The Unexpected Waltz (21 page)

“And just where do you plan to find this civilian partner?” Jane asks.

“The group class, of course,” she says, and we all start to giggle, picturing Harry and Lucas decked out in tuxedos and taking the floor.

“Well,” I say, “there’s always Steve.” And this makes us laugh harder for some reason. We’ve all gone punchy with some combination of nerves and vodka and hair spray fumes and sleep deprivation.

“Dr. Boob wouldn’t dance with me if I was the last woman on earth,” says Isabel. “I might make a mistake and God forbid he ends up with a partner who makes a mistake.”

“Steve’s not quite as bad as you think,” I say, and then I ask Jane, who’s been keeping a running total of who’s placing where on her program, how we’re doing on overall points.

“Good,” she says. “But I don’t know about Studio of the Year.” Anatoly really wants that silly trophy but we’re probably too far off our native turf. Some ballroom in Georgia will more likely take it. For the first time in a long time I feel like I’m on the inside of a group. I wish Carolina could be here. I should get my phone and send a few pictures to her.

Nik has been standing right at the edge of the dance floor, watching Pamela compete with Anatoly. She’s one of the dancers whose name is known around the region and it means a lot to the whole studio, but still . . . he shouldn’t be hovering so close or watching her so obviously. The rumor is her husband might show up. Apparently that’s always the rumor, at every comp and showcase, that Pamela’s husband might just swoop in at the last minute and start shooting or something. I glance around the ballroom. The judges are bent, conferring over their score sheets, and Nik rubs the back of his neck. He’s spent, I think. They all are.

I should have danced. Why didn’t I? What am I waiting for? It is just like Nik warned me it would be. I’ve run around all day like one of Cinderella’s mice, sewing rips and painting lips and fetching orange juice and being helpful and hesitant, just like I’ve always been. I may as well scoop up some of these molted feathers and dropped sequins from the floor and make them a goddamn tablescape. I’m the worst kind of hypocrite. I knocked Valentina for taking small steps when I didn’t take any steps at all.

At the table beside us, a woman has sat down while she waits for the callbacks to be announced. She puts her foot on a chair and I can see that she’s bleeding through her shoes. She’s wearing the pretty competition kind, which are made of pale gold silk. They’re designed to be flesh-colored, at least if you’re Caucasian, to imply one long stretch between your foot and leg. But apparently she didn’t break hers in enough before competition and she’s popped blisters. A pattern of blood has run across the top of her shoes, making the outline of each toe distinct.

“God,” I say, “I’m so sorry. Do you want an ice pack?” The ice packs are for our dancers, and she’s probably Pamela’s competition so maybe I shouldn’t have offered. But it comes out of my mouth automatically.

She shakes her head. “No time,” she says. And just then they announce a string of numbers and she rises, her shoe growing redder the moment she puts weight on it. She gives me a look somewhere between a smile and a wince and says, “Only the strong survive.”

They have called Pamela’s number too. Anatoly takes her hand and she seems to glide to the center of the ballroom, the red floats of her gown billowing behind her. She’s smiling even though there’s no guarantee of anything, not at this level, where everyone is good.

Nik is suddenly beside me. He puts his arm across the back of my chair.

“So,” he says, “you are bitten with bug? You will compete next time?”

“Not only that,” I say, “but I’m going to buy your girlfriend’s dress.”

CHAPTER
FOURTEEN

C
AROLINA IS BACK
in hospice. They took her in last night, after exactly what they warned might happen did. She caught a cold, probably from her kids, and her white blood cell count zoomed out of control. She treats it as a temporary setback, but she’s too smart to misread what this really means. Her immune system is shot. She can no longer screen out the everyday toxins of life, so she will spend her last Christmas in Hospice House after all.

“She seems defeated,” the client coordinator told me, but after I saw her, I would have said a better word was “fatalistic.” A lot of cancer patients are like this. People who come in from strokes and heart attacks often have a startled expression, as if they were ambushed, but most cancer patients have been stalked by their disease for months, even years. They’ve tried to hold the truth at bay: skipped tests, ignored symptoms, made excuses for how bad they’ve felt. But deep inside they’ve heard the rustling of the leaves and felt the breath of the beast. When he finally catches up to them, they are not terribly surprised.

“We need to come up with a dance quick,” I tell Nik. “It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be fast. Something we can perform in front of people who don’t know anything about dancing. People who have other things on their minds.”

He considers this for a moment. “We will waltz,” he says. “And we open with three unsupported spins.”

“I don’t do unsupported spins,” I remind him.

And so we spin. My whole private lesson is forty-five minutes of just the opening, practicing how we will get across this broad, flat floor to meet in the middle, and I am still, despite all his council about spotting by looking at a fixed place on the wall and keeping my abdominal muscles tight, coming out of the turns weak and wobbly. Almost falling into his arms.

This has been a frustrating session, but Nik is superstitious. He never lets me move on until I have at least somewhat mastered the step in question. I suppose I can understand it from his point of view—he doesn’t want me to get it in my head that certain steps are impossible—but on the flip side, this philosophy of teaching means that sometimes the lessons never end.

“What are you afraid of?” he asks me.

“Falling. Everything. I’m weak in the gut,” I say. But it’s more than that. I don’t have the stamina I once had and my lungs are aching with effort. My knees are even starting to hurt although I’d die before I’d admit that part. The older women at the studio are always complaining about their knees.

Nik is unimpressed. “You just need practice.” He demonstrates again. A perfect 360.

This time I’m so nervous I underspin, not making it quite all the way around. If we had been in hold, Nik would have been able to use my hand to help rotate me, tugging me the rest of the way through the circle. But in competition, a judge would catch that in a heartbeat, and besides, I can’t always depend on Nik being there. In group class the guys don’t help you at all. It’s every dancer for himself, with half the people overrotating and the rest of them underrotating. Once Lucas and I came out of a spin back to back.

Nik is trying hard to make a point. He spins and tells me to call out a number while he’s turning: 180, 360, 405, 540. No matter what number of degrees I call, he stops right on it, beautifully and without the slightest wobble. He isn’t doing this to show off, but rather to prove to me it can be done.

“Now,” Nik says, “you will push on pole.” We’ve come to the end of our forty-five minutes and he leads me over to the stripper-style pole in the corner that the young girls use to work on their backbends. I need to at least nail the 360, he says, before we can go further. I feel like a kid kept behind after class for bad behavior, and besides, we’ve spun a thousand times and my right foot is already hurting.

“I’m in a bad place with this,” I tell him, and I can feel myself starting to cry.

“Just for a minute, then you can stop,” he says.

“Sometimes people come to their personal limit, you know? My friend Elyse says everybody has a limit.”

“Yes. True. This is not your limit.”

“What makes you so sure?” I say, and to my horror I realize I am truly crying now. It’s not the spinning, or at least not just the spinning. It’s Carolina and finding Daniel on Facebook and the fact that I’m staring down the barrel of another Christmas without Mark. It’s everything.

I stomp out onto the sidewalk and leave him there, frowning at me, probably thinking I’m just one more self-indulgent American who’s never really dug in and worked for anything in her life. I’m so rattled that I’ve walked out in my practice shoes with their suede bottoms and risked ruining them on the sidewalk, so I sit down on the nearest bench to unbuckle them. Steve’s car is in the parking lot. I don’t know many cars, but I know his, this red BMW that screams out everything you need to know about the man. It’s three minutes after three and he’s just sitting there, alone in his car. I’ve always assumed the way he hurries in a few minutes after the hour was an affectation, his way of reminding us that his time is far more important than anyone else’s. But now I see him late but still waiting, until finally, at five minutes past three, he jumps out with his dance shoes in hand and dashes in the door as if he’s just arrived.

He’s scared, I think. He has so much trouble talking to people that he pretends to run late so that he has an excuse for not hanging out.

Maybe I’m a coward but I’ll be damned if I’m as big a coward as Steve. I push to my feet, grab my shoes, open the door, and walk back in. Nik very pointedly ignores me and I ignore him. I walk over to the pole and push off it. I go around in an almost circle, maybe 330 degrees, something like that. Not 360. I push again.

Quinn is working with Jane and apparently everything about her upper body is a disaster. Quinn is running her hands down the length of Jane’s arms, pulling some parts down and others up in pursuit of that elusive thing called frame. In waltz, the shoulders should be relaxed, the upper arm lifted—this in itself is hard enough—with the elbow in perfect alignment with the shoulder and the wrist dropped flat against the man’s bicep. Who knew the human arm had so many parts? Or the hand? The middle finger is key, extended straight out as a natural continuation of the arm. The second and fourth fingers are slightly elevated, and the pinky a centimeter higher still. You can do it, if you think about it. You can do it in the mirror, before class. But when the music starts and there are a hundred other things to remember, it’s easy for your hand to forget its graceful task and become a grasping claw. Pawing the air in search of any solid surface—preferably your instructor.

But frustration is what we’re paying for. Frustration is what we all want. Quinn guides Jane’s arm up and down, and I spin again, over and over, trying to find that still space in myself. It’s a type of meditation. It drives out all emotion and makes me forget everything. I have almost forgotten the sight of Carolina lying pale and motionless on her narrow bed.

Isabel has the next lesson after mine. She demands certain songs and certain dances during her private time with Nik. She likes to rumba to Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game.” When she told us this once, over drinks, every woman in the group had giggled a little slyly. “Wicked Game” is such a fantasy song for women. We have all imagined running across that white beach, toward that lanky, squinting boy. Nik tries to get her to dance to something else. He puts his iPhone in the stereo cradle and punches up this thumping Eurosound, pretending that he’s going to lead her into something modern and formless. But she just puts her hands on her hips and refuses to budge.

Maybe I should throw more fits, because Isabel is certainly not afraid to be a pain in the ass. She knows the instructors call her high-maintenance, but that can be said about most of the women at the studio, and besides, Nik likes her. She isn’t his favorite. She doesn’t pick up the steps the quickest, she doesn’t have the best form, and she certainly isn’t the easiest to get along with. But Isabel seems to understand that it isn’t necessary to be everyone’s favorite and I would imagine that realization must feel like manacles falling from your ankles. She stands in the middle of the floor with her hands on her hips until Nik laughs indulgently and puts on “Wicked Game.”

I spin. I watch them. It amazes me how different he is with each of us, how he brings a different part of his personality to every client’s dance. He treats Pamela, at least in public, like a china doll. He kids around with Isabel like a sister, speaks Russian with Valentina, and with me and Jane . . . he is harsher, more pedantic. Take it as a compliment, Quinn has told me. He doesn’t waste his energy on people unless he thinks they have promise.

Students come and go. Jane leaves, Steve leaves. Valentina stops by with some papers. Her English is a little too formal but otherwise perfect, and Quinn told me once that she had been a translator back in Moscow, that she still does some work for the studio. She leaves a folder on Quinn’s desk, waves at me, and I wave back. I’m covered with sweat by this point and my heart went into the aerobic zone about fifty spins ago, but I’ve come up with a system. I do five spins holding on to the pole and then five spins without holding on to the pole. Then a break for the vertigo to subside. When I use the pole for leverage, I can make it the full 360 most of the time. Without it, the turns are more of a crapshoot, but I won’t have a stripper pole beside me when I waltz at hospice.

By the time Isabel pays and leaves I can do ten unsupported spins in a row, about three of them good. Nik comes up to me and says “Enough spin” and asks me to tango. Just asks me, like I’m a regular person he met at a party. He knows how hard I’ve been working. This is a little reward. Two free minutes of tango.

We pivot, we corte, and it all feels easy after the spinning. I try to tell him that I’m sorry I got upset, but he stops me and says, “Everyone cries. Some cry and come back.”