Astonish Me (15 page)

As the days pass, she is becoming restless, tired of flipping through the dictionary, of weathering Arslan’s periods of bleak silence, of breathing old smoke, even of sex. The urgency of their first coupling in Paris and the rough, clutching grief of their second—conducted in the Toronto parking garage in the backseat of the Buick after Felicia had finally slunk off—has evaporated, leaving behind something residual and perfunctory, if also frequent. He is not what she would call an attentive lover. But she foresees no satisfying resolution to her restlessness. As soon as they leave the apartment, she will lose him: to Mr. K, to the company, to the reporters, to the whole country. His defection has been taken as a national compliment. In all likelihood, he is the best dancer in the world, or he will be as soon as he makes use of his new freedom. He is, by his very greatness, a vindication of the Soviet system, proof that the brutal heat with which they forge artists and athletes does, in fact, yield new, better human forms, and yet he has risked everything to escape (to liberty!), and she (Joan!) is the angel who bore him safely into the bosom of his new homeland. Our vindication tops their vindication—so imply the breathless magazines, the politicians quoted in the newspapers. Everyone wants what we have, they say.

Joan is tired of the apartment, but at least while she is in it, she has Arslan. She watches him with a hoarder’s eye, fearful of the moment when he will go outside. Her old life seems dull and unappealing now; it is like a shabby, outgrown dress she doesn’t want him to see her wearing. Out there, he will see her in the corps, no longer his rescuer but one of many identical girls, a bit of background, a swan or a peasant or a wili or a shade, and she will see him not as the
man who smokes in her bed and wallows in her bathtub and splays naked in her armchair, flipping through the Russian-English dictionary, but as she had first seen him: onstage, removed, at the spinning center of everything. She is having her own momentary flare of fame (her mother called to say an unfamiliar woman claiming to be her fourth grade teacher had gone on the local news and called her “lion-hearted” and “a patriot”), but when the political drama settles and there is only dancing, she will not be able to keep up. All her life she has wished for more talent, for better feet, longer arms, and the fact that her wishes have gone unfulfilled now seems like vindictive cosmic spite. She has asked him why he chose her, but he does not answer beyond rolling his eyes if he’s gloomy or telling her because she’s so pretty if he’s flirtatious. In low moments, she returns to the question, asking herself why he did this to her, why he had come from Russia to torment her with her own limitations.

They had stopped short of the border and, to be on the safe side, put Arslan in the trunk of the Buick. The bored customs official gave Joan’s driver’s license a cursory inspection and waved her through. She exited the highway at Niagara Falls and wound her way to a lookout spot with a dark parking area. “Les États-Unis,” she said, letting Arslan out of the trunk. They stood together at a railing above Horseshoe Falls, side by side, the metal bar vibrating under their hands from the force of so much water. The river, black and flat and gleaming, vanished at the brink as though lopped off by a sword, the dark, slick water turning white and pulverized as it poured into space. Colored lights played over the descending scrim. A plume of rising spray turned from a ghostly amber twist to a blue one to a white one.

“Qu’est-ce que c’est?” he shouted over the roar of water.

“C’est une …” Joan didn’t know the French word for
waterfall
, and surely he could see for himself it was a waterfall, surely they had waterfalls in Russia. He was asking something else, something for which she had no answer in any language.

On the eleventh day, without fanfare, while Joan is in the bath, he
gets dressed in flares and a checked shirt and goes outside. She hears the front door close, calls for him, hears nothing, splashes out of the bathroom, dresses in a panic, and rushes down the stairs while buttoning her dress, her hair still clipped up messily on top of her head. Outside, Arslan is posing for the one photographer who has won the war of attrition. He leans jauntily against the brick building. “Joan!” Arslan says, apparently delighted to see her. He beckons her over, and she comes to lean beside him. The photographer steps forward, releases her hair from its clip and fluffs it over her shoulders.

In the photo, which runs in all the newspapers, her panic is invisible. She looks happy, tucked under Arslan’s arm, her hair messy in a way that suggests they have been too busy in bed to emerge until now. The next day he goes to class, and then in the spring there is his grand debut with the company, as Albrecht in
Giselle
. The ovation goes on and on. Joan stands in the rear, in a row of girls all wearing long white tutus and wreaths in their hair. They are wilis, the spirits of jilted maidens who died of heartbreak. They have danced the gamekeeper Hilarion to death, but Albrecht is saved by Giselle. The principal who danced Giselle runs offstage, returns with an armful of red and white roses bound with a huge blue ribbon. She curtsys low, offering them to Arslan. He accepts, plucking out one red rose to give back to her. Joan watches him bow and bow to the roaring maw of the theater, and she remembers the waterfall. Here is the answer to his question.

FEBRUARY 1976—PARIS

J
OAN
’
S LEFT HAND IS TUCKED UNDER ARSLAN
’
S ELBOW
,
IN THE WARM
crook. Beneath the wooden slats of the Pont des Arts, the Seine slides between its stone embankments, crusted with patches of gold from streetlamps. A shallow lid of clouds has closed over the city like an oyster shell. Snowflakes fall but do not stick, and the iron railings gleam with half-frozen damp. At the center of the bridge, Arslan gathers Joan under his arm and faces downstream toward where the sharp prow of the Île de la Cité cleaves the arches of the Pont Neuf. The island’s narrow buildings huddle shoulder to shoulder, facing out at the encroaching metropolis, the towers of Notre Dame peeping over their roofs as though from within a circle of protective bodyguards. To the right, the bridge leads to the dignified gold-ribbed dome of the Institut de France. To the left, the Louvre.

“This city is exquisite,” Joan says. “It’s trite to say so, but I never get used to it. It makes me greedy. I want to stuff it into my pockets.”

“What is this word?” he asks, his cheek against her temple.

“Which word?”

“With ‘x.’ ”

“Exquisite. It means beautiful. But more than that. Like … so delicate and perfect it’s almost painful.”

“Painful … it is not help.”

“Perfect down to the smallest part. Like the most lovely ballerina possible. Delicate, fragile, almost too beautiful to look at. She is exquisite.”

“Exquisite,” he repeats, and a slight shift in his body betrays that his mind has left her, is following that ghostly ballerina off the bridge and away into the Parisian night. She should have thought of a different example. To remind him of her presence, she leans against his side. Grasping her shoulders, he turns her to him, bends to nuzzle her neck.

Her happiness is also exquisite, excruciating, barbed with fear. At any moment, it will be taken from her. The company, which will go to Amsterdam next and then London, did a matinee that day but no evening performance, and afterward Arslan sought her out and told her to put on a dress and meet him later in the hotel lobby. When she did, he took her hand in full view of the dancers hanging around the front desk and led her out into the city. They had a glass of wine in an art nouveau café, squeezed side by side behind a tiny round table, and he talked to her about dance. Lately he has been going off, away from the company, to work with other choreographers, other companies. Mr. K is annoyed with him, possessive. “People come because of me,” Arslan told Joan. “They buy tickets because of me. He knows this. Everyone knows this. But I can’t dance only here, only his dances. I stay in one place, I lose inspiration. I lose inspiration, I lose my soul. I can’t come here and do same thing again, again, again. What is point, you know?”

Yes, Joan said, of course.

“Is difficult, these new things, jazzy things, swing things, American things. I don’t know these things. They are not in me. Like eating too fast. Sometimes they—” He closed his hands over his throat, bugged out his eyes.

“Choke you. Get stuck.”

“Yes. Stuck. But I want to know. Is important to know.”

Yes, Joan said, it is.

They took a taxi to the Left Bank to hear a piano recital in a tiny
church with fluted columns and real candles that dripped wax from iron candelabras onto the stone floor, making a slow patter. The pianist, an old White Russian who played in a tailcoat, kissed Joan three times after Arslan introduced her, his long mustache tickling her cheeks. They went with him to dinner in a restaurant with red and gold walls, white tablecloths, red leather booths, a low ceiling of dark wood. Waiters who resembled the pianist in both mustache and tailcoat brought them caviar and vodka and borscht and chicken in cream sauce and more foods that Joan couldn’t identify but that seemed, like everything else on this night, romantic and profoundly Russian, part of a lost, maybe imaginary world of snow and sleigh-bells and gold onion domes. Drunk, she had reclined amid all the red and let their unintelligible conversation drift past. The pleasures of his native language transformed Arslan. In Russian, he was quick and lively and ebullient, a man who laughed, who made the old pianist and the waiters laugh. Here in Europe, without the comforting barrier of an ocean, Joan would have expected him to feel his exile more keenly, to fall into one of his glooms. She would have expected the vast, brooding bulk of his homeland to exert some dark magnetism on his soul. Instead: gregarious good cheer, an affectionate hand on her knee.

His moods are mysterious, but she has a sad certainty that this one will cool and fade soon enough. Maybe tonight when they are still in bed he will tell her he is tired and send her back to the room she’s sharing with Elaine, recently promoted to soloist, or maybe tomorrow he will flirt with another girl in the wings when she is watching. He will vanish after a performance without telling her where he is going. She might catch a glimpse of him leaving the theater with a sparkling flock of strangers in evening clothes, his arm around some woman’s waist. She is always losing him, but he is never quite lost. A year has passed since she drove him across the border, and they remain inextricably, inconclusively enmeshed. He goes away. He comes back. More and more slowly, but he comes back. When they are alone, lying quietly, he holds her the way a child
holds a stuffed animal: for comfort, for security, out of a primate’s urge to cling, to close one’s arms around a warm, soft object. Eventually, she knows, he will decide not to come back, but something—a force she wishes she could identify—binds him to her.

Almost as soon as they emerged from the apartment in New York, even before his debut, the first cascade of applause, he had begun to wander. For two months, maybe three, she was the main woman, the lead—the one on his arm at parties and events, famous as his accomplice, the brave girl in the news story—but she slipped bit by bit down into an ensemble cast. The gossip columns lavish question marks and exclamation points on items linking him to socialites and actresses. He always says the women are friends, but they are never friends. His sexual interest is a visible, obvious thing, easily tracked and monitored. He can’t be bothered to conceal his affairs, his flirtations, his wanderings. Why should he? Even as he tortures her, she sees he is simply living the life he prefers, a life of variety, and she sees there is no reason, really, why he should give anything up for her, why he should love her. The recriminations of women can be shrugged off, walked away from. A mass of recriminating women will not deter other women from taking their turns with him.

After cheese, after dessert, after cigars and aperitifs and black tea sweetened with jam, Arslan led her to the river, and they had walked to the Pont des Arts.

She tastes vodka and cigars on his mouth. His tongue lazily invades and then retreats. He leans away, studies her face, and smacks a peck on her lips. She presses her face to his neck, knowing they will go to his room soon but preferring this. They are more alone here than they will be in his room, where the shadows of other women dance around the bed. In his room, she fights his waning interest. Her sense that he is sliding away even when he is right there, as much of him touching her as possible, makes her worry she is losing her mind. She has tried to be sexier, more daring in bed, but her attempts only seem to bore him. They will go to his room—his
room is where this night must end—but even with the elaborate lingerie she is wearing and the erotic stratagems she has stored up, she will disappoint him. Going to his room will only hasten the end, but here, above the river, at the center of this exquisite city, they are caught in a romantic force as powerful as a solar flare. Even he must feel it.

“Thank you for this night,” she ventures.

He nods, his chin moving against her head. “Yes, was good to see Iosif. He still plays beautiful. If he was dancer, he would have stop thirty years now.”

“That’s true.”

“I will like to be old man.”

“No, you won’t.”

“Yes. Why not? Less trouble with women, no class every day, no worrying about being great dancer, no worrying about being old man because—hey—you are old man.”

“You bring the trouble with women on yourself, Arslan.”

He tsks, but affectionately, squeezing her. “Joan, you only hear not important part.”

After his defection he had tried to dance with her. He’d been generous, really, staying late in the studio with her, lifting her again and again. But every time he would say, “Is no good.” Then he would demonstrate, and the difference between what he wanted and what she could do caused her, horribly, to cry. Sometimes he stormed off in disgust, leaving her alone with her weeping reflection, and sometimes he gathered her into his arms, kissing her cheeks and nose, saying, “Always she cry. She is like baby.”