The Unexpected Waltz Read online

  “Exhale,” he says.

  I exhale.

  We lose the beat for a minute. Find it again. I bang my knee against his.

  “Maybe inhale too,” he says. “Good idea to do both.”

  I stop and step back from him, dropping my arms. “I’m fucking it up, aren’t I?” I say. “When I try to balance, I get tense and when I relax, I get all wobbly. But there’s got to be some way to be both balanced and relaxed, isn’t there? I know there is. I could do it when I was a kid. But I’ve forgotten how to work my body.”

  “What does it mean,” he says, “to have balance?”

  “It means like, I don’t know, like your weight is distributed evenly so you don’t—”

  “No,” he says. “I know definition. I am asking how you, Miss Kelly Wilder, will know it when it happens.”

  I shake my head and we stand for a moment, neither of us moving, while the cha-cha music throbs on in the background. Then he glances at the clock.

  “Thirty minutes,” he says.

  It couldn’t be. It seemed maybe five. I thought we were going to have another chance to dance. Because I really do think I can get it. I just need one more song.

  But Nik is already walking toward the front desk.

  “That was first lesson,” he calls over his shoulder.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  IT DOESN'T TAKE me long to drink the Kool-Aid.

  After my free introductory lesson, Nik offers me three for $99, then three more for $165. And then, when they’re over, the next offer is ten for $850. The math isn’t hard, but I still do it in my head twice, just to make sure I haven’t failed to understand. The price per lesson really has almost tripled.

  Nik seems nervous as he slides the contract toward me across the desk, and I say yes so fast I think I startle him. How does he want it—check? Charge? When he hesitates, I offer to go to an ATM and bring him back cash. Later I will learn that he hesitated because it’s standard to offer a free lesson with the ten-lesson deal and he didn’t know what to do when I agreed immediately. I’m not just drinking the Kool-Aid, I’m guzzling it.

  The next time the cleaning lady comes over I give her a task, probably her first since Mark died. She helps me push all the furniture out of the foyer and roll up the rug, exposing the smooth wooden floor. Then we carry down the full-length mirror from my closet and wedge it into the corner so that I have my own small version of the studio, right inside the front door of my house. Marita shows an admirable lack of curiosity during this whole operation, even though I’ve got on my dance heels, which are slipping and sliding on the stairs. I wear them all the time now, trying to break them in, to make them as unconscious as bedroom slippers or flip-flops, and I also wear the black Lycra practicewear I got at Target.

  The foyer looks strange with all the furniture smashed into the living room and the floors so naked. Like I’m moving, or maybe like I was never here in the first place.

  “To hell with feng shui,” I tell Marita, who solemnly nods. “Anything that gets in the way of dance is bad karma.”

  But when I flip on the speaker system and the Gipsy Kings come roaring out, she smiles. She will not dance with me, firmly shaking her head as I try to pull her into my bad salsa, but she stands on the broad, curved staircase, watching as I sway, first side to side and then forward and back.

  The music is so loud that it takes a minute for me to realize the doorbell is ringing. I pull it open to find an ostentation of the neighborhood ladies clustered on the stoop. That’s what Mark used to call them when they were all together, an ostentation of ladies, and I think he got the term from what they call a group of peacocks. But despite the fact he made fun of their supercharged Range Rovers and designer bags, he always urged me to go with these women whenever they called to invite me to some sort of shopping outlet or garden show or play. He wanted me to have friends in the community. It bugged him, I think, that this was always more his home than mine.

  The ostentation walks the development every morning, a reasonably ambitious undertaking, for the yards in this neighborhood are so large and the homes so spread apart that one lap equals over two miles. They usually do it twice. Right after Mark died they stopped by often, but I rarely went with them, and at times did not even bother getting out of bed and coming downstairs to open the door. After a while they gave up, just as after a while they stopped bringing by their offerings of jams, cakes, and pastries. It’s a southern thing, I guess, this compulsion to bake after someone dies. Ever since I was a child I’ve always associated the taste of sugar with grief.

  “Hello,” they chorus as I open the door.

  It’s the usual conversation. Come and walk the circle, they say. It will be good for you to get out. But the few times I pulled on my Nikes and went with them, it hadn’t been good for me at all. They eat and then they walk to work off what they’ve just eaten, and then they go home and cook some more and while they walk they talk about who is sick or dying or cheating or drinking or not quite as well off as she seems. It’s exhausting in ways that have nothing to do with four miles.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, even though it’s nice of them to ring my doorbell after all this time. Nice of them to keep trying when I give them so little encouragement. “I know I need to walk, but today I’m moving furniture.”

  They look at me with collective doubt. I am in my dance heels and black practicewear and the Gipsy Kings are yodeling now.

  “How are you doing?” one of them asks. It strikes me as a real question, sincerely meant, and deserving of a real answer.

  “I think I’m doing better,” I tell her.

  “You look better,” she says. “You look . . . tall.”

  “It’s the shoes.”

  They back down the steps, their chatter fading with them. “Marita,” I say as I close the door, for she is still standing on the staircase. “Do you think I really am doing better?”

  “Si,” she says. “Mucho mejor.”

  THAT NIGHT, IN MARK'S study, I read about the instructors on the Canterbury Ballroom webpage and try to weave in what they say about themselves in their bios—the European competitions they’ve danced in, their schooling and stated ambitions—with the shards of information I’ve picked up during my lessons. Anatoly is the owner of the studio, the man I saw dancing the first day I went in, and he’s been in the country the longest. He calls himself “the founder of the ballroom,” a touchingly elevated term for a business that employs three people in a fifteen-hundred-square-foot storefront.

  Anatoly is twenty-seven and Nik is twenty-four, but they both claim to have been dancing for more than twenty years, a fact that—if true—suggests a way of life I will never understand. The absence of a childhood, the sort of drive it would take to leave one world and start again in another, and how much this Canterbury Ballroom must matter to them, how many dreams it holds. They want to become Americans, they say. They want condos and cars. To drive to California with the top down, to send their children to Harvard. Their desires are unapologetic. They list them right there in their bios.

  The forty-five minutes of my lesson time are holy, so we rarely stop to talk, but still, in the course of dancing, Nik and I have shared random pieces of our history. I know that he was eight when he was selected from his village school to go to the dance academy in Moscow. He knows that I was twelve when I hyperextended my knee at cheerleading camp. He misses his mother. I am a widow. He’s allergic to peanuts and I like Ella Fitzgerald. He is in the United States on a student visa. That’s the best way to get into this country, he says, and I start to ask him where he’s studying, before it hits me. His schedule at the dance studio is brutal . . . thirteen lessons a day. He isn’t studying anywhere.

  As three weeks turn into four and one month into two, the studio continues to obsess me, like a new lover. Whenever I go to the grocery I park at the far side of the lot so I have an exc
use to walk past and peek in the door, to try to figure out who’s in there and what they’re doing. Normally, I keep a daily to-do list, with everything carefully recorded, but I never write down the time of my dance lesson. I don’t have to. Thursday at four o’clock is where my week begins and ends and at times I think it’s strange . . . why I have taken to it so quickly, how dance has moved from something I always sort of meant to try to becoming my religion. I wonder if I’m nothing more than just one of those lonely women who flits from Korean cooking to basketweaving and then I stop myself. It’s not the same. God knows, through the years I’ve decorated and redecorated, I’ve eaten and dashed to burn off what I’ve just eaten and then eaten again. I’ve pickled my vegetables and woven my baskets and that was nothing more than a way to escape from my mind and body, to fill my hours without emotion or thought, while this . . . even in just a few weeks, dance has pressed me back into my body, forced me to think and feel things I’ve avoided for years.

  Nik knows all this. He knows I always get there early, so that I can sit on the couch and watch the other lessons. The student in his three o’clock slot is a petite woman named Pamela. He has used the words “yesterday” and “tomorrow” with her, so evidently she takes a lesson every day. She must be a whale, which is what they call the people who spend the most money, those who think nothing of dropping four thousand dollars on a ball gown or flying their instructor to Vegas for a weekend competition. Just one or two whales can keep a whole studio going, so they must be nurtured carefully. Everyone stops what they’re doing when Pamela comes in. They greet her with enthusiasm, as if she has just returned from a long trip.

  Pamela is a Silver level dancer, which is pretty high up on the competition ladder. First there is Newcomer, which I guess is what I am, and then most people dance Bronze, which has many subcategories: Pre-Bronze, Bronze I and II, Bronze Open, and Bronze Closed. It’s incomprehensible to me, like levels of the military, and I never can keep straight who is supposed to salute to whom. But this woman is clearly far above me and I study her while I am pretending to check e-mail on my phone or fiddling with my shoes. Pamela looks like a little doll when she swirls.

  Nik has watched me watching her, so I know it’s only a matter of time until he starts pressuring me to take more lessons. And why not? I have the money and it’s getting harder and harder to wait all week for Thursday to roll around. Besides, we started with Latin, the sexy stuff, but then after spying on Pamela I told him I wanted to try the more formal dances too, things like waltz and foxtrot. The studio is like a little Baskin-Robbins, so many colors and flavors. You get a taste of one on your plastic spoon and it’s good, but then something else starts to look even better.

  Today we’re working on the foxtrot, which he says is both the easiest and hardest dance. The steps and timing are simple—slow and slow backward, then quick-quick to the side, a neat little L-shaped pattern across the floor. But to do it well is difficult, involving heel leads and toe releases that when placed together form a sort of gliding movement that makes it seem as if you’re skating across ice. The Bronze and Silver students curse when they’re practicing, so the beauty of an advanced foxtrot apparently comes at a high price. A minute to learn and a lifetime to master, I guess, like that board game Othello that Mark and I used to play, but I’m not to the point yet where I have to worry about technique. When I asked Nik if we could focus on foxtrot today, he said yes, that I should enjoy it while I can.

  We’re in the corner practicing underarm turns when Anatoly suddenly looks up from his desk and says, “What is the capital of Tallahassee?”

  There’s a moment of silence and then Quinn says, very gently, “Tallahassee is the capital of Florida.” She’s constantly helping Anatoly study for his citizenship exams and I guess Nik will try to qualify after that. It worries me. Nik seems so vulnerable, connected to no one, a twenty-four-year-old on a student visa that eventually has to run out. I know he’s allergic to peanuts, but I don’t know where he lives, or with whom, or how much of my weekly eighty-five dollars he gets to keep.

  “You should do two lessons,” Nik says. “Tuesday and Friday.”

  “Maybe,” I say. I don’t know why I’m stalling him when he and I both know I’ll end up doing it. I wonder how many thousands of lessons you have to take before they teach you Silver steps.

  He walks me through a few more turns and a twinkle, then we go over to the computer to pick out songs. I like this part, where we begin to put the movement to music, even though I make lots of mistakes. Music seems different to me lately. I listen for the beat. I surf among stations while I drive, trying to figure out what you would dance to each song, whether it’s a samba or a salsa or a tango. Foxtrot music is especially great, all the big-band stuff from the old MGM movies. Nik points at the screen, his fingertip hovering above “Fly Me to the Moon.”

  He’s considering it because it’s slow, I realize, an easy practice song, but I don’t care. When I was growing up my dad loved that song. Our shaky old hi-fi was as big as my bunk bed and I can remember albums stacked up to drop, one at a time, onto the turntable. It was the era of the Rat Pack, and space exploration. Telescopes on the front lawns of suburban houses, Tang on the breakfast table, and our teachers pushing TVs into our elementary school classrooms so that we could watch the astronauts coming and going. We were so sure that someday we’d all have flying cars, robot maids, and rocket-ship vacations. Everyone was wrapped up in the race to the moon and it was the Russians we were racing against. I start to ask Nik what it was like over there, then I remember he’s a kid. The space race was over before he was born.

  He points at “Fly Me to the Moon.” “You like this?”

  “Very much.”

  We walk back to the corner and he invites me into hold. “If you do not want two lessons, you should take group classes,” he says. “Much more practice for not much more money.”

  “How many seats are in the Senate?” Anatoly calls out.

  “A hundred,” Quinn yells back. “Two per state.”

  “Hold the slow-slow,” Nik says. “You are rushing.”

  “I don’t know about group,” I say. They just put the October schedule on the wall beside the bathroom. At fifteen dollars a class or a hundred dollars a month for unlimited classes, the group classes are a definite steal, so I suspect they’re populated by people looking to stretch their dollar or maybe, even worse, people who are dancing to meet potential dates, who consider this whole thing a social outing. Since I take my lessons in the afternoons, I haven’t encountered many of my fellow students, most of whom come in at night after work, and I’m terrified at the thought of dancing with another civilian. Nik makes it easy. He puts me where I need to be and I would imagine that all the students who take private lessons are similarly dependent upon their instructors.

  “I need a few more private lessons before I take group,” I tell Nik. “Look. I’m even screwing up a silly underarm turn.”

  “Slow down,” he says. “You have four whole steps to make turn. Slow, slow, quick-quick. You are back to me too soon.”

  “I don’t want to be late.”

  “You are early.”

  “Isn’t that better?”

  “No. In true dance when man leads and lady follows, she is just behind him in time. Not a whole beat, not a second, just a—”

  “Millisecond?”

  “Yes. So slow down. Is better that I wait on you than you wait on me.”

  “Well, all right,” I say. “But I always like to get to places early.”

  “I know,” he says, with a trace of a smile. “You are nerd.”

  I laugh. He may be the only person who’s ever figured that out about me.

  We try it again, and damn if I don’t make a four-beat turn in three beats. I’m back so fast that I’ve pulled us off the count and he has to hold us still for a second before he makes the next move.


  “What are you scared will happen,” Nik says in my ear, “if man has to wait for you?”

  The question startles me. I stop dancing entirely and look at him. “I don’t know. I never had enough guts to find out. Maybe I’m afraid that if I take my time, that when I get back, you will have disappeared. Gotten bored and gone off to dance with some other girl.”

  Or died, I think, but I don’t say that part.

  He is still smiling. “Let me wait for you. Is my job. I promise you I will not disappear.”

  One more song, one more slow shuffle around the floor and then the clock says 3:47 and he walks me back over to the desk, the two of us holding hands, as we often do. “Explain to her,” he says to Quinn, “how all students must take group class.”

  “Is Pamela going to take group?” I ask Quinn.

  A beat of silence is the answer. Of course she won’t.

  “Will make us stronger studio,” Nik says.

  Quinn nods. “It’s true. Anatoly is really pushing it because he thinks if we’re going to start showing well at competitions, the whole studio needs more practice. I’ve even talked Steve into starting with the new cycle and believe me, that wasn’t easy.”

  Steve is the guy I saw practicing the heel lead the day I came in for my introductory lesson. He’s the studio’s only male whale, and he seems completely wrapped up with Quinn. During their lessons they talk as much as they dance, always huddling into corners to confer about something, and I can’t imagine him risking the public humiliation of group. When two pros dance together, they’re golden. A pro and an amateur are okay. But when two people who don’t know what they’re doing attempt to dance together . . . it could get ugly real fast.

  “He’s a doctor, isn’t he?” I ask.