The Unexpected Waltz (6 page)

“You are practicing—”

“No, I’m not practicing. I mean I guess I was, but only because I was watching them and this . . . this is the first dance lesson I’ve ever really seen and like this is the first step I’ve ever really . . . I mean, you’re the boss, you’re the teacher. We can start wherever you say, but I don’t particularly want to start with something so . . . Actually, I need music. I think I’d be more, you know, relaxed if we had music.” I’m aware we are almost whispering, that he is standing unnervingly close to me, yet the silence of the room makes every word sound too loud and still I can’t seem to shut up. I let go of the wall and lurch. He’s thirty years younger than I am. I was not prepared for this.

He nods but does not smile automatically, like an American might do. He’s not going to laugh or say something to break the tension. If an American man stood this close or spoke this softly it would mean something, and it probably means something here too, but something I don’t yet understand. Nik smells of cigarette smoke and breath mints and another scent I can’t identify. He’s entirely too young, maybe, now that I stop to really look at him, not even twenty-five. I wish I’d known how short he was before I bought these damn shoes.

He extends a hand to me and I grab it and try to shake it before I realize he’s inviting me to dance. So my right hand is in his right. I’ve had so many clumsy handshakes lately. I seem to be shaking hands all over town, agreeing to any number of deals I don’t understand. But even though we are awkwardly linked, the boy doesn’t release his grip. He just backs onto the dance floor, pulling me along, and his palm is soft but very dry, almost as if he has dusted it with powder, as if he were a pool player or a gymnast, someone who must not let go, no matter what. He’s a child, possibly on steroids, and his hair is very strange. The gel in it must be the third thing I smell, or maybe it’s whatever he’s rubbed on his palms.

“We could start with cha-cha,” he says.

He takes me to the corner, far away from Quinn and the lord of the manor, which I appreciate. He has me stand behind him while he goes through a sequence of moves that I am supposed to watch and then emulate. It’s simple enough—a side step, a rock forward, then back, and a stuttering little three-step to the side, which I suppose is the cha-cha-cha part. His steps are small, I notice, which lets him move in a fast and controlled, almost mechanical manner. I watch once and then join in and he seems surprised.

“I used to be a cheerleader,” I say. “I know how to pick up routines.”

This information does not appear to enlighten him. I guess they don’t have a lot of cheerleaders in Russia. “Very good,” he says. “We add hips.”

We add hips.

He turns, frowns. “Very good again. Do not jerk hips. Foot movements are sharp, but hips roll through. Smooth and gentle.”

A little trickier. I try the sequence and he stops me.

“Hips sway and feet are sharp,” he says. “But top of body relaxed. Shoulders stay level. You are duck. This means—”

“I know,” I say. “Active on the bottom and serene on the top.”

“Serene?” he says slowly. “Just a minute.” And he goes over to the desk and pulls out an iPhone. I spell the world “serene” for him and he types it in. He doesn’t ask for the definition so I guess he got it from the context.

“I will have more English,” he says with a shrug, as he flips on the stereo and walks back toward me. “You learn fast, so now we dance with music.”

“Thank you,” I say.

“Thank you what?”

“For saying that I learn fast.”

He looks puzzled. “No need to say this,” he says. “I speak the truth.”

Okay, I think, so that’s a hint. He’s not going to flatter me and, in fact, he’ll probably get offended if he thinks I’m trying to flatter him. All we’re doing today is gauging my level of raw talent—a pure assessment, and thus no reflection of his abilities. But soon Nik will begin to see me as the product of his teaching and then I suspect that my progress—or lack of it—will matter very much. He’s got pride. He’s the sort of man who wants to know what people mean when they use a word like “serene.”

“Latin hold,” he says, stepping toward me, “is loose. Relaxed like hips.” He drapes my left arm over his right so that my hand comes to rest on his shoulder, almost at the base of his neck. He takes my right hand in his left so that we are standing close to each other. I have not been close to a man for a long time, and never like this. The muscles in his arms and shoulders. The faint smell of cigarettes, the dark and slightly slanted eyes, the dryness of his hand. I’m not sure where to look.

“This is what we most times do in lesson two,” he tells me. “But I do not think you will be the one to step on my foot.” Apparently his willingness to put on music and take me into hold is a sign that I’m having a good first lesson . . . or maybe anyone can do these steps immediately and he’s only suggesting I’m advanced as part of his sales pitch. That’s what Mark would say if he were here. I can hear his voice in my head, telling me that I’m gullible, which I suppose could be true, and yet I have the feeling that I really am doing well. How long has it been since I’ve tried something new, come someplace on my own without either Elyse or Mark to prop me up? I’d forgotten the simple joy of learning, the joy of mastering one thing and then moving on to something else. It’s a pleasure we normally concede to the young.

But now Nik is frowning again. “Arm should not lie like dead squirrel in road,” he says, tilting his head toward my left arm. “Even when in hold, lady must support her own weight. Keep shoulders back and arms to side. Not lean on man.”

I jerk my arm back, strangely stung. “I wasn’t leaning on you.”

“A little.”

I pull myself upright.

“Now,” Nik says. “I step forward and you step back. Begin with right foot. In dance, lady is always right. Only in dance. In everything else, man is right.”

He’s teasing. Making a little joke. At least I think he is. It’s impossible to tell by his expression.

But now that I’m self-conscious about my posture, it’s harder to move. He counts me down and we start the pattern and I’m going through the steps okay, but I seem to have lost all sense of rhythm, like the dance has suddenly been sucked right out of me. This sort of thing happens to me a lot. I call it the Curse of Early Promise. I tend to do well at things in the beginning, when they don’t matter, before I’ve had the chance to think too much or get nervous, and then at some point it all clinches down around me. I don’t know whom I’m trying to please, exactly, or why it matters how well a fifty-two-year-old woman keeps her form during a cha-cha lesson in a dance studio in the suburbs of Charlotte, North Carolina, in the middle of the afternoon. And yet I’m trying with everything in me to hold my arms loose and shoulders back while simultaneously making fast, small steps and rolling my hips gently through. Firm yet serene. Sharp yet smooth. On my own feet and still completely responsive to his movements. Even though it seems impossible to be all these things at once.

“Exhale,” he says.

I exhale.

We lose the beat for a minute. Find it again. I bang my knee against his.

“Maybe inhale too,” he says. “Good idea to do both.”

I stop and step back from him, dropping my arms. “I’m fucking it up, aren’t I?” I say. “When I try to balance, I get tense and when I relax, I get all wobbly. But there’s got to be some way to be both balanced and relaxed, isn’t there? I know there is. I could do it when I was a kid. But I’ve forgotten how to work my body.”

“What does it mean,” he says, “to have balance?”

“It means like, I don’t know, like your weight is distributed evenly so you don’t—”

“No,” he says. “I know definition. I am asking how you, Miss Kelly Wilder, will know it when it happens.”

I shake my head and we stand for a moment, neither of us moving, while the cha-cha music throbs on in the background. Then he glances at the clock.

“Thirty minutes,” he says.

It couldn’t be. It seemed maybe five. I thought we were going to have another chance to dance. Because I really do think I can get it. I just need one more song.

But Nik is already walking toward the front desk.

“That was first lesson,” he calls over his shoulder.

CHAPTER
FIVE

I
T DOESN'T TAKE
me long to drink the Kool-Aid.

After my free introductory lesson, Nik offers me three for $99, then three more for $165. And then, when they’re over, the next offer is ten for $850. The math isn’t hard, but I still do it in my head twice, just to make sure I haven’t failed to understand. The price per lesson really has almost tripled.

Nik seems nervous as he slides the contract toward me across the desk, and I say yes so fast I think I startle him. How does he want it—check? Charge? When he hesitates, I offer to go to an ATM and bring him back cash. Later I will learn that he hesitated because it’s standard to offer a free lesson with the ten-lesson deal and he didn’t know what to do when I agreed immediately. I’m not just drinking the Kool-Aid, I’m guzzling it.

The next time the cleaning lady comes over I give her a task, probably her first since Mark died. She helps me push all the furniture out of the foyer and roll up the rug, exposing the smooth wooden floor. Then we carry down the full-length mirror from my closet and wedge it into the corner so that I have my own small version of the studio, right inside the front door of my house. Marita shows an admirable lack of curiosity during this whole operation, even though I’ve got on my dance heels, which are slipping and sliding on the stairs. I wear them all the time now, trying to break them in, to make them as unconscious as bedroom slippers or flip-flops, and I also wear the black Lycra practicewear I got at Target.

The foyer looks strange with all the furniture smashed into the living room and the floors so naked. Like I’m moving, or maybe like I was never here in the first place.

“To hell with feng shui,” I tell Marita, who solemnly nods. “Anything that gets in the way of dance is bad karma.”

But when I flip on the speaker system and the Gipsy Kings come roaring out, she smiles. She will not dance with me, firmly shaking her head as I try to pull her into my bad salsa, but she stands on the broad, curved staircase, watching as I sway, first side to side and then forward and back.

The music is so loud that it takes a minute for me to realize the doorbell is ringing. I pull it open to find an ostentation of the neighborhood ladies clustered on the stoop. That’s what Mark used to call them when they were all together, an ostentation of ladies, and I think he got the term from what they call a group of peacocks. But despite the fact he made fun of their supercharged Range Rovers and designer bags, he always urged me to go with these women whenever they called to invite me to some sort of shopping outlet or garden show or play. He wanted me to have friends in the community. It bugged him, I think, that this was always more his home than mine.

The ostentation walks the development every morning, a reasonably ambitious undertaking, for the yards in this neighborhood are so large and the homes so spread apart that one lap equals over two miles. They usually do it twice. Right after Mark died they stopped by often, but I rarely went with them, and at times did not even bother getting out of bed and coming downstairs to open the door. After a while they gave up, just as after a while they stopped bringing by their offerings of jams, cakes, and pastries. It’s a southern thing, I guess, this compulsion to bake after someone dies. Ever since I was a child I’ve always associated the taste of sugar with grief.

“Hello,” they chorus as I open the door.

It’s the usual conversation. Come and walk the circle, they say. It will be good for you to get out. But the few times I pulled on my Nikes and went with them, it hadn’t been good for me at all. They eat and then they walk to work off what they’ve just eaten, and then they go home and cook some more and while they walk they talk about who is sick or dying or cheating or drinking or not quite as well off as she seems. It’s exhausting in ways that have nothing to do with four miles.

“I’m sorry,” I say, even though it’s nice of them to ring my doorbell after all this time. Nice of them to keep trying when I give them so little encouragement. “I know I need to walk, but today I’m moving furniture.”

They look at me with collective doubt. I am in my dance heels and black practicewear and the Gipsy Kings are yodeling now.

“How are you doing?” one of them asks. It strikes me as a real question, sincerely meant, and deserving of a real answer.

“I think I’m doing better,” I tell her.

“You look better,” she says. “You look . . . tall.”

“It’s the shoes.”

They back down the steps, their chatter fading with them. “Marita,” I say as I close the door, for she is still standing on the staircase. “Do you think I really am doing better?”

“
Si,
” she says. “
Mucho mejor.
”

THAT NIGHT, IN MARK'S
study, I read about the instructors on the Canterbury Ballroom webpage and try to weave in what they say about themselves in their bios—the European competitions they’ve danced in, their schooling and stated ambitions—with the shards of information I’ve picked up during my lessons. Anatoly is the owner of the studio, the man I saw dancing the first day I went in, and he’s been in the country the longest. He calls himself “the founder of the ballroom,” a touchingly elevated term for a business that employs three people in a fifteen-hundred-square-foot storefront.