Astonish Me (23 page)

Joan was sitting outside on her patio with the cordless phone. The pool reflected purple evening and a crescent moon. “What?” she said. “Really?”

“Really.” There was a whistling kind of inhale, a pause, and then a shallow cough. “Sorry, I’ve taken up smoking weed. I used to think it would make me fat, but now I’ll try anything just to chill out a little bit. You know? I used to do all that coke. I wouldn’t know what to do with that kind of high now. I would have to sit here and wait for it to go away.”

“You married Mr. K?”

“Yes, in holy matrimony. For the brief period till death do us part. He popped the question. A justice of the peace made a house call. It was sweet, in a macabre way. The hospice nurse witnessed and our neighbor from down the road. I think they would have been more suspicious except Mstislav told them I was already his sole beneficiary. And then he said, ‘She’s always dreamed of being a widow.’ ”

Joan couldn’t bring herself to say congratulations. “I’m sorry, Elaine. This sounds really hard.”

“Don’t be. You should see the ring.” A long pause. Joan could hear the roar of the Hudson crickets. Finally, Elaine said, “It is hard.”

Every time they talked, before hanging up, Joan told her she was always welcome to visit, that she should consider a change of scene when she had the time, which was, of course, code for after Mr. K was dead. Elaine had never seemed particularly interested, but after the funeral and the end of the company’s summer run, she had called and announced she would be arriving the next day and would Joan pick her up at the airport?

On the curb outside the baggage claim she told Joan she would be staying for a month. It has been three weeks. Joan doesn’t mind—she and Elaine have not lost the knack of being roommates—but Jacob shows signs of feeling crowded and marginalized. Most nights after dinner he retreats upstairs with restrained grumpiness to read or watch TV in the bedroom, ceding the family room to the other three so they can continue working their way through Harry’s collection of ballet videos. Harry absorbs Elaine’s new commentary hungrily, like she is a guru on top of a mountain and he has walked for days to meet her. He has questions. What does she think of the guy dancing Mercutio? Who is that girl dancing the Lilac Fairy?

Elaine says the guy is pretty good, that he dances in Holland now. The girl was subbed in at the last minute, impressed everyone, and then tore up her knee two weeks later and had to retire. No, she doesn’t know what became of her.

Elaine is modestly helpful around the house. She does the dishes, buys groceries, offers to chauffeur Harry wherever he wants to go—he is thrilled to have a principal dancer, a flesh-and-blood
artistic director
driving him around—but mostly she behaves as though she has checked in to a sanatorium, sleeping for ten hours at a time, picking through the refrigerator, surreptitiously smoking joints out by the back fence, spending hours standing in the pool under a broad-brimmed hat and reading a book. She doesn’t seem sad, exactly, though Joan knows she is. She hides it well. She says she did most of her mourning while Mr. K was still alive. When she thinks no one is looking, she worries at the huge emerald on her finger, turning it toward her palm and rubbing it with her thumb as though it were a
blister. She seems distracted, the way Joan feels when Harry is away on a school trip and part of her tries to follow him clairvoyantly through his day, probing the ether for any sign of distress. “I catch myself wondering how he’s doing,” Elaine has said. “Like how he’s doing with being dead. What he’s up to. If he needs me. Where he wants to go on our honeymoon.”

Joan thinks she should be doing more to draw Elaine out, pry back her layers of careful control, but she doesn’t know how. Her attempts are, for the most part, met with jokes and deflections. “You can freak out, if you want,” she tried once.

“I don’t,” Elaine said, not quite snapping, but firmly. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to suddenly explode and rend my garments and then be catatonic in your guest room for a week. I’m comfortable this way. There’s always a little motor going somewhere, processing, but it’s private.”

“Fine,” Joan said. “That’s fine.”

Sometimes Elaine comes to the studio and sits in a folding chair by the mirror. She watches Joan teach, mans the stereo, drinks from an enormous thermos of black tea. Twice she has taught the advanced class, five girls including Chloe plus Harry. She sounds uncannily like Mr. K as she walks up and down the barre correcting them. The students are dazzled by her and frightened of her demanding brusqueness, the way she might seize an underperforming arm or leg and shake it at its owner as though confronting a dog with a chewed-up shoe.

Out on the pool deck, Elaine rolls onto her stomach and fiddles with something she pulls from under Harry’s chaise—a small box that must be metal from the way it catches the sunlight. She sticks a joint in her mouth—Joan supposes for one foolish moment that it could be a hand-rolled cigarette—and lights it. Holding it at the end of one outstretched arm, she maneuvers onto her back again, then expels a cloud of smoke. The arm comes down to her mouth in a graceful curve, a swan’s neck bending to feed.

“Elaine,” Joan calls, going out and crossing the patio to stand over
her, “are you smoking marijuana in front of my son?” She should be angry, but Elaine’s brazenness has disarmed her. She’s like a tourist from Balletland who doesn’t know the most basic local customs.

Elaine looks up at Joan. The sun is a star against the black space of her sunglasses. She cracks her lips and smoke sidles out. “Well, he wouldn’t have noticed except you said so.”

“I know what pot smells like,” Harry interjects, propped up on his elbows. The position emphasizes how narrow his waist is compared to his shoulders. His shoulders seem to have passed into manhood, while the rest of him is still boyish and gangly. “It’s fine, Mom. Elaine is grieving.”

Elaine holds the joint up, proffering it to Joan, who shakes her head. She twists onto her side to stub it out in the lid of her little box, which holds a half dozen more skinny paper twists. Carefully, she tucks the remnant in with its brethren, shuts the lid. “Sorry,” she says. “That was presumptuous. But it’s so delicious here in the sun. I couldn’t resist.”

Suddenly it is deeply annoying to Joan that Elaine has chosen to rest on her life as though it were a lily pad. “Try,” she says. “I know it’s not very bohemian of me, but I don’t actually encourage Harry to do drugs.”

“I wasn’t
encouraging
him. I didn’t offer him any. I wouldn’t.”

“Mom,” Harry says again, soothingly, “it’s fine.”

“You don’t get to decide,” she tells him.

Elaine swivels up so she is sitting Indian style. The tendons in her groin stand out like guy wires holding her bikini in place. There is nothing to fold or pooch out on her stomach; the skin stretches taut around the shallow knothole of her belly button. With an air of giving Joan the straight scoop, she says, “Harry will have to make up his own mind, anyway, Joan, since he’s going to be a dancer. You remember how it was. If you’re going to just say no, you’ll have to say it a lot.”

Harry perks up. “You think I’m going to be a dancer?”

Elaine aims her sunglasses at him. “Don’t you want to be?”

“Yeah, obviously. But you think I’ll make it?”

“You’re special,” Elaine says. “There are no guarantees, but you have the talent. Some people think you just need to work, but they’re wrong. You need talent, too, and the right body, obviously. You’ve got those, so now you have to work harder than everyone else. The second you think you’re good enough, it’s over. Then you’re a complacent sack of shit, and you’re wrong. There’s no such thing as good enough.”

“Don’t promise things,” Joan says to Elaine. “Especially not while you’re high.” Harry is slipping away from her. She has thought for some time that he is gifted enough to be a professional, even a star, but she has only vaguely considered the intrusive mechanisms that will start to take over. People with more power will move in and shoulder her aside, claiming her son, her student. He is already becoming a commodity. She experiences a tickle of anticipatory jealousy. This is the beginning of people wanting him to dance what they choreograph, wanting him to make money for them, wanting him simply to be present on their stage or at their gala or party. Soon girls and women will want him to bestow attention and love and sex. Even as she wants him to succeed, Joan wants to keep him for herself. She envies the talent that will propel him away from her.

“I didn’t promise anything,” Elaine says. “Best-case scenario, I promised a lifetime of feeling inadequate.”

“I don’t think it’s helpful to tell him he’s special. I don’t want him to be disappointed.”

“Of course he’s going to be disappointed,” Elaine says. “Harry, you’re going to be disappointed sometimes. Is that okay?”

“Yes!”

Elaine pats his foot. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ll have to come to New York next summer for the intensive.”

Harry hesitates. “What about Chloe? Can she come?”

“She can audition. You’ll have to audition, too. I can’t just ordain
that you’re coming. Maybe I could. No, I won’t. Chloe needs to finish growing. I can’t tell what she’ll look like in a few years.”

“She’s having an awkward time with puberty,” Joan says. “She’s very good. She’ll work it out.”

“Can you tell what I’ll look like?” Harry asks Elaine.

“You—yes. Partly because I know your parents and partly because I can just see it. I get more excited about boys in general. There are fewer boys. Harry, you can’t tie your career to any other dancers. You can’t only do what Chloe does.”

“I know.” He nods gravely but looks unconvinced.

“You’re bossy for a pothead,” Joan observes.

“You should hear me without it. I’m Mussolini.”

Joan goes inside and gets her cigarettes out of their hiding place above the fridge. She returns to the pool, steps out of her sandals, sits down next to Elaine’s towel, and puts her feet in the water. Below, the wheeled cleaner robot glides in long arcs over the curvature of the bottom, vigilantly patrols its tranquil beat, sometimes running so high up the walls that part of it breaks the surface, dipping up into the air like a dolphin’s back. Elaine and Harry are talking to each other, uninterested in her, but they stop when she clicks her lighter, unites the tiny flame with the paper. “I guess we’re all adults now,” she says.

“I knew you smoked,” Harry says. “I have a
nose
.”

“Okay, then. Don’t start, though. You’ll never be able to stop.”

“I don’t do things just because you do them.”

The sound of bees comes from the orange tree. A mourning dove sings its four notes. Joan is the architect of this moment, but all along she has been building herself out of it, cheerfully walling off her son’s future. It is too late to undo anything. She has made Harry a dancer and can’t unmake him. She wouldn’t want to, but she is sorry to be left behind again.

MAY 1993—SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

I
N THE EARLY MORNINGS
,
BEFORE HER PARENTS WAKE
,
CHLOE MAKES
herself coffee and does her exercises. She stretches. She lies on her back and spins a bicycle tire around one ankle and then the other. She does handstands and yoga poses in the living room and pull-ups on the spring-loaded bar she ordered from a catalog and wedged in the doorway of the downstairs bathroom. She does these things, but each day she does them more slowly, with fewer repetitions, spending more and more time lying on her back and contemplating the ceiling, wondering if she should quit ballet.

Several reasons present themselves for quitting. For starters, dance takes up all her time and makes her tired and is hard and not fun. Second, her mother, who is a fat cow and doesn’t know anything about ballet, is always riding her about staying focused in class. And it doesn’t help that puberty, slow to arrive, finally overtook her like a plague and has spent the past year, her fourteenth, widening her hips, throwing off her center of gravity, robbing her of turnout. No matter how little she eats, the hips will not be fought back—the wideness is in the bone. Her pelvis has spread like a stain, pulling her femurs and knees out of alignment, changing everything forever. The hips are her mother’s fault, genetically speaking, and are resented as such, as though she had conceived Chloe as part of an
elaborate plan to cultivate her dancing and then, via anatomical time bomb, sabotage it. Chloe used to be good; ballet used to feel natural, not easy but not like an impossible struggle against her own limbs.

Harry, too, is undergoing the grand transition they’ve heard so much about in health class, but he seems to be having an unfairly easy time, simply growing taller and stronger.
His
arms and legs aren’t clumsy saboteurs but have assumed pleasant masculine proportions and continue to cooperate with his wishes. Pure physical luck—along with the political advantage of being Joan’s kid and Elaine Costas’s honorary kid or whatever and the numerical advantage of being one of the relatively few boys who do ballet—is why he got into a better summer intensive than she did (moral outrage: another reason to quit), the one in New York. The worst thing that puberty (such a gross word) has inflicted on him is a change in the way he smells, and she should know because they have been spending more and more time on partnering work and her face is always in his armpit or chest or, if something goes wrong, crotch. He doesn’t smell bad, but sometimes she tells him he does, whispering spitefully as they practice a promenade, him walking a slow circle around her, rotating her on her pointe. Joan says this difficult time will pass, that Chloe will learn how to dance in her new body, but she isn’t giving Chloe any breaks. “Push
down
with your leg, don’t pull up!” she shouted a few days ago as Harry lifted Chloe. “He can’t support you unless you support yourself. You need to
engage
.” Harry, trembling, lowered her back to the floor.

“
He
needs to get stronger,” Chloe said. “I can feel him shaking.”