Astonish Me (31 page)

“It is only about Chloe,” he said. “But I needed to be sure of that, in myself, so I told her about Harry.”

“Jesus,” said Elaine. “Really?” If Arslan had not seen for himself, she would not have told him, as Joan had never told her. She had suspected the truth when Joan was pregnant, and had been certain as soon as she saw Harry. Even when he was six years old it was obvious. Elaine suspects that Joan suspected she knew the truth all along, as though they were a pair of double-crossing spies.

“That is why it took six months for her to sleep with me,” Arslan says matter-of-factly. “But now we have trust.”

“I didn’t know you had it in you to be so patient.”

“Well,” he says, “I had other friends I saw sometimes while I waited.”

“Of course you did.”

“But not anymore.”

“I’m impressed. Honestly.”

“I always used to say I would like being old, and it’s true. I do. Although I am less of a eunuch than I thought I would be, thank God.”

“Maybe someday,” Elaine said. “You’re really not old. Just older.”

She had been the one to suggest Chloe audition for Rusakov Dance Project when she could no longer in good conscience keep her on as an apprentice, and Arslan and Chloe had put on a convincing deception, acting like friendly acquaintances when really they were already wrapped up in each other. But even if he hadn’t been in love with her, Arslan would have asked Chloe to join his company. Elaine’s great strength as an artistic director is her generosity, something that sprouted in her only after she stopped dancing.
She is not a gifted choreographer, but she nurtures those who are, granting them access to her company, giving them freedom, a large stage, nice posters, the chance for prominent reviews. She has an eye for artists who should work together, and Chloe is perfectly suited to Arslan’s choreography, which is too technically demanding for dancers without heavy ballet training but so modern and strange that most ballet dancers, male or female, can’t shed enough of their refinement to satisfy him. But Arslan likes the ferocity that emanates from Chloe when she dances, and together they have trained it in a way Elaine never could, working its angles so sometimes it looks like anger and other times grief or lust or even joy or stillness. They shared credit for the choreography of
Emma Livry
, in which Chloe metamorphosed from ethereal ballerina to fireball to ghost. She made the audience see the flames as she clutched her costume’s bodice to her chest, trying to preserve her modesty even in the face of death. Elaine thinks that what Arslan has really taught Chloe is how to forgive.

They reach the far end of the field and turn back toward the house. So far, for two days, they have been secretive about whatever they have come to discuss, preferring to gossip and drink tea and smoke a little pot and swim in the pool she put in three years ago when her joints had gotten serious about aching. Arslan seems to be dancing more than he has for years, stretching and doing barre in the mornings with Chloe on the porch while Elaine sits and works the crossword.

Elaine goes downstairs and out to the porch and is waiting, legs crossed and fingers steepled, in her favorite chair when they come in, Arslan holding the screen door open for Chloe. “Okay,” she says. “Enough. Tell me.”

They pause, exchange a glance. “It’s just an idea,” Chloe says warily.

“For a ballet?”

“Yes. Full-length, abstract, but also with a narrative.”

“And you want to use my company.”

“And your theater and your orchestra,” Arslan says with an air of coming clean. “And some of your money. But, if you do it the way we want, you will make it all back, and then some.”

Elaine works along the fingers of her left hand with her right thumb and forefinger, pinching the bones tenderly. “What’s the catch?”

“It’s Harry,” says Chloe.

“What about him? You don’t want to use him? You should. He sells tickets.”

Arslan sits in the chair opposite, hands between his knees. “No. We do want to use him. Actually, we need to use him. It is essential.”

Elaine’s confusion feels ominous. “But?” she says.

Chloe is standing several feet away from Arslan, looking like she has come to inform Elaine of a death. “He would have to know the truth.”

Elaine laughs, appalled. “No. Absolutely not.”

Arslan leans forward. “Don’t you think he deserves to know? Wouldn’t you want to know? He’s not a little boy anymore.”

“But Joan. And Jacob. This would kill Jacob. You would be destroying a family. And
why
? Why would he have to know? What is this ballet?”

They explain, and at first she can only stare, dumbstruck. Then she laughs again.

Arslan sits back. “It’s not so funny. Stop and think.”

“It’s just, I was watching you this morning in the field and thinking how you’d finally grown up. I thought, Chloe has made Arslan a man. After all this time, Arslan is a man. But this is the worst kind of selfishness, and I think it’s disturbing—deeply disturbing—that you don’t see that. It’s so
obvious
, so
basic
. And I’m not some altruistic goddess, so if
I’m
disturbed, something’s really wrong.”

“It was my idea,” Chloe says. Arslan holds out a hand, and she comes, slowly, to lean against him.

Elaine is still addressing Arslan. “You said this wasn’t about Harry or Joan.”

“What isn’t?”

Elaine frames them with her hands. “This! You! You said it wasn’t about getting back at them.”

Now he is angry. “It isn’t! I love Chloe because I love Chloe. We’re talking about dance.”

“I know why you laughed,” Chloe says. “I get it. But just stop and think for a minute. Imagine what it could look like. There’s never been anything like it.”

Elaine’s mind quiets. Once she starts to think about dance, she doesn’t think about Joan or Jacob or Harry. She imagines a stage, people moving on it. “Ballet about ballet has been done,” she muses. “Like
Le Conservatoire
.”

Arslan flicks his fingers. “That doesn’t have the same scope. That’s vaudeville, not personal.”

“Elaine, think”—Chloe hesitates, then plunges—“think about the commercial possibilities, too. It’s an incredible story. It’s a ballet about a person who was part of a bigger story. People are nostalgic for the cold war already. This ballet is historical, and it’s personal. The media would be all over it. Arslan is still famous.”

For a moment, all three are silent. Cicadas grind away in the trees. “Harry couldn’t do every performance,” Elaine says. “Neither could you. Would it work with other dancers? Is it a circus with you in it?”

“People will come,” says Chloe. “We’ll make a good ballet. You know we will.”

“Every performance will sell out,” Arslan concurs.

“So you’re just going to call up Harry and tell him? He’ll hate you. He won’t want to be in your ballet after you detonate his family.”

The look Arslan and Chloe give each other is full of the kind of solidarity that can only come from love and conspiracy, if those are two things and not one. She sees they have already thought of a solution to this problem.

THE NEXT MONTH, AT 4:00 A.M. ON A TUESDAY IN NEW YORK, HARRY’S
phone rings and he answers, still half asleep. Five minutes later, Jacob answers a different phone in California, his voice tight with fatherly fear. She says the same thing to both of them, and when they ask,
Who is this
, she tells them gladly, defiantly. She says she thought they should know, and she hangs up, sets her heavy, old-fashioned white and gold phone down on the floor, lies back on her green velvet sofa, marred here and there with cigarette burns, and looks out into the same urban half-light that the boy must be looking at. Neither of them will be sleeping for quite some time, Ludmilla is certain. Maybe days. The dachshund by her feet stirs and groans. She wonders what they are doing, if they have called each other yet. Perhaps the man is waking up that witch, perhaps he will strike her. They must know it is true. Neither had laughed. The man had said
No
, but more like someone who sees the reaper sliding in under the door than someone who disbelieves.

Poor darling Arslan, so distraught when he came over. Yes, she had screamed at him and smashed one of the precious Chinese vases he had given her years ago in apology for some forgotten transgression, but really her heart broke for him. She was a witch, that silly, moony girl from the corps, a temptress and a cheat and a thief and a slut. Arslan had come to Ludmilla willingly; it had been his idea to get married; she had not needed any black magic to lure him from the silly girl who was so impressed with herself for driving him from Canada. So she could drive a car. So what. From the beginning Ludmilla had known he would not be faithful, but when it got to be too much, she would smash something to make him behave for a while. He had not known about the boy, could not have known—the witch had seen to that—and he had always wanted children, poor lamb. He called and said he needed to talk, that only she could understand his suffering.
But you must tell him
, she had insisted, holding his hands on this very sofa.
He must know that you are his father
. But he only sat there, looking tired and old and slumped, and said that
he
could not tell the boy.
He
could not be the one to do it. And she patted his
hands and told him not to worry, everything would be fine. She had wanted to make love, for old times’ sake, but he pretended to be too sad, when really the impediment was the new little witch, the little blond one with the fat hips.

She wants to smash something else, but she doesn’t want to clean up the mess, and the maid only comes every other week now. The room is cluttered with gifts from her husbands and lovers and self: shiny, valuable, breakable things. She should sell them, not smash them; she keeps meaning to find someone who will do it. Rising, she pulls her shawl around her shoulders and crosses to her piano, a white baby grand inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Two more dachshunds sleep beneath it, curled up together on a cushion behind the pedals. The instrument was sent to her by one of her countrymen who had admired and seduced her when she returned to St. Petersburg for a time after the government fell, full of patriotism, unprepared for the inconveniences and slights of national transition. He only became wealthy (nickel? tungsten?) after she fled back to New York, stunned by the discovery that she had turned into an American. The note that came with the piano was an attempt to convince her to try Russia again, one last time. Why you would give someone an unmovable piece of musical furniture as an enticement to change continents was something Ludmilla had never understood.

Sitting on the bench beside a floor-to-ceiling window, she is up among the water tanks. The city spreads out below, purple-orange and silent. Taxis glide along the dim streets like lonely yellow beetles. She lights a cigarette, clamping her teeth down on the long white holder. For a moment she sits and smokes, considering what to play. Dawn won’t break for another hour. The neighbors are sleeping. She lifts her hands high and then drops them hard on the keys, releasing a torrent of Rachmaninoff.

APRIL 2002—NEW YORK CITY

I
N THE MORNING
,
THERE IS COMPANY CLASS
.
THEN THERE WON
’
T BE
any rehearsal, just the premiere at night. They are ready, Arslan says. He wants the cast to be fresh. Standing behind him at the barre, Chloe studies the grey hairs scattered around the back of his head, the creases in his neck, the freckled edges of his ears, the butterfly-shaped patch of sweat coming through his grey Mariinsky Ballet T-shirt. She had convinced him, finally, the year before, to go back to St. Petersburg with Rusakov Dance Project. They had taken a boat tour of the canals, had wandered through the Hermitage with ungainly slippers over their shoes, had lit candles in the Peter and Paul Cathedral. Then he had taken her to see the grand building where he once had an apartment, the Vaganova Academy where he had learned to dance, the fashionable boutique that had once been a café where he had boldly sat and written letters to Joan. At the Mariinsky, he walked onstage alone and looked out at the empty chairs, the imperial box. Then he had turned and held out his hands for her.

“And back back back, plié, reverse,” Elaine says, moving among them.

Chloe feels the presence of Arslan’s body as if it were her own ghost. She won’t disrupt her form to look down, but she is peripherally
aware of his leg in black sweats sliding out and in, out and in. When they turn to face the other way, she listens to him breathing behind her, the scrape of his slippers on the floor. In the mirror on the far wall, she sees his face over her shoulder and knows from his inward look that he is not aware of her in the same way. He focuses on his dancing so completely that there is no room for anything else. He’s lucky he’s not the pregnant one; he’s not the one making space for something to grow.

The timing is not ideal, but she thinks she will be able to dance through the run of
Rodina
, which is planned as three weeks. She’s only five weeks in, but she is having to fight her instinct to be tentative, protective of her body in a way she never was before. Once, Joan had told her that she danced her best ever while pregnant, that it had liberated her, but Chloe feels she is dancing around those new cells, not with them. She imagines they are as delicate as a bit of sea foam.