The Unexpected Waltz

by Kim Wright

  Quinn is working with Jane and apparently everything about her upper body is a disaster. Quinn is running her hands down the length of Jane’s arms, pulling some parts down and others up in pursuit of that elusive thing called frame. In waltz, the shoulders should be relaxed, the upper arm lifted—this in itself is hard enough—with the elbow in perfect alignment with the shoulder and the wrist dropped flat against the man’s bicep. Who knew the human arm had so many parts? Or the hand? The middle finger is key, extended straight out as a natural continuation of the arm. The second and fourth fingers are slightly elevated, and the pinky a centimeter higher still. You can do it, if you think about it. You can do it in the mirror, before class. But when the music starts and there are a hundred other things to remember, it’s easy for your hand to forget its graceful task and become a grasping claw. Pawing the air in search of any solid surface—preferably your instructor.

  But frustration is what we’re paying for. Frustration is what we all want. Quinn guides Jane’s arm up and down, and I spin again, over and over, trying to find that still space in myself. It’s a type of meditation. It drives out all emotion and makes me forget everything. I have almost forgotten the sight of Carolina lying pale and motionless on her narrow bed.

  Isabel has the next lesson after mine. She demands certain songs and certain dances during her private time with Nik. She likes to rumba to Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game.” When she told us this once, over drinks, every woman in the group had giggled a little slyly. “Wicked Game” is such a fantasy song for women. We have all imagined running across that white beach, toward that lanky, squinting boy. Nik tries to get her to dance to something else. He puts his iPhone in the stereo cradle and punches up this thumping Eurosound, pretending that he’s going to lead her into something modern and formless. But she just puts her hands on her hips and refuses to budge.

  Maybe I should throw more fits, because Isabel is certainly not afraid to be a pain in the ass. She knows the instructors call her high-maintenance, but that can be said about most of the women at the studio, and besides, Nik likes her. She isn’t his favorite. She doesn’t pick up the steps the quickest, she doesn’t have the best form, and she certainly isn’t the easiest to get along with. But Isabel seems to understand that it isn’t necessary to be everyone’s favorite and I would imagine that realization must feel like manacles falling from your ankles. She stands in the middle of the floor with her hands on her hips until Nik laughs indulgently and puts on “Wicked Game.”

  I spin. I watch them. It amazes me how different he is with each of us, how he brings a different part of his personality to every client’s dance. He treats Pamela, at least in public, like a china doll. He kids around with Isabel like a sister, speaks Russian with Valentina, and with me and Jane . . . he is harsher, more pedantic. Take it as a compliment, Quinn has told me. He doesn’t waste his energy on people unless he thinks they have promise.

  Students come and go. Jane leaves, Steve leaves. Valentina stops by with some papers. Her English is a little too formal but otherwise perfect, and Quinn told me once that she had been a translator back in Moscow, that she still does some work for the studio. She leaves a folder on Quinn’s desk, waves at me, and I wave back. I’m covered with sweat by this point and my heart went into the aerobic zone about fifty spins ago, but I’ve come up with a system. I do five spins holding on to the pole and then five spins without holding on to the pole. Then a break for the vertigo to subside. When I use the pole for leverage, I can make it the full 360 most of the time. Without it, the turns are more of a crapshoot, but I won’t have a stripper pole beside me when I waltz at hospice.

  By the time Isabel pays and leaves I can do ten unsupported spins in a row, about three of them good. Nik comes up to me and says “Enough spin” and asks me to tango. Just asks me, like I’m a regular person he met at a party. He knows how hard I’ve been working. This is a little reward. Two free minutes of tango.

  We pivot, we corte, and it all feels easy after the spinning. I try to tell him that I’m sorry I got upset, but he stops me and says, “Everyone cries. Some cry and come back.”

  THAT NIGHT I GO on Facebook again. I’ve gotten into the habit of doing it whenever Carolina is in one of her sinking spells or I’ve had a bad day at dance. It’s a small private pleasure, comforting like a cup of cocoa, and yet each time when I log out, I take care to obliterate my trail. Mark taught me how to do this when we started to bank online. He said it was important that if someone stole your computer, they couldn’t reopen the last thing you were looking at.

  It struck me as paranoid at the time—what was the likelihood someone would steal our computer?—but now I do it whenever I visit Daniel’s profile. Just in case I die in my sleep, I guess. I don’t want someone, most likely Elyse, to go through my things and find this last guilty secret: that even in the end, I was still trying to figure out Daniel.

  In my favorite picture, he’s leaning against the side of a boat. He has a fishing reel in his hand and the harbor behind him is clearly Charleston. He is laughing, looking happy, relaxed, fit for fifty-three. I play with the idea of messaging him. I write something silly—“Catch anything?”—and then erase it. I also backspace over the slightly accusatory “So that’s where you ended up,” the downright terrifying “I’ve got a few questions,” and the totally pedestrian “How have you been?”

  In the end I decide that the best message is a picture of my own. The faded one of me and Elyse standing at the feet of David. I had scanned it into my computer to make a copy for Tory as a Christmas gift, and I look at myself, so young and confident, pushing back my sunglasses and squinting into the Italian sun while Daniel’s shadow, even after all this time, is still lying on the floor between us.

  I attach the picture and press Send.

  PAMELA'S HOUSE IS PROBABLY twice the size of mine but oddly situated on its lot, sitting a bit catty-cornered to the street to accommodate a ravine running through the property. The landscaper has tried to hide the fact that the house is so precariously perched with an abundance of bushes, but there’s still something unsettled about the place. This is the lot the builder takes, I think, as I park my car in the street and begin the long trudge up her driveway. The unsalable, half-assed lot that’s left over after everyone else has had their pick.

  She greets me at the door with the normal small talk and then the two of us climb again, this time up a broad staircase with a chandelier dangling overhead. We pass a series of bedrooms that seem to belong to teenage boys. There are tangled wires on the floor connecting stereos and video games and shelves crammed full of silver trophies, most likely won for soccer or tennis or lacrosse. The hall leads into the master suite, which we transverse in silence, until I am at last in Pamela Hart’s closet, an enormous and well-lit affair with an entire wall of mirrors.

  “Do you practice in here?” I ask her.

  “No,” she says, sounding surprised. “I only dance at the studio.” Then she pauses and asks, “Do you want a drink?”

  Now it’s my turn to be surprised. I’ve never had anyone offer me a drink inside a closet. I guess there’s a wet bar somewhere within the master suite.

  She yanks open a pair of double doors and there they are—her ball gowns, their collective sparkle enough to blind a sinner, and each one hanging so that it faces out straight ahead. There are at least ten of them.

  “God,” I say, “they’re dazzling.”

  “You’re wondering how the rods manage to hold them up,” she says. I wasn’t wondering any such thing, but I nod and she goes on. “Bob had his men build in extra supports. Otherwise, the strain on this wall would be so much—” She breaks off and I have a vision of the dresses slowly pulling down the rods, the closet, and then the room and the hall, until the whole house falls, piece by piece, into the gulley.

  “And that’s why you need to marry a builder,” she finishes, with that tinkly little laugh, whic
h I guess could be either charming or annoying, depending on the situation.

  “Maybe I will take that drink,” I say.

  She turns and walks out of the closet and I sit down on one of the step stools, which were evidently placed there to help her reach the pocketbooks and shoes stacked on the shelves behind me. I’ve brought three thousand dollars, in a mix of hundreds and twenties, neatly tucked into a manila envelope. It’s a bit like a drug drop, but the fact that she specifically asked for cash gives me hope. Elyse began to hoard cash before she left Phil. Hiding small amounts of money here and there is apparently standard behavior in migratory females and so maybe Pamela ultimately does plan to leave Bob. Maybe she does love Nik. All of which is none of my business, but he seems so exposed to the winds of fate with nothing but a phony student visa standing between him and deportation.

  “I’m on to you, you know,” Pamela says.

  She has walked back into the closet and is coming toward me in the mirror, holding out a clear drink over a mound of shaved ice. I taste it. Gin and tonic.

  “The setting on that ring is way too modern to be a family heirloom,” she says, sipping her own drink as she leans against the mirror. “And with the size of the stone I can pretty much guesstimate what it cost. You’re one of us, aren’t you?”

  “My husband left me an allowance, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Well, you don’t have to look so guilty about it. And it wasn’t just the ring. I saw you at the MS ball. In fact, I think my husband used to serve on the board with your husband. He’s another one of the check writers.”

  “Wait a minute. Robert Hart’s your husband? God, I’m so stupid, but everybody just kept saying Bob and I didn’t make the connection. I’ve sat on a board with him too. Hospice.”

  She wrinkles her nose. “Hospice is depressing.”

  “MS isn’t exactly a barrel of laughs.”

  “Agreed. That’s why I went with the symphony.” She lifts her drink to her mouth and flicks her tongue over the mound of ice like a cat. “Because we have to do something useful, don’t we? We can’t just dance.”

  I can’t think of a damn thing to say to that, so it seems like it’s time to get my dress and go. “The money’s in the envelope,” I say, inclining my head toward the place where I left it propped against one of the mirrors.

  “And the dress is on the hanger,” she answers, pushing herself abruptly away from her own mirror. It’s the same sort of gesture I watched her make during the tango—a sudden surge of energy following an almost unnerving beat of stillness. It’s what makes her a good dancer, this willingness to wait, to not forecast her intention before that split second when she actually moves. There’s something animalistic in it, and something enviable as well.

  She hands me her drink and then slips a gray silk bag over the dress, stuffing the skirt a bit roughly and pulling up the long zipper. I hand both drinks back to her as we make a clumsy transfer and then I follow her out of the closet, through the master suite, down the hall, and to the top of the stairs, where I stop to grapple with the ungainly weight of the dress bag. I don’t want to trip and go tumbling all the way down this faux-historic staircase with a sixteen-pound red ball gown in my arms. So I inch my way slowly, step by step, and as I reach the bottom I hear a voice boom out from one of the rooms to the side.

  “That you?”

  “Yes,” Pamela said. “Of course it’s me.”

  I shift the dress again to look in the direction of the voice and see Bob Hart standing in the doorway of another room. His study, evidently, although perhaps “study” is not the proper word, for over his shoulder I can see a gun rack full of rifles. Do men have hunting rooms anymore? If I stepped closer, would I find deer heads on the wall or little stuffed foxes running along the tabletops? Bob is holding a tumbler of the same size and shape Pamela handed me, but his is empty. Which means that even though he must have gotten home just minutes ago, must have entered during the brief time Pamela and I were in the closet, he made his first drink of the night and threw it back immediately. Pamela’s right about me, in a way. I am one of them, and the first thing a woman who lives in a big house learns is how to gauge how fast a man is drinking.

  “Honey, this is Kelly Madison,” Pamela says. “I think you knew her husband, Mark, from MS.”

  “Fine man,” Bob says, leaning against the doorframe. “I haven’t seen him lately.”

  “Neither have I,” I say. “He died a year ago last summer.”

  “Oh,” says Bob. “Real sorry to hear that.”

  “Kelly is borrowing one of my dance dresses,” Pamela says, a little too quickly. “The red Doré, you know, the one you gave me last Christmas?”

  He nods without interest. She’s a trophy, all right, but he won her years ago, in a contest he’s long forgotten. Now she sits on a high shelf, like the collection in his sons’ rooms, representing his past glory, gathering dust.

  Speaking of the boys, there’s a portrait of them on the wall. Handsome kids, all three, which is another way of saying that they look like their mother. But they’re bigger than I would have guessed and I’m trying to readjust my thinking with each new piece of the Pamela puzzle I find.

  “You have fine-looking boys,” I say.

  Now this gets his interest. He turns and considers the picture. “The twins are at Duke and Carolina,” he says proudly, rattling the ice in his glass. “Youngest one goes next year and he’s thinking State.”

  “Good for them,” I say, shifting the dress bag yet again, for my shoulders are starting to ache. With three in college, Pamela must be older than she looks or else she had them white-trash young. Neither of which is the image she wants to give out at the studio, and she must have been following my thoughts, because she springs back into action, in that abrupt way of hers, moving toward the door as if she’s suddenly eager to hustle me out. I’ve seen too much—the alcohol, the guns, the age of her kids, the fact that this house, while enormous, has a slapped-together air. Bob’s a clever one—now that I know who he is I can remember the people at hospice talking about him. Came into the real estate market at just the right time. Bet on Charlotte before the banks exploded and this sleepy little burg became a boomtown. Built left and right while everybody else was saying “Wait and see.” And now he’s got wealth, but it’s a certain kind of wealth. The type the South looks down on, what my granddaddy used to call “money so new the ink’s not dry.”

  “Well,” I say. “I’ve got to go. Thanks for letting me borrow the dress.”

  “Think nothing of it,” she says, and opens the door.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  PEOPLE ALWAYS ASK me if I have children, a question that should be simple enough, but I have trouble answering it. The reason is Tory, who is technically Elyse’s daughter, but, just as Mark predicted we would, through the years we’ve shared her. And in my role of honorary aunt, I suppose that I’ve been overly indulgent—the giver of extravagant gifts, the planner of trips to Disney World, Broadway, Paris, and Cancún. This wasn’t really a problem when she was little and Elyse welcomed the break, but after her divorce . . .

  No. No, not really. That’s too easy an explanation for what went wrong between Tory and Elyse. All girls come to resent their mothers as they approach puberty, not just those who have been forced to sleep on air mattresses in a series of apartments in which their mothers throw pots and hold soirees and summon tribal spirits, and slip farther and farther from the epicenter of respectable suburban life. If I stepped in at a few key times—if I was the one who bought Tory her first bra, who took her to get her hair styled for the prom—it was only because we both knew how much Tory craved normalcy and how ill-equipped Elyse was to provide it.

  “You’re the un-mother,” Elyse has said to me on more than one occasion. We still find it funny when strangers think that Tory is my daughter, an assumption they stupidly base on the fact th
at we both have blond hair. Any glance beyond the superficial would immediately show that Tory and Elyse have the same facial structure, the same upturned almond eyes. They are alike in the bone. But most people just make assumptions because of our coloring—except for this waitress who once asked Tory if she wanted her soup brought out at the same time as her mom’s salad. “How did you know which one was my mom?” Tory had asked, and the waitress had answered, “Because you were going to get the chipotle chicken special too, weren’t you, I could see it on your face. You were all set to get the chicken until you heard her order it and then you said you wanted something else.” Perhaps this is indeed the crux of the ­mother-daughter ­relationship—you wait and see what your mother orders and then you ask the universe for something else.

  I have seven gifts wrapped for Tory, including a check with a number of zeroes that will probably make Elyse mad. But I’ve always liked giving her things, and it wasn’t just me—Mark doted on her as well. The two of them had their own little private history, ever since she came into the bank on her own, the summer between her junior and senior year of high school, and applied for a job as an intern. Mark hired her at once. He said it wasn’t because he knew her parents, but because she was clearly the best of the batch. “She’s a sharp kid,” he said the first day, without my having to ask how things had gone. “A damn miracle, considering . . .”

  Considering what? That unconventional Elyse was her mother, that stony-faced Phil was her father, that she was a child of divorce, that she had spent her life shuttling between two divergent worlds? He didn’t bring it up again, but later that summer we bumped into Elyse and Tory at a restaurant and Tory had run across the patio, squealed, and plopped down into Mark’s lap. “How’s my best girl?” he said. And then, the next spring when Tory graduated from high school, I asked him how much money we should give her and he said, “She wants to go to Scotland.”