Astonish Me (10 page)

She is thirty-one now, her body already less tolerant and cooperative than it was. The days when she could party through the night and survive class are long gone. She doesn’t smoke, drinks less, eats well, has cut out drugs except for coke, just a tiny bit before performances and at intermission. Sometimes a bump in the afternoon if she’s having a long day. She travels; she meets people, has lovers but loves only Mr. K; she is applauded. But all of that happens around the periphery of the narrow range of activities—class, yoga, massage, sleep—that will help her remain a dancer. She scrabbles against her inevitable decline, works to retain her strength, stave off injury. She has had stress fractures, torn ligaments, surgery on
her left knee. Never in her life, not once, has she danced the way she wishes to, but futility has become an accepted companion. The ideal that lives beyond the mirror makes teasing, flickering appearances but never quite shows itself, never solidifies into something that can be looked at and not just glimpsed. She might surprise it as she whips her head around, spotting during pirouettes, or catch it flitting through one hand or foot. But it never stays.

The only redemption she finds in age is that she understands so much more than she did when she was twenty and tireless and reckless and resilient. She can express more now; she knows what to express. The critics have noticed. They say she has become a better actress, but she believes the improvement isn’t in her acting but in her ability to feel. Even in Mr. K’s more conceptual works where she is less a character than a kinetic idea, she can convey experience, humanity, emotion. “Less feeling,” he tells her sometimes. “Stop feeling. You won’t die if you don’t feel for a little while. Just dance. It’s only about the steps.” Sad, really, how ballet has such limited use for wisdom. When she’s fifty, she might be the witch in
Sleeping Beauty
, the nurse in
Romeo and Juliet
, roles that call for pantomime and heavy makeup, presence more than technique. Margot Fonteyn danced into her fifties, but Elaine is no Fonteyn. Even if she were, she would not choose to carry on for quite so long. A woman old enough to be a grandmother has no business prancing around in a tutu, pretending to be a virginal peasant or princess.

Onstage, Elaine misses the mirror. Without it she is halved, uncertain of her existence; the dark maw of the theater is a poor substitute. She looks at her shadow on the floor until Mr. K catches her and adjusts her chin with a long, cool finger, saying, “All you will see is a hunchback.” So she watches the rows of arms lifting, the heads swiveling. A ribbon of music unspools from the piano. Slippers brush against the floor. Knees and hips crack. “One,” says Mr. K. “And up, and three, and out, and just the upper body, good, and out, and fifth, and out, and fifth, yes, and turn.”

During class or rehearsal, he never treats her differently from the others, but in the nighttime quiet, lying side by side in his bed, his hand resting companionably on her stomach, he has told her she is his true muse, she has become his idea of a woman. Idea, not ideal, which she would recognize as a lie. It is the idea of her—the idea of women in general—that obsesses him: their capacity as vessels, their aesthetics, their otherness. He eroticizes them, desires them in a way, but does not lust for them. He lusts for men, she knows, but she has never seen him be lecherous toward the boys in the company. She suspects he feels demeaned by lust. That part of his life is walled off, invisible, underground, nocturnal, private.

Elaine and Mr. K sleep together often; they have sex rarely, usually only when he is drunk or riding the high of a new ballet. She calls him Mstislav when they are alone, but she still thinks of him as Mr. K. He has suggested that she move in with him, and she supposes she will. They have mossed together. To think she could extricate herself at this point would be delusional. When she was younger, she had been tormented by his indifference in bed, had thought it meant he was always on the verge of abandoning her, and she had tried to hack herself loose from him. She told him she wanted normal love, a husband, monogamy, something she could explain to other people, but then, after a year, when normal turned out to be a disappointment, he made a ballet on her:
Catherine the Great
. It was her best role, the closest she had come to dancing the way she wanted. Her destiny is to serve a greater artist. They will share a life inside his apartment, but he will venture out into the city for his adventures. She will be free to do the same.

The girl on the other side of the barre, a dancer in the corps, murmurs, “Did you hear? Franny kicked me out of our room last night, and then I passed Mr. K in the hall, on his way. He gave her perfume last week, too. Guerlain. She’s getting promoted.”

“Well,” Elaine whispers without turning her head, “she’s very good.”

Together they rise up on demi-pointe. The girl says, “She said
they didn’t fuck—he just wanted to get naked and lie in bed and pet her like she was a dog.”

“Great story.”

“He wasn’t even hard.”

One of Elaine’s distinctions as a dancer is the measured, deliberate quality of her movements, which is the product of her cool, orderly mind. She is both annoyed and impressed that a dancer in the corps would speak to her, a principal, this way. They sweep down into grands pliés, and from under the barre, Elaine says, “Not something you’re ever going to have to worry about.”

“Especially since I’m not a boy.”

Rising, Elaine says, “Or talented.”

She has found ways to put aside the indignities of her situation with Mr. K. That is what she does: she sets them aside, moves them to a place outside herself. Still, sometimes she wishes he would vary his routine. A girl piques his interest, inspires some bit of choreography, and then he selects the perfume, a different one for each girl. The gift is not a token of affection but a mark of ownership. He will decide how they should smell. He will decide more and more about them, make dances on them, and, in service of his genius, they will do anything for him. Like the perfume, the sex (or whatever version of physical intimacy he demands now) is a gesture of possession, not passion. He wants to see and know their bodies as thoroughly as possible. Elaine could have slept with him only once, after she received her bottle of Jean Patou, but she kept coming back, needing to know she could. When he made his first dance on her, he rearranged the cells of her body according to his own specifications, rewired her nerves, possessed her. Her civilian boyfriends could not understand her that way. They treated her like a fragile possession of exotic provenance, when she is really a tool, an invention, a weapon. Mr. K is the only person who loves ballet as much as she does. Love for ballet is necessary to survive it, but she doesn’t know if she survives because she loves to dance or if the love comes from a need to survive.

“Breathe, breathe, breathe with it,” Mr. K says, walking around the stage. He pauses in front of the newly baptized Franny. “Dear, with your arm. No. Like this.” In his grey flannel pants, checked shirt, and black dress shoes, he demonstrates. Franny mimics him well. The good ones see what he wants; they are his mirror.

The company does more pliés, then ronds de jambe, tendus and the rest of the battements: dégagés, fondus, frappés, développés, and grands. To Elaine, the movements are less exercise than a process of organization. With each beat of a leg and sweep of an arm, she creates order, winding gears that will tick the rest of the day away.

After class, she strikes off down the freeway in a rental car, the whoosh of traffic making her feel timid and provincial, even though she is the one who lives in a real city, who should be accustomed to density and rush. It is warmer than she expected and dry. Joan is not a frequent or prolific correspondent, but when she writes, she says she likes California. She enjoys its warmth and convenience, its newness. Following Jacob’s directions, Elaine exits the freeway, skirts a mall’s vast parking lot and the grassy shores of a man-made lake, and pulls into an office park of low white buildings with reflective blue windows. She could never live in this benign suburban dreamland.

As she pulls open the door to the ballet school, she sees Joan through a studio’s big window, facing the mirror, leading a class of adult women, moms looking for exercise and for some trace of girlhood dreams. They are ungainly in their leotards, wearing slippers, not pointe shoes, and not turned out. But the sight of them is touching, triggers a gloating pride in Elaine that these women wish to do what she does. She had wondered if she would feel jealous of Joan with her family and easy life, but she feels only pleasure in her own existence, her freedom from the ordinary. In front of the big window, she strikes a silly Fosse pose, waits for Joan to catch sight of her in the mirror.

“I WAS HOPING YOU’D BRING HARRY,”
ELAINE SAYS.
“I’VE BEEN SO CURIOUS
to meet him.”

They are sitting at a table with a striped umbrella outside a donut shop near the studio. Elaine sips coffee and fiddles with a packet of Sweet’N Low. Joan sets her cigarette in a black plastic ashtray and digs her thumbnail into an orange, stripping the rind away in a ragged coil. “He’s at school. It’s Wednesday.”

“Oh. Of course. Stupid.”

Joan can’t tell whether Elaine had really forgotten about the existence of school. “Second grade.”

“I kept asking you to send a picture, and you never did.”

“Didn’t I? I’m sorry—I meant to. I can be so spacey.” This is not strictly true, and they both know it.

“Don’t you have a picture in your wallet or something? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?”

Joan purses her lips, conceding, and takes her wallet from her tote bag. She opens to a plastic sleeve of photos. Harry’s is on top, gap toothed in his first grade portrait, his dark bangs falling straight across his forehead.

“God,” says Elaine. She takes the wallet from Joan’s hands, examines it, and then abruptly hands it back. “He’s different than I imagined.”

“Not a great haircut,” Joan says.

“I thought he would look more like you.”

“He looks like Jacob,” Joan says, fishing in her bag again. “Do you want a smoke?”

“I’m on a health kick, but okay. For old times’ sake.” They light up and smile at each other, feeling young.

“Are you still doing blow?”

“No, not really. Just in emergencies.”

When Joan first joined the company, someone had told her Elaine was looking for a roommate, and they had become compatible cohabitants, then friends. They were bonded by their constant fatigue and the endless ministrations their bodies required. They liked to sit side
by side on the edge of the bathtub, drinking tea and soaking their feet. Each was grateful to have an ally. From the beginning, there was no question that Elaine was by far the better dancer. Elaine was waiting to be promoted; Joan was praying to stay.

“I’m bringing Harry to the matinee,” Joan says. “You’ll meet him then.”

“Does he dance?”

“No.”

“You should make him try it. He might like it.”

“He doesn’t seem interested.”

“We need boys.”

“You sound like an army recruiter.”

“They are an army—the young ones. Waves of them. Mostly girls, though. I like the boys, not the girls. I’m afraid for them, too. We’re losing boys.”

“I’ve heard.”

“Is Harry gay?”

“He’s seven.”

“So?”

Elaine has grown harder. Her voice, her eyes, her bones. Her sternum is like a turtle shell with skin stretched over it. They are all thin, dancers, but Joan can discern infinitesimal variations in thinness, and Elaine’s is the minimalist body of the survivor. She has reduced herself to the most essential pistons and gears. Nothing extra can be allowed to create strain or cause wear. She is a witty dancer with clockwork timing, best suited to comic heroines and the demanding tempos of Mr. K’s ballets. On Sunday, when Joan takes Harry to
Don Quixote
, Elaine will dance Kitri in red and black lace, a perfect curl of hair glued to each of her cheeks. She will prance and snap her fan, do the flamboyant sissonne leap where she nearly kicks the back of her own head. Now that Elaine is a principal and has danced the major roles, she has become an object of curiosity for Joan, like someone who has experienced space travel. If Joan had not had Harry, she would still not be dancing Kitri,
but Elaine, stacking packets of sweetener with bony fingers at the end of bony arms, caught in a small eddy of leisure between class and rehearsal, seems like an apparition, a ghost of what might have been.

But it would not have been, Joan reminds herself. She reminds herself, too, that she doesn’t miss the feeling of living at an accelerated pace, each year counting for more than an ordinary fraction of life, like dog years. Her childhood was dominated by discipline, fear, repetition—her small self in an endless, tearful hurry to get better, to get
good
in time to have a career. Her childhood bled seamlessly into her adulthood, each contaminated by the other. She had not felt grown up until Harry.