Astonish Me (20 page)

The painted trim on the Wheelocks’ windows and eaves is peeling and their stucco is mildewed. A row of cypress trees grows
tall and shaggy beside their driveway and casts a serrated shadow onto the Bintzes’ front lawn, stunting the grass. The lightbulbs in the fixture over their front door have all gone out and not been replaced; only their doorbell, a button of peach-colored light, interrupts the darkness. Jacob allows himself to be dragged to the ballet twice a year or so, and the Wheelock house reminds him a little of the vine-covered, narcoleptic kingdom in
The Sleeping Beauty
. Joan, too, presiding over Chloe’s and Harry’s training with alarming intensity, has started to seem like something out of a ballet, a dark sorceress.

Jacob has come to accept that there will be no second child, but he keeps waiting for Harry to turn out more as he had expected. There is nothing wrong with being considered a little weird by other kids, but he had been certain Harry would be nerd weird, that his would be a life of the mind. Instead, Jacob finds himself in the company of a son who sings scores by Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev in the shower and has a favorite brand of tights and possesses troubling thonglike undergarments and can do endless pull-ups and spends all his time with girls and idolizes Arslan Rusakov. Not a single day passes when Jacob is not treated to the name of his wife’s former lover coming from the lips of his son. Arslan this, Arslan that. And Joan, despite her stated antipathy for Rusakov, does nothing to discourage Harry. She buys the videotapes he circles in ballet catalogs, obligingly records every PBS special that features Rusakov. They have an entire cabinet devoted to their ballet video library, rows of tapes marked carefully in Harry’s evolving handwriting:
The Best of Rusakov
,
Swan Lake
,
Rusakov Dances Jerome Robbins
,
Coppélia
,
Phoenix Raiman Tribute
. Joan and Harry sit on the couch together, pausing, rewinding, and discussing like football coaches watching game films. Harry knows all the other dancers, too, gets excited when Elaine Costas appears. There is a recording of
Romeo and Juliet
from when Joan was in the corps. She covers her eyes when she is onstage, even as Harry shouts, “There you are! There you are!”

Jacob had taken down the photo of Joan and Rusakov from their
hallway, claiming a need to redecorate, but Harry rescued it and spirited it away to his bedroom.

“Dad,” says Harry from the shadows of the passenger seat. “Will it make you uncomfortable if I ask you something?”

Jacob hesitates. When his mother, Harry’s grandmother, voices her usual lines—“Isn’t ballet something girls do?” or “Couldn’t Joan have left well enough alone?”—he defends his son and wife fiercely, and when she once asked Harry why he couldn’t have a hobby that wasn’t for queers, Jacob had taken her outside and told her she had a choice between being banned from seeing her grandson or shutting up. Still, he has wondered—wonders every day—if Harry is gay. All he knows for sure is that his son envies another man’s
ballon
. “Maybe,” he says, “but I can live with a little discomfort.”

“Okay. This is it. How do you know if you’re in love?”

They are only two blocks from the house, so Jacob pulls over and switches off the engine. He thinks for a minute before speaking. “I think it’s different for different people, but the conventional wisdom is that when you’re around the person you’re in love with, you feel happy, more than happy—euphoric. And you want to be around that person all the time. You don’t notice that person’s faults. Some people say their hearts beat faster. They feel jittery. I think you know it when you feel it.”

He and Harry are both staring forward out the windshield as if they are still driving. All those years ago, when Jacob drove Joan out to the beach with plans to kiss her, the tension of loving her had been so electric, so torturous, that he had worried about cardiac arrest, about being killed by his own desire. Now that he is finally—finally, after more than twenty years—sure of her love, the longing has vanished. He still loves her, but no passion, especially not one germinated in a hothouse of adolescent despair, could survive so much familiarity and certainty. She has changed, too. She is not so wary anymore, not always in retreat, not unknowable. They are two animals inhabiting the same den, each accepting the presence of the other, going about the business of living.

“Is that helpful?” he says to Harry, who is quiet. “I don’t know how to describe the feeling except in clichés. And being ‘in love’ is different from loving someone. The really intense feelings don’t last. Does that help? It’s a big question.”

“Yeah, it’s just, in ballets, people just kind of put it out there, you know? But in real life, you’re supposed to be cool.”

“Maybe sometimes.” Tiny droplets have collected on the windshield, shutting them in. Jacob is much more nervous than he would like to be. “Are you in love with anyone in particular?”

“OF COURSE HE’S IN LOVE WITH CHLOE,”
JOAN SAYS THAT NIGHT IN THE
bathroom while she plucks her eyebrows at one sink and Jacob, in T-shirt and boxers, flosses at the other. “Anyone can see that.”

Jacob attends to his incisors, making a rabbit face. “I didn’t. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“He hasn’t told me directly. I didn’t want to gossip about him.”

“All we ever do is gossip about Harry. It’s half the reason people have kids.”

Joan puts witch hazel on a cotton ball and wipes her brows. “Yes, we definitely talked over the gossip possibilities before Harry was conceived.”

Opening wide to access his molars, Jacob grunts, conceding.

“Anyway,” Joan says, “he’s in class with Chloe four days a week. She’s always over here. They’re the age for crushes now. It’s the natural progression. I think it’s unrequited, so what difference does it make?”

He rinses out his mouth and spits into the sink, then he straightens up and looks at Joan, his lips wet. “Unrequited? She thinks she can do better?”

“She’s just a kid. She thinks she’s cool. But now you can stop worrying he’s gay.”

“I wasn’t. Now I’m worried about Chloe Wheelock breaking
Harry’s poor vulnerable heart. Let’s drop it. I feel uncomfortable intruding into our kid’s hormones.”

“You’re the one who brought it up. I’m right about the gossip—see?”

“I still hope he falls out of love with her soon. He will, won’t he?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know her very well.”

“What? What do you mean? You spend all your time with her.”

She is tired and doesn’t want to explain that she and Chloe communicate mostly through touch, gesture, French words. Joan knows Chloe’s knees well and her ankles and wrists; she is always touching them, shaking them loose, adjusting their angle. In fact, her deepest knowledge of the girl is of her joints. When Joan is giving Chloe a combination, she demonstrates what she wants, skimming across the floor, sketching the movements, murmuring their names, saying, “Like this, en arrière, and then—” and then, with her body, she suggests a glissade or a pas de bourrée and says, “See?” And Chloe sees. But the girl’s character is not yet fully formed, and the parts of it that most concern Joan—grit, discipline, expressiveness, sensitivity, control—are unproven. She is not far enough into her novitiate for Joan to know if she will see it through, if dance is an infatuation or a calling.

“Let the puppies have their love,” she says to Jacob.

“The puppy,” he says. “His love. Anyway, are we really sure he’s not gay? Maybe he wants to
be
Chloe.”

“That’s something your mother would say.”

“I thought he was in love with Arslan Rusakov.”

Joan rubs lotion vigorously onto her arms, concentrating on turning the white swoops of cream into a sheen on her skin, examining her elbows, interweaving her slick fingers and pulling them apart with enough force to make her knuckles sting. Harry’s fascination with Arslan is her fault, of course. He thinks his obsession is his own, but he has caught it from her. If she had known from the beginning how serious Harry would become about ballet, she might
have been more careful not to let her voice or her face betray how important this man had been, but it has been such a relief to have someone around who wants to talk about dance. It has been such a pleasure to let her son begin to know her, not just as she is but as she was.

“He is a little bit,” she tells Jacob. “But it’s not sexual. It’s a dance crush. I don’t know what I would do if it were sexual.”

“So you worried about him being gay, too?”

“I wouldn’t care if he were gay.”

“What then? Too weird to have your son be in love with your ex?”

Joan meets his eyes in the mirror. Sometimes she thinks he is giving her more opportunities for sarcasm as they get older, and sometimes she thinks she’s just been spending too much time with teenagers. She says, “What would be weird about that?”

“Whatever it is, it’s already weird. And what’s this scrapbook you apparently have of you and Arslan?”

Facing him, she loops her arms around his waist, leaning back, making him brace to support her weight. It’s been so long since he’s seemed jealous or possessive that the peeved look on his face makes her pleasantly nostalgic. She’d had so much power over him once. Power was her prize for not loving him fully, her compensation for not having been loved by Arslan. She wishes she could tell him that he, the boy who helped her find her classroom on the first day of high school, is the great miracle of her life. He has always pushed her to seek contentment, and he had waited patiently for her to realize that he would be the source of it. But, to express her gratitude, she would have to acknowledge how she had entered their marriage stupidly believing she was making some kind of compromise. “Oh, that.”

“Do you send him valentines?”

“I do. Big red construction paper hearts with glitter. I don’t know … the scrapbook … it’s a thing I made when I was young and crazy. I was trying to prove that what was happening was real.”

“I think Harry wants to trade me in for him.”

“No, he doesn’t. Not really. Because then Arslan would just be his boring dad. Besides, he likes you.”

“He
does
? Oh, good. Sometimes it seems like I’m the only dad in town who has to feel inadequate because he’s not a famous ballet dancer.”

“I think all men probably struggle with that from time to time.”

“Is it too late to challenge this Arslan guy to a dance-off?”

“It’s never too late for a dance-off.”

Gently, he disengages her arms, sets her upright. “All I’m saying is that sometimes this whole thing with Harry and Arslan gets weird.”

“I know. You’ve said. And I’ve said that Arslan is the obvious choice of idols for Harry. But I really think it’ll fade. Harry will get better. Arslan will get older. Harry will want to be the one who’s a god. This is how it works. I’ve seen it before.”

“Why couldn’t he have stayed in Russia where he belongs? Why couldn’t you have left him at a Canadian gas station?”

She puts her palm on his stomach, and he sucks in, stretches up on tiptoes, and lifts his arms over his head in a ballet pose, looking down at her with mock hauteur. She says, “I’ve asked myself the same thing.”

JACOB LIES AWAKE. WHEN HE IS SURE JOAN IS ASLEEP, HE SLIDES OUT
of bed and, turning the doorknob slowly so the latch doesn’t click, goes out into the hall. Pumpkin-colored light from the streetlamp washes down the stairs, and Jacob descends quietly through it, barefoot. Without turning on any lights, he navigates the darker, cooler downstairs, his toes curled under to avoid catching on corners or table legs. Only when he is in the garage, on the chilly, dusty concrete, does he feel for a switch. The fluorescent bars flicker and pop on, humming. He looks around at his parked car, the pile of bikes, the washer and dryer and sacks of plant food. Two boogie boards lean against the wall, still crusted with sand from the summer. Cardboard
boxes are stacked in one corner, never unpacked after the move, full of stuff that did not fit easily into this new Californian house and life: winter clothes, relics of childhood, relics of grandparents, things saved because to throw them away now would be to admit the foolishness of having saved them in the first place. The top box has JOAN written on it in black marker and creased flaps that are already partly open, scraps of tape curling back from their edges.

Now that Jacob has come all this way, committed to this self-indulgent and possibly upsetting fact-finding mission, it occurs to him that Harry has probably hoarded the scrapbook away in his room with all his other Rusakovian treasures, and he is preemptively annoyed with Joan for letting that happen. But when he pulls the flaps back and peers into the box, there is a large rectangular album bound in light blue vinyl textured to resemble leather. Jacob takes the book and boosts himself up onto the washing machine, his bare heels bumping against the cold white enamel. He wishes he had thought to put on a sweatshirt. He opens the book.

The first pages are full of postcards of Paris. He has never been to Paris, but he knows its landmarks well: the Eiffel Tower, the blocky Arc de Triomphe, the blockier, sootier façade of Notre Dame. He studies the opera house, its arches and columns and squashed green dome. Statues stand up on the roof, but he can’t quite make them out, even when he bends close to the page. In an oversaturated postcard of its interior, the gold plasterwork is banana yellow, the seats and curtains a lurid red. There is a program from a performance by the Kirov. Jacob finds Rusakov’s name. There is a program from a performance by the Paris Opéra Ballet. He finds Joan’s name. He thinks of Europeans all clapping together, like Harry said.
Clap clap clap clap
.

Next she has pasted in envelopes with exotic postmarks—Madrid, Berlin, Rome—their top edges carefully slit open. Inside are letters from Rusakov, all in French. Jacob takes them out and looks at them but does not understand. Languages have always been his bugaboo; he has no aptitude for them. He reads the letter from the
English dancer.
Don’t make the mistake of believing he is in love with you
. Pages of pasted-in clippings from the time of the defection follow: fragile rectangles of newsprint with long tails folded to fit in the book, some with yellowed photographs of Joan and Rusakov together on the street outside her apartment and then, later, in evening wear at dinners and balls, Joan smiling, skinny in chiffon. He remembers standing at the newsstand in Chicago and staring at these same pictures.
Library’s down the street, buddy
, the guy said every time.