The Unexpected Waltz (24 page)

“Why?” Elyse leans away from the refrigerator door and looks around my big, shiny kitchen. “Are you afraid they won’t like you if they know where you live?”

Actually I’m afraid they might like me more. Or at least like me different. I look around the kitchen too, and through the doors into the dining room with that monstrous tablescape running down the center of the table. “You think I’ve overdone it, don’t you?”

“Of course not, baby, why are you getting upset? Everything’s beautiful. You want to make some salad?”

“We could go out for lunch.”

“Do you mind if we wait until dinner?” I shake my head. She got up at God knows what hour this morning, of course she just wants to shower and relax. She slams the refrigerator door and a Christmas card flies off the front, one I’d stuck on with a snowman magnet.

“It’s from Nik,” I say.

She picks it up and looks inside. “See you son,” she reads.

“Isn’t that cute? He meant ‘See you soon,’ because I haven’t told anybody this but I’m doing a little recital while you and Tory will be here. Nik is meeting me at the hospice Christmas dinner and we’re going to waltz to ‘Silver Bells.’ Carolina has been after me to dance for her for weeks and this seems like a good time to do it. You’ll come, won’t you? Do you think hospice will freak out Tory?”

“Of course we’ll come.”

“I thought you and I can go over there tomorrow and watch a movie. I want you to meet Carolina. And maybe you can come with me to my dance lesson too, if it’s not too much—”

“Kelly,” Elyse says, her voice firm but kind. “What are you doing? There’s no way in hell I’m going to miss the chance to meet Carolina and Nik. You talk about them all the time. Why do you get so jumpy like this whenever two parts of your life come together? Tory will be fine at hospice. She’s a big girl. And we both want to see you dance.”

The kitchen is suddenly blurry with my tears. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I cry all the time lately.”

“Christmas makes people emotional.” Elyse sticks Nik’s card back on the fridge. “See you son,” she says softly. “That’s a funny mistake to make.”

"ARE YOU SURE WE
want to watch something this sad?” Elyse says when she notices the movie I’ve picked out for our visit with Carolina.

“This isn’t sad.”

“You don’t call a brain tumor sad?”

“She gets the brain tumor in
Dark Victory
. In
Now, Voyager
all she does is fall in love with a married man.”

“Oh yeah, right. A comedy.”

“How is Gerry, anyway?”

“He’s great. He’s always great. He doesn’t know how to be anything else.” Elyse looks up at the crooked wreath on the Hospice House doorway and her face tightens a little. “This is going to be hard, isn’t it?”

I’m used to the house of death, since I come here five times a week and sometimes I forget the effect it has on other people. I link my arm through Elyse’s. “You’re going to like her. And yeah, that’s exactly what’s going to make it hard.”

We find Carolina in her room. Getting her back on the IVs and meds has stabilized her a bit and she hugs us both and grins when she sees the bottle of wine Elyse has smuggled in her purse. She won’t drink much of it. With so many painkillers in her system, a thimbleful of alcohol is enough to get her looped. But she likes the idea that I bring it on movie nights, along with the bag of popcorn and the oversize box of Raisinets.

“Oh good. Bette Davis,” she says when she sees me open the DVD case.

“I’m teaching her about the heyday of Hollywood,” I tell Elyse as we all climb into the bed together. Carolina is so thin now that she lies between us like a child; Elyse unscrews the wine cap while I fiddle with the remote. “We’ve done Marilyn Monroe and Joan Crawford and we’re halfway through the classics of Miss Bette Davis.”

“You need to get her going on Elizabeth,” Elyse says. “Or maybe Lana.” She has always referred to movie stars exclusively by their first names, as if they were old childhood friends of hers.

“Elizabeth is up next.”

“I like Bette Davis,” Carolina says, her mouth full of popcorn. “She’s so real.”

“That she is,” says Elyse. “And I’ve got to tell you, it totally gets on my nerves.”

Carolina laughs delightedly and I can see Elyse has already charmed her. She pours glasses of syrah for me and her, a smaller one for Carolina, and the movie begins.

I always forget how disturbingly plain Bette is at the beginning of
Now, Voyager,
with her tight bun and wire-rimmed glasses and sensible clothes. I gulp the first couple of inches of wine and hold out my glass. Elyse tops me off, her eyes never leaving the screen. It’s not like we haven’t seen this movie a hundred times, like I don’t know that within minutes she’ll go to the sanatorium and have her big makeover. There’s no reason to worry that the movie is going to somehow change course and Bette will get stuck in ugly-land or that she’ll never get on that cruise ship and fall in love.

Elyse suddenly picks up the remote and hits Pause, freezing Bette with her mouth open and her eyes bulging.

“Is this the one where the guy puts two cigarettes in his mouth and lights them both at once?”

“Yeah.”

“And she says ‘Forget the moon and keep the stars’?”

“The actual line is ‘Don’t ask for the moon, we have the stars.’”

“It’s coming back to me.” She picks up the remote again but I find myself blurting something before she can press the button. It pops out in a little hiccup.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been in love,” I say.

Carolina and Elyse both shift in the bed to look at me.

“I know what you’re thinking,” I say to Elyse. “You’re thinking that if I wasn’t in love with Daniel, I sure as hell gave a good imitation of it, but that wasn’t love, it was obsession. He was like some itch right in the middle of my back that I couldn’t scratch. And then poor Mark . . . there was a woman at a charity dinner who said I gave him a lovely home and that’s all that matters, but do you think that’s really all that matters? Because I’ve been faking, faking it my whole life, and I think Mark sort of knew that. I’d catch him looking at me sometimes like a dog who doesn’t understand why you put him outside in the yard, and I don’t want to be like this but I always have been, and I don’t know how to stop and now I’m fifty-two, which seems significant, because it’s like the number of weeks in a year or the number of cards in a deck. It’s a big number. So that has to mean something, don’t you think, although maybe it just means I’m getting old. The kind of old where it’s too late to change. What do you think?”

Elyse seems strangely frozen, much like Bette, but when I come to the end of my speech and take a big, defiant swig of wine she exhales slowly and considers her answer. “I don’t think it’s too late,” she finally says.

“Time’s running out. I know that. I’m not delusional. But I think I have to try.”

“Try what?”

“To not be fake.”

Elyse nods, slowly and carefully. I’ve lost my fucking mind, that much is evident to everyone around me. Last week I made that crazy speech at the charity dinner about how romantic love keeps women from going on a quest and everyone thought I was drunk and now I’m here at hospice, drinking again and talking about putting dogs out in the yard and I don’t even have a dog, which is probably just one more thing that’s wrong with me. I feel like I’m on some flat, open territory, some prairie in a state where I’ve never been before. Emptiness and possibility stretch out all around me, in every direction. I start to say that I don’t want to be one of those women who lies on her deathbed and repents for what she does not do, when I remember that Carolina is right here between us, looking up at me with wide, solemn eyes.

I try again. “I know I was a bitch to you, Elyse, when you fell in love with Gerry and left Phil and I kept telling you to be careful. I know that’s not what you needed to hear. But the truth of it all is that I was jealous, so jealous I couldn’t see straight. Because you knew what you wanted and you went for it and now look at you, you got love. Meanwhile I’m still sitting here waiting and wondering if I even know what love is.”

Elyse shakes her head. “I swear, Kelly, sometimes it’s like you and I aren’t even watching the same movie. I got love? That’s what you think?”

“You got Gerry.”

“I don’t have Gerry. Gerry comes and goes.” Elyse looks at Carolina. “I’m sorry, honey, Kelly and I are being rude, talking over the top of you like you’re a piece of furniture. Gerry is a man I met years ago on an airplane and after that I left my husband—he’s the one she means when she says Phil. Everybody thinks I traded my husband for my lover but it’s way more complicated than that.”

“Oh, I know the whole story,” Carolina says confidently. “Kelly says that you had the safe man but you wanted the bad boy.”

“Good God,” Elyse says. I drain my glass and hold it out. She ignores me.

“And Kelly’s bad boy dumped her,” Carolina continues, her voice a little ragged. “So she married a safe man and she says that’s because there are two kinds of men in the world—the ones who make things easy and the ones who make things hard. You and her started out choosing the opposite, and then the two of you sort of crisscrossed somewhere along the way, and now she lives in a big house but you’ve had a lot more sex.”

“Really?” Elyse says. “That’s what she said?”

Carolina smiles and takes a dainty sip of syrah. “Some of it I figured out for myself.”

Elyse gives a big hoot of laughter, which relieves me. “Well, it’s right as far as it goes, Carolina, but let me tell you, my life is about one-tenth as exciting as Kelly makes it out to be. Yeah, I left my husband because I was bored and lonely, but what I didn’t realize was that all the other women who were bored and lonely but didn’t have the guts to leave their husbands were going to crucify me. It’s all anybody ever says about me, that I left a nice man. They’re going to carve it on my tombstone:
Here Lies Elyse Bearden. She Left a Nice Man
. And yeah, I have a boyfriend, but he pops in and out of sight like a kid on a water slide. Meanwhile selling a bowl every once in a while doesn’t pay the rent, so I teach pottery at a community college. I bet you know how glamorous that can be. And that doesn’t pay worth a shit either so I just signed up to teach three classes a week at the senior citizens’ center.”

“You didn’t tell me that,” I say.

She shrugs. “They just offered it to me. The class starts after New Year’s. They’ve warned me that some of my students will be in pretty bad shape, but touch is the last sense to go. Even blind people can feel clay.”

“You could do that at hospice,” I say. “The hospice in Tucson.” Elyse complains sometimes about money but I didn’t know things were this bad.

“Hmmm,” says Elyse. “What about it, Carolina? Do you want to throw pots? Do you think that would fulfill you?”

“I’ve never thought about it,” Carolina says, looking up at the clouds. “
I’ve never thought about what would fulfill me.”

“Then tell me this,” Elyse says after a minute. “Have you ever been in love?”

I’m ashamed to say this is a question I’ve never asked. I know odd things about Carolina, like her white blood cell count and the amount of her weekly car payment, but I don’t know what happened to the father of her boys. Whether she loved him, whether she married him, where he went, or even whether he was the one who truly mattered. I roll over to where I can hear her better.

“A long time ago,” Carolina says.

“And was he one of the safe men or one of the bad boys?”

“Hard to decide,” Carolina says. “And what difference would it make either way? Like my grandma used to say, they’re both no good.”

Elyse shrieks again with laughter, rocking her knees back and forth on the bed. I reach over Carolina to hand her my glass and this time she lifts the bottle to pour in more but then she stops, leaving me with my hand and my glass out there in midair.

“I guess you’ve noticed,” she says to Carolina, “that this one still wears her wedding ring.”

I turn my hand, dropping a couple of drips of syrah on the sheet in the process. All three of us study my ring.

“I can’t seem to take it off,” I say.

Carolina frowns. “You mean it’s stuck?”

“Not exactly. What does a ring like this say to you?”

“It says, ‘I’m rich.’”

“No, it says, ‘I married a rich man,’” I say. “Which, trust me, is a totally different thing.”

The size of my diamond seems to get Elyse’s mind back on Elizabeth Taylor. “We should have brought
Suddenly, Last Summer,
” she says. “It’s the best movie ever.” She proceeds to tell Carolina why Elizabeth was the last of the true American movie stars and I put my head back on the pillow and shut my eyes.

Suddenly, Last Summer
is at the top of the pile of movies on my bedside table. It’s the movie I most associate with Elyse and I did indeed start to bring it today. Elyse and I first saw it together on one of those Saturday nights at the drive-in when we had our eyes on the screen and the four hands of the Pressley twins up our skirts. It wasn’t until much later, looking back, that it occurred to me I’d been watching all those old movies because I was desperately trying to get an idea of what a desirable woman might look like. And when I’d seen Elizabeth Taylor in
Suddenly, Last Summer,
a film in which she is so beautiful that Montgomery Clift can’t stop himself from falling in love with her, even though he is her doctor, even though she is so obviously crazy and he is so obviously gay . . .