Waltzing at Midnight (14 page)

I watched her eyes, deep brown and luxurious, focus on mine and then look away, almost shyly, it seemed. How beautiful she is, I thought, admiring the streak of gray hair above her ear, the delicate neck in the open collar of her flannel shirt, her bare forearms with their fine covering of light-colored hair, her long fingers resting on the base of her wineglass. As I admired her features, I allowed myself to admit what I had been pushing out of my mind for some time—I wanted to touch her. I knew what that meant and how frightening it was, but it had been there for a long time, suppressed, growing more insistent and more impossible to rationalize away.

I looked away from her captivating gaze. “The wine is very good,” I said nonchalantly, my voice sounding strangely unlike me. “Yes, it’s one of my favorites. I have a friend with a vineyard.

He always comes through with a few bottles of this one for me.

He’s got the most fantastic cabernet too. Maybe next time, we can…” She stopped and looked embarrassed. “Well, perhaps I’ll snag a bottle for you sometime if you’d like.”

I was grateful to hear the phone ring. Rosie went into the living room to answer it, while I sat immobile at the kitchen table, nearly frantic on the inside, afraid to examine the jumble of thoughts and feelings erupting toward the surface.

When Rosie returned, she was frowning. “That woman is such an idiot,” she said, sitting down.

“Who’s that?”

“Tanya Lockhart.”

“I don’t know her, do I?”

Rosie shook her head. “Arts Commission charter member. The wife of a doctor with lots of time to devote to humanitarianism.

She’s been plaguing me for years. She wants to be part of everything, and people tolerate her because she has money and she’s generous with it. But you can always count on her for inanity.

102

This time she was worried about one of the entrants in the art scholarship contest. She said he was Yugoslavian and didn’t speak English.” Rosie used her fork for emphasis. “So, I said, what’s the problem? She said it would be disastrous if he won.”

“Why?”

“My question too. She said because he wouldn’t be able to deliver a thank you speech to the commission.” Rosie laughed.

“Imagine that. That tells you a lot about this woman. Is she concerned about art, really? Does she even know anything about art? No. She wants to make sure the Commission—she—gets the gratitude of the little people it helps…in English.”

“He could have a translator.”

“Exactly. She said it wouldn’t be the same. And then I got mad at her and threatened her with a charge of xenophobia if she did anything at all to bias the judges. Of course she didn’t know what it meant, but she’s too insecure to ask for a definition. Probably she’s looking it up now in her dictionary, probably under ‘z’.”

Rosie grinned and swallowed a large bite of rice. “Oh, Jean, that reminds me of a funny story about Tanya. You’ve got to hear this one.”

I was glad we’d found something to talk about, something to overcome the tension.

Rosie talked excitedly with her mouth full. “It’s been years ago now, when the Hmong people first arrived in California. I guess that was early eighties? Tanya was the director of the Women’s Action League of the county, and she was looking for a project.

I was a new member at the time. Someone mentioned that San Jose had started an Adopt-A-Hmong-Family program which had been very successful. We’d heard of all of the difficulties facing the Hmongs in our society. They were obviously in need of help in assimilating, more so perhaps than the other Asian groups who had already arrived after Vietnam. Well, Tanya took off after that idea like a squirrel up a pine tree. She promoted the program with flyers and posters and held fund-raising activities.” Rosie started giggling. “‘Adopt A Hmong Family’ was an omnipresent slogan around town. The response was tremendous, really. They 103

had educational lectures at the college about the Hmongs to raise public awareness. There was even a five-page report distributed at various service agencies explaining the Hmong language and listing the most common words. It was an impressive campaign, and Tanya was responsible for everything, except, of course, that she borrowed most of her material from San Jose. Well, the result was that we raised a lot of money. Then came the day when we would identify the Hmong families deserving of our goodwill.

You can’t really appreciate the humor of this unless you were there, but I’ll just say that’s when we found out that there were no Hmongs in our county.”

I laughed.

“Not one,” Rosie added. “Tanya panicked. She sent out pleas to Sacramento, to the Bay Area, to Bakersfield to please send us some Hmongs! None came. She couldn’t stall indefinitely, of course. People were waiting. Finally, Tanya found a group of Laotians who were willing to accept our help. They were photographed and passed off as Hmong.”

“That’s a good story,” I said.

“Tanya wasn’t daunted. She never is. But the next year, when the Hmongs came, nobody paid any attention to them.

Unfortunately, as they’ve had a hard time of it. Tanya is concerned primarily about image, her image. That woman grates on me so, I can’t tell you.”

We finished our meal and Rosie poured the last of the wine into both of our glasses equally. “I’m going to turn off the ringer for the phone while I’m gone,” Rosie said. “My phone rings a lot. I’ll let voice mail take the calls, then I can check them from Phoenix and not bother you. You’ll have your cell phone with you, right?”

Of course she wouldn’t want me taking her calls. That was one area where her personal and professional personas would mingle, and she wanted to keep me away from that. I finished my wine, feeling hot.

I saw that Rosie was looking at me as if she had something to say, but then she said nothing. Instead, she just stood, saying, 104

“Are we done here?”

I nodded.

“I’ll be leaving obscenely early in the morning,” she said. “I’ll feed the horses before I go, though, so you can just come out tomorrow afternoon.” Rosie put the dishes in the dishwasher, then said, “Come into the living room, Jean. I have something for you.”

While Rosie rummaged through a pile of papers on a counter in the living room, I sat on the couch, taking in my surroundings.

This room was simply and comfortably furnished with a mix of old and new like the rest of the house. It was a little disheveled too, a little neglected. One bookshelf contained a puzzling assortment of objects. There were books, but they were shoved in haphazardly, some upright, some lying flat in stacks, some even with the bindings facing in, and then there were papers and photos interspersed among them. There was very little order in the room, but it wasn’t especially cluttered. It had the look of a room that hadn’t received much attention over the years other than the obligatory cleaning.

After a few moments, Rosie said, “Oh, here it is,” and produced a five by seven photo in a frame. She sat beside me on the couch as I took it from her. It was a picture of the two of us, taken in Valencia Park at one of our last neighborhood barbecues, me in a Rosie for Mayor T-shirt and wearing one of those white straw hats, serving spoon in hand. She was standing beside me, her arm around my waist, her smile large, showing teeth. My smile, I noticed, was joyful, and I was looking at Rosie. Her head was slightly inclined toward me, as if she’d been listening to something I said. It was a great picture of us both. Looking at the expression on my face in that photo, I recognized something that I hadn’t actually seen with my eyes before, but had only felt.

“Somebody took that at one of the barbecues,” Rosie said. “I made this copy for you. I thought you’d like to have a memento.”

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you. I’m very happy to have it.”

“It captures the moment well, I thought. The crazy fun of the 105

thing, you know.”

“Yes, it was fun.”

“Excellent likeness of you.”

So this is what Rosie saw when I looked at her, I realized—

eyes full of joy, expression almost childlike in admiration.

When I looked up from the photo, I saw that she was looking at me with a slight, affectionate smile. The gray shock of hair above her ear stuck out whimsically at an odd angle. I reached over with my free hand and tucked it in, my fingers lingering for a moment on her exquisite ear, my thumb resting on the blue vein in her temple. I had to struggle to remove my hand. As I looked back to her face, I saw that her smile had faded.

“I’m falling in love with you,” I said, so quietly I barely heard it, and then wasn’t sure I had said it aloud after all.

She was just looking at me, no expression, eyes unblinking. “I know,” she said at last.

So I had said it aloud. “When did you know?”

“I’ve suspected for quite a while. But I didn’t think you’d recognize it. I knew, finally, that you knew it too on election night, at the party. When I found you on the deck, you were clearly lost in thought, watching Valerie and Carol down by the lake. When you turned and saw me, you looked like you expected me to be there. It was as though you had projected yourself, and me, out there. The way you looked at me that night, just like you’re looking at me now, it’s become painfully obvious.”

“Painfully?”

She nodded.

“And you’ve been avoiding me ever since that night,” I said.

She nodded again. “I’ve tried. But here you are.” She laughed nervously.

I put my hand to her cheek. Or rather, it went there of its own accord. Her skin, covered with fine, invisible hairs, was silky.

Her eyes closed. My hand slid down to her pale neck. I felt a crawling sensation in the pit of my stomach, spreading upward to my breasts, downward to my thighs. I sensed a relaxing of her body, an inclination of her head, as if she were giving herself over 106

to the touch of my hand. I moved my fingers along the line of her jaw and up to her lips. They were warm, soft, velvety soft, and between them, where I placed my index finger, they were moist.

I was burning up. Rosie opened her eyes, reached up and gently took my hand away.

“No,” she said softly. “Don’t.” She gripped my hand tightly between us, as though afraid of letting it go. “Stop yourself, Jean.

I don’t want this. I won’t let it happen.”

I was being rejected, I realized. “Why?” I asked, hurt and confused. “Is there someone else?”

“Yes,” she said sharply. “There’s a guy named Jerry. Remember him? Twenty-two years of marital bliss.”

Oh, I thought, seeing her point. I had never cheated on Jerry, had never considered it. And here I was forgetting him altogether, because this wasn’t me at all, this wasn’t his wife sitting here wanting this woman.

“There are lots of other reasons too,” Rosie said. “You’re much better off not complicating your life.”

She’s right. What was I thinking? The problem was that I wasn’t thinking, of course.

“I shouldn’t have let you come here,” Rosie said, appearing distraught. She released my hand. “I should have stopped this when I first realized.”

She didn’t want trouble. Her life was in order. Rosie’s not available, I thought, and neither are you. Thank God she at least has some sense.

“Please don’t allow yourself to do this,” she said. “It’s only going to cause trouble.”

A minute later she was giving me a house key and I was walking to my car. Where will I go, what will I do, I thought, feeling like a person with no home. Somehow I did manage to drive myself home, though, because I eventually found myself lying in my bed, unable to sleep.

I lay awake through the night, the image of myself in that photo blistering my brain. My emotions were volcanoes, my thoughts jungles as I relived in my mind all of the moments 10

of my association with Rosie, trying to understand how I had arrived at this place. I replayed every second, from the day Faye had asked me to volunteer and I’d said, “Who’s Rosie Monroe?”

to this evening when I told her that I was in love with her. How did that happen? When exactly did it happen? It happened long before tonight, that was evident. That woman in the photo was already so obviously in love. The curious thing was that the other woman in the photo also looked as though she could be in love.

10

Thursday afternoon I went back to Rosie’s with my suitcase.

She was gone, of course. Her house was chilly and quiet. I turned up the heat, put my things in the guest room and went out to feed and water the horses. They were standing in the barn calmly with softly blinking eyes. I stroked their sleek noses and gave them some feed. I went over to the stack of hay and grabbed hold of the end of one of the bales, giving it a hard tug. It moved, but not much. Yes, they were heavy. Very impressive, Rosie, I thought.

As night descended, I wandered through the house, trying to feel Rosie’s presence, trying to imagine being her, living here.

On her bedroom dresser were a few photographs. I recognized the subjects of only one. She and Catherine, arms locked, smiling fondly at one another. Rosie was younger, her hair longer, thicker, curled. “Brown curls bouncing,” I remembered.

In the lower corner of a picture of a young woman, about twenty, Chinese ancestry, was the inked inscription, “Your Doting One, Sue.” She matched the voice on the phone—shy eyes, a small mouth turned into a tentative, appealing smile. Her hair 10

was long, straight and black. She was standing on bare granite wearing a backpack, an expansive vista behind her, obviously Yosemite. Too young for you, Rosie, I thought, but there was no date, so this photo could have been taken long ago. There was a photograph that could have been her family, mom and dad, a brother, a sister, and Rosie between them, about thirty years old, her smile quite recognizable, though her features were leaner. I realized that I had never even asked if she had living parents or siblings. There were several photos of Rosie at various ages with women who could have been lovers. No matter how long I stared at these photographs, they kept their secrets from me.