Astonish Me (29 page)

Jacob waves vaguely over his shoulder. “He saw someone he knew. You try to raise a loner, and you end up with Mr. Popularity.”

“Chloe’s so proud of him,” Sandy says. “She’s always talking about what an amazing dancer he is and how famous he’s going to be. Even though I’m sure she’d like to be in New York, too.” They stare at her like she’s a space alien. Do they think she’s suggesting that Chloe should have been made an apprentice, too? Probably. They’re probably thinking about how to let her down easy.
You know, Sandy, Chloe just isn’t as godlike as Harry. What’s important is that Chloe find what she’s good at, which is nothing
.

“It’s been tough on the kids,” Jacob says slowly and carefully, talking down to her as usual, “being separated. They’re just kids. It’s easy to forget because of the dancing, but they’re kids.”

“Yeah,” Sandy says, breezy. “They’re cute. Chloe crossed off the days on her calendar until Harry got back. I couldn’t even get her to open the little doors in the Advent calendar. She only cared about the advent of Harry.”

Joan puts a bony hand to her forehead. Joan is always miming things. Her theatrical flourishes drove Sandy nuts back when they were friends. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m not feeling so well.”

“Too many Christmas cookies?” posits Tony, and now he’s the alien to be stared at, bless his heart. Joan’s probably never had a Christmas cookie in her life.

The lights dim and come back up. “It’s about to start again, anyway,” Jacob says. “We should go sit down.”

CHLOE, WAITING IN THE WINGS BEFORE HER PAS DE DEUX, TREMBLES
so much that her tutu flutters. She is not exactly nervous, nor does
she have the bold, predatory feeling she usually gets when she is about to attack the stage. The sensation is vague but intense—she supposes it’s shock over the breakup, tension and disbelief. She has not cried yet. Since her conversation with Harry, she has felt painfully alert, both vulnerable and dangerous, as though she were wrapped in explosives. She flexes one ankle and then the other, tests her pointes against the floor. “Are you okay?” her cavalier whispers. He is Danish, blond, poised, gay, solicitous, a soloist at the San Francisco Ballet poached for the Christmas season by the well-funded suburbanites behind this production.

“I’m fine. Why?”

“You’re fidgeting.”

“Sorry.” She folds her arms across her chest. Flowers are waltzing onstage. The music whirls. Clara and her Nutcracker sit on a throne at stage left behind a table piled with prop sweets. They are small, cute, assured. As a kid, she would have liked that: to sit onstage for the whole second act in a pretty white dress. She would not have wanted Harry to be the Nutcracker, though, because she wouldn’t have wanted people to look at them sitting together and think she had anything to do with him. Funny. All she wants now is to be seen with Harry, but she can still remember exactly how it felt to always want to get rid of him.

Her cavalier is not reassured. “Can I help?”

“No.”

The waltz accelerates, building to its finale. Chloe shakes out her legs, rolls her neck. Her cavalier extends his arm forward, and she places her hand over his. She takes a breath, pulls up, and walks smiling out onto the stage before the flowers’ applause has ended. When there is quiet, a harp begins scales, up and down on top of slow pizzicato strings. Swooning cellos. Woodwinds come in from above, sailing down to join the strings; brass follows behind, taking long, stately strides, warm and wide but bittersweet. The music is like a room slowly filling with people, but not a party. Maybe a wake. Chloe dances but is barely aware of what she is doing or of her
cavalier’s hands gripping hers, his hands skimming her waist as she turns. She is not thinking about the Sugar Plum Fairy, about sweetness and lightness, about smiling. Harry would not even explain himself, would not do her the favor of being honest so she might hate him. He just said he needed space, time, a break, the experience of not owing anyone anything, and then sullenly, he endured her reminders that
he
was the one who had always loved
her
, her entreaties, and then her accusations of vanity and conceit, of overestimating his own talent, of setting himself up to be lonely and miserable.

“Take it easy, Chloe,” her cavalier whispers through his smile. Her wrists shake. The audience must be able to see her tremors on the balances. Her cavalier’s arm vibrates as though she is sending electricity through him. Dire trombones plow downward, are caught and buoyed up by the relentlessly romantic strings. Her body is rigid, but at least that makes her easy to lift. He practically tosses her up into the air. From her new height, she glowers at the audience, at Harry in it. She is not a fairy; she is an avenging angel. The counterfeit sparkling, smiling prettiness she has worked so hard to stick to herself like sugar has been swept away. She knows what she is doing is wrong for her role, and she feels sorry for her cavalier, but she is burning. The consuming pain she felt after her father died had burrowed into her center and still smolders there like a coal fire. In New York, the teachers told her to try not to feel, to just work with the music, or to think of the movements as cold, crisp tasks her body must carry out. But she can’t. Feeling is what allows her to dance at all.

A last long balance while her cavalier rotates her on one pointe and then dips her forward so her fingers almost touch the stage, her extended leg going vertical. Then she is up again and he spins her quickly between his hands. Rolling kettledrums, bows grinding into strings. She throws herself too hard into the final fish dive, remembering Harry, the basement studio in New York, the sight of them in the mirror, and her cavalier, hissing through his teeth, almost drops her but doesn’t, sets her upright. Grim faced, she gives a sharp
bob of a curtsy and stalks into the wings to wait out her cavalier’s variation, a tarantella. He is a very nice dancer, tall with clean lines, but her eyes won’t focus on him. She stares blankly at a spot on the stage, oblivious as he passes in and out of her field of vision. Ordinarily, she would be blotting her face with tissues, wiping her chest and neck with a towel, perhaps paying a visit to the rosin box, preparing for her own variation, but now she stands, sweating, arms loose at her sides, and thinks of nothing.

Too soon, her cavalier flies offstage and, not even trying to smile, she abandons the shelter of the wings. Stage right, the back corner, her legs in croisé derrière à terre, arms low in a graceful hoop. In the instant before the music begins, she confronts the darkness, feeling Harry in it somewhere. Having to dance for him is humiliating, especially this saccharine, dainty variation that is so wrong for her. She had longed to be the Sugar Plum Fairy when she was a rat, and now she longs to be a rat. Plucked strings. She moves en pointe along the diagonal. Tiny steps, unsatisfying, nibbling at the stage. The celesta comes in, an instrument that looks like a toy piano and sounds like bells. The music is tinkling, tentative, a mouse creeping through a sleeping house. She is the rat again. A bassoon slides down a dark staircase. Piqué turns—she is getting ahead of the music. Her ankles shake. She thought she could let go of the prettiness, the carefulness, that what was left would feel instinctive, easy, but she has become unused to dancing with freedom. Her elbows and knees are sharp. It is all en pointe, mincing little steps and hops, her feet always moving, poking and prodding the stage, her arches cramping. Chaînés turns: chains indeed. She feels like she’s dragging them behind her. She stumbles badly, landing flat on her feet, putting out her arms for balance. Other dancers have gathered in the wings, staring. A pulse of strings, then scrubbing cellos, then another pulse. “What do I do?” she had asked Harry. “What do I do now? Everything is ruined. You’ve ruined everything.”

“That you think that,” he’d said, “is exactly the problem.”

She can see there were moments when she asked too much of
him, but she can’t be reasonable when she feels her life falling away in big, loose chunks. She doesn’t know what will be left. The chiming comes faster and faster. The rat is trapped, scurrying and spinning from one side of the stage to the other. She turns and turns. The stage tilts. The staring eyes in the wings whirl diagonally past. She is dizzy, but she does not fall. There is still the coda to do.

MAY 1998—NEW YORK CITY

T
HE CITY HAS CHANGED
.
THE ABSENCE OF GRIT
,
THE SAFETY OF IT
hits Joan like a betrayal, as though it had purposely waited until she left to undergo a course of self-improvement and is now putting on airs. She takes Jacob to see where she had lived with Elaine, and although the building doesn’t look much different, the block is now quiet and leafy and prosperous: innocent in its elegance, as though it had never been perched on the edge of blight. The subway cars are mostly silver, not funky and screaming with spray paint. Times Square is full of scaffolding and construction fences, illuminated by huge video screens and billboards of beautiful people, crowded with tourists, purged of massage parlors and peep shows.

She has not been back since before Harry was born, and now she and Jacob have come to see Harry make his debut as a soloist. Joan was right: he had been in the corps, but not for long and not without fanfare and plum solos. This would be a joyful occasion, but Arslan will be at the performance. Knowing he is in the city, Joan sees him hurrying down sidewalks, passing through subway turnstiles, sitting in restaurant windows, sailing by in taxis. She had tried to think of a way she could get out of seeing him, but making too much of an effort to avoid a reunion would be undignified, would imply she was still hung up on him. He is a mentor to Harry, and she knows Harry
wants her to see them together, to witness how he has forged a bond with his idol. She wonders if Arslan has guessed, when he will guess. Elaine must know. Joan has never said aloud to anyone that Arslan is Harry’s biological father. She is not sure she could form the words.

Getting ready in the hotel room, she is jumpy, breaks a water glass in the sink. Jacob removes her from the bathroom so he can clean up the glass, kisses the nape of her neck. She brushes him away, and he is frosty until they get to the theater and he sees a poster with Harry on it and wants her to take his picture next to it. She does, and he insists on taking one of her.

“Sorry,” she says, while he fusses with the camera. “I’m sorry I was a jerk.”

“Hey,” he says, “it’s fine with me, but that water glass still seemed pretty broken up about it.”

Then they are in their seats, and the back of Arslan’s head, his real head, the head she has held between her hands, is six rows up, tilting sometimes to catch whatever the woman beside him is saying, and then he is a precisely identified bit of darkness that never fades into the rest of the darkness as the gala begins, never stops itching at her attention, even when Harry is onstage. His performance is, objectively, extraordinary. Elaine has him doing the Bluebird pas de deux with a very good young Cuban ballerina, a real-life defector, and the two are well suited, classic, technically brilliant, romantic without sacrificing refinement. But Joan is used to seeing Harry dance. She is not used to being in the same enclosed space, however spacious and dark, as Arslan Rusakov.

Had she set out to create a dancer? If that had been her purpose, she thinks she would feel more elation at the sight of the stunning young performer now alone onstage, flying through his variation. She bore him, raised him, taught him, released him to New York. She masterminded every step of the process that made him what he is, but a part of her still pretends she has been passively swept up by something larger than herself. Harry’s dancing is beautiful
but frightening. The better he is, the more conspicuous he is, and the more likely someone is to do the math, ask questions, notice the resemblance, which now, as Harry becomes a man, seems glaringly obvious. When she was that silly girl in Arslan’s bed, she might have thought it would be romantic for their affair to produce another dancer. She had thought then that she had so much to lose—her place in the corps, the shape of her body—but really she had possessed nothing, no one.

Afterward she must lean on Jacob’s arm as they make their way out to the white tent erected in the plaza. Mercifully, he seems to have decided against having a big conversation about Arslan. He talks about how incredible Harry was. Joan’s arms and chest ache from the force and speed of her blood. In the tent they are greeted by an ice sculpture of a ballerina and a phalanx of waiters with trays of champagne flutes and morsels on toothpicks and a maze of white tables and twiggy chairs. They wind their way to the bar in the back, where Joan braces herself against a table and gulps from a vodka tonic. Several hundred tuxedos and gowns filter in and settle around the bar, chattering and pawing at one another with convivial menace. Chloe should be among them somewhere, but Joan can’t quite remember to look for her. “Let’s move out of the way,” Jacob says as the crowd grows dense, and he pulls her along through a tunnel of bodies that dead-ends, abruptly, inevitably, at Arslan.

“Joan,” he says, visibly ruffled. “How nice to see you.” There is a woman on his arm, a young brunette who is unmistakably a dancer, and he turns her slightly, adjusting her trajectory, and gives her a practiced, graceful little push. Unresisting, she glides off into the party as though wearing ice skates, and Joan watches the shimmering crowd swallow up her bare, narrow back.

Jacob offers his hand. “Jacob Bintz. Joan’s husband. Nice to meet you after all these years.”

Arslan gives a Russian smile: somber eyes, lips curling in a wry wince. “Harry was excellent tonight.”

“I’m no expert,” Jacob says, “but he looked pretty damn fantastic
to me.” Arslan stares at Joan. Jacob adds, more cheerfully than he needs to, “He’s been really pleased you’ve taken an interest in him.”

“He will have very good career. Who knows what will happen, but he could be …” He trails off, opens his hands as though releasing a bird.