Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

FOR MARY BETH BLUMENTHAL and Mike Renfro, the New Year arrived like this: they and two hundred other couples packed themselves into a hotel ballroom ringed in green-and-white awning-striped wallpaper; Salt Lake City meant the New Year’s Eve crowd was lily white, and there was no line at the bar, because the citizens of Utah prided themselves on restraint. That applied to their dancing too, tentative maneuverings that reminded Mary Beth of the cautious classmates she’d watched at her twenty-year high school reunion, moving stiffly with hands and elbows tucked to their sides.

Atop a temporary knee-high stage at the far end of the ballroom, a dance band robed in matching purple jackets meandered through a catalog of familiar songs from the last five decades; when they weren’t playing, the four-piece horn section jerked together in stiff choreography, white boys imitating the Four Tops. During the twenty-year-old tunes, couples bounced and circled on the dance floor, percolating gently, singing along as the vocalist slurred out his urge to celebrate good times, come on!

That was exactly what Mary Beth wanted to do.

She attributed her giddiness to the altitude, or maybe the remarkably pleasant weather, not to the bourbons or the champagne she’d had at the table. She felt relaxed, confident, her face radiant with a good, even suntan. Without the pressing demands of her child pulling at her hem, her worry lines had eased. She could not describe the relief of a four-day vacation, no obligations and no hurrying to the telephone. Tomorrow she would return to Texas, to her responsibilities and her routine, but tonight she wanted to give herself over to the occasion.

Mike and Mary Beth staked their claim to a table near the back of the ballroom. Mike retrieved a pair of cocktails, and they nibbled selections from the hors d’oeuvre trays of passing waiters. Mary Beth led Mike back to the dance floor as he chewed a scallop wrapped in bacon. But he didn’t protest, just discreetly palmed the toothpick from his snack and fell in behind her, hands on her hips, as they conga-ed toward the band.

When the next song sped up, Mike dabbed at his hairline with his ubiquitous clean handkerchief. She liked that Mike did not have the big man’s usual reticence to strut; he moved with a grace he inhabited easily despite his size. So many of the men looked flustered by the up-tempo music, but Mike moved with the confidence of a man armed with more than just lessons in the Arthur Murray method of dance; he was a surprisingly competent dancer, and that was the word that best summed up Mary Beth’s feelings about Mike as a partner: competent, a possessor of minor but nonetheless impressive skills. He could choose a patterned tie that matched a striped shirt, make a decent dinner that did not include red meat, fillet any number of small, bony fish; he never forgot the birthdays of any of the girls who worked at the Mike Renfro Agency; he wasn’t fazed by the cartons of Mary Beth’s Swedish furniture that arrived labeled SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED; tonight, he demonstrated the secrets to dance steps that lived on in the films of the forties, the fox trot, the Lindy.

Since there wasn’t some great passion, Mary Beth knew she was feeling a sort of Cinderella effect. She’d been treated well for the past three days and hoped both the feeling and the treatment wouldn’t vanish once they returned to Dallas. Maybe it was the alcohol, the way they gulped the last of their drinks before heading out to dance, but Mary Beth could not help but feel she was on the precipice of some important change, a way she had not felt since her high school days, when she gave too easily of her heart and body. How refreshing it was to learn that under the weighted yoke of decades of minor disappointments might lurk an optimist.

Mary Beth swayed along with Mike, surveying the crowd, writing histories for each blank face she saw. The party was filled with couples, long- and short-term, alliances of permanence or convenience, anniversaries ranging from paper to gold. The song morphed into something newish; the younger couples nodded their heads in agreement, mouthed the words. She was one of the very few who did not know the song. Mary Beth limited her movements to half arcs in front of Mike, who danced behind the beat, then lurched to a stop.

He checked his watch and stopped in place and shouted at her over the squawk of the horn section. “Jesus Christ. They’re missing it.”

“Missing what?” Mary Beth too stopped dancing and leaned in to hear Mike over the thrum of the party.

Mike tapped the dial of his watch then pointed as a man in a well-worn tuxedo bounded onto the stage, waving his arms over his head in a panic to stop the band, flashing two inches of white shirt cuff from beneath his too-short jacket sleeve. “The goddamn New Year. It’s already midnight.”

Knowing that her New Year’s kiss would arrive late felt like the evening was offering her a peculiar brand of betrayal. How often real life fell short of even her slightest expectations. She had a moment of guilt, the passing thought that perhaps she should have been watching the ball drop on television, on her own couch, with her son, nested in a huge swaddle of blankets and pillows. She’d kiss him on the forehead and carry him to her room, let him sleep the rest of the night in the big bed. Soon he’d be too old for that particular comfort, and that would be another disappointment to add to her list.

Onstage, the emcee’s voice counted down the last seconds of another year—“Three, two, one”—filling the air around them, but the timing was off, too late. Even though it was just seconds, it was a ridiculous mistake, an Apollo rocket already off the launch pad while the voices at mission control kept on counting.

Half a minute into January, the band managed “Auld Lang Syne,” the music rising over the noisemakers and the report of champagne corks. Mary Beth tilted her head to accept Mike’s incoming kiss. He slipped his arms around her waist, slid a step closer, reached a hand into the stripes of her hair near her temple. She craved an epic kiss, if only because the other kisses that surrounded her—the dancing couples with their homogeneous, perfunctory pecks—were so disappointing, the loveless duties she remembered of her parents. She opened her lips and waited for Mike’s tentative introduction of his tongue. His hand crossed her back, his warm fingers circling to touch the skin left exposed by her cocktail dress. The song’s melody, funereal, dirgelike, now swelled as an overture, a call to arms, a battle cry to bury the disappointments of the past year and embrace the promise of the new. The nearby couples sang along, and Mary Beth opened her eyes to find that she and Mike were the only ones still in the clutches of their kiss. She had kissed Mike hundreds of times, kisses as a necessary thing, kisses as a prelude to roaming hands or more advanced activities. She snuck a moment’s peek at Mike’s face because she wanted to capture the kiss in her memory.

Mary Beth wished everyone could witness the beauty of their kiss. Tomorrow, replaying the moment from an outsider’s view, she would see them in the center of the ballroom, sharing a noteworthy embrace, a life-shaping event. Already she was comparing it to a scene in that French movie, Un Homme et Une Femme, a man and woman kissing on the beach as the camera swirled around them in vertiginous loops. She kept both those images together, allowing them to blend into one, something to recall, replay, savor. Their long kiss ended with a second, shorter kiss—Mary Beth pulling Mike back to her with a two-handed grip on his lapels—touching his moist lips quickly, then pulling away with an audible smack. She could not help but feel that she was getting carried away to the soundtrack of a good-bye song.