The Unexpected Waltz (28 page)

When I get home,
I call my lawyer. I’m thinking he might say something about the way I ran out of the charity event. I’ve always wondered how they explained the clothes I abandoned in the ladies’ room.

As it turns out, he doesn’t mention it at all. In fact, he comes on the line sounding jovial and a little hungover.

“Let me guess, you overspent at Christmas,” he says.

“Do you have an immigration attorney in your practice?”

There’s a pause. “Not specifically. Why? Are you having some problem with your housekeeper?”

I can’t believe I ever invited this ass to my house for dinner. “No, I need some advice for a friend.”

“A friend,” he says doubtfully. “We do have someone on staff with a bit of experience. I think he did an internship in Texas.”

“I need to make an appointment with him. And about the money . . . I can go into the principal if I want to, right?”

Another pause. Longer. “Is there some kind of problem? Perhaps you and I should have a private talk.”

“There’s no problem. My housekeeper is fine and I’m fine and I have a ridiculous balance in my checkbook. I’m just asking if I could go into the principal if I wanted to.”

“It’s your money,” he says, a slight edge to his voice. “You can do anything you want to with it.”

“Good,” I say. “That’s exactly what I thought.”

CHAPTER
NINETEEN

J
ANUARY IS TANGO
month in Nik’s group class. After everyone assembles he says that in honor of the New Year, we’re going to try a harder routine and it will open with two pivots into a promenade and then a corte. I know the sequence he’s talking about—we worked on it just the day before in my private lesson. The same thought must have occurred to him because he pulls me out to demonstrate.

Tango is my best dance, but I’ve never been the model before. Nik puts on the music we’d practiced with, the Bon Jovi song “You Give Love a Bad Name.” It’s surprisingly good for tango, the way lots of old rock music is. He whispers “Three times through” and then we’re off, ripping through the step sequence once, then again and again.

I feel good. When I drive my thigh between Nik’s for the pivot I am more solidly on my feet than I have ever been. He has me demonstrate again, both the right way and the wrong way, and afterward he says “Thank you,” two words I do not believe I have ever heard come out of his mouth.

But it isn’t just the pivot. I’m strong in everything tonight. Just strangely on, and it all feels effortless, a runner’s high. People dance weeks and months and years hoping to hit a night like this and for some reason I’m given one. When I go down the line of men, every single one of them is able to do the pivot with me, even though they struggle through the move when they’re with the other women. They struggle so badly that we don’t even get to the promenade and the corte. We spend the entire forty-five-minute class just trying to pivot.

“Once again, see how Kelly pushes her leg,” Nik is telling the class. He has started adding pronouns and conjunctions more often now, I’ve noticed. Sounding just a bit more American every day. “A pivot depends on the woman and how she places her leg forward and into floor.” He steps back and I stand solid, unwavering, in a pose that looks a bit like a fencer’s lunge.

“And when we turn, we keep our bodies very connected”—and here he illustrates by pulling me closer, until our hips are almost fused—“and the spin is much faster.” He releases me, stands back. “Spinning is about pulling in lower body, being very tight to partner because this reduces mass. It helps your—”

And here he looks at me. He knows the word but has trouble pronouncing it. He doesn’t want to risk saying “Moo-mentum” in front of the class.

“Momentum,” I say. “The closer you are to your partner in the spin, the more you create momentum.”

“Yes,” Nik says, with a professorial little nod. “Very good.”

And in that exact second I’m aware that something has changed. Nik now treats me as an equal—more like a partner than a student. At some point something clicked in my head and I guess he must have heard it too.

We all clomp down to the restaurant after class and of course I end up again in the seat beside Steve. He was especially tough to dance with tonight. I’d had to practically muscle him through the steps. He smiles and moves over a bit as I sit down. He’s been leaning across the table to talk to Valentina. Sometimes he treats the studio like his own little international buffet, making his way down the line of girls with an empty plate, having a little of this and a little of that. Valentina pulls back with a giggle, happy I’m there and she isn’t stuck all alone listening to Steve. She has been trained to be polite—being nice to older men is pretty much her livelihood—and besides she’s sweet by nature. But Steve’s weird combination of arrogance and neediness can wear anyone out. He’s like the male equivalent of Pamela.

“There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you ever since that night with Mary Tyler Moore,” I say, when he finally settles back in his seat with his drink.

He gives me a look out of the corner of his eye. “What?”

“Exactly why does your ex-wife have it in for you so bad?” I ask. “What did you do to her?”

“She’s a dancer,” he says.

“You’re kidding.”

“No, she’s as good as . . . what’s her name, Pamela? That woman whose picture they keep in the window? Lucy was like that and she always wanted me to dance with her but she was a star. How was I going to catch up?”

“She didn’t want you to go to competitions with her,” I say, exasperated on behalf of this long-ago wife. “She was just trying to get you to do the social stuff.”

“Maybe so,” he says, “but what was in it for me? I was just going to be one of those guys stumbling along behind his more talented, better coordinated wife. She gave me lessons for birthdays and anniversaries on more than one occasion, but I never found the time to go. Okay, save your breath. I know I was passive-aggressive or whatever you women call it. I told her I was too busy with my medical practice.”

“God,” I say, “you were such a husband.”

Isabel’s voice suddenly rises. She’s having an argument with her end of the table. “Why can’t a woman pay for it?” she’s asking. “If a woman gets to a certain age and is of a certain means, why can’t she put her money on the table and buy it just as good as a man?” Harry is laughing but Valentina has gone silent. I’m not sure if Isabel has noticed.

Steve nods, drains his drink. “I admit it. I was acting like a husband. So we split up—it wasn’t just that, it was lots of things—and you’ll never guess what I did the day the divorce papers were signed.”

“You signed up for dance lessons.”

He grins guiltily. “I’ve taken two hundred eighty-nine lessons in the past three hundred sixty-five days.”

“Damn. You really are a male whale. We need to start calling you Moby Dick.”

“Call me every kind of dick you can,” he said. “I know it’s insane. But the minute she stopped nagging me to dance, that was all I wanted to do.”

CHAPTER
TWENTY

I
'VE ALWAYS THOUGHT
that the saddest thing on earth is taking down Christmas decorations. Hospice House has stalled until Epiphany, January 6, technically the last of the twelve days of Christmas and thus the absolute dead end by all accounts of the holiday season. But it still gives me a little pang when I pull up in the parking lot and see the maintenance guys pulling the wreaths off the front door. The tree has already been dragged out and is lying by the curb, waiting for recycling like some sort of wounded soldier. I walk over to it, swap off a twig, and smell the pine. Stronger now, the sap higher in it. That final surge of life that trees often get when they’re dying.

I dread going in. Carolina has been sinking all week. The cold has dragged on and her lungs have gotten worse. It’s obvious to everyone that her immune system has given up. Now she’s unpacked for the last time and put the family pictures back on the bed stand. She’s been sleeping a lot lately, requesting higher doses of medication. I don’t think it’s as much about masking the pain as about masking the disappointment, but I don’t know that for sure and it’s wrong of me to guess.

Carolina had said many times she wanted to see my red dress, so yesterday I came straight from the studio to hospice with it, but when I got to her room she was asleep. Months ago, she’d asked me to promise her consciousness without pain, a gift no one can give, and when I’d seen her there in that deep, hopeless sleep, I knew that I’d failed her. I said her name but she didn’t stir. Right now she can’t stand to feel anything, I know that. She can’t stand to open her eyes and find herself back in this place where Christmas is being carted away in boxes, where angels are being taped into bubble wrap and trees are leaning against the curb. I touched her but there still was no reaction, and I wondered for a second if she was choosing the slow suicide so many hospice patients opt for, if she was so eager to blot out the sadness that she was willing to blot out everything else too. But I looked at her kids on the bedside table and figured that I was just being melodramatic. I hung the dress on the hook of her door and unzipped the bag. It sprang out in all directions and I left it there, a message for when she woke up.

Some days this place just sucks you down. Each bed holds a different story and each story ends the same. Now I stand in the hall, looking one way and then the other, and finally decide not to go straight to Carolina’s room. One of the other volunteers is spending a couple of weeks with her daughter in California over the holidays and she has asked me to keep an eye on her client, a ninety-four-year-old woman named Miss Eula who is confused, sweet, docile, and apparently utterly alone in the world. No one came to see her over Christmas and New Year’s except a choir from a nearby church that makes an annual trek of coming on Christmas Eve, walking the halls by candlelight and singing “Silent Night.” It’s beautiful, I guess, but also a little creepy. The nurse on duty said Miss Eula had opened her eyes when the choir walked by. She hasn’t spoken in weeks, so it’s impossible to tell how much of it registered, but according to her file she had once played the organ in a Baptist church.

“She was employed by a church?” I said to the nurse. “Where the hell are those people? Why don’t her former choir mates come to see her?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess she outlived them all.” And a little chill had run across me, light and quick like a mouse. When I look at someone like Miss Eula who has come to the end without a spouse or children, I see myself in that lonely bed. I’ve always assumed that Elyse will be the one to truly grow old with me. We joke about it in a not totally joking way—how we’ll move in together, take care of each other. Make big pots of stew with nourishing root vegetables, move to Scotland, watch our movies all day long. But the joking hides a truth that neither of us wants to face—that unless we pull a Thelma and Louise, we’re highly unlikely to die on the same day. One of us will outlive the other and become Miss Eula.

In most ways Miss Eula is easier than Carolina because she doesn’t seem to understand what’s happening. She is motionless when I come into the room, except for the gentle rise and fall of her chest, and I sit down beside her bed. I wonder if she can hear. They have said she’s down to the final days, but I have always suspected that hearing is the last sense to go. I don’t know why I believe this, but I talk to people as long as I can, until my tongue goes numb and rubbery and the stories I’m telling no longer make sense. I read to them from library books—children’s stories seem the most appropriate and best—but I have no book today and I don’t really know enough about this woman to guess at what sort of story she might want me to tell.

“Silent night,” I say. “Holy night.”

She doesn’t move.

“All is calm,” I say. “All is bright.” It’s not my favorite Christmas carol, but I do like that line. It’s nice to picture heaven—or whatever word people assign to whatever comes next—as calm and bright. I could sing, I suppose, but I have a terrible voice and I don’t want this poor woman, assuming she can indeed still hear, to go out on a wave of my discordant notes. “Round yon virgin,” I say. “Holy and mild?”

It’s surprisingly hard to remember the lyrics of songs without singing them, so finally I do begin to sing softly, just to get myself back in the groove of remembering. I mumble my way through “Silent Night” and “Joy to the World” and “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” and Miss Eula does not move. It’s not the first time I have half sung to a patient, although it always feels a bit awkward at first. I finish up my little recital with “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” and stand up. Ease my way from her bedside as if she were a sleeping child, even though I know I could probably upend every piece of furniture in the room without disturbing this woman.

Carolina’s door is open but she’s still asleep. I could take the dress off the hook and go home but I’m not sure if she’s been conscious during the last twenty-four hours, if she’s even opened her eyes long enough to see it. I stand again in the hall, turning, indecisive. A young man leaves the room across from Carolina’s. His T-shirt says “Love Your Enemy,” but he is one of those angry boys, charging from some relative’s bedside as if it were a bar where he’d been insulted. Maybe the phrase is meant ironically, a punk message. Maybe Love Your Enemy is the name of a band. I wander down to the lounge area. Some of the clients are sitting there, watching the disintegration of Christmas, and I wander back.

This time, her eyes are open. She presses a button and raises her bed a little. “Were you just here?”

“Yeah. Did I wake you?”

She looks at me vaguely. “You brought your dress.”

“That was yesterday. I left it here last night so you could see it.”

She nods, slowly. “I’ve been thinking about what your friend Elyse said.”

“You’re going to have to be more specific. Elyse says lots of things.”

She grins and for a minute there’s a flash of the old Carolina. “She asked me if I’d ever been in love. But I didn’t really answer her.”