Astonish Me: A novel

by Shipstead, Maggie

  THE DOOR OPENS AND A WOMAN COMES INTO THE BAR ON A BURST OF cold air. She is bundled in a sheepskin jacket with epaulettes of snow and a purple scarf. An ear-flapped lumberjack hat is pulled low on her brow. She stops short. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she says, staring at Jacob from between hat and scarf like a knight peering out of a suit of armor.

  “Liesel?” he says. “Is that you under there?”

  In answer, she unwraps her scarf from around her broad, shrewd milkmaid’s face. “Ta da,” she says. Before he can process what is happening, she goes and kisses the mustache guy on the lips. The guy raises his glass at Jacob.

  Liesel pats the guy on his beefy pectoral. “This is my boyfriend, Ray.”

  “Hey,” Jacob says.

  “Ray, this is my ex-boyfriend, Jacob.”

  “Yeah,” Ray says, “I’d guessed.”

  “Really?” Liesel looks between them. “How?”

  “He said he was married to a ballet dancer.”

  “Do you tell everyone?” Liesel asks Jacob with scorn and amusement. “You should get cards printed up and go around tossing them in people’s laps on the El. Anyway, I thought I got custody of this place.”

  “I wanted a beer,” he said. “It’s too cold to walk anywhere else.”

  They have not spoken much for a year, not since he dumped her, which he had only done because, perplexingly, she had not dumped him after he told her about Joan’s pregnancy. She takes off her jacket and turns it inside out over a barstool; snow drips off it onto the floor. The bartender sets a beer in front of her.

  Her wispy blond hair, recently and unwisely cut to chin length, lies limp against her head, but the cold has flushed her cheeks and lips in a way that makes him think of sex. He chides himself for being so predictably horny, like a lab subject responding to stimuli. Since Harry’s birth, Joan has not been interested in sex, but, for Jacob, the relentlessness and insistence of the baby’s physical being draws constant attention to bodies and skin and nakedness and his own maturity and virility. He finds himself getting turned on in the most inappropriate situations, such as by a pissed-off ex, in front of her boyfriend.

  Liesel doesn’t attract him as strongly as Joan, but he likes her looks, which are ruddy and earthy. She had tried to couch their breakup as a rejection of her appearance. Sorry I’m not a ballerina, she’d said, bending the last word into a long, sarcastic sine wave.

  “What do you do, Ray?” he asks.

  “I’m a cop.” Ray smiles.

  Liesel leans against him, and he wraps an arm around her waist and tucks his fingers into her pocket. “No more academics for me,” she says. “I can’t take all the narcissism and insecurity.”

  “Fair enough,” Jacob says.

  “Really, though, what are you doing out drinking all by yourself?” Liesel asks.

  He has no answer, of course, beyond his simple desire to be drinking and by himself and not at home. But to say this would suggest discontentment. One of Jacob’s greatest fears is that his life will not appear intentional. Had he subconsciously wanted to run into Liesel? Maybe. But only to use her as a reminder that he is happy. “I was supposed to meet a colleague, but I’m afraid I’m being stood up.”

  “A colleague,” Liesel says, imitating his haughty tone. “How unfortunate.”

  It is, Jacob realizes, time to leave. “I should go.”

  “Great running into you.” Liesel smiles. “Here in my favorite bar. What a coincidence.”

  When he opens the door, piled-up snow falls inside. “Nice move!” calls the bartender. But there is nothing Jacob can do. He clambers out into the cold, wedging the door closed behind him as best he can. The stairs are buried under a ramp of powder, and he climbs carefully, clinging to the frigid handrail, probing for each step. At the top, in a streetlamp’s soft orange circle, he pauses, enjoying the cold, which settles on his body like a weight. He turns for home.

  A BLAST OF HEAT STRIKES HIM WHEN HE OPENS THE DOOR, AND HE strips off his coat before he even takes the key out of the lock. Joan is sitting on the floor with her back against the hissing radiator and her legs open in a wide V around the blanket where Harry is sitting upright, unsupported, in a diaper and a University of Chicago T-shirt, studying an assortment of rattles strewn around his plump legs. They turn to look at Jacob, Joan with the absorbed, private smile she gets around the baby, Harry with grave hesitation that turns to openmouthed delight, showing his gums and two bottom teeth.

  “Hello, sweethearts,” Jacob says, tugging his sweater over his head and stepping on the heels of his boots to pry them off.

  When he stoops to kiss Joan’s cheek, he slides his hand down the neck of her shirt. She gave up on breast-feeding as abruptly and conclusively as she had quit dancing, even when the doctor said she should keep trying. Jacob suspects she had simply disliked it. Her breasts are bigger than they were before Harry but still no more than gentle hillocks on her chest, self-supporting, nothing pendulous. She looks up at him, not lusty, mildly amused. He tweaks her nipple. “Knock it off, they’re sore.”

  “Do you know how many times we’ve had sex?” he asks her. “Ever?”

  “I’m not keeping a tally.”

  “Thirty-six. Eight when you came to visit. Twenty-one when you were pregnant. Seven since the baby.” He lies down on the floor, curved on his side, his body closing the wedge of her legs, penning Harry in, who cranes around to look at him and tips over.

  “Oops,” Joan says to the baby. Harry sweeps his limbs like four oars.

  Jacob smoothes Harry’s spider silk over his scalp. “It’s not that many, is all I’m saying.”

  “There’s no hurry. You’ll have plenty of time to get bored with me.”

  “I won’t get bored.”

  “Also,” Joan says, “I still feel—I don’t know—off. I mean in my body. I did when I was pregnant, too. I don’t feel like myself. I don’t feel sexy. I feel strange.”

  Jacob does ordinary, utilitarian things with his body: eat, drink, sleep, walk, jog, swim occasionally, have sex if the opportunity presents itself. He doesn’t do any of these things with unusual finesse or grace or stringency. Joan talks about her body as though it were her primary stake in the living world, an entity capable of moods separate from her own. Jacob wants her to say that both she and her body want him, that she is looking forward to a lifetime of sex with only him. But begging for reassurance is unattractive, unmanly, something he can permit himself only in tiny, rationed bursts. Joan’s father left when she was a baby and never came back, and Jacob thinks, psychoanalytically speaking, she should be the one to worry about his leaving. It’s worrisome that she doesn’t seem to worry. In fact, in all the time he’s known her, he can’t remember her ever seeming as relaxed as she does when she’s home with the baby.

  Harry curls his toes and claps his feet together like two scoops.

  “I like how he gestures with his feet,” Jacob comments, giving up the subject of sex. “I should start doing that. Just wave them around when I want to make a point.”

  Harry pushes out his legs and, rolling sideways, swivels up to a sitting position. He flaps in celebration. Gently, Joan grasps his hands, and Harry pumps his torso and bows his legs and is suddenly, startlingly upright, balanced on those gesticulating feet. His diaper hulas for balance. He has been doing this for a week. Seven months is early for a baby to stand—Jacob knows this even though infancy isn’t his field. His dissertation is on the identification of gifted children, but he is wary of getting attached to the idea of Harry being gifted, of inadvertently pushing the boy or making him feel like a disappointment.

  “Do you want to show Daddy?” Joan asks Harry. “Do you want to show him what you can do?” She releases the baby’s hands, and for a breathless moment he balances on his own, feet spread wide like a surfer’s. Then he flexes at the waist and falls onto his padded butt.

  Jacob picks Harry up under the arms, turns him around, and looks into his face. “You,” he says. “We�
�re going to have to watch you.” Joan had asked him to name the baby, bestowed complete power on him to do so, and he had chosen Harold after his grandfather who died early in Joan’s pregnancy.

  Joan stands and goes to their tiny kitchen nook to warm up some formula. She is wearing poufy harem pants, thick socks, and that thin, soft shirt he wants to put his hands in. “Is there anything to eat?” he asks.

  “Formula, bananas, and cereal.”

  “You didn’t go to the store?”

  “It was too cold.”

  Jacob eases down on his back, bringing Harry with him to lie on his chest. “Mommy thinks because she can live on bananas, so can everyone else,” he tells the baby. Harry grasps his shirt with both hands and squints drowsily, coming down from the thrill of standing. The old chestnut is true: Jacob has always liked babies, but the love he feels for his own is an epiphany, shocking in its irreversibility. Even so, as he watches Harry’s tiny fingers crab at his shirt, he can’t help but wistfully consider, again, the early end to his bachelorhood. When Joan had come to see him the previous summer and hopped so briskly into his bed, it had seemed to vindicate his long-held conviction that his stock would rise steadily the further he got from high school. Finally holding Joan’s naked body, he had felt tenderness and love, but he had also, distinctly, felt the primal triumph of the sower of wild oats.

  “Guess who I ran into?” Jacob says in a low voice, not wanting to interfere with Harry’s wind-down.

  “Who?”

  “Liesel.”

  Joan appears from the kitchen, dribbling formula from a baby bottle onto the inside of her wrist and licking it off. “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  She picks Harry up, uncovering a baby-sized patch of sweat on Jacob’s shirt. “It’s a thousand degrees in here,” he says.

  “Mmm.” She settles cross-legged on the couch with a towel over her shoulder and the baby reclining against her arm. Idly, Jacob turns a rattle over in his fingers, watching her, wanting her to look at him. Her contentment is wrapped so tightly around Harry that he can never be certain it extends to him, too.

  He gets up and goes, without much optimism, to search for dinner. As he does most nights, he pours out a bowl of cornflakes. The last of the milk is not quite enough to cover them. “Do you think you’d be able to make a grocery run tomorrow?” he says, sitting beside her on the couch and wiping a dirty spoon on his shirt. “I’m not asking for a steak dinner. Just soup or something. Something I can heat up.”

  “Sure.” She raises her eyebrows at Harry and makes her lips into an O, mirroring his face as he suckles the bottle.

  “You know, never mind. I’ll go myself.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  He wants to pinch her, to hide Harry behind his back, to say something that will amaze her. Instead, he says, casually, “I think Liesel still has a thing for me.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “Is it such a mystery? I’m a catch. Was a catch.”

  “No, I meant why do you think that?”

  “Oh. I don’t know—I could just tell.”

  Finally she looks at him, perplexed. “Jacob, are you trying to make me jealous?”

  He watches Harry work at the bottle, his small hands coming up to caress it as Joan holds it. “Yes. I am. I’m sorry. It’s stupid.”

  “It’s not stupid,” she says. “It’s just not necessary.”

  “Here, give him to me.”

  She passes Harry and the bottle to him without disconnecting one from the other and drapes the towel over his shoulder. He wants her to watch the two of them at the same time, to see that they are part of the same picture. “Maybe,” he says, “it’s just that when you want someone for so long, and then you get that person magically out of nowhere, you have trouble believing it’s for real.”

  She smiles at him, brightly, the way she does when she is nervous, and the creeping in of her old skittishness reassures him more than anything she could say. “I think you miss the crush,” she says. “I’m probably a letdown because life is still life. Just with less suspense, and a baby.”

  “You’re not a letdown,” he says, brushing Harry’s powdery cheek with a finger. “I’d rather have you than wish for you.”

  The exact mechanism by which Joan became pregnant is something that bothers him from time to time. She had said she was on the pill, and then, later, when he’d asked how this could have happened, she said something about having had a stomach flu right before she came to see him, and maybe the pill doesn’t work when you throw it up. He can’t think of a reason why she would have done it on purpose.

  He says, “But I worry that you’re not happy. Sometimes it feels like you’re a fugitive hiding out here, like you’re in the witness protection program. I keep thinking I’m going to come home and find a note. That’s the new suspense.”

  Her feet burrow under his thigh, always seeking warmth. “I’m happy.”

  He is not sure he believes her. “Good,” he says, patting the tops of her feet. “I’m glad.”

  December 10, 1970

  Dear Joan,

  Well, I’ve been drinking. I should say that right away. I was at a party with the girl I’ve been seeing (yes, I’ve been seeing a girl), and we walked along the river, and then I told her I was feeling sick, which is true but really I wanted to come back here to my room and write you a letter. I wonder if I’ll see you when I’m home for Christmas. Where are you? I’m sending this to your mom’s house, but I don’t even know if you’re there. I hope you’re dancing, wherever you are. If you’re taking a typing class, please quit immediately.

  Joan. About the day at the beach. I’m sorry. I was a jackass. I’m sorry for what I said and for acting like I had earned some sort of right to kiss you. My friendship isn’t contingent on kissing, I promise. But I’m not sorry for the actual kiss. I have always wanted to kiss you. Maybe you knew that. Maybe I should have told you sooner and not let it build up.

  I think we might end up together, Joan. Do you think I’m insane? Does the idea horrify you? You kissed me back at first, for a second. You didn’t say why you stopped. Then I was a jackass. That day, before, I said you were lucky because you’d decided for yourself what you wanted out of life and I hadn’t. But that wasn’t true. I realized later I’d decided for myself that I want you. Will you please just consider that I’m the right one? Just consider it. Don’t decide now. Consider it, I don’t know, forever. Or at least until it happens.

  I am going to have one more little bit of whiskey, and then I am going to mail this. And in the morning I’ll probably regret everything, but it’ll be too late.

  Love,

  Jacob

  January 20, 1971

  Dear Jacob,

  I’m sorry I didn’t write sooner. As you probably realized, I didn’t go home for Christmas. I’ve been in San Francisco—did my mother tell you? Madame Tchishkoff helped me get a spot as an apprentice here. I’m so relieved. My foot is basically better, and the city is beautiful. My dancing has improved a lot, I think. I hope. Anyway, I didn’t get your letter for a while, and then I didn’t know how to write back. I still don’t, but I am. The long and short of it is that I adore you. I told you I know you took care of me. I don’t know if I said that I was grateful, but I am. I’ve never really had romantic feelings for you, exactly, though. I knew you felt a little differently. Maybe it was selfish of me to just let things go on. I was afraid of you bringing it up or trying something, and when you did, I didn’t know what to do. You’d think I would have decided in advance, but I couldn’t decide. Then when it happened, it felt like too much. I think you want too much from me. Does that make sense? I can’t put things into words the way you can. Is it enough to say that I’m confused? Maybe things will change. Some people seem to know themselves. I don’t feel that I do.

  But I would like us to write, even if it’s (still) selfish of me. I miss you. You are my best friend by miles and miles. Is that okay? I wish there were some way
for people not to want things from each other. But now you have my address. Write me back and tell me about how brilliant everyone at Georgetown thinks you are. (Tell me about the girl, too.)

  Much love,

  Joan

  JUNE 1982—SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

  AS THE PLANE DESCENDS, JOAN HOLDS THE CURTAIN TO ONE SIDE and peers out. Desert crinkles up into scrubby mountains topped with antennae; those drop away into low hills fringed with a terraced reef of neighborhoods. Then parking lots, electric blue swimming pools, golf courses, highways, and, just beyond the plane’s falling arc, the ocean. She fidgets, flipping the armrest ashtray open and closed. The smell of stale ash and sweet mint gum reminds her of touring with the company, everybody sleeping and stretching and getting up to smoke in the back, circulating up and down the aisle as though at a cocktail party.

  Jacob is already down there somewhere. A school district, flush with state money, has hired him to expand a program for gifted children. First the children are identified, then they are placed in small classes with specially trained teachers, and then they are tracked and studied over the long term. Jacob is enthusiastic, pleased to be regarded as a young hotshot, an innovator. He can build something here, he says. The system shouldn’t neglect the most promising individuals. He flew out before Joan and Harry and bought a house in a place called Valle de los Toros, one of those California towns that melt invisibly into the next, forming a continuous, hundred-mile-long patchwork of coastal domesticity.

  “Really,” Jacob says to Joan as they unpack the kitchen things, “what they’ve done is taken suburbia to the next level, cut out the middleman.” He has emptied a box of newspaper-wrapped dishes, and now he makes a precarious stack of mugs in a cupboard, not bothering to rinse off the ink and dust. “People like to live in places with specific names, so they chopped the sprawl into tiny little pieces and gave each piece some fakey Spanish label. This way, we can all tell ourselves we actually live somewhere—like we have a hometown, like we’re living the wholesome small town life, when really each of us is just one fleck of pig snout in the biggest hunk of real estate sausage ever made.”