Astonish Me (14 page)

So she had written back as best she could, describing the company’s repertoire and the choreographers who cycled in and out depending on how territorial Mr. K was feeling. She told him what they were rehearsing: short ballets of Greek myths, a long ballet about Wyatt Earp. She tried to explain how Mr. K made dances, how he was always asking his dancers to be faster and sharper and more controlled and more turned out and how he was expanding their vocabulary of steps. Then she answered questions Arslan had not asked. She told him about her mother and how she had thought ballet was cute when Joan was little but now understood almost nothing about her life. She told him about her bed behind the sheet in Elaine’s apartment, about how all she had ever wanted was to perform with the company and how strange it was that a dream, once realized, could quickly turn mundane. She skimmed over her doubts about her own talent, her fears about what she would do when she was inevitably shouldered out of the company. The Frenchwoman’s note had instructed Joan to mail any response to her address in Paris, and she would try to get it to Arslan.

A few weeks later, sooner than Joan had expected, an envelope arrived that contained a stern note in English from a West German informing her that secrecy was imperative and then another discourse on
la danse
roaming over more sheets of the thin, grey paper. She replied again, this time sending her letter to Berlin, telling Arslan more about herself, asking him questions about where he lived, what his days were like.
I think about you all the time
, she wrote.
I worry about you
. Another letter arrived before her reply could possibly have reached him, accompanied by another warning to keep her mouth shut, this time from a woman in Milan. More letters followed. They were never personal, but they were increasingly passionate. He seemed to be working himself up, churning out long screeds about artistic paranoia in the USSR and the way the system built
magnificent dancers and then smothered them. He listed ideas for new ballets. He wanted to make a ballet about nuclear war, another about a rock band, another set to the dull peals of Russian Orthodox church bells, another set to the sound of crickets and performed in near darkness. Each letter was chaperoned by a haughty European admonishment to keep the correspondence secret. Joan told no one. She was only being obedient, but she inadvertently passed a test of trustworthiness. When word got out that Arslan was coming to Toronto with a small touring company, a letter arrived from an Englishwoman, a soloist with the Royal Danish Ballet, the first of many sets of instructions.

Arslan insists that you should be the one to help him in his hour of need. I wish with all my heart it could be me—Arslan feels the same—but we don’t know when another opportunity like this will arise. As you probably aren’t aware, he hasn’t been allowed to perform in the West since ’73. They think because he is a Tatar and because he is interested in choreographers other than Petipa (or, more accurately, regurgitated “Petipa”) and doesn’t like idiotic dogmatic ballets, he can’t be trusted. They are right, of course, but another dancer was injured, and so they are allowing him to go to Canada with this little circus troupe (everyone else in it is a thousand years old or completely terrible or both, by the way, but that means for once he gets to dance the lead, their way of bribing him). For reasons unknown to me, he has chosen you to help him. He is too stubborn to be dissuaded, and so you must do it. Don’t make the mistake of believing he is in love with you
.

Waiting behind the theater, watching the bald man smoke, nervously tapping her fingers on the hard plastic steering wheel, Joan thinks that Arslan must be in love with her. You could only trust someone you love with a task this important, this dreadful. She remembers his eyes on her in Paris. Two years have not diluted the memory. Something was sprung open by what they had done—
she had felt the new space, the possibility—but then he was gone, and impossibility swung shut behind him, and she thought she had been foolish to imagine there was anything more than a fuck on a floor. She thinks she confuses the articulation of dance with the incoherence of sex. Within sex, bodies tell you nothing. They are incidental objects, assemblages of moving parts in a pleasure-generating mechanism. For him, she was probably nothing, barely a blip in his faraway life. She had accepted this. But then the letters, then the summons to Toronto.

The stage door light goes out. There is a shout, a slam. She fumbles to turn the key in the ignition, almost forgets to flash the lights, then jerks the lever back and forth, gasping out loud with fear. The asphalt appears in white light, disappears, appears again. The brake lights of parked cars flash like the eyes of surprised animals. Arslan runs toward her, an apparition becoming solid, his white tights glowing, and then he is at the car, struggling with the door behind her. She hears him flipping the handle—a metallic clapping accompanied by a slight shaking of the car as he begins to tug frantically—but she does not make sense of what is happening until his face, wild, is at her window, yelling something. The bald man is almost to them, charging flat-footedly across the parking lot. As Joan twists around to unlock the door, she catches a peripheral glimpse of the minder’s face. He looks terrified, as though he were not the pursuer but the pursued. His eyes plead against what is happening, his own failure. Then Arslan is in the car. All the bald man can do is scrabble at the Chrysler’s stubby rear end as Joan throws it into gear and jolts away, not roaring and squealing like in a movie, just driving, but still moving faster than the bald man, the back door hanging open until Arslan, splayed across the seat, pulls it shut.

Arslan is still ranting in Russian. She glances at him in the rearview mirror. His face is tight with fury at her, the idiot who forgot to unlock the car door, who might have let him be seized by the bald man, dragged away to a different car, an airplane, back to Moscow. “Je suis désolée,” she says, then says it again, grateful
she has to concentrate on driving and can’t turn around and assess the devastating discrepancy between the look in his eyes now and the one she has been polishing in her memory. After her third apology, he falls silent.

The drive to the parking garage is short, quiet, and uneventful. She stops at yellow lights, signals when she turns. In the mirror, he watches the city. Sometimes he cranes around to look out the back, maybe checking to be sure they are not being followed or maybe getting a longer look at something that has interested him. The plan had been for him to crouch down, but she lets him sit and look out the window. She doesn’t want to speak to him for fear of rekindling his anger, and she sees no reason for him to hide. No one is chasing them. Who would, really? It has already worked. He is already free. She half hopes the bald minder decided to run away, too, that he will become a Canadian.

In the garage, as planned, another car is waiting, this one a Buick with New York plates. Not as planned, Felicia is standing beside it, smiling, shimmying with anticipation like an overexcited dog. The key was supposed to be in a magnetic box under the front bumper, a change of clothes for Arslan in the trunk.

“Qui est-ce?” Arslan says.

Joan pulls into a parking space. “Felicia. Ton amie.”

“Zdravstvujtye!”
Felicia calls, bending down to wave at Arslan through the window. He stares coolly at her through the glass. “Welcome!” Felicia says, opening the door for him. “Welcome to Canada!”

Slowly, he emerges. Joan gets out and hovers between them. She is more anxious and embarrassed for this woman than she thinks she should be, given how unfriendly and rivalrous Felicia was during the day, but she has intuited that Arslan, already on edge because of the locked door and the weeks of tension that must have led up to this moment and the dawning reality of his defection, will not welcome an improvisation on his request for no fuss, no people, no chatter. Felicia is already chattering. “You have done a very brave thing,”
she tells Arslan, staring at him with an intensity that excludes Joan. “The free world welcomes you. We are so very, very happy to have you, really, I can’t express how honored I am to witness this moment. And I want to assure you that I understand your sacrifice. I do. Really, I do. I hope we might have the chance to get to know each other better.”

Arslan is looking away, across the mostly empty garage to where a narrow window lets in cold air and frames ashy city darkness perforated by a smattering of lit windows in a tall building. He stands in his white tights and slippers, mouth pursed in annoyance, arms folded in the blousy white sleeves of his prince’s shirt across his cream-and-gold waistcoat. He has the appearance of an impatient time traveler. Felicia steps toward him, perhaps to embrace him, and he stiffens, fending her off without even acknowledging her.

“Would you translate?” Felicia says to Joan. “Please?”

“Elle dit—” Joan begins.

Arslan looks at her. “Vêtements?” he says sharply.

“What did he say?” asks Felicia.

Joan hesitates, not wanting to be rude but also wanting to leave, to be rid of this woman. “He’s wondering where his clothes are.”

“Oh. Yes. I have them here.” Felicia, crestfallen, opens the trunk of the Buick and takes out a brown shopping bag. Arslan is already unbuttoning the waistcoat and stripping off the loose shirt. His torso is narrow, pale, armored with compact muscle. Hooking his thumbs in the waistband of his tights, he looks at Joan as he pulls them down, revealing his thighs and the flesh-colored, neutering triangle of his dance belt. The corner of his mouth curls, and he winks. She is forgiven. Felicia, reproached by his nakedness, turns away to study the streaks of salt and dirty water on the cement. She holds the bag out to Joan. Inside is a grey sweat suit, socks, and a pair of black high-top Chuck Taylors. Without quite looking at him, Joan hands Arslan the pants first, then the hooded sweatshirt, the socks, the too big shoes. Dressed, his fine head dwarfed by the hood, he looks small
and painfully young and tired, like a high school athlete after a lost game. His ballet clothes are a pale puddle on the cement.

“Allons-y,” he says to Joan.

FOR TEN DAYS AFTER THEY REACH NEW YORK
,
ARSLAN REFUSES TO
leave the apartment Joan had hastily rented in Chelsea before going to Toronto, explaining to a mildly bewildered Elaine that she needed her own space. A dwindling platoon of reporters camp out on the sidewalk, tipped off by someone in the company.
SOVIET BALLET STAR DEFECTS IN CANADA
, announce the headlines.
American ballerina drives getaway car all the way to New York love nest
. The newspapermen bribe people who live across the alley to let them spy from the fire escape. Joan and Arslan smoke and smoke but don’t open the windows for fear of eavesdroppers, and the tiny rooms are hazy and stale. In Leningrad, Arslan had been given an apartment in a former palace with large windows and fine things that were chosen for him. He tells her this slowly, painfully slowly, with the aid of the Russian-English dictionary they keep on the nightstand. He expresses some disappointment with the neighborhood, which he seems to have expected to be glamorous, not gritty, with piles of garbage and men loitering on stoops, and she shows him the words for
cheap
and
available
and
hurry
. They communicate best in French, but he has ordained that they must speak only English. Conversation drips slowly, as though from a leaky faucet, with suspenseful gaps between words.

Lawyers come and go. Mr. K brings a samovar and smoked fish and Chinese food and pastrami sandwiches and piles of new clothes—Levi’s, underwear, baseball tees, a sport coat, checked shirts like the ones Mr. K favors, a necktie, dancewear—but even in the presence of visitors, Arslan will only put on a pair of running shorts, yellow with white trim. He sits bare chested and cross-legged on the unmade bed, enthroned, smoking and nodding at what the lawyers and their translator have to say. When the visitors are gone, he tosses the shorts aside and retreats under the covers. Sometimes
he is playful, making funny faces at Joan and reciting English phrases passed among the male members of the Kirov: “Cool chick, please be meeting you, very sexy.” Sometimes he stares moodily at the ceiling and smokes in silence, extinguishing his butts in an ashtray shaped like Mount Rushmore.

“Who is?” he had asked on their first night together, pointing at the enamel faces.

“Presidents,” she said. “Their faces are carved in a mountain.”

His black eyes are set in a narrow, expressive, high-cheekboned face, and he screwed the whole thing up in exaggerated confusion. She had gotten up, naked, and gone to her stack of books on the floor—a bookshelf had not been among the bits and pieces of furniture she’d bought in one rushed sweep through a consignment store—and found her eleventh grade history textbook, which she had kept out of a vague concern that someday she might need to look up something historical. There was no picture of Mount Rushmore, but she found a painting of George Washington and pointed to it and then the ashtray. By the time she got to Roosevelt, Arslan’s interest had waned, and when she went for the dictionary, he grabbed her arm and rolled her onto her back. While he kissed her, she thought it was just as well. The whole thing would look like a Communist monument to him anyway, and he would either think too much or too little of it.

“Marvelous girl,” Mr. K says every time he comes to the apartment. Clasping her face in his hands, he kisses her cheeks. “Beautiful, marvelous girl. I knew I saw something in you in Paris. You have a brave soul.” He takes her by the arm and shakes her at Arslan. “Très belle, non? Très courageuse.”

“Oui, oui. Très belle,” Arslan agrees, and then they speak to each other in Russian while Joan wrangles the samovar and empties ashtrays. They drink gallons of dark tea from glass tumblers Mr. K brought, sweetening it with sugar cubes. Mr. K shakes his head with a show of great reluctance at something Arslan asks, and Joan wonders if they are talking about her. Arslan has told her he wants
to dance with her. She is not good enough. She knows this. Mr. K knows this, too, but Arslan has never seen her dance and he is, as the Englishwoman said in her letter, stubborn. She sits on the floor and stretches. The subway rumbles under her building, and her few dishes rattle on their shelf. Mr. K has told her not to worry about missing a week of class. He says she is right to stay by Arslan’s side, guarding him. She is a good girl.