The Unexpected Waltz

by Kim Wright

  He said, “You deserve more for your life, Kelly.”

  And then he began to tell me about himself, in a linear and measured way, as if we were on a job interview. It took my guilt-addled mind a while to figure out that I was the one interviewing him and that the job he was applying for was that of my boyfriend. No, not my boyfriend. Something more. He was explaining to me why he would be a good husband. At the time I thought of him as old, but now, looking back, I do the math and it kicks me right in the gut. Mark was fifty-five when I met him, barely older than I am now.

  He finished his litany by saying, very simply, “And I furthermore promise you that I will never cheat.”

  Furthermore? I just stared at him. My own fish was untouched, the envelope with the camisole was on my lap, and there were streaks of mascara on my napkin. This man knew the worst thing he could know about me, and it didn’t seem to make any difference. He still wanted me. Was it only because I looked the part of a corporate wife? I tried to think back to the only occasion in which I’d ever really spent much time with him. A fund-raiser for the Special Olympics. I had played basketball with the kids. So had he. Not everyone in the office had ventured into that violent and illogical game. Most of them had just given money and sat in the stands, drinking bourbon out of thermos bottles and cheering.

  “I’m not saying this to brag,” he said. “It’s just something I don’t do, you know. I don’t cheat.”

  He sounded so sure of himself. Exactly like Elyse. Sometimes standing in the presence of that much certainty weighs you down . . . and at other times, it feels like a lifeline.

  “Is it because I’m pretty?” I asked.

  “Partly,” he said, which was the right answer. I appreciated the fact he didn’t try to bullshit me, even though we both knew he was the one holding the cards. He smiled and blotted his mouth with his own perfect napkin. “If you say yes, will it be because I’m rich?”

  We laughed then. I finally ate a bite of fish. “Because that’s what everyone will say,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “They’ll say we got together because you’re pretty and I’m rich. I hope that sort of gossip doesn’t bother you.”

  It didn’t. Just a few weeks earlier I had gone by Elyse’s house and she had been baking Christmas cookies. She had sworn to me that baking cookies was hard, infinitely harder than it appeared on the surface, and she had been babbling about making 144 of them for a church cookie swap and how I couldn’t possibly understand the sort of pressure she was under. But I had leaned against her sticky counter and absorbed it all—her tree, the carols on the sound system, Tory toddling around underfoot, the smell of cinnamon—and I had known that this was what I really wanted. The allure of the bank was fading for me. A woman can only own so many red jackets. She can only drink so many bottles of cabernet. The Year of Many Boys had come to an end. It was now January and I was sitting here, across the table from a man who had suddenly opened a door.

  Mark and I set down our wineglasses at the same time and they clanked against each other. Very gently, but the sound rang out with such pure clarity that we both jumped, and so you could see it as an act of chance, or maybe something deeper, as if the universe itself was toasting our deal, even if we were too tentative to do it ourselves.

  WE BREAK OURSELVES AGAINST men. Break ourselves like waves against rocks and we can’t seem to help it, or even explain it. Elyse had never liked Daniel, never understood why I’d spent the twilight of my twenties going in and out of a hopeless relationship with a married man. Well, maybe at the beginning, when it was all sort of light and charming, she got it a little bit. Saw it as one of those movies with Glenda Jackson or Audrey Hepburn being all fey and carefree and wearing great clothes. But then at the end . . .

  At the end I know I scared her. By the end I was scaring myself.

  And then came the Year of Many Boys, which was actually more like the Eighteen Months of Many Boys, and the longer that madness had droned on, the less amused Elyse had been. “Do you know what you’re doing?” she asked me once, and I’d answered, “Sometimes I don’t even know who I’m doing.” She hadn’t laughed.

  So I thought she would be thrilled to meet Mark. He was so different from Daniel—respectable, honest, eager to marry me and save me from myself.

  We made a plan to have lunch at a café on a spring day. Mark and I were sitting outside, drinking wine, and Elyse had walked toward us pushing Tory in her stroller, a balloon tied to the handle and a big smile on Elyse’s face. It seemed like it would go well. Mark insisted the lunch was his treat and Elyse has always liked men who pay—it’s one of her little inconsistencies, one of many. He made a great fuss over Tory too, who with her wispy blond hair and fat cheeks always looked like a baby in an ad for something wholesome, like yogurt.

  “Do you want more kids?” Elyse had rather pointedly asked him, as he’d made a puppet with his napkin and Tory had chirped and cooed.

  “No, this part of my life is over,” he said, his eyes never leaving Tory’s face. “So we’ll all have to share this beautiful little girl, if you don’t mind.”

  It was like a thunk hit the table, a thunk that only Elyse and I heard. She glanced at me, trying to read my reaction. Although Mark and I had discussed the children by his first marriage, and the fact that he wasn’t sure he had the heart to, in his words, “do that shit all over again,” hearing that direct and flat “no” was a shock. I tried to cover. Act nonchalant, as if I were unsurprised by the certainty of his answer.

  The thing is, I was never sure I wanted kids either. I imagine that many women who’ve had an abortion carry a niggling sense of unfinished business, but a niggling sense is quite a different thing from a full-blown desire to be a mother. So I had nodded and said yes, that Tory would have to be enough for us all, and Elyse just sat back and absorbed it, with the slightest little frown on her face.

  Later, walking her and Tory back to the car, I said, “So what do you think? He’s different, right?”

  I didn’t have to say “different from Daniel” because she knew what I meant. The very fact that Mark had been prepared to meet us at a café in broad daylight was different from Daniel.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Totally upstanding . . . but Kelly . . .”

  “What?” I said, dreading the answer but figuring we may as well get it all out now.

  She stooped to lift Tory from the stroller and put her into the car seat. A lot of strapping and buckling, with Tory fighting her the whole time, and then she cranked the car to get the AC going so that the baby wouldn’t swelter while we talked, and then walked back around to the other side of the car to fold up and store the stroller. There were so many steps, I thought, so many steps to being a parent. Even going out to lunch was a procedure.

  “It’s like,” Elyse finally said, slamming the door and leaning against the side of the Jeep. “It’s like you ran off the road on one side and said ‘Well, that sucked’ and so you got back in the car and drove it off the road on the other side, you know what I mean?”

  “You think he’s too upstanding.”

  “Maybe. Sometimes it’s nice to, you know . . . lie down a tiny bit and wallow.” She looked at me directly, chewing her lip.

  “But I won’t judge you,” she said. “Even if I don’t completely understand it, you know that I would never judge you. That’s our deal.”

  IT WAS A NICE little lie and it got us through the next few months. Planning the wedding, my moving into his house. “The big house,” we called it, which was what my daddy used to call prison, and I was astounded by the size of the place and its emptiness, the fact that there were whole rooms that would echo when you walked through them. The first time Elyse came to see me, they wouldn’t let her past the gate. I had failed to understand the system, which is that you have to leave a guest’s name down at the guardhouse before they are admitted, and this was in the days before cell phones, so El
yse had to abandon her car by the side of the road and walk into the little stone guardhouse. It was covered in ivy and always reminded me of a place where elves or dwarfs would live, and she had them call me from there, all the while bouncing Tory on her hip.

  “I’m with the guards,” she said, her voice dripping with exasperation and exhaustion, “and they won’t let me through the gates. Will you please, please, pretty please tell them that you know me?”

  After that I took a picture of her down there for them to post on the wall, for the guards were old and changed shifts frequently, and I wanted to make sure that they all knew her face and would wave her through on sight. I wrote LET THIS WOMAN IN ANYTIME on the bottom of the picture with a black Magic Marker and we never had that problem again.

  Mark gave me free rein to do anything I wanted with the house. He knew that it echoed, and that an echoing house was sad, and that beneath the granite countertops and oak floors, the place cried out for a woman’s touch. He had built it, but it would be my job to make it come to life. I started with the garden. Hired a landscape architect and an arborist from the local college and the result was so beautiful that when the time came for the wedding, we decided to have it there, among the roses. This meant a small ceremony, with a much larger reception to follow, and I liked the notion of taking our vows privately and fulfilling all the social obligations later, at the country club. Tory would be our only attendant. She could barely toddle but she would walk before me down the cobblestone path, throwing petals.

  “She might mess up,” Elyse fretted.

  But there was practically no one to see her if she did, and besides, I love it when children act up at weddings. That’s how the morning of the ceremony found me and Elyse and Tory dressing in the master bedroom. She’d brought a CD of old music to keep me calmed down. The stuff we listened to as kids—Joni Mitchell and the Eagles and Neil Young. We started by drinking mimosas, but then the orange juice ran out.

  “Just as well,” said Elyse, who has always liked drinking champagne straight from the bottle.

  “You threw them away, didn’t you?” I asked, calling out from the closet where I’d gone to slip into my own dress.

  “Threw what away?” she asked, although I suspect she knew.

  A couple of weeks earlier I had taken Daniel’s letters out of the glove compartment of my car, where they had ridden around with me for over two years, and given them to Elyse. “Burn them,” I’d said. “Flush them. Bury them in the yard and play the bagpipes. I don’t care. Just get rid of them.” But of course all the time I had known she would keep them. Elyse is the curator of my life, just as I am of hers. It’s not enough to keep the pom-poms from cheerleading or the first stubs from our first big-girl paychecks. We are required to hold all of each other’s history, the good and the bad, and Elyse could no more throw away Daniel’s letters than an archivist could forget the Civil War.

  “Of course I did,” she said. She was lying on the bed where Tory was playing with some sort of box toy where you push a car forward and back. Tory was already dressed in the filmy little blue dress with all its tedious buttons, sitting on the pouf it made like a cherub on a cloud, and Elyse had taken a dozen pictures of her already.

  And when I finally came out of the closet in my Italian silk dress, she said, “My God, you look gorgeous.”

  “It’s right for a second wedding?”

  “It’s right for anything. Seriously, I’ve never seen you look better.”

  “Then why do you have that look on your face?”

  “What look?”

  “You seem sad.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, standing and scooping up Tory, as we began to move slowly toward the bedroom door. Down the long staircase, through the wide doors, into the garden and my new life. “Maybe I’m a little bit jealous.”

  IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE WEDDING, I began my slow excavation of the soul of Mark Madison. There was kindness beneath the gruffness—but I suppose a lot of people knew that. Over time I furthermore found the shyness beneath the kindness, the small wounds that only women detect in men. I tried to look past the abruptness, the occasional rush to judgment, the political incorrectness and the awkward jokes, toward the boy he once must have been. Before the alcoholic mother. Vietnam. The first wife, who had moved to California with his sons. Before he had begun to suspect that even the very heart that pumped within his ribs would someday betray him.

  There’s a sweetness there, I thought. There are treasures just below the surface, and thus for almost twenty years I devoted myself to a kind of emotional archaeology. Striving to unearth all the clues from my husband’s past and analyze everything that made him what he was. And after he had the heart attack and retired I took on a second task, working to make his days pleasant, agreeable, just stimulating enough to be purposeful, but always shielding him from the small irritants of life, diverting problems before they landed in his lap. The things he couldn’t quite feel, I felt for him. And this, I fear, was where I was truly a typical woman. Not by falling in love with a worthless guy who abandoned me. Not by faking in bed. Not even with the Year of Many Boys. A lot of women have those experiences, but what is truly universal, what truly aligns me with all other human females past and present, is my stubborn belief that by saving a man I could also save myself.

  The weird thing is, it partly worked. Mark softened during our marriage and he never spoke of the morning he found the camisole—not even in anger, which a lesser man might have done. He found himself in the charity work and by the time he died he had more friends than I did.

  "ARE YOU STILL IN mourning?”

  The person asking the question is the wife of Mark’s lawyer. They were sitting at my table when I was escorted there, along with two other couples. There was a bit of a scuffle but a chair and a place setting were swiftly removed and the gap at the table is not so noticeable now.

  “Diane . . .” her husband says warningly.

  “I’m just asking,” the woman says, waving a well-manicured hand in my direction, “because navy is a vague color. And she would be so perfect for John Carlyle, don’t you think? Are you ready to date, my dear?”

  “Not yet,” I say.

  “Stay out of it, Diane,” says her husband, who still hasn’t told me how rich I am but who now seems to at least be aware of my discomfort, and the awkwardness of the situation.

  “Well, she has to get out and about eventually, doesn’t she?” the woman chirped on. “And, Kelly, you shouldn’t feel one bit guilty about it. You gave Mark a lovely home while he lived. That’s all that matters.”

  Is that what I did? I’ve barely grazed over the first and second courses but already I feel as if the Spanx are about to give way and fly around the table like a released balloon. My collar is scraping my neck and the earrings feel ponderous on my lobes. Another thing I haven’t worn in a year—these golden drops so heavy and serious, a gift for my fifteenth anniversary, I think, or maybe my fiftieth birthday. I remember Mark claiming he chose them because they were so understated. “Nothing is more gauche than showing off wealth,” he would say, and this room is full of people who evidently agree with him. For we are all understated, elegant, restrained. Even our faces, which have a uniform expression of polite boredom. As if it’s a sin to try. A sin to want anything too much.

  “What are you doing to fill your time?” asks another woman at the table. “We haven’t seen you on any of the planning committees.”

  Is that an implied criticism? I can’t remember her name, or that of her husband.

  “They could have used you here,” she goes on, with a little laugh, and everyone looks at the centerpieces in unison. A round bowl of roses sitting on a round mirror. Pretty sad.

  “I’m dancing,” I tell them. “That’s how I fill my time.”

  “Well, that’s nice,” says Diane. “Dancing is a great way to meet men.”


  “No,” I say. “My teacher is my partner.”

  She swallows this, along with an oyster.

  “I waltz,” I say. “At the Canterbury Ballroom.”

  “Doesn’t Steve Mesovic dance there?” someone asks someone. “The plastic surgeon?”

  “Have you run across Steve?” Diane says. “Tall, good-looking man with a—”

  “I know him,” I say. “But I’m not looking for a way to meet men. I find it impossible to be in a romantic relationship and still be a whole person. When I’m with a man I’m not curious and authentic and big and you know, questing and all that.”

  Now where the hell did that come from? I sound like Elyse. The six people, the three couples, at my table all stare at me. About half with curiosity, the other half with concern.

  “Are you all right?” asks the woman whose name I don’t know.

  She means “Are you drunk?” but I’m not. I do feel a little breathless, more the result of this damn dress than anything else. I have a sudden urge to rip it off my body, to toss my shoes into the centerpiece of roses.

  “What time is it?” I ask.

  “Almost seven,” Diane says with a peek at her watch. “Entrées any minute.”

  Not yet seven? I had forgotten how early they hold these dinners, in concession to the fact that the median age of their donors is somewhere in the seventies. If I hurry I can still make tango.

  “Excuse me,” I say. I am up and away before anyone can respond. Out of the ballroom and through the lobby, and then the revolving door, until I am at last on the windy street where the valet parking boys are huddled beneath their umbrellas. I hand them my claim and a twenty and the car appears before me with stunning speed. I grab my duffel bag out of the backseat, ask the kids to hold the car for five minutes, and run back into the hotel, where I find a ladies’ room and lock myself in the handicapped stall.