Astonish Me: A novel

by Shipstead, Maggie

  MARCH 1990—SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

  AT THE END OF THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER, JACK RYAN (Alec Baldwin) and the defector Captain Ramius (Sean Connery) survey the moonlit Penobscot River from the sail of a hulking black submarine. “Welcome to the New World, sir,” Jack Ryan says.

  The credits roll while a Russian choir sings. Harry and Jacob sidle out of their row and walk up the aisle. “That’s what Mom did for Arslan Rusakov,” Harry says when they are in the popcorn-and-carpet-cleaner air of the lobby. “Mom’s like Jack Ryan.”

  “Mom didn’t shoot anyone,” says Jacob. “That I know of.” Harry strides ahead, buoyant. His stride lengthens until he is half galloping toward the glass doors, his arms lifting away from his sides as though he might leap into the air. But he stops short, pivoting to face his father, radiating energy, and it is a miracle he only folds his arms across his chest and shifts from foot to foot. He always seems to be on the verge of some ostentatious movement, some theatrical gesture. Jacob has never manifested enthusiasm the way Harry does, through his body, and he tries not to let on that his son’s tendency to cavort in public embarrasses him. “Take it easy,” he says.

  “I am,” says Harry. “It was just such a great movie. But I wish that guy had gotten to see Montana.”

  Jacob squeezes Harry’s shoulder and is startled by the muscle. Harry is almost twelve and always doing push-ups in preparation for the fast-approaching day when he will need to lift Chloe Wheelock. “Yeah,” he says, as they pass out through the doors and into a cool, cloudy night, the mildness of March in California still novel after seven years. “That part was sad.”

  “Do you think there’s a chance someone might really have defected in a submarine? And we just never knew about it? I mean, the newspapers found out about Zuyev and Belenko, but they went through other countries first.”

  “I think lots of things happen that we don’t know about, but this was probably just a good story.”

  “I wish it were true.”

  “I think things can be true even if they didn’t really happen.”

  Harry doesn’t seem to be listening. He is doing a kind of Russian soldier march, arms rigid, head erect. But then he says, “I don’t get what you mean.”

  “I mean if a story really resonates with you, it can be true for you, even if it never actually happened. Like ancient myths. Those stories probably mattered more to people than some things that really happened.”

  Harry spins around and moonwalks alongside Jacob. “I guess. But I still wish it had really happened. I wish a submarine captain would defect.”

  Defectors are an object of fascination for Harry. He keeps a scrapbook of clippings about Russian dancers, particularly Rusakov, and after Alexander Zuyev flew his MiG-29 to Turkey, he expanded his reach, adding long ribbons of newsprint about the pilot. Later, he branched out still further and pasted in photos snipped from Time magazine of the crowds at the Brandenburg Gate. His bulletin board is dense with thumbtacked ballet programs and pictures of Rusakov, but in a bottom corner he made room for a photocopy of the famous shot from the sixties of the East German border guard jumping over barbed wire, the nascent Berlin Wall. When he was ten, Harry had insisted Jacob take him to Die Hard because he wanted to see Alexander Godunov, the Bolshoi defector, play a German terrorist.

  But a crumbling is happening. The Wall has fallen, and Jacob expects Harry will be disappointed if soon there is no more Eastern Bloc, no more ballerinas curling themselves inside suitcases to be rolled through Heathrow to freedom. Harry has always been prone to obsession, but the longevity of these particular fixations—ballet and defectors—has been a disquieting surprise.

  “I wonder if Arslan will see that movie,” Harry says as Jacob starts the car.

  “Who knows.”

  “I wish Mom still knew him. Do you think she’ll ever stop being mad at him for dumping her?”

  Harry knows the basic outline of Joan’s history with Rusakov, but he seems to sense there is more, something adult and tangled and uncomfortable, a mesh of fungal filaments that his parents have done their best to conceal. He is always poking around, asking questions, trying to turn up the loose end that will make everything clear. He does not understand that he cannot understand, that the loves of others are unfathomable. “She’s mad for more complicated reasons than that,” Jacob says. “He wasn’t very nice to her. I don’t think she thinks he’s worth knowing.”

  “I can’t believe he dated Mom. He’s such an amazing dancer.”

  “It’s more important to be a good person.”

  “I would kill for his ballon.”

  Ballon is Harry’s new favorite word, and he has already explained to Jacob that it describes the way good dancers seem to hang in the air longer than possible. The trick, Harry says, isn’t just height but what you do with your arms. Jacob turns out of the parking lot and onto the main road. While they were in the movie, it must have rained. The streets are wet, and the stoplights fall on them in long red and green ribbons.

  All boys have their heroes, Jacob has told himself again and again, but there is a needy quality to Harry’s worship that reminds him ominously of how Joan had given herself over to Rusakov as though to a doomsday cult. Jacob had doggedly churned out letter after letter during that time and cast them into the postbox’s dark mouth like pennies into a well. He sent her banal accounts of his daily life mingled with philosophical musings meant to impress and saccharine paragraphs of supportive mush meant to hasten her realization that Jacob, not Rusakov, truly loved her. Her responses, when they came, maybe one to every ten of his letters, were cruelly unfiltered tracts detailing her feelings of being paralyzed by her love for the other man, frozen around it. Stupidly hopeful that her misery might translate into corrective action, he would send stern yet loving replies, urging her to abandon what was clearly an unhappy and unhealthy situation, a man who did not love or appreciate her, because she deserved more, he would declare, she deserved everything. After a period of silence, her next letter would arrive, exactly like the last.

  After a minute, Harry says, “I just can’t believe he was Mom’s boyfriend. It’s so crazy. Why do you think he liked her?”

  “Because your mother is a wonderful person. Anyway, I don’t know if he was really her boyfriend.”

  “He was. There are all those pictures of them together.”

  “Which pictures?”

  “In Mom’s scrapbook. The newspaper ones, and then all the other ones—normal camera pictures.”

  “She has a scrapbook?” Jacob’s voice rises. “She showed you this?”

  “I found it by accident. It was in the garage.” Harry opens the glove compartment and roots through a jumble of cassette tapes as though demonstrating how he might stumble upon something in the course of his normal rummaging.

  “You shouldn’t go through other people’s things.”

  “I wasn’t! I was just exploring.” He closes the glove compartment without choosing a tape. “Mom wasn’t mad. We went through it, and she told me where the pictures were taken and stuff and about when the company went to Europe, which was the first time Arslan left America after he defected. I guess everyone was worried he was going to be kidnapped or something and taken back to Russia. Anyway,” Harry says, looking sideways at Jacob, clearly skeptical of his objectivity, “it really seemed like he was her boyfriend.”

  “Usually if you’re someone’s boyfriend you’re nice to them and supportive of what they do. I don’t think Arslan ever took Mom all that seriously, which was hard for her because she tried really hard to please him.”

  Jacob worries he’s taking the discussion too far, getting into too much nuance, but Harry only makes a noncommittal noise and says, “Did you know in Europe ballet audiences applaud all together? What’s the word for it? Mom told me. Like, clap clap clap clap all at the same time, on the same beat.”

  “In cadence,” Jacob says.

  A year before, Jacob had decided he was weary of gifted chil
dren. They had become monotonous in their specialness, and he was tired of dealing with their overbearing nightmare parents. Fortunately, he is well liked in the district and was offered a job as the principal of a new middle school in a new town, out on the edge of civilization, where the new houses stand shoulder to shoulder, an advance guard against the empty hills. The students chose the coyote as their mascot, after the clever creatures that steal their neighbors’ cats and yip and howl in the night. Jacob suggested to Joan that they might move, get a nicer house closer to school, even one with a pool, and she has begun to warm to the idea. Truthfully, he wouldn’t mind trading in the Wheelocks for some new neighbors. Gary has become a sad sack, shuffling between his car and house, never going out on his bike anymore. Jacob would never have expected to be nostalgic for Gary’s dandyish outfits, but he would be grateful to see the old suspenders and cuff links instead of the new baggy khakis and rumpled shirts. Late at night, the blue flicker of a television spills into their backyard.

  The painted trim on the Wheelocks’ windows and eaves is peeling and their stucco is mildewed. A row of cypress trees grows tall and shaggy beside their driveway and casts a serrated shadow onto the Bintzes’ front lawn, stunting the grass. The lightbulbs in the fixture over their front door have all gone out and not been replaced; only their doorbell, a button of peach-colored light, interrupts the darkness. Jacob allows himself to be dragged to the ballet twice a year or so, and the Wheelock house reminds him a little of the vine-covered, narcoleptic kingdom in The Sleeping Beauty. Joan, too, presiding over Chloe’s and Harry’s training with alarming intensity, has started to seem like something out of a ballet, a dark sorceress.

  Jacob has come to accept that there will be no second child, but he keeps waiting for Harry to turn out more as he had expected. There is nothing wrong with being considered a little weird by other kids, but he had been certain Harry would be nerd weird, that his would be a life of the mind. Instead, Jacob finds himself in the company of a son who sings scores by Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev in the shower and has a favorite brand of tights and possesses troubling thonglike undergarments and can do endless pull-ups and spends all his time with girls and idolizes Arslan Rusakov. Not a single day passes when Jacob is not treated to the name of his wife’s former lover coming from the lips of his son. Arslan this, Arslan that. And Joan, despite her stated antipathy for Rusakov, does nothing to discourage Harry. She buys the videotapes he circles in ballet catalogs, obligingly records every PBS special that features Rusakov. They have an entire cabinet devoted to their ballet video library, rows of tapes marked carefully in Harry’s evolving handwriting: The Best of Rusakov, Swan Lake, Rusakov Dances Jerome Robbins, Coppélia, Phoenix Raiman Tribute. Joan and Harry sit on the couch together, pausing, rewinding, and discussing like football coaches watching game films. Harry knows all the other dancers, too, gets excited when Elaine Costas appears. There is a recording of Romeo and Juliet from when Joan was in the corps. She covers her eyes when she is onstage, even as Harry shouts, “There you are! There you are!”

  Jacob had taken down the photo of Joan and Rusakov from their hallway, claiming a need to redecorate, but Harry rescued it and spirited it away to his bedroom.

  “Dad,” says Harry from the shadows of the passenger seat. “Will it make you uncomfortable if I ask you something?”

  Jacob hesitates. When his mother, Harry’s grandmother, voices her usual lines—“Isn’t ballet something girls do?” or “Couldn’t Joan have left well enough alone?”—he defends his son and wife fiercely, and when she once asked Harry why he couldn’t have a hobby that wasn’t for queers, Jacob had taken her outside and told her she had a choice between being banned from seeing her grandson or shutting up. Still, he has wondered—wonders every day—if Harry is gay. All he knows for sure is that his son envies another man’s ballon. “Maybe,” he says, “but I can live with a little discomfort.”

  “Okay. This is it. How do you know if you’re in love?”

  They are only two blocks from the house, so Jacob pulls over and switches off the engine. He thinks for a minute before speaking. “I think it’s different for different people, but the conventional wisdom is that when you’re around the person you’re in love with, you feel happy, more than happy—euphoric. And you want to be around that person all the time. You don’t notice that person’s faults. Some people say their hearts beat faster. They feel jittery. I think you know it when you feel it.”

  He and Harry are both staring forward out the windshield as if they are still driving. All those years ago, when Jacob drove Joan out to the beach with plans to kiss her, the tension of loving her had been so electric, so torturous, that he had worried about cardiac arrest, about being killed by his own desire. Now that he is finally—finally, after more than twenty years—sure of her love, the longing has vanished. He still loves her, but no passion, especially not one germinated in a hothouse of adolescent despair, could survive so much familiarity and certainty. She has changed, too. She is not so wary anymore, not always in retreat, not unknowable. They are two animals inhabiting the same den, each accepting the presence of the other, going about the business of living.

  “Is that helpful?” he says to Harry, who is quiet. “I don’t know how to describe the feeling except in clichés. And being ‘in love’ is different from loving someone. The really intense feelings don’t last. Does that help? It’s a big question.”

  “Yeah, it’s just, in ballets, people just kind of put it out there, you know? But in real life, you’re supposed to be cool.”

  “Maybe sometimes.” Tiny droplets have collected on the windshield, shutting them in. Jacob is much more nervous than he would like to be. “Are you in love with anyone in particular?”

  “OF COURSE HE’S IN LOVE WITH CHLOE,” JOAN SAYS THAT NIGHT IN THE bathroom while she plucks her eyebrows at one sink and Jacob, in T-shirt and boxers, flosses at the other. “Anyone can see that.”

  Jacob attends to his incisors, making a rabbit face. “I didn’t. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “He hasn’t told me directly. I didn’t want to gossip about him.”

  “All we ever do is gossip about Harry. It’s half the reason people have kids.”

  Joan puts witch hazel on a cotton ball and wipes her brows. “Yes, we definitely talked over the gossip possibilities before Harry was conceived.”

  Opening wide to access his molars, Jacob grunts, conceding.

  “Anyway,” Joan says, “he’s in class with Chloe four days a week. She’s always over here. They’re the age for crushes now. It’s the natural progression. I think it’s unrequited, so what difference does it make?”

  He rinses out his mouth and spits into the sink, then he straightens up and looks at Joan, his lips wet. “Unrequited? She thinks she can do better?”

  “She’s just a kid. She thinks she’s cool. But now you can stop worrying he’s gay.”

  “I wasn’t. Now I’m worried about Chloe Wheelock breaking Harry’s poor vulnerable heart. Let’s drop it. I feel uncomfortable intruding into our kid’s hormones.”

  “You’re the one who brought it up. I’m right about the gossip—see?”

  “I still hope he falls out of love with her soon. He will, won’t he?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know her very well.”

  “What? What do you mean? You spend all your time with her.”

  She is tired and doesn’t want to explain that she and Chloe communicate mostly through touch, gesture, French words. Joan knows Chloe’s knees well and her ankles and wrists; she is always touching them, shaking them loose, adjusting their angle. In fact, her deepest knowledge of the girl is of her joints. When Joan is giving Chloe a combination, she demonstrates what she wants, skimming across the floor, sketching the movements, murmuring their names, saying, “Like this, en arrière, and then—” and then, with her body, she suggests a glissade or a pas de bourrée and says, “See?” And Chloe sees. But the girl’s character is not yet fully formed,
and the parts of it that most concern Joan—grit, discipline, expressiveness, sensitivity, control—are unproven. She is not far enough into her novitiate for Joan to know if she will see it through, if dance is an infatuation or a calling.

  “Let the puppies have their love,” she says to Jacob.

  “The puppy,” he says. “His love. Anyway, are we really sure he’s not gay? Maybe he wants to be Chloe.”

  “That’s something your mother would say.”

  “I thought he was in love with Arslan Rusakov.”

  Joan rubs lotion vigorously onto her arms, concentrating on turning the white swoops of cream into a sheen on her skin, examining her elbows, interweaving her slick fingers and pulling them apart with enough force to make her knuckles sting. Harry’s fascination with Arslan is her fault, of course. He thinks his obsession is his own, but he has caught it from her. If she had known from the beginning how serious Harry would become about ballet, she might have been more careful not to let her voice or her face betray how important this man had been, but it has been such a relief to have someone around who wants to talk about dance. It has been such a pleasure to let her son begin to know her, not just as she is but as she was.

  “He is a little bit,” she tells Jacob. “But it’s not sexual. It’s a dance crush. I don’t know what I would do if it were sexual.”

  “So you worried about him being gay, too?”

  “I wouldn’t care if he were gay.”

  “What then? Too weird to have your son be in love with your ex?”

  Joan meets his eyes in the mirror. Sometimes she thinks he is giving her more opportunities for sarcasm as they get older, and sometimes she thinks she’s just been spending too much time with teenagers. She says, “What would be weird about that?”

  “Whatever it is, it’s already weird. And what’s this scrapbook you apparently have of you and Arslan?”