Astonish Me: A novel

by Shipstead, Maggie

  “This city is exquisite,” Joan says. “It’s trite to say so, but I never get used to it. It makes me greedy. I want to stuff it into my pockets.”

  “What is this word?” he asks, his cheek against her temple.

  “Which word?”

  “With ‘x.’ ”

  “Exquisite. It means beautiful. But more than that. Like … so delicate and perfect it’s almost painful.”

  “Painful … it is not help.”

  “Perfect down to the smallest part. Like the most lovely ballerina possible. Delicate, fragile, almost too beautiful to look at. She is exquisite.”

  “Exquisite,” he repeats, and a slight shift in his body betrays that his mind has left her, is following that ghostly ballerina off the bridge and away into the Parisian night. She should have thought of a different example. To remind him of her presence, she leans against his side. Grasping her shoulders, he turns her to him, bends to nuzzle her neck.

  Her happiness is also exquisite, excruciating, barbed with fear. At any moment, it will be taken from her. The company, which will go to Amsterdam next and then London, did a matinee that day but no evening performance, and afterward Arslan sought her out and told her to put on a dress and meet him later in the hotel lobby. When she did, he took her hand in full view of the dancers hanging around the front desk and led her out into the city. They had a glass of wine in an art nouveau café, squeezed side by side behind a tiny round table, and he talked to her about dance. Lately he has been going off, away from the company, to work with other choreographers, other companies. Mr. K is annoyed with him, possessive. “People come because of me,” Arslan told Joan. “They buy tickets because of me. He knows this. Everyone knows this. But I can’t dance only here, only his dances. I stay in one place, I lose inspiration. I lose inspiration, I lose my soul. I can’t come here and do same thing again, again, again. What is point, you know?”

  Yes, Joan said, of course.

  “Is difficult, these new things, jazzy things, swing things, American things. I don’t know these things. They are not in me. Like eating too fast. Sometimes they—” He closed his hands over his throat, bugged out his eyes.

  “Choke you. Get stuck.”

  “Yes. Stuck. But I want to know. Is important to know.”

  Yes, Joan said, it is.

  They took a taxi to the Left Bank to hear a piano recital in a tiny church with fluted columns and real candles that dripped wax from iron candelabras onto the stone floor, making a slow patter. The pianist, an old White Russian who played in a tailcoat, kissed Joan three times after Arslan introduced her, his long mustache tickling her cheeks. They went with him to dinner in a restaurant with red and gold walls, white tablecloths, red leather booths, a low ceiling of dark wood. Waiters who resembled the pianist in both mustache and tailcoat brought them caviar and vodka and borscht and chicken in cream sauce and more foods that Joan couldn’t identify but that seemed, like everything else on this night, romantic and profoundly Russian, part of a lost, maybe imaginary world of snow and sleigh-bells and gold onion domes. Drunk, she had reclined amid all the red and let their unintelligible conversation drift past. The pleasures of his native language transformed Arslan. In Russian, he was quick and lively and ebullient, a man who laughed, who made the old pianist and the waiters laugh. Here in Europe, without the comforting barrier of an ocean, Joan would have expected him to feel his exile more keenly, to fall into one of his glooms. She would have expected the vast, brooding bulk of his homeland to exert some dark magnetism on his soul. Instead: gregarious good cheer, an affectionate hand on her knee.

  His moods are mysterious, but she has a sad certainty that this one will cool and fade soon enough. Maybe tonight when they are still in bed he will tell her he is tired and send her back to the room she’s sharing with Elaine, recently promoted to soloist, or maybe tomorrow he will flirt with another girl in the wings when she is watching. He will vanish after a performance without telling her where he is going. She might catch a glimpse of him leaving the theater with a sparkling flock of strangers in evening clothes, his arm around some woman’s waist. She is always losing him, but he is never quite lost. A year has passed since she drove him across the border, and they remain inextricably, inconclusively enmeshed. He goes away. He comes back. More and more slowly, but he comes back. When they are alone, lying quietly, he holds her the way a child holds a stuffed animal: for comfort, for security, out of a primate’s urge to cling, to close one’s arms around a warm, soft object. Eventually, she knows, he will decide not to come back, but something—a force she wishes she could identify—binds him to her.

  Almost as soon as they emerged from the apartment in New York, even before his debut, the first cascade of applause, he had begun to wander. For two months, maybe three, she was the main woman, the lead—the one on his arm at parties and events, famous as his accomplice, the brave girl in the news story—but she slipped bit by bit down into an ensemble cast. The gossip columns lavish question marks and exclamation points on items linking him to socialites and actresses. He always says the women are friends, but they are never friends. His sexual interest is a visible, obvious thing, easily tracked and monitored. He can’t be bothered to conceal his affairs, his flirtations, his wanderings. Why should he? Even as he tortures her, she sees he is simply living the life he prefers, a life of variety, and she sees there is no reason, really, why he should give anything up for her, why he should love her. The recriminations of women can be shrugged off, walked away from. A mass of recriminating women will not deter other women from taking their turns with him.

  After cheese, after dessert, after cigars and aperitifs and black tea sweetened with jam, Arslan led her to the river, and they had walked to the Pont des Arts.

  She tastes vodka and cigars on his mouth. His tongue lazily invades and then retreats. He leans away, studies her face, and smacks a peck on her lips. She presses her face to his neck, knowing they will go to his room soon but preferring this. They are more alone here than they will be in his room, where the shadows of other women dance around the bed. In his room, she fights his waning interest. Her sense that he is sliding away even when he is right there, as much of him touching her as possible, makes her worry she is losing her mind. She has tried to be sexier, more daring in bed, but her attempts only seem to bore him. They will go to his room—his room is where this night must end—but even with the elaborate lingerie she is wearing and the erotic stratagems she has stored up, she will disappoint him. Going to his room will only hasten the end, but here, above the river, at the center of this exquisite city, they are caught in a romantic force as powerful as a solar flare. Even he must feel it.

  “Thank you for this night,” she ventures.

  He nods, his chin moving against her head. “Yes, was good to see Iosif. He still plays beautiful. If he was dancer, he would have stop thirty years now.”

  “That’s true.”

  “I will like to be old man.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “Yes. Why not? Less trouble with women, no class every day, no worrying about being great dancer, no worrying about being old man because—hey—you are old man.”

  “You bring the trouble with women on yourself, Arslan.”

  He tsks, but affectionately, squeezing her. “Joan, you only hear not important part.”

  After his defection he had tried to dance with her. He’d been generous, really, staying late in the studio with her, lifting her again and again. But every time he would say, “Is no good.” Then he would demonstrate, and the difference between what he wanted and what she could do caused her, horribly, to cry. Sometimes he stormed off in disgust, leaving her alone with her weeping reflection, and sometimes he gathered her into his arms, kissing her cheeks and nose, saying, “Always she cry. She is like baby.”

  Why had he even bothered? She could never be his partner; Mr. K had told him so when they were still holed up in the apartment. Why had he written those letters? Why had he c
hosen her to drive the car, to escort him from one life into another? Had he considered how her life would be changed, too? There were so many others: better dancers, better drivers, more beautiful women. But when she asked, even begged, for the answer while sitting in a heap on the studio floor, Arslan rolled his eyes or slammed the door or worked alone in the center as though she weren’t there. She couldn’t gauge how much of the impasse came from their language barrier and how much was willfulness and how much was just the way he was.

  “My little American,” he says on the Pont des Arts, murmuring into her ear. “My silly little thing.” She moves closer, angling her hips against him, standing up in demi-pointe, wanting to shinny up him like a monkey. “Thank you for dining with couple old Russians. You were”—he pauses as he does before trying out a new word—“trouper.”

  “I loved it,” she says. “You don’t have to thank me.”

  Gently, he extricates himself from her arms. “But unfortunately tonight is not for us. I have to leave you now. I’m sorry, baby.”

  She steps back, confused, vibrating with the low hum of incoming pain. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m sorry. I have to go. I promise a friend to make a visit.”

  “You’re just going to leave me here? I have to walk back to the hotel alone in the middle of the night?”

  His face has begun to close. His eyes wander out over the river. He wants to be away from her. “I will give you money for taxi. Come on, Joan, don’t ruin things.”

  “I shouldn’t ruin things? What was all this for?”

  “All was what for?” He shakes his head, knowing he has garbled the sentence.

  She opens her arms to encompass the river, the bridge, the streetlamps and snowflakes, the Louvre’s solemn procession of windows, the elegant Haussmann apartments, the black needle of Sainte-Chapelle’s spire. “This. This perfect night. Why did you put me through any of it?”

  “Why? Why? Why?” He tips his head back and forth, mocking. “You always ask why. I don’t know why. I don’t want know why. I don’t care why.”

  “Is it the language? Could you say why in Russian?”

  He half turns away in exasperation, his torso twisting, arms swinging loose, head rolling up and away, then he rotates back. Like all his movements, it is eloquent.

  “Never mind,” she says. “Clearly I’m not worth the trouble of an explanation.”

  He shakes his head. “I don’t understand.”

  “Yes, you do, Arslan. You just pretend you don’t so you seem oblivious instead of like a selfish, spoiled child. No, you don’t care if you’re selfish and spoiled. You ignore this whole inconvenient world where other people matter, and that makes you smaller, it makes you less of an artist, even if you don’t know it. People aren’t just bodies. You’re not just a body.” He is shaking his head at the river, impatience radiating from him. She is breathing hard, as though she has been dancing. She feels her rib cage flexing. “I keep letting you throw me away. It makes me sick. I wish to God you had asked someone else to help you defect. From now on, you can leave me alone. Consider our debt settled.”

  Her last words make him look at her. “You drived a car. That’s all. You do nothing. You are little girl in corps. You get attention, get notice. I give up everything.”

  “Not everything. Not everything, Arslan. You didn’t give up fame. Or wealth. Or people falling all over themselves to please you.”

  He lunges and grasps her by the arms. She stands straight and still as a soldier, not flinching, even though his face, close to hers, has never looked so angry, so helpless. He left his brother and mother behind, but he has never mentioned them to her. She read about them in the newspaper. She also read that his teacher with whom he had lived when he was at school in Leningrad was fired and rumored to have been imprisoned. “You don’t understand,” he cries. “You know nothing.”

  Joan is frightened but lifts her chin. “You’re the one who doesn’t understand.”

  “Okay,” he says, stony. “So. Then, good-bye.” He turns and strides away toward the Left Bank, his footsteps hollow on the bridge, off to see whoever is expecting him at two o’clock in the morning. When he is gone, Joan finds herself sitting on the wooden planks, looking through the iron railing. The lights are not for her, not the river, not the immense loveliness. The bridge itself, she has heard, is slated to be demolished and rebuilt. The Germans bombarded it; too many barges have crashed into it; it is not sound. The new bridge will look the same except with wider arches to let the boats through, and it will be steel, not iron, stronger. She doesn’t want to go back to the hotel. Elaine might be in their room, and Joan wants no witnesses to the end of this night. Or Elaine might be with Mr. K or with someone else, and the empty room will be another kind of awfulness. She will cry here, where no one is watching, in the company of so much beauty.

  ELAINE HAD NOT BOTHERED TO FIND A NEW ROOMMATE AFTER JOAN left, and so it is easy to let her move back in. She helps Joan return her bits and pieces of furniture to the consignment store to be sold at a loss; her double bed is traded back for a twin; the sheet of printed Indian cotton is tacked up again. When Joan is out, Elaine checks for the box of letters from Jacob and Arslan and finds it under the bed again, as though it had never left, Arslan’s letters still tied with the pink ribbon, Jacob’s now in several neat bundles tied with ribbons of their own. She draws a hammer and sickle in lipstick on the bathroom mirror, making the hammer look like a penis. “Welcome back, putain,” she writes underneath.

  In the mornings they split a banana, go to class, go to rehearsal. At night, Elaine goes out or to Mr. K’s, and Joan stays in, sleeps, watches the TV Elaine bought in her absence. A dullness settles over her. She wonders out loud to Elaine how much of her life she wants to spend sliding one foot out from the other and back again, lifting one arm over her head and lowering it. She says, “I feel like I’m working on an assembly line, but I’m not even making anything. I’m just doing something that disappears as soon as it happens. I used to feel like I had to dance, and now I feel like I’m doing it just to keep the option open, so I don’t get out of shape.”

  “But what else would you do?” Elaine asks, genuinely curious.

  “Nothing,” Joan says. “I don’t know. I’m just depressed.”

  Arslan is always at the front barre in class with the three hotshot male dancers he pals around with and shows off for. He manages to look both complacent and intent as he goes through the battements, determined to do the movements better than anyone else, to do them as well as they possibly can be done but without sacrificing his air of ease. Elaine watches Joan watch him, forlorn and puzzled as an abandoned dog. She is torn between sympathy for her friend’s pain and scorn for her vulnerability. It was ridiculous for Joan to expect that a man as brilliant and hungry and capricious and sought after as Arslan would make a rewarding object for her love. But of course he encouraged her. Elaine’s theory is that he chose Joan almost arbitrarily: he needed to fixate on one person, like isolating a star to navigate by, even if the star is not the destination. She has not told Joan yet that a dance is to be made on her and Arslan by Phoenix Raiman, a choreographer whom Elaine knows slightly from the club scene. Mr. K approached Phoenix about working with the company because Arslan asked him to, and then Phoenix suggested Elaine as Arslan’s partner because she wants a dancer who is modern and American and not stiff.

  Elaine means to tell Joan, but she is too slow; somebody else does. In the apartment, at the kitchen table, Joan is composed, furious, fearful. “Couldn’t you have said no?” she asks.

  “No,” Elaine says. “Of course not.”

  “Because of your career.”

  “And because I want to. And because if I didn’t do this dance, someone else would.”

  “Not me, though.”

  Elaine sits down across from her, feeling like a placating parent. “If it would be you instead, I would have thought about saying no.”

  “Too bad I’m such a
bad dancer that no one would think of pairing me with Arslan. He might as well dance with an anvil hanging around his neck.” Joan slides her thumbs and forefingers out along the table’s edge and then back in.

  Elaine waits. She wants to tell Joan she won’t sleep with Arslan, but it would sound presumptuous, condescending. She knows Joan will ask. It is what matters. The dancing is a betrayal, but there is no such thing as monogamy in dance.

  “Promise you won’t sleep with him,” Joan says. “He’ll probably try, but please, Elaine, please don’t. This is pathetic, but I have to ask. I know you wouldn’t take it as tacit approval if I didn’t say anything, but I need to put it out there that this is the line of my friendship. Maybe you’d rather sleep with Arslan than be friends with me, lots of girls would, but in that case I should just move out again. I can’t live with you if you sleep with him. Maybe I sound crazy. I wanted to be clear.”

  “I won’t sleep with him,” Elaine says.

  When rehearsals start, she sees quickly that the promise will be less easily kept than she thought. Phoenix, a tall, elegant, low-jawed black woman who always dresses in pristine white layers, has an idea for a dance that is slinky, jazzy, loose, juicy. Arslan struggles. He has difficulty unlocking his hips to allow for the Latin figure-eight movement Phoenix wants; he has difficulty letting his body curve forward, like a sail filling with wind, until he falls off balance and must catch himself; he has difficulty being light and sexy, not intense and passionate. She asks him to turn on one leg while the other and his torso are extended parallel to the floor, counterbalancing each other. Elaine, who has more training in contemporary dance, finds herself in the unexpected position of offering reassurance and advice. Arslan learns quickly, even when frustrated. Elaine is impressed by how he persists in the struggle. He could so easily demand that the dance be shaped around what he already knows, but he is fired by curiosity.