Dead Man Waltzing

gait a bit stiff. “With you and Vitaly both being so blond, we need a strong hue that will contrast with your coloring, but not overwhelm you. Not this,” she said, moving aside a bolt of cream satin, “or this.” She pushed past a pale yellow velvet I quite liked. “I’m thinking maybe this red”-she pulled out a bolt of dark red fabric-“or this green. With flesh-colored inserts-or maybe midnight blue?-and stones. Lots of rhinestones.”

She passed me, thin arms laden with bolts of fabric, and laid them on the cutting table in the middle of the room. “But first, let’s try the other dress.” With a gait that was surprisingly graceful despite the limp, she disappeared into the back and emerged a moment later, holding a hanger high. I could vaguely make out the shape of the carnation-colored dress under a plastic bag. Unzipping the bag, Lavinia freed the dress, removed it gently from the hanger, and passed it to me. I ducked into the tiny changing room outfitted with only a couple of hooks and a curtain instead of a door.

Slipping out of my clothes, I carefully dropped the new gown over my head and smoothed it into place. I loved the way the salmon pink made my skin glow and set off my blond hair. It was a strong color and would be distinctive on the dance floor without being harsh or garish. I brushed aside the curtain and stepped out for Lavinia’s inspection.

“Hm.” She pinched a fold of fabric at my waist. “You have lost weight.”

“Maybe a pound or two,” I admitted.

Her deft fingers inserted a couple of pins.

“I was so sorry to hear about Corinne Blakely,” I said. “I know you two were friends for a long time.”

She hesitated, her face hidden from me as she bent to measure the distance from the floor to the hem in several places. “She was my best friend for many, many years,” she said, straightening. True sorrow lined her face.

“How did you meet?”

She draped a spangled length of tulle several shades lighter than the dress around my shoulders and stepped back to survey the effect. “I grew up on a ranch in Montana, but I was always more interested in dancing and fashion than cattle or corn. I ran away to New York when I was seventeen, convinced I’d be starring in Broadway shows within minutes of my arrival.”

“That was brave of you.”

“‘Stupid’ is the word you’re looking for. Anyway, I was doing telephone sales selling newspaper advertisements by day, auditioning every chance I got, and taking acting and dancing classes at night. I shared a one-bedroom apartment with three other gals and lived off canned tuna and peanut butter. The building super was out to get in my pants, and the rats outnumbered the tenants three to one. I’m pretty sure they were better fed, too.” She gave a grim little smile. “But I was too proud to go home, take up again with William Denney, who’d been hoping to marry me since we were in junior high, and live out my days as a Montana rancher’s wife.”

I turned to face the mirror, in obedience to the pressure of her hand on my shoulder.

“Too much,” Lavinia announced, removing the scarf. “We’ll keep the neckline simple.”

“Okay.”

“Anyway,” she continued, “one night I went to a tiny dance studio in the Village that a friend had mentioned. I’d heard a big-shot producer was casting an off-Broadway musical that required waltzing, and I was determined to impress them with my dancing ability, since my singing voice was only so-so. Well, I walked up four flights of stairs to this studio, and was huffing and puffing by the time I got to the top. I was a smoker in those days. We all were- it’s how we kept our weight down. When I got to the top, there was Corinne, dressed in an aqua gown and elbow- length gloves, twirling with her partner. She looked like a princess or a fairy queen. Titania, maybe, if I remember my Shakespeare correctly, or Queen Mab. I was captivated.

“Halfway through the piece, Corinne broke away from her partner with a few choice words about his dancing- she could cuss like a ranch hand, even though she looked so dainty-and said that someone who had never waltzed could dance more gracefully than he did. Before I knew what was happening, she grabbed my hand and pulled me out onto the dance floor. People-there must have been eight or ten students standing around, most of them older than Corinne and me-were laughing, and Corinne’s partner was sulking, and I wanted to sink through the floor. But then I got caught up in the music and the rhythm and let myself dance. That was it for me; from then on, it was ballroom dancing or nothing.”

“Did you get the part?” I asked.

A reminiscent smile lit her face. “I did, actually. But the show folded after only a couple of performances. I ditched my telephone sales job and studied ballroom dancing with Corinne and a couple of others. What a time that was. Think Rent set in the sixties, with booze and cigarettes instead of drugs, and without the AIDS, and you get a feel for how close we were-those of us who were serious about ballroom dance- and how passionate about our art. Corinne and I became roommates and best friends. We did everything together- double-dated, went to competitions, taught dance. She even came out to Montana with me one Christmas.” Lavinia laughed at the memory. “I don’t think she’d ever seen a cow in person before. Anyway, competitive Latin dancing was just coming into its own in the early 1960s and I fell in love with it. My partner, Ricky Marini, could have made it in the movies-he was easily as good as-and much better-looking than-Astaire or Kelly. Together… we set the dance floor on fire.”

Her focus was past me now, past the display window with the lavender gown, past the view of the busy street outside, all the way back to the 1960s. “We were the best. Absolutely the best. Corinne and her partner were good, but not as good as Ricky and I were. The four of us were invited to the first Professional Latin Championship at Blackpool. Nineteen sixty-four, that was.” She tucked a strand of auburn hair behind one ear and rubbed her fingers together like she wished she had a cigarette. The sun slanting through the window deepened the lines and hollows of her face in a mean way.

“What happened?” I asked softly.

“To make a long story short-it’s too late for that, isn’t it?-the four of us were coming out of a nightclub in the wee hours of the night before the competition started. A man jumped us. Corinne screamed. I barely caught sight of him before something slammed into my leg and I fell. The guy took off and Ricky chased him. He didn’t catch up with him, though.

“At the hospital, the doctors said my leg was broken. I couldn’t dance in the competition. I was devastated. So were the others, Corinne especially. She kept saying, ‘This was your championship, Lavvy. This was your time.’”

“Did she win?”

“Corinne and Donald? No. The winners were a married Swiss couple named Kaiser. I’m sure worrying about me distracted Corinne and Donald and cost them their chance at the title, too.”

“How awful.” I looked at the seventy-year-old woman in front of me, imagining her as a young twenty- something anxious to set the world on fire with her ballroom dancing, excited about competing overseas. She’d been beautiful, I was sure, with glowing auburn hair and the lithe, athletic figure she still had to some degree.

“Change,” she ordered, unzipping the pink gown.

I shrugged out of it behind the curtain, draped it over the hanger, and quickly donned my own clothes.

“Yes, well. It got worse when my leg got infected. The doctors couldn’t get it under control, and eventually they had to amputate below the knee.” She moved away from the dressing room and I heard the ka- thump, ka-thump as she unrolled the fabric bolt on the cutting table. Her voice was brisk as she said, “My dancing career was over, of course. Prosthetics in those days were nothing like they are today. I keep up with that, you know; I read the articles about what they’re able to do for our soldiers who lose limbs in Afghanistan or Iraq and I’m just amazed. The technology these days is wonderful.”

I popped out from behind the curtain, tucking my blouse in. “Did they ever catch the guy?”

She shook her head. “No. The police never caught up with him. Their theory was that he was attempting a mugging and panicked, that he hit my leg by accident.”

“You didn’t agree?”

“I wasn’t sure. Corinne always maintained that he’d hit me on purpose. And then in the nineties, when that awful Harding person arranged for someone to injure Nancy Kerrigan, hoping to keep her from skating in the Olympics, I began to think about it again. It sounded just like what had happened to me, although of course the Blackpool Dance Festival was not a sporting event on a par with the Olympics, at least not as most people viewed it. That was thirty years after the fact, though, and I didn’t spend much time thinking about it. I’d made a name for myself as a designer by then-Corinne and her first husband loaned me the money to get started and supported me