The Unexpected Waltz (17 page)

In the end, I agreed to go. I wouldn’t be helping with the auction this year, or setting up the tables, but I would attend. “It’s the least you can do,” another woman told me, rather artlessly, and never let it be said that Kelly Wilder Madison didn’t do the least that she could do. I didn’t think about what to wear until the evening of the event and then I dug an old gown out of my closet. Dark blue, that kind of clipped velvet that looks almost like suede. Off one shoulder with an interesting play of the straps in the back and it had once been one of my favorites. But it’s snug when I pull it on. It makes puckers across my thighs and strains in the hips. I glance at the clock. I’m cutting it close on time as it is, so I don’t want to dig around trying to come up with something else. I find a pair of heavy-duty Spanx, the kind that start just under your breasts and end at your knees, and heave my way into them and then put the dress back on.

I look in the mirror. I feel miserable but I look okay, so I wiggle my way into the car and drive uptown to the hotel, trying to keep myself as diagonal as I can in the driver’s seat so that I don’t make a whole new set of creases in the dress. My decision to come was prompted more by guilt than anything else. Just as I’ve stopped calling Elyse every night, at some point in the last few months I’ve stopped thinking about Mark. Trying to preserve his legacy by going to this stupid auction—it’s a halfhearted stab at best. I’m sure I look ridiculous at stoplights, with my head pushed back and my butt in the air, and I wonder vaguely just how much weight I gained during that year I lay in bed and ordered takeout, and how much of it I’ve so far managed to dance off. I need to lay off the five-dollar margaritas at Esmerelda’s, that much at least is clear.

I valet. Toss five bucks at the kid and wobble inside. There are only a few name tags left on the table outside of the ballroom. One for me and one for Mark, I notice with a small pang. When I sent in the RSVP, did I respond for one, or did I just mail the form back without looking? It must have been the latter, because there it is, his name staring up at me.

“I’m Mrs. Madison,” I say, tapping my own name tag with a fingertip.

“Good evening, ma’am,” says the young girl working the desk, with the kind of overblown enthusiasm I’ve noticed is typical among nonprofit employees. “Is your husband parking the car?”

“No, it’s just me,” I say.

“Oh, that’s too bad. I hope Mr. Madison isn’t ill.”

“He’s dead.”

This shuts her up, if only for a minute. She seems confused as to why I am attending a charity event in an overtight dress when my husband’s just died, but I take pity on her and add, “It was a long time ago. I made a mistake on the RSVP.”

“I see,” she says, crumpling his name tag in her hand, as if that somehow makes it all better. “I’ll get someone to escort you to your table.”

Oh God. It just hit me that there will be an empty seat beside me. I’ll be as bad as Steve at Esmerelda’s. All the society ladies will gaze upon me with expressions of smug compassion. But the usher is already there. He holds his arm out to me, much like Nik does when we’re taking the floor at the studio.

“Mrs. Madison?” he says.

WHEN MARK MADISON PROPOSED
twenty years ago, it was an escape chute.

Because after Daniel had left town—or, more to the point, after Daniel had left me—I went through what Elyse called the Year of Many Boys. Which is a nice way of saying I was a slut. I’ve heard someone explain—Oprah maybe, or Dr. Phil, or Dr. Oz, or Ellen, some disembodied voice I’ve overheard in passing—that a lot of “sexually impaired” women go through periods of promiscuity, much in the way that compulsive gamblers believe one more roll of the dice will change their luck. And my job at the bank was tailor-made for brief, meaningless affairs. There were so many men and so few women on my level, the hours were so long, the business trips so frequent, the bars always so close at hand.

The fling that ultimately ended the Year of Many Boys was with a guy named Ron McSomething and the fact that I don’t remember his name is telling, because he’s a very small part of the story.

But I do remember the night we went back up to the arbitrage floor after dinner and found ourselves utterly alone. That in itself was rare. It was the eighties and people were ambitious. They worked all hours, they did cocaine in the bathroom, they did each other in the stairwell, and the money came so easily that I think we were all high on the smell of it. I know I was.

The arbitrage floor had that strangely haunted quality that normally busy places have when they’re empty, that echo of silence. Ron started to pull me back toward his desk but I said no, not here, and we ended up sneaking into one of the corner offices, where we knew there would be a couch and pillows. The one we chose happened to belong to a man named Mark Madison.

The next morning Mr. Madison’s secretary called the secretary for my division and invited me to lunch. I couldn’t think why. Mark Madison was not directly over me and I hardly knew the man. So my anxiety had steadily grown all morning and by the time I joined him in the executive elevator—the one that went directly to the top floor, where the private lounge and gym and restaurant were located—I was convinced that I had been summoned there to be fired.

The restaurant was tasteful in that sort of “nothing’s untasteful” kind of way. We sat at a table with white chairs and a long, white tablecloth, ordered white wine and white fish, and then made small talk. Where I’d gone to school, renovations he was making to a vacation home in the mountains, the local sports teams. God help us, I think we even discussed the weather. We were seated right beside a window, fifty-two stories up, and this unfamiliar view of my hometown city was scary.

Then finally he brought out a manila envelope and handed it to me, saying, “I believe this may belong to you.”

It was my silk camisole, lost somehow in the cushions of his couch the night before.

A strange thing for me to forget and probably the proverbial cry for help, although why my subconscious had decided to cry out to this particular man, white-haired and elegant and a little stern, I do not know. My reputation preceded me, I suddenly realized. For him to assume without question that the camisole was mine meant that even the executives in the corner offices knew who I was and what I was about. And then I did a highly uncharacteristic thing. I began to cry.

He patiently ate his Dover sole and waited for me to finish. I was so shamed, sitting there among all that whiteness, so high in the air, with my underwear folded and tucked neatly into one of the bank mailers. I knew he wasn’t really going to fire me. He wasn’t my boss, and besides, you can’t fire someone for having sex on a couch. If they did that, they would have had to shut down the whole sales department. But I wasn’t prepared for what happened next.

He said, “You deserve more for your life, Kelly.”

And then he began to tell me about himself, in a linear and measured way, as if we were on a job interview. It took my guilt-addled mind a while to figure out that I was the one interviewing him and that the job he was applying for was that of my boyfriend. No, not my boyfriend. Something more. He was explaining to me why he would be a good husband. At the time I thought of him as old, but now, looking back, I do the math and it kicks me right in the gut. Mark was fifty-five when I met him, barely older than I am now.

He finished his litany by saying, very simply, “And I furthermore promise you that I will never cheat.”

Furthermore? I just stared at him. My own fish was untouched, the envelope with the camisole was on my lap, and there were streaks of mascara on my napkin. This man knew the worst thing he could know about me, and it didn’t seem to make any difference. He still wanted me. Was it only because I looked the part of a corporate wife? I tried to think back to the only occasion in which I’d ever really spent much time with him. A fund-raiser for the Special Olympics. I had played basketball with the kids. So had he. Not everyone in the office had ventured into that violent and illogical game. Most of them had just given money and sat in the stands, drinking bourbon out of thermos bottles and cheering.

“I’m not saying this to brag,” he said. “It’s just something I don’t do, you know. I don’t cheat.”

He sounded so sure of himself. Exactly like Elyse. Sometimes standing in the presence of that much certainty weighs you down . . . and at other times, it feels like a lifeline.

“Is it because I’m pretty?” I asked.

“Partly,” he said, which was the right answer. I appreciated the fact he didn’t try to bullshit me, even though we both knew he was the one holding the cards. He smiled and blotted his mouth with his own perfect napkin. “If you say yes, will it be because I’m rich?”

We laughed then. I finally ate a bite of fish. “Because that’s what everyone will say,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “They’ll say we got together because you’re pretty and I’m rich. I hope that sort of gossip doesn’t bother you.”

It didn’t. Just a few weeks earlier I had gone by Elyse’s house and she had been baking Christmas cookies. She had sworn to me that baking cookies was hard, infinitely harder than it appeared on the surface, and she had been babbling about making 144 of them for a church cookie swap and how I couldn’t possibly understand the sort of pressure she was under. But I had leaned against her sticky counter and absorbed it all—her tree, the carols on the sound system, Tory toddling around underfoot, the smell of cinnamon—and I had known that this was what I really wanted. The allure of the bank was fading for me. A woman can only own so many red jackets. She can only drink so many bottles of cabernet. The Year of Many Boys had come to an end. It was now January and I was sitting here, across the table from a man who had suddenly opened a door.

Mark and I set down our wineglasses at the same time and they clanked against each other. Very gently, but the sound rang out with such pure clarity that we both jumped, and so you could see it as an act of chance, or maybe something deeper, as if the universe itself was toasting our deal, even if we were too tentative to do it ourselves.

WE BREAK OURSELVES AGAINST
men. Break ourselves like waves against rocks and we can’t seem to help it, or even explain it. Elyse had never liked Daniel, never understood why I’d spent the twilight of my twenties going in and out of a hopeless relationship with a married man. Well, maybe at the beginning, when it was all sort of light and charming, she got it a little bit. Saw it as one of those movies with Glenda Jackson or Audrey Hepburn being all fey and carefree and wearing great clothes. But then at the end . . .

At the end I know I scared her. By the end I was scaring myself.

And then came the Year of Many Boys, which was actually more like the Eighteen Months of Many Boys, and the longer that madness had droned on, the less amused Elyse had been. “Do you know what you’re doing?” she asked me once, and I’d answered, “Sometimes I don’t even know who I’m doing.” She hadn’t laughed.

So I thought she would be thrilled to meet Mark. He was so different from Daniel—respectable, honest, eager to marry me and save me from myself.

We made a plan to have lunch at a café on a spring day. Mark and I were sitting outside, drinking wine, and Elyse had walked toward us pushing Tory in her stroller, a balloon tied to the handle and a big smile on Elyse’s face. It seemed like it would go well. Mark insisted the lunch was his treat and Elyse has always liked men who pay—it’s one of her little inconsistencies, one of many. He made a great fuss over Tory too, who with her wispy blond hair and fat cheeks always looked like a baby in an ad for something wholesome, like yogurt.

“Do you want more kids?” Elyse had rather pointedly asked him, as he’d made a puppet with his napkin and Tory had chirped and cooed.

“No, this part of my life is over,” he said, his eyes never leaving Tory’s face. “So we’ll all have to share this beautiful little girl, if you don’t mind.”

It was like a thunk hit the table, a thunk that only Elyse and I heard. She glanced at me, trying to read my reaction. Although Mark and I had discussed the children by his first marriage, and the fact that he wasn’t sure he had the heart to, in his words, “do that shit all over again,” hearing that direct and flat “no” was a shock. I tried to cover. Act nonchalant, as if I were unsurprised by the certainty of his answer.