The Unexpected Waltz

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  To my teacher and friend, ­Max Ma­­­­­leshko

  CHAPTER ONE

  I WAS BORN THE year Disneyland opened, the year Elvis sang “Heartbreak Hotel” and McDonald’s raised their golden arches, the year James Dean died. My first car was a powder-blue Mustang with white bucket seats and the summer before I turned sixteen, Elyse and I used to drive it up and down the road between our houses with the 8-track blaring. Elyse would prop her long, tan legs against the dashboard and click through the songs with her toe. Our favorite band was the Rolling Stones, promising us over and over that time was on our side.

  I believed them. When I was young, I thought the future stretched out before me like some long, shimmering road, and that the girls would always stay pretty and the boys would just plain stay. I was a member of the luckiest generation to ever have been born in the luckiest land on earth.

  So it was a bit of a shock to wake up on a perfectly average August morning and find my husband dead in the bed beside me.

  "NOTHING HAS TO CHANGE."

  Is he kidding? Everything’s changed. I’m a fifty-two-year-old widow, which is the last thing on God’s green earth I ever expected to be . . . No, wait a minute. Rich is the last thing I ever expected to be, and evidently I’m that too.

  A year has passed since Mark died, and I’m sitting in a conference room listening to his lawyer tell me that we really must settle the estate. Apparently there is a socially acceptable number of days that a widow can spend lying in bed watching HGTV and eating takeout, and I have just passed that limit.

  The lawyer’s face is grave, not with the professional solemnity the occasion demands, but with a more personal kind of regret. This man played golf with Mark. He’s been to our house for dinner. He has, on many occasions, poured me a glass of wine or pulled out my chair. I don’t know the other attorneys gathered around the table, but I assume the sheer number of them is evidence of the size of the estate. It has taken a long time to make financial peace with Mark’s sons in California and Japan, to set up educational trusts for the grandchildren he rarely saw, to wait out probate, to honor his commitments to various charities and schools. But now everyone has been paid up and paid off and the lawyer extends his palm to me. For a strange moment I think he’s expecting me to tip him, but then I see he’s trying to shake my hand. He’s what . . . seventy? Seventy-five? Somewhere near Mark’s age and thus well past the point when most men retire. Maybe he’s upset because this all cuts too close to home. The big house, the German car, the heart attack, the fifty-page will, and, finally, the younger, blonder second wife sitting here before him, fidgeting like crazy in her black knit St. John suit.

  “How much is left?” I say, and I know it’s the wrong question. It sounds vulgar, grasping, as if I really did marry an older man for the money just like everyone at the country club said I did. I’m fouling up everything. I didn’t realize so many people would be here or that they would seat me at the head of this long, scary table.

  “I think we all can agree that the important thing is not to touch the principal,” the lawyer says. “But we can close out the estate account and easily create enough cash flow . . .”

  That isn’t what I asked him. I look away and my eye catches another attorney, a bespectacled young woman in a business suit, whose hair is pulled back in a bun. She reminds me of those secretaries in old sitcoms who stand up from behind their desks, unclip their hair, fling off their glasses, and suddenly become beautiful. Her expression is appropriately serious, but nothing about her disguise fools me. She’s one of those women who try to hide their femininity, but that trick never works for long. Suppressing sex is like holding a beach ball under the surface of the water—the harder you push it down, the harder it will eventually spring back up.

  This young lawyer sees me watching and she winks, or at least I think she does, but that’s too creepy, that she would look down this long line of men and wink, so I probably imagined it. I imagine lots of things. I see stuff no one else seems to see, and besides, coming here always rattles me. I never feel like I’m dressed right. I met Mark when we both worked at a bank, but I doubt that anyone around this table would believe I used to be a junior VP of finance. When I’m faced with these legal papers, I become math impaired, unable to divide or subtract in my head. The female attorney is staring at a document on the table, biting her pale lip. She didn’t wink at me. I must be losing my mind.

  “Actually,” I say, in my most cheerful and reasonable voice, “I’m asking how much there is in total.”

  “Without touching the principal and without acquiring even the slightest risk, we can deposit eleven thousand a month into your checking account,” the lawyer says. On the one hand, my mind reels because it’s a staggering amount of money for someone who owns her house and car outright, for a woman whose favorite food is pizza, and whose idea of a vacation is visiting her best friend from high school and sleeping on the couch. But on the other hand, he’s saying that even from the grave Mark has put me on an allowance. A very generous allowance, but an allowance nonetheless.

  “You won’t have to leave Mark’s house,” the lawyer says, and then quickly corrects himself. “What I mean is, you won’t have to leave your home.” He was actually closer to the truth the first time—Mark was living in that huge empty house when I married him and all I really did was decorate it. Hang some curtains and paint some walls, cram some rosebushes into the ground. Everyone always saw my husband as strong and powerful, but another image zooms back to me now, the first time he took me over to see the house. Mark looked as shy as a little boy as we stood in the foyer, which was so empty that it echoed, and he said to me “What do you think of this big old box? Do you think you can fill it with something, like music or color or flowers . . . or a life?”

  His little misstatement seems to have rattled the lawyer. He clears his throat and adjusts his glasses before continuing, glancing down at the stack of papers as if he doesn’t know damn well what they say. “Yes, the house is yours,” he repeats, “and there’s no need to get a job, of course.” And here a slight titter of laughter runs around the table at the very suggestion of something so ridiculous as Kelly Wilder Madison filling out a W-4 form. “Mark arranged for the continuation of his contributions to the charities he supported so you’ll still be—”

  “Invited to serve on their boards,” I finish for him. “Welcome at the teas and galas and auctions.”

  “Of course,” he says. “The only thing you really need to know is that—”

  “I get it,” I tell him. I stand up, my head still swimming, and the lawyers all rise at once, like a congregation getting ready to sing. “I understand what you’re saying. Nothing has to change.”

  I WANT THINGS TO change.

  I know I’m lucky. I know that a cash flow of eleven thousand a month is what my daddy used to call a high-class problem. But I’ve lived for too long in a world where everything is controlled and monitored and predictable. I know the number of steps leading into every medical building in Charlotte, North Carolina. I’ve parked in the handicapped spaces, run in and gotten wheelchairs and run back, and counted out pills and become a master of low-sodium cuisine. And I’ve made tablescapes—endless tablescapes, which are like centerpieces, only bigger. They run down the full length of the ta
ble and their purpose is to give the meal a theme. Tablescapes cost a frigging fortune and they take forever to do, but they’re my specialty, the task that’s delegated to me at every charity dinner. Sand dollars and blue glass in the summer, gourds and leaves in the fall, holly and crystal in the winter, and tulips wedged into overturned moss baskets in the spring.

  I know none of that sounds very original. In fact, I know it’s downright ordinary and that meals don’t need to have themes. But years ago I did a tablescape that everyone liked, and in the world of charitable causes, if you do something right one time, they expect you to duplicate it, with the smallest possible variations, for the rest of your life. After a while, I actually started to dream about ­tablescapes­ . . . but that’s not the point. The point is that I’ve spent the last twenty years of my life pretending to be a whole lot more conservative and stupider and nicer than I really am.

  “You deserve a younger man,” Mark said to me once, but he said it in bed so he probably was talking about sex. When he had the first heart attack and his doctors told him to be careful, we knew what they meant. That night I scooted over beside him and laid my head on his chest and told him that this was all I wanted. He made a sad little grunt of disbelief, but it was true. I’ve always liked cuddling better than sex, and besides, when I married him I knew what I was signing up for. I wanted a safe place and Mark gave me one.

  According to this tableful of lawyers, he’s still giving me one.

  On the way out, I ask the receptionist if they validate parking, a question that seems to amuse her. She takes my ticket, but I know she’s thinking that the widow of Mark Madison doesn’t have to worry about two dollars an hour for parking. The widow of Mark Madison could spend the whole day driving in and out of parking decks all over town, just for the hell of it. She thinks I’m silly, or maybe even tight and mean, one of those women with millions of dollars in the bank who dock the maid for being fifteen minutes late, but she stamps my ticket and as I turn to go I see the young female attorney again. She is standing in the doorway of her office. I smile and she nods slowly. Like she’s congratulating me for something, but I can’t imagine what.

  WHEN I GET IN the car there’s a call on my cell from hospice. I tell myself I’ll wait until I’m out of the deck and reception is better before I return it, which is a stall. I know why they’re calling. They’ve found me someone new.

  My last client—hospice calls them clients for some reason, as if we were styling their hair or remodeling their kitchens—was a man named Mr. Duggan who didn’t seem to have a single memory beyond his Louisiana boyhood. I used to come in every day to just sit at his bedside and listen to him talk. “You’re good at watching people die,” one of the nurses said, and when I flinched, she quickly added, “What I mean is, you have a lot of patience.”

  Strange thoughts preoccupy people near the end. They don’t regret mistakes, or at least the ones I meet don’t. Maybe those who have maimed or molested or raped lie on their deathbeds filled with remorse, but most people have lived polite little lives and they tend to think more about what they didn’t do. The chance that slipped by, the door they were afraid to enter, the lover they let walk away. Mr. Duggan in particular talked a lot about pirates. I’m pretty sure he’d never been a pirate—he was small and neatly groomed and well insured. He may have been remembering a dream or a movie, an old Halloween costume, or a game he played back in the bayou. Because that’s another thing about the dying: they circle all the way back to the beginning. I’ve heard them calling their siblings and childhood playmates, their voices breathless, as if they were running hard across an open field. Wait for me, they mumble. I’m right behind you, I’m right here.

  “He has no idea what’s happening to him,” Mr. Duggan’s daughter used to say to me, her voice dripping with relief. “He doesn’t even know who he is anymore.” I’d nod because she needed me to nod, but inside I disagreed. I always had the funny feeling that this man was having the most lucid moments of his life. Later, after his daughter was gone, I used to go back into his room and lean over his bed. “Where are you now?” I’d ask him. “Tell me everything you see.”

  Because this is what I have agreed to do: I have agreed to make tablescapes and to be the one who sits and waits once a situation has been declared truly hopeless. The doctors don’t stop by much anymore when the patient is CTD, as they say in the shorthand of oncology. Circling the drain. The nurses only come in for the pain meds and the families hover in the doorways, assuring one another that it’s over long before it really is. It mostly falls to us, to the volunteers, to be the final witnesses. “What does the shoreline look like?” I’d whisper to Mr. Duggan. “Are you off the coast of Africa? Or is it more like Jamaica? Maybe China?”

  CTD. The phrase is funny and cruel and accurate. Because I’ve always imagined our lives to be funnel shaped. They grow narrow as we age and we all begin to swirl faster and faster until the concept of a day or an hour or a year no longer has any meaning. Maybe there’s even some sort of gentle sucking motion that pulls us down with the last breath and we pass from one world to the next just as easily as water goes through a tube. I hope so. I hope it was like that for Mr. Duggan. I wasn’t there when he died, but if you take all that stuff people say about Jesus and Buddha and Muhammad and set it aside, I’ve noticed it’s usually the pirates who go easiest when their time finally comes.

  They haven’t given me a new client since Mark died. That’s hospice policy. After a volunteer loses someone in her own family they switch her to fund-raising or clerical work for a year. Thanks to Mark’s friends, most of whom have way more time and money than they know what to do with, I’ve been good at bringing in cash. I thought they might leave me in fund-raising indefinitely, but just last week when I was in the office, the client coordinator called out to me as I was walking past her door. She asked me how I was doing and I said fine, that it had been almost a year. She’d frowned and said, “A year? Already?”

  So that’s why they’re calling, to give me a new client. I drop the phone back into my purse. Why didn’t I insist that the lawyer tell me how much money I have? I’m a grown woman and I have a right to know, but I let him cow me just like I always do. If Elyse had been there, she would have grabbed him by the lapel and said, “Bottom-line it for us,” but Elyse is living in Arizona now, throwing pots and drumming and chanting by the light of the moon with a circle of crazy women, and besides, I can’t rely on her forever. I’ll run by the library, I decide, and then I’ll stop at the grocery and pick up something for dinner. And tonight I’ll get my bottle of wine, go into Mark’s office, and write the law firm an e-mail. For the subject line I’ll type “Bottom-Line It for Me.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  AND THAT'S HOW it all started, at the lawyer’s office, with my being told I’m some variation of rich. Or maybe the story really begins an hour later, in the grocery store, at the moment when I stole the apple. Because I’m not naturally a thief. In fact, that apple is the only thing I’ve ever taken in my whole life that wasn’t mine.

  Okay, maybe the second.

  THE SHOPPING AREA CLOSEST to my house is a place with fountains, gazebos, and park benches called the Village at Canterbury Commons. I used to be sarcastic about the name, but now I’ve faced the fact that I’m paying good money to be near all this simulated charm, and besides, the center has everything I need. A ridiculously upscale grocery, a Starbucks, a Walgreens, a ballroom dance studio, a day spa, a branch of the library, and the holy trinity of takeout: Chinese, Mexican, and Italian.

  The grocery is almost aggressively dark and cool inside, and it’s designed to emulate a medieval hill town on market day. There are slate tiles beneath my feet and rough wooden beams over my head and there are trees, live trees, clustered in the corners. The aisles are deliberately crooked, to make them seem all the more like winding streets, with nooks and random alleyways, as if you’re lost somewhere in Italy. The stock bo
ys look like waiters in their black double-breasted tunics and they whisk by with sample trays bearing jams and cheeses and dark chocolate dusted with kosher salt. I’ve come here often in the last year, despite the expense, because they make up so many individual salads and put them in the coolers. It’s an easy place to shop for one.

  In the seafood grotto they’ve piped in the sound of crashing waves. They’re overdoing it, trying too hard, the way people always do when they’re faking. I select a single piece of tuna, which the man behind the counter wraps in brown paper and ties with a string. It’s like an old-fashioned gift, the kind of tuna Julie Andrews would sing about. I have my quinoa salad and my bottle of pinot gris and all I need now is a piece of fruit for dessert. The produce section holds the true masterpieces of the store—strange fruits with strange names. Jujube. Mamey sapote. Rambutan. Horned melons. They tumble artfully across burlap sacks, reminding you that they’re fresh off a dock somewhere, and the displays are carefully lighted, with the shadows planned to fall a particular way, to tempt the eye in a certain direction.

  Despite the bounty—or maybe because of it—I’m not a good shopper. I buy the same stuff over and over, because otherwise I become paralyzed with possibility. Take this pyramid of artichokes, with their leaves curled around each other, all green and purple and plump, arranged in perfect symmetry, protecting the edible heart. I could reach for one. I could carry it back to my kitchen, but when I got there I wouldn’t know how to cook it. I’ve seen them roasted on a grill but I’ve never understood exactly what that entails. I suppose I could put it in a pot and steam it, but how long does that take and if you overcook it, don’t you risk turning everything brown and mushy? Besides, at some point in the process you must take scissors and snip off all the thorns and I’m not sure how to do that either, and then there are these key limes which are as small as olives and an ugly yellow color. I know this means they’re the good ones, the real key limes and not the engineered clones, but how many of them would it take to make a pie?