Nothing. He’d moved out. Probably right now he was shopping for roses. It wouldn’t make any difference this time. Finally he’d done the unforgivable.
Mary sat down with the program copies and immediately sorted out the registration pages, containing the names of dancers. She slipped a rubber band around them and placed them in a large envelope she’d addressed to the Baton Rouge post office box.
She pasted a liberal number of stamps on the envelope, then walked to the mailbox at the corner and dropped it in. It landed hard at the bottom of the obviously empty metal box. She peered at the pickup schedule and saw that the mail had been collected an hour ago, but there was another pickup at midnight.
In a few days, Rene should call and tell her he’d received the envelope.
He’d be grateful, she was sure.
28
The weekend crawled past, then Monday, and Rene hadn’t called to confirm he’d received the envelope. Mary began to wonder if she’d pasted on enough stamps. She tried to reassure herself by thinking the worst that could happen was that the envelope would be delivered with postage due. But did it work that way if the recipient had a post office box? If it didn’t, would the envelope be returned to her with “Insufficient Postage” stamped on it in officious red letters? Was it even now wending its way back toward its origin while Rene nervously awaited its arrival in Baton Rouge?
She found herself thinking too often about the envelope, even to the point where it interfered with dance practice.
“Don’t let your feet wander along with your mind,” Mel admonished her with a smile, as she stepped sideways in the wrong direction during a tango.
“Sorry,” Mary said, embarrassed, “I was doing fox-trot.”
“Better not get the two mixed up in Ohio,” Mel said, sharply this time. He wasn’t smiling now, and there was a hard pinpoint of light in his eyes.
It wasn’t like him, or any of the Romance Studio instructors, to be openly critical. Mary felt her blood rush hotly to her cheeks, but before she could stammer an apology he led her through a series of pivots and backward basics.
“Mel-” She gasped, a little breathless from the pivots.
“ ’S’okay, Mary. You’re doing terrific.” Despite his reassuring manner, there was an intensity about him she hadn’t seen before. The way he was staring at her…
When the music stopped, he wasn’t breathing hard. She was.
“I need a break,” she gasped, raising a hand palm-out as if to halt something advancing on her.
“Sorry,” he said. “Guess I got wound up and needed to wind down. Doesn’t happen very often.”
“So, are you?”
He backed away and stood with his hands on his slim dancer’s hips; the man probably had a waist smaller than Mary’s. “Am I what?”
“Wound down.”
Mel cocked his head sideways, did a perfect spin, and grinned at her. “Tell you what, Mary, the lesson’s about over, and I don’t have anyone coming in for another half hour. Let’s go next door to the sandwich shop, get a soda or something, and talk about the competition.”
She didn’t know what to think. “You usually do that with students before they compete?”
“No. But there’s some stuff we need to get straight.” His eyes slid sideways, then back, like those of a schoolboy plotting a classroom conspiracy. “I suppose we can talk here if you want.”
Helen was smooth dancing with Nick, staring curiously at Mary over his perfectly squared shoulder. Helen was a human seismograph able to detect the slightest irregular tremor in any relationship.
“Next door’s better,” Mary said.
The Hungry Hobo sandwich shop adjoined the studio in the strip shopping center, so there was only a short distance to walk through rain so gentle it was almost mist. Before leaving the studio, Mary and Mel sat on the vinyl bench and changed to their street shoes. Step in a puddle with suede-soled dancing shoes and they were useless for anything other than expensive bedroom slippers.
Helen was still craning her neck to see them as they left the studio together.
When they’d settled into a booth near the window, Mary ordered a diet Pepsi, and Mel absently told the waitress he’d have the same.
Mel sat staring out the window at the damp evening until the drinks were brought, then he looked directly at Mary. She was used to seeing him in the overhead lighting of the studio, but now his lean face was starkly sidelighted and appeared older and more serious, youth with a hint of mortality.
He took a sip of soda through his straw but didn’t seem to taste it. He said, “Mary, when I say you’re getting better fast, I really mean it.”
“ ’Course you do.” She said nothing more, waiting for him to toss back the conversational ball, wondering where this little impromptu talk was talking them.
“We, uh, speaking in confidence?”
“Sure, if you want it that way, Mel.”
“ ’Cause I’m gonna run a risk in what I say.”
“There’s no risk saying anything to me,” Mary assured him.
“The way a dance studio like Romance works,” he said, “is that we gotta make sure the students walk out feeling good so they wanna sign up for more lessons, or for our night on the town, or some party or other. Maybe the Romance Studios’ intercity competition. Long-term contracts, competitions, that kinda thing’s gotta be our top priority.”
“You have to make money,” Mary said. “I’m not naive, Mel; I realize it’s a business.”
“Some women don’t. They get too emotionally involved. That can lead to a kinda gigolo aspect, if you know what I mean.”
Mary knew. She was sometimes visited by an image of a middle-aged spinster trying to hold back time, making a fool of herself, and hoped it wasn’t her, the Ghost of Mary Future.
“That’s a small part of the dance scene,” Mel said. “Older women being escorted by their young instructors, each one fawning over the other. Usually there’s nothing real intimate going on, but I guess sometimes there must be.”
“Sure. People are people.”
“Rich divorcees, or widows with their husband’s insurance money, that’s what keeps a studio like Romance out of the red. Among ourselves, we instructors call those students Cadillacs, and we’re told to give them special treatment.”
“Cadillacs, really?”
He shook his head, as if frustrated that he wasn’t getting through to her. “The in-house competitions between the Romance Studios in different cities, like the one coming up in Miami, aren’t exactly fixed, Mary, but they come close.”
She’d noticed how almost everyone who entered came home with some sort of medal or trophy, so it had struck her before that the Romance competitions must not be too critically judged, but still she was surprised to hear Mel admit it. She supposed she was guilty of seeing only what she wanted, and closing her eyes to the rest. But why was Mel opening her eyes?
“What about the Ohio Star Ball?” she asked, already knowing the answer.
“That’s a different story. That kinda competition’s sanctioned by the National Dance Council of America and is on the up-and-up. If you do well there, you know you can compete. Except for a few cases of politics maybe, among the top pros, it’s honest and you’ll only win what you deserve.”
“Then how come you’re telling me this?”
“ ’Cause I’m not just going up to Ohio with you as part of my job so the studio makes money. Maybe it was mostly work before, but things have changed. You’ve improved tremendously the past few months. More’n I thought
