Astonish Me: A novel

by Shipstead, Maggie

  During class or rehearsal, he never treats her differently from the others, but in the nighttime quiet, lying side by side in his bed, his hand resting companionably on her stomach, he has told her she is his true muse, she has become his idea of a woman. Idea, not ideal, which she would recognize as a lie. It is the idea of her—the idea of women in general—that obsesses him: their capacity as vessels, their aesthetics, their otherness. He eroticizes them, desires them in a way, but does not lust for them. He lusts for men, she knows, but she has never seen him be lecherous toward the boys in the company. She suspects he feels demeaned by lust. That part of his life is walled off, invisible, underground, nocturnal, private.

  Elaine and Mr. K sleep together often; they have sex rarely, usually only when he is drunk or riding the high of a new ballet. She calls him Mstislav when they are alone, but she still thinks of him as Mr. K. He has suggested that she move in with him, and she supposes she will. They have mossed together. To think she could extricate herself at this point would be delusional. When she was younger, she had been tormented by his indifference in bed, had thought it meant he was always on the verge of abandoning her, and she had tried to hack herself loose from him. She told him she wanted normal love, a husband, monogamy, something she could explain to other people, but then, after a year, when normal turned out to be a disappointment, he made a ballet on her: Catherine the Great. It was her best role, the closest she had come to dancing the way she wanted. Her destiny is to serve a greater artist. They will share a life inside his apartment, but he will venture out into the city for his adventures. She will be free to do the same.

  The girl on the other side of the barre, a dancer in the corps, murmurs, “Did you hear? Franny kicked me out of our room last night, and then I passed Mr. K in the hall, on his way. He gave her perfume last week, too. Guerlain. She’s getting promoted.”

  “Well,” Elaine whispers without turning her head, “she’s very good.”

  Together they rise up on demi-pointe. The girl says, “She said they didn’t fuck—he just wanted to get naked and lie in bed and pet her like she was a dog.”

  “Great story.”

  “He wasn’t even hard.”

  One of Elaine’s distinctions as a dancer is the measured, deliberate quality of her movements, which is the product of her cool, orderly mind. She is both annoyed and impressed that a dancer in the corps would speak to her, a principal, this way. They sweep down into grands pliés, and from under the barre, Elaine says, “Not something you’re ever going to have to worry about.”

  “Especially since I’m not a boy.”

  Rising, Elaine says, “Or talented.”

  She has found ways to put aside the indignities of her situation with Mr. K. That is what she does: she sets them aside, moves them to a place outside herself. Still, sometimes she wishes he would vary his routine. A girl piques his interest, inspires some bit of choreography, and then he selects the perfume, a different one for each girl. The gift is not a token of affection but a mark of ownership. He will decide how they should smell. He will decide more and more about them, make dances on them, and, in service of his genius, they will do anything for him. Like the perfume, the sex (or whatever version of physical intimacy he demands now) is a gesture of possession, not passion. He wants to see and know their bodies as thoroughly as possible. Elaine could have slept with him only once, after she received her bottle of Jean Patou, but she kept coming back, needing to know she could. When he made his first dance on her, he rearranged the cells of her body according to his own specifications, rewired her nerves, possessed her. Her civilian boyfriends could not understand her that way. They treated her like a fragile possession of exotic provenance, when she is really a tool, an invention, a weapon. Mr. K is the only person who loves ballet as much as she does. Love for ballet is necessary to survive it, but she doesn’t know if she survives because she loves to dance or if the love comes from a need to survive.

  “Breathe, breathe, breathe with it,” Mr. K says, walking around the stage. He pauses in front of the newly baptized Franny. “Dear, with your arm. No. Like this.” In his grey flannel pants, checked shirt, and black dress shoes, he demonstrates. Franny mimics him well. The good ones see what he wants; they are his mirror.

  The company does more pliés, then ronds de jambe, tendus and the rest of the battements: dégagés, fondus, frappés, développés, and grands. To Elaine, the movements are less exercise than a process of organization. With each beat of a leg and sweep of an arm, she creates order, winding gears that will tick the rest of the day away.

  After class, she strikes off down the freeway in a rental car, the whoosh of traffic making her feel timid and provincial, even though she is the one who lives in a real city, who should be accustomed to density and rush. It is warmer than she expected and dry. Joan is not a frequent or prolific correspondent, but when she writes, she says she likes California. She enjoys its warmth and convenience, its newness. Following Jacob’s directions, Elaine exits the freeway, skirts a mall’s vast parking lot and the grassy shores of a man-made lake, and pulls into an office park of low white buildings with reflective blue windows. She could never live in this benign suburban dreamland.

  As she pulls open the door to the ballet school, she sees Joan through a studio’s big window, facing the mirror, leading a class of adult women, moms looking for exercise and for some trace of girlhood dreams. They are ungainly in their leotards, wearing slippers, not pointe shoes, and not turned out. But the sight of them is touching, triggers a gloating pride in Elaine that these women wish to do what she does. She had wondered if she would feel jealous of Joan with her family and easy life, but she feels only pleasure in her own existence, her freedom from the ordinary. In front of the big window, she strikes a silly Fosse pose, waits for Joan to catch sight of her in the mirror.

  “I WAS HOPING YOU’D BRING HARRY,” ELAINE SAYS. “I’VE BEEN SO CURIOUS to meet him.”

  They are sitting at a table with a striped umbrella outside a donut shop near the studio. Elaine sips coffee and fiddles with a packet of Sweet’N Low. Joan sets her cigarette in a black plastic ashtray and digs her thumbnail into an orange, stripping the rind away in a ragged coil. “He’s at school. It’s Wednesday.”

  “Oh. Of course. Stupid.”

  Joan can’t tell whether Elaine had really forgotten about the existence of school. “Second grade.”

  “I kept asking you to send a picture, and you never did.”

  “Didn’t I? I’m sorry—I meant to. I can be so spacey.” This is not strictly true, and they both know it.

  “Don’t you have a picture in your wallet or something? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?”

  Joan purses her lips, conceding, and takes her wallet from her tote bag. She opens to a plastic sleeve of photos. Harry’s is on top, gap toothed in his first grade portrait, his dark bangs falling straight across his forehead.

  “God,” says Elaine. She takes the wallet from Joan’s hands, examines it, and then abruptly hands it back. “He’s different than I imagined.”

  “Not a great haircut,” Joan says.

  “I thought he would look more like you.”

  “He looks like Jacob,” Joan says, fishing in her bag again. “Do you want a smoke?”

  “I’m on a health kick, but okay. For old times’ sake.” They light up and smile at each other, feeling young.

  “Are you still doing blow?”

  “No, not really. Just in emergencies.”

  When Joan first joined the company, someone had told her Elaine was looking for a roommate, and they had become compatible cohabitants, then friends. They were bonded by their constant fatigue and the endless ministrations their bodies required. They liked to sit side by side on the edge of the bathtub, drinking tea and soaking their feet. Each was grateful to have an ally. From the beginning, there was no question that Elaine was by far the better dancer. Elaine was waiting to be promoted; Joan was praying to stay.

&n
bsp; “I’m bringing Harry to the matinee,” Joan says. “You’ll meet him then.”

  “Does he dance?”

  “No.”

  “You should make him try it. He might like it.”

  “He doesn’t seem interested.”

  “We need boys.”

  “You sound like an army recruiter.”

  “They are an army—the young ones. Waves of them. Mostly girls, though. I like the boys, not the girls. I’m afraid for them, too. We’re losing boys.”

  “I’ve heard.”

  “Is Harry gay?”

  “He’s seven.”

  “So?”

  Elaine has grown harder. Her voice, her eyes, her bones. Her sternum is like a turtle shell with skin stretched over it. They are all thin, dancers, but Joan can discern infinitesimal variations in thinness, and Elaine’s is the minimalist body of the survivor. She has reduced herself to the most essential pistons and gears. Nothing extra can be allowed to create strain or cause wear. She is a witty dancer with clockwork timing, best suited to comic heroines and the demanding tempos of Mr. K’s ballets. On Sunday, when Joan takes Harry to Don Quixote, Elaine will dance Kitri in red and black lace, a perfect curl of hair glued to each of her cheeks. She will prance and snap her fan, do the flamboyant sissonne leap where she nearly kicks the back of her own head. Now that Elaine is a principal and has danced the major roles, she has become an object of curiosity for Joan, like someone who has experienced space travel. If Joan had not had Harry, she would still not be dancing Kitri, but Elaine, stacking packets of sweetener with bony fingers at the end of bony arms, caught in a small eddy of leisure between class and rehearsal, seems like an apparition, a ghost of what might have been.

  But it would not have been, Joan reminds herself. She reminds herself, too, that she doesn’t miss the feeling of living at an accelerated pace, each year counting for more than an ordinary fraction of life, like dog years. Her childhood was dominated by discipline, fear, repetition—her small self in an endless, tearful hurry to get better, to get good in time to have a career. Her childhood bled seamlessly into her adulthood, each contaminated by the other. She had not felt grown up until Harry.

  “I’m dying to see you dance,” Joan says.

  “Don’t be. I’m the same, just older, with all the same bad habits.”

  “No, you were always wonderful.”

  Joan has lined up the slices of her orange end to end like a train, and Elaine takes one from the middle and bites it in half. “I’m a workhorse.”

  “You’re a star.” Joan doesn’t know if she wants her to be a star or not, fulfilled or not. She doesn’t know if Elaine thinks she is jealous, if that is why she is downplaying the miracle of becoming a principal.

  “No. I don’t have that dazzle. I think I thought I could learn it. You watch dancers who have it, and you know it’s magic, but then when it comes to your own dancing, you tell yourself you just need to work harder. And then you work and work, and you’re still just you, and then one day you realize you’re not getting better, only older.”

  “We’re all getting older.”

  “Being older doesn’t matter as much for most people. It really doesn’t.”

  Joan, wishing to reassure but also to needle, says, “You’re Mr. K’s muse. That’s important.”

  Elaine flares slightly. “Yes, I got on the right bandwagon. I believe in him enough to serve him. I’m his biggest project. He’s made a life on me. And in return, every time he gets written about—and he will forever—I’ll get written about too. After we’re dead, people will still be wondering if we had sex. I’ll live on as an ambiguous appendage to a genius. I think there’s a blankness about me he likes. He projects onto me. He likes the idea of a vessel. It’s an honor and an insult. I don’t want to sound bitter. I’m not bitter. Sometimes I’m afraid he just couldn’t find anyone else so willing to be subsumed. So. There it is.”

  “No,” Joan says, not knowing if she means to agree or disagree, surprised to feel some distaste about Elaine’s arrangement with Mr. K. She had not noticed herself becoming conventional, but, undeniably, she is out of practice deciphering relationships like theirs—or the way hers had been with Arslan—that are part love and part self-imposed misery and part ballet experiment. Her impulse is to tell Elaine to find a nice man to marry, but Elaine never will. Joan would not like it if she did. She prefers Elaine to remain fixed in her old life like an obsolete weather instrument gathering data no one ever sees.

  Elaine stubs out her cigarette and says, “Do you ever hear from Arslan?”

  “God, no.” Joan flicks her fingers the way Arslan would, shooing the idea away.

  “Will you ever write to him?”

  “No. I don’t know what I would say. What good would it do? He probably doesn’t even read his own mail. Some intern would send me a signed photo.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe you’d put some demons to rest or something.”

  “I don’t have any demons. I’m happy.” Elaine’s face betrays no skepticism, but Joan knows it’s there. “I love Jacob,” she says firmly “Of course.”

  “Not of course. He was an escape hatch.”

  “But I must have known it would be okay. On some level. I think I wasn’t open to loving him until I needed to be.”

  “Like arranged marriages that turn out to be love marriages. Except it was always a love marriage for him.”

  “Yes,” Joan says simply.

  “And for you now too?”

  “Yes.” Joan looks away, embarrassed. That she has finally fallen in love with Jacob is good luck for both of them, but to say so would demean it.

  With an air of declassifying information, Elaine says, “I’m probably moving in with Mr. K. Do you think it’s a mistake?”

  “I don’t know. What would qualify it as a mistake? Is he still … does he have boyfriends?”

  “I assume so. I never ask. What would qualify it as a mistake? I don’t know what my threshold is for mistakes anymore. I used to make them all the time. I adjusted for them. Now I only do safe things. This doesn’t feel safe, though. It’s committing to something that people find strange. Maybe I’m worried we won’t be able to stand each other, and it’ll be over, and I’ll have nothing.” She restores the packets of sweetener to their ceramic box. “He doesn’t even screw the new girls anymore. This girl this morning told me—Never mind. It’s not important, only gross.”

  “I want to hear.”

  “No, I can’t say it out loud. It’ll make me feel sick. Forget it. We’re going to his dacha up the Hudson more. He’s different there. Nicer. The butterflies and wildflowers mellow him out. I keep expecting him to start wearing belted shirts like Tolstoy. He says he’ll marry me when I retire. I think he just wants to feel like less of an old queen.”

  “God. Do you want to marry him?”

  “I don’t want to marry anyone else. Maybe that’s half the battle. And I don’t want children. They deform the body.”

  Joan adjusts her cardigan. “No kidding.”

  “At least you’ve grown titties. Does Jacob want more?”

  “Titties or children? No to boobs, I think, but yes to kids. We’ve been trying, but nothing.”

  “How long?”

  “A year and a half.”

  “You want more, too?”

  Jacob wants to go to a fertility doctor—just to see, he says. Joan won’t. She tells him they should be grateful for what they have. She doesn’t want to know. Reprieved from the burden of another baby, she has mourned the lost possibility more than she would have expected. “I do and I don’t. I can live with either.”

  Elaine eyes her. Her shrewdness is more on the surface than it used to be. She seems shrewd and also weary, like a dictator who has weathered more than one coup and anticipates more. “Did you know that Arslan and Ludmilla split?” Elaine says.

  “No.” Joan sits back. She feels a sour satisfaction and an odd disappointment. “I’m impressed they made it as lo
ng as they did.”

  “I don’t think they’ve been together much the past few years.”

  Joan lights another cigarette, offers the pack to Elaine. They angle their streams of smoke away from each other. “When did you fall in love with him?” Elaine asks.

  “Arslan?”

  “Jacob.”

  “I saw him across the village square, and we did a big dance for all the peasants.” She hopes Elaine will be bought off by the joke, but Elaine waits without smiling. Joan looks away, says, “Little by little. It’s an accumulation of ordinary things.”

  “Romantic.”

  Joan bristles. “It is, in a way.”

  “Romance is irrelevant, anyway.” Elaine smokes. “At least for me. I prefer collaboration. Speaking of, did you see Arslan’s special on PBS? Rusakov and Friends or whatever it was?”

  “I saw the beginning,” Joan says, irritated that Elaine keeps bringing up Arslan, irritated at herself for being irritated. For a moment she is nostalgic for her failed friendship with Sandy, Sandy’s lack of interest in her past. “Cheesy. That top hat. Do you think he’ll ever come back to the company?”

  “I doubt it. I’ve heard he’s happy in Europe. They throw money at him. They can’t get enough of the weird ballets he’s making. I saw one in Milan—it was just him and a huge red rubber ball and a white ramp. It was actually fantastic.” Elaine looks up at the sky. “It’s so hot out.”

  “You should have come in February.”

  “But what else?” Elaine asks after a pause. She sits straight in her chair, arms square on the rests like a brooding empress. “What else is there?”

  “Nothing really.” Joan smiles, melancholy, thinking that friendships go through cycles of extinction, that perhaps she and Elaine won’t be able to evolve quickly enough. “I’m boring.”