The Unexpected Waltz (16 page)

“It seems like it’s been a long time since we’ve had dinner together on the phone.”

She pauses. “You’ve been taking group lessons almost every night and then going out for drinks with your new friends afterward. You’re a lot busier than you used to be. And that’s a good thing.”

“Is it? Sometimes I feel like dance has eaten up my whole life.” Now it’s my turn to pause. There’s something wrong in that sentence but I’m not sure exactly what. “You were always the one who was too busy for me,” I finally finish lamely.

“Kelly, it’s fine,” she says with a laugh. “As it should be.”

“You don’t think we’re growing apart?”

“Don’t be silly. We don’t have to talk every night just to prove we’re friends. We’re not in high school anymore.”

“But you’re still coming at Christmas, right?”

“Of course I am. You’re my home. Always have been, always will.”

I HANG UP THE
phone unsettled and craving a taco salad. They were one of my private indulgences during my marriage, one of the things I would sneak out to eat when Mark was playing golf. Now all of a sudden I want the whole guilty thing, with the jalapeño ranch dressing and the sour cream and tortilla chips and dark meaty chili with cinnamon and garlic.

I’ve never gotten the hang of asking for a table for one, so I just take a seat at Esmerelda’s bar, wedged between a young girl who keeps tossing her hair on me and a sour-faced man who never looks up from his food. Happy hour has started and the speaker above my head is pumping out music with such force that the whole bar is vibrating. They have one of those big glass containers on the corner of the bar that’s approximately the size and shape of a beehive but instead of honey it holds vodka and many wedges of pineapple, intricately stacked. It’s all lit from below so that it looks like it’s glowing and I noticed it the first night I came in with the group class. Alcohol as art, I guess.

“What do you call that drink?” I ask the bartender. “The one with the vodka and pineapple juice?”

“Vodka and pineapple juice.”

“Oh,” I say. “Okay, I’ll try it.”

The drink is strong, sweet, heavy on my tongue. The backs of my knees are hurting, like they do all the time now, and as I reach down to rub them I see, of all things, Steve sitting in the corner. He is having dinner with a woman who looks like a young Mary Tyler Moore. He notices me too and nods.

“Would you like a drink?” the man beside me asks.

“I have a drink,” I point out.

“What I mean is, I’d like to pay for your drink,” he says. “In celebration of the fact I’m getting to sit beside such a beautiful woman.”

“I’m not sure my husband would like that,” I say, pointedly twisting my ring.

He backs down. They always do. The size of this ring is kryptonite.

“Well, you’re still pretty,” he says, and then he leans back, presumably to take a shot with the hair-tossing woman on my other side.

Just then Steve’s date squeezes by us and disappears down the bright orange hall, evidently in search of the ladies’ room. She has her purse with her, which is normal, but she also has her jacket with her, which is not. And she’s walking just a little too fast.

She’s bailing on him.

I can read it in her body language. She may be acting like she’s headed to the bathroom but she’s really going to walk out that back service door at the end of the hall and just keep going. I look over my shoulder. The waiter is delivering the food to Steve’s table, and judging from the way he’s smiling and joking with the guy, I don’t think he’s realized anything has happened.

I wonder how long it’s going to take him to figure out that she’s gone. It pains me to watch him in the mirror, looking about the room, obviously unsure if he should start eating his own food or wait for her to return. He makes some comment to the people at the table beside him, giving them his big, full-throttle billboard smile, but I’ve seen this man anxious before and I recognize that slight pucker between the brows. It’s beginning to dawn on him that he may have to finish this meal alone.

It’s hard to eat alone, true. But not nearly as uncomfortable as it was on those times I went out to eat with Mark and he simply wouldn’t talk. He never had any of my social self-consciousness. If Mark had nothing to say, then he said nothing—which I suppose is admirable if you’re a Zen master but which did me little good in restaurants, where I always imagined other diners were looking at us with pity. “What a sad couple that is, eating with their heads down, sitting there in silence,” I would imagine them thinking. “She’s utterly failed to enchant him—that much is clear.”

Once I told Mark about this little trick Elyse and I used to have when we were in high school and they were taking pictures of us for the school paper or yearbook. One of the side effects of popularity is that you’re in a lot of pictures, and in them you want to be chatting and laughing and talking—like you’re the sort of funny, clever girl who deserves to be so frequently photographed. So we came up with a little ruse. While we were waiting for the kid to take our picture, Elyse would turn to me and say, “ABC?”

And I would answer back “DEFGH,” then pause for a second and add “IJ.” We would carry on like that for as long as it took, saying the alphabet back and forth to each other while the camera flashed, creating images of two girls who were full of lively conversation, who always had plenty to say.

Mark had been nothing short of flabbergasted by the suggestion. “You want us to sit here,” he said, “in a perfectly lovely restaurant having a perfectly lovely meal, and keep saying the alphabet back and forth to each other? All because you have it in your head that the busboy feels sorry for us?” And then he sat back in his seat and leveled the same condemnation he had directed toward me so many times before.

“You expect too much,” he said.

Did I? Was I really that much like Elyse by the end or was that bit about expecting too much just something all men say to all women? Now, sitting here alone in a Mexican restaurant, I pull a dance shoe from my purse, where I stuck them after today’s lesson. I hold it in my palm, turn it from side to side under the bar, admiring the elegant, torturous arch in the sole. I want this, I suddenly think. I haven’t wanted anything in a long, long time. The vodka has hit me like a truth serum and it’s scary to think that I might want something that Mark’s money can’t buy for me, something that being the pretty girl won’t help me get either. Scary to want something that I can only give myself. I take another sip of the drink, roll it around in my mouth, and beneath the bar I stretch my legs. Developing your flexibility is the most painful and dangerous part, Nik says. Much harder than becoming fast or strong.

My salad comes and I cram the shoe back into my purse. Yep. I want this. I want this and no one else can give it to me. But, it occurs to me that if you want something that no one else can give you, then no one else can take it away from you either, and there’s a certain comfort in that. I’m going to have to figure out a way to stand tall and give Nik the sort of frame he’s asking me for. I take a bite out of the chili and look around the bar. Except for the man who wanted to buy me a drink and now possibly Steve, I’m the only person in the whole room sitting alone. Everyone else has a friend or a lover or at least someone they work with. Elyse likes to eat alone but I’ve never understood that, never understood her penchant for solitude in public places. I feel vulnerable, I think, and I can almost imagine Nik whipping out his iPhone and saying, “What is this ‘vulnerable’?”

“Hey,” says Steve. He’s come up behind me. “I know this is a little out of line, but I have a favor to ask you.”

“You want me to go to the bathroom and look for your date?”

He grimaces and shakes his head. “I don’t think you’d find her. I was wondering if you would just pick up your salad and come sit down at my table. The waiter feels sorry for me. And so do the people beside me.”

“She might come back. Maybe she went on the sidewalk to make a phone call.”

“I doubt it. That door leads to the loading dock. This isn’t the first time this has happened to me.”

“Well . . . okay,” I say slowly, but I’m wondering what the waiter is going to think when he comes back and finds a whole new woman at the table. I slide off the bar stool and Steve grabs my salad and my vodka and pineapple juice. When we get to his table, I notice Mary Tyler Moore’s plate has already been cleared and that the couple beside us does indeed seem to be taking a lively level of interest in the unfolding drama. Or maybe they’re just happy to have a distraction, something to focus on other than each other.

“So what happened?” I say to Steve when we get everything settled and I’m in my seat. “Did she get pissed off or something?”

“I have no idea,” he says, raising his margarita to his lips. “It was a setup. You know, a blind date. All of mine are.”

“Come on.”

“Trust me, being known as Dr. Boob of Charlotte makes dating a challenge.” And then he proceeds to tell me that a lot of women refuse to date a plastic surgeon on principle and that this, along with his ex-wife’s efforts to get him blackballed from the city’s elite social clubs, has driven him to do the unthinkable—to sign up for a matchmaking service. A discreet one, of course, and he has carefully instructed the women working there to describe him only as a doctor, without elaborating on the exact nature of his practice.

“The whole dating after forty thing,” he says, “is impossible.”

I’ve misjudged him. Maybe I’ve misjudged lots of people about lots of things. So I sit there steadily eating and let him tell me all about the women he’s met through the dating service. Women, not girls, he insists. He won’t go below thirty, that’s just sick. Quinn is like the daughter he never had, the daughter he was too busy to have, and he loves her for the very fact that she doesn’t care how she looks. He dates at least twice a week, he says, but it’s tough. Thanks to the billboards, some of the women recognize him on sight. Others walk into the restaurant or bar and when they see him they frown and start wondering why his face is familiar. And then at some point in the evening, it hits them. He dreads this moment, dreads the self-consciousness that inevitably follows. Sometimes he feels like he’s spent the year since his divorce buying strange women drinks and listening to them apologize for the size and shape of their breasts. He’s been trapped in one-sided arguments about feminism and the La Leche League and
Baywatch
reruns, he tells me. He’s been the subject of very amateur and very unfair Freudian analysis.

“That’s awful,” I say, although while he’s been telling me all this, a couple of times I’ve snuck a look at my own cleavage. My breasts used to be quite good but now I’ve got a bit of asymmetry and tons of age spots on my chest and most definite sagging.

“And you want to know the joke of it all?” he says. “I’m an ass man.” He sighs, puts his empty glass down, and gestures to the waiter that we’ll need two more. “So what brings you out to Esmerelda’s?”

He doesn’t say “What brings you out ‘alone,’” but I feel the word, sitting between us on the table just as plain as the basket of chips.

“Nik told me I’m too old to do the cha-cha.”

Steve stops midbite. “He did not.”

“Well, not in so many words. But the more I think about it, the more I think maybe he’s right.”

“Why do we do this to ourselves?” he asks, waving his fork around.

“Do what? The dating?”

“The dancing. Why do we keep trying?”

“Because it’s our new religion.”

“Quinn calls it optimal frustration.”

“Yeah, she said that to me too. Just today.” He sighs again and looks around the room as if he’s still somewhat embarrassed by the situation.

“Oh, come on,” I tell him. “Don’t get all morose just because Mary Tyler Moore ran out on you.”

“You want her burrito to go? I told the waiter to box it.”

“Sure,” I say. “Tomorrow’s lunch.”

“You really think she looked like Mary Tyler Moore? Because if I’m going to get dumped in a Mexican restaurant, I’d like to think that at least I was dumped by Mary Tyler Moore.”

I laugh and pick up my second drink. Earlier I thought that I felt “vulnerable,” but now I’m thinking that wasn’t the right word. I have sore knees and I’m too old to shake my ass and I want something that I probably can’t get, and here I am eating dinner with some other woman’s discarded date and the word for what I’m feeling is “happy.” I’m happier than I’ve been in a long, long time.

CHAPTER
TWELVE

M
ARK AND I
went to the MS Holiday Auction every December for years and the tickets automatically arrive the day after Thanksgiving, in the mail—two of them. I stick them to the refrigerator with a magnet.

And about a week before the event, the calls start. Some from the ostentation and some from people I haven’t seen since Mark’s funeral. He was one of the big donors to this particular charity and it seems important to the planning committee that I be there. Several couples offer to stop by and pick me up so that I don’t have to find my way to the big, bad hotel on my own. “We thought you might not want to drive at night,” said one woman, as if I were the one who was eighty, as if it weren’t widely known throughout our gated community that her own husband/chauffeur was half-blind, half-deaf, and in the early stages of dementia.