Astonish Me (19 page)

Brett groans and shifts his weight, trying to support her with his hip, but then he gives up and leans back so she is draped down the front of his body. The fur on the back of her leotard mingles with the fur on his chest, and she can feel the hot dampness of his unitard through her tights. She can even feel his heart beating. During rehearsals, she liked him. He was nice and asked her about school and showed her a special way to jump after her tail got stepped on so the audience would know how much it hurt. He wore cut-off red sweatpants over his tights and a bandanna over his curly blond hair, which she liked, but he also wore tank tops, which she didn’t like because of the dingy clumps of hair in his armpits. When she informed him she was afraid of being touched by his armpit hair, he laughed and wore T-shirts instead.

But Brett’s nice face and curly hair is hidden under that big, whiskery rat head with two shiny white teeth and protruding black eyes. There is also the problem of the amorphous bumps in the front of his tights, where her bottom is resting. She likes the embroidered vests and velvet jackets and shirts with long, blousy sleeves that male dancers wear, but their lower bodies, exposed and monochromatic in tights, all muscles and butt cheeks and those troubling bumps, disconcert her. She knows what boys have, has seen illustrations in books and has made Harry show her his, but those purple and pink drawings and Harry’s embarrassed snail-without-a-shell seem to have little to do with the contours of Brett’s tights.

Once when an Arslan Rusakov special was on TV, her father had come in with a plastic cup full of red wine, stood and watched for a minute, then said, “So much brouhaha about one fruity little grape smuggler.”

“What’s a grape smuggler?”

“A guy in tights,” he said, picking up the remote and changing the channel.

So now she can’t see grapes without thinking of men stuffing them down their tights, and when she finds grapes in her lunch,
warm from sitting in her backpack all morning, the sides of the baggie misted with condensation, she throws them away. She asked Joan if she could be a famous ballerina without doing all the pas de deux stuff, and Joan said no but also that she didn’t have to worry about partnering for a few more years. The Sugar Plum Fairy’s variation is just the kind of thing Chloe wants to do—light and dainty and self-sufficient—but when the Fairy’s cavalier is around he is always holding her hand and touching her waist while she turns and lifting her by her thighs.

Her mother has come to every performance, but this is the only night her father would agree to come. At home, the stack of presents is small and wrapped in paper left over from last year. Chloe’s class had done a wrapping paper sale, and while most kids’ parents bought at least a few rolls, Chloe had to peddle her paper swatches door-to-door in the neighborhood because her mother wouldn’t buy any, not even the silver paper dotted with tiny penguins, which was the best. At the school Christmas fair, Chloe picked out a small framed photograph of a racing cyclist for her father with an inspirational saying about perseverance printed underneath. He lost his job at the mall and is having trouble finding another one. She is under strict orders not to tell anyone even though everyone already seems to know. At night, after she goes to bed, her parents either watch TV or fight. Sometimes they fight about her.

“You were so obsessed with her being gifted—she
is
gifted. This is what she’s good at.”

“
I
was obsessed? You’re the obsessed one. You care about this ballet stuff more than she does.”

“I care about her having opportunities. You were always talking about her having every opportunity. You said it a million times. Like really you were so oppressed growing up. Like really it was so tragic being from Grand Rapids and having a dentist for a father. Bull
shit
.”

“I’ll tell you what’s bullshit. This ballet crap is bullshit. It’s a fantasy for little girls. Little girls and you and Joan Bintz and her
faggoty kid. The best thing I can say about it is that at least girls who do it don’t get fat. Do you ever stop to think about how much it costs?”

“Of course I do.”

“Why don’t we just give the whole house to the Bintzes, would you be happy then?”

A silence, and then her mother’s voice, calm like a teacher’s: “Do you want me to find her a different studio? It’ll mean a longer drive, which means more gas money, more of my time.”

“Because you’re so busy.”

“I could get a job. It would be so much better if we just had a little money coming in. I could bartend again.”

“I’m not going to be supported by my wife. I’m not going to have a wife who’s a bartender.”

“Great. Let’s wait for the repo man to come. Let’s move in with my parents. No, let’s starve to death.”

Chloe’s father, quietly: “Shut up. You’re being stupid. Just shut up.”

She thinks her father is right not to want to be supported by her mother. She imagines their doing a pas de deux, her mother lifting and spinning her father, and it is all wrong. She cries when they fight and worries they will make her stop dancing, but she is impatient with them, too. Her dancing is none of their business. She has begun to divide the world into dancers and nondancers, and her parents are nondancers. What they think is not important. Harry doesn’t even seem to know how lucky he is to live with Joan. At school, a nondance place, Harry is in the class for smart kids, but on the playground he embarrasses Chloe with his overtures of friendship and gestures of familiarity, and she wishes he would just leave her alone there so she wouldn’t have to hurt his feelings. He is a part of a better world, the hard one, the one you have to work to get inside.

The Rat King makes his entrance, and Chloe locks into an arabesque, raising her fist over her head as Brett swings her sideways, lifts her high, and rushes onstage.

MARCH 1990—SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

A
T THE END OF
THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER
,
JACK RYAN (A
lec Baldwin) and the defector Captain Ramius (Sean Connery) survey the moonlit Penobscot River from the sail of a hulking black submarine. “Welcome to the New World, sir,” Jack Ryan says.

The credits roll while a Russian choir sings. Harry and Jacob sidle out of their row and walk up the aisle. “That’s what Mom did for Arslan Rusakov,” Harry says when they are in the popcorn-and-carpet-cleaner air of the lobby. “Mom’s like Jack Ryan.”

“Mom didn’t shoot anyone,” says Jacob. “That I know of.” Harry strides ahead, buoyant. His stride lengthens until he is half galloping toward the glass doors, his arms lifting away from his sides as though he might leap into the air. But he stops short, pivoting to face his father, radiating energy, and it is a miracle he only folds his arms across his chest and shifts from foot to foot. He always seems to be on the verge of some ostentatious movement, some theatrical gesture. Jacob has never manifested enthusiasm the way Harry does, through his body, and he tries not to let on that his son’s tendency to cavort in public embarrasses him. “Take it easy,” he says.

“I am,” says Harry. “It was just such a great movie. But I wish that guy had gotten to see Montana.”

Jacob squeezes Harry’s shoulder and is startled by the muscle. Harry is almost twelve and always doing push-ups in preparation for the fast-approaching day when he will need to lift Chloe Wheelock. “Yeah,” he says, as they pass out through the doors and into a cool, cloudy night, the mildness of March in California still novel after seven years. “That part was sad.”

“Do you think there’s a chance someone might really have defected in a submarine? And we just never knew about it? I mean, the newspapers found out about Zuyev and Belenko, but they went through other countries first.”

“I think lots of things happen that we don’t know about, but this was probably just a good story.”

“I wish it were true.”

“I think things can be true even if they didn’t really happen.”

Harry doesn’t seem to be listening. He is doing a kind of Russian soldier march, arms rigid, head erect. But then he says, “I don’t get what you mean.”

“I mean if a story really resonates with you, it can be true for you, even if it never actually happened. Like ancient myths. Those stories probably mattered more to people than some things that really happened.”

Harry spins around and moonwalks alongside Jacob. “I guess. But I still wish it had really happened. I wish a submarine captain would defect.”

Defectors are an object of fascination for Harry. He keeps a scrapbook of clippings about Russian dancers, particularly Rusakov, and after Alexander Zuyev flew his MiG-29 to Turkey, he expanded his reach, adding long ribbons of newsprint about the pilot. Later, he branched out still further and pasted in photos snipped from
Time
magazine of the crowds at the Brandenburg Gate. His bulletin board is dense with thumbtacked ballet programs and pictures of Rusakov, but in a bottom corner he made room for a photocopy of the famous shot from the sixties of the East German border guard jumping over barbed wire, the nascent Berlin Wall. When he was ten, Harry
had insisted Jacob take him to
Die Hard
because he wanted to see Alexander Godunov, the Bolshoi defector, play a German terrorist.

But a crumbling is happening. The Wall has fallen, and Jacob expects Harry will be disappointed if soon there is no more Eastern Bloc, no more ballerinas curling themselves inside suitcases to be rolled through Heathrow to freedom. Harry has always been prone to obsession, but the longevity of these particular fixations—ballet and defectors—has been a disquieting surprise.

“I wonder if Arslan will see that movie,” Harry says as Jacob starts the car.

“Who knows.”

“I wish Mom still knew him. Do you think she’ll ever stop being mad at him for dumping her?”

Harry knows the basic outline of Joan’s history with Rusakov, but he seems to sense there is more, something adult and tangled and uncomfortable, a mesh of fungal filaments that his parents have done their best to conceal. He is always poking around, asking questions, trying to turn up the loose end that will make everything clear. He does not understand that he cannot understand, that the loves of others are unfathomable. “She’s mad for more complicated reasons than that,” Jacob says. “He wasn’t very nice to her. I don’t think she thinks he’s worth knowing.”

“I can’t believe he dated
Mom
. He’s such an amazing dancer.”

“It’s more important to be a good person.”

“I would kill for his
ballon
.”

Ballon
is Harry’s new favorite word, and he has already explained to Jacob that it describes the way good dancers seem to hang in the air longer than possible. The trick, Harry says, isn’t just height but what you do with your arms. Jacob turns out of the parking lot and onto the main road. While they were in the movie, it must have rained. The streets are wet, and the stoplights fall on them in long red and green ribbons.

All boys have their heroes, Jacob has told himself again and again, but there is a needy quality to Harry’s worship that reminds
him ominously of how Joan had given herself over to Rusakov as though to a doomsday cult. Jacob had doggedly churned out letter after letter during that time and cast them into the postbox’s dark mouth like pennies into a well. He sent her banal accounts of his daily life mingled with philosophical musings meant to impress and saccharine paragraphs of supportive mush meant to hasten her realization that Jacob, not Rusakov, truly loved her. Her responses, when they came, maybe one to every ten of his letters, were cruelly unfiltered tracts detailing her feelings of being paralyzed by her love for the other man, frozen around it. Stupidly hopeful that her misery might translate into corrective action, he would send stern yet loving replies, urging her to abandon what was clearly an unhappy and unhealthy situation, a man who did not love or appreciate her, because she deserved more, he would declare, she deserved
everything
. After a period of silence, her next letter would arrive, exactly like the last.

After a minute, Harry says, “I just can’t believe he was Mom’s boyfriend. It’s so crazy. Why do you think he liked her?”

“Because your mother is a wonderful person. Anyway, I don’t know if he was really her
boyfriend
.”

“He was. There are all those pictures of them together.”

“Which pictures?”

“In Mom’s scrapbook. The newspaper ones, and then all the other ones—normal camera pictures.”

“She has a scrapbook?” Jacob’s voice rises. “She showed you this?”

“I found it by accident. It was in the garage.” Harry opens the glove compartment and roots through a jumble of cassette tapes as though demonstrating how he might stumble upon something in the course of his normal rummaging.

“You shouldn’t go through other people’s things.”

“I wasn’t! I was just exploring.” He closes the glove compartment without choosing a tape. “Mom wasn’t mad. We went through it, and she told me where the pictures were taken and stuff and about when the company went to Europe, which was the first time Arslan
left America after he defected. I guess everyone was worried he was going to be kidnapped or something and taken back to Russia. Anyway,” Harry says, looking sideways at Jacob, clearly skeptical of his objectivity, “it really seemed like he was her boyfriend.”

“Usually if you’re someone’s boyfriend you’re nice to them and supportive of what they do. I don’t think Arslan ever took Mom all that seriously, which was hard for her because she tried really hard to please him.”

Jacob worries he’s taking the discussion too far, getting into too much nuance, but Harry only makes a noncommittal noise and says, “Did you know in Europe ballet audiences applaud all together? What’s the word for it? Mom told me. Like,
clap clap clap clap
all at the same time, on the same beat.”

“In cadence,” Jacob says.

A year before, Jacob had decided he was weary of gifted children. They had become monotonous in their specialness, and he was tired of dealing with their overbearing nightmare parents. Fortunately, he is well liked in the district and was offered a job as the principal of a new middle school in a new town, out on the edge of civilization, where the new houses stand shoulder to shoulder, an advance guard against the empty hills. The students chose the coyote as their mascot, after the clever creatures that steal their neighbors’ cats and yip and howl in the night. Jacob suggested to Joan that they might move, get a nicer house closer to school, even one with a pool, and she has begun to warm to the idea. Truthfully, he wouldn’t mind trading in the Wheelocks for some new neighbors. Gary has become a sad sack, shuffling between his car and house, never going out on his bike anymore. Jacob would never have expected to be nostalgic for Gary’s dandyish outfits, but he would be grateful to see the old suspenders and cuff links instead of the new baggy khakis and rumpled shirts. Late at night, the blue flicker of a television spills into their backyard.