to the little ladies’ room, where we take turns rinsing our palms over the bright yellow and blue ceramic sink.

“You dance with Nik, right?” she says, looking at her reflection in the mirror as she talks.

“Right,” I say. She already knew this. “My lesson is right after yours on Thursday. He’s great.”

She cuts off the water with her elbow and wipes her hands. “Yeah, he is,” she says. “But don’t get too attached.”

I pull down a paper towel. “Why would I get attached?”

“You’re single, right?”

My mind flashes back to Isabel and her BFE. “Yeah, but come on. He’s a baby. His bio says twenty-four. It’s a little sick that we’re even dancing with him, don’t you think?”

She doesn’t answer. Just uses her forearms to open the door without touching the knob, and we walk back to the table.

When we get there, only two open seats are left—on either side of Dr. Boob.

"I MAY AS WELL
not have been there,” I’m telling Elyse an hour later on the phone. “First he flirts with the Russian Internet bride and then some poor little mess in angora who’s the studio gossip, and then he moves on to this Silver dancer who, get this, orders chicken tortilla soup without the chicken or the tortillas, and he finishes up by hitting on a pair of lesbians. And all he says to me all night is that I rushed the rock step.”

“Do you even like this guy?”

“God, no. Can you imagine dating a plastic surgeon who specializes in breasts? It would be the lowest circle of hell.”

“Then why does it matter?”

“It doesn’t. I don’t even know how we got off on this doctor guy when I was calling to tell you that I had a good time. I’m going back for tango tomorrow.”

“We got off on him because every man you’ve ever met has automatically fallen in love with you at first sight and for some reason this guy didn’t. Of course it bugs you.”

I walk off the deck and toward the back lawn with the phone pressed to my ear. The soil in the garden is soft and loamy, causing my heels to sink in like little golf tees, and with the next step I stumble, making a noise loud enough that all the way from Arizona Elyse asks me what’s wrong.

“Remember how we always used to say that when we got old we were going to move to Scotland?”

“Sure,” says Elyse. “We were going to get a job as caddies and wear sensible tweeds and stomp around in the mist.”

“How old did you think we’d be when we were wearing those sensible tweeds?”

“I don’t know. Maybe seventy? Eighty?”

“Exactly. We had a plan for when we were young and we had a plan for when we were old, but we forgot to make a plan for all those years in between. So what’s a woman supposed to do between the ages of fifty and seventy? There’s at least twenty years in life when you’re not young and you’re not old and there’s absolutely no plan.”

“We’ve sailed into uncharted territory,” Elyse says. Her voice is light, breathy, almost on the edge of a laugh. Maybe she’s agreeing with me or maybe she’s only pretending to agree with me to humor me out of my mood. I look down at the rosebushes. A few buds are still intact and I give one a yank. I think it’s one of the Moonstones, white with a pink center, but it’s hard to see colors in the darkness so it might be a First Kiss or a Mermaid. I should scavenge whatever blooms are left for Carolina. She’d probably like them. She likes everything.

I ordered the rosebushes from catalogs when we first moved here, more romanced by the sounds of the names than by any thought of how the colors would look together or what would thrive in this crumbly clay soil. I don’t particularly like roses themselves, or even the way they smell, but I do love their names, which sound like small promises. The garden came together so well that they put our house on the cover of
Charlotte Fine Living
magazine with me pictured in the foreground, sitting on a white silk couch that the photographer and his assistant had carried off the back of a truck and placed in the middle of the flowers. “She chose her roses by their names” was the first line of the article, a statement that makes me sound dreamy and a little bit daft, but everyone agreed that the picture of me sitting on that white couch in a white dress, gazing into the center of a Moonstone, was proof that our garden—that our very marital existence—was a great success.

“Kelly?” Elyse’s voice is flickering. I must have walked too far from the house. “Did you say something? You’re breaking up.”

“When it comes to men, I’m over,” I tell Elyse. “I’m like a garden at the end of a season.”

“Some weird stuff has come out of your mouth lately but that’s the craziest thing you’ve said yet. You’re all about men and you always have been. More than anybody I know. That doesn’t just end with the snap of a finger.”

“But what happens if you’re sexual and you don’t have anybody to be sexual with? I’ll be like that tree that falls in the forest and nobody’s there to hear it so it doesn’t make a sound.”

“I always thought that tree made a sound.”

“That’s not the point.”

“You’re the one who brought it up.”

“It was an illustration, Elyse. A metaphor. Men don’t see me anymore and that bothers me, even if they’re crappy men I never would have wanted in the first place. It’s one thing to face the end of sex and it’s a whole other thing to face the end of the possibility of sex. I think I need therapy. Or drugs. Do you know what I really need, in all seriousness? I need to meditate.”

Elyse laughs. “You just need to get laid.” Getting laid is Elyse’s remedy for everything. If you told her you’d gone deaf in one ear or wrecked your car, she’d tell you that you just needed to get laid.

CHAPTER
SIX

E
LYSE AND I
met at cheerleading tryouts, the summer before ninth grade, and I liked her before I even knew her name. My childhood had been a series of lessons—piano and painting and horseback riding and finally gymnastics. I wasn’t particularly good at any of them, but after three years on the balance beam I knew I could handle any namby-pamby routines that a small-town high school cheerleading squad would put together. I was rock solid on a front flip. Pretty good for a back one. And I didn’t mind being on the top of the pyramid just as long as I had somebody strong below me. Just as long as I knew that the person designated to catch me when I fell out of formation would really be there.