Astonish Me: A novel

by Shipstead, Maggie

  “Go out tonight,” Phoenix commands after their third rehearsal, “just the two of you. Go find that thing you’re going to bump back and forth.”

  Arslan is no stranger to the city’s shinier, flashier clubs, places where he is likely to have his picture taken, and so Elaine takes him to SoHo, to a brick building with black-painted windows on an empty-looking block.

  “It’s not open yet,” she tells Arslan in the taxi. “They’ve been having these ‘construction parties.’ No frills, no booze or anything. Just good music. Amazing music. You’ll like it. The sound system is in already. It’s great. No one will pay attention to us. It’s mostly gay kids.”

  “No booze?”

  “There’s a bar down the street if you get desperate. And …” She takes a baggie of coke from her clutch. “I don’t know. Do you …?”

  “Sometimes. A little.”

  “Me too. Exactly.” She drops it away, snaps her purse shut. “You haven’t asked what it’s called.”

  “Coke. I know, of course.”

  “No, the club.”

  “Why? What is it called?”

  “The Kremlin.”

  He snorts.

  A burly blond guy at the door recognizes Elaine, waves them in. The entrance, which Elaine’s friend assures her will be extremely cool when it is finished, is, for now, a dark ramp with a red star glowing at the top, a narrowing space that, as they ascend, thuds louder and louder with a 4/4 beat. Arslan takes her hand, and it seems natural because, rehearsing, they have already spent most of the day touching. She has wrapped her legs around him and been dipped backward, the crotch of her leotard a fulcrum against his waist. Before they go through the black double doors to the dance floor, they pause to do a line off a black marble pedestal that might eventually hold some bit of décor for the extremely cool entrance or might exist for exactly this purpose. Shimmering, popping, they push through the doors and into a room that is black, loud, cavernous, struck through with red spotlights, and jammed with moving flesh. The crowd is mostly black and Puerto Rican boys in cutoffs and bare chests, jeans with suspenders, tank tops, white T-shirts, denim vests, berets, nothing too crazy or flashy, some girls thrown in, white guys here and there, just people dancing. Mirrored balls hang overhead but do not turn—probably a kink to be worked out—and the room is splattered with unmoving specks of light as though by paint. Above it all, in a blue-lit glass box, the DJ leans over his turntables, the captain of their submarine.

  And it feels like they are in a submarine, or something like that, a dark space apart from the world, a pressurized bubble of survival. Elaine draws Arslan into the crowd. He catches the beat, of course, and can imitate how everyone is dancing, but he still looks like an impostor. He reminds Elaine of Joan’s way of dancing at clubs: too controlled, too smooth, without the little hitches and catches that make an attitude. The boys in the cutoffs have both wildness and precision; their long, bare legs slide and prance and groove, seeming to twist together like two strands of rope when they turn.

  “I am terrible,” he shouts in Elaine’s ear, clowning a wry shrug.

  “No,” she says, “You’re—” But a man cuts in then, spins her away. He is tall and dark, a terrific dancer. Elaine tosses her hair from side to side for him, trots and turns, bops her ass up and down. When Arslan cuts back in, he is clearly annoyed, and that makes him better, looser. He pulls her hip against his, glares at her, holds her close enough that she can’t quite move freely. This is what they will bump back and forth in Phoenix’s piece, she understands after a while, this restriction, this assertion and yielding, his attempt to dance her way while at the same time forcing her to dance his way. Songs come and go, bleed together. They keep dancing, settling into the precarious balance they’ve found, solidifying it.

  “Let’s get air,” he says finally, pulling his shirt up to wipe his face, exposing the stomach she has seen countless times before but that now makes her avert her eyes.

  They go up to the roof, where people are standing around, cooling off, making out, doing drugs, admiring the washes of skyline that show through the thin fog. The evening is warm for late March but still chilly, and their coats are down in a heap of other coats at the base of the ramp.

  “More?” Elaine asks, digging in her purse for the baggie.

  “Please.”

  The line warms them up some, and Arslan steps close, rubs her arms, tilts his head to the side, gives her an oddly paternal, oddly apologetic smile, and kisses her. She had expected him to, had decided not to avoid it. She thinks their dance will be about intentions, power, and unfinished things.

  “Sorry,” she says, leaning back. He leans in, trying to follow her mouth, but she evades him. “I can’t. Because of Joan.”

  “Joan.”

  “She’s not thrilled we’re dancing.”

  “I don’t talk about girls with girls.”

  “Good policy. But …” She hold up her hands, palms up.

  “But Joan and I are finished. You don’t want some fun? Maybe the dance will be better.”

  “No.”

  “And Mstislav? It is because of him too? You know he is probably here, dancing with boys, wearing little shorts.”

  “I don’t talk about men with men.”

  He pouts, sees her indifference, gives it up with the ease of a man who knows he has unlimited options. “Suit yourself,” he says.

  They go downstairs again. As they dance, they balance their tension between them, rolling and compacting it like a snowball, into something Phoenix can use. Elaine is curious about Arslan but does not want him, not really. He is, offstage, just a guy. Joan would hate the way they are dancing, would be livid at the kiss, but if Arslan were not dancing with Elaine, he would be dancing with someone else. After her, he will dance with someone else, and then someone else and someone else but never Joan.

  THROUGH THE SMALL WINDOW IN THE STUDIO’S CLOSED DOOR, JOAN watches Arslan rehearse with Ludmilla Yedemskaya. It is May. The season is about to begin, and they are working on the balcony scene from a new version of Romeo and Juliet. Behind them, two understudies mark the roles: lesser shadows, ghostly mimics. Ludmilla has a blue Hermès scarf tied around her head and is wearing a black unitard, a black shrug, and red lipstick. She is perfect for Juliet, ethereal and custard blond with precise footwork, supernatural Russian extension, and a fragile, childlike stage presence. Arslan kneels on the floor in front of her, wraps his arms around her thighs, clings to her until she breaks away and flees to the far side of the studio. Then, as if tossed by a slingshot, she wheels around and does a fluttering run back to him, balancing for an instant in an elongated, windswept arabesque before his hands catch her hips and she is airborne, back arched and legs lifted, her pelvis resting on his shoulder. He sinks down so his ass is against his heels and then rises up again as though he loves her so much he has no choice but to offer her to the sky. Joan wants the lift to be silly, like the airplane game people play with children, but it’s erotic and thrilling, a human sculpture of the feeling of falling in love. Ludmilla’s face is luminous, ecstatic, but her expression curdles when she catches sight of Joan through the window. From above Arslan’s straining back and clenched buttocks, she sneers.

  Ludmilla’s defection was the kind of dramatic escape newspapermen and artistic directors dream of. Traveling with the Kirov, she’d feigned illness and disappeared into a bathroom at Heathrow where an old family friend who’d gotten out to England during the Stalin years was waiting to zip her into a suitcase and wheel her briskly into the land of tea and biscuits, innocuously presided over by distant relatives of the czars. Three days later Ludmilla had boarded a flight with a fake passport and requested asylum in New York. Arslan had known she was coming. He was waiting at the airport with a huge bouquet of red and white roses tied with a blue ribbon. The press had gone wild.

  In Romeo and Juliet, Joan is an anonymous Capulet in act 1, and in act 2 she is one of the ladies-in-waiting who come to wake Juliet and find
her apparently dead. The difficult part is pretending to be sad when she presses her cheek against Ludmilla’s limp hand.

  Mr. K’s checked shirt moves into Joan’s frame of vision. Arslan sets Ludmilla down, and she moves toward the piano, reaching for her cigarettes. Underneath, watchfully ensconced in their basket, the black dachshunds lift their sleek heads. Arslan stretches his back and turns around. Joan darts away.

  She walks purposefully down the hall, ignoring the dancers stretching on the floor, and hangs a left into the company office. The receptionist, Martha, a huge grey sandbag of a woman, is on the phone as usual, and Joan slips past with a little wave, ignoring the woman’s snapping fingers. She has a flirtation going with the company manager, Campbell Hodges, who is recently divorced and manages to be breezy and harried at the same time and acts more like a distracted academic than a ballet bureaucrat. He claims to hate ballet, in fact, and is always griping about his pittance of a salary, the high cost and short life span of pointe shoes, and the agony of being trapped in that cash-strapped ghetto of an office all day discussing fairy tales and tulle wholesalers and other people’s feet. Really, though, he loves ballet, and Joan suspects he nursed an array of fantasies about ballerinas through his decade of sterile marriage to a prim socialite whose inheritance included a vast apartment on Park Avenue. She likes him for the tartness of his personality and also because he is not a dancer but not quite a civilian, either. Tonight they have a half-facetious plan to go out to dinner. Half-facetious because he has stated repeatedly that he believes she never eats, and she has promised, without any intention of following through, to eat a bacon cheeseburger in front of him.

  Campbell’s door is cracked, and a roar of his laughter blasts out through the gap. Joan sidles in without knocking. Campbell is sitting in his chair, and two of the volunteer office gophers lean over his shoulders. They are all looking at something on his desk, a book that lies open on top of a mess of paperwork, and are all grinning with a sharp, impure merriment. Campbell has one hand over his mouth, clamping down the thick black beard he has allowed to run wild since his divorce, like living in a studio in Midtown makes him a woodsman. When they see Joan, there is a general blaze of guilt and a scramble on the part of the volunteers to conceal the book. She says, “What is that?”

  Campbell says, after a pause, “Game over, girls. Let her see it.”

  The volunteers appear to be in their late teens and have the groomed, minimalist look of future society ladies. Their plain, long faces are made regal, even beautiful, by their certainty of their status. Reluctantly, one hands Joan the book. It is a scrapbook, spiral-bound, with a black cover. Like the scrapbook she kept of herself and Arslan after the defection (now relegated to the back of a closet), it has thick black pages onto which photos and folded letters have been pasted haphazardly, ringed with dried swoops of excess glue. Joan opens it in the middle. Next to a photo of a woman reclining on a pool chaise in a bikini is a note giving a phone number and commanding, If a man answers, DO NOT HANG UP!!! Say you’re calling for Mrs. Palmadessa. If I’m not home, leave a message with your number and the name Dwight Davis. Say it’s about work. My husband is VERY JEALOUS, but I know our meeting will be worth your while. I am 34-25-34 and a GREAT ADMIRER.

  Some of the other women had not bothered with bikinis, and Mrs. Palmadessa’s letter proved to be among the most decorous. Jean from Philly: What I would really like to do is wait in your dressing room after a performance in nothing but a smile—better than a bouquet, right? And I pull off your tights and—Joan flipped the page. In my dream, wrote Cynthia from Oregon, we hide out from the KGB in a cabin in the woods and you screw me silly.

  “We just think they’re funny,” one of the volunteers says. “He never sees them. He said he doesn’t want them.”

  Campbell stirs. “Would you excuse us?”

  Joan closes the book but doesn’t offer to return it to the girls as they leave. She’s always known Arslan’s world is crowded with eager women, but these words and photos, thrown at him like the volleys of roses that sail from the audience after every performance, mock her. She settles in one of the sagging chairs across from Campbell and tries to smile. He is wearing a charcoal waistcoat over a maroon-and-white-striped shirt with the cuffs rolled back and the collar open. Leaning forward, he rests his elbows on the desk and cups his chin in his hands, gazing at her and making a soft putt-putting sound with his lips, which are pink and shiny in their thatch of beard. “You flinched,” he remarks.

  “What?”

  “Just now. At the book. You shouldn’t take it personally. They’re just bored kooks indulging their fantasies, taking a shot in the dark.”

  “It doesn’t have anything to do with me.” But she isn’t sure their wanting is so different from hers. Why do they want Arslan? His fame, his talent, his body? Why does she want him? Without realizing, she has become part of a corps with these women, unseen and scattered across the country but all alike, all in the background, unified in their hopeless, persistent desires. “Even if he made house calls to every single one of them, it still wouldn’t have anything to do with me.”

  “Exactly.”

  “He’s with Ludmilla now.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I wouldn’t take him back. He’s a narcissist with no soul.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Even onstage. He’s always using up too much music. He ruins whole ballets by showing off. I don’t know why no one complains about it.”

  “Because of the applause, darling. The applause. Do you know every performance is selling out this season? Even the ones he’s not in. People care about ballet all of a sudden. Don’t ask me why. Ballet is awful.”

  “You’re not fooling anyone, Campbell.”

  “Really? I’d hoped to fool you.”

  His small blue eyes turn searching, and Joan slides from her chair to the floor, pretending a sudden need to stretch, taking the scrapbook with her. “I’m going to quit,” she calls up to him. “I mean it.”

  “No, darling, you can’t. You mustn’t. Why would you say such a thing?” His chair squeaks, and suddenly he has beached himself across his desk, his piratical beard hanging over her like a storm cloud.

  “I’ll never be satisfied.”

  “Who wants to be satisfied?”

  “Who wants to be tormented by their own inadequacy?”

  “Touché.”

  “I think if I had just been allowed to toil in obscurity like I’d planned, everything would be better. I would admire Arslan from afar and idolize Ludmilla even though she’s a bitch, but now it all seems so disappointing. So drab. Now I have to think about how if I’d only happened to be more talented, my life would be a thousand times more exciting and I’d get to really dance with him, and he would take me more seriously. It’s like there’s an empty space in the world that was meant for me, but I can’t get inside. I can just bang on the outside.”

  Campbell’s face disappears. He comes around the desk and sits on the floor, leaning against a precarious stack of cardboard boxes full of binders and papers, crossing his legs. The bottoms of his shoes are scuffed and gummed from the city.

  “What do you really want to say, darling?”

  “I hate Ludmilla.”

  “Tell me.”

  “She has everything. She has the right feet, the right hips, the right arms, the right pinkie fingers, the right eyebrows, the right nostrils. It’s tough enough living with Elaine, but she still can’t hold a candle to Ludmilla. Ludmilla probably has the ideal lower intestine for a ballet dancer.”

  “Genetic luck. Out of our hands.”

  “She’s disciplined. Plus, she has musicality and vivacity, and I don’t know how she does it but onstage she gives off this sweetness. You’d never guess she was made of steel and nicotine. And—this is what burns me—no one would care about her except she defected. She’s a traitor, when you think about it.”

  “And Arslan,” Campbell said.

  “He�
�s a traitor, too?”

  “Yes, technically, although I think we can agree they both had good reasons. But I meant she has him. For now.”

  “You don’t think it’ll last?”

  “Do you?”

  “I don’t know. Probably it’ll last because I hate them together, and clearly I was someone terrible in a past life.”

  “So it’s all about you then.”

  “Oh, I know. Shoot me. I’m just tired of being unhappy. It’s exhausting.”

  “Everyone finds someone to be jealous of. Arslan’s probably jealous of Nijinsky.”

  “Arslan’s jealous of Paul Newman.”

  Campbell smiles. In the silence, they hear Martha the receptionist grumbling on the phone, someone clipping past in high heels, a muffled run of notes from a distant piano. Campbell is not unattractive, but talking about Arslan with him has been a mistake; it has forced the comparison. As if he senses her thought and subsequent rejection, he says, coolly, “Enough. You can’t be weak in the ballet or it’ll crush you.”

  “Too late.”

  Campbell stands and offers her a hand. She takes it and he pulls her up so forcefully that she stumbles against his chest. “Sorry,” he says, stepping back. “You’re so light.” He smiles, warm again but sad around the edges, knowing their moment has passed. “Nothing a cheeseburger won’t fix.”

  “Campbell, I haven’t eaten a cheeseburger since I was a little kid.”

  He holds out his hand for the scrapbook. “Give me that rotten thing.”

  Joan presses it against her chest. “No. I have other plans for it.”

  “Such as?”

  “I’m going to put it in Ludmilla’s dance bag.”

  “Ah. Then, bonne chance.”

  In the doorway, she pauses, taps her fingers on the jamb, turns back. “I know I should be over it. I want to acknowledge that I know that.”