Astonish Me: A novel

by Shipstead, Maggie

  It is after eight, but Mr. K will still be at the theater. Elaine slips one letter into her purse, puts the rest carefully back in their box, shoulders on her coat, and goes out. The neighborhood isn’t terrible, just a little seedy, especially at night when gratings are locked over storefronts and trash bags are piled on the sidewalk. She always walks quickly, using speed as a talisman against getting mugged. It is a middle neighborhood, an uneasy tipping point. A few blocks uptown, a more serious unraveling begins. SRO hotels and weary apartment buildings give way to shelters, pawnshops, methadone clinics, empty lots, and boarded-up buildings on which tangles of graffiti grow like ivy. But a few blocks downtown is the theater, a square, luminous building on one side of a broad, sleek plaza. Two other square, luminous buildings, boxes that contain operas and symphonies, face into the plaza. The three stand together with a tolerant, formal intimacy, like heads of state posing for a portrait. The company’s offices and practice studios are in a less exalted building across the street. The occasional pedestrian who happens to look up at its windows might see dancers at work, moving silently behind reflected bits of sky.

  Elaine canvasses the dark hallways until she finds Mr. K in one of the big rehearsal rooms with a principal dancer, Clarissa. She watches them through the narrow window in the door. Mr. K is making a dance. He wears a three-piece grey suit and a checked shirt with an open collar. Blue silk blooms from his breast pocket. He steps forward onto one toe, extends an arm, rocks back, talking the whole time. Clarissa stares at him, nodding. Mr. K steps away, leans against the mirror, claps his hands once. Clarissa takes a beat to prepare and then goes through a complicated combination. The step forward, extended arm, and rock back are buried in the middle of it, barely perceptible. That is the key, Elaine knows: to be able to give Mr. K exactly what he wants, to understand him. He likes her, has begun to pay more attention to her. He gives her corrections in class and calls her by name. Every time he pauses beside her at the barre, she wants to kneel at his feet and have him pour ballet into her, to receive his visions.

  She sits on the floor of the hallway and waits. She tries to decide what she will say about the letters, but all she can think of is that he should see them. They are important, and they are about ballet, so he has a right to know about them. After a while, maybe half an hour, Clarissa comes out, a towel over her shoulders. She jumps when she sees Elaine but collects herself and rolls her eyes, holding the door open. Not looking at her, Elaine sweeps past. Mr. K is at the baby grand piano. He stares thoughtfully at the ceiling and plays a few bars to himself. At the sound of her footsteps—she is still in street shoes—he frowns and folds his hands in his lap.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry to intrude,” Elaine says, “but I have something I need to show you.”

  “Show me?” He presses one finger down on middle C. “What can you have to show me, child?”

  She takes folded paper from her bag. “I found letters, lots of letters, between Joan and Arslan Rusakov. I can’t read French, so I don’t know what they say, but I thought you should know.”

  He purses his lips, plays a short run of scales. “For heaven’s sake, dear, come closer. Don’t shout across the room.”

  She comes and stands beside the piano like a singer about to give a recital, holding out the letter. She expects him to seize it and pore over it, but instead he continues to play, staring off at nothing, kneading out a slow improvisation, seemingly oblivious to both her presence and the activity of his fingers. Eventually, he resolves his melody and drops his hands into his lap, turning his full attention to her. “Elaine,” he says. “Child. What is it you want me to do? You want me to read this letter? Spy on poor little Joan and a man I do not know? Maybe it is a simple love letter.”

  “No, they’re about dance. There are lots of them.” She unfolds the paper, sets it on the music stand, and taps it to make him look. “It says danse a million times.”

  He squints at the paper. “So it does.”

  “What does it say?”

  “You are too nosy, my dear. It is, as you surmised, about dance. He is telling little Joan all the things he thinks about dance.” He squints again. “He has grand ambitions, this young man.”

  “That’s exactly … I came to you because, what if he wants to defect? What if—”

  He holds up a hand. “Indeed. What if? Should I write letters to him myself, posing as Joan, urging him to defect? Should I parachute into Leningrad with a machine gun and break him out? Should I write to the president, request an invasion? No, if this is what Arslan Rusakov will do, he must do it himself. Of course I would be happy to have him here because by all accounts he seems to be extraordinary, but there is nothing for us to do but be patient. It is not a small thing to defect. You must leave a great deal behind. Even if you are someone who has very little, you leave more than you can imagine. People close to you will suffer. They might be punished on your behalf. You must be willing to sacrifice them. You will be a traitor. You probably don’t think much about having a country, Elaine, but you would if you were leaving yours and could never return.”

  Her embarrassment at being chided emboldens her; she must take a risk or else slink away. “How did you decide to do it?” she asks. “When did you know you were going to leave?”

  Mr. K studies her face, his expression stern, but then he smiles, slides over, and pats the space beside him on the piano bench. She sits, and he puts an arm around her shoulders. His face is close to hers. She has heard he sleeps with the dancers he promotes and has assumed that someday she, too, will sleep with him, but she is unprepared for anything to happen so soon. His thigh presses against hers. The material of his suit is very fine, a light dove grey. She has heard he sleeps with men, too, but only outside the company. Dancers, even the gay ones, talk about that as if it is sleazy, shameful—it’s the secrecy, they say, the self-hatred of it, and why even bother with the girls?—but Elaine can’t imagine Mr. K doing anything that isn’t aesthetically perfect. She can’t imagine him hating himself, because he is a genius. If he sleeps with men, it must be beautiful.

  “It was an impulse,” he says. “An instinct. What do they say—fight or flight? I prefer flight. Especially then, flight was a relief. I could not fight anymore. Maybe I always knew I wasn’t meant to stay in Russia, but I didn’t know I was going to do it until I did it. I was in Berlin at the end of the war, in the army, and I … I ran away. It was much easier for me than it is for them now. There was so much chaos for me to slip into. I found my way to Paris. After the war, for a while, I wasn’t afraid of anything. I felt nothing. That is how I survived. Millions were not going home because they were dead. Why should I go home only because I happened to be alive? I would not see my mother again, but what was that compared to everything else? At the time it seemed like nothing. I threw away my uniform. I stole new clothes. I already spoke French. That was very helpful.” He removes his arm from her shoulders and plays a chord, then another. He watches his hands critically, mouth pulled down so his chin disappears into his neck. Time passes. He seems to have forgotten about her. She sits very still.

  Finally, quietly, he says, “My mother spoke French to me.”

  She doesn’t know what to ask. She is nothing. Joan’s letters are nothing. His life seems immeasurably large.

  He stops playing. “Elaine,” he says, abruptly cheerful, twisting to look at her. “Child. You must help me. Clarissa has gone home, and I have no one to make a dance on.”

  She is afraid. This is not how she thought it would happen. “I’m wearing jeans,” she says.

  “Well,” he says, “go find something else.”

  She hurries through the dark hallways to her locker, terrified and elated. This is a test. It must be. He must know how far he has thrown her off balance. She struggles into tights and a leotard, neither exactly clean, pulls her hair up. In the back of her locker, tucked in a slipper, is a baggie of cocaine. She sets a pinch on the back of her hand and inhales it, we
lcoming the burn. Carrying her shoes, she runs back to Mr. K, making little leaps as she goes, invincibility accumulating in her body. She passes a framed poster of Clarissa in an arabesque as Giselle and gives it the finger. While she sits by the mirror and puts her shoes on, trying to stretch as she does, Mr. K moves around the center floor, humming to himself, making tiny motions, shifting his weight this way and that.

  “Come, child,” he says. “Stand here.”

  She goes to stand in the middle of the room and looks at herself in the mirror. She is as she always is, except that Mr. K, dapper in his suit, is studying her, only her, with one finger pressed to his lips. He swivels around, looking at their reflections, side by side. “Yes,” he says. “She is very nice, that girl, very pretty, but now you must forget she is there.” He steps in front of her, obstructing her view, taking her face in both his hands. “If we make a dance, we make it in this room, not in the mirror.”

  She can smell him. Cologne and tobacco, something sour on his breath, some kind of pomade in his hair. His eyes are pale blue with dark rings around the irises. She has never noticed the rings before. He is going grey at his temples and in his eyebrows. She sees his nostrils expanding and contracting. She wants him to kiss her, to breathe into her, to descend upon her like an angel, but he says, “And you must not be so nosy. You will make more of yourself if you are not the conniving kind. Promise. No more. You will put Joan’s letter back and forget about it.”

  She promises.

  He stares at her, then nods and releases her face. He says, “Okay. Begin like this.” He lifts barely onto his toes, suggests a tendu. “Then this.” He turns, sweeps a hand toward the floor. “And prepare and quick sissonne changée one, fouetté two, piqué, arabesque, chassé, big assemblé, then like this, then hold, sissonne ouverte, then something light, maybe turn, turn, turn, then assemblé, attitude, and so on, yes, yes, like so. Yes? Do you see?”

  She hesitates, finds she understands. “Yes, I see,” she says. He moves away, leans against the barre, gestures for her to begin. She dances into the silence, beginning their conversation.

  “Good,” he says. “And next this.”

  JANUARY 1975—TORONTO

  JOAN WAITS IN A CAR BEHIND THE THEATER, WATCHING THE GREEN metal stage door. A bald man in a boxy suit smokes in the yellow light of a sodium lamp set into the cinder blocks of the theater’s back wall. Soon—she hopes it will be soon—that lamp will go out, will be turned out by a stagehand who is in on the plan, and she will flash her headlights so Arslan knows where to run. The KGB minder looks neither fast nor particularly vigilant; he looks cold. Joan has been watching him for an hour, wondering why he has no overcoat and no hat for his bald head. Maybe he underestimated the Toronto winter and left his warm things behind out of Soviet machismo, or maybe some official regulation compels him to be miserable. What does he think of Canada? Of the polite, busy streets, the neat rectangles of neon affixed to the buildings, the construction cranes everywhere? What will he think when Arslan makes his run? Joan hopes that the man will sympathize, even unconsciously, and allow Arslan to slip away. She knows the hope is naïve, but still she hopes. She hopes for any advantage.

  The man claps his hands against his biceps and paces back and forth, seven steps away from the door, seven steps back, sending up a plume of smoke as constant as a steamship’s. Joan is smoking, too. She cranks down the window an inch to let out some of the haze. Frigid air flows in. Butts and grit fill the ashtray of the Chrysler 160 that was given to her, along with detailed instructions, by the Canadian woman who met her at the airport that morning, one of Arslan’s many international female friends.

  Joan fingers the headlights lever with one hand and touches the key, already in the ignition, with the other. The Chrysler is a cream-colored, eager-looking car, long in front and stubby in back. Earlier, elsewhere, she had practiced starting it while simultaneously flashing the lights. Three times, with the Canadian woman in the passenger seat, she practiced driving the two miles from the theater to the parking garage where she will trade this car for one with New York plates. She knows the way, with a few extra turns thrown in for safety, and she knows an alternate way. From the parking garage, she knows how to get to the highway that will take them to the border and then to New York.

  The Canadian woman, Felicia, had expressed skepticism that Joan was the right accomplice for Arslan’s escape. “I thought you would be a race car driver or a secret agent or something,” she said as Joan navigated through the city, feeling like she was taking a driving test. “More of an aggressive person. To be completely honest, I can’t make out why he was so set on you.”

  “I don’t know either,” Joan said, “but I couldn’t say no.”

  “He doesn’t want a fuss, or people, or a celebration. There’s going to be so much fuss and so many people eventually. I think he wants to stave it off so he’s not overwhelmed right away. He said he doesn’t want chatter, so don’t chatter. You know he doesn’t speak English anyway.”

  “We spoke French.”

  “Oh. You’ve met him?”

  “Yes, of course. Haven’t you?”

  “No, but it feels like I have. I got involved in his case through friends. I saw him perform two years ago. In Paris. It changed my life. He’s extraordinary.”

  “Funny, that’s where I met him. In Paris. I was with the Opéra Ballet. It could have been the same day as when you saw him.”

  Felicia says nothing. The air is spiky with competition. She is older than Joan, in her midthirties, and her clothes are conservative but high quality. She wears a sizeable diamond engagement ring and a wedding band.

  Joan wants to tell her about the dressing room floor but only says, “I would do anything to help him.”

  “So would I,” Felicia snapped. “Of course. Communication has been difficult, to say the least. We never knew what got through to him. It was simplest to do exactly what he wanted. Arguing would have taken too long, and the more messages we passed back and forth, the more likely he was to get caught, and that’d be it. We’ve had a terrible time planning. This should work, though.” She paused and then said, “As long as no one fucks up.”

  At the moment, Joan’s sole wish in life is not to fuck up. The mechanism of how she has become Arslan’s getaway driver, his escort to the New World, is not entirely clear. From what she can gather, he informed his network of friends, to their universal puzzlement, that he wanted to be met by Joan and conveyed to New York by Joan. That he has chosen her fills her with an ever-shifting combination of amazement, confusion, joy, a desperate feeling she suspects is love, and a fear of failure that pursues her through the days and nights. She has scarcely slept since she learned of the plan.

  Months earlier, his first letter had materialized like a hoax or an omen. In Paris she had given him the address of her mother’s house in Virginia, but this mysterious, portentous cream-colored envelope with a French stamp had somehow found her New York apartment. She had not known what to expect—a friendly note? a sexy one?—but could not have guessed that inside would be a stiff card bearing an admonition from an unknown Frenchwoman not to tell anyone that Arslan had written to her and then, from Arslan, three sheets of thin, grey paper, densely scrawled over on both sides. It was an oddly impersonal treatise on dance, in French, detailing what he perceived as its limitations, its glories, its future. Please tell me, he wrote at the end, about dance in the USA.

  So she had written back as best she could, describing the company’s repertoire and the choreographers who cycled in and out depending on how territorial Mr. K was feeling. She told him what they were rehearsing: short ballets of Greek myths, a long ballet about Wyatt Earp. She tried to explain how Mr. K made dances, how he was always asking his dancers to be faster and sharper and more controlled and more turned out and how he was expanding their vocabulary of steps. Then she answered questions Arslan had not asked. She told him about her mother and how she had thought ballet was cute when Joan was little but
now understood almost nothing about her life. She told him about her bed behind the sheet in Elaine’s apartment, about how all she had ever wanted was to perform with the company and how strange it was that a dream, once realized, could quickly turn mundane. She skimmed over her doubts about her own talent, her fears about what she would do when she was inevitably shouldered out of the company. The Frenchwoman’s note had instructed Joan to mail any response to her address in Paris, and she would try to get it to Arslan.

  A few weeks later, sooner than Joan had expected, an envelope arrived that contained a stern note in English from a West German informing her that secrecy was imperative and then another discourse on la danse roaming over more sheets of the thin, grey paper. She replied again, this time sending her letter to Berlin, telling Arslan more about herself, asking him questions about where he lived, what his days were like. I think about you all the time, she wrote. I worry about you. Another letter arrived before her reply could possibly have reached him, accompanied by another warning to keep her mouth shut, this time from a woman in Milan. More letters followed. They were never personal, but they were increasingly passionate. He seemed to be working himself up, churning out long screeds about artistic paranoia in the USSR and the way the system built magnificent dancers and then smothered them. He listed ideas for new ballets. He wanted to make a ballet about nuclear war, another about a rock band, another set to the dull peals of Russian Orthodox church bells, another set to the sound of crickets and performed in near darkness. Each letter was chaperoned by a haughty European admonishment to keep the correspondence secret. Joan told no one. She was only being obedient, but she inadvertently passed a test of trustworthiness. When word got out that Arslan was coming to Toronto with a small touring company, a letter arrived from an Englishwoman, a soloist with the Royal Danish Ballet, the first of many sets of instructions.