Astonish Me (11 page)

“I’m dying to see you dance,” Joan says.

“Don’t be. I’m the same, just older, with all the same bad habits.”

“No, you were always wonderful.”

Joan has lined up the slices of her orange end to end like a train, and Elaine takes one from the middle and bites it in half. “I’m a workhorse.”

“You’re a star.” Joan doesn’t know if she wants her to be a star or not, fulfilled or not. She doesn’t know if Elaine thinks she is jealous, if that is why she is downplaying the miracle of becoming a principal.

“No. I don’t have that dazzle. I think I thought I could learn it. You watch dancers who have it, and you know it’s magic, but then when it comes to your own dancing, you tell yourself you just need to work harder. And then you work and work, and you’re still just you, and then one day you realize you’re not getting better, only older.”

“We’re all getting older.”

“Being older doesn’t matter as much for most people. It really doesn’t.”

Joan, wishing to reassure but also to needle, says, “You’re Mr. K’s muse. That’s important.”

Elaine flares slightly. “Yes, I got on the right bandwagon. I believe in him enough to serve him. I’m his biggest project. He’s made a life on me. And in return, every time he gets written about—and he will forever—I’ll get written about too. After we’re dead, people will still be wondering if we had sex. I’ll live on as an ambiguous appendage to a genius. I think there’s a blankness about me he likes. He projects onto me. He likes the idea of a vessel. It’s an honor and an insult. I don’t want to sound bitter. I’m not bitter. Sometimes I’m afraid he just couldn’t find anyone else so willing to be subsumed. So. There it is.”

“No,” Joan says, not knowing if she means to agree or disagree, surprised to feel some distaste about Elaine’s arrangement with Mr. K. She had not noticed herself becoming conventional, but, undeniably, she is out of practice deciphering relationships like theirs—or the way hers had been with Arslan—that are part love and part self-imposed misery and part ballet experiment. Her impulse is to tell Elaine to find a nice man to marry, but Elaine never will. Joan would not like it if she did. She prefers Elaine to remain fixed in her old life like an obsolete weather instrument gathering data no one ever sees.

Elaine stubs out her cigarette and says, “Do you ever hear from Arslan?”

“God, no.” Joan flicks her fingers the way Arslan would, shooing the idea away.

“Will you ever write to him?”

“No. I don’t know what I would say. What good would it do? He probably doesn’t even read his own mail. Some intern would send me a signed photo.”

“I don’t know. Maybe you’d put some demons to rest or something.”

“I don’t have any demons. I’m happy.” Elaine’s face betrays no skepticism, but Joan knows it’s there. “I love Jacob,” she says firmly “Of course.”

“Not of course. He was an escape hatch.”

“But I must have known it would be okay. On some level. I think I wasn’t open to loving him until I needed to be.”

“Like arranged marriages that turn out to be love marriages. Except it was always a love marriage for him.”

“Yes,” Joan says simply.

“And for you now too?”

“Yes.” Joan looks away, embarrassed. That she has finally fallen in love with Jacob is good luck for both of them, but to say so would demean it.

With an air of declassifying information, Elaine says, “I’m probably moving in with Mr. K. Do you think it’s a mistake?”

“I don’t know. What would qualify it as a mistake? Is he still … does he have boyfriends?”

“I assume so. I never ask. What
would
qualify it as a mistake? I don’t know what my threshold is for mistakes anymore. I used to make them all the time. I adjusted for them. Now I only do safe things. This doesn’t feel safe, though. It’s committing to something that people find strange. Maybe I’m worried we won’t be able to stand each other, and it’ll be over, and I’ll have nothing.” She restores the packets of sweetener to their ceramic box. “He doesn’t even screw the new girls anymore. This girl this morning told me—Never mind. It’s not important, only gross.”

“I want to hear.”

“No, I can’t say it out loud. It’ll make me feel sick. Forget it. We’re going to his dacha up the Hudson more. He’s different there. Nicer. The butterflies and wildflowers mellow him out. I keep expecting him to start wearing belted shirts like Tolstoy. He says he’ll marry me when I retire. I think he just wants to feel like less of an old queen.”

“God. Do you want to marry him?”

“I don’t want to marry anyone else. Maybe that’s half the battle. And I don’t want children. They deform the body.”

Joan adjusts her cardigan. “No kidding.”

“At least you’ve grown titties. Does Jacob want more?”

“Titties or children? No to boobs, I think, but yes to kids. We’ve been trying, but nothing.”

“How long?”

“A year and a half.”

“You want more, too?”

Jacob wants to go to a fertility doctor—just to
see
, he says. Joan won’t. She tells him they should be grateful for what they have. She doesn’t want to know. Reprieved from the burden of another baby, she has mourned the lost possibility more than she would have expected. “I do and I don’t. I can live with either.”

Elaine eyes her. Her shrewdness is more on the surface than it used to be. She seems shrewd and also weary, like a dictator who has weathered more than one coup and anticipates more. “Did you know that Arslan and Ludmilla split?” Elaine says.

“No.” Joan sits back. She feels a sour satisfaction and an odd disappointment. “I’m impressed they made it as long as they did.”

“I don’t think they’ve been together much the past few years.”

Joan lights another cigarette, offers the pack to Elaine. They angle their streams of smoke away from each other. “When did you fall in love with him?” Elaine asks.

“Arslan?”

“Jacob.”

“I saw him across the village square, and we did a big dance for all the peasants.” She hopes Elaine will be bought off by the joke, but Elaine waits without smiling. Joan looks away, says, “Little by little. It’s an accumulation of ordinary things.”

“Romantic.”

Joan bristles. “It is, in a way.”

“Romance is irrelevant, anyway.” Elaine smokes. “At least for me. I prefer collaboration. Speaking of, did you see Arslan’s special on PBS?
Rusakov and Friends
or whatever it was?”

“I saw the beginning,” Joan says, irritated that Elaine keeps bringing up Arslan, irritated at herself for being irritated. For a moment
she is nostalgic for her failed friendship with Sandy, Sandy’s lack of interest in her past. “Cheesy. That top hat. Do you think he’ll ever come back to the company?”

“I doubt it. I’ve heard he’s happy in Europe. They throw money at him. They can’t get enough of the weird ballets he’s making. I saw one in Milan—it was just him and a huge red rubber ball and a white ramp. It was actually fantastic.” Elaine looks up at the sky. “It’s so hot out.”

“You should have come in February.”

“But what else?” Elaine asks after a pause. She sits straight in her chair, arms square on the rests like a brooding empress. “What else is there?”

“Nothing really.” Joan smiles, melancholy, thinking that friendships go through cycles of extinction, that perhaps she and Elaine won’t be able to evolve quickly enough. “I’m boring.”

“No,” Elaine says without conviction.

“I am.”

“You have Harry. Harry’s not boring.”

Joan stubs out her cigarette and allows herself a half smile. She has made Harry, and Elaine will never have anything like him. “He’s just a little boy.”

“But maybe he’ll be a dancer.”

“Maybe,” Joan says. “Who knows. He doesn’t have to be.”

“Won’t you mind if he never tries?”

“Not at all.”

“Not true. But what else?”

There is too much to tell. Explaining themselves would be impossible, even an attempt would be exhausting, and Elaine has to go to rehearsal. Joan has to pick Harry up at school.

“Merde,” they say to each other upon parting, the way members of the corps do for luck just before going onstage.

II
 

FEBRUARY 1973—PARIS

J
OAN KNEELS IN A DARK BOX IN THE THIRD LOGE OF THE PALAIS GARNIER
, the Opéra, peeping over the red velvet railing. Six rickety chairs stand close around her, but she knows they creak and is careful not to disturb them. The houselights are down, but the glow from the stage picks out a profusion of gilded plasterwork: serene deities, trumpeting angels, lyres, garlands, flowers, oak leaves, masks, Corinthian columns, all deeply shadowed, piling up around the proscenium and among the boxes like the walls of a craggy gold cave, climbing to Chagall’s painted round ceiling of naked angels and voluptuous ballerinas and goats and chickens and lovers and blue Eiffel Tower and red-splotched rendering of the Palais itself. From the center of this hangs the great sleeping chandelier: an enormous gold and glass thistle hung upside down to dry, darkly gleaming.

The Kirov’s orchestra noodles around in the pit, waiting. At stage left, just in from the wings, the young star who has been the subject of so much hubbub stands in a heavy grey sweater, white tights, and thick army-green leg warmers pulled up to his thighs. Joan’s angle is not ideal—she is looking steeply down on him—but he seems too delicate and too boyish to be impressive. Most of the corps girls milling around in black leotards and white practice tutus are taller than he is. The ballerina who is his partner, however, is tiny, like a
fairy, and she stands facing away from him, smoking a cigarette in a long white holder and absently blowing rings of smoke. Her head is wrapped in a printed scarf. Rusakov makes one smooth turn around her and plucks the holder from her fingers. He skips backward, puffing and making faces at her. Not taking the bait, she watches impassively, then pivots and disappears into the wings. He tires of his own game at once and presses the cigarette in its holder into the hand of one of the corps girls. She appears terrified by the gift and passes it off to her neighbor, who rushes into the wings after its owner.

Joan is not supposed to be watching the rehearsal, but she can always claim she did not understand the remonstrations of the ballet master. Still, to be safe, she had crept in a back door and made her way higher and higher through the gloomy backstage passages and stairways until she emerged into the third loge, which was quiet and a little musty without crowds of gossiping, mingling Parisians. Its balconies overlook the bronze and marble excess of the
grand escalier
. There is a curved wall of closed doors, each with a round porthole and leading to a box. She had used an usher’s key, purloined in advance, to open the door of box 11.

Some invisible cue makes the dancers flee the stage and the orchestra collect itself. The conductor lifts his baton, slices downward. After a few bars, Rusakov launches out from the wings. He has shed the leg warmers and sweater, and his body, in tights and T-shirt, is perfectly proportioned, muscled but not bulky. His legs appear longer than they are; his ass is round and high. Rumor has it that the Kirov won’t cast him as a romantic lead because he is small, preferring to use him as Ali the slave boy or the Bluebird or the Golden Idol, but his stage presence is aggressive and masculine, arrogant. He has arched, almost pointed eyebrows and very dark eyes that bounce imperiously off the empty theater. At first the raked French stages had given Joan trouble. She would migrate toward the pit on her turns, earning a few kicks from the next girl in line. But the stages in Russia are raked, too, and Rusakov shows
no discomfort as he flutters downstage, hooking his body from side to side in a series of brisés volés. Another rumor is that he bleaches his hair to look more Russian, less Tatar, and the contrast of his feathered blond mop against his olive skin and black, restless eyes is striking.

The choreography is old-fashioned, but as Rusakov circles the stage doing high, perfect coupés jetés en tournant, his technique is not fusty but pure. His movements are quick but unhurried, impossible in their clarity and difficulty and extraordinary in how they seem to burst from nowhere, without any apparent effort or preparation. But the beauty of Arslan’s dancing is not what moves Joan to cry in her red velvet aerie: it is a dream of perfection blowing through the theater. She has been dancing since before her fifth birthday, and she realizes that the beauty radiating from him is what she has been chasing all along, what she has been trying to wring out of her own inadequate body. Forgetting herself, she leans out over the railing, wanting to get closer.
Étonnez-moi
, Diaghilev had said to his dancers in the Ballets Russes. Astonish me.

As Rusakov executes a final leap offstage and the music abruptly ends, the silence that follows is an injustice. Someone starts shouting in Russian. It is the artistic director. He leaps from his seat and charges up the aisle, bellowing. Rusakov reappears, his face blank. He listens to the harangue but does not nod, only stares at his slippers. Without waiting for the other man to finish, he stalks to the back of the stage, and with no music except the lone, rising, furious voice, comes whirling forward in the fastest chain of steps Joan has ever seen. Each step leads inexorably and precisely into the next. Nearly in the pit, he stops and holds an arabesque, all his momentum falling away, leaving a flawless statue. Then he spits and walks offstage. A deeper silence than before follows. Joan looks up at Chagall’s angels. Their fleshy wings are like those of penguins, more like fins than tools of flight. As she gets to her feet, she bumps into the chairs, making a clatter, but she doesn’t look back to see if anyone has heard.