Astonish Me (3 page)

But when they were sitting side by side at the movies or watching TV on the couch when her mother was out, not speaking and not looking at each other, he would stay so still that she sensed he was restraining himself, wary of any movement that would betray what he wanted, and some hidden sensory organ in her would rotate toward him, probing, considering.

“Did you do it on purpose?” Elaine asks.

“Of course not.”

“You can’t do this if it’s only about running away from Arslan.”

Since she got pregnant, the cattle prod jolt of Arslan’s name has worn off, become only a faint zap, two weak wires touched together. “It’s not. It’s really not. I might be running from everything else, but I have to go. I have to find something else. You’ll make it. I was never going to.”

“You did it on purpose.”

“I didn’t!”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s done. But you don’t have to … you could, you know, just quit the company. Not have a baby. Get a job. Do something else.”

Solemnly, Joan shakes her head. “I couldn’t just decide to stop. I thought about it. But I’m too much of a coward. I can’t stay in the
city if I’m not dancing, and I wouldn’t know where else to go. Or what to do, generally.”

“So you’re counting on Jacob to figure all that out for you. This all seems really elaborate, Joan. I feel sorry for Jacob. He’s walking around Chicago right now with no idea he’s a marked man.”

“He’s getting what he wants.”

“Oh yeah?” Elaine takes another cigarette from her pack. “Well then. You’re a Good Samaritan.”

“Give me a cigarette, please.”

“You shouldn’t smoke.”

“I know. This one and then I’m quitting. I’m quitting everything. Everything is going to be different.”

“Inevitably.”

Finding nothing else to say, they pretend to be interested in the party that drifts around them as lightly as fog. Joan makes eye contact with a series of men. They are the kind of men who look over shoulders while they chatter, searching for the people they will chatter at next. The crowd shifts, revealing the host’s pale head inclined attentively toward the fast-moving mouth of a blond woman in a paisley jumpsuit.

Joan says, “Will you introduce me to Christopher?”

JOAN LIES AWAKE
.
BESIDE HER
,
THE MAN SLEEPS
.
EVEN HIS SNORES ARE
polite and well formed. His name is Tom, not Christopher. Probably some other Christopher had swum through Elaine’s nocturnal world, crossing bubble trails with this handsome Tom, an assistant professor of Old and Middle English at NYU. His bed is surprisingly clean and nice smelling for a single man with bohemian tastes. Joan wonders if he will be the second-to-last man she ever sleeps with.

The yellow night drops a window-square on the pale sheet. Tom makes a rough sound in his sleep that might be Old or Middle English. The cells continue to multiply. Joan rests her palm against
her belly, trying to divine the exact spot where life has been planted like a tulip bulb. Usually when she is in bed with a strange man—there haven’t been so many—she has trouble sleeping because she is preoccupied by the nearness of the unfamiliar body that has been recently and intimately explored and is now remote, locked away in sleep. But Tom holds no curiosity for her. She strokes her own skin, wonders what time it is. His wrist with his watch is under his pillow, and she doesn’t see a clock in the room. When the sun rises she will make her way home and then, later, to class. She wonders how many more times she will go to class. When she stops dancing, class will continue on without her, every day except Sunday, part of the earth’s rotation. The piano will swoop and clatter, and Mr. K will say
No, girl, like this
to dancers who are not her. Her empty spot at the barre will heal over at once. But she wants a few more days, a week or two. She wants the cells to grow in time to the piano, to Mr. K’s clapping hands, his
one pa pa pa, two pa pa pa, and UP pa pa pa
, to the rhythm of her battements. Until now, even when surrounded by twenty women dressed just like her, moving in unison with her, she has always been lonely, but the cells give her a feeling of companionship. For the first time she can remember, she is not afraid of failing, and the relief feels like joy.

NOVEMBER 1978—CHICAGO

A
S JACOB CROSSES THE QUAD
,
SHUFFLING HOME THROUGH NEW
snow, he is seized by a rebellious impulse to stop at a bar. Not that he doesn’t want to see Joan and the baby, and not that having a quiet beer by himself would be a crime, but the enormous obligations that have arrived abruptly (and, one could argue, prematurely) with his new status as a family man have recalibrated his sense of himself, made him ashamed of his moments of selfishness and guilt stricken whenever he feels a twinge of resentment. He wants so badly to satisfy and delight Joan in all possible ways and to be a good father to Harry that he is not certain there should be space left over for wanting a beer. Or solitude. Or freedom, which is unmistakably a thing of the past.

He has never been one to fetishize freedom, though. Since he can remember, he has pursued obligation and commitment, which is why, at twenty-four, he is already into the fourth year of his doctorate. That he is, at twenty-four, also already the father of an infant son and already married to a woman he has coveted since it first occurred to him to covet women, might not have been part of his original plan, but he can’t claim he hadn’t been an enthusiastic participant in Harry’s conception or that he hadn’t wanted to marry
Joan, at least as far as he was capable of imagining marriage, since he was a high school kid desperately playing it cool.

The snow is the first serious one of the year. It settles in strips on naked tree branches, builds white doilies on the stone traceries of Gothic windows. In the summer, the façade of Green Hall is bearded with Boston ivy, and a wreath of leaves surrounds Jacob’s office window, giving the light a pleasantly verdant quality, like the inside of a tree house. But now, in late November, the vine is a withered caul of twigs, tapping and scratching at the walls. Jacob changes trajectory, heading for a dank subterranean bar he likes and away from the tiny apartment where Joan and Harry are waiting. The apartment has a demonic radiator that shrieks in defiance when Jacob tries to turn it off and incubates all the fetid baby smells and makes his hair brittle and his skin itchy. Joan, who is always cold, likes the radiator and will not let him call the super. She takes a reptilian solace in its heat, perching neatly sideways atop the flaking silver coils.

The mug of Old Style the bartender coaxes from the tap is mostly foam but is delivered with a look that discourages Jacob from complaining. He is happy, anyway, to be sitting on a stool with a ripped vinyl cover, resting his elbows on sticky Formica, gazing at pocked dartboards and a jumble of Bears and Cubs ephemera. There is a TV behind the bar, but it’s angled so only the bartender can watch. Light flickers over the ranks of bottles.

The woman Jacob was dating before—and, truthfully, during and for some time after—Joan paid her fateful visit had introduced him to this place. Liesel, a Ph.D. student in chemistry. There is one other guy at the bar: thirtyish, with a mustache, on the beefy side, sipping whiskey.

“Great place, isn’t it?” Jacob remarks. His stolen hour, now that he has committed to it, is making him expansive and giddy.

“Yeah,” the guy says, “a real hidden gem.” He has a strong Chicago accent and a plump face that suggests, in a friendly way, that bullshit would be unwelcome.

“I used to come here with an ex,” Jacob says.

“Yeah?”

“It was kind of her spot. I haven’t been here since we broke up.”

“Bad breakup?”

“It wasn’t great.” Then, wanting to clarify, Jacob adds, “I married a ballet dancer.”

At
ballet dancer
, the guy’s smile seems to snag on something. “Yeah?” the guy says. “Like a professional?”

Jacob nods. “Yeah.”

The fact that Joan is a dancer impresses most men and rankles most women.
Was
a dancer, although he has no plans to tell this stranger she is retired. When Joan was pregnant, Jacob had thought she might try to go back to ballet after the baby, but she said flatly that she couldn’t. Her career had run its course. She will teach, but she will not perform. Elaine sent them tickets to the Joffrey not long before Harry was born. On the way home, Joan had cried on the El, clasping her thin arms around her belly, but she only shook her head when Jacob said it didn’t have to be over for her. He didn’t understand, she said. She had never been that good, anyway, she said, and to keep trying would be pathetic.

There is, in this decision, a loss for Jacob he would never admit to her. For as long as he has known Joan, since they were almost children, she has lived a double life, as a dancer and as a civilian, and her retirement means she has been reduced in some essential way. He will miss seeing her onstage, displayed so beautifully at the front of all that darkness, and he will miss the mystery of her hours of class and rehearsal, her proximity to other beautiful women and to the hands of other men. He finds low-level jealously to be enlivening, pleasantly astringent.

He has his limits, though. During the months Joan was involved with Arslan Rusakov, Jacob had been in agony. Her other boyfriends, beginning in high school, had irritated and disgruntled but not tortured him; Joan had not appeared to be very attached to the others, had certainly not loved any of them. Then Rusakov came along and swallowed her up, and Jacob’s belief that they would end up together
one day, after they’d exhausted the dubious pleasures of trying out people they didn’t love, had begun to dwindle. His mother, who has never liked Joan, made a point of phoning him long-distance when she showed up in magazines or newspapers with Rusakov, and he would go out to the newsstand to see for himself, flipping clumsily through the pages and then staring down at the photos until the guy said,
Library’s down the street, buddy
. Joan’s letters dwindled to a trickle, and the few she did write only made things worse.

The mustache guy signals the bartender for another drink, and the bartender, surprisingly, hops to it. “Where’d you meet?”

“High school. In Virginia.”

Jacob and his two older sisters had high IQs, and their father, a naval officer, was frequently reposted, allowing their ambitious, unmaternal mother to skip her children forward in school until they were high school freshmen at twelve and college students at sixteen. The great mercy of Jacob’s life was that he grew early (but then stopped—he is not tall) and was a reasonably handsome, affable kid, good enough at baseball and track to avoid classification as an irredeemable nerd. Joan’s locker had been across from his when they were freshmen, and she was so small, so knobby and tentative like a fawn, that at first he had hoped she was young, too.

“Excuse me,” she had said, appearing beside him on the first day while he fussed with his books and notebooks. “Do you know where room three-nineteen is?” She wore a red and blue plaid dress with a collar and a red belt and peered at him with anxious earnestness, like a tourist asking for directions in a dicey neighborhood.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s on my way. I’ll show you.”

“Are you a sophomore?” she asked as they walked. “How do you know where things are already?”

“I took a class here last year,” he said, trying to project proprietary confidence. “I got the lay of the land.”

“Lucky.” She flinched away from a group of older students. “I thought about coming down on a weekend and making sure I knew where to go, but then I thought someone would see me and think I
was nuts. You probably think I’m nuts. It’s just, I have a feeling I’m going to do this wrong.”

“Do what wrong?”

“Everything. High school.”

“You’ll be fine. Just act like you’re sure you belong.” He was echoing what his sister Marion had said to him that morning. “Nobody knows any better.” He let a beat go by. “How old are you?”

“I’ll be fourteen in October. I’m a little young. When’s your birthday?”

“March,” he said, neglecting to mention that his next birthday would be his thirteenth.

“Why did you ask?”

“I was just wondering. You look young.”

“I hope I always do,” she said with unexpected vehemence. “I do ballet. I can’t be big or old.”

Jacob, who wouldn’t have minded being either of those things, said, “It might be hard to avoid getting older.”

“I know that,” she said, sharply again. She was not as meek as she had first appeared, and he liked her more for it. “It only matters how you
look
.”

“That’s not true,” he ventured after a moment, “in the big picture.”

He was afraid he might have offended her, or that she would think he was an annoying goody-goody, but she made a wry face. “I mean in ballet,” she said. “Which is my big picture.”

They fell into separate groups of friends—Joan’s smallness and prettiness and docility made her popular—but they chatted by their lockers and greeted each other in the halls. Their houses were not far apart, and sometimes they walked together. The ballet studio was on the way to Jacob’s house, and when he didn’t have baseball, he escorted her there, carrying her dance bag. He never went inside, and, in his imagination, the unassuming little storefront was a cloistered place of rites and mysteries. Sheer white curtains covered its front windows, and through them he caught vague, gauzy glimpses of girls in black leotards.

“Is that your brother?” Jacob heard one of Joan’s friends ask in the lunchroom.

“Basically,” Joan replied, and he felt both honored and insulted.

Her nerviness and discipline appealed to him, and he felt protective of her in a way that seemed adult and masculine and new. As the younger brother of two bossy sisters, he was used to being clucked over by girls, but Joan seemed to trust that he could take care of himself and also, as needed, her. He understood that this was a role worth cultivating. Her mother was single and worked and didn’t understand ballet or Joan. Joan’s dance teacher, Madame Tchishkoff, was of the formidable, exacting variety and offered little beyond unyielding rigor and the motivational power of perpetual, implacable disappointment. Joan’s school friends were the kind of pretty girls who clumped together to assert their collective prettiness. They were companions and accessories, not confidantes.