Astonish Me. Maggie Shipstead
at him. He lifts his ears, then remembers himself and flattens them, recanting his interest. Joan has never danced as well as tonight. She is of the corps but also entirely herself, both part and whole. The tiny ball of cells clinging to her uterine wall is a secret, but she feels as translucent and luminous as a firefly.
Arslan Rusakov and Ludmilla Yedemskaya appear in the bright channel between the black stage drapes and stop, glazed with sweat and white light. He turns her waist between his palms, his face set in an ardent mask. Love in a ballet is something that does not exist and then suddenly does, its beginning marked by pantomime, faces fixed in rapture, a dance. After, when they are hidden in the wings or behind the curtain, the dancers will grimace like goblins, letting the pain show.
At home in their apartment, Elaine sometimes does an unkind imitation of Arslan’s love face, dancing pompously and then turning to answer herself with a parody of Ludmilla’s smile: bared teeth beneath flinty eyes. Joan laughs and asks for more, but the mockery stings. Arslan had been her lover. She had been the one to help him defect.
He and Ludmilla had been a couple when they were both in the Kirov, and now they are getting married. They had announced their engagement after a performance of Swan Lake with champagne for the whole company. Ludmilla’s head was swathed in a crown of white feathers. Joan and Arslan were done before Ludmilla arrived, but still the tiny yellow-haired Russian provokes Joan’s sense of having been taunted and robbed, deprived.
Applause, and Ludmilla sweeps into the wings. The music for Arslan’s variation begins. Joan keeps petting the dogs, but the animals crane their long necks for a glimpse of their mistress. “They are not nice,” Ludmilla says after a moment, her accent flat and heavy like a stone in the back of her throat. “You should not touch.”
Before curtain, the dachshunds had moped around Ludmilla’s feet while she warmed up, narrowly avoiding being kicked. She never seems to pay them any attention, but she brings them to every class, every rehearsal, every fitting, every performance, every gala. They were a gift from Arslan when she arrived in New York after her defection, replacements for dachshunds left behind in Leningrad. Their bony, penitent faces are always turned, like so many others, toward her. They would never think of barking, not even when cymbals crash or when stagehands pump out chilly clouds of fog from a machine to make an enchanted haze or suggest the surface of a lake.
“They seem sweet,” Joan says.
Ludmilla, dabbing her cheeks with a tissue, gazes at her with amused malevolence. “They bite.”
“I don’t think so.”
“They are my dogs, not your dogs, but if you want get bite, suit yourself.”
Suit yourself is something Arslan says because it is something Joan says. She taught him, and now he has taught Ludmilla. Joan gives the dachshunds a final rub—one bares a set of tiny, sharp ivory teeth at her, as dainty and menacing as his mistress—and stands up. Ludmilla turns away to watch Arslan pirouette at center stage (he is a prince! it is his wedding day!) as the music accelerates and sweat flies from his hair. Arslan is racing the conductor, trying to squeeze in more turns. When he is done, the audience will let loose the huge, docile roar of amazement they always do. The ovation is a given, but he will still earn it. He is extraordinary. The audience loves him for being extraordinary and also for having been born to the enemy, for coming to dance for them instead.
The end of the music. His last turn squeaks around a beat late. The roar explodes from the belly of the theater, blasts out to the back of the house. Arslan bows, bows again, gives a modest flick of his head. Ludmilla draws herself up, raises her arms over her head, and steps briskly out from the wings. Her variation begins, but Joan does not watch.
Joan has known plenty of pregnant dancers but only a handful who stayed that way and only one who then returned to the company—a principal famous enough to be forgiven for the months of leave, her slow battle back into shape. For most of the women Joan knows, a child is unthinkable. The body has already been offered up; the body is spoken for. She is only eight weeks or so and still not showing, but she is surprised she hasn’t been found out. The dancers keep close surveillance on one another, report suspicions of weakness. Elaine might have guessed, Joan thinks, but it’s not her nature to interrogate or tattle. Usually they share a banana in the morning before class, but Joan, both nauseated and famished, has a new compulsion to toast frozen waffles and spread them with peanut butter. Elaine, eating her banana half, watches the passage of the sticky knife, says nothing. Mercifully, magically, Joan’s nausea tends to dissipate during morning class. She hasn’t betrayed herself by puking.
In July, after the blackout, she had faked a slight sprain and gone to visit Jacob in Chicago. He is not her boyfriend. In high school, they had explained themselves as best friends, proud of their status as a bonded but platonic pair, a relationship that seemed modern and cosmopolitan to them, worlds away from the short-lived, sweaty-palmed hormonal couplings happening around them. But Joan had known Jacob wanted more. For so long, he was too timid—and too proud—to try anything.
He had kissed her once, just before he left for college. It had been the kind of kiss that asks for something enormous. When she pushed him away, he was angry, and she had turned his anger around and punished him with it and hidden behind it. Then he left, and they wrote letters, which seemed safer.
She supposes Jacob still is her best friend, although during the time she was with Arslan and then recovering from being with Arslan, she had allowed their friendship to lie fallow. She prefers to think that way—her bond with Jacob was resting, regathering itself—instead of admitting she had neglected him. But Jacob is the forgiving type, the comforting type, the patient type.
In Chicago, at first he had affected a breezy version of their high school intimacy, taking her to a loud and smelly bar, alluding to the latest woman he was seeing, letting her buy the drinks. “What’s the latest with Arslan the Terrible?” he’d asked in a brotherly tone. But shifting the momentum had not been difficult. She’d touched his arm as they drank, leaned into him, bumped against his side as they walked to his apartment, and, over a nightcap, told him she’d missed him. “I’ve been considering,” she said. “Like you asked me to.”
“Yeah?” he said, guarded. They were sitting on his sway-backed sofa.
“I think maybe.”
“Maybe what?”
She was too afraid to look at him. “Just, you know, maybe.”
She had anticipated a long nocturnal conversation full of hesitation, negotiation, reminiscence, and uncertainty. But instead he had taken off his glasses and set them carefully on his junky coffee table and then lunged at her the way he had before, when they were teenagers. In spite of herself, she laughed.
“What?” he said.
“Nothing,” she said. “Sorry. Just nerves.”
There had been no discussion of pills or condoms. She had the sense he was afraid to raise any impediment to what was finally about to happen.
Ludmilla is turning rapidly across the diagonal as the music builds toward the end of her variation. The corps girls in their lavender tutus shake out their legs, prepare. Joan can feel how impatient the audience is to applaud. Their hands are held apart like straining magnets. Ludmilla wraps the tension around herself as she turns.
When Joan begins to show, when she is found out, she knows she will feel regret, sorrow, panic—but now the sensation of purpose soars over her like the hunting bugle from act 2. She is surprised by the strength of it, the way it unfurls.
Applause. She falls into line with the others and is pulled out into the light.
THE SUMMER HAS been long, hot, chaotic. Civilization seems fragile. When the lights went out for a night in July, thousands of people looted and marauded and set fires. David Berkowitz has been arrested, but the specter of random death lingers. Elaine knows all the bouncers in the city and has enticed Joan to nightclubs and parties where glittering people loom out of the smoke and flashing lights, sometimes in costume—Cleopatras, unicorns, Dionysuses—slip-sliding and pivoting,