Astonish Me (30 page)

Jacob puffs up with pleasure. “As long as he’s happy.”

The two men look at Joan with their four dark eyes, waiting for her to say something, but she can only look back, riveted by the strangeness. She has imagined this encounter for more than twenty years. The air inside the tent has turned thick and heavy. Their voices plow slowly through it.

“Joan,” says Arslan, “does the cat have your tongue?”

She smiles but feels tension quivering in the corner of her lip. She presses her fingers to it. “Your English is so good now.”

“But not perfect. It will never be perfect.”

Jacob takes her empty glass. “Want another one?” He is asking if she would like him to leave for a minute, and she nods. Now that the first shock is over, a thrill-seeking impulse has taken hold. She wants to know what will happen when she and Arslan are alone, what he might say.

But she does not expect him to say, immediately, forcefully, champagne flute in one hand, “He is mine, this boy.”

“No,” she says, claustrophobic, trying to breathe, “he’s mine.”

“He must be. Once I saw, I had no doubt.”

“Jacob is Harry’s father.”

“Yes. I know. Your husband raised Harry. As far as they know, they are father and son. But, Joan, don’t lie. It is too late for that. I
know
. The blackout. You were full of purpose. I still remember. Like you were in Paris. Driven. I could never resist you like that.”

She doesn’t know how to ask what she needs to know: if he intends to ruin her family. “What do we do?” she says.

He sips the champagne, hand shaking. He sees her notice the tremor and says, “I don’t hide things so well now that I’m old.”

She grasps his other wrist, lets go at once. “Hide this. Please.”

“Why would you do this to me, Joan? I have no other children.”

“That you know of. Isn’t that the joke? What would you have done if I had told you? Would you have been a good dad? Would you have done all the things for Harry that Jacob has? He wouldn’t be the kind of dancer he is without Jacob.” She has never quite formed this thought before, but as she speaks it, she knows it is true.

“Or without me.”

This, too, is true.

“You were never going to tell me,” he says. “It is perfect crime. Poor Jacob, probably you have him waiting already, he has no idea, just think, oh, good, Joan loves me. I will marry her. Sure, why not?” His English is breaking apart. He gulps unsteadily at the champagne. “I have always wanted children, Joan.”

“You could have had them. Don’t try to tell me there weren’t dozens of women begging to have your babies.”

“No. It’s no small thing to have a baby. Maybe to you, not to me. I took women lightly sometimes but never children. Ludmilla could not have them, and there has been no other woman I would trust.”

“You’ve been Harry’s hero since he was a little boy. Can’t that be enough?”

He stares over her shoulder. “Your husband is coming back.”

It is too soon, but the conversation will never be complete, not even if Jacob took a year to bring the drinks. “Don’t tell Harry,” she says.

“He would have better career as my son.” But he says it feebly, as a last stab.

“Arslan, if you were ever going to do one kind thing for me, let this be it.”

“I owe you, yes? For the ride from Toronto. The trip to Niagara Falls.”

“This isn’t about a debt.”

Jacob is upon them, bearing drinks, resolutely cheerful, and before Arslan can excuse himself, Harry is there too, in a tuxedo, his hair still damp from the shower. His Cuban pas de deux partner is
holding his hand. She is tiny, coffee skinned, all clavicle and narrow thighs in a short beaded dress. Joan greets her distractedly. Harry tells them he has just learned the company will go to Paris in the fall and dance in the opera house. “Harry says there is a lake below?” the ballerina says in her musical accent.

Joan looks at Arslan. They think of the dressing room. “There’s sort of a cistern below the basement,” Joan says. “With a locked grate over it.”

Arslan nods. “There are big fish in the water, big white fish. I think they are carp. The Opéra firemen feed them. They come up to the surface like ghosts of hungry prisoners. And now there is a man who keeps bees on the roof.”

“Really?” says Joan. “I never saw fish.”

“What is a grate?” asks the ballerina. “What is a cistern?”

To Joan, Arslan says, “They were there.” His eyes, crimped around their edges by middle age, are sad, not morose like when he used to descend into one of his moods or wildly tragic like when he was mourning Juliet or Giselle onstage, but soft and sad as he stands and drinks.

LATER, MUCH LATER, AFTER THE BINTZES ARE GONE, CHLOE SITS ON
the edge of the fountain in the middle of the plaza. Water rains down over a jagged metal sculpture and into an illuminated turquoise pool. Through the tent’s open flaps, the caterers are stripping and collapsing the tables, stacking the chairs, dismantling the bar. She should go home; she has morning class, but she feels stuck. If she had somewhere to go, she could move, but she doesn’t, not really. Only back to the tiny apartment she shares with two other girls, to class in the morning, and then where? She knows she will never be asked to join the corps. Elaine made her an apprentice out of kindness, but everyone knows she is wrong for the company. Her technique is good, but her hips will always be slightly too wide. The problem isn’t her weight but her skeleton, her unchangeable bones.
Her stage presence, too, is an issue. She is not, as Elaine has said, a ballerina, not like Verónica, Harry’s girlfriend, who is like a specially evolved bird with hollow bones and tulle plumage and unshakable calm. “You can fake it sometimes,” Elaine said, “cover up this thing you have with prettiness, but then you lose something. The audience can see something’s missing. But if you don’t cover up, they see you wrestling with the dance, and it worries them. You’re gifted—uniquely gifted—but I don’t know how to use you.”

Tonight at the reception, Chloe and Joan had cried when they hugged and then chitchatted to cover their tears. Watching Harry and Verónica circulate, accepting congratulations, Chloe had expected to feel jealous or at least bitter, but her jealousy seems to have finally run its course, leaving her exhausted to the point of immobility, like a castaway. She had asked Elaine for the apprenticeship, begged really, in part because she didn’t know what else to do—auditions for other companies had not gone well; she can’t see a reason to go to college—and in part because she wanted to be close to Harry, to force him to realize he couldn’t simply discard her after a lifetime of loving her. He had yielded a few times, letting her drag him drunkenly back to her apartment, but then he had closed and locked himself to her. “What are the odds,” he had said once, “that we would both make it? Two little kids who lived next door to each other both going pro?”

“Is that what this is?” she said. “You’re afraid I’m hurting your odds?”

“I’m saying we need separate destinies.”

A man in a tuxedo and undone bow tie emerges from the tent, glass in hand, and makes his way toward her, turning his unsteadiness into a little dance, staggering sideways until he seems about to fall over, then catching himself with a nimble hop and staggering back the other way. When he reaches the fountain, he turns a stuttering pirouette on his heels like Charlie Chaplin caught in a gust of wind and plops down beside her, nearly tipping backward into the glowing water.

“I didn’t know they got a clown,” she remarks.

“Hello, Chloe,” Arslan says.

She takes the glass from his hand but doesn’t bother to sniff it. True to stereotype, he always drinks vodka.

He winks. “You want some?”

She dumps the liquor into the fountain. “Don’t flirt with me.”

“You don’t like to flirt?”

“Not with drunk old men.”

“How old do you think I am?”

“Fifty?”

He cringes. “No, not yet. A few more years. She is cruel tonight.”

“Maybe I’m cruel every night.” She has met him a dozen or so times, usually briefly, always with Harry, who never seemed overly anxious to share his mentor.

“Maybe. But always with good reason, I am sure.” His thoughts appear to wander, and she watches in the active, watery light as his face relaxes into sadness.

“No, sometimes just for fun,” she says.

“What are you doing out here? Are you waiting for someone? Harry has seen his mistake?”

“I don’t know. I just didn’t get any farther. What are you doing here? Where’s your date?”

“You noticed my date. Then you are not indifferent.”

“But you are to her, I guess.”

“She is the indifferent one.”

“Please.”

“Yes, please. She is one of these young ones, like a balloon. I let her go, and she drifts away. Bye-bye. Not a word. Up into the sky. A nice light thing.”

“Or you pop her.”

“Only when she asks nicely.” Now she laughs, and he looks pleased. Then he is serious again. “Are you very heartbroken by Harry?”

Two men in leather work gloves tip over what is left of the ballerina ice sculpture and drop it into a rubber bin. “I was. But now I’m just tired.”

“I think you are too tired to go home. I think you should come in a taxi with me, to my apartment, and we will keep each other company.”

“Arslan, I’m not going to sleep with you.”

Some dark expression crosses his face, and he turns his head to hide it. “You think I’m too old?”

It was mortality in his face, flitting quick as a bat. “Not exactly. I wouldn’t want Harry to think I was trying to get revenge on him. I wouldn’t want you to think that, either.”

“I wouldn’t,” he says plaintively. “And I don’t tell Harry who I sleep with.”

“That’s the other thing. I don’t want to be one of your girls. I feel pathetic enough as it is.”

“Oh, Chloe,” he says, putting an arm around her shoulders. His grasp is gentle, but she can feel his strength. “You make me so sad. We are both sad tonight. Okay. Come with me anyway. We need someone to keep us company. I have a guest room. I have milk and cookies.”

She wants to be proud, to say no. At least she wants to ask why he has suddenly focused on her, but she knows if his answer is not perfect (and what would the perfect answer be?), she will have to go home to her cheap futon in her tiny bedroom partitioned from a windowless corner of her shared apartment. So instead she asks, “Why are
you
sad?”

“I am sad because I am an old man, and nobody wants to sleep with me. And because I am Russian, and we are always sad late at night.”

AUGUST 2000—UPSTATE NEW YORK

E
LAINE WATCHES FROM HER UPSTAIRS WINDOW AS THEY WALK
slowly around the meadow, not touching but straying into each other’s paths and bumping shoulders from time to time. Sometimes she thinks she should envy them, but she has no appetite for entanglement anymore. She has cleared out human mess from her life. Her boyfriends are short-lived, convenient, and never invited to the dacha. In fact, Arslan and Chloe are the first guests she has ever had here, and she is pleasantly surprised not to resent their presence, especially since they invited themselves. There is something they want to discuss.

She still calls it a dacha even though it is just a house now. She painted the paneling white and got rid of Mr. K’s lace curtains and most of his Russian bric-a-brac. No more troikas, no more saints frowning down at her from under their gilded halos. The samovar survived the purge because of sentiment and because her years with Mr. K left her hopelessly addicted to tea, and the balalaika still leans against the fireplace. Arslan remembered the instrument at once. He had picked it up and played it, first some bittersweet folk tune and then the theme from
Doctor Zhivago
. Who knew he could actually play? He turned to Chloe and said, “Tonya, can you play the balalaika?”

Elaine had thought the reference would go over Chloe’s young head, but the girl replied, “Can she play? She’s an artist!”

“Ah, then it’s a gift,” Arslan said.

And they laughed. Elaine wasn’t sure she had ever seen a woman make Arslan laugh before Chloe. Certainly she had never seen him toss off a movie quote.

They are a puzzling couple. On the surface they make perfect, if scornworthy, sense: the older, famous, wealthy man, and the young, slender, beautiful blond girl. And yet Chloe mothers Arslan, who is almost thirty years her senior, scolds and teases him, hectors him to drink less, drive more carefully, go away once in a while and give her some peace and quiet. (Elaine has never seen Arslan endure being teased, either.) Chloe is not possessive, but for the first time since Elaine has known him, Arslan appears to be faithful. He has to cajole Chloe into appearing with him in public. She returns most of the presents he buys for her. She will spend weeks holed up with him at his place in Maine, but she has an apartment of her own in New York, a tiny studio in Chelsea, ten blocks from his place. She will not live with him unless he marries her, and she seems to offer the caveat without resentment, even though he says he will never marry again. Perhaps she is untroubled because she has plenty of time, time to change her mind and move in with him or time to leave him.

The task of telling Joan about Chloe and Arslan’s involvement had fallen to Elaine. It had not been a pleasant conversation. First Joan had giggled like a lunatic. Then she had issued a series of sarcastic warnings for Elaine to pass along to Chloe, followed by serious ones. She had been worried for Harry. She had been disgusted with Arslan. She had gone silent.
The father-and-son thing is incredibly strange
, Elaine had said, wanting Joan to know she grasped the epic weirdness at work, even more than Harry could.
Jacob is Harry’s father
, Joan said. Then Elaine was silent until Joan said,
Like you used to say, control is everything
, and Elaine said,
Okay
.

But time has soothed everyone. Two years without implosion have made Arslan and Chloe seem borderline viable.

“This thing with Chloe isn’t about Harry, is it?” Elaine had asked him at the beginning. “Or Joan?” Although it wasn’t really at the beginning when she asked him because Chloe had resisted sleeping with him for six months and refused to be seen publicly with him for another six months after that, so by the time anyone knew about their romance, it was a year old.