Astonish Me (16 page)

Why had he even bothered? She could never be his partner; Mr. K had told him so when they were still holed up in the apartment. Why had he written those letters? Why had he chosen her to drive the car, to escort him from one life into another? Had he considered how her life would be changed, too? There were so many others: better dancers, better drivers, more beautiful women. But when she asked, even begged, for the answer while sitting in a heap
on the studio floor, Arslan rolled his eyes or slammed the door or worked alone in the center as though she weren’t there. She couldn’t gauge how much of the impasse came from their language barrier and how much was willfulness and how much was just the way he was.

“My little American,” he says on the Pont des Arts, murmuring into her ear. “My silly little thing.” She moves closer, angling her hips against him, standing up in demi-pointe, wanting to shinny up him like a monkey. “Thank you for dining with couple old Russians. You were”—he pauses as he does before trying out a new word—“trouper.”

“I loved it,” she says. “You don’t have to thank me.”

Gently, he extricates himself from her arms. “But unfortunately tonight is not for us. I have to leave you now. I’m sorry, baby.”

She steps back, confused, vibrating with the low hum of incoming pain. “What do you mean?”

“I’m sorry. I have to go. I promise a friend to make a visit.”

“You’re just going to leave me here? I have to walk back to the hotel alone in the middle of the night?”

His face has begun to close. His eyes wander out over the river. He wants to be away from her. “I will give you money for taxi. Come on, Joan, don’t ruin things.”

“
I
shouldn’t ruin things? What was all this for?”

“All was what for?” He shakes his head, knowing he has garbled the sentence.

She opens her arms to encompass the river, the bridge, the streetlamps and snowflakes, the Louvre’s solemn procession of windows, the elegant Haussmann apartments, the black needle of Sainte-Chapelle’s spire. “
This
. This perfect night. Why did you put me through any of it?”

“Why? Why? Why?” He tips his head back and forth, mocking. “You always ask why. I don’t know why. I don’t
want
know why. I don’t
care
why.”

“Is it the language? Could you say why in Russian?”

He half turns away in exasperation, his torso twisting, arms swinging loose, head rolling up and away, then he rotates back. Like all his movements, it is eloquent.

“Never mind,” she says. “Clearly I’m not worth the trouble of an explanation.”

He shakes his head. “I don’t understand.”

“Yes, you do, Arslan. You just pretend you don’t so you seem oblivious instead of like a selfish, spoiled child. No, you don’t care if you’re selfish and spoiled. You ignore this whole inconvenient world where other people matter, and that makes you smaller, it makes you less of an artist, even if you don’t know it. People aren’t just bodies.
You’re
not just a body.” He is shaking his head at the river, impatience radiating from him. She is breathing hard, as though she has been dancing. She feels her rib cage flexing. “I keep letting you throw me away. It makes me sick. I wish to God you had asked someone else to help you defect. From now on, you can leave me alone. Consider our debt settled.”

Her last words make him look at her. “You drived a car. That’s all. You do nothing. You are little girl in corps. You get attention, get notice. I give up
everything
.”

“Not everything. Not everything, Arslan. You didn’t give up fame. Or wealth. Or people falling all over themselves to please you.”

He lunges and grasps her by the arms. She stands straight and still as a soldier, not flinching, even though his face, close to hers, has never looked so angry, so helpless. He left his brother and mother behind, but he has never mentioned them to her. She read about them in the newspaper. She also read that his teacher with whom he had lived when he was at school in Leningrad was fired and rumored to have been imprisoned. “You don’t understand,” he cries. “You know nothing.”

Joan is frightened but lifts her chin. “You’re the one who doesn’t understand.”

“Okay,” he says, stony. “So. Then, good-bye.” He turns and strides away toward the Left Bank, his footsteps hollow on the bridge, off
to see whoever is expecting him at two o’clock in the morning. When he is gone, Joan finds herself sitting on the wooden planks, looking through the iron railing. The lights are not for her, not the river, not the immense loveliness. The bridge itself, she has heard, is slated to be demolished and rebuilt. The Germans bombarded it; too many barges have crashed into it; it is not sound. The new bridge will look the same except with wider arches to let the boats through, and it will be steel, not iron, stronger. She doesn’t want to go back to the hotel. Elaine might be in their room, and Joan wants no witnesses to the end of this night. Or Elaine might be with Mr. K or with someone else, and the empty room will be another kind of awfulness. She will cry here, where no one is watching, in the company of so much beauty.

ELAINE HAD NOT BOTHERED TO FIND A NEW ROOMMATE AFTER JOAN
left, and so it is easy to let her move back in. She helps Joan return her bits and pieces of furniture to the consignment store to be sold at a loss; her double bed is traded back for a twin; the sheet of printed Indian cotton is tacked up again. When Joan is out, Elaine checks for the box of letters from Jacob and Arslan and finds it under the bed again, as though it had never left, Arslan’s letters still tied with the pink ribbon, Jacob’s now in several neat bundles tied with ribbons of their own. She draws a hammer and sickle in lipstick on the bathroom mirror, making the hammer look like a penis. “Welcome back,
putain
,” she writes underneath.

In the mornings they split a banana, go to class, go to rehearsal. At night, Elaine goes out or to Mr. K’s, and Joan stays in, sleeps, watches the TV Elaine bought in her absence. A dullness settles over her. She wonders out loud to Elaine how much of her life she wants to spend sliding one foot out from the other and back again, lifting one arm over her head and lowering it. She says, “I feel like I’m working on an assembly line, but I’m not even making anything. I’m just
doing
something that disappears as soon as it happens. I used to
feel like I had to dance, and now I feel like I’m doing it just to keep the option open, so I don’t get out of shape.”

“But what else would you do?” Elaine asks, genuinely curious.

“Nothing,” Joan says. “I don’t know. I’m just depressed.”

Arslan is always at the front barre in class with the three hotshot male dancers he pals around with and shows off for. He manages to look both complacent and intent as he goes through the battements, determined to do the movements better than anyone else, to do them as well as they possibly can be done but without sacrificing his air of ease. Elaine watches Joan watch him, forlorn and puzzled as an abandoned dog. She is torn between sympathy for her friend’s pain and scorn for her vulnerability. It was ridiculous for Joan to expect that a man as brilliant and hungry and capricious and sought after as Arslan would make a rewarding object for her love. But of course he encouraged her. Elaine’s theory is that he chose Joan almost arbitrarily: he needed to fixate on one person, like isolating a star to navigate by, even if the star is not the destination. She has not told Joan yet that a dance is to be made on her and Arslan by Phoenix Raiman, a choreographer whom Elaine knows slightly from the club scene. Mr. K approached Phoenix about working with the company because Arslan asked him to, and then Phoenix suggested Elaine as Arslan’s partner because she wants a dancer who is
modern
and
American
and not
stiff
.

Elaine means to tell Joan, but she is too slow; somebody else does. In the apartment, at the kitchen table, Joan is composed, furious, fearful. “Couldn’t you have said no?” she asks.

“No,” Elaine says. “Of course not.”

“Because of your
career
.”

“And because I want to. And because if I didn’t do this dance, someone else would.”

“Not me, though.”

Elaine sits down across from her, feeling like a placating parent. “If it would be you instead, I would have thought about saying no.”

“Too bad I’m such a bad dancer that no one would
think
of pairing me with Arslan. He might as well dance with an anvil hanging around his neck.” Joan slides her thumbs and forefingers out along the table’s edge and then back in.

Elaine waits. She wants to tell Joan she won’t sleep with Arslan, but it would sound presumptuous, condescending. She knows Joan will ask. It is what matters. The dancing is a betrayal, but there is no such thing as monogamy in dance.

“Promise you won’t sleep with him,” Joan says. “He’ll probably try, but please, Elaine, please don’t. This is pathetic, but I have to ask. I know you wouldn’t take it as tacit approval if I didn’t say anything, but I need to put it out there that this is the line of my friendship. Maybe you’d rather sleep with Arslan than be friends with me, lots of girls would, but in that case I should just move out again. I can’t live with you if you sleep with him. Maybe I sound crazy. I wanted to be clear.”

“I won’t sleep with him,” Elaine says.

When rehearsals start, she sees quickly that the promise will be less easily kept than she thought. Phoenix, a tall, elegant, low-jawed black woman who always dresses in pristine white layers, has an idea for a dance that is slinky, jazzy, loose, juicy. Arslan struggles. He has difficulty unlocking his hips to allow for the Latin figure-eight movement Phoenix wants; he has difficulty letting his body curve forward, like a sail filling with wind, until he falls off balance and must catch himself; he has difficulty being light and sexy, not intense and passionate. She asks him to turn on one leg while the other and his torso are extended parallel to the floor, counterbalancing each other. Elaine, who has more training in contemporary dance, finds herself in the unexpected position of offering reassurance and advice. Arslan learns quickly, even when frustrated. Elaine is impressed by how he persists in the struggle. He could so easily demand that the dance be shaped around what he already knows, but he is fired by curiosity.

“Go out tonight,” Phoenix commands after their third rehearsal,
“just the two of you. Go find that thing you’re going to bump back and forth.”

Arslan is no stranger to the city’s shinier, flashier clubs, places where he is likely to have his picture taken, and so Elaine takes him to SoHo, to a brick building with black-painted windows on an empty-looking block.

“It’s not open yet,” she tells Arslan in the taxi. “They’ve been having these ‘construction parties.’ No frills, no booze or anything. Just good music. Amazing music. You’ll like it. The sound system is in already. It’s great. No one will pay attention to us. It’s mostly gay kids.”

“No booze?”

“There’s a bar down the street if you get desperate. And …” She takes a baggie of coke from her clutch. “I don’t know. Do you …?”

“Sometimes. A little.”

“Me too. Exactly.” She drops it away, snaps her purse shut. “You haven’t asked what it’s called.”

“Coke. I know, of course.”

“No, the club.”

“Why? What is it called?”

“The Kremlin.”

He snorts.

A burly blond guy at the door recognizes Elaine, waves them in. The entrance, which Elaine’s friend assures her will be extremely cool when it is finished, is, for now, a dark ramp with a red star glowing at the top, a narrowing space that, as they ascend, thuds louder and louder with a 4/4 beat. Arslan takes her hand, and it seems natural because, rehearsing, they have already spent most of the day touching. She has wrapped her legs around him and been dipped backward, the crotch of her leotard a fulcrum against his waist. Before they go through the black double doors to the dance floor, they pause to do a line off a black marble pedestal that might eventually hold some bit of décor for the extremely cool entrance or might exist for exactly this purpose. Shimmering, popping, they
push through the doors and into a room that is black, loud, cavernous, struck through with red spotlights, and jammed with moving flesh. The crowd is mostly black and Puerto Rican boys in cutoffs and bare chests, jeans with suspenders, tank tops, white T-shirts, denim vests, berets, nothing too crazy or flashy, some girls thrown in, white guys here and there, just people dancing. Mirrored balls hang overhead but do not turn—probably a kink to be worked out—and the room is splattered with unmoving specks of light as though by paint. Above it all, in a blue-lit glass box, the DJ leans over his turntables, the captain of their submarine.

And it feels like they are in a submarine, or something like that, a dark space apart from the world, a pressurized bubble of survival. Elaine draws Arslan into the crowd. He catches the beat, of course, and can imitate how everyone is dancing, but he still looks like an impostor. He reminds Elaine of Joan’s way of dancing at clubs: too controlled, too smooth, without the little hitches and catches that make an attitude. The boys in the cutoffs have both wildness and precision; their long, bare legs slide and prance and groove, seeming to twist together like two strands of rope when they turn.

“I am terrible,” he shouts in Elaine’s ear, clowning a wry shrug.

“No,” she says, “You’re—” But a man cuts in then, spins her away. He is tall and dark, a terrific dancer. Elaine tosses her hair from side to side for him, trots and turns, bops her ass up and down. When Arslan cuts back in, he is clearly annoyed, and that makes him better, looser. He pulls her hip against his, glares at her, holds her close enough that she can’t quite move freely. This is what they will bump back and forth in Phoenix’s piece, she understands after a while, this restriction, this assertion and yielding, his attempt to dance her way while at the same time forcing her to dance his way. Songs come and go, bleed together. They keep dancing, settling into the precarious balance they’ve found, solidifying it.