Astonish Me (22 page)

“Let’s practice a lift,” he suggested.

“No, I’m going to go talk to Joan.”

“Fine,” he said, and then he turned a backflip and settled down on the bottom of the pool, leaden as a crocodile, holding his breath until her legs climbed the steps and he was alone.

Chloe sniffles more or less continuously through the first act and dabs her eyes with a tissue she takes from her little beaded purse. She cries when Christine sings with the Phantom; she cries when Christine sings with Raoul. Her indiscriminate rapture in the face of so much excess—material and emotional—troubles Harry. More and more he has noticed girls reacting to movies and songs and pictures in magazines in ways that don’t make any sense. Girls always seem to be straining and crying for some invisible thing they recognize and want but that seems completely obscure to him. They seem to want to have something to want, as though wanting was an end in itself.

In the lobby, before they sat down, Harry had seen a clump of middle-aged women all wearing white ceramic Phantom masks pinned to their sparkly theatergoing outfits, and he had recognized the edgy excitement in their eyes, the elevated pitch of their voices, the way they clumped together. They were grown-ups, but they were also like the girls in his class. Girls, he is beginning to conclude, love to feel. They’re hooked on it. He doesn’t love to feel. He wishes he felt less. Life would be less confusing if he felt less, especially for Chloe, and would be more pleasant if he wanted less from her. He wants her to be nice to him at school, to dance with him and only him at dances. (Why won’t she dance with him, a boy who actually knows how to dance? Why does she prefer to dance in a group with her smug-but-awkward girlfriends and then with boys who just shuffle back and forth like crippled, sweating bears?) But Chloe’s face, flickering in the light from the stage, wet with tears, is so pretty. He is pleased to be the one to have brought her here, given her what she wants.

Love for Chloe lodged in him before he can remember, administered like a baby vaccination, and he isn’t prone to changing his mind, even though the project of loving her has become steadily more complicated. Even when they were very small, she excluded him at school, always turning away, choosing someone else, making it clear that the hours spent playing in each other’s houses and backyards had no bearing on the way things would be in public. After he started dancing, they had become both closer and more estranged. No one else understands the harsh regime they’ve chosen to live under, the time and pain lavished on every tiny rotation of wrist or ankle, the relentless need they feel to get better, to work harder, but at school she is worse than a stranger. When people laugh at him for doing ballet, she sometimes almost seems to agree with them that it is normal for her to dance but freakish or stupid for him to do the same. The fineness of his body, its small neatness and the precision with which he moves draw mockery, but the same qualities make her desirable. At dances, the shuffling bears line up for her.

The third reason Harry is glad for the darkness is that, at the end of Raoul and Christine’s song, when the Phantom has taken over and howled his echo of it, Chloe finds his hand and holds it. She doesn’t look at him, and he is startled by the creeping fingers that tug his left hand out from where he has tucked it under his thigh and interweave with his own. The sensation in itself is nothing new. They hold hands all the time when they do partnering work, and so he thinks maybe she has taken his hand purely out of habit. Or maybe out of gratitude for bringing her here. Maybe his reward for ceding his birthday to her is this slightly sweaty pressure in the darkness. Or maybe she thinks he is as swept up in the ludicrous love triangle happening onstage as she is, wanting Christine somehow to give herself to the masked genius living under the opera house but also to marry the handsome aristocrat and go to parties and have a mansion. The story would be better as a ballet, he thinks. Closing his eyes, still holding Chloe’s hand, he clears the stage of sets and people and mist and candelabras and puts himself at its center, alone, and imagines how one day he will be the best dancer and Chloe will want to dance only with him.

JULY 1992—UPSTATE NEW YORK

E
LAINE SITS AT MR
.
K
’
S BEDSIDE AND WATCHES HIM SLEEP
.
HIS SLEEP
is no longer simple rest. Dutifully, regularly, he subsides into unconsciousness, sometimes because of the drugs, sometimes because something in his ravaged, overgrown interior reaches up and pulls him down into oblivion. Several blankets are piled on him even though the evening is warm. When his raspy breathing grows deep and regular, she crosses to open a window. His hospital bed is in the dacha’s living room because the bedroom is upstairs, and stairs are no longer on the agenda. Elaine sleeps alone up there, under the steeply sloped ceiling, oppressed by the dark wood and lace that he loves, the paintings of troikas and peasants and birch trees. There are icons on the walls, too, heavy with gold leaf, but he is not religious, only sentimental. Arslan once sent him a balalaika as a joke, but he received it in seriousness and keeps it propped beside the fireplace. The house is decorated to remind him of a house on the Black Sea where he spent summers as a child.

Only the top half of his face shows above the blankets. The contours of his skull protrude through his wispy hair and thin yellow skin. His nose is marked by a dark lesion, one of the few remaining now that his body is too exhausted even to disfigure itself. Out the window, in the fading light, fireflies dawdle over the long meadow
The far line of fir trees atop the steep slope down to the river has turned to a pronged shadow. Not tonight, but often when he is asleep, she goes out to the barre on the porch and stretches and goes through the battements. She has stopped performing—she is Mr. K’s associate artistic director—but the closer he comes to death, the harder she has been working at the barre. She hears his voice in her head issuing polite, rhythmic orders:
one, and up, and three, and plié, and just the upper body, good, and out, and fifth, and out, and fifth, yes, and turn
. When she runs company class, she feels like a medium speaking with his voice.
And up and out and pa pa pa pa. No, like this
. “You think you can stave off mortality,” he said once when she came inside drenched in sweat. “You think you can be too strong for it. You think, child, that you’re working a spell out there.”

“I’m just staying out of trouble,” she told him.

The New York Times
has his obituary all ready to go. The fact-checker has called to confirm that Mstislav Ilyich Kocheryozhkin, known as Mr. K for obvious reasons, was born in Moscow in January 1924, days after Lenin’s death, to a Bolshevik mother who disavowed her aristocratic family and a father who was one of the architects of the Second Five Year Plan. He attended ballet school in Leningrad until his father was sent to the Gulag, at which point he was conscripted. At the end of the war, he deserted from the Red Army in Berlin and made his way to Paris and eventually New York, where he found a wealthy patron and began to choreograph for fledgling ballet companies. He was believed to have contracted the virus sometime in the early eighties, and he kept his diagnosis a secret for more than seven years.

Yes, Elaine said, as far as she knows, that’s true. The other things the newspaper will print are true, also: that he is perhaps the most famous choreographer in the twentieth century, that he was among the first to make ballets that didn’t rely on stories or romance, that he trained his dancers according to a system of his own devising, emphasizing speed and clarity of technique over emotional expression, that he nurtured many great American dancers along with
famous defectors like Arslan Rusakov and Ludmilla Yedemskaya. The fact-checker is businesslike, offers brisk condolences for her vigil. As his replacement artistic director, he asks, how will she handle the burden of his mixed legacy? There are more questions—a black, tarry pit of curiosity bubbling under his
mmhmms
—but the boundaries of politeness exclude them.

She is not infected. Every day, as she and the nurse watch his wasted body convulse around the tasks of discharging sputum and diarrhea, she gives silent, ashamed thanks. She could have contracted it, certainly. She had many opportunities, but she was lucky, beyond lucky. Over the years, she had usually supplied him with a condom, and even when she hadn’t, he was as likely to give up in the middle as to finish, which, the doctor said, had probably diminished her odds of infection, not that withdrawal (a charitable way to put it) was a viable method of protection. For the past five years, since well before she knew he was positive, they have not had sex. When she was younger his indifference had hurt, but now she is grateful for it. She would have liked more passion over the past eighteen years, to have been loved more fully, but now she will keep on living when she easily might not have. There is even an element of revenge to her health, something—at last! one thing!—she has not because of him but in spite of him, though she knows she will suffer when he is gone.

He stirs and coughs. Yellow eyes open beneath the bony overhang of his brow. She takes a cup of water from the nightstand and holds it for him so he can sip from the straw.

“What do you want to open the window for?” he asks in an abraded whisper. “You’ll catch your death.”

“Wishful thinking. I’m not coming with you.”

“You see, I have made you Russian after all. Gallows humor about someone else’s gallows.”

She straightens his blankets, folding them neatly under his chin. He watches her face. She sits; there is a silence. She asks, “What do you think today?” Lately, they have started talking more about
death, almost gossiping about it, speculating as if it were as changeable as the weather. Together they wait for his death as though for a bus.

“Today I think it is like inside a theater with all the lights out, after everyone has gone. Black, with a damp smell, but large. What do you think?”

Night has fallen, and, outside, the crickets are droning. “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know if there can be blackness. There definitely won’t be smells.”

“Who are you to say there won’t be smells? Then no sights, no sounds either?”

“Do you think you’ll have a body?”

He coughs, and she holds a tissue under his mouth for him to spit. “Today, I hope not,” he says. “It’s too much trouble. But then there will be no ballet.”

“No, I suppose not.” Elaine tries and fails to make sense of the idea that there could be ballet after death. The absurdity of it casts a shadow over ballet in life. Why, she wonders, would you spend your life doing something that will be useless to you when you’re dead and have no body? But everything will be useless when you’re dead, she thinks.

A whole, bare arm emerges from under the covers, a hinged broomstick, and reaches for her. She takes the assemblage of bones that is his hand. “You know,” he says, “I would like to do one thing before I go.”

“Skydive?”

“Serious now, Elaine.”

“I’m sorry. I’m listening.”

“I said I would marry you. Years ago. Maybe you don’t remember.”

“I remember.”

“I should have done it long ago, but now … maybe it is wrong to ask you to marry a corpse, but I will ask anyway. I think it will be nice to die married. My mother wanted me to marry.”

Shocked, she lets go of his hand because she is afraid she will
squeeze too hard and hurt him. He watches, mildly interested in her surprise but no longer able to get worked up over anything. She has been stunned by how little anger he directs at death, this man who could fly into a rage if the temperature in a dance studio was one degree too warm or if some poor girl had a hair out of place. Finally, she finds her voice. “I’ll have to call your obituarist and give him the news.”

“I like a little surprise at the end. Like in my ballets.”

“You probably didn’t have a chance to run out and buy a ring.”

“On the contrary.” He straightens one finger. “In the little Palekh box on the bookshelf.”

The box is a two-inch cube, varnished black with a tiny firebird picked out in glowing reds and golds on its lid, a swirl of burning plumage flying over the bare branches of a silver tree. Inside is an enormous emerald held with fragile teeth to a tiny gold band.

“From my mother,” comes the whisper from the bed. “One of the few things she kept from her family. A little insurance, maybe. She gave it to me before I went to the front. I don’t know why. Most likely I would have died, been buried or burned with it in my pocket. I think she wanted to lose everything all at once. No one has worn it in fifty years. More.”

An idea of the emerald’s provenance crackles through Elaine. A cave in India; merchants; traders; a journey overland; St. Petersburg; a soldier fleeing through the rubble of Berlin. “I can’t.”

“No, girl. You must.”

IN AUGUST, JOAN LOOKS OUT HER KITCHEN WINDOW AT ELAINE LYING
beside her pool, flat on her back on a towel, eyes closed, offering her body, still taut in a black bikini, to the sun. She is maybe too thin now, all greyhound contours of muscle and bone. Nearby, on a chaise, Harry is equally flat and still. The two of them look like anesthetized patients waiting for some cosmic surgeon to open them up.

In the preceding months, Elaine had called a handful of times,
usually while Mr. K slept. She was taking the train back and forth between the dacha and the city a few times a week, trying to care for both the company and Mr. K and always feeling guilty about one when she was with the other.

“It would be more convenient if he wanted to die in the city,” Elaine said, “but there’s no changing his mind.”

“Don’t worry about the company,” Joan told her. “It can take care of itself.”

“The thing is,” Elaine said, lowering her voice, “if I never left here, if I stayed with him all the time, I would lose my mind. All I can do is watch him and wait and give him water or drugs. At least in the city I get to yell at people, tell them what to do. There’s nothing for me to tell him to do. It’s a little late for the whole Lucy and Ricky routine. Oh. I haven’t told you. We got married.”