Dancing Through the Empty House

Rebecca Fitzgerald was forty-five years old, and on a Thursday night in October she was standing in the middle of her own living room wondering how a woman ended up with this much space and this little to do with it.

She'd been testing the chicken marbella recipe all day. Six hours on her feet, two trays of prunes and olives she'd nearly burned because Dot from the book club wouldn't stop talking, and a box of leftover puff pastry sitting on her kitchen counter like an accusation. Her feet hurt. Her back hurt. Her house smelled like rosemary and old wood, which honestly was not the worst combination, but it was the smell of work, not the smell of anything else.

The kids had moved out in August, both of them, one to college in Eugene and one to an apartment in Seattle with a boy Rebecca did not approve of but had learned to keep quiet about. And then Roger had moved out in September, into an apartment across town with a woman named Dolores, which was a whole other thing Rebecca had learned to keep quiet about. Twenty-one years together and he'd left a note on the fridge that said "This is nobody's fault, I just need to find out who I am alone." She'd kept the note for a week and then thrown it away, and if anyone asked, she told people it was nobody's fault, because that was easier than the truth, which was that it was at least somebody's fault. The divorce had been filed and she had signed her half that week with a pen from the bank, so whatever she was now, she was nobody's wife.

So the living room was quiet. The couch faced a TV nobody watched. And on the mantel, where a family photo used to sit, there was now a pair of dance shoes.

The house had been making sounds since September, small ones. A stair that talked. A door that eased shut on its own. The click of something settling that was not the radiator. Rebecca told herself houses did that when the people left.

She'd bought them twenty-two years ago, at a community college ballroom class she'd signed up for on a whim. She'd been twenty-three and Jeffery had been twenty-four, a classmate, and game for anything back then. She'd worn the shoes maybe four times and then the class ended and life happened, and there they were, cream colored, scuffed, a size and a half too small now because her feet had spread after two pregnancies and nobody warns you about that.

She was staring at them when the doorbell rang.

"That better be you, Jeffery, because I ordered no pizzas," she called, going to open it.

Jeffery Devlin stood on her porch holding a bottle of wine and wearing what could only be described as teaching clothes, fitted black shirt, soft gray pants, shoes that probably cost more than her car payment. He was forty-six now, hair gone silver at the temples, still built like someone who had made his living moving gracefully, because he had. Retired ballroom dancer, competitive circuit, the whole thing. He'd pivoted to teaching at a studio out on Division Street.

"Hello, Rebecca," he said. "I brought red. You look like a red wine kind of evening."

"I look like someone who has been on her feet since nine in the morning, so yes, pour heavy."

He came in, kissed her cheek, which surprised her a little, and stopped in the middle of the living room. She'd pushed the coffee table against the wall and rolled up the rug that afternoon, and the floorboards showed their age in the lamplight, creaking, worn honey-colored.

"This is good," he said, turning in a slow circle. "Hardwood, decent space, good light even at night. Did you used to dance in here?"

"I used to do nothing in here. That's kind of the problem." She sat on the arm of the couch while he opened the wine with the corkscrew she handed him from the kitchen drawer. "Roger took the good glasses. He took the good glasses, Jeffery. Who does that?"

"A man who is not thinking clearly," Jeffery said, pouring into two of her mismatched everyday ones. "Here. Now. Shoes!"

He nodded at the mantel. She laughed and got up and fetched them, sat on the couch to try them on. They pinched.

"They don't fit," she announced. "My feet got wider."

"That's fine, socks are fine for lesson one. Do you have socks you can slide in?"

"I have an entire sock drawer, Jeffery, I'm a grown woman with a sock drawer."

"There it is," he said, grinning, and she remembered that grin. Twenty-two years ago, four Tuesday nights in a row, a man of twenty-four with terrible posture and a beautiful frame, who'd asked her out after class and taken her to a Thai place where they'd both gotten the same curry and argued cheerfully about whether cilantro tasted like soap. Six months, that had lasted. Six sweet, aimless months, ending amicably when he'd gotten an offer to tour with a company and she'd gotten an apprenticeship at a bakery and neither of them had wanted to be the one to say the hard thing, so they'd both said it at the same time over milkshakes, and laughed, and that had been that.

"So," she said, standing, wobbling in her socks on the boards. "Basic waltz. Box step. That's all I remember. Box step and that the teacher said I had heavy feet."

"Your teacher was wrong and also I remember your feet, they were fine," Jeffery said. "Feet are never the problem. Everything above the feet is the problem. Come here."

He set his wine down and held out his hand, and she took it, and he arranged her the way you arrange a dance partner, her right hand in his left, his other hand coming to rest low on her back, just above the waistband of her jeans.

She stiffened. She couldn't help it. It had been a long time since a man's hand had been anywhere on her, and the heel of it pressed warm and steady and specific, and every muscle she owned went on alert.

"Hey," Jeffery said quietly. "Breathe. I've got you. That is the entire first lesson, actually. Somebody's got you."

She breathed. She let her shoulders drop. The hand stayed where it was, patient, and after a moment it stopped feeling like an alarm and started feeling like a hand.

"Okay," she said. "Okay. Sorry. It's just been."

"You don't have to explain."

"Twenty-one years with the same man and then suddenly nothing, and my body doesn't know what to do with being touched on purpose."

"Well," Jeffery said, "on purpose is my specialty. Count with me. One two three, one two three."

They moved. Badly, at first. She stepped on him twice and he made an exaggerated face of agony both times, and the third time she caught the rhythm and they made it around the coffee table and back, and the boards creaked under them in something close to time.

"There," he said. "There it is. You remember more than you think."

"I remember falling over in class that first night. That's mostly what I remember. You picked me up."

"I did. And then I asked you to dinner and you said yes before I finished the sentence."

"You were very easy to say yes to," Rebecca said, and then heard herself, and both of them laughed at the same time, awkward and warm, and the laugh loosened something in her chest that had been tight since September.

"Look at us," Jeffery said, steering her through a turn she nearly got. "Twenty-two years later. You're a little heavier on your left foot."

"You're a little grayer, but I'm being polite about it."

"Thank you for your service." He spun her, gently, and she came back into the low press of his hand and this time didn't stiffen at all. "Same time Thursday?"

"Thursday." She stepped back, retrieved her wine, drank half of it. "Jeffery. Why are you doing this? Really. You teach paying students all week."

"Because you called me in September at eleven at night and said, and I quote, 'I have a huge house and nobody in it,' and I've been thinking about that ever since," he said. "And because it's fun. That's all it is, Rebecca. It doesn't have to be anything else."

"Good," she said, and meant it, and also didn't entirely mean it, which was a problem for a future Rebecca.

"Good," he agreed, and kissed her cheek again at the door, and this time she was expecting it, and this time it lingered maybe half a second longer than a cheek strictly required.

Thursday came with rain, because Portland, and Rebecca spent the afternoon stress-testing a catering recipe she'd promised a client for a March wedding. Chicken marbella, the client wanted, which Rebecca thought was a strange thing to want in March but the client was paying, so the kitchen smelled like prunes and olives and rosemary by four o'clock, and the counters were a disaster of sample containers and tasting spoons.

Jeffery arrived at six with his dance shoes in a bag and his hair flattened by the rain, and stopped in the doorway of the kitchen and just breathed in.

"Okay, what is that, because I want to marry it."

"Chicken marbella. It's for a client, don't get attached. Here, taste it, I need a civilian opinion."

She'd made this exact gesture a hundred times for a hundred people. Hold out the spoon, wait for the nod. But this time when she lifted the spoon to his mouth he didn't take it with his hand. He leaned in, closed his lips around the bite, and as she pulled the spoon back his mouth caught the pad of her thumb, brief and deliberate, a slow lick across the smear of sauce there.

Rebecca stood very still, holding a spoon in an empty kitchen, feeling her pulse in her thumb of all places.

"Well?" she managed.

"Well what, I'm chewing."

"Jeffery."

"Good God, Rebecca, that's incredible. That's the best thing I've eaten this year, and I ate at a really good Thai place last week, so that's saying something."

"You licked my thumb."

"I did." He said it plainly, no apology in it, setting the spoon down. "That was me being clear about something. Was it all right?"

And there it was, the question, out in the open air of her cluttered kitchen between the tasting spoons and the prune juice, and she found she wasn't frightened of it, only aware of it, the way you're aware of a low note held under music.

"It was all right," she said. "It was more than all right, which is the part that surprised me."

"Good. Then I'll keep being clear. Your chicken is a triumph and your thumb tasted like olives and I regret nothing."

"You're ridiculous."

"I'm a retired dancer, ridiculous is the retirement plan. Now. Where's my wine, we're doing tango tonight."

They ate standing up at the counter like barbarians, which she never would have done with Roger, who had believed meals happened at tables or not at all, and that small rebellion pleased her more than it should have. Then she shoved the coffee table against the wall and they cleared a lane down the middle of the living room, and Jeffery put on something slow and ominous with a bandoneón in it.

"Tango," he said. "First rule of tango. It's not a box. There's no box. There's only walking with intention and blaming your partner."

"That sounds like every job I've ever had."

"Then you'll be a natural. Close hold."

She stepped in and he gathered her in, and this was different from the waltz hold, closer, her collarbone against his chest, his arm around her lower back like a bracket. She was forty-five years old and her knees made a sound and she didn't care.

"Walk," he said. "Just walk backward. One two, one two, chest leads, I'll tell you where we're going."

They walked. The floorboards creaked their familiar creak and the rain ticked at the window and somewhere in the third pass across the room he turned her at the corner of the couch, a small rotation she didn't orchestrate and didn't need to, and in the middle of the turn his thigh came forward and slid between hers.

It wasn't an accident and it wasn't not an accident. It was the step. It was the actual step, the thigh closure every tango in every movie has in it, and knowing that did nothing at all to help.

Rebecca gasped. An actual audible gasp, small and stupid, and her foot stopped mid-weight-shift and they stood there tilted against each other, his thigh firm against the inside of hers, his whole body a column of heat through two layers of clothes and her jeans, and the heat of him was uncanny, it was specific, it was a temperature she hadn't felt against her in longer than she wanted to do the math on.

"Sorry," Jeffery said immediately, easing back. "Too much, too soon. That's a later-lesson move and I got ahead of myself."

"No!" She said it before she'd decided to. "No, don't. Sorry, I just!" She laughed at herself, breathless. "God. I wasn't expecting to feel anything and then I felt everything, all at once, like the whole thing showed up at once."

"Take your time."

"Roger and I, by the end, we were nice to each other. We were so nice. Nobody touched anybody on purpose for about three years and we both pretended that was fine." She was looking at his collar while she said it, which was easier. "And now some man puts his leg where legs go in a tango and I make a noise like a startled bird."

Jeffery didn't laugh at her, which she appreciated, and didn't rush to comfort her either, which she appreciated more.

"So the alarm bell," he said carefully, "that's the wanting. Wanting somebody again after a long quiet. It comes with a siren on it for a while. That's normal. That's been my experience anyway."

"Your experience being you left a tour and moved back here and dated half the studio."

"Dated one woman at the studio for two years and she was lovely and it ended and the siren went off then too. Yes." He shifted his weight. "Can I put the leg back? Only if the answer's yes. The tango works fine without it, it just looks like two people politely arguing in a hallway."

Rebecca laughed, a real one, wet around the edges. "Put