The Unexpected Waltz (35 page)

The teenagers get the dress over my head, both commenting on how heavy it is, and begin to fasten the hooks. With the exception of the family dinner after Carolina’s service and too much champagne back in Charleston, I’ve had practically nothing but protein shakes for the last two weeks. The scale today went below 140 for the first time in months, but I’m still anxious as Valentina begins pulling up the zipper, stuffing in rolls of flesh as she goes. I’ve tried the red dress on before, but this is the first time I’ve seen it with the floats, and the hair, and the jewels. I’m suddenly shy and I wish there was some way I could slip back into the ballroom without a fuss.

But no, of course not. Valentina even claps her hands and makes an announcement as I enter and there are all these oohs and aahs. Nik can’t avoid looking at me now. I’m blushing as I come in, still fastening the left earring, but probably no one can see it underneath the mask of my makeup and Nik says to hurry, we need to warm up next. Everyone in the studio goes back to their business within ten seconds of my grand entrance and I’m not terribly nervous as we begin to waltz. I make a couple of stumbles, nothing major, and I often do this at first. It takes me a while to get into the rhythm of the dance. So I’m surprised when Nik speaks to me sternly, telling me not to fight him, and to relax.

You can’t order someone to relax. Besides, he’s the one who’s off. I don’t say anything and we start again. But then there is another slight miscue and he snaps, “Do we need to get the blindfold?” and it hits me why he’s so upset. In the red dress with my hair lightened and slicked back, I look far too much like Pamela. We are the same size now, at least almost, and my emergence from the back room has been a shock to him. Forced him to remember that she’s out there somewhere, scared and angry and alone.

“Yes,” I say. “You should blindfold me.” If he doesn’t see my face, perhaps he can pretend I am Pamela. I don’t know if that will make things better or worse, but the present situation isn’t working, that’s for sure. He goes to the desk when Anatoly is still staring gloomily at the computer, perhaps trying to figure if we have a chance of ranking at all now that he’s lost his ultimate whale. Nik pulls out the Hermès and brings it to me. I tie it lightly. I don’t want to mess up my hair and makeup—hard to say if that even would be possible—and I don’t really need to obscure my vision. Because for once, I’m not fighting him. He’s fighting me.

Once the scarf is in place I stand still, listening. I can hear the clink of glasses at the bar, Jane saying something and Steve laughing. Quinn telling Isabel to hold still, she’s almost done, and the young girls fussing with their jars and the clatter of tubes of makeup against the desk. I don’t think anyone else is on the dance floor. Nik chooses “Fly Me to the Moon.” At least he remembers that I’m the one who likes it.

The music starts and, just beneath the melody, I hear something crack. Nik must have stumbled against a chair. He’s more nervous than I’ve ever seen him. It’s my first competition, I think, in a wave of petulance. It’s unfair that I have to be worried about him and how like Pamela it is, to trump tonight, just as she has trumped all the others, to somehow manage to be the most important thing going on even when she’s isn’t here. There’s another thud, the dull drag of a chair.

Come on, Nik, I think. Get it together.

I hold up my right hand and wait. The song is already to the part about what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars and I wonder what’s keeping him. He should be here, taking my hand, pulling me forward and beginning the dance. Instead I feel him moving behind me, slipping his hand around my waist and inviting me to step backward, into shadow hold. We do not begin our foxtrot in shadow hold. He’s even got our routine mixed up with someone else’s, I think irritably, but then it occurs to me he’s just testing me. He’s always saying that no dancer should get too dependent upon her routine. That in competition there are so many couples on the floor that you rarely get through anything the way you rehearsed it, and that I should be ready, at any moment, for him to do an unexpected step.

I laugh and say, “Are you trying to trick me?”

And then I feel the cold circular imprint of something pressed against my temple. The arm around my waist tightens. And someone screams.

Another scream, another thud, and out of nowhere my grandfather’s voice comes to me, something he used to say, what was the phrase? The business end of a gun. The business end, the barrel, and there are noises coming from all around me. “Fly Me to the Moon” and a door opening and slamming, something else crashing to the floor. The arm around my waist is trembling, vibrating so fiercely that it makes both of us shake, hard enough that I can feel my earrings flick against my cheeks.

“You’re not going to leave me,” a voice says. “I won’t let you go.”

IT IS NOT UNTIL
much later that I will understand exactly what happened. That Pamela’s husband had been as upset as she by the meeting with their lawyer. That after she ran out, he ran out too and had spent the last twenty-four hours searching for her, driving in one wide furious loop between their lake house, their mountain house, their beach house, and their Charlotte house, ripping open each door and finding each room empty. How his fury and panic had risen with each passing mile. How he’d gotten speeding tickets in three different counties within hours of each other and some computer had finally triggered in Raleigh. Telling the authorities that there’s a dangerous person out there, a man driving wildly from one end of the state to another, a man who’d been doing ninety in a sixty outside of Asheville at eleven in the morning and was stopped again just four hours later, almost to Wilmington, for failure to yield. Despite the fact that they had put out an APB on his license plate, he’d somehow made it back to Charlotte undetected and to this studio. Did he really think she’d be here? He’d sat outside watching the door for some time, a witness would later confirm, and then at some point he had grabbed the gun and gone in. A pistol, not one of his rifles, a smaller gun that he kept hidden in his bedside table, a gun he claimed to have bought for his wife’s protection. He’d seen a red dress through the window and the slender shape of a blond woman and in that split second he’d made the same mistake as Nik. The woman was getting ready to dance. She lifted her right hand as if she were waiting for a man to come and claim her and that had been too much. He’d grabbed the gun with no idea of how he was going to use it. That’s the strangest part of all. That during all that driving, all those hours alone in the car, he had not formulated a plan.

Of course I didn’t know any of this when I was standing there with the pistol pressed against the side of my face. I didn’t know that a few seconds earlier Bob had brought the butt of this same gun down on Anatoly’s head as he came through the door or that Anatoly had been so intent on his computer screen that he had never seen it coming. But Nik had looked up from the stereo at the sound of the first thud and had known what was happening at once. He must have started for the back door, and it’s hard to say with all the noise, with all the confusion, with the music so damn loud, what happened next or in what exact order the other people in the room became aware of the gunman’s presence. I was standing there like a ninny, blindfolded with my right arm up, probably looking like Justice without her scales, and when the gunman grabbed me I had even tried to dance. At what point did he realize he had the wrong woman? When I asked him if he was trying to trick me, did he know at once that was not Pamela’s voice? Or was it not until his arm went around my waist? Maybe I moved differently, smelled differently, or maybe there was something in the shape of my shoulders or my hips that told him his wife had eluded him yet again. That he was holding a gun to the head of a stranger. That he was as much a hostage to the situation as I was.

“I’m not your wife,” I say, but by now I’m only telling him what he already knows. The barrel pulls away from my cheek and there’s the sound of a shot, impossibly loud, so much so that the room echoes with it, reverberating, turning it into a thousand shots at once. I roll away from him, using all my strength, and he releases me so abruptly that I lose my balance. I feel myself tumbling through the blackness, hitting the wooden floor hard enough that one of my earrings flies off, and when I pull the blindfold away I’m lying on my side, half under Quinn’s desk. From this angle the ballroom looks strange, as if the whole world has tilted and slid. Anatoly is stirring in the chair above me, mumbling like someone coming out of a deep sleep. He tries to stand and falls back, saying one word in Russian.
Izvinite.

From my vantage point beneath the table, I can see it all. See the women moving as one to engulf Nik. Surrounding him, shielding him, pulling him toward the back door. They move as if they’ve choreographed it, as if this were all some sort of dance they’d been secretly rehearsing for months. Isabel has a cell phone pressed to her face as she walks. Calling the police probably, and her expression shows more irritation than fear. She yells back toward the gunman, “You can’t come in here,” as if he were nothing more than a badly trained dog, and then she holds the door open for the other women. Nik’s eyes are searching the room for something, but it’s like he’s being carried away on a great wave. He understands that the gun meant for him has been turned on me. The man who is so proud that he refuses to let anyone buy him a Sprite knows full well that he has run up tremendous charges and is leaving a woman to pay his bill.

Later the story will improve, become nearly epic in the retelling, and will require them to use words like “overpowering” and “wresting,” but the truth is that by the time Steve and Harry are across the floor, Pamela’s husband has already dropped his hand to his side. The mirror behind him is shattered, a spiderweb of broken glass with a dark hole in the center, and he stands helplessly, turning in a slow circle, his face as thoughtless as a child’s. Steve got the gun from him easily, and it took only the slightest nudge from Harry before he toppled to the floor, a gunman no more. Just a jilted husband, a man who panicked and shot at his own reflection, a man named Bob. The music has stopped and his sobs are the loudest thing in the room. Steve kneels and puts one hand on my shoulder, saying, “Are you all right?” When I say yes, he stands and turns to Anatoly, pressing something against his head. He has taken my blindfold, I realize. Pamela’s scarf. The Hermès is now covered with blood, and it takes me another second to remember that, beneath all the jokes, Steve really is a doctor. He’s speaking calmly to Anatoly and saying, “You’ll be fine. Just sit back.”

The police come thundering through the back door. When Isabel had called, they were already on their way. The witness in the parking lot, who we would later learn was a busboy from Esmerelda’s, had reported a man leaping from a parked car with a gun. He read them the car’s license plate number and they’ve come with their full SWAT team, only to be met by a group of women, running across the parking lot toward them in sequined dresses, shrieking words like “hostage,” “gunshot,” and “blood.” But in the ballroom all they find are four men and a woman. One of the men is on his knees, sobbing. Another man is holding a gun on him while the third is pressing a cloth to the head of the fourth man, who appears to be wounded. The woman is crawling out from beneath a desk and swatting at the long strings of cobwebs clinging to her red dress.

Bob is taken away. They handcuff him and put him in a car and then they insist on escorting me and Anatoly out to the ambulance. When I step into the parking lot—as surprised by the bright sunlight as if I were exiting a movie theater—it sets off a fresh spasm of weeping among the women and the sight of Anatoly behind me on a stretcher only makes it worse. Now that it is over, we’re collapsing. Of course we are. Jane’s knees buckle and the medics look her over too. I can’t stop shaking, so they wrap me in heated blankets and have me lie down in the back of the ambulance. They check Anatoly’s head, thinking perhaps he has a concussion. Through the ambulance door I can see the men making gestures in the air and the women all on their cell phones calling God knows whom.

Quinn and one of the cops are also standing at the door of the ambulance and she tells him the name of everyone who was in the studio when the gunman entered. She enunciates the names slowly and methodically, helping with the Russian spellings, talking loudly enough that I can hear her. There is one name she leaves out. I raise my head, dizzy and trapped by the heat of the blankets, and our eyes meet. I nod, to let her know I understand.

Nik was never there. That’s our story and we have all silently agreed to it, with negotiations composed of raised eyebrows, meaningful glances, and texts sent to the person standing right beside you. I remember Isabella’s words back in the food court and if “some sort of trouble” can get a man permanently deported then it is simpler, cleaner, smarter, to pretend that Nik was nowhere near this particular trouble. Anatoly is telling the medic that he doesn’t want to go to the hospital and he tries to prove that he’s fine by counting backward from one hundred. “You must let me stay,” he says to the doctors as they bandage his head. “This is my studio. I am responsible for these people.”