Astonish Me (32 page)

“Fully stretching, Harry,” Elaine says. “Yes. Okay. Reach, stay, stay, stay, and fifth.”

Chloe finds Harry in the mirror. He has a bandanna tied around his head. His eyes bore holes in space. If she didn’t dance with Harry, she would not know him anymore. The situation is beyond unusual, no denying it. When she started seeing Arslan, he had been jealous of both of them, certain there was some revenge plot at work. After Ludmilla told him the truth, and again after she and Arslan married, he distanced himself from her for a while, but he came back. She knows sometimes he wanted never to see her again, as, when she was younger, she had wished he would disappear, but they have accepted that they are yoked together. They were in dress rehearsals when she told him she was pregnant; he had no time to pull away. He had been forced to endure and to accept. The choreography includes the daredevil fish dive they had so clumsily attempted in the basement studio the night they first had sex, and she told him so he would not drop her and also so the audience would see his fear. She wonders if their shared childhood, spent hearing bizarre stories of
love and devastation and enchantment, women dying from heartbreak, women turning into birds, prepared them for the tangling of their lives, if this ballet is a form of therapy.

When they go to center floor, Arslan retreats to the back. He will not do the whole class, not the allégro. Age has humbled him, Chloe gathers. She is glad she did not know him when he was young.

Harry drinks from his water bottle, wipes his face, comes to the front. She catches his eye, sees his preoccupation. He is probably thinking of his father. Jacob has promised to come, but his flight won’t land until the afternoon. Harry thinks he’s cutting it close on purpose, so he can pretend something went wrong and stopped him from showing up. But only if Jacob sees the performance and still loves Harry afterward will Harry forgive himself for dancing the role.

“… and one, croisé. And two, open,” Elaine is saying. “Lift three, full ronde de jambe to the back, promenade, six, seven. You hold the eight. Like this. Okay? Clear? Then prepare.”

Side by side in the mirror, Chloe and Harry cross their legs in fifth position, lift their arms.

JACOB SITS IN FRONT OF THE TV IN BOXERS AND A T-SHIRT. DAWN HAS
barely broken. A morning talk show is on. Behind the hosts, outside their fishbowl studio, New York is green with spring. He stands and looks out the window at the driveway of his rented townhouse, goes and looks out the other window, looks in the refrigerator, snaps his fingers, swings his arms, sits down again. He has decided not to go. The time when he should have left for the airport has come and gone. But he still might make the flight if he leaves now. He will feel better after it is really too late. Or he will feel worse. He doesn’t know. How can they ask him to do this? How can they ask him to do anything? But it’s not really
them
asking. Joan hasn’t tried to contact him in months. It’s Harry. But Joan would want him to go, too, he knows.

He gazes at the TV and wills it to give him a sign. A commercial
for frozen pizza comes on. Jacob turns off the TV. It is not a sign, but to have asked for one is enough. He has not packed a suitcase. He grabs the garment bag that holds his tuxedo from his closet and tosses some random clothes, his toothbrush, and a book in another bag. He will buy whatever else he needs.

At the airport, while he panics that he might miss the flight he has been contriving to miss all along, his agitation and lack of luggage attract some attention from security. Eventually, after Jacob’s urgent explanations, the guard gives him a slow up and down and says, “All right, you seem harmless.”
Harmless
, Jacob repeats to himself as he hurries down the terminal, emasculated but giddy.
I am harmless
. Only when the plane is airborne, swinging out over the Pacific, gathering speed for its long arc back over the continent, does the dread return and wrap around him. He peers out of it into an oval of pale sky and morning sun. He will not disappoint Harry, but he will pay a price of whispers and pity.

The plane’s engine is the audible rush of hours passing, time pushing him to New York even as he braces against it. He tries not to think, only to surrender to the flow of obligation. He is on the wrong side of the plane to see the missing twin towers. He sees the Rockaways and the ocean instead. Then he is through the airport, and a taxi is pulling him past the deteriorating flying saucers of the World’s Fair, past row houses and a cemetery and neighborhoods that mean nothing to him, over the Queensboro Bridge among secretive Town Cars, Midtown standing up like a waiting bully. Then a rushed shower, three attempts before his bow tie is tied, cursing his clumsy fingers and his sweating, miserable face in the mirror, wishing for Joan to help him, remembering not to wish for Joan. A minibar bottle of Jim Beam. He hurries through the city with all the other hurrying people, and then he has crossed the plaza and given his ticket to the usher and climbed the stairs, looking down so as not to see the posters of Harry and Chloe and Arslan, not to see anyone he might recognize. He is exposed and alone but surviving, and he is in his seat.

Joan is somewhere in the theater. Jacob does not see her, does not look for her. He had asked Harry to get them seats as far apart as possible, and it seems his request was honored. Audience chatter rises as a movie star in a spangled gown finds her seat near the front. Other famous people are here, politicians and pop stars and moguls, all of Arslan’s dazzling friends. Jacob sees Sandy Wheelock making her way down the aisle in emerald moiré silk, on the arm of a grey-haired man.

At first Jacob had told Harry no, under no circumstances would he attend the premiere of
Rodina
, the monstrous ego trip of a ballet about the man who had pulled Jacob’s life out from under him like a cheap rug. But Harry had made the point that Jacob would otherwise spend the night alone getting very drunk, and so he should probably just come and support his son instead.
Son
. Harry uses the word a lot these days, more than is necessary, and Jacob knows he is being reassured, something he finds both irritating and, truthfully, reassuring.

Tired of craning his neck for celebrities and unwilling to be impressed by their abundance, he opens his program. The advertisements in ballet programs are always for expensive things, watches and fancy hotels and, toward the back, private schools and dance academies and barge trips down the Danube. Usually there is an insert on colored paper with that night’s cast, but because this is a premiere and because Arslan is the most important being in the universe, the usher had handed Jacob a stiff sheet of embossed card stock. Beneath
Rodina
stamped in red at the top along with the date and above the names of the dancers in the company and the list of scenes and acts, there is printed the following:

Harry’s name is indeed terrible for a dancer, as its bearer had whined throughout his adolescence, but Jacob is unexpectedly and absurdly moved to tears at the sight of it. Harry could have changed it, taken a stage name or, horrifically, Rusakov’s name, but he had kept the name Jacob gave him.
I want you to name him
, Joan had said.
I don’t want to choose
. Jacob closes the program without reading the synopsis. He knows the ballet is the story of Arslan’s life (“But abstract,” Harry says), and that is enough.

He hears a small, anxious laugh and looks up at Joan. She is standing awkwardly in front of the person on Jacob’s left, a tall man who has opted not to get up to let her through but instead to swivel his knees as far over as he can and brace his torso backward as though trying to evade a searchlight. Joan points at the empty seat next to Jacob and cringes an apology. He has not seen her in a year, nor has he spoken to her or replied to her e-mails or given in to any of Harry’s suggestions for friendly dinners or holiday reunions. But he has not been to see a lawyer, either. He has dated a few women without much enthusiasm. Joan looks thinner than ever, a little drawn in the face and, under tight sleeves of sheer black chiffon, withered in the arms, but the sight of her is not unpleasant. Really, he could almost laugh at how uncomfortable she looks, trapped against the shins of a stranger. The lights dim.

“Jacob?” she whispers. “There’s nowhere else.”

He swings his legs to one side, letting her pass. The conductor’s solemn face, flowing hair, white tie, and black shoulders pop up from the orchestra pit like the bust of an Asian Beethoven. He nods in acknowledgment of the applause and descends again. Only the tip of his baton and the uppermost waves of his hair are visible. The baton jerks once; the overture begins. Jacob’s pulse speeds up so much that he feels he is blurring around his edges. If he gets through the evening without having a heart attack, he will consider it a victory. He dips into his pocket and finds the other minibar bottle of Jim Beam. He unscrews the cap and drinks half of it. He pauses, considers offering some to Joan, swallows the other half. Joan’s hand alights on his
forearm and then springs away like a grasshopper. “It’s only a ballet,” she whispers. “The worst is over.”

This calms him a little. Maybe she is right. All the things that will happen onstage have, in fact, already happened. The performance is an illusion, but the past twenty-four years have also been an illusion. After Ludmilla’s call, he had gone back to bed, telling Joan, who barely stirred, that it was a wrong number. For five and a half hours he lay paralyzed, packed so closely inside his thoughts that they absorbed him, sucked him out of his body. A series of revelations exploded, bringing a blinding, excruciating pain that felt almost ecstatic. As dawn broke, his visions faded into the dull whir and flicker of a film projector replaying his life, the life of a fool, until the alarm clock finally beeped his release. He got up and called in sick. Then he called the ballet studio and left a message that Joan would not be teaching, and while Joan showered, he sat at the kitchen table and readied himself for battle, preparing his arsenal of accusations, arranging them into a neat line, stroking and polishing them.

“I know why you married me,” he told her later, following her up the stairs. “Because I have dark eyes. Because I’m not tall. Because you knew you could pass his son off as mine.”

Joan stopped and turned, slowly, deliberately, her elegant head swiveling on her slender neck, and the grace that had once made him proud now made him want to sweep her feet violently out from under her. “I married you,” she said, “because I wanted a life with you.”

“Clearly not. Clearly not because you’ve been using our family as a ballet sleeper cell while you tinkered around in your studio and perfected this Frankenstein monster that you
bred
. You
made
him. I was just the patsy who gave you the time and money to do it.”

“Harry is your
son
.”

They had not known then that Ludmilla had called Harry, too.

“He’s your
experiment
,” Jacob spluttered. “Your championship pedigree science project.”

She retreated up the stairs, down the hall, past Harry’s room. “That’s not what I wanted. It’s not what I was doing.”

“What were you doing? Tell me what you were doing. Explain to me what you were doing. I’m listening. Tell me. Tell me. Tell me.”

He followed her into their bedroom, and they faced off across the bed like actors in a play. “I wanted you!” she said. “I wanted a family! I wanted to be important. I had no idea what it meant to be content. I’d spent my whole life laboring away for something that’s impossible, but you—this family was possible.”

“This family is a lie.”

“No. The secret is nothing compared to everything else. You can have a secret that stops
mattering
.”

“Oh, sure. Sure. Like a Nazi war criminal, going about his business in Buenos Aires, doing some errands, taking the kids to school. Nothing matters but the present. Clean slate. All you’re saying is that it didn’t matter
to you
, and I don’t even buy that.”

“You’re the one who says things can be true without actually being true. This is true, Jacob. You gave me a life. What we are is true. You know me. It’s been twenty-two
years
. No one knows me like you do. You know the truth about me.”

“Do I? That’s great—I’m glad I know the truth about somebody, because I don’t know the truth about my own fucking self.”

“You are Harry’s
father
!”

Jacob had wanted to deny and to agree with equal fervency. “You didn’t want more children. You would have his child, but you didn’t want mine.” He mimicked her: “ ‘Let’s just count ourselves lucky we had Harry.’ You wanted his child, but you wanted me to raise it. I don’t have any children, Joan. You took that away from me. Unless I’m infertile, which seems possible now, and I never knew. In which case,
thank you
, Joan. Thank you for loaning me a son. But I guess now I should step aside. What’s behind door number one? It’s Arslan Rusakov! The father you’ve always dreamed of! The greatest ballet dancer in the world and—now that I think about it—genetic material that makes a whole
lot
of
sense
.”

“Don’t say that,” she said, crying. “Please don’t.”

“Would you have come to Chicago if he hadn’t gotten you pregnant?” he demanded. “Would you have married me?”

The helplessness on her face had launched the silence. It had not taken hold right away—there were more battles to be had—but he had seen the truth, nodded curtly, turned away from her and their bed, and said nothing else for the rest of that day. Gradually more days were silent than not, and then whole weeks, and finally he had left the house and her, rented the townhouse close to school. Harry had recovered far more quickly from the news, or else he was determined not to show Jacob his true reaction. He said Arslan had always been so important to him, even before he knew him, that, in a way, there wasn’t much room for him to take on any more significance. Maybe, he said, on a subconscious level he had already guessed and so was on his way to being used to the idea. “Nothing has changed,” he told Jacob a thousand futile times. “Please, Dad, don’t let things change. I’ll never think of anyone but you as my father.”