The Unexpected Waltz Read online

  I never say “fake it,” not even in my own mind. “Fake” is a harsh word and it’s the wrong word. It’s just that in those moments it’s easy to give him something—a couple of muttered references to religion, a twist of the hips, a moment of held breath followed by a relieved gasp. I’m careful not to overdo it. I think that’s a mistake a lot of women make.

  And it isn’t that I don’t like sex. There are parts of it I like very much. I like the beginning, when it’s sweet. I like the sense of falling, of a decision being made so fast that it’s almost like you’re not making it. A decision being made so fast that the next day you can stand in the shower and think words like “inevitable” and “fate.” I like it when I lie back and a man looks at me, really looks at me. Intently, as if he’s trying to memorize something. It would be enough for me if it stopped right there. I know my breasts are good, and my shoulders, and my waist, and so I am confident to be like this. My hips I’m less sure about—there is a low-slung belt of flesh just below my navel that I have never managed to totally lose and so I leave that part covered as long as I can.

  I’m quick to cover up when it’s over too, and through the years I’ve created sarongs out of towels and men’s shirts because that’s the other part of sex I like—when it’s over. The middle—it’s okay, I guess, but I sometimes get lost in it, as if I’m flipping through the pages of a very long book. A Russian novel maybe, with strange names and confusing jumps in time, and at a certain point all I really want is to know the end. Do they live? Does he love her? Will God stoop down and set it all right?

  And there are times, in this confusing middle, when my thoughts go back to that drive-in and those Saturday nights, when Elyse would make her noises and I would listen, somehow knowing that with every moan and mumble, our paths were diverging. The noises she made were as ugly as truth. She was actually feeling something. She was being carried away to a place I couldn’t follow, and lying there, with the trembling weight of Kevin Pressley beside me, I could see our whole future. Being real was going to make her life more dangerous. Pretending was going to keep me safe.

  “Pretty girl,” the boy in the helmet said, and from that point on, men have, one by one, written the story of my life.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I AM THE FRAME," Nik says. “Which makes you . . .”

  I’m ready for this one. “The picture.”

  “Yes. So if we both do our job, then you are the one they see.”

  He gets me into the proper dance position in stages. “Bend knees,” he says. “Incline hips forward, settle your pelvis over mine, then tilt . . . No. Not so far. Your back does not bend. Is optical illusion.” I’m surprised he uses the terms “pelvis,” “incline,” and “optical illusion,” but Nik knows a lot of English nouns and verbs. It’s the adjectives and adverbs that give him trouble. I don’t think that as a language Russian has so many. We practiced the waltz last lesson, so before he has to tell me, I remember to extend my arms, trying to keep my elbows high and level and my chin jutting toward the sky. This is the princess dance. The prettiest and the most masochistic.

  “This is good?” he says.

  He’s incapable of understanding sarcasm, so I don’t bother trying. “I’m miserable.”

  “Don’t look to me,” he says. “Not to other couples on the floor. Look to line where the floor becomes the ceiling.”

  The scary part is that I’m beginning to understand him when he talks like that. I stare at the seam where the wall meets the ceiling. He spins me once and I drop my chin. This is your natural impulse when you spin, to tuck your head in and tighten your arms to your body and try to make yourself aerodynamic.

  He steps back. “What,” he says, “is nature of this dance?”

  He asks me this question almost every lesson, so I’m ready. The cha-cha is flirtatious. The tango is passionate. The rumba is sensual and the foxtrot is playful and the jive is energetic. We have discussed all this before.

  “Rapturous,” I say.

  He frowns. “This means?”

  “Happy.”

  “All dance is happy.”

  Completely not true, but the last ten weeks have taught me that there’s no point in arguing with Nik. “Happy in a certain way,” I say. “Like when you die and go to heaven. You know, happy like an angel.”

  He nods. “Is good word.” He walks over to his desk, pulls out his iPhone. I spell “rapturous” to him and he types it in.

  “Yes,” he says, walking back to me. “Like angel, so raise your chin.”

  I’m trying very hard, but then we go into a series of turns and I lose my form. Why am I so unable to spin? All the other girls can. When I do turns in the cha-cha or the jive, I control my vertigo by looking straight at Nik, but you’re not allowed to look at your partner in the waltz, and besides, it’s not just a turn here and there. The waltz is a dance of endless circles and maybe this is really why it frightens me.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “Shit, I’m so sorry.”

  He shakes his head. He hates it when I apologize. “Close your eyes.”

  Against all logic, it works. A little voluntary self-blinding does calm me down but the minute I find myself relaxing, my eyes startle open like that jerk thing you do when you’re falling asleep. It scares me to lose my position in the room, to not be able to see where the other couples are, or how close Nik and I are coming to the wall.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “It’s just that I get dizzy.”

  “Because your head go back and forth like dog in car.”

  I glance at the clock. Twenty-five minutes to go. Usually my lesson flies by, but today time is dragging. He walks back over to his desk. Opens a drawer and digs around for a minute, then returns with a scarf.

  “Here,” he says, handing it to me.

  The scarf is silky, a swirl of blue and green, clearly a woman’s. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

  He sighs, hugely, as if he’s regretting the day he first left Moscow. He pulls the scarf from my hands, folds it twice, and ties it around my eyes. The world goes soft and black. The knot in back is tight, tight enough that I can feel the pulse in the dome of my head. I’m too surprised to be angry or frightened.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “Lady left it. Now we waltz.”

  I lift my right hand and he pulls me gently toward him. Puts his arm around me, moves me into his side, and in that exact same instant my left hand descends in perfect position and comes to rest lightly on his shoulder. Is anyone watching us? There are other people in the room. Anatoly has a student and I think Quinn is here somewhere too. Does Nik do this with other women? Or is the scarf the sign of the most stubborn, the most hopeless, the ones who can’t listen to reason and have to be treated like horses in a burning barn? Nik pulls his leg back from mine and settles into position.

  “Breathe,” he says sharply.

  I exhale and we begin. Are we turning? I think we are but not very much. It feels slow and easy to follow. Maybe it’s just like they say on the Discovery Channel—that when you obscure one sense the others become sharper—because I can feel every nuance of the floor beneath my feet and the music sounds more distinct, broken into units. One-two-three, Nik counts, or do I merely think it? The first step of the waltz is the big one, a surge of movement either straight forward or back. The second step is to the side and you rise with it, and then hover on your toes for a split second, stretched to your greatest height before you sink in the third beat. You sink, you rest, you settle, you wait. This is the tricky part of the waltz. This third beat, this part where you hardly move at all, where it is all energy and anticipation and shaping. The third beat is what separates the amateurs from the pros.

  The blindfold is helping. I can feel the beats in the music as completely separate spaces, the one-two-three, the surge-rise-fall, and for once in my life, I don’t rush the rest
. This rhythm is like a wave that comes and lifts you and then there is another. Why would I fight this? Fighting this would be like refusing to float on the surface of water and it’s easy to float, isn’t it? If you let yourself, floating is the most natural thing in the world.

  One song fades and another begins. The melody is different but once again I feel the beat beneath the notes. This must be what they call musicality and everyone says it’s the hardest thing to learn. You can’t practice it alone in your foyer, the way I practice the steps. Musicality is spontaneous, like God. It’s either there when you need it or it’s not.

  At one point Nik slips behind me, pressing his chest into my back. This is what they call shadow hold, a high Bronze step or maybe even Silver, and I’m tentative at first but then quickly confident. Sure that the floor is there and Nik is there and that the world is safe and steady. I step forward and he turns me. I step again, we turn again, and we fall into a pattern that I cannot see but that I imagine to be like a braid, like two people weaving their way across the room. For a split second, life seems easy. For a split second, I’m rapturous.

  “What do you call this step?” I ask him.

  His voice is close to my right ear. “Waterfall,” he says.

  “That’s right. I remember.”

  “We have never done.”

  We stop. Nik pulls my blindfold down and I blink.

  “Better,” he says.

  I grin. I know I earned that “better.”

  When I walk to the couch to get my purse, my eye drags by the clock. We’ve gone over. It’s ten minutes after three and Nik never goes over. A minute is money in this business. Every minute is two dollars.

  The room is empty. No one else on the floor and no one at the desk. Nik seems surprised too. He turns the music off abruptly, not fading it out in that deejay way like he usually does, and he heads straight across the dance floor. There’s a room somewhere in the back where the instructors take their showers and eat their lunches, a cot where they nap between lessons. I sign the schedule on Quinn’s desk as I walk out. It’s not like Nik to forget to say good-bye or confirm the time of our next appointment, but then it’s not like him to go over either.

  As I slide into my car seat, I realize I still have the scarf around my neck. It’s such a strange thing for Nik to have in a drawer. The edge says Hermès, and while it’s probably one of those fakes that you can buy in the straw market of Nassau or on some side street in New York, it’s still somebody’s scarf. I pull the visor down and study myself in the mirror. It’s tied badly, one big knot in the back like a noose, but it’s nice and I don’t know why I never wear scarves. I should get one like this, in a mix of blues and greens.

  The studio is silent when I walk back in. I start to put the scarf in Nik’s drawer, but that’s presumptuous, to just go into his little cubicle and mess with his desk. Quinn would know what to do with it, but her desk is on the other side of the room and now that I’ve held it in my hands for a few minutes, it’s dawning on me that perhaps this scarf is a true Hermès, because the pattern is exactly as clear on the back as on the front. In fact, there is no back or front. It isn’t hemmed, it’s carefully rolled at the edges so that both sides are completely identical.

  I was wrong about it being a knockoff. Nik blindfolded me with someone’s five-hundred-dollar scarf. This is not the sort of thing a woman would leave behind by accident and I can’t just drop it on a desk by the front door. I can’t stuff it into some random drawer and I sure as hell can’t take it home with me.

  I start toward the back room. Nik is probably in there, having his snack or maybe lying down on the cot. I’m holding the scarf out in front of me like it might bite and I’m at the door before I really think about what I’m doing.

  One step in the room and I see them. Nik and Pamela.

  They aren’t embracing. They’re standing very close and although Nik stands close to everyone, although people touching other people is pretty much the whole point of this place, I somehow know that dance is not what this is about. Nik lifts his head, but I’m gone before he can speak, back out the door before I’m fully in. It’s probably the fastest turn I’ve ever made in the ballroom.

  It’s not like I walked in on two people having sex, I try to remind myself as I scurry back across the dance floor. I didn’t even interrupt a kiss. But there’s no doubt that I’ve seen something I wasn’t meant to see. Pamela isn’t as old as I am but she’s certainly older than Nik and she gives off the vibe of a well-tended wife. Very dignified, very well dressed. She is, come to think of it, exactly the sort of woman who might own a Hermès scarf.

  Quinn is just stepping out of the bathroom as I rush by, humming to herself and rubbing lotion into her hands. “I walked out with this scarf by accident,” I say, but Quinn’s hands are sticky and she pauses, still twisting them together while I slap the Hermès around in the air. “It’s somebody’s scarf and I think it’s expensive and I’m sorry, I’m so very sorry.”

  Quinn looks at me quizzically. She must think I’m some sort of kleptomaniac, stealing apples and scarves and then immediately returning to the scene of the crime to confess. I suspect my face is very red.

  “He used it to blindfold me,” I say. “Because we were waltzing and I was being stubborn but then when I realized I still had it around my neck . . .”

  In unison, we both look toward the back room. The lounge, they grandly call it, although it’s no bigger than a closet. The instructor’s lounge, and just in this moment someone inside is quietly closing the door.

  “I should have knocked,” I say.

  She shrugs. “You were bound to find out eventually,” she says. “Everyone does.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  IWANT YOU TO promise me something,” Carolina says.

  “If I can,” I say. She’s having a bad day. Her quesadilla lies untouched at her side and she’s dozed off twice since I got here.

  Cancer’s ironic. Carolina had looked so good for so long that the supervising doctors had decided they might have been wrong about her. Not wrong about the diagnosis, but about the amount of time she had left. One of them ordered another course of chemo—extraordinary measures are usually verboten in hospice—and told us in the staff meeting that it might buy her a “bonus round.” So Carolina has traveled by ambulance to the hospital for treatment and then back and the experience clearly exhausted her. You can’t blame the doctor for trying. With someone this young, you always want to hold out hope, but hope is painful and chemo’s a double-edged sword. Now, just two days after it was declared she might get better, she looks much worse.

  “It’s about the pain,” she says.

  “Are you in pain now?”

  She shakes her head. “When Virginia brings the boys . . . don’t let them make me too groggy.”

  “Okay.”

  “Keep me right on that place where you’re not really hurting but you’re not drunk-on-your-ass-out-of-it either. You know what I mean?”

  I nod. “The sweet spot.”

  One of the major responsibilities of hospice is pain management. By the time someone gets to us, they’re generally in the last stages of their illness, at the point where doctors stop using verbs like “cure,” “remove,” and “eradicate” and begin using vague terms like “quality of life,” “palliative care,” and “keeping her comfortable.” These patients are daily reminders of the limitations of medicine, so most doctors would prefer not to see them at all. It’s the nurses who make this closing stage of life tolerable. But exactly how to do that is open to debate.

  The true mission of hospice—at least in my opinion, although I’ve never stated this to anyone—is to give people a calm arena in which to think their final thoughts. Not everyone wants this opportunity. Some of our clients come in demanding the highest possible dosages of drugs, a premature sort of oblivion, which the nurses willingly provide th
em. At the other end of the spectrum are the people who fight any attempts at sedation, the ones who grip the steel bars of their bed frames with surprising strength, the ones who seem determined to suffer. We don’t argue with them either. It’s not our job to deny people pain any more than it’s our job to deny people drugs. I’ve always figured that if death buys you anything, it buys you the right to stop explaining yourself to strangers.

  But this scares the student nurses when they come through on rotation. Like the doctors, they have a surprisingly low tolerance for illness. At least this kind.

  “Why don’t you give them something?” they ask the staff, wide-eyed and frightened at the sight of such ostentatious suffering. What is it with these people, anyway? Are they religious nuts, deluded into thinking that pain in this life buys them a free ride into the next? Or are they paying the price for some private sin, trying to atone for some mistake they made sixty years ago, or maybe just the failures of last week?

  The clients who want drugs are the easiest ones. They require nothing from their nurses but the plunge of a syringe or a pill on a tray. They die as if they have a train to catch. Those who refuse drugs aren’t quite as easy, but at least they’re understandable. All they want is a witness, someone to watch this final negotiation, to verify whatever deal they’re striking with God and to stand at their bedside as impartial as a notary.

  It’s the ones who fall between these two extremes that keep me up at night. The ones like Carolina.

  She’s asking for consciousness without pain, and that’s tricky. It requires chemistry and math, sure, but also an intuitive sense for each patient’s limits and a careful observation of how those limits can vary from day to day. A dose that will send a burly man into a deep and dreamless sleep might have absolutely no effect on the hundred-pound woman in the room beside him. A cocktail that lets a person sail through Monday might leave that same patient trembling and weepy on Tuesday. At this point it’s more about soothing the mind than soothing the body, and each human mind, I’ve come to understand, is a continent unto itself.