Astonish Me: A novel

by Shipstead, Maggie

  Thoughtfully, Arslan drags one hand over his mouth and chin. “This is good,” he says, “but it can be better. How old are you, Harry Bintz?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Sixteen.” Arslan paces a few steps one way and then back, hands on his hips. “Okay. Your arms. On the last jump, organize them better. And use your breathing better. Take breath, and up, and breath, and up. Yes? In the middle … I don’t know how to say exactly. I will show you. Here, when you come out of the turn and into lunge pose, you know, like this”—he comes into the middle of the floor and demonstrates, making a shape like the blade of a sundial: one leg bent at the knee, the other stretched behind him, an arm continuing that leg’s ascending line to point at something high in the distance—“then up into the arabesque, but not pushing with back foot. Push with other leg. The whole leg. Straight up. Pop. It must be straight. It is very exposed.”

  Arslan pops into an arabesque en relevé. He is only in his early forties, but Elaine is still impressed by how undiminished he is. He could easily still dance the major roles if he wanted to. But he is interested in other things. “And then,” Arslan says, “you take these two steps, but you must already be prepared to jump. You are preparing even before the arabesque.”

  Two small steps, and he is in the air, spinning, knees bent like a genie’s to lend an exotic flair, and then when he lands, he seems unable to resist the pull of the variation, of memory, and so he continues on, the piano chiming in, the room holding its breath because no one has seen this particular man do this particular dance in almost twenty years. Arslan does the final, uninhibited leap, legs flying, and then he is on one knee, and the boys are hooting and applauding. Arslan waves a hand, pleased but pretending to be abashed. His half-suppressed smile says the ongoing miracle of his artistry is nothing, only a trifle. “Come,” he says to Harry, “we do last bit again. Together.”

  And they do the final chaînés again and the wild, flailing leap, ending side by side, each on one knee, arms upraised, looking into the mirror. Arslan is staring not at his own face but Harry’s, and Elaine sees in their reflection that, as she had hoped and feared, he understands.

  IV

  JULY 1977—NEW YORK CITY

  ARSLAN OPENS HIS DOOR WEARING ONLY SHORTS, BLUE WITH white piping. Joan asked him once if he had ever deigned to get dressed in his apartment in Leningrad, but he had not answered, not really, just said that there he wore a fur robe like Peter the Great. On this July night, which is miserably hot and offers little relief from a hotter day, his undress makes more sense than usual, doesn’t seem so much like an affectation, a flaunting. He is sweating. It shines on his chest and trickles through his sideburns. “Joan,” he says, out of breath. Wearily, he waves her inside, half fanning himself, half directing her.

  “Why are you so hot?” she says. “It’s hot, but it’s not that hot.”

  He shrugs. A set of hand weights is out on the parquet floor beside a rubber mat. It would be such a simple thing for him to say he’s been working out, but, true to form, he can’t be bothered. She wants to think he gets a sadistic pleasure from frustrating her, but she doubts the impulse is that coherent. The door to his narrow strip of a balcony is open, and she goes to it, drawn as always by the black carpet of Central Park, beaded with round white streetlamps that illuminate irregular patches of green. The low skyline of grand apartment buildings to the east is blocky and yellow grey, and to the south are to the towers of Midtown, windows lit in an indecipherable code.

  “I hate the city in the summer,” she says. “It’s like living inside a dog’s mouth. I thought there would be a breeze up here, but there isn’t. You should send a letter to your co-op board demanding breezes.”

  “Did you come to talk about weather?” He flops into a black leather Eames chair and regards her. The apartment is all black and white and glass except for a couch in harlot red. The walls are mirrored. She resists looking at herself but then gives in, wondering what he’s seeing, if he can tell she’s drunk. She has been across the park at Campbell Hodges’s new girlfriend’s apartment, another sky palace, though one with more conventional décor: heavy drapes, floral rugs, chintz sofas. In the mirror she looks flushed and messy but also, she thinks, fetching, silhouetted as she is against the glowing city night. Her sundress is pretty, though not glamorous like the tight and shiny dresses Ludmilla wears with her ridiculous head scarves. The Disco Babushka, Campbell calls her.

  “No,” she says. “I came to ask you something.”

  He rolls his eyes but purses his lips in a half smile. When he is languid and sardonic like this, she knows he is horny. His mood gratifies her, is contagious even though she had planned to be frosty and remote. She puts a hand on her hip and leans against the doorframe. Campbell had invited her to lunch to celebrate his girlfriend being out of town, and together they had eaten shrimp cocktail on the absent woman’s roof terrace and sampled her excellent wine collection and then, into the evening, her assortment of ports and sherries. Sometime around sunset, Campbell had told Joan that, according to the all-knowing Mr. K, Arslan and Ludmilla are secretly engaged.

  “Always questions,” Arslan says. “What can the question today be? Don’t tell me. I will guess.”

  “Don’t guess.”

  “You want to know whether I like your dress. Yes?”

  “No. Arslan, I’m serious.”

  “I am serious, too. I like this dress. I would like to see behind of it. Turn around, please.”

  Joan steps away from the door and turns in a circle. His attention, thrilling and humiliating, compels her.

  “Yes, I like other side, too. There. I have answered. Good-bye.” He smirks the infuriating smirk she both loves and despises. “You’re still here? There are more questions? Or maybe you have something else you want to show me?”

  Joan wants to go to him. She grasps the doorframe with one hand. “Are you going to marry Ludmilla?”

  He pauses, nods. “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  The smirk again. “Why not?”

  “That’s not an answer. Why don’t you ever answer me?” She had thought she would cry. Campbell had been sitting on the floor while she sat on a ruffle-skirted sofa, his head lolling against her knee and his fingers caressing her ankle. She had moved her foot away, and he had said, “If I know something, do you want me to tell you?”

  “It sounds like I won’t like it.”

  “No.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay, tell you?”

  “Yes.”

  He had poured her more sherry, and he had told her about the engagement, and she had cried, surprising herself with the violence of her short, spluttering sobs. “Darling,” he’d said, immediately contrite, “I’m sorry. I always forget this thing with Arslan was real. I do that with other people’s dramas. I think it’s all a game and act like an ass just to stir the shit. I didn’t mean to spoil our day.” Later, still guilty, he had insisted on paying for her taxi. She told him she was going straight home.

  She had cried again in the taxi, but now her eyes are dry and her voice steady. This unexpected reprieve from tears steels her to her mission.

  “I deserve an answer,” she tells Arslan.

  He rests a bare foot on his Lucite coffee table and swivels from side to side. The chair squeaks. “You want to know about Ludmilla or you want to know about you?”

  “This isn’t about me.”

  “Is always about you, Joan.”

  “That’s rich.”

  The fine head tilts, trying to catch her meaning; the black eyes belong to a hawk or eagle. “Rich?”

  His English has improved dramatically in two years, but his accent is still strong, and she likes tripping him up when she can. “It’s ironic you would call me the selfish one.”

  Ironic he knows. Ironic is one of his favorite words. “It’s i-ron-ic,” he says, giving each syllable its own little moment in the sun, “you don’t understand. Ludmilla is very good dancer. I want t
o be with very good dancer. You want to be with me because I am very good dancer. Why else? Because we make good conversation? Because we are happy all the time? Because we are so good in bed together? Even when you wear your little stockings and say your little dirty things, we are still—it is … I can see is work. Like with dance. Is not natural between us.”

  She ignores the pain of this, saving it for later, pressing forward. “Do you even love her?”

  He considers. “Yes,” he says, fingers flicking the question away. “But love and marriage are not same. Only American schoolgirls think this.”

  “I feel sorry for Ludmilla. She’s in for a bad time.”

  He slides farther down into his chair, the leather creaking, his knees moving farther apart and his head lolling back, black eyes watching her. The posture seems almost submissive, but she knows better. Pretending to smother a yawn, he asks, “Why did you come here?”

  “I don’t know. No, I know, but it already seems stupid and pointless. I wanted to understand.”

  “What is to understand?”

  “I wanted to know why you chose me. We didn’t even know each other. What did you think I was? Why did you write me those letters? Why did you want me to come to Toronto?”

  He looks at her pensively, with some annoyance, and the lights go out. They both exclaim, not complete words, just sounds of reflexive surprise, his an odd, foreign bark.

  The chair creaks, and he brushes past her to the balcony that is little more than a shallow ledge with a railing. She follows. Beyond the railing: nothing, only darkness. She senses the park as a lower, softer sort of darkness, and the buildings on its far side as solid, squared-off hunks of it, barely perceptible against the sky. “What is this?” he says.

  “A blackout.”

  A siren is already wailing, the sound floating away like the call of a night bird. Maybe it is only the heaviness of the heat, but the darkness feels close, stifling. Joan wants to pull away from it, but there is nowhere to go. Above and below, she hears doors opening, people stepping murmuring onto their balconies, all looking out into the same vanished city as Joan and Arslan. Her question seems irrelevant in the dark, or maybe it is that the answer has to do with irrelevance. She could have been anyone. Most theaters have a red light in the back for the dancers to spot off of as they turn. She had been that light for Arslan as he considered defecting, a fixed point to look at, to steer by, unremarkable except in its use.

  When Joan reads in the newspaper how thousands of people were arrested for looting and arson and running wild in the dark streets, how people ripped the grates off storefronts with chains attached to the bumpers of cars and smashed the windows and took everything inside, how muggers mugged one another, stole what had already been stolen, she is not surprised. Darkness is permission, if you want it to be. Arslan had pressed his hand flat against her hip, not pushing her away but seeming to steady himself. They had turned together and gone inside, retreating from the night and also burrowing farther into it. There was nothing else to do.

  When Harry is a newborn and Joan happens across a newspaper article about the spike in births nine months after the blackout, she is not surprised that others had felt the same recklessness, the same constricting, driving momentum. Within her body, in the deeper darkness there, she had committed a theft.

  DECEMBER 1995—SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

  JOAN WHIPS AROUND THE CORNER INTO THE KITCHEN, SURPRISING Jacob as he loiters against the island, flipping through a catalog of travel accessories and picking at a bowl of pistachios. “Have you seen Harry?” she asks. She is wearing a ladylike dress, navy blue with a pleated skirt and a narrow brown belt around her narrow waist, sheer nylons, and brown high heels. She loves Christmas, loves The Nutcracker, which they are about to go see for the zillionth time, but refuses, as a policy, to ever wear anything holiday themed. He tried to coax her into a red blouse for his school party, but she had worn black, which had seemed unnecessarily contrary.

  “Narcissus?” Jacob replies. “I think he’s out by the reflecting pool.”

  “We’re going to be late.”

  He follows her out into the living room. “You don’t have to tell me. I’m ready. Do you think this year they’ll change it up? The whole thing will end before intermission with the rats tearing down the tree and eating Drosselmeyer?”

  Joan stands at the base of the stairs and shouts up them, “Harry!”

  Jacob flops into an armchair. As he often does around his son these days, Jacob feels equally amused and annoyed. He has become increasingly convinced that there is something autoerotic about ballet, with all that mirror gazing and body perfecting, and lately Harry has done nothing to dissuade him. Ballet, like other pursuits that require immense determination and reward showmanship, seems to foster hubris. But maybe all art fosters hubris. Joan’s angle is that a little confidence (she will not say Harry is arrogant, even though Jacob can see she is bothered by his arrogance) will sustain a dancer through hard times. It provides a little support, a little cushion.

  With Harry off in New York, ballet is mentioned less frequently in the house—the house is, in general, much quieter—but ballet has also stolen his son, replaced college with a GED (Just for now, Joan says), and created a thousand awkward variations on conversations with new acquaintances in which people learn Harry is a dancer and then, thinking they’re being subtle, try to find out if he’s gay.

  You’re boring, Jacob wants to tell them. His ambivalence is private, nothing compared to his pride in Harry. Your thoughts and your sneaky little questions are boring. You could never do what my son does, and he could do so many other things, too, if he wanted.

  Joan stands with her heels together and the toes of her brown pumps sticking out to the sides. She lifts her chest toward the silent upstairs. “HARRY!”

  Harry slides down the banister in one of his dandyish new outfits: shiny, stiff-looking jeans, black Converse sneakers, a tight tweed vest over a white shirt and narrow black tie. He wears a tweed cap that Jacob thinks makes him look like a newsboy, but Harry has already informed him that he, Jacob, knows nothing (nothing!) about fashion outside of (smirk) principal chic. Excuse me, Harry says, for not wearing a tie that looks like a big crayon.

  Harry lands on one foot and spins around to grab Joan, dipping her backward like Fred Astaire. Unfazed, she accepts the manhandling and bends gracefully over his arm. Jacob thinks of the photo of her with Rusakov, arched in the same way, her throat exposed. He fingers his necktie, which is red with tiny green Christmas trees and which he had chosen in defiance of the other Bintzes. They think he’s uncool. They think his job is dull and that his friendly ties and collection of knock-knock jokes, which are meant to put kids at ease, are evidence of a lack of seriousness, sophistication, and discrimination. Sometimes he has an urge to remind them that he is the only one with a college degree, let alone a doctorate, that he knows things they don’t, but he resists. He doesn’t want to talk himself into thinking less of his family.

  “All right,” Harry says, righting his mother. “Let’s go. Yippee. Bring on the technical fireworks.”

  Jacob pushes himself out of the armchair. “Looking sharp, Harry,” he says. “Chloe will be wowed.”

  “Oh,” Harry says, shifty, squaring his tie in a mirror on the wall. “Yeah. That reminds me. Chloe and I are taking a break.”

  “Harry,” Joan says, arrested in the act of opening the front door. “You broke up? Since when?”

  “This afternoon. It’s not totally final yet. I just told her I thought I needed some time.”

  “You broke up with her right before a performance?”

  “I wasn’t planning it. Things are a little unclear right now.”

  “Unclear? After all these years?” Jacob says.

  “One year. Nice tie, by the way.”

  Jacob ignores the tie comment and presses his hands to his heart the way ballet princes do. “But the longing! All those years of longing!”

  “Peop
le change, Dad,” Harry says in the superior tone he has brought back as a souvenir from New York. “People change.”

  Except for a few stray remarks on the opening of new movie theaters next to the freeway and the closure of Long King Chinese Palace where they ate every Friday when Harry was little, they are quiet for most of the drive. Only when Jacob is hunting for a parking place at the theater does Joan twist to face Harry in the backseat. “How do people change?”

  HIS ANSWER CHILLS HER, AND THE CHILL LINGERS AS THEY PRESENT their tickets to the white-haired ushers, find their seats, flip through their programs until the lights go down. It stays with her through the overture and the party scene and Drosselmeyer’s gift of the Nutcracker to Clara. This production, put on in a large, professional auditorium, follows a version that uses children for Clara and the Nutcracker. Chloe is the Sugar Plum Fairy and will not appear until the second act. Joan has seen her perform twice. She is doing well in the role. There are still traces of a strange fury in her (or hostility, or something—Joan has never satisfactorily been able to name the disquieting vibe Chloe’s dancing took on after Gary’s death), but Joan thinks only a practiced eye would notice. Indeed, the practiced eyes of Chloe’s auditioners, while beguiled by her sharp, beautiful face and crisp technique, had not missed her misplaced ferocity. “Your little Valkyrie protégée,” one of them had called Joan to ask, “can she tone it down? Be sweet and pretty? To be totally honest, we don’t have a lot of good options, and we like the idea of having someone so young and fresh and local, not to make her sound like produce. We thought we could pitch newspaper stories about her as a rising star. It’s a shame your son isn’t available, too.”

  “Chloe will be wonderful,” Joan had promised, liking that word: protégée. She had not expected to find much in teaching besides a little extra income, something to do, a way to keep fit. She had not anticipated she might be able to re-create, even improve, her young self through the body of another. Chloe’s unusual stage presence worries her—things would be simpler, careerwise, if she were just sweet and pretty—but sometimes Joan envies her strangeness. At least Chloe is different. Her imperfection makes her interesting.