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Astonish Me: A novel

Page 16

by Shipstead, Maggie


  Facing him, she loops her arms around his waist, leaning back, making him brace to support her weight. It’s been so long since he’s seemed jealous or possessive that the peeved look on his face makes her pleasantly nostalgic. She’d had so much power over him once. Power was her prize for not loving him fully, her compensation for not having been loved by Arslan. She wishes she could tell him that he, the boy who helped her find her classroom on the first day of high school, is the great miracle of her life. He has always pushed her to seek contentment, and he had waited patiently for her to realize that he would be the source of it. But, to express her gratitude, she would have to acknowledge how she had entered their marriage stupidly believing she was making some kind of compromise. “Oh, that.”

  “Do you send him valentines?”

  “I do. Big red construction paper hearts with glitter. I don’t know … the scrapbook … it’s a thing I made when I was young and crazy. I was trying to prove that what was happening was real.”

  “I think Harry wants to trade me in for him.”

  “No, he doesn’t. Not really. Because then Arslan would just be his boring dad. Besides, he likes you.”

  “He does? Oh, good. Sometimes it seems like I’m the only dad in town who has to feel inadequate because he’s not a famous ballet dancer.”

  “I think all men probably struggle with that from time to time.”

  “Is it too late to challenge this Arslan guy to a dance-off?”

  “It’s never too late for a dance-off.”

  Gently, he disengages her arms, sets her upright. “All I’m saying is that sometimes this whole thing with Harry and Arslan gets weird.”

  “I know. You’ve said. And I’ve said that Arslan is the obvious choice of idols for Harry. But I really think it’ll fade. Harry will get better. Arslan will get older. Harry will want to be the one who’s a god. This is how it works. I’ve seen it before.”

  “Why couldn’t he have stayed in Russia where he belongs? Why couldn’t you have left him at a Canadian gas station?”

  She puts her palm on his stomach, and he sucks in, stretches up on tiptoes, and lifts his arms over his head in a ballet pose, looking down at her with mock hauteur. She says, “I’ve asked myself the same thing.”

  JACOB LIES AWAKE. WHEN HE IS SURE JOAN IS ASLEEP, HE SLIDES OUT of bed and, turning the doorknob slowly so the latch doesn’t click, goes out into the hall. Pumpkin-colored light from the streetlamp washes down the stairs, and Jacob descends quietly through it, barefoot. Without turning on any lights, he navigates the darker, cooler downstairs, his toes curled under to avoid catching on corners or table legs. Only when he is in the garage, on the chilly, dusty concrete, does he feel for a switch. The fluorescent bars flicker and pop on, humming. He looks around at his parked car, the pile of bikes, the washer and dryer and sacks of plant food. Two boogie boards lean against the wall, still crusted with sand from the summer. Cardboard boxes are stacked in one corner, never unpacked after the move, full of stuff that did not fit easily into this new Californian house and life: winter clothes, relics of childhood, relics of grandparents, things saved because to throw them away now would be to admit the foolishness of having saved them in the first place. The top box has JOAN written on it in black marker and creased flaps that are already partly open, scraps of tape curling back from their edges.

  Now that Jacob has come all this way, committed to this self-indulgent and possibly upsetting fact-finding mission, it occurs to him that Harry has probably hoarded the scrapbook away in his room with all his other Rusakovian treasures, and he is preemptively annoyed with Joan for letting that happen. But when he pulls the flaps back and peers into the box, there is a large rectangular album bound in light blue vinyl textured to resemble leather. Jacob takes the book and boosts himself up onto the washing machine, his bare heels bumping against the cold white enamel. He wishes he had thought to put on a sweatshirt. He opens the book.

  The first pages are full of postcards of Paris. He has never been to Paris, but he knows its landmarks well: the Eiffel Tower, the blocky Arc de Triomphe, the blockier, sootier façade of Notre Dame. He studies the opera house, its arches and columns and squashed green dome. Statues stand up on the roof, but he can’t quite make them out, even when he bends close to the page. In an oversaturated postcard of its interior, the gold plasterwork is banana yellow, the seats and curtains a lurid red. There is a program from a performance by the Kirov. Jacob finds Rusakov’s name. There is a program from a performance by the Paris Opéra Ballet. He finds Joan’s name. He thinks of Europeans all clapping together, like Harry said. Clap clap clap clap.

  Next she has pasted in envelopes with exotic postmarks—Madrid, Berlin, Rome—their top edges carefully slit open. Inside are letters from Rusakov, all in French. Jacob takes them out and looks at them but does not understand. Languages have always been his bugaboo; he has no aptitude for them. He reads the letter from the English dancer. Don’t make the mistake of believing he is in love with you. Pages of pasted-in clippings from the time of the defection follow: fragile rectangles of newsprint with long tails folded to fit in the book, some with yellowed photographs of Joan and Rusakov together on the street outside her apartment and then, later, in evening wear at dinners and balls, Joan smiling, skinny in chiffon. He remembers standing at the newsstand in Chicago and staring at these same pictures. Library’s down the street, buddy, the guy said every time.

  The snapshots stun him: the youth of the people, their pervasive beauty, their ease in their bodies. His jealousy, which he had thought was gone, eroded to nothing by the passage of time, rears up. There is Joan, her bare legs curled under her, nestled against Rusakov on a green couch at a party, stuck to him like a limpet. Rusakov, holding a drink, looks up at a man in a tweed blazer who sits, legs crossed, on the couch’s arm. There is Rusakov, smirking, shirtless and barefoot in running shorts, sprawled in a chair. Rusakov on the Brooklyn Bridge, in Central Park, on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, his head cocked sardonically to the side, hands in his pockets. Rusakov again and again. Mugging, clowning, glowering, pondering, dancing, preening. Eerily, Rusakov sleeping, his young forehead slightly furrowed in dream concentration. Jacob can’t let himself think about Joan taking that photograph, crouching beside the bed, framing the defenseless face and greedily making a memento out of it. Joan in a party dress, Joan in bell-bottoms and platform sandals and too much makeup. He can tell by her shy, intense expression that Rusakov is the photographer. Joan in leg warmers sitting on the floor of a dance studio, Rusakov’s head in her lap. She looks tender, her fingers buried in his hair, but he is amused, hoisting an eyebrow at whoever took the picture. Programs from ballets. Clippings about Rusakov that no longer mention Joan. More snapshots, but they are less intimate. Group shots. Joan still smiles but is not happy. A plane ticket, a postcard of a bridge made of delicate iron fans on stone legs, and then blank pages.

  APRIL 1991—SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

  FOR HIS THIRTEENTH BIRTHDAY, HARRY HAS REQUESTED THAT JOAN and Jacob take him and Chloe to see The Phantom of the Opera in L.A. Though Harry is pretending to be enthusiastic, Joan knows he has engineered the trip more for Chloe’s benefit than his own. Gary has changed jobs again, and money is too tight for the Wheelocks to be buying theater tickets. Worse, Gary is in a religious phase and has begun to disapprove of a growing list of things that might include musical theater, especially when it concerns lust, opera, and French people. He isn’t so sure about Chloe dancing around in a leotard. “He’s a big Jesus freak now,” Harry said. “He’s always getting together with a bunch of dads to pray.”

  “What does Chloe think?”

  “I don’t know. She goes to church with him, but I don’t think she’s getting into Jesus, really, except to be nice to Gary. I don’t think she likes to say bad things about Gary because everyone else does. He’s such a dick.”

  “Harry.”

  “You and dad call him that.”

  “Maybe he is k
ind of a dick,” Joan allows, “but, please, Harry, don’t pass that on to Chloe.”

  “Mom, I’m not stupid. I want Chloe to like us.”

  Last month, Chloe told Joan she was hoping to be taken to see Phantom for her birthday, but instead she had come to class with CDs, a gift from her mother. “It’s the original cast recording,” she said brightly and requested they listen to it during barre. The other girls were excited by the prospect of dancing to music with singing, so Joan had indulged her, watching Chloe mouth the lyrics in the mirror, refraining from reminding her that her battements didn’t need to be quite so emotive.

  The Bintzes have moved to a new house, and so they drive back to their old neighborhood in Valle de los Toros to pick up Chloe. They study their former house the way someone might scrutinize an ex-lover from across a restaurant, taking in the little sprucings the new owners have done, agreeing that it looks smaller and older now that they don’t live there. The previous summer they moved to a new tract of pink-stucco, tile-roofed houses near Jacob’s school. They have a rectangular swimming pool and a wheeled aquatic robot that scoots around the bottom vacuuming up leaves. They have a guava tree in the backyard that yields hard, grey-green fruit nobody will eat and an orange tree that periodically explodes with more citrus than they can use. Joan has bought an electric juicer, but overripe oranges still fall and split open on the patio, enticing the bees. The new house is bigger than the old house and lighter and more modern, and these advantages bring her a straightforward domestic pleasure. She had thought she would miss the old house, the place where their family had taken shape, but her loyalty has shifted, along with their furniture and boxes of stuff, into this comelier shell they have found for their lives. Jacob takes a lordly pride in sitting on a chaise and surveying the blue water of the swimming pool. They believe they are owed sunlight, newness, and abundance. They have become Californians.

  The new house is only six miles from the old one, still in the same school district. Harry and Chloe go to the same middle school, although Joan wishes they didn’t. Harry says that Chloe at school isn’t really Chloe, but he won’t give details. He seems to think the real Chloe is the one in the studio, the one who is mostly movement. Joan has begun to work on partnering with them. Harry’s crush on Chloe is an advantage; he is focused on her, determined not to drop her, not squeamish, not selfish, not annoyed with how much effort he must put into being scaffolding for another dancer. He dances with the other students, too, because he is the only boy, and he is a conscientious partner to them all because he doesn’t know how to be otherwise.

  Chloe flies from the Wheelocks’ front door, smiling broadly with a mouth full of braces, running down the front walkway in a clingy calf-length dress printed with pink and yellow roses. Her turned-out feet are quick in blocky white heels. Her hair, which has darkened over the years from a baby blond to the dirty color of tarnished brass, is loose on her bare, bony shoulders. Joan is startled. She has not seen Chloe outside of the studio for a while, and, as girls this age do, she seems to have changed overnight. She still has a child’s skinny shape, but something is different. Perhaps the body is collecting itself in preparation to change, getting ready for the exertion of growth. Despite all the hours Joan spends staring at Chloe in the studio, molding her, this gawky adolescent who jumps into the backseat, radiating excitement and smelling strongly of cheap body spray, seems unfamiliar, and the whole expedition to L.A. is suddenly embarrassing, as though they were four strangers going on a double date.

  Joan wonders what Chloe’s fragrance is supposed to be. Freesia? Rose? Middle school girls have an insatiable enthusiasm for making themselves reek of imitation melon or gardenia or strawberry. Joan has prohibited her students from wearing anything scented to class—no sprays, no lotions—but still she catches them sneaking plastic bottles of purple and pink liquids out of their dance bags during breaks for a restorative spritz. They have strange ideas, these girls, of what it means to be a woman. Mr. K, she sees now, was clever with his courtly little gifts of perfume. This is the kind of woman you are, he tells the dancers he chooses to elevate. This is how you should smell. According to Elaine, he has fewer muses these days. He no longer sleeps with them but still picks out their perfume. His health is irregular, Elaine says, but apparently nothing can deter him from going out and spending an hour at Bloomingdale’s, smelling and wafting and pondering until some stray puff of fragrance finally captures the essence of a certain teenager in pointe shoes. If Joan has a muse it is certainly Chloe (not Harry, whose instruction she approaches with both maternal pride and pedagogical terror—she is too close to him; like a sculptor, she needs distance to take in the whole), but she has no impulse to mold any part of the girl besides her dancing. She believes that the less she knows about Chloe, the better she can see her.

  As they drive north, Harry passes one of Chloe’s CDs forward between the seats, nudging Joan in the shoulder. “We’re going to hear all this again in a couple hours,” Joan says, but she pushes the disc into the slot.

  There is a bit of dialogue about a chandelier, and then the car is flooded with churning organ music. “Yow,” says Jacob, taking a hand off the wheel to turn down the volume.

  “Thank you so much for inviting me,” Chloe says sweetly to Joan and Jacob.

  Jacob glances in the rearview mirror. “Of course, kiddo.”

  “We’re glad you could come,” Joan says, “but Harry invited you. He’s the one with the birthday.”

  “Thanks, Harry.”

  Joan turns her head so she can see Harry out of the corner of her eye. He leans against the window, pleased and blushing. “Yeah,” he says. “It’s cool. Just don’t tell anyone at school. They already think I’m weird. I don’t need anyone thinking I’m into musicals.”

  “Weird is good,” Jacob says. “Weird means you’re interesting.”

  “No,” says Harry. “Weird means you’re weird.”

  “I won’t tell,” Chloe says magnanimously. She leans forward, grasping the back of Joan’s seat. “Joan, when you used to dance in Paris, were there ghost stories about the opera house?”

  “Oh, some. There are ghost stories about most old theaters, I think.”

  “Did anyone ever die there?”

  “I’m sure. In fires and accidents. Probably of natural causes, too—audience members having heart attacks and things. And, way back, the whole opera company used to live in the building.”

  “Do you think it’s haunted? Did anything spooky ever happen?”

  “Spooky?” She remembers the red velvet box on the third loge, her first glimpse of Arslan, her reflection in his dressing room mirror. “No, not really. The basement is a little spooky. It’s stone with archways and things, kind of like a crypt. There are lots of different levels. There used to be stables. But now it’s mostly just stuff in storage, like sound equipment and old props and things.”

  “Is there really a lake underneath?”

  “There’s water but not really a lake. When they were building, water kept seeping through and ruining the foundations, so they gave up and made a cement tank for it. There’s a grate in the basement you can look through and see the water down below. Someone told me the water was for if there was a fire. I don’t know if that’s true. Performers aren’t really supposed to go down there. You have to make friends with the stagehands.” Joan wishes she were the kind of person who could make a good story out of that old murky cistern.

  But Chloe seems delighted. “Wow,” she says. “That’s so cool. So maybe the Phantom story is partly true.”

  Harry stirs. “Made-up things can be true,” he says. “Dad says it better, but it’s like, if a story matters to you, it’s true for you, even if it never happened. Like myths. Right, Dad?”

  “Right,” says Jacob, pleased. “Or Bible stories.” After the words are out, Jacob glances at Chloe in the rearview mirror, remembering that Gary is now a Jesus freak.

  “I feel that way about Swan Lake,” Joan offers qu
ickly. “Some other ballets, too. Romeo and Juliet.”

  “Shakespeare was so lucky to have that ballet to base his play on,” Jacob says.

  “Ha, ha. The problem is I’ve only seen the play once. I’ve seen the ballet a million times.”

  Chloe still says nothing, and Joan worries that Jacob offended her or she thinks they are being ridiculous, but then she says quietly, “I feel that way about pretty much everything.”

  Joan reaches back with one arm. She finds Chloe’s familiar hard knot of a knee in the space behind her seat and pats it.

  HARRY IS GLAD THE THEATER IS DARK FOR SEVERAL REASONS. THE first is that he is mortified. He can barely bring himself to look at the effusion that’s happening onstage, all the singing and acting, the mist and the candelabras, the organ and the electric guitar, the decadent opera house set with gold, bare-breasted sculptures, red drapes, and a huge chandelier. For people to walk around onstage singing seems unnatural, a desecration of a space intended for the rigors of dance. Of course some ballets are all about drama and passion and swelling music, and of course dancers emote, but all that ardor is kept in check by their silence. Onstage, the girl Christine and her young suitor Raoul are singing a duet, and it all seems too obvious, too easy, too literal. They just sing the lyrics someone else wrote. Anyone could play these parts and get the point across. These performers are just people: people who can sing, which Harry cannot, but still just people. Dancers are not just people.

  The second reason he appreciates the darkness is that, since he doesn’t want to look at the stage, he can look at Chloe, at least some of the time. His mother, without making a big deal about it, bought seats for herself and his dad on the other side of the theater from him and Chloe. He sees Chloe five days a week at dance, but they are always in motion, always observed. Since his family moved away, they are never quiet and still together anymore, the way they used to be when they watched TV or read books or hung out in the backyard. She had come to swim in his pool once right after they moved in, dropped off by Gary, who did not even turn his head to look at the house before speeding away, but their old friendship, which had worn deep, inviting grooves through the old house and yard, could not seem to find purchase in this shiny new place. Harry had been excited about showing her the pool and by the prospect of her two-piece bathing suit, but they had become awkward and hostile with each other, brought up short by the smooth rectangle of water as though by an ancient riddle. If they were younger, they would have dived for rings or invented events for pool Olympics or done water ballet. If they were older, they would have known to float peacefully on the rafts or lie roasting on the chaises. But they didn’t know how to play anymore. They treaded water, chins at the surface. Chloe’s head looked small, sleek, and mean. “I thought it would be a bigger pool,” she said. “I guess it’s nice, though.”

 

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