Astonish Me (33 page)

“Please still be proud of me,” Harry had begged. “Please.”

And that plea was why Jacob had endured the news that Arslan and Harry were going to appear together on
60 Minutes
to tell their story, why he had tried not to be demolished by Harry’s participation in this ballet, why he had taken Harry to the Bahamas after Chloe and Arslan had gotten married and kept him company while he stared at the ocean in silence, why he didn’t miss his flight, and why he is now sitting in the dark with thousands of glittering people waiting to see his own life be danced by a man named Georges Lazaresco. Things have changed. If he hopes for one thing, he hopes that someday he will be able to look at Harry and not immediately be reminded that his son is not his son. He is still proud of Harry, but the pride is different than it used to be: it has been cut away from his pride in himself and left to stand on its own.

At first the music is sharp, jangly, modern, and then a melody swells up, strong but melancholy, Russian in flavor. Jacob remembers Harry’s Russian music phase, triggered by
The Hunt for Red October
. He can smell Joan’s perfume. He has sat beside her in so many dark theaters, smelling that smell, waiting to watch Harry. He leans toward her and whispers, “We’ve been parent trapped.” After all the months of silence he would not have expected his first words to her to be a joke, but he is glad not to want to heap more recriminations on her and surprised to be grateful for her presence beside him as the curtain goes up, revealing a bare stage and, at its center, Harry in fifth position, arms low, dressed like a student in black tights and white T-shirt. His hair is longer than usual and has been lightened and cut in a feathered seventies style. The resemblance to Rusakov is unmistakable. A murmur ripples through the audience.

THE FIRST ACT IS ABOUT RUSSIA AND THE KIROV; THE SECOND ACT IS
about the defection and America and fame; the third act is about age and youth. There is a story, but it’s not complicated. Most of Harry’s role, the Young Dancer, is based in ballet, but Arslan has forced him to loosen up, to let his hands flail, to push his movements slightly off balance and do some ugly, turned-in steps. Harry watches the beginning of the second act from the wings, as Chloe dances with the corps and then, subtly, against it. Besides Arslan and Elaine, only he knows she is pregnant, and he thinks he can see the change in her, even though her stomach is perfectly flat, her breasts still minuscule.

The first act ended with a pas de deux between Harry and Chloe that Arslan had said must be passionate but not romantic, two strangers grasping each other only as bodies but also, somehow, with a sense of destiny, of purpose. An image of the ceiling of the Paris Opéra was projected onto the blank drop cloth behind them, Chagall’s angels and goats.
Why did you choose Mom?
he had asked Arslan without receiving an answer. He had asked his mother too, and she claimed to have no idea. She said she wasted years wondering but eventually concluded there might not have been a reason.

Chloe hurled herself at him, and he caught her in the fish dive, his arm around her belly, around what is beginning there. When
Harry thinks it through, that he is dancing the role of his biological father while his ex-girlfriend plays his mother while pregnant in real life with his half sibling, he becomes disoriented and troubled, and so he prefers not to think but to simply inhabit the role.

He has done a lot of simply inhabiting lately. He uses his old trick of closing his eyes and driving everything away, then dropping back into his body. If he could be only his physical self, he would be happy. You can be happy with only your body, he thinks. But Elaine says that he is incomplete unless he inhabits his body and his mind and the reality around him. He has inhabited the knowledge that Arslan is his father, that his parents are not speaking, that Chloe is a marvelous, stunning dancer and he had been a blind, conceited little idiot when he dumped her. As he watches from the wings, she turns a horrendously difficult double pirouette, the heel of her supporting leg just off the ground, the toe of her other shoe barely brushing the stage, as though drawing a circle in the snow. Arslan was the one to recognize her for what she is, to turn her strangeness into power. Harry has inhabited his regret.

The corps disperses, scattering into the wings, their pointe shoes making a hollow galloping sound. Chloe is alone onstage, and Harry lifts his arms, prepares, and goes out to meet her. They dance together victoriously at first, full of freedom, and then awkwardly, misunderstanding each other, moving to conflicting tempos. The dance breaks down. Other dancers come and go around them. The Russian is always sliding in between them, a delicate, sinister ballerina who snuffs out the American’s wildness, makes her ordinary by overpowering her with impossible challenges to her technique. Harry lifts one and then the other, and soon they are only bodies, only weight and movement. The ballet is the result of endless repetitions: uncounted rehearsals of acts, of scenes, of combinations, of steps. The steps themselves are only the most recent repetitions of movements he has done thousands, probably millions, of times in different rooms, on different stages, with different partners. He dances through a confusion of echoes. There are echoes of echoes, of other
people, other places, other lives, other times and places. He wants to drive the echoes away, to be unobscured by their expanding, bouncing rings of memory.

At the end of the act, he dances alone, the speed and difficulty of his steps increasing as he goes. His concentration is so absolute, his body so close to the breaking point, that darkness contracts around him. There is nothing outside himself. He turns grandes pirouettes à la seconde at center stage, spotting off a red light at the back of the theater. Somewhere his parents are sitting together, watching him. His head whips around and around. Sweat flies from him like spray from a fountain. He can’t turn anymore, but he does, his stomach and back aching, his leg burning. His lungs, which have always looked after themselves, now need to be reminded—ordered—to fill with air, then begged to fill again, one more time. What confusion of fate and electricity will one day tell his heart to stop? Could you live forever if you had enough will? He turns and turns until his leg drops of its own accord to retiré and he is spun through two final rotations before he falls to his knees and the lights go off. The fall is planned, but he would not be able to stay on his feet anyway. A breath, and then the applause crashes onto his back as the curtain comes down. He gets to his feet; the curtain flies up, and he bows. He can see the conductor, a few rows of faces, and then nothing, a roaring emptiness. He bows again.

AS THE HOUSELIGHTS COME UP FOR INTERMISSION, JOAN AND JACOB SIT
stunned, like two people picked up by a tornado and then set down again. Jacob says something Joan doesn’t quite catch. “Sorry?” she says.

“I said, what happens now?”

Joan pages needlessly through her program. “Now it’s mostly Arslan and Chloe. Harry says it’s good. He said the dance is about age and also the contrast between the limitations of the body and
the way love makes you”—she gives an embarrassed flip of one hand—“free.”

“Free,” says Jacob. “No, it doesn’t.” They sit, knees twisted sideways to let people pass. “Are you in it again?”

“No, in the third act ‘The American’ means Chloe. Chloe as Chloe.” Joan has seen a dress rehearsal.

“Is Harry in it again?”

“At the very end, he and Arslan and Chloe dance a pas de trois.”

Jacob blows out a breath. “I might have to get out of here.”

The thought of sitting beside an empty seat for the rest of the performance distresses Joan. She is alone so much now, she should be used to empty seats. But she touches her fingertips to her temple, shielding her face from him.

“I’ll come back another day,” he says gently. “I promised Harry I would see the whole thing.”

She digs in her purse for a tissue and nods, pressing the back of her hand to her dripping nose. She will not beg him. She has already said everything that can be said.

“Joan.” Jacob rests a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t cry.”

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m trying not to. I just don’t want you to go.”

Pressure from his fingers. She looks up. He is watching her intently. He says, “You could leave, too. We could get a drink.”

A tiny, foolish tendril of hope unfurls.

“Please stay,” she says. “Stay until the end.”

V
 

FEBRUARY 1973—PARIS

A
RSLAN STUDIES HIMSELF IN THE MIRROR
,
SURROUNDED ON THREE
sides by lightbulbs. The girl had written her name and address in kohl pencil on a scrap of paper before she left. What kind of place is Virginia? He folds the paper carefully, places it inside an eye shadow compact, and pushes the compact to the bottom of his makeup bag. She must be a real dancer, this girl. She had the cursedness, the insatiability, the doom. Other girls, many girls, have wanted him, but their desire was always playful or sultry. Her desire was like a whip at her back. When he looked into her eyes, he could see she was suffering from it, the wanting, and for a moment, they understood each other.
Tu m’étonnes
, she said. You astonish me.

So there are real dancers in America. He had not been sure before. Now he will go. He will find this girl again and dance with her. When he is homesick or uncertain, she will remind him of this, the moment when he decided.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My first thanks are to my first reader: my agent, Rebecca Gradinger, who patiently guided this project through many incarnations. For that, and for being generally fantastic, she is the object of my constant gratitude.

Jordan Pavlin, brilliant editor and stellar human, always knows what is missing and what is superfluous and shares her insights elegantly and humanely. I can’t imagine a better reader.

At Knopf and Vintage: thanks to Kate Runde, Biz Lindsay, Andrea Robinson, Caroline Bleeke, and Alex Houstoun.

My extended publishing family lives in London and works at Blue Door and HarperCollins. Thanks to Patrick Janson-Smith, Laura Deacon, Louise Swannell, and Stuart Bache.

I’m privileged to work with Gráinne Fox, Melissa Chinchillo, Sylvie Greenberg, and Rachel Crawford at Fletcher & Co. and am thankful for their expertise, help, and good cheer. Thanks also to Fletcher alumna Mink Choi.

Much of this book was written while I was in residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. I am grateful to that institution for providing space for artists to live and work and to Stanford University for giving me the opportunity to go.

Thank you, Lily Stockman, for so generously and patiently sharing your aesthetic wisdom and for your fanatical cheerleading.

The wise and wonderful Nina Schloesser might not remember the dog walk in Los Altos when we talked through how my short story “Battements” could be expanded, but I do. That conversation was a crucial spark. I owe you one, Nina.

Last, thanks to my mom, who started taking me to the ballet when I was a little squirt. Without lifelong exposure to her love for dance, this book would never have been written.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Maggie Shipstead is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. Her first novel,
Seating Arrangements
, was a national bestseller, a finalist for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, and the winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize and the
Los Angeles Times
Book Prize for First Fiction.

Astonish Me

By Maggie Shipstead

Reading Group Guide

ABOUT THIS READING GROUP GUIDE

The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your reading group’s discussion of
Astonish Me
, Maggie Shipstead’s first novel since her award-winning, national best-selling debut,
Seating Arrangements
.

ABOUT THE BOOK

From the author of the widely acclaimed debut novel
Seating Arrangements
, winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize and the
Los Angeles Times
Book Prize for First Fiction: a gorgeously written, fiercely compelling glimpse into the passionate, political world of professional ballet and its magnetic hold over two generations.

Astonish Me
is the irresistible story of Joan, a ballerina whose life has been shaped by her relationship with the world-famous dancer Arslan Rusakov, whom she helps defect from the Soviet Union to the United States. While Arslan’s career takes off in New York, Joan’s slowly declines, ending when she becomes pregnant and decides to marry her longtime admirer, a PhD student named Jacob. As the years pass, Joan settles into her new life in California, teaching dance and watching her son, Harry, become a ballet prodigy himself. But when Harry’s success brings him into close contact with Arslan, explosive secrets are revealed that shatter the delicate balance Joan has struck between her past and present.