by Grace Palmer
But now, she saw it from a different angle. The Toni in the photograph wasn’t some Zen woman suffused with joy and contentment.
She was lonely, looking out into the distance as if hoping that someone or something was going to come hurtling towards her bearing a sense of purpose on a silver platter.
She barely had time to register those disquieting thoughts, much less to process them, before two things occurred to her at once.
The first thing was that, when she’d slipped off her shoes by the door, there had been an unfamiliar pair of shoes lined up against the wall there. Why she was just now realizing that, she couldn’t say, but it hit her like a blunt object. A pair of black women’s pumps, with one buckle busted. They did not belong to Toni, or to this house.
The second thing was that there was a noise coming from the office. Two noises in one, actually. Voices. Breathing. Heavy panting, to be precise.
So when Toni pushed open the door of the office and caught a glimpse of her husband cheating on her, it wouldn’t be quite right to say that she was surprised. Because she had known at once what those noises had indicated. And she knew what it meant for her, too: that her life as she had known it was over, as suddenly and irrevocably as the drop of a guillotine cleaving her past from her future.
She fainted. The cake in her hands fell and hit the floor. Icing flew everywhere. Her last sight, before everything went completely black, was a smear of blue cream on the doorframe. It dripped down, down, down.
It hit the floor. Only then did she fully give in to the rush of darkness.
Eleven years and fifty-one weeks before she dropped the cake and passed out in the hallway of the home she shared with the man who was cheating on her, Toni Benson had been walking down a dark and quiet street with that very same man.
It was close to midnight, and they’d been drinking for hours at a quiet little bar in Virginia Highlands, so she had a pleasant buzz coursing through her head, making the world seem pastel and welcoming.
As far as first dates went, it had gone extremely well in that he seemed charming, smart, and handsome, the last of which she already knew. But it was nonetheless nice to be seated across from him again and confirm that she hadn’t just made that fact up in her mind in the couple of weeks since they’d first met at her office.
Jared stopped and playfully grabbed her hand as they passed under an old-timey gas lamp outside the door of another quiet bar. “I can’t in good conscience let the night end here, can I?” he mused. He pulled her close to him so that they could both feel the heat of the lamp wafting over them. He smelled nice—a woodsy cologne layered on top of a clean, masculine soap scent—and when she rested a hand on his chest without thinking much of it, she noticed that it was stronger and more muscled than she might’ve otherwise suspected, what with him being a computer programmer and all.
“I don’t know,” Toni replied, biting her lip to hide a teasing smile. “Can you?”
“It just wouldn’t be right,” Jared said solemnly before cracking a grin of his own. He had a cleft chin, what Toni’s mom would’ve called a Superman chin, and it was absurd how good-looking she found that silly little feature.
As tipsy as she was, she was only just now beginning to suspect that they were hurtling towards their first kiss. It was a little faster than she might’ve planned if she’d had time to stop and think about it, but they’d been hanging out for hours now; they’d shared cocktails and good conversation. Given that he had only been in her office for maybe an hour or two, he was awfully good at doing impersonations of all the people she worked with. Sabrina’s cackle and Marlon’s baritone boom and the way Damon, the lead partner who saw himself as the firm’s alpha male, liked to hold his arms perfectly still and flexed at his sides as he walked down the hallway, as if to show everyone how strong he was. Jared did each of them in turn, and Toni laughed louder and louder with each one, until the two of them subsided into the kind of tense but not uncomfortable silently-staring-into-each-other’s-eyes that invariably happens in the final third of a good first date.
The back of her mind was swimming with the sorts of silly images that crop up in a moment like that: white picket fences and church bells ringing and the idle pondering of whether their kids would have Jared’s copper curls or blonde hair like hers. She put those aside and focused instead on that country-boy smile.
As they stood under the gas lamp and the occasional passerby studiously avoided eye contact while they strode down the sidewalk, it felt like they’d stepped into a candlelit bubble and found that moment. Jared looked at Toni, and Toni looked at Jared, and for a second, the rest of the world ceased to exist.
He kissed her, softly and chastely, and then let her go. Toni’s hand never left his chest. She could feel his heart beating.
Ba-boom, ba-boom.
Ba-boom, ba-boom.
“Toni.”
Toni’s eyes fluttered open. Jared’s face was right up in hers. She saw him leap backward as if shocked to see her awake. For a moment, he looked terrified, like a little kid called to the principal’s office. Then a mask of hardened ice settled over his features, and the look of fear was gone.
“Are you okay?” he asked. There wasn’t an ounce of softness in his voice.
“I…I think so.” Toni sat up. She was laid out on the couch in the living room. Jared had put on a pair of raggedy jeans and an old white T-shirt, which was two items of clothing more than he’d been wearing when she opened the door of his office. “How long have I been out?”
“Just a couple of minutes. I brought you here. You hit your head pretty hard on the wall.” He stood on the far side of the room, leaning against the doorframe that led to the kitchen, arms folded across his chest.
Toni reached up and felt her forehead. She winced when her fingers brushed across a knot at her right temple. That was going to turn into a gnarly bruise.
She straightened up a little more, groaning as she did. Her mouth tasted like blood, although her finger came away clean when she poked the inside of her cheek.
She didn’t want to look at Jared, so she looked around. Strange how somewhere that was once home can become something other than that in a single instant. The pictures on the walls, the pillows on the couch—she’d chosen all of them, and yet they suddenly felt foreign, staged, as if she’d never seen them before.
She did her best to avoid it, but eventually, the magnetic pull of the hallway was too strong, so she looked down there, too. She saw blue cake frosting smeared on the wall. There was a rectangle of light cast onto the floor, emanating from Jared’s office, and as she watched, she saw a shadow pass across it and then retreat again.
Toni’s jaw clenched. “Who is she?” She stared down at her hands as she spoke. They were trembling.
“No one,” Jared said. At the very uppermost edge of Toni’s vision, she saw him shake his head. That only made her madder.
“Who is she?” she repeated hollowly.
Jared sighed. “I don’t want to do this right now.”
That made her look up at him. “Do you think I want to do this right now, Jared?”
He said nothing, did nothing, just looked back at her with an unreadable blankness in his eyes.
“Heather,” he answered finally.
All Toni could say was, “Ah.”
That made sense. Heather was his “secretary,” as Jared had explained it, though why a one-man software operation would need a secretary had never made sense to Toni. Particularly not a twenty-seven-year-old secretary with a loud giggle and a propensity for high heels. The girl had been respectful to Toni on the few occasions when they’d met, which went some ways towards assuaging the stupid doubts that inevitably crop up in the mind of a woman in her late thirties whose husband has just hired a curvy young thing to work for him. Toni wasn’t a jealous woman or an insecure one; so as long as the girl could look her in the eye and converse politely, she’d never paid her much attention.
That, it turned out, was
a stupid error.
“How long?” Toni asked quietly.
Jared sighed again, like this was all some big drag on his mood. “I said I don’t want to do this right now, Toni.”
Toni bit her lip. Part of her wanted to do this, to drag all the answers out into the light and rage at them. But part of her was suddenly tired. She felt like she could crawl into her bed and sleep for days, weeks, months, years.
Although she realized with a sudden pang, it wasn’t her bed anymore. And who knows how long it had been like that? How many times had Heather slept there, curled up against her husband’s side, feeling the heartbeat that Toni had felt under that gas lamp almost a dozen years ago? Toni was immediately overwhelmed by the haunting, nauseating feeling one gets after a house break-in. Someone had been in her home, treading in her footsteps, touching her things, all without her knowledge or consent. She grabbed the pillow next to her and hugged it tightly like it could anchor her surging anxieties and stop them from drowning her.
“I’m sorry it happened like this,” Jared said with sudden sharpness, “but it’s best that it happened sooner rather than later, I guess.”
“So that’s it then.”
“Yes.”
“Yes?”
“Yes, that’s it.”
What an answer! It was both wildly inadequate, and yet somehow, it was also all that needed to be said. She didn’t want to hear anything else he had to say. Not the how or the why or the when.
All she wanted was to be out of this stranger’s house. It belonged to an old version of her, or to her soon-to-be ex-husband and his new woman, and she no longer wanted to be under this roof because if she stayed here much longer then it would shrink around her and suffocate her. She wanted out.
So she stood up and walked over to the entryway. She slipped on her shoes, grabbed her keys, and walked out the door. She half expected Jared to say something—“I’m sorry” or “I’ll let you know when you can come get your stuff” or even just a limp “Goodbye, Toni.” But he said none of those things. She couldn’t decide if she appreciated his silence or if she despised him for it.
The summer air greeted Toni on the front stoop like an unwelcome dog licking her face. She went to her car, got in, and sat there in silence with the keys lying in her hand. A lot had happened in the last fifteen minutes. In fact, the inside of the car was still cool from the air conditioning.
She closed her eyes and breathed. Two truths were staring her in the face: either her marriage was a lie all along, or it was a good thing that she would never have again. Toni wasn’t sure which option was worse.
4
Buenos Aires, Argentina—May 5, 2018
“Toni, come out and show me!” Camille calls in her smooth trill.
“Absolutely not,” Toni responds at once. She is standing in the dressing room of the little boutique in the Palermo neighborhood, where Camille has dragged her, looking in the mirror and seeing what feels like a completely different woman gazing back out at her.
It isn’t just the dress she’s trying on that is throwing her for a loop, though that is certainly where a lot of the questions in her head begin and end. After all, Toni Benson is a born-and-raised Nantucket native. She has never stepped so much as a single toe in what Camille taught her is called a milonga, the Argentine term for a party where the national dance, tango, is performed.
“Like a sock hop?” Toni had asked and then immediately regretted asking.
Luckily, by the way she wrinkled her nose in confusion, it was clear that Camille didn’t know what a sock hop was, so Toni was spared the embarrassment of dating herself so badly.
“A milonga is a celebration, a festival, a ritual,” Camille eventually explained in that poetic, indirect way of hers. “There are rules that must be followed, but we will get there in time. The first order of business is your attire.”
Which is what brought them to this boutique, a cute shop with flowers in the windows and an exquisitely made-up saleswoman smoking a cigarette out front. When Camille explained to the woman in a flurry of Spanish what they were looking for, the woman stubbed out her cigarette, gave Toni a once-over with a discerning eye, and led her inside by the crook of her elbow. Toni found herself poked, prodded, measured with a length of tape, and deposited—not rudely, but firmly—into a dressing room.
Then, one after the other, came the dresses.
They were dresses like Toni had never seen before. Shocking in color, daring in cut, the kind of thing she would never in a million years choose for herself. After all, she was a fifty-seven-year-old divorcée with a bad left knee, not a young Latina heartbreaker with swiveling hips and hardly a care in the world!
But Camille and the saleswoman have thus far merely shushed right over her protests and continued to throw dresses over the door. Feeling cornered and overwhelmed, Toni has decided it is easier to do things their way for the time being.
For a Frenchwoman, Camille knows an awful lot about Argentine culture. The way she tells her story, she came here years ago and fell in love with the country and its people. After a divorce, she made one more trip from her homeland to Buenos Aires and simply stayed put. Her accent has remained French, but everything else about her swoons with that distinctly porteño mélange of European classiness and South American fire.
Toni is glad that the two of them met by chance on her first night here. It has been one month since she landed in Argentina, and Camille has been a near-constant companion since the day of her arrival. They’ve shared coffee, walks through the park, and trips to the national museum to look at the beautiful art kept on display there. Camille has also been urging Toni to join her on a wild night out. Thus far, Toni has begged out of it every time.
The truth of the matter is that Toni’s heart is still sore. She cries herself to sleep as often as not. The loss of a brother is an unfathomable thing under the best of circumstances, and she is a long, long way from finding a bottom on which to plant her feet.
But, time being what it is, she is finding it harder and harder to refuse Camille’s pleas. “It will be fun!” she cries whenever they discuss the prospect. “No one is asking you to do anything but dance, chica.”
“I can’t dance to save my life,” Toni has pointed out on more than one occasion.
And each time, Camille offers up the same proverb: “It’s like the Japanese say, Toni—‘We’re fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance.’” And each time, she nods and smiles enigmatically, as if that settles things.
This little power struggle over the issue of the dresses is merely an extension of the bickering they’ve been having for a month. That Toni is here, trying them on, is surely evidence that she is fighting a losing battle.
But there is something about the garment she is wearing that almost makes her want to lose.
This most recent dress—the eleventh or twelfth one Toni has tried on—is doing something in her reflection that Toni can’t quite wrap her head around. It is the crisp red of a fresh-bloomed rose, with thin straps over her shoulders and a graceful knot tied in the center of her chest. The fabric hugs her torso and her hips as it descends into a scalloped hem just above her knees.
She looks like how she has not felt in a very long time: powerful, confident, capable. She looks like a woman who knows how to tango and what wine to order with her dinner and how to navigate the grief brought on by tragedy. And even if she doesn’t feel those things in her heart of hearts, the dress tells her that perhaps she is a bit closer to feeling them than she was before she put it on.
“These, too!” Camille chirps. She slides a pair of black stilettos under the door.
Sighing, Toni dutifully slips them on, buckling the straps around her ankles. When she stands up again, she cannot help but smile, even if she feels like she is far over her head.
She swallows, takes a deep breath, and opens the dressing room door.
“Bellissima!” the saleswoman says with the air of a craftsman who has meas
ured and cut perfectly.
Camille just smiles.
“Are you sure it’s not too much?” Toni says. She feels guilty for saying it because it’s obvious to everyone in the room that it’s perfect. It just feels like the sort of thing she is supposed to say in this scenario.
Camille touches her softly on the shoulder. “It is right,” she says softly.
Toni steps up to the platform in front of the three-sided mirror and does a nervous twirl. The dress flares out slightly as she pirouettes, and the heels make a soft, rhythmic tapping noise beneath her.
“Okay,” she says finally. She turns back to look at Camille and smiles. “Let’s go dancing.”
After a nap, a shower, dinner at a small café with Camille where they chitchat about anything except for the night’s upcoming festivities, and then a return to Toni’s hotel to finish getting ready for the milonga, Toni finds herself seated in a chair at the outer rim of a large, empty ballroom. The wooden floor gleams under the warm lights overhead. All around her, people are buzzing in. Some bear broad smiles and big laughter, but many of them look just as nervous as she does.
“Cálmate,” Camille tells Toni, resting a hand on her knee. “It is only dancing.”
“Sorry,” Toni apologizes. She hadn’t realized that she was bouncing her knee quite so ferociously. It’s a nervous habit that she hasn’t been able to shed in nearly sixty years of living, no matter how hard she tries.
“What frightens you?”
“Everything,” Toni answers immediately. She blushes. It is hot beneath the lights, though they dim a bit almost as soon as she thinks that.
“But there is nothing to fear, no?”
