Astonish Me: A novel

by Shipstead, Maggie

  Joan is somewhere in the theater. Jacob does not see her, does not look for her. He had asked Harry to get them seats as far apart as possible, and it seems his request was honored. Audience chatter rises as a movie star in a spangled gown finds her seat near the front. Other famous people are here, politicians and pop stars and moguls, all of Arslan’s dazzling friends. Jacob sees Sandy Wheelock making her way down the aisle in emerald moiré silk, on the arm of a grey-haired man.

  At first Jacob had told Harry no, under no circumstances would he attend the premiere of Rodina, the monstrous ego trip of a ballet about the man who had pulled Jacob’s life out from under him like a cheap rug. But Harry had made the point that Jacob would otherwise spend the night alone getting very drunk, and so he should probably just come and support his son instead. Son. Harry uses the word a lot these days, more than is necessary, and Jacob knows he is being reassured, something he finds both irritating and, truthfully, reassuring.

  Tired of craning his neck for celebrities and unwilling to be impressed by their abundance, he opens his program. The advertisements in ballet programs are always for expensive things, watches and fancy hotels and, toward the back, private schools and dance academies and barge trips down the Danube. Usually there is an insert on colored paper with that night’s cast, but because this is a premiere and because Arslan is the most important being in the universe, the usher had handed Jacob a stiff sheet of embossed card stock. Beneath Rodina stamped in red at the top along with the date and above the names of the dancers in the company and the list of scenes and acts, there is printed the following:

  YOUNG DANCER …… Harold Bintz

  THE AMERICANS …… Chloe Rusakov

  THE RUSSIAN …… Tatiana Nikulina

  THE HUSBAND …… Georges Lazaresco

  OLD DANCER …… Arslan Rusakov

  Harry’s name is indeed terrible for a dancer, as its bearer had whined throughout his adolescence, but Jacob is unexpectedly and absurdly moved to tears at the sight of it. Harry could have changed it, taken a stage name or, horrifically, Rusakov’s name, but he had kept the name Jacob gave him. I want you to name him, Joan had said. I don’t want to choose. Jacob closes the program without reading the synopsis. He knows the ballet is the story of Arslan’s life (“But abstract,” Harry says), and that is enough.

  He hears a small, anxious laugh and looks up at Joan. She is standing awkwardly in front of the person on Jacob’s left, a tall man who has opted not to get up to let her through but instead to swivel his knees as far over as he can and brace his torso backward as though trying to evade a searchlight. Joan points at the empty seat next to Jacob and cringes an apology. He has not seen her in a year, nor has he spoken to her or replied to her e-mails or given in to any of Harry’s suggestions for friendly dinners or holiday reunions. But he has not been to see a lawyer, either. He has dated a few women without much enthusiasm. Joan looks thinner than ever, a little drawn in the face and, under tight sleeves of sheer black chiffon, withered in the arms, but the sight of her is not unpleasant. Really, he could almost laugh at how uncomfortable she looks, trapped against the shins of a stranger. The lights dim.

  “Jacob?” she whispers. “There’s nowhere else.”

  He swings his legs to one side, letting her pass. The conductor’s solemn face, flowing hair, white tie, and black shoulders pop up from the orchestra pit like the bust of an Asian Beethoven. He nods in acknowledgment of the applause and descends again. Only the tip of his baton and the uppermost waves of his hair are visible. The baton jerks once; the overture begins. Jacob’s pulse speeds up so much that he feels he is blurring around his edges. If he gets through the evening without having a heart attack, he will consider it a victory. He dips into his pocket and finds the other minibar bottle of Jim Beam. He unscrews the cap and drinks half of it. He pauses, considers offering some to Joan, swallows the other half. Joan’s hand alights on his forearm and then springs away like a grasshopper. “It’s only a ballet,” she whispers. “The worst is over.”

  This calms him a little. Maybe she is right. All the things that will happen onstage have, in fact, already happened. The performance is an illusion, but the past twenty-four years have also been an illusion. After Ludmilla’s call, he had gone back to bed, telling Joan, who barely stirred, that it was a wrong number. For five and a half hours he lay paralyzed, packed so closely inside his thoughts that they absorbed him, sucked him out of his body. A series of revelations exploded, bringing a blinding, excruciating pain that felt almost ecstatic. As dawn broke, his visions faded into the dull whir and flicker of a film projector replaying his life, the life of a fool, until the alarm clock finally beeped his release. He got up and called in sick. Then he called the ballet studio and left a message that Joan would not be teaching, and while Joan showered, he sat at the kitchen table and readied himself for battle, preparing his arsenal of accusations, arranging them into a neat line, stroking and polishing them.

  “I know why you married me,” he told her later, following her up the stairs. “Because I have dark eyes. Because I’m not tall. Because you knew you could pass his son off as mine.”

  Joan stopped and turned, slowly, deliberately, her elegant head swiveling on her slender neck, and the grace that had once made him proud now made him want to sweep her feet violently out from under her. “I married you,” she said, “because I wanted a life with you.”

  “Clearly not. Clearly not because you’ve been using our family as a ballet sleeper cell while you tinkered around in your studio and perfected this Frankenstein monster that you bred. You made him. I was just the patsy who gave you the time and money to do it.”

  “Harry is your son.”

  They had not known then that Ludmilla had called Harry, too.

  “He’s your experiment,” Jacob spluttered. “Your championship pedigree science project.”

  She retreated up the stairs, down the hall, past Harry’s room. “That’s not what I wanted. It’s not what I was doing.”

  “What were you doing? Tell me what you were doing. Explain to me what you were doing. I’m listening. Tell me. Tell me. Tell me.”

  He followed her into their bedroom, and they faced off across the bed like actors in a play. “I wanted you!” she said. “I wanted a family! I wanted to be important. I had no idea what it meant to be content. I’d spent my whole life laboring away for something that’s impossible, but you—this family was possible.”

  “This family is a lie.”

  “No. The secret is nothing compared to everything else. You can have a secret that stops mattering.”

  “Oh, sure. Sure. Like a Nazi war criminal, going about his business in Buenos Aires, doing some errands, taking the kids to school. Nothing matters but the present. Clean slate. All you’re saying is that it didn’t matter to you, and I don’t even buy that.”

  “You’re the one who says things can be true without actually being true. This is true, Jacob. You gave me a life. What we are is true. You know me. It’s been twenty-two years. No one knows me like you do. You know the truth about me.”

  “Do I? That’s great—I’m glad I know the truth about somebody, because I don’t know the truth about my own fucking self.”

  “You are Harry’s father!”

  Jacob had wanted to deny and to agree with equal fervency. “You didn’t want more children. You would have his child, but you didn’t want mine.” He mimicked her: “ ‘Let’s just count ourselves lucky we had Harry.’ You wanted his child, but you wanted me to raise it. I don’t have any children, Joan. You took that away from me. Unless I’m infertile, which seems possible now, and I never knew. In which case, thank you, Joan. Thank you for loaning me a son. But I guess now I should step aside. What’s behind door number one? It’s Arslan Rusakov! The father you’ve always dreamed of! The greatest ballet dancer in the world and—now that I think about it—genetic material that makes a whole lot of sense.”

  “Don’t say that,” she said, crying. “Please
don’t.”

  “Would you have come to Chicago if he hadn’t gotten you pregnant?” he demanded. “Would you have married me?”

  The helplessness on her face had launched the silence. It had not taken hold right away—there were more battles to be had—but he had seen the truth, nodded curtly, turned away from her and their bed, and said nothing else for the rest of that day. Gradually more days were silent than not, and then whole weeks, and finally he had left the house and her, rented the townhouse close to school. Harry had recovered far more quickly from the news, or else he was determined not to show Jacob his true reaction. He said Arslan had always been so important to him, even before he knew him, that, in a way, there wasn’t much room for him to take on any more significance. Maybe, he said, on a subconscious level he had already guessed and so was on his way to being used to the idea. “Nothing has changed,” he told Jacob a thousand futile times. “Please, Dad, don’t let things change. I’ll never think of anyone but you as my father.”

  “Please still be proud of me,” Harry had begged. “Please.”

  And that plea was why Jacob had endured the news that Arslan and Harry were going to appear together on 60 Minutes to tell their story, why he had tried not to be demolished by Harry’s participation in this ballet, why he had taken Harry to the Bahamas after Chloe and Arslan had gotten married and kept him company while he stared at the ocean in silence, why he didn’t miss his flight, and why he is now sitting in the dark with thousands of glittering people waiting to see his own life be danced by a man named Georges Lazaresco. Things have changed. If he hopes for one thing, he hopes that someday he will be able to look at Harry and not immediately be reminded that his son is not his son. He is still proud of Harry, but the pride is different than it used to be: it has been cut away from his pride in himself and left to stand on its own.

  At first the music is sharp, jangly, modern, and then a melody swells up, strong but melancholy, Russian in flavor. Jacob remembers Harry’s Russian music phase, triggered by The Hunt for Red October. He can smell Joan’s perfume. He has sat beside her in so many dark theaters, smelling that smell, waiting to watch Harry. He leans toward her and whispers, “We’ve been parent trapped.” After all the months of silence he would not have expected his first words to her to be a joke, but he is glad not to want to heap more recriminations on her and surprised to be grateful for her presence beside him as the curtain goes up, revealing a bare stage and, at its center, Harry in fifth position, arms low, dressed like a student in black tights and white T-shirt. His hair is longer than usual and has been lightened and cut in a feathered seventies style. The resemblance to Rusakov is unmistakable. A murmur ripples through the audience.

  THE FIRST ACT IS ABOUT RUSSIA AND THE KIROV; THE SECOND ACT IS about the defection and America and fame; the third act is about age and youth. There is a story, but it’s not complicated. Most of Harry’s role, the Young Dancer, is based in ballet, but Arslan has forced him to loosen up, to let his hands flail, to push his movements slightly off balance and do some ugly, turned-in steps. Harry watches the beginning of the second act from the wings, as Chloe dances with the corps and then, subtly, against it. Besides Arslan and Elaine, only he knows she is pregnant, and he thinks he can see the change in her, even though her stomach is perfectly flat, her breasts still minuscule.

  The first act ended with a pas de deux between Harry and Chloe that Arslan had said must be passionate but not romantic, two strangers grasping each other only as bodies but also, somehow, with a sense of destiny, of purpose. An image of the ceiling of the Paris Opéra was projected onto the blank drop cloth behind them, Chagall’s angels and goats. Why did you choose Mom? he had asked Arslan without receiving an answer. He had asked his mother too, and she claimed to have no idea. She said she wasted years wondering but eventually concluded there might not have been a reason.

  Chloe hurled herself at him, and he caught her in the fish dive, his arm around her belly, around what is beginning there. When Harry thinks it through, that he is dancing the role of his biological father while his ex-girlfriend plays his mother while pregnant in real life with his half sibling, he becomes disoriented and troubled, and so he prefers not to think but to simply inhabit the role.

  He has done a lot of simply inhabiting lately. He uses his old trick of closing his eyes and driving everything away, then dropping back into his body. If he could be only his physical self, he would be happy. You can be happy with only your body, he thinks. But Elaine says that he is incomplete unless he inhabits his body and his mind and the reality around him. He has inhabited the knowledge that Arslan is his father, that his parents are not speaking, that Chloe is a marvelous, stunning dancer and he had been a blind, conceited little idiot when he dumped her. As he watches from the wings, she turns a horrendously difficult double pirouette, the heel of her supporting leg just off the ground, the toe of her other shoe barely brushing the stage, as though drawing a circle in the snow. Arslan was the one to recognize her for what she is, to turn her strangeness into power. Harry has inhabited his regret.

  The corps disperses, scattering into the wings, their pointe shoes making a hollow galloping sound. Chloe is alone onstage, and Harry lifts his arms, prepares, and goes out to meet her. They dance together victoriously at first, full of freedom, and then awkwardly, misunderstanding each other, moving to conflicting tempos. The dance breaks down. Other dancers come and go around them. The Russian is always sliding in between them, a delicate, sinister ballerina who snuffs out the American’s wildness, makes her ordinary by overpowering her with impossible challenges to her technique. Harry lifts one and then the other, and soon they are only bodies, only weight and movement. The ballet is the result of endless repetitions: uncounted rehearsals of acts, of scenes, of combinations, of steps. The steps themselves are only the most recent repetitions of movements he has done thousands, probably millions, of times in different rooms, on different stages, with different partners. He dances through a confusion of echoes. There are echoes of echoes, of other people, other places, other lives, other times and places. He wants to drive the echoes away, to be unobscured by their expanding, bouncing rings of memory.

  At the end of the act, he dances alone, the speed and difficulty of his steps increasing as he goes. His concentration is so absolute, his body so close to the breaking point, that darkness contracts around him. There is nothing outside himself. He turns grandes pirouettes à la seconde at center stage, spotting off a red light at the back of the theater. Somewhere his parents are sitting together, watching him. His head whips around and around. Sweat flies from him like spray from a fountain. He can’t turn anymore, but he does, his stomach and back aching, his leg burning. His lungs, which have always looked after themselves, now need to be reminded—ordered—to fill with air, then begged to fill again, one more time. What confusion of fate and electricity will one day tell his heart to stop? Could you live forever if you had enough will? He turns and turns until his leg drops of its own accord to retiré and he is spun through two final rotations before he falls to his knees and the lights go off. The fall is planned, but he would not be able to stay on his feet anyway. A breath, and then the applause crashes onto his back as the curtain comes down. He gets to his feet; the curtain flies up, and he bows. He can see the conductor, a few rows of faces, and then nothing, a roaring emptiness. He bows again.

  AS THE HOUSELIGHTS COME UP FOR INTERMISSION, JOAN AND JACOB SIT stunned, like two people picked up by a tornado and then set down again. Jacob says something Joan doesn’t quite catch. “Sorry?” she says.

  “I said, what happens now?”

  Joan pages needlessly through her program. “Now it’s mostly Arslan and Chloe. Harry says it’s good. He said the dance is about age and also the contrast between the limitations of the body and the way love makes you”—she gives an embarrassed flip of one hand—“free.”

  “Free,” says Jacob. “No, it doesn’t.” They sit, knees twisted sideways to let people pass
. “Are you in it again?”

  “No, in the third act ‘The American’ means Chloe. Chloe as Chloe.” Joan has seen a dress rehearsal.

  “Is Harry in it again?”

  “At the very end, he and Arslan and Chloe dance a pas de trois.”

  Jacob blows out a breath. “I might have to get out of here.”

  The thought of sitting beside an empty seat for the rest of the performance distresses Joan. She is alone so much now, she should be used to empty seats. But she touches her fingertips to her temple, shielding her face from him.

  “I’ll come back another day,” he says gently. “I promised Harry I would see the whole thing.”

  She digs in her purse for a tissue and nods, pressing the back of her hand to her dripping nose. She will not beg him. She has already said everything that can be said.

  “Joan.” Jacob rests a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t cry.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m trying not to. I just don’t want you to go.”

  Pressure from his fingers. She looks up. He is watching her intently. He says, “You could leave, too. We could get a drink.”