The Unexpected Waltz

by Kim Wright

  Anatoly is waiting.

  “I’d be delighted,” I hear myself say.

  Anatoly holds my hand high as he leads me to the center of the floor. We stand still for a second while he gives me the chance to settle in. To get used to the fact that he is much taller than Nik, that he holds his shoulders even farther back. That he gives a woman such a big frame that I will have to stretch to my maximum size if I even hope to fill it. Quinn goes over to the sound system and pushes a button. Too loud, too loud, the whole room is overwhelmed with music, but Anatoly remains perfectly still. He gives me another second to breathe, to get the rhythm of the rumba out of my mind and begin to hear the waltz. The one-two-three, one-two-three, the rise and fall of a different sort of world. Although he does not watch my face, although he is in fact looking in the opposite direction, he seems to sense the exact moment when the rumba fades. Or, more accurately, the moment when everything else in the room is pulled from me fast, like when you hit the little picture of a garbage can on an iPhone and whatever you were looking at crumples and is sucked away. He gives me just enough time to settle, but not enough time to think, because he knows that if I think, I’ll panic.

  Later, when it’s all over, this is what I’ll remember. It was early fall. Just starting to get dark outside the door. I will remember the group class pausing, the students turning toward me, their faces serious and full of doubt. Nik’s lips were pursed together as if he was mad at Anatoly for interrupting class, but of course he wouldn’t be mad. Anatoly is his boss. He’s probably just wondering, like everyone else in the room, why Anatoly had chosen me to demonstrate instead of Pamela. The teenagers lean against the back wall, shoulder to shoulder, as if they were expecting some sort of show. The French Canadians consult among themselves. Anatoly is trying to make a sale, possibly one that could bring a significant amount of money to the studio, so why would he choose to dance with Kelly Wilder, a beginner? Someone likely to stumble or hesitate, someone likely to mar the stately and unforgiving rhythm of the waltz?

  I’ll remember all this but not the dance itself.

  I will just sort of come to on the other side of the room. I’ll have no actual recall of waltzing and yet apparently I did, because here I am, in a different place on the dance floor. It was like I passed out for a few minutes—perhaps because I’m scared of Anatoly, who is so tall and stern and expansive and grander than Nik. Nik tried to explain it to me once—he’d said Anatoly is a white Russian and he is a black Russian, a description that makes them sound like drinks. Which, in a way, they are.

  But he must have taken me and we must have waltzed. Or rather Anatoly must have waltzed and my mind must have clicked off and allowed me to follow, and furthermore he must have led me into steps I don’t know, because it’s coming to me that there was a fall-away, possibly three, and that Anatoly had spun me—repeatedly and with more force than I’m used to. Not one turn like I’ve practiced with Nik, but multiple turns, and I still ended up the correct way. Facing the French Canadians, with enough presence of mind to curtsy.

  Anatoly says “Thank you” and makes his little half bow. As if we are in Vienna or Prague or somewhere, as if it were 1826. Maybe I thank him too. He leads me back to the rumba line and the other students fold around me. Valentina says “You were great” and Isabel nods, although, being Isabel, she feels compelled to add, “Of course, Anatoly could lead anyone.” When I look into the mirror, I’m flushed. Nik puts his arm around me, leans in to kiss my cheek, as if in congratulations. But when he gets close to my ear he whispers, “What the hell was that?”

  THIRTY MINUTES LATER I'M sitting in the dark parking lot. I’ve called Elyse but she didn’t answer and I remember it’s the night she teaches a pottery class at the university. I need to check on Carolina anyway and when I call the front desk number the nurse says, “She’s out here in the TV room, wanna talk to her?”

  “She’s sitting up?”

  “Yes, and she ate a full dinner. Doing just a whole lot better.” There’s a pause and I can hear her carrying the phone across the lobby and the sounds of Jeopardy! in the background. Then Carolina’s voice.

  “What’s up?”

  “I wanted you to be the first to know I danced with Anatoly tonight.”

  She exhales with a fast “Whoa.” She knows what it means. But of course she doesn’t know how it happened, so I tell her, with every detail. And when I get to the end of the story, including what Nik whispered in my ear, she laughs and says, “So what was it like? Was that lady right when she said it was better than sex?”

  “Promise me you won’t laugh.”

  “You know I can’t promise you that.”

  “Okay, well, it was magic. He had me doing things I don’t know how to do. I’ve heard the other women in the studio talk about ‘soaring,’ but I never knew what they meant until tonight. It was like I simultaneously left my body and was hyperaware of my body. You know, looking down on myself from the ceiling but at the same time feeling every nerve and muscle. Like magic.”

  She digests this bit in silence, then says, “Sometime I want to see you dance.”

  “Sure,” I say. I can hardly refuse her this small request. “My lessons are Tuesday and I’m going to start going on Fridays too. I could come by and pick you up.”

  “I don’t want to watch a lesson,” she says. “I want to see you in a contest, wearing one of those dresses covered in crystals with your hair all up.”

  “It’ll be months or maybe years before I’m ready to compete.”

  “Why?”

  I pause. Look out across the rain-washed parking lot. The studio is closing. The front light has gone out. Someone is finishing up with the sweeping, then will go out the back door. The grocery is still open, and the Starbucks, but the pharmacy and dry cleaner are locking up too. The clock on my dashboard says 9:03. How can I tell a woman with cancer that I don’t feel like I have enough time? How can I tell her that I am afraid of how I will look or what people will think?

  “Here’s the thing,” I finally say. “I’m never going to be really good. I started too late.”

  “You said everybody clapped tonight.”

  “Yeah, but that’s just in the studio. I’m not one of those people who are going to compete and win trophies. Nobody is ever going to see my name on a heat sheet and be scared to death. I just don’t arch like the young girls arch anymore. I’m not flexible. I wake up in the middle of the night with cramps in my butt.”

  “Your teacher thinks you’re good.”

  “They say that to everybody. They have to. If they tell you the truth, you’ll stop writing them checks. Look, I know how this must sound to you, like I’m not grateful for the chance I have, and I’ll be the first to tell you that there was a time . . . if I had walked through those doors when I was thirty or even forty and a young man like Nik would have told me I had potential, I would have sucked all that praise straight down like vodka.”

  “I’m not saying you have to be some sort of world champion. I’m just saying I want to see you dance. In one of those dresses with the shimmers on it.”

  “I guess you know you’ve got me over a barrel.”

  She gives a little hiccup laugh. “Don’t they have a competition at Christmas?”

  “That’s way too soon,” I say.

  “Isn’t there one in March?”

  Does the woman take notes on everything I say? “Yeah,” I admit. “The regional qualifier is in March.”

  “I want to see you there. In a fancy dress. Come on. You might not have as much time as you think you do.”

  “I can’t believe how much better you sound than you did this afternoon.”

  Carolina begins to chatter that they might even let her go to the older boy’s football game next week and I lean back in the seat and shut my eyes. My head is tilted sideways, my cheek against the cool glass of the window. Maybe that w
altz truly was like sex, I think, for I am totally relaxed, my body loose and open in a way it rarely is. Is this what women feel like after orgasms? What they call afterglow? If so, I understand why you’d do almost anything to have it. After sex I used to get restless. I’d get up for water or to pee or get something to eat or check the locks. Sometimes, once I was sure Mark was sleeping, I would move to one of the other bedrooms and read. There was always some sense of unfinished business, the need to move and do something, but tonight . . . tonight I feel as if there is nowhere else to go, nothing to do, no other way I want to be.

  The cadence of Carolina’s voice rises and falls. I’m half listening and I know that I would not change anything about my dance with Anatoly. I would not change the music or the setting or the faces of any of the people who had stood and watched me. And I know that when it comes my time to die, that this is one of the nights that will make it easier to let go. That I’ll be able to say to myself “But you know, there was that one night, a long time ago, when I waltzed” and this thought will be a comfort. To know that there were times when I got it. When, at least for a few seconds, my life was not entirely wasted on me.

  CHAPTER TEN

  BY NOVEMBER I am indeed taking a private lesson each Tuesday and Friday and dancing group five days a week—six if they have a party on Saturday. I come to every class on the schedule, no matter who’s teaching. Even on the nights when they bring in one of the local college dance majors to teach, even on the nights when they’re doing something cheesy like the mambo or hustle. Any kind of practice is good, I tell myself. Every single movement brings you closer. Closer to what, I can’t yet say, but I try especially hard to make the most of my individual lessons with Nik. And in order to squeeze every ounce of progress out of every hour, I decide that I must concentrate on the dances where I actually have some potential.

  Talking to Nik about this won’t be easy. The Russians are not big on conversation. If you ask them their opinion about anything, they grow wary, because they know if they give it, there’s a chance you might say something else in response and then they’re trapped. They speak primarily to convey information—it is not a culture of chitchat, and I suspect that at times Nik and Anatoly must feel as if the whole studio is spinning in a vortex of words.

  AT MY PRIVATE LESSON the next Tuesday Nik leans back and asks me, “Who is leading dance?”

  I’m ready for this one. “You are,” I say. “You’re the man.”

  “To dance is to create space and to fill space,” he says. “When lady steps back, she makes space man steps into. He cannot be bigger than she will let him be. So who is leading dance, the one who makes space or the one who steps into it?”

  He gets like this sometimes, kind of wonkily philosophical. It reminds me of those SAT questions from back in high school, the kind that go “If one train leaves Moscow traveling west at 100 miles an hour and another train leaves Paris traveling east at 80 miles an hour, which foot should you have your weight on?” Well, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but Nik does make everything harder than it needs to be. And ever since I did that waltz with Anatoly, I get the feeling he’s been trying to take me down a peg or two.

  “I guess the one who creates the space is leading,” I say.

  “Wrong. Is trick. Man always leads.”

  “Screw you,” I say, and he smiles, pleased with himself. Pamela is in the center of the ballroom floor. She’s dancing with Anatoly today, and they’re working on cha-cha. Her Latin clothes are sexy, even her practicewear, and it suddenly hits me that this is why Nik and I started with tango today, instead of warming up with the waltz like we usually do. There is a pecking order at the studio, one based more on finances than talent, and the sheer amount of money Pamela spends here in a week means that whatever she happens to be dancing at the moment determines what kind of music is coming out of the speakers. Pamela is doing cha-cha so the whole studio is pulsing with Los Lobos, and in turn I am doing tango because it is possible to do tango to the same beat as cha-cha. We all literally dance to the tune of the whales.

  “Thrust the girls to the sky, darling,” Anatoly says, and Pamela obligingly lifts her chest. Sometimes I wonder if he’s gay. He supposedly slept with all his professional partners back in Russia, one right after another, but he makes outrageous statements to the women in the studio. The kinds of things only gay guys get away with. Or maybe this is all some sort of game Anatoly plays with Nik, hard to say. Flirting with his lover right before his eyes, but with this sort of tease-flirting that doesn’t really have any teeth.

  The music is fast, too fast for a tango, at least a tango at my level, and I know that I’m compensating by collapsing my frame. Just a little, but of course Nik has noticed. My legs are slightly apart, like a skier on the bunny slope, like someone who expects to topple at any minute. “Why do you sloop?” Nik asks me, with the exasperated tone of someone who’s never fallen down once in his whole life. “I want you to stand like queen. Be the big lady.” There’s no good way to explain to him that American women don’t want to be big, that we recoil from the word like a gunshot.

  “Look at our girl,” Anatoly says, right on the verge of a squeal, and Nik and I pause, still in tango hold, and watch him lead Pamela through a complicated set of swivels. All steps I haven’t learned yet.

  “Isn’t she something?” Anatoly says.

  “Very good,” Nik says.

  Pamela puts her hand to her chest and drops her head with a sort of exaggerated false modesty. Anatoly goes over to the stereo to start the same song again.

  “I want to learn that step sequence,” I whisper to Nik through gritted teeth.

  “Later,” he says.

  “You don’t think I can learn that sequence?”

  “You learn later.”

  I sigh. He sighs too—loudly, as if he’s mocking me—and we begin again, inching our way around the dance floor and all the time keeping an eye on Anatoly and Pamela. This whole lesson has been annoying. Nik’s new thing lately is making sure that I’m always, at any point in the dance, balanced within myself and not leaning on him. He tests this by releasing me when I least expect it. Already today he has stepped back from me twice, letting me go in midspin and asking “Are you on your feet?” Quinn came in at some point and called out “Good job.” Her compliments always feel a little random and today I was literally stumbling out of a turn when she said it.

  I’d rolled my eyes and she’d said, “No, really. You’re in the zone where people learn. Where you’re uncomfortable with what you’re doing but not so uncomfortable that you can’t move at all. We call it optimal frustration.”

  Nik says, “We pivot again.”

  “God,” I say. “You’re relentless.” He drops his palm from my shoulder blade and goes over to his little phone. He picks it up and looks at me expectantly.

  “Re-lent-less,” I repeat. “I bet if you try, you can figure out what it means.”

  “I love dancing with you,” Anatoly coos to Pamela. All throaty, like some sort of porn star. “Does Nik ever tell you how good you are?”

  I bet I know the answer to that. Nik never tells anyone she’s good. I doubt he would even apply the word to the pros, because he knows dance is a slippery summit. You get your rumba almost perfected, but by the time you’ve done that, you’ve forgotten your waltz. So you work on that for a week but by then you’ve lost the foxtrot. And there is always someone younger, stronger, and prettier nipping at your heels. I suppose that’s what makes dance addictive. This idea that you’re moving toward something but never quite ­arriving. Of course they don’t tell you any of this when you sign up. If you knew how hard it was going to be, you’d never have the heart to begin. “It costs too much,” Isabel says as she gets out her credit card, literally crossing her fingers as Quinn slides it through the machine, and I nod, although the truth is, it’s costing all of us different things.

 
Pamela’s music starts yet again. She and Anatoly have reclaimed the center of the dance floor while Nik and I have been exiled to the Siberia of the far corner. The opening step of her competition cha-cha routine is flashy, a little impressive. But not, at least to my mind, all that hard. I could do that, I think, and my mind is drifting so that when Nik lets me go at the end of my pivot I’m not expecting it. I almost fall. I roll clumsily to a stop and look back at him, furious that he let me make such a rookie mistake in front of Anatoly and Pamela. He is standing with his legs apart and his arms folded over his chest.

  “Dance your dance,” he says. “Not hers.”

  “I could do that step,” I whisper, even though I know they’re not listening.

  “Is Silver.”

  “What difference does that make? I already told you I’m not going to compete.”

  “You should. You know all Bronze steps.”

  “If I ever did compete, which I’m not going to, it would be in Newcomer.”

  He shrugs. “Is under you. And this,” he adds, inclining his sleek, dark head in the direction of the spinning forms of Pamela and Anatoly, “is above you.”

  He’s playing with me. He knows that today I am pissed about it all—about the incessant cha-cha music when I am paying to dance the tango. About the way Anatoly flatters Pamela and he does not flatter me—about the fact he almost dropped me, let me come out of that turn all a mess in front of a man I like and a woman I don’t.

  “I should compete on the Newcomer level,” I say. “That’s what I am.”

  “It is not supposed to be easy. You go up, you go down. Is your choice. Problems either way.”

  What he means is that Newcomers are only allowed to compete with a few very basic steps, which they do over and over again, and dumbing it down would frustrate me. And the bitch of the matter is, he’s probably right. I do know all the Bronze steps—it was a Bronze level pivot that I fell out of just a minute ago—but to dance Bronze is to risk competing against women who have been dancing much longer than I have, women who I know going in are far better than me. The competitions are stacked with dancers who have taken lessons for years, who should have long since advanced to the Silver level with Pamela and such. Yet they hang back in Bronze, at the expense of people like me, and if I try to dance Bronze, Nik and I both know that these women will eat my lunch. They’re nothing but a bunch of praise whores, I think, and I pull myself a little higher as Nik takes me back into hold, as we try that damn pivot yet once again. He’s right about it all. Do I really want to dance Newcomer when I know I’m better than that? Or am I prepared to have my ass kicked by the Pamelas of the world?