Astonish Me: A novel

by Shipstead, Maggie

  “Don’t hassle her,” Gary scolds. He gives Joan a brisk, apologetic nod, and she looks back at him, stymied. Her knife and fork hover over her plate. Jacob has wondered if Gary has the hots for Joan, but that doesn’t seem quite right. More likely Gary just appreciates her as a physical template, a more refined model of wife than his own. Something about dancers’ bodies, the obviousness of their manufactured perfection, makes people brazen about looking and commenting.

  Flustered, Sandy redirects her attention to Jacob. “What do you mean, people can be gifted in other ways?”

  “The gist is that someone who might not do well with traditional academic tasks could still have other aptitudes. Like for music or spatial relations. Or someone might have interpersonal gifts.”

  “That’s you, honey,” Gary puts in, conciliatory.

  “Or someone might be physically gifted—Gardner calls it bodily-kinesthetic intelligence—and be an excellent athlete or a dancer like Joan.” Jacob strokes his wife’s leg under the table, then remembers the children and stops.

  Gary says, “I aced an IQ test when I was a kid. Off the charts, I guess.”

  Jacob nods politely, as though it were possible to “ace” an IQ test. All people want to do is tell him about their IQs, which are either off the charts or, in the case of a certain breed of red-faced men on airplanes, so low they almost put me out with the cattle, but, sure enough, a few years down the road I started my own business, and now you wouldn’t believe what I’m worth, so just goes to show you IQ tests don’t amount to a pile of beans.

  “What I’m afraid of with Chloe,” Gary goes on, “is that she won’t get the support she deserves.”

  “That happened to Gary,” says Sandy. “No one challenged him.”

  “I’m not complaining, but I want Chloe to have every opportunity.” Gary wipes his mouth, drops his napkin back into his lap, shakes his head. “Every opportunity.”

  “In my experience,” Jacob says, hearing and regretting the preachy note in his voice, “the key is to allow children to discover what they’re passionate about.”

  “How old are you?” Gary asks.

  “Twenty-eight.” Before he can stop himself, he adds, “And a half.”

  Gary’s smile is controlled and contemptuous. “Robbing the cradle,” he says to Joan.

  A yipping comes from under the table. “Do I hear a puppy?” Sandy says. “Is there a puppy under this table?”

  The yipping turns to a howl and then trails off.

  Sandy leans to one side and lifts the tablecloth, peering underneath. “What kind of puppy is it?”

  “Two puppies!” Harry announces. “And one’s a bitch!”

  Gary dives under the table like a sea lion after a fish. “Excuse me, young man? What did you say?”

  Jacob feels his son’s small hand on his knee. He bends and peers into the dim space, at the small curled bodies of the children and the large staring faces of Sandy and Gary. “Dad,” whispers Harry. “A bitch is a girl dog. Chloe’s a girl. We’re playing dogs.”

  “You’re right,” Jacob tells him, “but it’s also a bad name people call each other to be mean. Probably you should just avoid saying it.” He sits back up, and the Wheelocks surface too.

  Joan is fighting the giggles and losing. For a long minute she turns away, shielding her face while the others watch in silence. It’s the tension, Jacob knows. In high school she would laugh when someone got yelled at in class. When she looks up, her eyes are red and watering. “Sorry,” she says to Gary and Sandy, her face crimping with the effort of seriousness. “I didn’t even know he knew that word.”

  “He owes Chloe an apology,” Gary says.

  “As far as he knew, he was being factual,” says Jacob. “If we make a big deal out of it, we only draw attention to it.”

  Joan trembles in her chair, tears rolling down her cheeks. He can’t look at her or he’ll laugh too.

  Gary runs his tongue over his incisors, close mouthed, making a gorilla face. “Thanks for the parenting lesson, but Chloe needs to know she’s respected.”

  “He’s not being a misogynist. They’re playing puppies.”

  “I don’t see what’s funny.”

  Joan plunks her elbows down on the table, making the china rattle, and presses her face into her hands. Jacob feels himself being pulled after her as though by a tether. As he tries not to laugh, he makes an accidental strangled sound, which sends him shooting off the edge. He lists toward her and presses his face into her shoulder. She leans back against him, shaking, and rests one hand on top of his head, lightly gripping his hair. “I’m sorry,” he wheezes. “I’m sorry. It’s contagious.”

  Whether it is a blessing or curse that the contagion spreads to Sandy, Jacob doesn’t know. Probably a blessing for him and a curse for her, as Gary singles her out as the target of his most stern and outraged glaring. The children are laughing too, under the table. They are all in it together until, inevitably and abruptly, control filters back, and they pull themselves upright, hot faced, spent, vaguely ashamed.

  “Got that out of your systems?” Gary asks. He has an air of beleaguered dignity, like the only sober one in a room full of drunks.

  “I’m sorry,” Joan says. “I just lost it.”

  Sandy waves her hands. “It feels so good to laugh like that.”

  Gary’s narrow eyes cut to her, and the woman cringes. In his agitated state, Jacob is acutely aware of the guilty, animal way Sandy’s back hunches and she flashes a grimace, exposing her teeth.

  “What were you saying before?” she asks Jacob. “I was interested.”

  “I don’t remember.” Jacob gropes for the lost thread of his thoughts, his euphoria draining away.

  “Something about passion.”

  “Oh. Right. Well. My basic point was that people tend to make opportunities for themselves when they love something. Look at Joan. She saw a picture of Margot Fonteyn in a magazine when she was four and said, ‘I want to do that.’ ”

  With the air of scoring a point, Gary asks, “Did you want to be a psychologist when you were four?”

  Joan dabs her eyes one last time with her napkin, rises, and begins clearing their plates. Jacob has noticed their ongoing refusal to acknowledge her dancing. When he mentioned it to Joan, she brushed him off, saying she’s not a dancer anymore, she doesn’t need anyone to make a big deal about it. “No,” Jacob says, resisting the urge to ask if Gary had played Mall Leasing Office as a kid, “but I was always interested in people and the way their minds work.” He twists in his chair, watching his wife. Everything she does is elegant, including carrying dirty dishes for a pair of boors. “Joan, tell them how you remember feeling when you saw that picture.”

  “I was so little.”

  He holds out his hand, beckoning her back from the kitchen. “Tell them.”

  She comes closer, uncertain, like a fawn, her cheeks flushed from laughing. Even those few steps betray her as a dancer. She hasn’t lost her turned-out, precise walk. She is so upright, so deliberate; her head is supported so regally by her long neck.

  “It’s silly,” she says, “but I just loved her. I loved this woman I’d never met. I didn’t even know what to call her or why she was up on her toes. I wanted an explanation. I had to find out what that picture meant.”

  The Wheelocks look at each other. Gary raises his eyebrows slightly, skeptically. “Well,” he says, “it’s getting late.”

  Sandy puts a hand on his arm. “No, Joan has to have cake.”

  “Did you ask her if she wants cake?”

  “It looks delicious,” Joan says.

  “Joan was the one who helped Arslan Rusakov defect,” Jacob persists, avoiding his wife’s eyes so as not to see her surprise that he would bring up Rusakov. “Did she tell you that? She drove the getaway car. Have you heard of him?”

  “I read the newspaper every day,” Gary says. “Of course I’ve heard of him.”

  Sandy is staring after Joan, who has retreated
to the kitchen. “Joan, you never said.”

  “It’s ancient history.” Joan’s voice floats back from the kitchen. “It could have been anyone. I just did what some strangers told me to do. Should I light these candles?”

  “You can’t light your own birthday candles,” Sandy says.

  “EVERY FAMILY HAS A MYTHOLOGY,” JACOB SAYS IN BED, LYING ON HIS side with his arms folded across his chest. His pillow pushes his glasses away from his face at a funny angle. Joan has always found his postures of relaxation to be odd and stiff, and this one is no exception. He looks like a tipped-over mummy.

  “How so?”

  “You know, everyone has a role and an epithet and a story about how they came to be who they are.”

  “Epithet?”

  “Like, ‘Unappreciated-Genius Gary.’ ”

  “Hmm.” Joan considers. She has always liked it when Jacob comes up with these theories. They become games to play, puzzles to solve. Lying on her back, she stretches her arms up and eyes them critically, letting her elbows and wrists curve out so she is holding an oval of air, her fingertips almost touching. Her arms are still thin enough, but she is losing tone. She drops them. “Perfectionist Joan.” She points a finger at him before he can protest. “It’s what you think.”

  “Then what am I?”

  They stare at each other, and Joan senses they are both trying to gauge how truthful the game should be. “Gentle Jacob,” she offers.

  “Jacob the Nerd.”

  “Jacob the Gentle Nerd?”

  He smiles, and she can see that he will not offer up one of the labels they know would be more accurate: Jacob the Proud, Jacob Who Does Not Make Mistakes. It must have cost him to mention Arslan to Gary. He says, “Perfectionist isn’t the first word I think of when I think of you.” His tone is mild, but the game has turned dangerous.

  “No? What is?”

  He rolls onto his back, looks at the ceiling. She likes his profile: his strong chin with its dense, clipped beard, his long nose with a bump just below the bridge. “Unobtainable.”

  “Oh, Jacob. I have been obtained.”

  Behind his glasses, his eyes briefly close. “You know what I mean. It’s vestigial.”

  She considers climbing on top of him, kissing him, but he will recognize the cheapness. She could tell him there is no one she would rather be married to, that her love is growing, but slowly, accumulating imperceptibly the way trace minerals in dripping water build rock structures in caves, and it would all be true. But what he wants is impossible—he wants to change the past, for everything to happen in the right order. He wants them to love each other equally, but he is afraid of what it would be like if they did.

  “I haven’t laughed like that in a long time,” she says. “I used to lose it in high school when someone would get in trouble. Remember? It was the same at ballet. If Tchishkoff really tore into someone, I’d get the giggles. I felt like a monster. Some poor girl would get ripped apart, and I’d have to leave because I was laughing so hard. What is that?”

  “You’re what’s known as a sociopath. You have no empathy.”

  “Oh, okay. Glad to have a diagnosis.” After a moment, she says, “You know, if I had loved you right away, like I should have, when I was fourteen, you would have gotten tired of me, and I wouldn’t have you now. I had a whole plan, you see. You fell for it.”

  He turns to look at her. “I am such a dupe.”

  She slides across the sheets, hooks one leg over him, and sits up so she is straddling his belly. She rests both her hands on his chest and looks down at him. The beauty of sex, Elaine said once, is that you don’t have to talk. Jacob’s hands come up to clasp her thighs. His chin lifts; his eyelids droop. Desire looks like something going away at first, an ebbing. Sex is something they do well together. With Arslan, fear had made her ravenous. Even his laziest, most perfunctory touches had thrilled her because they meant he was not yet gone. She had clambered around doing his bidding, neither of them considering what she wanted. There is no thrill with Jacob, but there is comfort and pleasure and the freedom that comes from trust.

  He shifts. His hands move to her hips. “Why don’t we ever talk about having another baby?”

  He must feel her unease because his hands stop moving, and his eyes lose their dreaminess. “We do,” she says.

  “Not really. I hint, and you dodge.”

  Sitting on him has become awkward, but she is afraid he will take it as a rejection if she moves away. “No, I don’t.”

  “You do. Look, if you don’t want another one, you should at least say so.”

  “How can you be sure you want another one?”

  He nudges her off him, not roughly but with an apologetic grimace. “You’re sitting on Sandy’s cake. I just am. I see us with another. I liked having sisters.”

  “God, a girl.” Joan sits cross-legged, one of her knees against his thigh, and picks at her fingernails. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I want to risk all the things that can go wrong. Everything would be different if we had another. Why take the chance? Why mess with something that’s working?”

  “No,” Jacob says, excited, lifting onto his elbows. “No, you have to be biologically brave. It’s in our nature to take that chance. I understand the fear, but I don’t think fear should be enough to stop us.”

  “You’re not the one who has to be pregnant and give birth. You don’t have to push another person out of yourself. I hear women say they forget all about birth as soon as it’s over, but I didn’t. I don’t know why nobody seems to take birth into account when they think about having a baby.”

  “A few stretch marks aren’t the end of the world, Joan.”

  “I’m not ready.”

  After a moment, he pulls her down beside him, her head on his shoulder. “I wish you wanted one.”

  “I know.”

  After another silence, he sets his glasses on the nightstand and switches off the light. In the dark, lying against his body as though it were a gently respiring bolster, she imagines she can feel his thoughts coming through his skin like a fever. She feels his disappointment, his accusatory argument that she had been willing to trick him into conceiving a baby when he was young and unprepared but now that he has spent five years proving himself as a husband and father, she is unmoved by his desire for another. She feels him criticizing her vanity, rejecting her concern for her body as unjustified, even pathetic, now that she doesn’t perform. She feels his sadness that the family he imagined isn’t to be. She feels his love grow less dense around her, like fog lifting.

  But, really, all she can feel is his breathing. It strikes her as strange that two people lying quietly in the dark, remote in their thoughts, locked away in their bodies, have everything necessary to make a third person who will, barring tragedy, lie quietly through darknesses long after they are dead. She had excused herself from Jacob’s love when they were teenagers because she was young and unprepared, a luxury she hadn’t granted him. But now she is his, they are each other’s, and for him to be unhappy, to love her less, is intolerable.

  “There’s still time,” she says. “I need a little more time.”

  Under her ear, she feels a pulse in his shoulder. That his heart has begun to pound with hope makes hers pound with fear. She should give him what he wants. She will, just not quite yet.

  “When?” he says.

  “Soon.”

  He shifts to lie squarely on her. She touches his face. In the early days, his weight had felt oppressive, suffocating, but now the burden of him is comforting. “I can live with soon,” he says.

  She doesn’t want to have to say anything else. She pulls his head down and meets his mouth with hers.

  AUGUST 1984—DISNEYLAND

  MERLIN TILTS A LONG FINGER OVER THE HEADS OF CHILDREN AND parents, over mouse ears and Peter Pan hats, through the strings of their balloons, and, in his booming wizard voice, bids Tim approach the stone and remove the sword. All the children raising their hands, str
aining to show their worthiness, subside in disappointment that a grown-up has been chosen. Tim squeezes through the ranks of families and goes to stand beside Merlin. He strikes a silly body-builder pose.

  “Valiant knight,” says Merlin, opening his arms to show off his robe’s voluminous purple sleeves, “are you the one we seek? Do you possess the strength to free this mighty blade from yonder stone? Are you destined to become ruler of the realm?”

  “You bet!” says Tim.

  Tim’s daughter Amber, who has rejected Sandy’s offer to hold her up so she can see better, stands on tiptoe and whispers, “My dad is really strong.”

  Sandy suspects she’s right. She had met Tim the previous afternoon on the artificial white sand beach by one of the pools at the hotel, the pool that Chloe and Harry love because it has waterslides made out of big, fake rocks. Except for his ponytail, he reminds her pleasantly of the frat boys she used to date: burly, soft in spots, sunburned. Tim is a carpenter, divorced and in the middle of a weekend-long attempt to bribe Amber into forgetting she has anything to be unhappy about. Chloe, barely deigning to watch as Tim makes a show of pushing up his sleeves and pretending to spit on his palms, says, “He’s not going to do it. I’ve seen this before.”

  “He can do it,” Amber says desperately. Her father braces one foot on the stone, grasps the sword’s hilt, and pulls. Nothing happens. Tim crosses his eyes and sticks out his tongue. Most children in the audience laugh but not Amber.

  “Your dad’s being funny,” Joan tells her.

  Sandy and Joan planned this trip months ago. They envisioned it as part girls’ getaway and part last hurrah before the kids start first grade—two nights in a hotel, two days split between the park and the pool, no husbands. They had planned so well and so far in advance that when Sandy decided she was tired of Joan and didn’t want to go anymore, it was too late. Chloe would have been crushed, and Gary wouldn’t let her lose the cost of the hotel room, which was already paid for. “Plus,” he said, “Joan’s a good friend for you to have.” She had not asked what he meant because she knew he imagined this weekend would be a good chance for her to observe how Joan stayed so thin (Sandy already knew: no food, surreptitious cigarettes) and that she would come home twenty pounds lighter, as though from a summer at fat camp.