The Unexpected Waltz Page 6

  “How many justices sit on the Supreme Court?” Anatoly asks.

  “Nine,” Quinn says, and then to me, “He’s a plastic surgeon. Don’t tell me you haven’t seen his billboards.”

  “Oh God,” I say. That’s where I know him from. “He’s Dr. Boob.”

  I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to figure this out. Steve’s face has gazed down at me from billboards located at the most desirable intersections in town for years, along with the words NOT JUST BIGGER. BETTER. His picture is almost too perfect to be real: the slight pucker of concern between his eyebrows, the brushstrokes of white at his temples, the large and uniform teeth. There have been times I’ve looked up at him during red lights and wondered if they hired an actor to play the part. Like someone phoned Central Casting and said, “Send us a tall, good-looking doctor-type whom women will trust.”

  “He doesn’t like it when people call him that,” Quinn says quickly, and a little defensively. “He devotes three days a month to pro bono reconstruction for the uninsured survivors of breast cancer, you know.” She says this rat-a-tat, clearly a prepared speech she’s given many times before, and I nod, wondering at the strange alliance between a plastic surgeon and a woman as unorthodox as Quinn. She’s the un-Barbie, with her cartoon skin and spiky hair and the little belly that hangs over the top of her yoga pants, and she’s smarter than anyone might guess. I thought there were seven people on the Supreme Court.

  “I’m sure he’s a great doctor,” I say. “Devoted to his work.”

  “So you come to group,” Nik says, nodding vigorously, as if it’s all been decided. “If Dr. Boob can do this thing, so can you.”

  "NOW THEY'VE ROPED ME into a group class five times a week,” I tell Carolina. I’ve come by, as I often do, right after my lesson to show her my new steps. It is hard to demonstrate an underarm turn with no arm to turn under, but she sits up patiently in bed with the Taco Bell bag in her lap and watches me try. When I stop, she claps.

  “What’s wrong with group class?”

  “Just the fact that there are other people there. You know those plastic surgery billboards that say NOT JUST BIGGER. BETTER.? That guy will be there.” I start to tell her he does free reconstruction but I’m not sure what the idea of new breasts might mean to a woman who’s already in hospice. But once again today she looks great, like someone who might rally and make it out of here. It doesn’t happen often but it does happen. She has plowed through her burritos and sweet iced tea.

  “Why do guys like that even take lessons?” she asks. “He can’t have any trouble meeting women.”

  “I don’t know,” I say, taking off my dance shoes and sitting down in the chair opposite the bed. “Everybody has their own reasons, I guess. I think people look to dance to give them whatever’s lacking in their day-to-day lives. You know, they want to feel elegant or sexy or feminine or powerful or something that normal life doesn’t offer. So they go into the studio and for forty-five minutes a week they get to tap into that fantasy part of their lives.”

  “Sounds like you need to do it more than once a week.”

  A strange little dig, but I let it slide. “Group class might make me worse. The civilian dancers . . . we’re not very good. I’ve watched group a couple of times and the instructor shows everybody a step and then they line up all the men on one side of the room with the women facing them. You rotate through, until you’ve practiced it with everybody, but some of these guys . . . I swear you can practically smell the fear on them. They hold out their arms to the women and they’re shaking, and it becomes this great big circle of nerves. Everybody gets worse and worse, even the ones who started out pretty good. You know what I mean? You’d think the good dancers would make the bad ones better, but it’s more like the bad ones are making the good ones worse. Everybody sinks to the lowest common denominator.”

  “How’s Dr. Boob?”

  “He hasn’t started group yet either. He might not. His instructor just thinks he needs the practice.”

  “So he’s a snob like you.”

  I stick out my tongue at her.

  “I think you should do it,” she says. “Practice is practice and they can’t all stink. Tell you what. Go to one class and report back to me. It’s an assignment. Tell me who the other people are and what they want. You like figuring people out.”

  “I do?”

  “Yeah,” she says, balling up the Taco Bell bag and throwing it toward the wastebasket. She misses and it bounces across the floor. “You like sitting in the corner pretending to be busy but the whole time you’re just secretly trying to figure other people out.”

  THE FIRST DAY OF October falls on a Monday so Quinn is teaching jive. This doesn’t seem like an auspicious start. Jive—despite its all-American, Victory Garden, bebopping roots—is rumored to be technically difficult. Whenever I ask Nik to show me the steps he always says “Next time.”

  I decide that jive calls for a full skirt, a bright red top, a high ponytail. The schedule I’ve stuck on my refrigerator door says that tomorrow is tango and for that I have my long fringe black skirt and my hair, I think . . . it should be slicked back again, but this time, nothing that bounces. Maybe a low chignon. It’s silly. I know it is. I’m on the verge of becoming my own tablescape. But I’ve done this all my life and I can’t seem to stop. I know how to pick out clothes to create a certain effect—how to be sweet, and smart and sexy and sophisticated and pretty much anything the occasion demands. It’s all about the costume, because people don’t look hard and they don’t look deep. Ninety-nine percent of the time they just treat you like your clothes.

  But after I’m dressed, I have a moment of doubt. As I’m walking out of the bedroom I look back and think how easy it would be to just get in bed and close my eyes. No one is counting on me to be there. I told Nik I would come, but he didn’t believe me. Wouldn’t be surprised in the least if I bailed. It’s nearly dark outside the window and in a few weeks, after the time change, seven o’clock will be darker still. And most of all, it makes me nervous to think about dancing with a group of strangers. Moving into the arms of men, rotating from one to the other, having to smile and tell them all my name.

  For a minute I give in to the temptation. I lie down on the bed, with my ponytail jabbing so awkwardly into the back of my head that I roll to my side and curl up in a little ball. The TV remote is on the bedside table and the top drawer is crammed full of menus from every takeout place in town.

  Nothing has to change. That’s what the lawyer told me. I could lie here forever and the world would still go on.

  Elyse has always said that there are small moments that knock your life one way or another, the way an unseen rock beneath the surface of water can nudge a canoe off its course. She claims it’s the tiny stuff that makes or breaks a life—or a marriage—and the first time she told me this was on my wedding day, as she and I sat on this very same bed stuffing her squirming daughter Tory into a flower-girl dress. Elyse had been doing all the right things that morning, smiling and chattering and popping champagne corks and muttering over the dozens of small silk-covered buttons on the back of Tory’s dress, but I don’t think she expected much from my marriage. She wasn’t sure it would be enough and that’s when she said it, how it was the little things that could break you. The disappointment you brush off, the compromise that seemed worth it at the time, all the comments you let slide, even if they sting.

  You’ve got to figure out which of these small moments matter, she said. Which ones look small but are really big. And when you find them, you have to dig in and fight. Because otherwise you wake up someday, almost as if from a dream, and find that you’ve drifted to a place you don’t even recognize. You don’t know how you got there and you don’t know how to get back. She looked up at me, her eyes suspiciously bright, and said, “No kidding, Kelly, it just happens. All of a sudden you’re bewildered by your own life.”<
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  I didn’t want to believe her. She was starting to come out of her marriage just as I was going into mine, and our friendship has always been like this, a bit out of sync. Oh sure, we’ve had all the same experiences, but we seem to have had them at different times, like two women stuck in the same revolving door, and even though we’re often exasperated by life’s strange timing, I think we count on it too. It’s the way we protect and rescue each other. Like when we were younger and we had that rule that only one of us could get drunk at a time. Somebody had to drive.

  But I cut her off on the morning of my wedding, before she could get going on one of her full-blown speeches or, maybe worse, start to cry. Yes, her marriage may have been disappointing, but that was Elyse. She has always expected too much out of life—and way too much out of men. And thus it was her destiny to be constantly disappointed, and I told myself I wasn’t like that. I had always been the practical one who knew how to make do and adapt. To admit that Elyse had a point would have been to admit that my marriage also might fail, that I too might end up alone.

  I turn, look at the clock: 6:25. I still have plenty of time. And I know this is one of those small moments when things could as easily go one way as another. I could march downstairs, get in the car, drive to the studio, and face my fears, or I could pull this annoying clasp from my hair and go back to sleep once again. Drift just a little farther down the river of dreams.

  I ARRIVE AT THE studio at six fifty and lurk around watching the others file in. Pamela enters and I’m surprised she’s deigned to try group, but she goes off into a corner by herself and begins practicing arm movements in the mirror. And then I get swept up in rapid-fire chatter with a woman in a pink angora shell named Isabel who before I can tell her my name announces she’s been married three times and has a crush on Nik. “My husband can’t believe I’m spending the money,” she whispers, “and I tell him it’s for exercise, which of course doesn’t make any sense because the Urban Fitness place up the street is like twenty bucks a month. But I figure ballroom’s cheap when you factor in the BFE.”

  “BFE?” I ask blankly, watching another clump of people come through the door. A slim black man in a newsboy cap, two women in jeans, one of them stunningly tall. A gaggle of teenagers.

  “You know how when men go to call girls they can pay extra and get the GFE?” she says, bending so close to me I can smell her tropical shampoo. “That means if you like double the price or something you get the girlfriend experience. The whore will go to dinner with you and kiss you and pretend like she likes you. I figure when I get to dance with Nik on Wednesdays, he’s my boyfriend experience.”

  I doubt Nik would appreciate the analogy. “So you take private lessons?”

  “When I can,” Isabel says, “but I have to put it all on plastic. Group’s my regular fix. I mean, Quinn teaches most of them and the guy students suck, but sooner or later Wednesday’s here and Nik puts his arm around me. Money well spent. And who knows? I might sell a kidney and compete at the Holiday Classic down in Hotlanta. You going?”

  “God no,” I say. I haven’t heard anybody call Atlanta “Hotlanta” in thirty years. “I just started.” From across the room Nik gives me a little wave, like he’s glad that I’m here.

  A few others drift in. A chubby and prematurely bald man whom Isabel introduces as Harry, evidently another regular, and a pretty young girl named Valentina who greets Nik and Anatoly in Russian. “Bought and paid for on the Internet,” Isabel whispers. “Her husband’s about a hundred but she’s real sweet.” One of the women in jeans retreats to the back couch, where she pulls knitting out of a big sack, while the tall one leans down to put on her dance shoes. “Lesbians,” Isabel whispers. “Jane’s the one who dances and she takes most of her private lessons with big, bad Anatoly, who likes to whip his ladies around and make them submit, you know what I mean, to his throbbing, masculine will. The other one just sits there knitting and watching him work her over. Makes you wonder what happens when the two of them get home, doesn’t it?” It’s all I can do to keep from laughing, but I’ve got to admit, Isabel’s an absolute gold mine of information. I should just bring her to Carolina’s room tomorrow, sit her down on the bed, and pull her string.

  “Okay, let’s get started,” Quinn says, walking to the center of the room, and the regulars fall into a line. I stand at the end. Quinn tells us a few things I already know about the jive—quick, sharp movements and lots of bounce—and then the door opens and Steve strides in. Maybe he planned it this way, making his big entrance after we’re already lined up, but Quinn gives him the same sort of smile Nik gave me: Thanks for coming, for being a team player. She takes us through the jive basic—a three-step shuffle to the right, then the left, ending with a rock step. Everyone seems to know that much at least, so she quickly adds on a little turn that ends with the couple in a sweetheart pose, shoulder to shoulder with their arms around each other’s back. It doesn’t seem to be a terribly hard step, but it’s cute and it does require the man and woman to be quite close when they rock back. She teaches us the women’s part, which is almost always the showiest and most complicated, and we practice on our own while she walks the men through their steps.

  Then she says, “Here’s what the whole thing looks like with a partner.”

  Apparently the highlight of group class is when the instructor chooses a student to demonstrate. In theory, the student is pulled from the line at random but I don’t think any of us are clueless enough to buy that. The instructor is going to choose a student who he or she thinks can demonstrate the sequence with ease; otherwise you risk destroying the confidence of the remaining pupils before they even begin. The logical thing for Quinn to do is choose Steve, who not only takes plenty of private lessons but takes them with her. But when she glances at him, he makes a great show of checking his phone, pulling it from his pocket and frowning as if he’s just been informed of some breast-related emergency. She settles instead on the obviously eager Harry, who stumbles gracelessly through it, counting out loud the whole time.

  “Do we need another demonstration?” she asks. We sure as hell do. She says, “Pamela, would you care to show us how it looks from the feminine point of view?” Nik comes over from behind his desk to demonstrate with Pamela, and they run the sequence flawlessly. Pamela gives us a dismissive little smile as she walks back to the mirror, and it occurs to me that she’s chosen to demonstrate all the time. This is probably why she’s hanging around the studio during the group class hour, for this brief moment in which it’s clear she’s the special one.

  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 w
hen 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.