The Unexpected Waltz

by Kim Wright

  “Oh,” I say. “Okay, I’ll try it.”

  The drink is strong, sweet, heavy on my tongue. The backs of my knees are hurting, like they do all the time now, and as I reach down to rub them I see, of all things, Steve sitting in the corner. He is having dinner with a woman who looks like a young Mary Tyler Moore. He notices me too and nods.

  “Would you like a drink?” the man beside me asks.

  “I have a drink,” I point out.

  “What I mean is, I’d like to pay for your drink,” he says. “In celebration of the fact I’m getting to sit beside such a beautiful woman.”

  “I’m not sure my husband would like that,” I say, pointedly twisting my ring.

  He backs down. They always do. The size of this ring is kryptonite.

  “Well, you’re still pretty,” he says, and then he leans back, presumably to take a shot with the hair-tossing woman on my other side.

  Just then Steve’s date squeezes by us and disappears down the bright orange hall, evidently in search of the ladies’ room. She has her purse with her, which is normal, but she also has her jacket with her, which is not. And she’s walking just a little too fast.

  She’s bailing on him.

  I can read it in her body language. She may be acting like she’s headed to the bathroom but she’s really going to walk out that back service door at the end of the hall and just keep going. I look over my shoulder. The waiter is delivering the food to Steve’s table, and judging from the way he’s smiling and joking with the guy, I don’t think he’s realized anything has happened.

  I wonder how long it’s going to take him to figure out that she’s gone. It pains me to watch him in the mirror, looking about the room, obviously unsure if he should start eating his own food or wait for her to return. He makes some comment to the people at the table beside him, giving them his big, full-throttle billboard smile, but I’ve seen this man anxious before and I recognize that slight pucker between the brows. It’s beginning to dawn on him that he may have to finish this meal alone.

  It’s hard to eat alone, true. But not nearly as uncomfortable as it was on those times I went out to eat with Mark and he simply wouldn’t talk. He never had any of my social self-consciousness. If Mark had nothing to say, then he said nothing—which I suppose is admirable if you’re a Zen master but which did me little good in restaurants, where I always imagined other diners were looking at us with pity. “What a sad couple that is, eating with their heads down, sitting there in silence,” I would imagine them thinking. “She’s utterly failed to enchant him—that much is clear.”

  Once I told Mark about this little trick Elyse and I used to have when we were in high school and they were taking pictures of us for the school paper or yearbook. One of the side effects of popularity is that you’re in a lot of pictures, and in them you want to be chatting and laughing and talking—like you’re the sort of funny, clever girl who deserves to be so frequently photographed. So we came up with a little ruse. While we were waiting for the kid to take our picture, Elyse would turn to me and say, “ABC?”

  And I would answer back “DEFGH,” then pause for a second and add “IJ.” We would carry on like that for as long as it took, saying the alphabet back and forth to each other while the camera flashed, creating images of two girls who were full of lively conversation, who always had plenty to say.

  Mark had been nothing short of flabbergasted by the suggestion. “You want us to sit here,” he said, “in a perfectly lovely restaurant having a perfectly lovely meal, and keep saying the alphabet back and forth to each other? All because you have it in your head that the busboy feels sorry for us?” And then he sat back in his seat and leveled the same condemnation he had directed toward me so many times before.

  “You expect too much,” he said.

  Did I? Was I really that much like Elyse by the end or was that bit about expecting too much just something all men say to all women? Now, sitting here alone in a Mexican restaurant, I pull a dance shoe from my purse, where I stuck them after today’s lesson. I hold it in my palm, turn it from side to side under the bar, admiring the elegant, torturous arch in the sole. I want this, I suddenly think. I haven’t wanted anything in a long, long time. The vodka has hit me like a truth serum and it’s scary to think that I might want something that Mark’s money can’t buy for me, something that being the pretty girl won’t help me get either. Scary to want something that I can only give myself. I take another sip of the drink, roll it around in my mouth, and beneath the bar I stretch my legs. Developing your flexibility is the most painful and dangerous part, Nik says. Much harder than becoming fast or strong.

  My salad comes and I cram the shoe back into my purse. Yep. I want this. I want this and no one else can give it to me. But, it occurs to me that if you want something that no one else can give you, then no one else can take it away from you either, and there’s a certain comfort in that. I’m going to have to figure out a way to stand tall and give Nik the sort of frame he’s asking me for. I take a bite out of the chili and look around the bar. Except for the man who wanted to buy me a drink and now possibly Steve, I’m the only person in the whole room sitting alone. Everyone else has a friend or a lover or at least someone they work with. Elyse likes to eat alone but I’ve never understood that, never understood her penchant for solitude in public places. I feel vulnerable, I think, and I can almost imagine Nik whipping out his iPhone and saying, “What is this ‘vulnerable’?”

  “Hey,” says Steve. He’s come up behind me. “I know this is a little out of line, but I have a favor to ask you.”

  “You want me to go to the bathroom and look for your date?”

  He grimaces and shakes his head. “I don’t think you’d find her. I was wondering if you would just pick up your salad and come sit down at my table. The waiter feels sorry for me. And so do the people beside me.”

  “She might come back. Maybe she went on the sidewalk to make a phone call.”

  “I doubt it. That door leads to the loading dock. This isn’t the first time this has happened to me.”

  “Well . . . okay,” I say slowly, but I’m wondering what the waiter is going to think when he comes back and finds a whole new woman at the table. I slide off the bar stool and Steve grabs my salad and my vodka and pineapple juice. When we get to his table, I notice Mary Tyler Moore’s plate has already been cleared and that the couple beside us does indeed seem to be taking a lively level of interest in the unfolding drama. Or maybe they’re just happy to have a distraction, something to focus on other than each other.

  “So what happened?” I say to Steve when we get everything settled and I’m in my seat. “Did she get pissed off or something?”

  “I have no idea,” he says, raising his margarita to his lips. “It was a setup. You know, a blind date. All of mine are.”

  “Come on.”

  “Trust me, being known as Dr. Boob of Charlotte makes dating a challenge.” And then he proceeds to tell me that a lot of women refuse to date a plastic surgeon on principle and that this, along with his ex-wife’s efforts to get him blackballed from the city’s elite social clubs, has driven him to do the unthinkable—to sign up for a matchmaking service. A discreet one, of course, and he has carefully instructed the women working there to describe him only as a doctor, without elaborating on the exact nature of his practice.

  “The whole dating after forty thing,” he says, “is impossible.”

  I’ve misjudged him. Maybe I’ve misjudged lots of people about lots of things. So I sit there steadily eating and let him tell me all about the women he’s met through the dating service. Women, not girls, he insists. He won’t go below thirty, that’s just sick. Quinn is like the daughter he never had, the daughter he was too busy to have, and he loves her for the very fact that she doesn’t care how she looks. He dates at least twice a week, he says, but it’s tough. Thanks to the billboards, some
of the women recognize him on sight. Others walk into the restaurant or bar and when they see him they frown and start wondering why his face is familiar. And then at some point in the evening, it hits them. He dreads this moment, dreads the self-consciousness that inevitably follows. Sometimes he feels like he’s spent the year since his divorce buying strange women drinks and listening to them apologize for the size and shape of their breasts. He’s been trapped in one-sided arguments about feminism and the La Leche League and Baywatch reruns, he tells me. He’s been the subject of very amateur and very unfair Freudian analysis.

  “That’s awful,” I say, although while he’s been telling me all this, a couple of times I’ve snuck a look at my own cleavage. My breasts used to be quite good but now I’ve got a bit of asymmetry and tons of age spots on my chest and most definite sagging.

  “And you want to know the joke of it all?” he says. “I’m an ass man.” He sighs, puts his empty glass down, and gestures to the waiter that we’ll need two more. “So what brings you out to Esmerelda’s?”

  He doesn’t say “What brings you out ‘alone,’” but I feel the word, sitting between us on the table just as plain as the basket of chips.

  “Nik told me I’m too old to do the cha-cha.”

  Steve stops midbite. “He did not.”

  “Well, not in so many words. But the more I think about it, the more I think maybe he’s right.”

  “Why do we do this to ourselves?” he asks, waving his fork around.

  “Do what? The dating?”

  “The dancing. Why do we keep trying?”

  “Because it’s our new religion.”

  “Quinn calls it optimal frustration.”

  “Yeah, she said that to me too. Just today.” He sighs again and looks around the room as if he’s still somewhat embarrassed by the situation.

  “Oh, come on,” I tell him. “Don’t get all morose just because Mary Tyler Moore ran out on you.”

  “You want her burrito to go? I told the waiter to box it.”

  “Sure,” I say. “Tomorrow’s lunch.”

  “You really think she looked like Mary Tyler Moore? Because if I’m going to get dumped in a Mexican restaurant, I’d like to think that at least I was dumped by Mary Tyler Moore.”

  I laugh and pick up my second drink. Earlier I thought that I felt “vulnerable,” but now I’m thinking that wasn’t the right word. I have sore knees and I’m too old to shake my ass and I want something that I probably can’t get, and here I am eating dinner with some other woman’s discarded date and the word for what I’m feeling is “happy.” I’m happier than I’ve been in a long, long time.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  MARK AND I went to the MS Holiday Auction every December for years and the tickets automatically arrive the day after Thanksgiving, in the mail—two of them. I stick them to the refrigerator with a magnet.

  And about a week before the event, the calls start. Some from the ostentation and some from people I haven’t seen since Mark’s funeral. He was one of the big donors to this particular charity and it seems important to the planning committee that I be there. Several couples offer to stop by and pick me up so that I don’t have to find my way to the big, bad hotel on my own. “We thought you might not want to drive at night,” said one woman, as if I were the one who was eighty, as if it weren’t widely known throughout our gated community that her own husband/chauffeur was half-blind, half-deaf, and in the early stages of dementia.

  In the end, I agreed to go. I wouldn’t be helping with the auction this year, or setting up the tables, but I would attend. “It’s the least you can do,” another woman told me, rather artlessly, and never let it be said that Kelly Wilder Madison didn’t do the least that she could do. I didn’t think about what to wear until the evening of the event and then I dug an old gown out of my closet. Dark blue, that kind of clipped velvet that looks almost like suede. Off one shoulder with an interesting play of the straps in the back and it had once been one of my favorites. But it’s snug when I pull it on. It makes puckers across my thighs and strains in the hips. I glance at the clock. I’m cutting it close on time as it is, so I don’t want to dig around trying to come up with something else. I find a pair of heavy-duty Spanx, the kind that start just under your breasts and end at your knees, and heave my way into them and then put the dress back on.

  I look in the mirror. I feel miserable but I look okay, so I wiggle my way into the car and drive uptown to the hotel, trying to keep myself as diagonal as I can in the driver’s seat so that I don’t make a whole new set of creases in the dress. My decision to come was prompted more by guilt than anything else. Just as I’ve stopped calling Elyse every night, at some point in the last few months I’ve stopped thinking about Mark. Trying to preserve his legacy by going to this stupid auction—it’s a halfhearted stab at best. I’m sure I look ridiculous at stoplights, with my head pushed back and my butt in the air, and I wonder vaguely just how much weight I gained during that year I lay in bed and ordered takeout, and how much of it I’ve so far managed to dance off. I need to lay off the five-dollar margaritas at Esmerelda’s, that much at least is clear.

  I valet. Toss five bucks at the kid and wobble inside. There are only a few name tags left on the table outside of the ballroom. One for me and one for Mark, I notice with a small pang. When I sent in the RSVP, did I respond for one, or did I just mail the form back without looking? It must have been the latter, because there it is, his name staring up at me.

  “I’m Mrs. Madison,” I say, tapping my own name tag with a fingertip.

  “Good evening, ma’am,” says the young girl working the desk, with the kind of overblown enthusiasm I’ve noticed is typical among nonprofit employees. “Is your husband parking the car?”

  “No, it’s just me,” I say.

  “Oh, that’s too bad. I hope Mr. Madison isn’t ill.”

  “He’s dead.”

  This shuts her up, if only for a minute. She seems confused as to why I am attending a charity event in an overtight dress when my husband’s just died, but I take pity on her and add, “It was a long time ago. I made a mistake on the RSVP.”

  “I see,” she says, crumpling his name tag in her hand, as if that somehow makes it all better. “I’ll get someone to escort you to your table.”

  Oh God. It just hit me that there will be an empty seat beside me. I’ll be as bad as Steve at Esmerelda’s. All the society ladies will gaze upon me with expressions of smug compassion. But the usher is already there. He holds his arm out to me, much like Nik does when we’re taking the floor at the studio.

  “Mrs. Madison?” he says.

  WHEN MARK MADISON PROPOSED twenty years ago, it was an escape chute.

  Because after Daniel had left town—or, more to the point, after Daniel had left me—I went through what Elyse called the Year of Many Boys. Which is a nice way of saying I was a slut. I’ve heard someone explain—Oprah maybe, or Dr. Phil, or Dr. Oz, or Ellen, some disembodied voice I’ve overheard in passing—that a lot of “sexually impaired” women go through periods of promiscuity, much in the way that compulsive gamblers believe one more roll of the dice will change their luck. And my job at the bank was tailor-made for brief, meaningless affairs. There were so many men and so few women on my level, the hours were so long, the business trips so frequent, the bars always so close at hand.

  The fling that ultimately ended the Year of Many Boys was with a guy named Ron McSomething and the fact that I don’t remember his name is telling, because he’s a very small part of the story.

  But I do remember the night we went back up to the arbitrage floor after dinner and found ourselves utterly alone. That in itself was rare. It was the eighties and people were ambitious. They worked all hours, they did cocaine in the bathroom, they did each other in the stairwell, and the money came so easily that I think we were all high on the smell of it. I know I was
.

  The arbitrage floor had that strangely haunted quality that normally busy places have when they’re empty, that echo of silence. Ron started to pull me back toward his desk but I said no, not here, and we ended up sneaking into one of the corner offices, where we knew there would be a couch and pillows. The one we chose happened to belong to a man named Mark Madison.

  The next morning Mr. Madison’s secretary called the secretary for my division and invited me to lunch. I couldn’t think why. Mark Madison was not directly over me and I hardly knew the man. So my anxiety had steadily grown all morning and by the time I joined him in the executive elevator—the one that went directly to the top floor, where the private lounge and gym and restaurant were located—I was convinced that I had been summoned there to be fired.

  The restaurant was tasteful in that sort of “nothing’s untasteful” kind of way. We sat at a table with white chairs and a long, white tablecloth, ordered white wine and white fish, and then made small talk. Where I’d gone to school, renovations he was making to a vacation home in the mountains, the local sports teams. God help us, I think we even discussed the weather. We were seated right beside a window, fifty-two stories up, and this unfamiliar view of my hometown city was scary.

  Then finally he brought out a manila envelope and handed it to me, saying, “I believe this may belong to you.”

  It was my silk camisole, lost somehow in the cushions of his couch the night before.

  A strange thing for me to forget and probably the proverbial cry for help, although why my subconscious had decided to cry out to this particular man, white-haired and elegant and a little stern, I do not know. My reputation preceded me, I suddenly realized. For him to assume without question that the camisole was mine meant that even the executives in the corner offices knew who I was and what I was about. And then I did a highly uncharacteristic thing. I began to cry.

  He patiently ate his Dover sole and waited for me to finish. I was so shamed, sitting there among all that whiteness, so high in the air, with my underwear folded and tucked neatly into one of the bank mailers. I knew he wasn’t really going to fire me. He wasn’t my boss, and besides, you can’t fire someone for having sex on a couch. If they did that, they would have had to shut down the whole sales department. But I wasn’t prepared for what happened next.