Astonish Me: A novel

by Shipstead, Maggie

  In a moment, a crackle, and then Elaine, sounding unfriendly: “Yes?”

  “It’s Harry,” he yelled into the speaker. “Can I come up?”

  Another crackle, a buzz, and a loud click. Harry pushed open the door and climbed the stairs. Elaine was waiting for him on her landing. She was barefoot. An indigo cotton bathrobe printed with white horses hung open over her leggings and loose tank top. An elastic headband held back her hair. She looked young, much younger than Harry’s mother, and he wondered what she did when she wasn’t at the studio or the theater. What had she been doing before he rang her buzzer? It occurred to him that if he ever had that much privacy he might never stop masturbating, and the thought made Elaine’s solitude titillating and mysterious.

  “Harry?” she said.

  He stopped just below her. “Would you please not tell Arslan who my mom is?”

  She held her door open. “You must have been really worried to come all this way. Come in for a bit. And you don’t have to scream into the intercom. You’re like an old man sometimes, kid. Take your shoes off.”

  Harry followed her to the kitchen, where she took two Diet Cokes from the refrigerator, and then into the cavernous living room. She pointed him to a sofa. Through an open door, he could see her bed, which had a wrought-iron headboard and pale green bedding and was unmade. He looked away, blushing. The apartment had white walls and wide, caramel-colored floorboards covered irregularly by thin rugs in geometric patterns. Sheer white curtains hung from iron rods, and potted ferns crowded the wide windowsills. A tall chrome sculpture stood in one corner, and on the walls there were a couple paintings of trees and one of a frozen river. “I like these paintings,” Harry said.

  Elaine gave a little snort of amusement. “You said that when you came here last year. Do you remember?”

  “I guess not.”

  “I remember. I thought they were a funny thing for you to notice. They were Mr. K’s. I don’t like them very much, honestly, but I got used to them. I don’t know what I’d put up instead.” Elaine picked up two ferns and set them on the floor to make a perch for herself beside an open window, where she settled, one foot tucked under the other knee, and cracked her soda.

  “Are they valuable?”

  “Yes. And old.”

  “Did Mr. K miss Russia?”

  “Yes, but I think he liked to play up being homesick, too, for drama, as a reason to be melancholy. He grew up in the city, but he only bought paintings of the countryside. I think he missed the idea of all those trees and rivers more than he missed any real place. Our house upstate was his mini-Russia. I wish you could have known each other.”

  “Does Arslan miss Russia?”

  Elaine smiled, narrowing her green, feline eyes, and Harry felt a desire to be touched by her, though he couldn’t gauge if he wanted something sexual or only a maternal caress. “I don’t know,” she said. “Probably. He could go back now, though, to visit, and he hasn’t. Harry, I haven’t told him that he’ll be meeting the son of an old flame. I had the same thought as you, that he should see you dance first.”

  “I don’t want any special treatment,” Harry said vehemently.

  “Of course not,” Elaine agreed, matching his passion, gently mocking.

  “I’m really nervous.” Something occurred to him, looking at Elaine sitting among her ferns, and he decided to be daring. “Hey, do you have any weed?”

  She laughed in a loud, startled way. “Are you a pothead now? Is this my doing? I brought you to New York, and now you’ve got reefer madness?”

  “No. No, I just thought it might make me less nervous.”

  She looked out the window. Her hand dipped into her robe pocket but emerged empty. “I’m not your dealer,” she said after a pause, “but you can have a glass of wine if you want one. Do you?”

  “No, that’s okay. I’m not done with my Coke.” Feeling stupid, he took a long swig and sat forward on the couch, his hands wrapped around the can. A rumble came from outside. “Was that thunder?” he asked.

  “I think so.” The ferns rustled, and the sheer curtains billowed gently. Elaine grasped the window frame and leaned back, angling her torso out so she could look up at the sky.

  She tipped back upright. “Definitely going to rain. Hey, what’s wrong, kid?”

  Harry said, “What if Arslan doesn’t like how I dance?”

  “Kid. I know I told you not to be complacent, but don’t worry so much.” Elaine stretched her arm outside, palm up to check for droplets. She studied her hand, wiped it on her robe. “He’s just a guy. He’s a brilliant, brilliant dancer, but he’s not God.”

  “My dad calls him the Jedi master.”

  “Maybe he’s that.” It had begun to rain, and she dropped off the windowsill and replaced the ferns. Harry helped her close the windows. Rain tapped politely, asking to be let in, and then started hammering and hammering against the glass.

  “I wish I weren’t scared,” he said. “I don’t mind being nervous. I like that feeling when you’re about to go onstage, and your stomach is full of that crazy whirring feeling, and your heart is beating really hard. I like that. I feel like a rocket about to launch, or something. But this … it’s like it’s too important. I just feel awful.”

  “Listen,” Elaine said, coming to sit beside him on the couch and patting him on the knee. “You have to use what you have. You have to take the fear and use it to wind yourself tighter and tighter, and then, at the right moment, you let go, and it’ll drive you forward. When I’m afraid, I do extra barre work. It reminds me that everything I know is still there. Fear comes and goes. You’ll learn how to deal with it. Okay? Look at me. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Harry said.

  Elaine took a small glass pipe from her pocket. “One toke,” she said, “and then I’m putting you in a taxi. This is me treating you like an adult, Harry. You’re a dancer to me now, not Joan’s kid. So be discreet, okay? I don’t want all the intensive kids talking about how I got you high. I could get in trouble.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  But in the taxi back to the dorm, he wasn’t sure if he felt anything, even though he had talked Elaine into a second hit, had held it as long as he could. The city, revived by the rain from its turgid afternoon, glimmered with menace. He wished, briefly, that he had never started dancing so that he wouldn’t feel this way. He wished he could have stayed at Elaine’s, tucked under a blanket on the couch. With a pang of guilt, he imagined her in the blue robe with nothing underneath, inviting him into the bedroom, the green bed. Then he thought of being in the green bed with Chloe, then with Natasha, the girl he’d slept with the previous summer and so was easiest to imagine. His thoughts began to accelerate. He shifted on the cracked pleather seat.

  Once, in an acting class at school, the teacher had told them all to lie on the floor and push their thoughts away, breathe them out through their noses, squeeze them out through one arm and then the other, and then push what was left down through their bodies, their legs, out through their toes, until they were left with dark, empty space.

  He closed his eyes. He pushed away Elaine, and Chloe, and Natasha. He pushed Arslan away, and then his mother, and he pushed away the taxi, the rain, the streets, the clouds, the sky. He became a void. For a moment, he held the entire universe at bay, and then he let go, let it all fall back into his body as though from a great height. He jolted in the seat and giggled. The cabbie looked at him in the mirror. Every cell in his body was alive. He told himself to remember this feeling, this certainty, this knowledge that his body was his and that it was the most important thing, all he needed. It was beautiful to be in this taxi, this city. He felt like a sparkling silver parachute had opened around him, delicate as the billow of a jellyfish.

  HEAD DOWN, HARRY CROSSES TO AN EMPTY SPOT ON THE BARRE. HE has been following Elaine’s advice to do extra barre work, focus on the fundamentals, and he tries to settle his mind, to open lines of communication with his body. Putting the arch of one
foot on the barre, he stretches his hamstring, then bends the leg to get at his hip flexor. He is bruised and sore from where he and Chloe crashed to the floor together. They had not known how to turn their cautious schoolroom fish dive into an explosive, daredevil catch—there was a reason the audience had gasped in amazement at the Russians—and without anyone to teach them, Harry had seen little hope of figuring it out. But Chloe would not be deterred and leapt at him from across the room like a predatory cat. He needed to get his right arm wrapped around her torso and his left arm around her leg, but there wasn’t enough time. She slipped through his hands like, truth be told, a fish and landed hard at his feet. “Let’s not do this right now,” he said after the first try, helping her up. “It’s too hard. We need someone to coach us.”

  But she was already stalking away, back to where she started. “Ready?” she said, and hurled herself at him again.

  That time they both went down, his shoulder taking the brunt of their weight. “Chloe!” he said, roughly pushing her off him. “This is stupid. We’re going to get injured.”

  She stood up, her lip bleeding. “Ready?”

  It was on their eleventh or twelfth try that the miracle occurred, after they had stopped talking and their breathing and Chloe’s footfalls were the only sounds in the studio. He knows he could not replicate the feat, not for a million dollars, but somehow that time when Chloe flew at him, eyes blazing in her tiny face, he had snatched her out of the air in a perfect fish dive, as good as the Russians’, maybe better, maybe more ferocious and brilliant and dangerous. After, as it dawned on them that they had not gone down in a heap, his arms, which had locked around her of their own accord, refused to lift her up and set her back en pointe, and instead he held her, almost upside down, her arms open and relaxed, and they watched themselves in the mirror, winded and bloodied and full of disbelief. In fact, he never put her on her feet but instead lowered her to the floor of the dreary basement studio. Things had proceeded rapidly, unstoppably. He had peeled off her leotard and tights like one long snakeskin, exposing her imagined flesh, her familiar shape. The level of her surprise that he was not a virgin had offended him enough to make them both laugh, although he thought to himself that, really, she shouldn’t have been surprised. The girls at the intensive were after him like a pack of baying hounds. He had tried to tell her before they even got on the airplane, but she was so used to him being a loser that she had been slow to grasp the new order. Even with an eleven o’clock curfew and morning class, the liberation of being in New York shocks him, like he has been woken from hypnosis.

  Arslan warns them that he runs a fast barre. He hopes they are sufficiently warmed up. “Prepare,” he says, and they begin with pliés. He walks around the room as they go through the battements, pausing occasionally to adjust someone or demonstrate a correct position, thumping his own legs with a closed fist for emphasis. Twice he stands behind Harry and watches in silence for long, unnerving seconds. When Harry does ronds de jambe en l’air, Arslan comes close and grips his thigh with both hands. “Hold more still,” he says. “Keep pulling up.” Harry studies himself in the mirror. He sees his arms and legs, the sweat on his face, Arslan moving toward the other side of the room, and, ghosted over all of it, he sees himself and Chloe as they had been on the floor. They were so used to watching themselves in the mirror, neither could keep from looking. In sex, as they never would in dance, they had looked perfect.

  After only half an hour Arslan moves them to center floor. First tendus, then more adagio ending with diabolically slow grands battements en cloche, their legs swinging forward and up, then all the way back like bell clappers, their ankles wiggling and their feet curling to grip the floor as Arslan tells them to bring their heels forward, hold their turnout, not to sacrifice placement for extension, things they have heard a thousand times, nothing that will make them like him. “And we’re not leaning back, are we?” he says pleasantly while they tremble. “No. Not even a little.” Then petit allégro and finally three at a time into grand allégro, which he makes tricky, giving them an enchaînement of turns and jumps so quick their legs must beat together at hummingbird speed. “And one, pa pa pa,” Arslan shouts at them. “And up, ba ba ba, and front, and stay. Good!” Kyle, Harry’s roommate, loses control and crashes into Phillip, a catty, slinky boy who, when Harry was fresh off the plane last year, had administered his first kiss, declaring that he would be the one to decide if Harry was straight or not.

  As he careers through the combination, Harry wobbles on the edge of control, struggling to roll down into his landings, to breathe, not to neglect his arms. When the music ends, he stands with Kyle and Phillip, chest heaving, waiting for what Arslan will say. He has danced better than the others—he always does—but he is never happy with his performances, and now he is crestfallen to the point of near panic. He hadn’t been able to focus, to marshal all his nerves and all his cells the way he knew he could. Why had Chloe chosen last night of all nights? Why had she left him bruised and distracted? Did some part of her want him to fail?

  Arslan has been leaning against the barre near the piano, and he pushes off and walks slowly toward Harry, stopping in front of him. He cocks his head, smiling with one corner of his mouth. To be looked at by someone he has spent so much time looking at is unsettling. “Who are you?” Arslan says in his soft accent.

  “Harry Bintz.”

  “Not such a great name for a dancer. Do you know Fonteyn’s real name?”

  “No.”

  “Peggy Hookham. Not the same, is it?”

  Harry had not planned to tell him, but suddenly he needs to. He can’t bear to listen to what Arslan might say about his dancing, must head him off. “You used to know my mother,” he blurts. “Joan Bintz. Or, Joan Joyce, I guess back then.”

  The amusement falls away, and the eyes sharpen, searching Harry’s face. “Joan? You are Joan’s son?”

  “Harry,” says Elaine from beside the piano, “maybe this could wait until after class?”

  Everyone is looking at him. He has never been so embarrassed. Of his dancing, of his lame ploy to distract the one person in the world whose opinion matters most to him by bringing up his mother.

  “No, it’s okay.” Arslan is smiling again, smirking really, but seriousness has pooled under his ironic façade. “How is Joan Joyce? I have not seen her in many many years.”

  “She’s good. She teaches ballet.”

  “Yes? She taught you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, Joan’s son, what are you working on? What would you like to show me?”

  Harry hesitates. Finally, reluctantly, he says, “Ali the slave boy.” There are other variations he knows, but he is best at Ali. It is a role meant for a small dancer, a quick dancer, a good turner, all of which Harry is. But, really, the reason he has worked so hard on the dance (and the reason the studio is now heavy with silence) is that it was the showpiece that secured Arslan’s gold medal at Varna. In the States, Arslan had sworn off Ali forever, saying the Kirov had treated him like a performing monkey, he was tired of Ali, this was meant to be a free country, no?

  “The slave boy,” Arslan repeats, dragging out the syllables. “It is difficult one.”

  Harry smiles. “At least it’s short.”

  “That’s what they say about me, too. Difficult is good. You are not an artist if you only do what is comfortable. You must always find new challenge, new pleasure. Okay, Joan’s son. Let’s see it.”

  The other boys step back, pressing against the walls as though Harry is about to attempt a feat of dangerous sorcery. Some look envious, others smug, others nervous. Harry walks to the front corner. He wishes he were in costume, bare chested above blue and gold harem pants, gold cuffs on his biceps.

  “Prepare,” says Arslan. In the moment of stillness that precedes the piano, as Harry steps into fifth position and pushes up into demi-pointe, he empties his mind, pushes it all away. He finds that he is, in fact, prepared. A buoyancy rushes in,
driving away his fear.

  ELAINE WATCHES ARSLAN WATCH HARRY. SHE HAS TRIED TO SHIELD the boy from the most rhapsodic bits of the speculation surrounding him, the comparisons to Rusakov himself. And those whispers aren’t out of nowhere. They have similar proportions, Harry and Arslan, similar lines, similar instincts. The biggest difference between them has to do with presence and attitude. Arslan onstage is impish and arrogant but can also be dark, even grotesque; Harry is sweet, earnest, noble, perhaps a tiny bit too effusive, but that can be ironed out. He is so young, too young to be complex. There is no telling how good he might become. As he whirls through the slave boy variation, he surprises even her. He is a gravity-defying dervish, full of bravura and brio, all the things male dancers need to be full of. He does the horribly difficult pirouettes where he pliés on his supporting leg without losing momentum. He does the turning jumps cleanly and with good height. His takeoff is naturally quick; he doesn’t need a low plié to get off the ground, even in fifth position. And there is a welcome hint of interpretation beyond the technique, a hint of defiance from the slave. Even before she’d seen Harry dance, years ago, when Joan had pulled that gap-toothed school picture from her wallet, Elaine had recognized him as a potential asset for the company. Now is the time to secure him. When he is still young and his technique still pliable. She wants to protect him from injury, to choose the right moment to unveil him to the public.

  The creases in Arslan’s forehead deepen. Any flippancy is gone. Elaine wonders if he will be threatened. Or if he will try to take Harry for his own weird company, spirit him away to Maine and make him dance in a purple bodysuit to Arvo Pärt or Balinese gamelan music. Mostly she wonders if he will see what she wants him to see. The piano ends, and Harry is on one knee, his head back and his right arm lifted. Then he drops the arm and stands up. He makes a little bow to Arslan and another to the pianist.