Astonish Me (21 page)

The snapshots stun him: the youth of the people, their pervasive beauty, their ease in their bodies. His jealousy, which he had thought was gone, eroded to nothing by the passage of time, rears up. There is Joan, her bare legs curled under her, nestled against Rusakov on a green couch at a party, stuck to him like a limpet. Rusakov, holding a drink, looks up at a man in a tweed blazer who sits, legs crossed, on the couch’s arm. There is Rusakov, smirking, shirtless and barefoot in running shorts, sprawled in a chair. Rusakov on the Brooklyn Bridge, in Central Park, on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, his head cocked sardonically to the side, hands in his pockets. Rusakov again and again. Mugging, clowning, glowering, pondering, dancing, preening. Eerily, Rusakov sleeping, his young forehead slightly furrowed in dream concentration. Jacob can’t let himself think about Joan taking that photograph, crouching beside the bed, framing the defenseless face and greedily making a memento out of it. Joan in a party dress, Joan in bell-bottoms and platform sandals and too much makeup. He can tell by her shy, intense expression that Rusakov is the photographer. Joan in leg warmers sitting on the floor of a dance studio, Rusakov’s head in her lap. She looks tender, her fingers buried in his hair, but he is amused, hoisting an eyebrow at whoever took the picture. Programs from ballets. Clippings about Rusakov that no longer mention Joan. More snapshots, but they are less intimate. Group shots. Joan still smiles but is not happy. A plane ticket, a postcard of a bridge made of delicate iron fans on stone legs, and then blank pages.

APRIL 1991—SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

F
OR HIS THIRTEENTH BIRTHDAY
,
HARRY HAS REQUESTED THAT JOAN
and Jacob take him and Chloe to see
The Phantom of the Opera
in L.A. Though Harry is pretending to be enthusiastic, Joan knows he has engineered the trip more for Chloe’s benefit than his own. Gary has changed jobs again, and money is too tight for the Wheelocks to be buying theater tickets. Worse, Gary is in a religious phase and has begun to disapprove of a growing list of things that might include musical theater, especially when it concerns lust, opera, and French people. He isn’t so sure about Chloe dancing around in a leotard. “He’s a big Jesus freak now,” Harry said. “He’s always getting together with a bunch of dads to pray.”

“What does Chloe think?”

“I don’t know. She goes to church with him, but I don’t think she’s getting into Jesus, really, except to be nice to Gary. I don’t think she likes to say bad things about Gary because everyone else does. He’s such a dick.”

“Harry.”

“You and dad call him that.”

“Maybe he is kind of a dick,” Joan allows, “but, please, Harry, don’t pass that on to Chloe.”

“Mom, I’m not stupid. I want Chloe to like us.”

Last month, Chloe told Joan she was hoping to be taken to see
Phantom
for her birthday, but instead she had come to class with CDs, a gift from her mother. “It’s the original cast recording,” she said brightly and requested they listen to it during barre. The other girls were excited by the prospect of dancing to music with singing, so Joan had indulged her, watching Chloe mouth the lyrics in the mirror, refraining from reminding her that her battements didn’t need to be quite so emotive.

The Bintzes have moved to a new house, and so they drive back to their old neighborhood in Valle de los Toros to pick up Chloe. They study their former house the way someone might scrutinize an ex-lover from across a restaurant, taking in the little sprucings the new owners have done, agreeing that it looks smaller and older now that they don’t live there. The previous summer they moved to a new tract of pink-stucco, tile-roofed houses near Jacob’s school. They have a rectangular swimming pool and a wheeled aquatic robot that scoots around the bottom vacuuming up leaves. They have a guava tree in the backyard that yields hard, grey-green fruit nobody will eat and an orange tree that periodically explodes with more citrus than they can use. Joan has bought an electric juicer, but overripe oranges still fall and split open on the patio, enticing the bees. The new house is bigger than the old house and lighter and more modern, and these advantages bring her a straightforward domestic pleasure. She had thought she would miss the old house, the place where their family had taken shape, but her loyalty has shifted, along with their furniture and boxes of stuff, into this comelier shell they have found for their lives. Jacob takes a lordly pride in sitting on a chaise and surveying the blue water of the swimming pool. They believe they are owed sunlight, newness, and abundance. They have become Californians.

The new house is only six miles from the old one, still in the same school district. Harry and Chloe go to the same middle school, although Joan wishes they didn’t. Harry says that Chloe at school isn’t really Chloe, but he won’t give details. He seems to think the
real Chloe is the one in the studio, the one who is mostly movement. Joan has begun to work on partnering with them. Harry’s crush on Chloe is an advantage; he is focused on her, determined not to drop her, not squeamish, not selfish, not annoyed with how much effort he must put into being scaffolding for another dancer. He dances with the other students, too, because he is the only boy, and he is a conscientious partner to them all because he doesn’t know how to be otherwise.

Chloe flies from the Wheelocks’ front door, smiling broadly with a mouth full of braces, running down the front walkway in a clingy calf-length dress printed with pink and yellow roses. Her turned-out feet are quick in blocky white heels. Her hair, which has darkened over the years from a baby blond to the dirty color of tarnished brass, is loose on her bare, bony shoulders. Joan is startled. She has not seen Chloe outside of the studio for a while, and, as girls this age do, she seems to have changed overnight. She still has a child’s skinny shape, but something is different. Perhaps the body is collecting itself in preparation to change, getting ready for the exertion of growth. Despite all the hours Joan spends staring at Chloe in the studio, molding her, this gawky adolescent who jumps into the backseat, radiating excitement and smelling strongly of cheap body spray, seems unfamiliar, and the whole expedition to L.A. is suddenly embarrassing, as though they were four strangers going on a double date.

Joan wonders what Chloe’s fragrance is supposed to be. Freesia? Rose? Middle school girls have an insatiable enthusiasm for making themselves reek of imitation melon or gardenia or strawberry. Joan has prohibited her students from wearing anything scented to class—no sprays, no lotions—but still she catches them sneaking plastic bottles of purple and pink liquids out of their dance bags during breaks for a restorative spritz. They have strange ideas, these girls, of what it means to be a woman. Mr. K, she sees now, was clever with his courtly little gifts of perfume.
This is the kind of woman you are
, he tells the dancers he chooses to elevate.
This is how you should smell
. According to Elaine, he has fewer muses these days. He no longer sleeps with them but still picks out their perfume. His health is irregular, Elaine says, but apparently nothing can deter him from going out and spending an hour at Bloomingdale’s, smelling and wafting and pondering until some stray puff of fragrance finally captures the essence of a certain teenager in pointe shoes. If Joan has a muse it is certainly Chloe (not Harry, whose instruction she approaches with both maternal pride and pedagogical terror—she is too close to him; like a sculptor, she needs distance to take in the whole), but she has no impulse to mold any part of the girl besides her dancing. She believes that the less she knows about Chloe, the better she can see her.

As they drive north, Harry passes one of Chloe’s CDs forward between the seats, nudging Joan in the shoulder. “We’re going to hear all this again in a couple hours,” Joan says, but she pushes the disc into the slot.

There is a bit of dialogue about a chandelier, and then the car is flooded with churning organ music. “Yow,” says Jacob, taking a hand off the wheel to turn down the volume.

“Thank you so much for inviting me,” Chloe says sweetly to Joan and Jacob.

Jacob glances in the rearview mirror. “Of course, kiddo.”

“We’re glad you could come,” Joan says, “but Harry invited you. He’s the one with the birthday.”

“Thanks, Harry.”

Joan turns her head so she can see Harry out of the corner of her eye. He leans against the window, pleased and blushing. “Yeah,” he says. “It’s cool. Just don’t tell anyone at school. They already think I’m weird. I don’t need anyone thinking I’m into musicals.”

“Weird is good,” Jacob says. “Weird means you’re interesting.”

“No,” says Harry. “Weird means you’re weird.”

“I won’t tell,” Chloe says magnanimously. She leans forward, grasping the back of Joan’s seat. “Joan, when you used to dance in Paris, were there ghost stories about the opera house?”

“Oh, some. There are ghost stories about most old theaters, I think.”

“Did anyone ever die there?”

“I’m sure. In fires and accidents. Probably of natural causes, too—audience members having heart attacks and things. And, way back, the whole opera company used to live in the building.”

“Do you think it’s haunted? Did anything spooky ever happen?”

“Spooky?” She remembers the red velvet box on the third loge, her first glimpse of Arslan, her reflection in his dressing room mirror. “No, not really. The basement is a little spooky. It’s stone with archways and things, kind of like a crypt. There are lots of different levels. There used to be stables. But now it’s mostly just stuff in storage, like sound equipment and old props and things.”

“Is there really a lake underneath?”

“There’s water but not really a lake. When they were building, water kept seeping through and ruining the foundations, so they gave up and made a cement tank for it. There’s a grate in the basement you can look through and see the water down below. Someone told me the water was for if there was a fire. I don’t know if that’s true. Performers aren’t really supposed to go down there. You have to make friends with the stagehands.” Joan wishes she were the kind of person who could make a good story out of that old murky cistern.

But Chloe seems delighted. “Wow,” she says. “That’s so cool. So maybe the
Phantom
story is partly true.”

Harry stirs. “Made-up things can be true,” he says. “Dad says it better, but it’s like, if a story matters to you, it’s true for you, even if it never happened. Like myths. Right, Dad?”

“Right,” says Jacob, pleased. “Or Bible stories.” After the words are out, Jacob glances at Chloe in the rearview mirror, remembering that Gary is now a Jesus freak.

“I feel that way about
Swan Lake
,” Joan offers quickly. “Some other ballets, too.
Romeo and Juliet
.”

“Shakespeare was so lucky to have that ballet to base his play on,” Jacob says.

“Ha, ha. The problem is I’ve only seen the play once. I’ve seen the ballet a million times.”

Chloe still says nothing, and Joan worries that Jacob offended her or she thinks they are being ridiculous, but then she says quietly, “I feel that way about pretty much everything.”

Joan reaches back with one arm. She finds Chloe’s familiar hard knot of a knee in the space behind her seat and pats it.

HARRY IS GLAD THE THEATER IS DARK FOR SEVERAL REASONS
.
THE
first is that he is mortified. He can barely bring himself to look at the effusion that’s happening onstage, all the singing and acting, the mist and the candelabras, the organ and the electric guitar, the decadent opera house set with gold, bare-breasted sculptures, red drapes, and a huge chandelier. For people to walk around onstage
singing
seems unnatural, a desecration of a space intended for the rigors of dance. Of course some ballets are all about drama and passion and swelling music, and of course dancers emote, but all that ardor is kept in check by their silence. Onstage, the girl Christine and her young suitor Raoul are singing a duet, and it all seems too obvious, too easy, too literal. They just sing the lyrics someone else wrote. Anyone could play these parts and get the point across. These performers are just people: people who can sing, which Harry cannot, but still just people. Dancers are not just people.

The second reason he appreciates the darkness is that, since he doesn’t want to look at the stage, he can look at Chloe, at least some of the time. His mother, without making a big deal about it, bought seats for herself and his dad on the other side of the theater from him and Chloe. He sees Chloe five days a week at dance, but they are always in motion, always observed. Since his family moved away, they are never quiet and still together anymore, the way they used to be when they watched TV or read books or hung out in the backyard. She had come to swim in his pool once right after they moved in, dropped off by Gary, who did not even turn his head to look at
the house before speeding away, but their old friendship, which had worn deep, inviting grooves through the old house and yard, could not seem to find purchase in this shiny new place. Harry had been excited about showing her the pool and by the prospect of her two-piece bathing suit, but they had become awkward and hostile with each other, brought up short by the smooth rectangle of water as though by an ancient riddle. If they were younger, they would have dived for rings or invented events for pool Olympics or done water ballet. If they were older, they would have known to float peacefully on the rafts or lie roasting on the chaises. But they didn’t know how to play anymore. They treaded water, chins at the surface. Chloe’s head looked small, sleek, and mean. “I thought it would be a bigger pool,” she said. “I guess it’s nice, though.”

She ducked beneath the surface and pushed off the bottom, turning into a long streak against the sun dapples, the pink halves of her bathing suit powered by her churning feet to the far end of the pool, where her sleek head popped up again and one thin arm emerged to clutch the edge. “This is boring,” she called.