The Elevator Waltz

Johnny Lagarde was forty-two years old and had spent half his life working cranes at the port, so when his wife Isabella suggested they take swing dance classes at the settlement recreation hall, he figured it would be easier than arguing about it. It turned out to be harder than any shift he had ever worked, because the instructor, a wiry man named Del who was sixty if he was a day, kept telling Johnny his feet were fine but his timing was a crime.

Now they were walking out into the cool northern evening, and Isabella was laughing at him in that way she had, the laugh that started in her shoulders and worked its way down. She was forty, two years younger than him, and after six years of marriage he still thought her laugh was the best sound in the Yukon, which was a good thing because there was not much competition out there.

"You stepped on my foot four times," she said, hooking her arm through his as they crossed the gravel lot toward the truck. "I counted. Four times, same foot, like you were punishing it."

"Del said my timing was getting better," Johnny said, and she snorted, and he grinned at the road ahead because she could not see him grin in the dark and he did not want to waste it.

"Del said your timing was getting better because Del is a kind man who wants us to come back next week and pay again. Your timing is a crime, Johnny. Your own words, two hours ago."

"Del's words. I just agreed with him because he was holding my shoulder and it hurt."

They got into the truck, her old Ford with the passenger door that had to be lifted a little on the pull, and they sat there for a minute in the cab while the engine ticked, neither one of them reaching for the keys yet. Isabella turned in her seat to face him and pulled one knee up, her boot resting on the bench seat, and he watched her do the little shimmy move she had finally gotten right near the end of the lesson.

"See?" she said, wobbling her shoulders. "I learned something. You learned nothing. You just stepped on things."

"I learned one thing," Johnny said. "I learned that when you spin, your skirt does this thing, and I lost my count every time."

"That's not learning, that's staring."

"Same thing in this family."

She laughed again and leaned over the console and kissed him, quick and warm, and for a second the whole cold camp outside the windshield did not exist. Six years of marriage and some weeks it felt like thirty and some nights like this it felt like nine years ago at the company holiday party, when a crane driver with sawdust in his hair asked a dispatcher to dance and she said yes because she felt sorry for him, her words, which he repeated back to her every anniversary and she denied every anniversary.

Isabella pulled back and looked out the windshield at the recreation hall, all its windows dark now except the one over the door where Del was killing the lights. The hall was the biggest building in the settlement, built back when the camp cut lumber year round, and it still had things in it nobody used anymore, a stage with a torn curtain, a trophy case with nothing in it, and at the far end, past the coat racks, an old elevator, a real antique box on cables, sealed shut behind a chain for as long as anyone could remember.

Isabella was looking at it and Johnny knew that look, and he felt the night shift under him like a change in the weather.

"No," he said, though he was already smiling.

"I didn't say anything."

"You looked at the elevator."

"I'm allowed to look at things," she said, opening her door. "Come on. Walk me around the long way. I want to see if Del chained it up again."

He got out because he always did, because a woman he had followed into marriage for six years said walk me the long way and he walked. The gravel crunched and the wind came off the treeline and smelled like spruce and cold diesel from the generator shed. She took his hand and pulled him past the truck, past the corner of the hall, around to the side entrance, and there it was at the end of the corridor of old boards, the elevator doors, brass gone brown, the heavy chain looped through both handles with a padlock hanging open because Del had not bothered to click it shut, chain only, chain that meant look but do not touch and had meant it for years.

Isabella stopped in front of it and put her back against the doors and looked up at him with her hair coming loose from the clip she wore to dance class.

"Slip it through," she said. "The chain. It's just looped, Johnny, no lock. Slide it out of the gap and step in there with me for one minute."

"The car hasn't moved in twenty years. Floor's probably rotten."

"Then we'll stand very still," she said, and her hand came up and flattened on his chest, over the flannel, over the heartbeat. "One minute. I want to show you my shimmy in private, without Del saying follow the count, and without those two boys from the mill watching my skirt. Just you. Please."

He looked down at her and thought about the four foot-stompings and the skirt thing during the spin and the fact that the last time she had asked him please with that particular tone had been her birthday last spring, and he reached out and worked the slack chain through the gap in the doors, quietly, link by link, the metal cold in his fingers, until it hung loose and there was a gap a man could fit through if the man was motivated.

The doors slid maybe an inch on their own weight when he pushed, and the smell inside was old machine oil and dust and twenty years of nothing, and the car was there, thank God, sitting level with the floor, a little wooden-paneled box with a single caged bulb and a hand rail. He went in first and checked the boards with his boot heel, and they held, and then Isabella slipped in after him and he pulled the chain back through the gap behind them, not locked, nothing locked, just looped again, because the chain rattling in the quiet was part of what made her laugh low in her throat the way she did.

It was dark in there, barely a gray glow from the hall window down the corridor, and the box was narrow, three feet across maybe, built for two men and a hand truck in an era when men were smaller. Her hips brushed his and there was nowhere to step back to, and he heard her breath go short and pleased.

"So," she whispered, and he could feel her words more than hear them, her mouth an inch from his jaw. "This is the private part of the lesson. Watch my feet."

He could not see her feet and he told her so, and she said that was the point, and then she started to move. The shimmy, slow, her shoulders rolling against his chest through both their jackets, and her hip catching his hip with each little swing, and somewhere above them the old chain shifted an inch along the door gap and rattled, a bright small sound in all that dark, and she froze for a second and then did it again on purpose, rolled her hip so the chain moved, so it rattled, out here where anybody cutting across to the hall could hear it and look and see nothing but a chained dead elevator, and she laughed that low laugh against his collar.

"You're insane," Johnny whispered.

"I'm forty years old and I'm dancing in a haunted elevator with a crane driver," she whispered back. "This is the most fun I've had since March. Hold the rail and don't step on my foot."

She kept moving, and Johnny held the rail the way she told him to, one hand on the cold brass and the other hovering at her waist because he did not know where to put it, and the caged bulb above them threw just enough of a glow that he could see her face tilted up, her mouth open a little, her eyes catching what little light there was. The shimmy went on, shoulders and hips, her body rolling against him in that slow wave she had learned in the first three weeks of class and refused to perform in public ever since, and every time her hip swung the chain along the door gap ticked and rattled, and every rattle made her breath catch in a way he had not heard in years, not since the early days at the port company dances when she used to pull him behind the forklift shed just to feel the risk of it.

He had forgotten she was like this. Or maybe he had not forgotten, maybe he had just let it go quiet, the way a crane goes quiet when the shift ends, and now here it all was again, running hot