Astonish Me (28 page)

With Harry off in New York, ballet is mentioned less frequently in the house—the house is, in general, much quieter—but ballet has also stolen his son, replaced college with a GED (
Just for now
, Joan says), and created a thousand awkward variations on conversations with new acquaintances in which people learn Harry is a dancer and then, thinking they’re being subtle, try to find out if he’s gay.

You’re boring
, Jacob wants to tell them. His ambivalence is private, nothing compared to his pride in Harry.
Your thoughts and your sneaky little questions are boring. You could never do what my son does, and he could do so many other things, too, if he wanted
.

Joan stands with her heels together and the toes of her brown pumps sticking out to the sides. She lifts her chest toward the silent upstairs. “HARRY!”

Harry slides down the banister in one of his dandyish new outfits: shiny, stiff-looking jeans, black Converse sneakers, a tight tweed vest over a white shirt and narrow black tie. He wears a tweed cap that Jacob thinks makes him look like a newsboy, but Harry has already informed him that he, Jacob, knows nothing (nothing!) about fashion outside of (smirk) principal chic.
Excuse me
, Harry says,
for not wearing a tie that looks like a big crayon
.

Harry lands on one foot and spins around to grab Joan, dipping her backward like Fred Astaire. Unfazed, she accepts the manhandling and bends gracefully over his arm. Jacob thinks of the photo of her with Rusakov, arched in the same way, her throat exposed. He fingers his necktie, which is red with tiny green Christmas trees and
which he had chosen in defiance of the other Bintzes. They think he’s uncool. They think his job is dull and that his friendly ties and collection of knock-knock jokes, which are meant to put kids at ease, are evidence of a lack of seriousness, sophistication, and discrimination. Sometimes he has an urge to remind them that he is the only one with a college degree, let alone a doctorate, that he knows things they don’t, but he resists. He doesn’t want to talk himself into thinking less of his family.

“All right,” Harry says, righting his mother. “Let’s go. Yippee. Bring on the technical fireworks.”

Jacob pushes himself out of the armchair. “Looking sharp, Harry,” he says. “Chloe will be wowed.”

“Oh,” Harry says, shifty, squaring his tie in a mirror on the wall. “Yeah. That reminds me. Chloe and I are taking a break.”

“Harry,” Joan says, arrested in the act of opening the front door. “You broke up? Since when?”

“This afternoon. It’s not totally final yet. I just told her I thought I needed some time.”

“You broke up with her right before a performance?”

“I wasn’t planning it. Things are a little unclear right now.”

“Unclear? After all these years?” Jacob says.

“One year. Nice tie, by the way.”

Jacob ignores the tie comment and presses his hands to his heart the way ballet princes do. “But the longing! All those years of longing!”

“People change, Dad,” Harry says in the superior tone he has brought back as a souvenir from New York. “People change.”

Except for a few stray remarks on the opening of new movie theaters next to the freeway and the closure of Long King Chinese Palace where they ate every Friday when Harry was little, they are quiet for most of the drive. Only when Jacob is hunting for a parking place at the theater does Joan twist to face Harry in the backseat. “How do people change?”

HIS ANSWER CHILLS HER, AND THE CHILL LINGERS AS THEY PRESENT
their tickets to the white-haired ushers, find their seats, flip through their programs until the lights go down. It stays with her through the overture and the party scene and Drosselmeyer’s gift of the Nutcracker to Clara. This production, put on in a large, professional auditorium, follows a version that uses children for Clara and the Nutcracker. Chloe is the Sugar Plum Fairy and will not appear until the second act. Joan has seen her perform twice. She is doing well in the role. There are still traces of a strange fury in her (or hostility, or something—Joan has never satisfactorily been able to name the disquieting vibe Chloe’s dancing took on after Gary’s death), but Joan thinks only a practiced eye would notice. Indeed, the practiced eyes of Chloe’s auditioners, while beguiled by her sharp, beautiful face and crisp technique, had not missed her misplaced ferocity. “Your little Valkyrie protégée,” one of them had called Joan to ask, “can she tone it down? Be sweet and pretty? To be totally honest, we don’t have a lot of good options, and we like the idea of having someone so young and fresh and local, not to make her sound like produce. We thought we could pitch newspaper stories about her as a rising star. It’s a shame your son isn’t available, too.”

“Chloe will be wonderful,” Joan had promised, liking that word: protégée. She had not expected to find much in teaching besides a little extra income, something to do, a way to keep fit. She had not anticipated she might be able to re-create, even improve, her young self through the body of another. Chloe’s unusual stage presence worries her—things would be simpler, careerwise, if she were just sweet and pretty—but sometimes Joan envies her strangeness. At least Chloe is different. Her imperfection makes her interesting.

But Joan was right about Chloe as the Sugar Plum Fairy—everyone is happy. Chloe is excellent in performance and terrible at auditions, no matter how many times Joan has tried to convince her that the two are not so different. Auditions bore her, and she
resents the necessity of proving herself. She had only gotten into the summer intensive in New York because Joan had pitched her hard to Elaine, but then she had made a good impression and been asked back. She is very good, really—far better than what Harry had called her in the parking lot: mediocre. He used to worship Chloe, but now he thinks that, as a dancer, she’s mediocre at best. And that, he told Joan, was how he’d changed.

“I’m not sure I respect her as a dancer,” Harry had gone on, “and that’s starting to get to me. You know, honestly, I’m not sure we have the best training system in place in this country. It seems unfair to get kids started down a road when they’re doomed to failure. Like in Europe lots of schools take X-rays of kids’ legs to see what kind of turnout they’ll be able to get before they let them in. That’s not the worst idea. Right? Like it’s a little harsh, but it makes sense. I don’t mean to be a jerk, but Chloe’s hips aren’t ideal for a dancer. And the U.S. is so decentralized. I probably shouldn’t have languished here for as long as I did.”

“
Da
, Comrade Bintz,” Jacob said. He mostly speaks to Harry in jokes these days. “
Da
, we take leetle children from families, X-ray legs, send to People’s Ballet Factory.”

Joan had been tongue-tied. “Chloe’s not mediocre,” she finally managed to say. “She’s very good.”

“Maybe for the corps somewhere.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the corps. The corps does the most work for the least glory. You’ll be in the corps.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think what?”

“I think they’re planning to bring me into the company as a soloist. Just to make more of a splash. Otherwise I’d already be in the corps.”

“Everyone has to go through the corps,” said Joan. “It’s part of the process.”

“Arslan didn’t.”

“Obviously you don’t have to if you’re coming from another company.
But, Harry, you should want to earn your place. If you’re not in the corps, you’ll never have the same understanding of how ballets work. And I’m sorry you had to
languish
here for so long. That must have been terrible for you.”

“I’m just saying.”

Jacob parked the car and shut off the engine. “Also,” he said into the silence, “you might be barking up the wrong tree as far as what makes a good relationship. What if the best dancer in the world is a big bitch?”

Joan said, “Which she probably would be.”

“So then,” Jacob went on, “things are great when she’s dancing and miserable the rest of the time. What people can
do
isn’t everything.”

“I know,” Harry says. “You’ve been saying that my whole life. I know. I feel like you’re trying to brainwash me with these mushy
Sesame Street
values that aren’t actually helpful once things get messy. Why’s everyone on my back? Dad, why are you all high on Chloe now? You used to want me to forget about her.”

“No, I didn’t.” Jacob sounded wounded. “I like Chloe.”

“I’m seventeen,” Harry said with exaggerated patience. “I live three thousand miles away. I just think I’d like to date other people, that’s all. I don’t think that makes me a monster.”

Jacob opened his door. “I see your point,” he said quietly. “Do what you want.”

Joan has to admit she sees Harry’s point, too, even though the chill will not leave her, not when the Christmas tree grows up taller and taller, or when the soldiers defeat the rats, or when the snowflakes dance their waltz, or when little Clara and the Nutcracker Prince fly in their sleigh to the Land of Sweets. She remembers how Arslan had looked at her during the brief time when he had tried to dance with her, his disappointment. Usually she feels at home in the fanciful worlds of sets and costumes, music and colored lights, but tonight the familiar dances seem bawdy and farcical and accusatory.
Didn’t you want this?
the snowflakes ask as they pirouette.
Didn’t you make this?
Joan shivers. Jacob turns to look at her, blue light playing across his glasses, the same wire-rimmed glasses he’s always had, the same face she has known since she was a child, just older. He puts an arm around her and rubs her shoulder, but she only feels colder. When the lights come up for intermission, she turns around and spots Sandy Wheelock two rows back, snuggled up next to a bald man in a golf sweater. Then she flushes with nervous heat.

“WHO IS THAT?”
TONY ASKS
.

“Who?” says Sandy.

“The woman who just waved at you.”

“Chloe’s ballet teacher.”

“Should we go say hi?”

“Not if we can avoid it.”

“Oh-ho,” says Tony. “Bad blood.”

“Not really. Do you have anyone who’s all tied up in the worst parts of your life? And you just wish they didn’t exist?”

“Sounds rough. Why don’t you get Chloe a new teacher?”

“Chloe does what she wants. They have this whole”—she swivels a hand in a circle—“thing. I’m not involved. And her son has been in love with Chloe forever. Darn, they’re coming over. Anyway, he and Chloe are dating. He dances. Actually, he’s dancing in New York now.”

As they make their way down the row in front of Sandy and Tony, the Bintzes look more uncomfortable than Sandy thinks they need to, strictly speaking. Chloe hasn’t even been onstage yet, and even if she makes some horrible ballet mistake, Sandy will not be bothered. After Gary died, she stopped thinking about ballet or watching Chloe’s classes or following her progress or doing anything except clapping at her performances, and for a while she had not even done that. Sandy had mourned her husband and forgiven him—for inflicting his death on them and also for the dark years that had come before—but she was not sure she would ever fully forgive Chloe for attacking her in the school office. You had to forgive
your own child, especially for something she did out of panicked grief and some nonsensical, backward teenage idea of blame. But pieces of that awful day have stuck in them like shrapnel, healed over but still hard and alien and painful when you least expected. When Chloe dances, Sandy can’t help but think of Gary.

And right now she would prefer not to think of Gary or death or anything but all the usual Christmas schlock: eggnog and candy canes and even the damn
Nutcracker
. Though she would never say so out loud—there are restrictions and responsibilities that come with being tragically widowed—she is happier than she has been since Chloe was a baby. She took up cycling as a way to remember Gary and has gotten in pretty good shape. She tends bar at a grill near the beach, and she’s in the late stages of planning to open a hole-in-the-wall strip mall pub all her own. She’s good at bartending. She has fun with it. Tony was one of her regulars, and then he asked her out. It happens all the time.

Joan and Jacob arrive in front of them. Sandy introduces Tony.

“Chloe’s pas de deux is a treat,” Joan says, earnest as a preschool teacher. “She’s very good.”

Sandy nods, struck by how this woman seems like more of a stranger now than when she first saw her doing ballet on her patio. It had been so suspenseful, having a little kid, wondering how she’d turn out, competing with other parents over hypothetical futures. Joan probably thinks she won, but Sandy doesn’t care. Chloe is what she is.

“Yeah, she gets the best music,” Sandy says. “The tingly-wingly fairy dust stuff.”

Jacob keeps squeezing Joan against his side like he’s sheltering her from the wind. “I remember when she was the baby rat,” he says.

Sandy smiles politely, thinking about the rat year, how she had watched every rehearsal, every goddamn, endless, mind-numbing, amateur-hour rehearsal, and how she had been such a hideous stage mom about it too, leaning forward in her seat whenever Chloe did her little solo, almost doing the steps herself. Chloe had been right
when, driving home from Gary’s funeral, she accused Sandy of always needing everything to be perfect, of making Gary feel inadequate. But she had the cause and effect inside out. Gary hadn’t killed himself because of Sandy. He killed himself because nothing was ever perfect. “Is Harry here?” she asks.