Astonish Me (25 page)

She is very still. He wishes he could take the words back: they were worse than trying to cop a feel under the guise of offering comfort, even more selfish. Finally, her voice muffled by the blankets, she says, “Do you remember when we rode the Matterhorn at Disneyland? That first time we went? When we stayed in the hotel?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Do you remember a guy coming on it with us?”

“A guy?”

“Yeah, a guy with a ponytail.”

“No. I thought it was just us and your mom. Why?”

“I have this memory of being on that ride and seeing a guy with his arms around my mom, and I don’t even know if it’s real. I’ve never been able to shake it. I think it’s real because it always comes back.”

“You could ask her.”

“I couldn’t.”

“I don’t remember a guy.” He does, actually, vaguely remember a guy, a ponytail, a little girl, but he sees no good in saying so.

“That doesn’t mean he wasn’t there. We were so little.” She is quiet. Under his hand, her side rises and falls. It strikes him as strange that her skin should be so warm in the midst of her pain. She rolls onto her back, the streetlight touching her pointed chin, her small, sharp nose. With the movement, her tank top rides up and his hand slides thrillingly onto her bare, narrow stomach. He thinks she might shake him off, but she hardly seems to notice he’s touching her. “On one level,” she says suddenly, “I know I love you too, because you’re my oldest friend and because I just do, but on another, I basically can’t imagine what you’re talking about right now. I don’t believe he’s dead. But he doesn’t seem alive either.” She draws a ragged breath. “We love each other—so what? What difference does it make?”

The mixture of elation and humiliation her words cause is familiar. He settles into it, feeling at home.

JULY 1994—NEW YORK CITY

T
HE DANCERS DOING THE PAS DE DEUX ARE MARRIED RUSSIANS
, not defectors, just dancers looking for opportunity. They danced in the Bolshoi until the collapse of the Soviet Union brought new freedom and also a collapse in their funding. The company was pleased to have them in New York, and so here they are. They own a chic apartment in SoHo, paid for by the advertisements she does for luxury watches and by the clinics he holds for young students and small companies, bringing some old-school Russian refinement to the more aggressive American style.

Their white costumes are lovely and simple against a plain backdrop lit pale blue, and their dance is one of Mr. K’s most famous short works, a storyless, virtuosic duet set to an otherwise forgotten scrap of Tchaikovsky. The performance is in honor of the second anniversary of Mr. K’s death, and the summer intensive students sit together at the back of the third balcony. Chloe would have liked to be next to Harry, but another girl, Cassandra-with-the-Turnout, snaked through at the last second and stole her seat.

Waiting at the airport for their flight to New York, Harry had turned to Chloe and said, “Just so you know, things might be a little different at the intensive than at school.”

Paging through
Cosmopolitan
, Chloe said, “What do you mean?”

“Socially.”

Affecting indifference, she’d let it go at that, although she already suspected something of the sort. After the previous summer, when Harry had gone to New York and she had gone to San Francisco, he’d come back with more confidence. His dancing was markedly better, so much better she’d begun to feel self-conscious being partnered by him, especially after he started offering tips he’d picked up from his
many
female friends in New York.
My friend Natasha says this. My friend Kirstin says that. This girl Jennifer I know switched to a shoe with a firmer shank, and she says it made a big difference
. His confidence provided armor at school, too. He wasn’t popular by any means, but he didn’t get picked on anymore, either. Not that she is up on such a high social perch. Since her father died, she has given up hooking up with boys; she has given up schoolwork; she has given up on her mother, who tends bar six nights a week and doesn’t even seem sad; she has given up crying; she has given up pretty much everything except dancing, and she can’t even seem to do that right.

“Chloe,” Joan has said more than once, “not every dance should seem angry.” But anger has made her turns blisteringly quick, her jumps unusually propulsive for a woman. She dances so hard and so long that blood seeps through the satin of her shoes. In San Francisco, she danced herself into a knee injury and had to sit out the end of the session, seething as she watched the others do their showcase performance. The Sugar Plum Fairy is no longer the role she dreams of but Manon, the fallen courtesan who dies in a swamp.

And it turns out that, indeed, Harry in New York is someone very different from Harry in California, although Chloe can’t tell if he’s actually changed or if it’s all context. She is just another girl, but he is one of the boys, one of the straight boys, even one of the cutest straight boys, and a star. An aura of promise surrounds him. He is called on to demonstrate in class. He knows all the teachers and most of the students from last year, and he knows how the subway works and which bars don’t card. He has been invited to take
company class twice already, and the session is only half over. There are whispers about him, rumors he might be invited to apprentice with the company after the summer. The girls trample one another trying to get to him in partnering class.

Onstage, the pas de deux is in its last fervent coda. Chloe knows the dance well, has learned it with Harry, and she waits for her favorite moment, when the woman steps quickly toward the man and he catches her in a fish dive, one arm supporting her abdomen, the other around her extended leg so she is almost upside down, her body curved like a fish jumping out of the water. But these Russians have their own way of doing things, and instead of just stepping toward her husband, the woman leaps at him from what seems an impossible distance. He catches her inches from the stage. The audience gasps. Chloe’s hands spring up from her lap in surprise. A minute later, another fish dive. The leap is headlong, reckless, full of faith.

As they leave the theater, Chloe elbows through a pack of girls until she is at Harry’s side. Gripping his arm, she whispers, “When we get back, let’s sneak into a studio.”

“Why?” he says at a normal volume.

“Shh. Just for a little while.”

“I should really sleep.” Tomorrow Arslan Rusakov is coming to teach a special class for the boys, and Harry is nervous. More than nervous. Harry seems to believe that only Arslan’s opinion matters, that all the other people already oohing and aahing over him don’t count for anything. This man, this stranger, is the only one who can convince him he will be a dancer.

“We won’t get in trouble. It’ll help you sleep. I want to try something. Please.” Disliking herself for it, she puts a girly plaintiveness into her voice.

He is not as pliable to her will as he once was, but he still gives in. When they are back at the school—a short walk, just two blocks from the theater—they pass rapidly through the dorm to pick up their dance bags and descend to a small basement studio where no
one has much reason to go. They turn their backs to each other and put on whatever they find in their bags. Chloe sees Harry hesitate, holding a dance belt, but he hurriedly tucks it in the bottom of his bag, staying in boxers instead. He changes his black pants and dress shirt for track pants and a T-shirt. Chloe wriggles into tights under the dress she wore to the gala and then lets the dress hang around her neck while she pulls on a leotard. In the mirror, she sees Harry peek at her bare chest.

“What do you want to do?” he asks when she is sitting on the floor, tying the ribbons of her shoes, and she sees the tension in his face and hears it in his voice. He still wants her, despite all his other options.

“The fish dive,” she says, “like they did it.”

WHEN HARRY COMES INTO THE BIG STUDIO, ARSLAN RUSAKOV IS
already there. He wears black drawstring pants, a black V-neck sweater, and white slippers, and he is standing and talking to Elaine, his weight on one leg, arms folded across his chest. His hair is darker than when he defected and shorter, cropped close to his head in an almost military style. The lines between his eyebrows and from his nose to the corners of his mouth have deepened with middle age, giving his face a sternness that is only slightly mitigated by the air of amusement that sits on him like a rakish hat.

Not that anything about his appearance could surprise Harry, who remains committed to his lifelong scrutiny of the man. Just two months back there was a ten-page spread in
Vanity Fair
of Arslan at his island property in Maine. He has a converted barn where he choreographs avant-garde works for his small eponymous troupe. One shot showed the dancers at the barre in summer, the barn doors open to a vista of rocks and ocean. The facing page showed him alone at the barre in winter, the windows framing falling snow. In fact, in some ways, this man, this stranger, is more familiar to Harry than people he knows well. Harry hasn’t just looked at Arslan every
day, the way he looks at his friends or teachers or parents: he has studied him, hungrily trying to mine some deeper understanding from the glossy surfaces of photographs and video, to figure out what makes him the greatest ever. Yes, he’s perfectly centered, as if his own private axis pins him to the earth. Yes, his positions are always precise, even when he’s transitioning from one step to the next. No, he never falls out of a turn or an attitude; he seems able to balance forever. Arslan has elevated an entire art form. Because of him, ballet will never be the same. Michael Jordan doesn’t do it for Harry, but he understands the guys at school when they talk about him. If you can do something perfectly, you are a god.

A handful of other boys are already at the barre, stretching and warming up, all in regulation black tights, white T-shirts, and black slippers. They sneak covert glances at Arslan from between their knees or over their shoulders, trying to seem workmanlike and unconcerned. Arslan rarely teaches. They have been told they are exceptionally lucky. Harry catches Elaine’s eye as he sets down his dance bag, and she gives him a cursory smile. Usually she has little to do with the summer students, but she was the one to arrange Arslan’s visit.

Two weeks before, after it was announced that Arslan would teach them, Harry had gone for a walk in the evening to clear his head, working his way downtown, farther and farther, letting the people and the food cart smells and the traffic noise and the heavy, humid air wash over and around him. The sky was overcast. He was sweating. He wouldn’t have been sure he would remember where Elaine’s building was—he had only been there once, for dinner the previous summer, and knew it was in Tribeca but nothing more specific—but then he happened to pass a Japanese restaurant with window decorations he recognized and realized he was on the right track. Farther down the block, past a fancy shop with huge windows sparsely occupied by purses on pedestals, there was a heavy green door, and next to the brass button marked “4” was a label that said “Kocheryozhkin/Costas.” He pushed it, and then pushed it again.

In a moment, a crackle, and then Elaine, sounding unfriendly: “Yes?”

“It’s Harry,” he yelled into the speaker. “Can I come up?”

Another crackle, a buzz, and a loud click. Harry pushed open the door and climbed the stairs. Elaine was waiting for him on her landing. She was barefoot. An indigo cotton bathrobe printed with white horses hung open over her leggings and loose tank top. An elastic headband held back her hair. She looked young, much younger than Harry’s mother, and he wondered what she did when she wasn’t at the studio or the theater. What had she been doing before he rang her buzzer? It occurred to him that if he ever had that much privacy he might never stop masturbating, and the thought made Elaine’s solitude titillating and mysterious.

“Harry?” she said.

He stopped just below her. “Would you please not tell Arslan who my mom is?”

She held her door open. “You must have been really worried to come all this way. Come in for a bit. And you don’t have to scream into the intercom. You’re like an old man sometimes, kid. Take your shoes off.”

Harry followed her to the kitchen, where she took two Diet Cokes from the refrigerator, and then into the cavernous living room. She pointed him to a sofa. Through an open door, he could see her bed, which had a wrought-iron headboard and pale green bedding and was unmade. He looked away, blushing. The apartment had white walls and wide, caramel-colored floorboards covered irregularly by thin rugs in geometric patterns. Sheer white curtains hung from iron rods, and potted ferns crowded the wide windowsills. A tall chrome sculpture stood in one corner, and on the walls there were a couple paintings of trees and one of a frozen river. “I like these paintings,” Harry said.

Elaine gave a little snort of amusement. “You said that when you came here last year. Do you remember?”

“I guess not.”

“I remember. I thought they were a funny thing for you to notice. They were Mr. K’s. I don’t like them very much, honestly, but I got used to them. I don’t know what I’d put up instead.” Elaine picked up two ferns and set them on the floor to make a perch for herself beside an open window, where she settled, one foot tucked under the other knee, and cracked her soda.

“Are they valuable?”

“Yes. And old.”

“Did Mr. K miss Russia?”

“Yes, but I think he liked to play up being homesick, too, for drama, as a reason to be melancholy. He grew up in the city, but he only bought paintings of the countryside. I think he missed the idea of all those trees and rivers more than he missed any real place. Our house upstate was his mini-Russia. I wish you could have known each other.”

“Does Arslan miss Russia?”

Elaine smiled, narrowing her green, feline eyes, and Harry felt a desire to be touched by her, though he couldn’t gauge if he wanted something sexual or only a maternal caress. “I don’t know,” she said. “Probably. He could go back now, though, to visit, and he hasn’t. Harry, I haven’t told him that he’ll be meeting the son of an old flame. I had the same thought as you, that he should see you dance first.”