The Unexpected Waltz Read online

  She shakes her head. “My sister, Virginia, never had her own and she came straightaway and I’ve lived in the same development and worked at the same salon for seventeen years. There’s people fussing over those boys left and right. You don’t have to worry about any of that.”

  “So what do you need?”

  “I want you to talk to me. When you get sick, people stop talking to you. I mean, really talking. They just keep telling you to try and get some rest now.” She folds her arms across her chest. “I want to be entertained.”

  “I can do that,” I say. I’m not really surprised by her bluntness. Death’s just one more foreign country and people begin to speak a different language the closer they get to the border. Sweet old ladies start to curse. Cynics start to pray. And people like this woman, who I bet never asked anybody for anything her whole life long, suddenly come up with a whole list of demands.

  “We can talk about whatever you want,” I tell her. “And I can bring movies, if you like them, and whatever food you crave. The stuff that comes out of the kitchen here is nutritious but it isn’t very tasty.”

  “I want sugar and salt and fat,” she says. “I don’t know why they’d bother trying to be nutritious now. That just seems mean.”

  “Their intentions are good,” I say, although privately I agree with her. Some people don’t have the stomach for working with the actual clients. Soft volunteers, Teresa calls them, and they have odd little ideas about what dying people need. They paint clouds on blue ceilings and show up with grandma gifts like hand-knit afghans and saltwater taffy. And they insist on paying twenty percent of the whole annual budget for a dietician to plan meals full of calcium and roughage and antioxidants, even though at this stage in the game you could probably make a better argument for spending the money on tequila.

  “I’ll bring you whatever you want,” I say. “I’ve got plenty of experience sneaking ice cream and barbecue past the guards.”

  “What kind of movies do you watch?”

  “Old ones,” I say.

  “Like Pretty Woman?”

  “No, really old ones, from the thirties and forties and fifties. Have you ever heard of Bette Davis?” She shakes her head. “Joan Crawford? Katharine Hepburn? I know you know Marilyn Monroe.”

  She brightens. “I want Marilyn Monroe and a Meat Lover’s Supreme. Thin crust. Can we do that?”

  “Sure.”

  “And you still have to tell me something about yourself. You’ve probably got a whole file on me and I don’t know anything about you. Like . . . are you married?”

  “My husband died a year ago.”

  “Did you love him?”

  I force myself to an upright position and look back at her. “Of course I loved him. What kind of question is that?”

  She folds her arms behind her head. “Okay, we’ll start with something easier. What are you going to do this afternoon when you leave here?”

  “I’m going to let a Russian man teach me how to dance.”

  “You’re jerking me.”

  “Am not. Just this very morning I spent a hundred and ten dollars on a pair of high-heel dance shoes.”

  She looks at me and we both burst out laughing. Her bangs fall forward and she pushes them back again and I think that yeah, you can tell she worked in a beauty salon because although her hair is thin, she’s trying hard to keep it neat. This woman cares what she looks like. The chemo probably broke what was left of her heart.

  “See?” I say. “You think you have me pegged but I’m full of surprises.”

  “I never said I had you pegged,” she says, and when she grins I see that she’s chewing gum, the kind they give you to help with the nausea. She’s slumped farther down in the bed and her breathing is a little labored. Our conversation has both revved her up and worn her out and I make a mental note to remember this, that she’s sicker than she seems. Without thinking, I reach toward her and she grabs my hand. It’s an awkward sideways grip, but we do a little shake thing with it, like we’re agreeing on something. Working out some sort of deal, the details of which will be determined later.

  “Are you scared?” I ask her.

  She tilts her head and looks up at the clouds. “Not yet,” she says.

  I WASN'T SURE WHAT to wear to my first dance lesson. It’s the continual conundrum of fashion—you want to look like you tried, but not too much. I remember the old woman I saw in the studio and how, even with her slow and unsteady movement, her dress swayed around her legs. All that furling and unfurling—it was almost as if the dress were a living thing and she was merely riding along within it.

  So after digging around in my closet, I find a Lycra dress with a full skirt that I bought to wear on my last and only trip to Europe with Mark, because the salesgirl promised it would pack well. It’s teal blue, an awkward color—awkward because it is a color at all and I normally wear beige or black or gray. It always makes me feel like a stewardess on some airline that went bankrupt in the seventies, but when I turn side to side the dress swishes. It makes what I imagine to be the sound of dance. I pull my hair back too, but loosely, not in an ostentatious ballerina bun, which might indicate that I think I’m better than I am, but in a hairstyle I stole from Elyse, a sort of sloppy French twist.

  Even with all the fussing, I still arrive at three thirty for my four o’clock lesson, carrying my new dancing shoes in their little blue sack. Quinn’s not at her desk, but is instead with a student. Surprising. I wouldn’t have guessed she was a teacher as well as a receptionist. I walk to the back of the room, uncomfortably aware of how loud my sandals sound on the polished wooden floor, and sit down on the couch. The studio is a different place without music.

  Quinn and the man are not dancing but are rather standing in front of the mirrored wall, frowning at their reflections, holding hands. At first they seem utterly immobile, but then I see that they’re each slowly extending the right foot, tilted with the toe in the air and the heel grazing the floor, and then slowly pulling it back. Quinn does this easily; when her foot slides forward, her body stays relaxed and erect and the knee of her standing leg flexes. She has good range in her step. She must be naturally limber, or maybe the ability to slide your heel like that is more a matter of balance.

  The man is a whole other story. He’s tall, with a ruddy face, and something about him is familiar—where could I have seen him? The country club? Some fund-raiser? He’s handsome, I realize, with a belated jolt. What’s wrong with me that I see a man and it takes me a full five minutes before I figure out whether or not he’s ­good-looking? If this were a movie, he’d be cast as a duke or an earl, perhaps even a king. There’s something haughty in his expression, something aristocratic. Something that implies he rides horses and jumps over fences, followed by packs of yelping dogs. But his face is frozen in concentration and when he pushes out his heel, it doesn’t slide smoothly, like Quinn’s, but rather sticks and then jerks forward as if there are bumps in the dance floor that only he can feel. Worse, when his leg is fully extended, he leans his torso backward to compensate, which makes him look like a vaudeville comedian, someone who is about to stride onstage with a cane and straw hat. It doesn’t make sense. He looks like the lord of the manor but he dances like a clown, and he must know this, so why is he dancing at all?

  I bend down to put on my shoes. The woman at the store had talked me through the process, the crisscrossing of the straps, the buckle that rests in the indentation of my heel. I get them on without much trouble, but when I stand, the straps shift a little. Perhaps they should be tighter. The woman said that if they hurt when you’re sitting, that means they’ll fit perfectly when you’re standing, so if you’re in pain, that’s a good sign. Because hey, we can’t have our foot sliding around, can we? Do we want our foot rocking back and forth in our shoes while we’re dancing, do we want our toes slipping out from under us while we’re trying to grip
the floor? I’d shaken my head vigorously, like a schoolgirl sucking up to the teacher. No, we certainly don’t want that. But the shoes are a full size smaller than what I usually wear and this alarms me too. The woman had given me one of those little shriveled-up nylon socks to make it easier, and she knelt down to help me turn my foot and insinuate it into the shoe. “A perfect fit,” she’d said.

  I refasten the straps, yanking until they hurt, and stand up again. The heels are higher than any I’ve ever worn and as I push off the couch, I feel like I’m unfolding. I’ve never been this tall. I take a tentative step. The suede soles will take some getting used to. Elyse was right, they’re designed to slide smoothly, but still . . . I look at the ruddy-faced man again and wonder if men’s dance shoes work the same as women’s, if they also have suede bottoms and fit too tight. The man’s tongue is sticking out of the corner of his mouth, like that of a child learning to write. Back and forth he jerks his heel, with Quinn standing beside him, leaning in and saying something softly. Telling him that it would be easier to slide his right heel forward if he bent his left knee a little more—at least that’s what I assume Quinn might be saying, since that’s what I’d like to tell him.

  Is this a dance lesson? Is this what I can expect? The woman I saw the first day had been glowing with joy, but this man’s misery is palpable. Of course that woman had been terribly old and probably past the point of improvement, and Quinn is clearly trying to teach this man something. They’ve been sliding their heels back and forth now for ten minutes and while it doesn’t look like he’s getting any better at it, Quinn must think he’s capable of more, for why else would she be standing so patiently, speaking so quietly, and holding him steady with the grip of just one hand?

  I put my palm on the wall beside the couch and flex my left knee, pushing my right foot forward just a couple of inches and raising my toe.

  It isn’t that hard. Well, I did lean back just a little and I was touching the wall. You probably just have to hold your core really tight, that’s the trick. It’s probably more about the muscles in your abdomen than the muscles in your leg. The man and Quinn aren’t aware of me at all. They’re utterly intent, and I slide my foot a bit farther this time, almost on the verge of taking a step. Okay, that’s a little tougher, but by squeezing my whole pelvis and exhaling like in yoga I manage to stay upright. Am I ready to let go of the wall?

  “Is called heel lead.”

  The man who has come up behind me is maybe three inches shorter than I am, at least when I’m wearing these heels, and almost laughably muscular. His eyes are dark, deep-set, and quizzical, and his black shoulder-length hair flips up at the ends, like a girl’s. He has the same intimidatingly good posture and strange formality that I noticed the first day, in the man who’d danced with the old lady. It must be a particularly Russian type of bearing.

  “I’m Kelly,” I say. “I guess you’re Nik.”

  He cocks his head. “Is not as easy as it looks, this heel lead. This is where we start?”

  “What? No, no we don’t need to start there.”

  “You are practicing—”

  “No, I’m not practicing. I mean I guess I was, but only because I was watching them and this . . . this is the first dance lesson I’ve ever really seen and like this is the first step I’ve ever really . . . I mean, you’re the boss, you’re the teacher. We can start wherever you say, but I don’t particularly want to start with something so . . . Actually, I need music. I think I’d be more, you know, relaxed if we had music.” I’m aware we are almost whispering, that he is standing unnervingly close to me, yet the silence of the room makes every word sound too loud and still I can’t seem to shut up. I let go of the wall and lurch. He’s thirty years younger than I am. I was not prepared for this.

  He nods but does not smile automatically, like an American might do. He’s not going to laugh or say something to break the tension. If an American man stood this close or spoke this softly it would mean something, and it probably means something here too, but something I don’t yet understand. Nik smells of cigarette smoke and breath mints and another scent I can’t identify. He’s entirely too young, maybe, now that I stop to really look at him, not even twenty-five. I wish I’d known how short he was before I bought these damn shoes.

  He extends a hand to me and I grab it and try to shake it before I realize he’s inviting me to dance. So my right hand is in his right. I’ve had so many clumsy handshakes lately. I seem to be shaking hands all over town, agreeing to any number of deals I don’t understand. But even though we are awkwardly linked, the boy doesn’t release his grip. He just backs onto the dance floor, pulling me along, and his palm is soft but very dry, almost as if he has dusted it with powder, as if he were a pool player or a gymnast, someone who must not let go, no matter what. He’s a child, possibly on steroids, and his hair is very strange. The gel in it must be the third thing I smell, or maybe it’s whatever he’s rubbed on his palms.

  “We could start with cha-cha,” he says.

  He takes me to the corner, far away from Quinn and the lord of the manor, which I appreciate. He has me stand behind him while he goes through a sequence of moves that I am supposed to watch and then emulate. It’s simple enough—a side step, a rock forward, then back, and a stuttering little three-step to the side, which I suppose is the cha-cha-cha part. His steps are small, I notice, which lets him move in a fast and controlled, almost mechanical manner. I watch once and then join in and he seems surprised.

  “I used to be a cheerleader,” I say. “I know how to pick up routines.”

  This information does not appear to enlighten him. I guess they don’t have a lot of cheerleaders in Russia. “Very good,” he says. “We add hips.”

  We add hips.

  He turns, frowns. “Very good again. Do not jerk hips. Foot movements are sharp, but hips roll through. Smooth and gentle.”

  A little trickier. I try the sequence and he stops me.

  “Hips sway and feet are sharp,” he says. “But top of body relaxed. Shoulders stay level. You are duck. This means—”

  “I know,” I say. “Active on the bottom and serene on the top.”

  “Serene?” he says slowly. “Just a minute.” And he goes over to the desk and pulls out an iPhone. I spell the world “serene” for him and he types it in. He doesn’t ask for the definition so I guess he got it from the context.

  “I will have more English,” he says with a shrug, as he flips on the stereo and walks back toward me. “You learn fast, so now we dance with music.”

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “Thank you what?”

  “For saying that I learn fast.”

  He looks puzzled. “No need to say this,” he says. “I speak the truth.”

  Okay, I think, so that’s a hint. He’s not going to flatter me and, in fact, he’ll probably get offended if he thinks I’m trying to flatter him. All we’re doing today is gauging my level of raw talent—a pure assessment, and thus no reflection of his abilities. But soon Nik will begin to see me as the product of his teaching and then I suspect that my progress—or lack of it—will matter very much. He’s got pride. He’s the sort of man who wants to know what people mean when they use a word like “serene.”

  “Latin hold,” he says, stepping toward me, “is loose. Relaxed like hips.” He drapes my left arm over his right so that my hand comes to rest on his shoulder, almost at the base of his neck. He takes my right hand in his left so that we are standing close to each other. I have not been close to a man for a long time, and never like this. The muscles in his arms and shoulders. The faint smell of cigarettes, the dark and slightly slanted eyes, the dryness of his hand. I’m not sure where to look.

  “This is what we most times do in lesson two,” he tells me. “But I do not think you will be the one to step on my foot.” Apparently his willingness to put on music and take me into hold is a sign
that I’m having a good first lesson . . . or maybe anyone can do these steps immediately and he’s only suggesting I’m advanced as part of his sales pitch. That’s what Mark would say if he were here. I can hear his voice in my head, telling me that I’m gullible, which I suppose could be true, and yet I have the feeling that I really am doing well. How long has it been since I’ve tried something new, come someplace on my own without either Elyse or Mark to prop me up? I’d forgotten the simple joy of learning, the joy of mastering one thing and then moving on to something else. It’s a pleasure we normally concede to the young.

  But now Nik is frowning again. “Arm should not lie like dead squirrel in road,” he says, tilting his head toward my left arm. “Even when in hold, lady must support her own weight. Keep shoulders back and arms to side. Not lean on man.”

  I jerk my arm back, strangely stung. “I wasn’t leaning on you.”

  “A little.”

  I pull myself upright.

  “Now,” Nik says. “I step forward and you step back. Begin with right foot. In dance, lady is always right. Only in dance. In everything else, man is right.”

  He’s teasing. Making a little joke. At least I think he is. It’s impossible to tell by his expression.

  But now that I’m self-conscious about my posture, it’s harder to move. He counts me down and we start the pattern and I’m going through the steps okay, but I seem to have lost all sense of rhythm, like the dance has suddenly been sucked right out of me. This sort of thing happens to me a lot. I call it the Curse of Early Promise. I tend to do well at things in the beginning, when they don’t matter, before I’ve had the chance to think too much or get nervous, and then at some point it all clinches down around me. I don’t know whom I’m trying to please, exactly, or why it matters how well a fifty-two-year-old woman keeps her form during a cha-cha lesson in a dance studio in the suburbs of Charlotte, North Carolina, in the middle of the afternoon. And yet I’m trying with everything in me to hold my arms loose and shoulders back while simultaneously making fast, small steps and rolling my hips gently through. Firm yet serene. Sharp yet smooth. On my own feet and still completely responsive to his movements. Even though it seems impossible to be all these things at once.