The Unexpected Waltz (31 page)

“Anatoly doesn’t need this,” Isabel had said last week at Esmerelda’s. “Nik’s going to have to face facts and go to Canada for a while. Wait it out and then reenter.”

“Otherwise he’ll take down the whole studio with him,” Steve had agreed. “He’s smart. Anatoly is like a brother to him, and Nik isn’t going to let him ruin his business trying to protect him.”

But, looking at the man-boy who sits before me now, staring down at the table and sullenly fiddling with a plastic straw, I’m not so sure. Love, or at least the idea of love, stupefies us all, and it’s ironic, to say the least, that I’m the one they’ve elected to talk to him. Two things have happened in the last twenty-four hours. I’ve learned that I have slightly over nine million dollars in the bank and I’ve agreed to meet Daniel in Charleston. He asked me an impossible question—“Are you still you?”—and I had written back, “You’re the only one who can tell me.”

“Come to Charleston,” he replied.

He pointed out that we always talked about going there and that now, at last, there are no impediments in our way. At least that’s what I think he meant to say. He miswrote, used the word “implements” instead, as if twenty years ago we had been in constant danger of stepping on a rake. When Elyse found out I agreed to meet Daniel, she exploded. She used words like “self-destructive” and “masochistic,” words I might use now too if I thought Nik would understand them.

So here I sit on the patio of a pizzeria, the supreme hypocrite of the planet Earth, come to tell this boy he needs to do all the things I can’t seem to do myself. I’ve gathered every sort of document Nik might possibly need and put them in—what else?—a manila envelope. The number of a bank account in both our names, set up as tenants in common, as if we were business partners. Either of us can make deposits to this account and either of us can make withdrawals. It’s not much. Not much in the face of what I own. A couple of months’ worth of allowance for me can buy a whole new life for someone like Nik. And there’s a one-way plane ticket that was expensive because the date was left open, and contact information for an attorney in Toronto. I slide the envelope across the table.

“I’m going to insist that you take this,” I say.

He opens the envelope. Sees the contents. He knows what it all means at a glance and he pushes the papers back in, his face flushing, as if I’ve brought him to this pizzeria patio and shown him porn.

“No one has to know about this except for the two of us,” I say, which is true. All the Esmerelda’s crowd expected me to give him was advice.

He shakes his head, slides the envelope across the table toward me.

“I’m going to insist that you take it,” I repeat. “It’s up to you what you do with it once you’re out of my sight, but we’re not leaving this table without that envelope in your hands. You’re always telling me to trust you, and I do. But it works both ways.”

“I am fine,” he says. There is a slight tremor in his voice. I wonder how long it has been since he slept eight consecutive hours.

I love this boy, I think, and the realization comes to me with a shock. It is, needless to say, a different kind of love and yet I know I could make the same mistake with Nik that I made with Daniel. I could so easily convince myself that he has some special magic. Put him on the pedestal that has stood vacant for so long. I already half believe I can’t dance without him, that the world of the ballroom is something he has given me, something I couldn’t have found with anyone else. When they were all talking at Esmerelda’s about how he had to go to Canada, I had known that they were right and yet one thought had snuck in, a splash of selfishness among all the altruism.

But if he goes to Canada, I’ll never waltz again.

As he slumps here before me now, staring at the table, fiddling with the wrapper of his straw, he has never looked younger or more scared. Elyse accused me of making him the son I never had and women my age idolize their sons, this I know without question. I have heard them tell themselves a variation of this new fairy tale over and over. His father may have failed me, but my son never will. The world may be going to hell but my boy—my Joshua or Eli or Jordan or Andrew—he is perfect. He will be with me to the end.

It gives me an idea. “If your mother was here,” I ask him, “what do you think she would tell you to do?”

It’s unfair to play the mother card, but I’m desperate. I know how much he loves her, worries about her, the look that comes across his face when he tells me about leaving his village so long ago. If she were here, she’d tell him to get his butt to Canada and we both know it.

“This is my fate,” he says. What he means is “Pamela is my fate.”

“People can change their fates.”

He shakes his head. “It is not your problem,” he says, and his voice is devoid of an accent. It’s just like when Isabel said Anatoly’s voice changed when he told Builder Bob he could suck his cock. I guess anger makes people sound like Americans.

“Not all affairs end well,” I say. “You know that just as well as I do.”

He stands up and pulls out his wallet. Carefully counts out two ones and leaves them on the table for the Sprite.

“Yes,” he says. “These things you say. I know them all.”

But when he leaves he takes the envelope.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO

I
JERK AWAKE. IT
wasn’t a bad dream, just one of the vague ones, and it’s slipping from me even as I open my eyes. I try to lie very still and think about the ocean. Maybe if one wave of sleep carried me into wakefulness, another one will carry me back.

But the clock says 4:00 a.m., that impossible point where you’ve been in bed too long to go back to sleep. This is all going to catch up to me this afternoon. Exhaustion will undoubtedly hit me at the worst possible time, twelve hours from now, when I’m due to meet Daniel in Charleston. After a few minutes of indecision, I rise and pull an afghan over my shoulders like a shawl, then wander down the stairs and out the French doors leading to the garden.

The night is still remarkably warm, and the moist soil promises an early spring. I feel among the bushes for buds, but they’re not quite there, not yet. The night that Mark died had been very much like this one, another large low moon. I’d jerked awake then too, and had known at once that something was wrong. I’d put my head on his chest but there was no movement within, no heartbeat. And so I’d done what I always do when there’s trouble. I called Elyse.

It was even more the middle of the night in Arizona and she had been, of course, disoriented by the ringing phone. It had taken her a while to understand what I was saying. She seemed to think that Mark and I had a fight, and when I said that he was cold and I couldn’t get him to talk to me, she started giving me her usual bad advice about men, and when I kept saying no, not that, she finally said, “Are you telling me you’re going to divorce him?” and I said, “Elyse, I’m telling you that I think he’s dead.” We’ve never discussed that night, never laughed about that ridiculous conversation, although I suspect there is something sickly funny in the story. But when I said the word “dead,” she gave this little scream and her scream scared me, woke me out of my trance, and I finally started to cry. She asked me if I had called 911.

Of course I hadn’t. I had called her. But then I remembered that I should’ve called 911 so Elyse and I hung up and I did. While I was standing at the bedroom window waiting, looking down the driveway toward the road, I saw not the ambulance I expected but rather a whole line of golf carts, coming toward me one after another, in the growing daylight. Because within this self-contained community almost all of our neighbors had abandoned their cars for golf carts, and one of the women already had a jug of iced tea on her lap. It seems the 911 dispatcher had called the security guard at the gatehouse, who had, in turn, lit up the prayer chain, whose efficiency was so remarkable that my neighbors, experts in the rituals of southern death, had beaten the ambulance to my house.

The garden is beautiful by moonlight. The air is sweet and soft and the wind doesn’t really blow as much as it breathes. The trees arch above me and for the hundredth time I feel guilty that I haven’t mourned Mark more. He deserves to be mourned. In the dream I think we were on some beach. He was calling out to me from the dunes and his face seemed terribly sad, but I can’t remember what he was saying.

I sigh. Look up at the moon. I should climb back into bed and catch a couple of more hours of sleep. Maybe I would even remember whatever it was Mark was trying so hard to tell me. Some people claim they can do this. Elyse keeps a notebook on her bedside table to record her nocturnal impressions, as if the gods of Arizona are talking to her by day and by night.

But I’ve never been particularly good at recapturing dreams.

"SO YOU'RE REALLY GOING?"

“Yeah,” I say to Carolina. “I’m already on the interstate.”

“Are you excited?”

“Mostly scared.”

“Of what?”

“He might not be like I remember.”

Across the phone line I can hear the creak of Carolina shifting in her hospital bed, and a cough. She’s getting another cold. I wore a surgical mask the last time I was in to see her and she made fun of me. But we can’t be too careful. “I’ve never been to Charleston,” she says.

“Someday we’ll go.”

A hollow promise, and she makes no comment. “What’s it like?”

“Old. Pretty. Kinda touristy. One time Elyse and I took Tory when she was a little girl and we all went on one of those candlelight cemetery tours where the guides dress up like southern belle ghosts. They painted their skin real white and had cobwebs hanging off their straw hats and our guide called herself Scarlett O’Scara. I don’t know why we thought that was a good idea. Tory was only about seven and I think we scared the crap out of her.”

Carolina laughs. Talking about tombstones and cemeteries never seems to bother her. In fact, on our last movie night she requested the theme be “ghosts” and we’d watched
Portrait of Jennie
and
Blithe Spirit.
I believe she’s studying up on how to haunt someone but I’m not sure whom.

“Does Elyse know you’re meeting Daniel?”

“Oh yeah, and she’s thrilled about it. Thinks it’s a swell idea. But I’ve spent my whole life letting Elyse talk me in and out of things and that’s got to stop. And besides, she started coming around a little when I got into the details of the trip and I was asking her about what makes a hotel a good place to meet a lover. She loves trysts.”

“Twists?”

“Trysts.” I spell it for her. “That’s Elyse’s word for meeting a man in some fabulous place.” I’ve come dangerously close to letting it slip that it was I and not Daniel who planned this meeting. That I was the one who called the hotel and read out the sixteen digits of my credit card number. A credit card still in the name of Kelly Madison and maybe that’s why I dreamed about Mark last night. He’s paying for all this from beyond the grave, which is terribly wrong when you stop to think of it. No wonder he was yelling at me to get out of the water, because it’s coming back to me now, that I was in the water and Mark was in the dunes and he was waving like he saw some sort of danger coming up behind me, a shark or a powerboat or a tsunami. But this is something that I have to do, whether anyone else understands it or not. It’s like I’m taking the grand tour of my old life and I’ve got to see Daniel the way Elyse had to see
David
in the Accademia. I need to see him just so I can say I have.

“My sister Virginia got back with an old boyfriend one time,” Carolina says. Her voice is a little breathless, and I realize she’s on her cell and walking.

“How’d that play out for her?”

“She’s living with me, ain’t she? Okay, here we go. Tryst. I got the dictionary off the nurse’s desk.” Carolina’s breathing is really quite ragged. She must have walked the entire length of the hall. “It means ‘a secret meeting between lovers.’ Well, shoot, we already knew that. Can be a noun or a verb. Here’s an example in a sentence: ‘Both lovers had to hurry to keep their noontime tryst in the park.’ Rhymes with cyst, fist, grist, mist, twist, and wrist.”

“I had to twist his wrist to make him tryst,” I say.

Carolina ignores me. “Okay, listen to this: It might come from the Middle English word for ‘trust’ or it might come from the Old French for ‘to lie in wait,’ like where hunters used to hide in the bushes until the deer came by. Well that’s two weird things to get confused, isn’t it? I mean are you supposed to trust them, or are they gonna shoot you? It seems like they would have to know what words mean better than that before they put them in the dictionary.”

“That’s all very interesting,” I say, although the truth is that part about lying in wait creeps me out a little. “What are you going to do today?”

“Nothing as exciting as what you’re fixing to do. I guess I’ll watch a movie, since you left me about a million of them. Maybe that Elizabeth Taylor one your friend Elyse thinks is so great.”

“
Suddenly, Last Summer
? You need to wait until I’m back for that one. Trust me, it’s intense.”