Astonish Me: A novel Read online

  “I have a little dress,” the girl says.

  It is a very little dress, and yellow, but it suits Elaine, as most things do. “Do you want to come to a party?” Elaine asks Yvette.

  The girl, who is zipping up another little dress, blinks as slowly and mechanically as a doll as she considers. “Yes,” she says. “That would be very nice.” Joan is disappointed even though she likes Yvette, finds her dippy and harmless. Yvette was born in France and retains traces of an accent and of continental diffidence even though she has lived in New York since kindergarten. But Joan is becoming nostalgic in anticipation of the end of her ballet life and had imagined the night as belonging to her and Elaine, a memory just for the two of them, although Elaine will probably vanish as soon as they get wherever they’re going. She has a way of vaporizing at parties, being immediately absorbed into the revelry.

  Outside, the three of them find a taxi heading downtown. The city’s summer breath rushes forcefully in through the windows, smelling of garbage and gasoline, and they recline in the warm air, saying little, worn out but also energized, their blood circulating smoothly, as though the performance had swept their veins clean. Joan is already too hot in her jeans and borrowed top. She envies the others’ little dresses even though their bare legs must be sticking to the grimy vinyl seat cover. The driver peeks in the mirror, the silver rim of his glasses catching red and green sparks from the traffic lights. He handles the wheel gently, cautiously, with his plump hands. Most cabbies flirt a bit when the dancers are out together, make some suggestion about where they should go, comment on how nice they all look, but he doesn’t. He takes his glances in the mirror, like someone peeping over a fence.

  The party is near Astor Place, in a brick building with peeling yellow paint and a fire escape made out of rust. It is not Elaine’s usual sort of glitzy, careening, pill-popping party but something else, just a party, a humid crowd of languid people gathered in a smoky apartment. Edith Piaf warbles from the stereo. Joan didn’t need to have worried about Yvette. The girl takes the French music as a sign of welcome and sets off for the table of bottles in the far corner, greeting strangers as she goes with little sideways bonjours.

  “Drink?” Elaine says.

  “No, I need to drop weight.”

  Elaine takes a pack of cigarettes from her purse. “Want one?”

  “No, thanks.”

  A knowingness hovers around Elaine’s pursed lips and raised eyebrows as she lights up.

  About Yvette, Joan says, “I don’t know why she still does this French act.”

  “She’s just French enough to pretend to be French. I don’t know—look at her. It works. I should think it’s obnoxious, but I don’t.”

  They look together through the people. At the makeshift bar, Yvette is smiling up at a tall and gorgeous black man. She cuts her eyes to the side, murmurs something out the corner of her mouth, making him lean in.

  “I’m going to get a drink,” Elaine says. “And hopefully a very tall man.”

  Joan grabs her arm. “No, don’t. I’ll never see you again. You’ll disappear.”

  “This place is tiny.”

  “You have a way.”

  “Come with, then. Five steps that way. We can rope ourselves together first if you want.”

  Joan follows. “How did you know about this party?”

  “I went home with the guy whose apartment this is a couple months ago, and then I ran into him the other night. He said he was having a thing. I wasn’t going to come, but then you … he’s—where is he?—oh, he’s that one.” She points through the crowd to a pale head with full pale lips and small pale eyes. The head, partially obscured by a woman’s red curls, nods in a courtly way, smiles slyly. It is the smile of a man who knows women like to think they are being amusing.

  “He’s handsome.”

  “Isn’t he? I thought so.” Elaine pours bourbon into a mug and offers the bottle. “You sure?”

  Joan shakes her head. “All your men are handsome.”

  “I would not call this guy one of my men. I would call him … Christopher? I’m not sure. I should have asked when I saw him again, but it seemed impolite. Maybe we can delicately find out from someone here.”

  “Except Mr. K. He’s not handsome.”

  “Mr. K doesn’t have to be handsome. He’s a genius. You should know. Arslan doesn’t have to be handsome either.”

  “Arslan is handsome.”

  “No, Arslan’s sexy. Anyway, he’s not a genius the way Mr. K is. Mr. K creates. Mr. K has changed everything.”

  “Please, tell me more about your boyfriend, your old, gay boyfriend.”

  Elaine taps her cigarette into an empty wine bottle, unflappable. “Labels are a waste of time. So is possessiveness. I know what he is.”

  “God,” Joan says on a long breath. “I can’t believe how liberating it is not to care anymore. I watched Arslan walk out the stage door with Ludmilla tonight and didn’t want to kill myself. Finally. I’m cured. It’s heaven.”

  “Hmm.” Elaine drags on her cigarette, drops it into the wine bottle. “I think you’re pregnant.”

  Joan smiles at the linoleum floor. She draws her toe across it in an arc. “Because of the waffles?”

  “Lately you seem like you’re saying good-bye all the time, like you’re about to go catch a bus.” Elaine studies her. “Have you told Jacob?”

  “No.” Joan watches the tentatively identified Christopher as he walks around with a jug of red wine, filling people’s glasses and mugs. This is the first time she has spoken about the pregnancy except with the doctor who gave her prenatal vitamins, and Jacob’s name is loaded with a heavy, sudden future.

  In high school, she had decided her mild sexual curiosity about Jacob was nothing more than a generic offshoot of her general sexual curiosity. He was younger, which was not sexy, and wore little wire-rimmed glasses, which had seemed to signify something important then, and he was transparently devoted to her, which was not sexy, and he was academically brilliant and a little insecure (not sexy, not sexy). Joan, however, had the mystique of ballet to trade on, her tininess and her suppleness, the grace that had been drilled into her until she was physically unable to be awkward. Lots of boys wanted to date her, and dating them was simple, while dating Jacob would not have been.

  But when they were sitting side by side at the movies or watching TV on the couch when her mother was out, not speaking and not looking at each other, he would stay so still that she sensed he was restraining himself, wary of any movement that would betray what he wanted, and some hidden sensory organ in her would rotate toward him, probing, considering.

  “Did you do it on purpose?” Elaine asks.

  “Of course not.”

  “You can’t do this if it’s only about running away from Arslan.”

  Since she got pregnant, the cattle prod jolt of Arslan’s name has worn off, become only a faint zap, two weak wires touched together. “It’s not. It’s really not. I might be running from everything else, but I have to go. I have to find something else. You’ll make it. I was never going to.”

  “You did it on purpose.”

  “I didn’t!”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s done. But you don’t have to … you could, you know, just quit the company. Not have a baby. Get a job. Do something else.”

  Solemnly, Joan shakes her head. “I couldn’t just decide to stop. I thought about it. But I’m too much of a coward. I can’t stay in the city if I’m not dancing, and I wouldn’t know where else to go. Or what to do, generally.”

  “So you’re counting on Jacob to figure all that out for you. This all seems really elaborate, Joan. I feel sorry for Jacob. He’s walking around Chicago right now with no idea he’s a marked man.”

  “He’s getting what he wants.”

  “Oh yeah?” Elaine takes another cigarette from her pack. “Well then. You’re a Good Samaritan.”

  “Give me a cigarette, please.”

  “You sh
ouldn’t smoke.”

  “I know. This one and then I’m quitting. I’m quitting everything. Everything is going to be different.”

  “Inevitably.”

  Finding nothing else to say, they pretend to be interested in the party that drifts around them as lightly as fog. Joan makes eye contact with a series of men. They are the kind of men who look over shoulders while they chatter, searching for the people they will chatter at next. The crowd shifts, revealing the host’s pale head inclined attentively toward the fast-moving mouth of a blond woman in a paisley jumpsuit.

  Joan says, “Will you introduce me to Christopher?”

  JOAN LIES AWAKE. BESIDE HER, THE MAN SLEEPS. EVEN HIS SNORES ARE polite and well formed. His name is Tom, not Christopher. Probably some other Christopher had swum through Elaine’s nocturnal world, crossing bubble trails with this handsome Tom, an assistant professor of Old and Middle English at NYU. His bed is surprisingly clean and nice smelling for a single man with bohemian tastes. Joan wonders if he will be the second-to-last man she ever sleeps with.

  The yellow night drops a window-square on the pale sheet. Tom makes a rough sound in his sleep that might be Old or Middle English. The cells continue to multiply. Joan rests her palm against her belly, trying to divine the exact spot where life has been planted like a tulip bulb. Usually when she is in bed with a strange man—there haven’t been so many—she has trouble sleeping because she is preoccupied by the nearness of the unfamiliar body that has been recently and intimately explored and is now remote, locked away in sleep. But Tom holds no curiosity for her. She strokes her own skin, wonders what time it is. His wrist with his watch is under his pillow, and she doesn’t see a clock in the room. When the sun rises she will make her way home and then, later, to class. She wonders how many more times she will go to class. When she stops dancing, class will continue on without her, every day except Sunday, part of the earth’s rotation. The piano will swoop and clatter, and Mr. K will say No, girl, like this to dancers who are not her. Her empty spot at the barre will heal over at once. But she wants a few more days, a week or two. She wants the cells to grow in time to the piano, to Mr. K’s clapping hands, his one pa pa pa, two pa pa pa, and UP pa pa pa, to the rhythm of her battements. Until now, even when surrounded by twenty women dressed just like her, moving in unison with her, she has always been lonely, but the cells give her a feeling of companionship. For the first time she can remember, she is not afraid of failing, and the relief feels like joy.

  NOVEMBER 1978—CHICAGO

  AS JACOB CROSSES THE QUAD, SHUFFLING HOME THROUGH NEW snow, he is seized by a rebellious impulse to stop at a bar. Not that he doesn’t want to see Joan and the baby, and not that having a quiet beer by himself would be a crime, but the enormous obligations that have arrived abruptly (and, one could argue, prematurely) with his new status as a family man have recalibrated his sense of himself, made him ashamed of his moments of selfishness and guilt stricken whenever he feels a twinge of resentment. He wants so badly to satisfy and delight Joan in all possible ways and to be a good father to Harry that he is not certain there should be space left over for wanting a beer. Or solitude. Or freedom, which is unmistakably a thing of the past.

  He has never been one to fetishize freedom, though. Since he can remember, he has pursued obligation and commitment, which is why, at twenty-four, he is already into the fourth year of his doctorate. That he is, at twenty-four, also already the father of an infant son and already married to a woman he has coveted since it first occurred to him to covet women, might not have been part of his original plan, but he can’t claim he hadn’t been an enthusiastic participant in Harry’s conception or that he hadn’t wanted to marry Joan, at least as far as he was capable of imagining marriage, since he was a high school kid desperately playing it cool.

  The snow is the first serious one of the year. It settles in strips on naked tree branches, builds white doilies on the stone traceries of Gothic windows. In the summer, the façade of Green Hall is bearded with Boston ivy, and a wreath of leaves surrounds Jacob’s office window, giving the light a pleasantly verdant quality, like the inside of a tree house. But now, in late November, the vine is a withered caul of twigs, tapping and scratching at the walls. Jacob changes trajectory, heading for a dank subterranean bar he likes and away from the tiny apartment where Joan and Harry are waiting. The apartment has a demonic radiator that shrieks in defiance when Jacob tries to turn it off and incubates all the fetid baby smells and makes his hair brittle and his skin itchy. Joan, who is always cold, likes the radiator and will not let him call the super. She takes a reptilian solace in its heat, perching neatly sideways atop the flaking silver coils.

  The mug of Old Style the bartender coaxes from the tap is mostly foam but is delivered with a look that discourages Jacob from complaining. He is happy, anyway, to be sitting on a stool with a ripped vinyl cover, resting his elbows on sticky Formica, gazing at pocked dartboards and a jumble of Bears and Cubs ephemera. There is a TV behind the bar, but it’s angled so only the bartender can watch. Light flickers over the ranks of bottles.

  The woman Jacob was dating before—and, truthfully, during and for some time after—Joan paid her fateful visit had introduced him to this place. Liesel, a Ph.D. student in chemistry. There is one other guy at the bar: thirtyish, with a mustache, on the beefy side, sipping whiskey.

  “Great place, isn’t it?” Jacob remarks. His stolen hour, now that he has committed to it, is making him expansive and giddy.

  “Yeah,” the guy says, “a real hidden gem.” He has a strong Chicago accent and a plump face that suggests, in a friendly way, that bullshit would be unwelcome.

  “I used to come here with an ex,” Jacob says.

  “Yeah?”

  “It was kind of her spot. I haven’t been here since we broke up.”

  “Bad breakup?”

  “It wasn’t great.” Then, wanting to clarify, Jacob adds, “I married a ballet dancer.”

  At ballet dancer, the guy’s smile seems to snag on something. “Yeah?” the guy says. “Like a professional?”

  Jacob nods. “Yeah.”

  The fact that Joan is a dancer impresses most men and rankles most women. Was a dancer, although he has no plans to tell this stranger she is retired. When Joan was pregnant, Jacob had thought she might try to go back to ballet after the baby, but she said flatly that she couldn’t. Her career had run its course. She will teach, but she will not perform. Elaine sent them tickets to the Joffrey not long before Harry was born. On the way home, Joan had cried on the El, clasping her thin arms around her belly, but she only shook her head when Jacob said it didn’t have to be over for her. He didn’t understand, she said. She had never been that good, anyway, she said, and to keep trying would be pathetic.

  There is, in this decision, a loss for Jacob he would never admit to her. For as long as he has known Joan, since they were almost children, she has lived a double life, as a dancer and as a civilian, and her retirement means she has been reduced in some essential way. He will miss seeing her onstage, displayed so beautifully at the front of all that darkness, and he will miss the mystery of her hours of class and rehearsal, her proximity to other beautiful women and to the hands of other men. He finds low-level jealously to be enlivening, pleasantly astringent.

  He has his limits, though. During the months Joan was involved with Arslan Rusakov, Jacob had been in agony. Her other boyfriends, beginning in high school, had irritated and disgruntled but not tortured him; Joan had not appeared to be very attached to the others, had certainly not loved any of them. Then Rusakov came along and swallowed her up, and Jacob’s belief that they would end up together one day, after they’d exhausted the dubious pleasures of trying out people they didn’t love, had begun to dwindle. His mother, who has never liked Joan, made a point of phoning him long-distance when she showed up in magazines or newspapers with Rusakov, and he would go out to the newsstand to see for himself, flipping clumsily through the pages and then st
aring down at the photos until the guy said, Library’s down the street, buddy. Joan’s letters dwindled to a trickle, and the few she did write only made things worse.

  The mustache guy signals the bartender for another drink, and the bartender, surprisingly, hops to it. “Where’d you meet?”

  “High school. In Virginia.”

  Jacob and his two older sisters had high IQs, and their father, a naval officer, was frequently reposted, allowing their ambitious, unmaternal mother to skip her children forward in school until they were high school freshmen at twelve and college students at sixteen. The great mercy of Jacob’s life was that he grew early (but then stopped—he is not tall) and was a reasonably handsome, affable kid, good enough at baseball and track to avoid classification as an irredeemable nerd. Joan’s locker had been across from his when they were freshmen, and she was so small, so knobby and tentative like a fawn, that at first he had hoped she was young, too.

  “Excuse me,” she had said, appearing beside him on the first day while he fussed with his books and notebooks. “Do you know where room three-nineteen is?” She wore a red and blue plaid dress with a collar and a red belt and peered at him with anxious earnestness, like a tourist asking for directions in a dicey neighborhood.

  “Yeah,” he said. “It’s on my way. I’ll show you.”

  “Are you a sophomore?” she asked as they walked. “How do you know where things are already?”

  “I took a class here last year,” he said, trying to project proprietary confidence. “I got the lay of the land.”

  “Lucky.” She flinched away from a group of older students. “I thought about coming down on a weekend and making sure I knew where to go, but then I thought someone would see me and think I was nuts. You probably think I’m nuts. It’s just, I have a feeling I’m going to do this wrong.”

  “Do what wrong?”

  “Everything. High school.”

  “You’ll be fine. Just act like you’re sure you belong.” He was echoing what his sister Marion had said to him that morning. “Nobody knows any better.” He let a beat go by. “How old are you?”