Astonish Me

“Except Mr. K. He’s not handsome.”

“Mr. K doesn’t have to be handsome. He’s a genius. You should know. Arslan doesn’t have to be handsome either.”

“Arslan is handsome.”

“No, Arslan’s sexy. Anyway, he’s not a genius the way Mr. K is. Mr. K creates. Mr. K has changed everything.”

“Please, tell me more about your boyfriend, your old, gay boyfriend.”

Elaine taps her cigarette into an empty wine bottle, unflappable. “Labels are a waste of time. So is possessiveness. I know what he is.”

“God,” Joan says on a long breath. “I can’t believe how liberating it is not to care anymore. I watched Arslan walk out the stage door with Ludmilla tonight and didn’t want to kill myself. Finally. I’m cured. It’s heaven.”

“Hmm.” Elaine drags on her cigarette, drops it into the wine bottle. “I think you’re pregnant.”

Joan smiles at the linoleum floor. She draws her toe across it in an arc. “Because of the waffles?”

“Lately you seem like you’re saying good-bye all the time, like you’re about to go catch a bus.” Elaine studies her. “Have you told Jacob?”

“No.” Joan watches the tentatively identified Christopher as he walks around with a jug of red wine, filling people’s glasses and mugs. This is the first time she has spoken about the pregnancy except with the doctor who gave her prenatal vitamins, and Jacob’s name is loaded with a heavy, sudden future.

In high school, she had decided her mild sexual curiosity about Jacob was nothing more than a generic offshoot of her general sexual curiosity. He was younger, which was not sexy, and wore little wire-rimmed glasses, which had seemed to signify something important then, and he was transparently devoted to her, which was not sexy, and he was academically brilliant and a little insecure (not sexy, not sexy). Joan, however, had the mystique of ballet to trade on, her tininess and her suppleness, the grace that had been drilled into her until she was physically unable to be awkward. Lots of boys wanted to date her, and dating them was simple, while dating Jacob would not have been.

But when they were sitting side by side at the movies or watching TV on the couch when her mother was out, not speaking and not looking at each other, he would stay so still that she sensed he was restraining himself, wary of any movement that would betray what he wanted, and some hidden sensory organ in her would rotate toward him, probing, considering.

“Did you do it on purpose?” Elaine asks.

“Of course not.”

“You can’t do this if it’s only about running away from Arslan.”

Since she got pregnant, the cattle prod jolt of Arslan’s name has worn off, become only a faint zap, two weak wires touched together. “It’s not. It’s really not. I might be running from everything else, but I have to go. I have to find something else. You’ll make it. I was never going to.”

“You did it on purpose.”

“I didn’t!”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s done. But you don’t have to … you could, you know, just quit the company. Not have a baby. Get a job. Do something else.”

Solemnly, Joan shakes her head. “I couldn’t just decide to stop. I thought about it. But I’m too much of a coward. I can’t stay in the city if I’m not dancing, and I wouldn’t know where else to go. Or what to do, generally.”

“So you’re counting on Jacob to figure all that out for you. This all seems really elaborate, Joan. I feel sorry for Jacob. He’s walking around Chicago right now with no idea he’s a marked man.”

“He’s getting what he wants.”

“Oh yeah?” Elaine takes another cigarette from her pack. “Well then. You’re a Good Samaritan.”

“Give me a cigarette, please.”

“You shouldn’t smoke.”

“I know. This one and then I’m quitting. I’m quitting everything. Everything is going to be different.”

“Inevitably.”

Finding nothing else to say, they pretend to be interested in the party that drifts around them as lightly as fog. Joan makes eye contact with a series of men. They are the kind of men who look over shoulders while they chatter, searching for the people they will chatter at next. The crowd shifts, revealing the host’s pale head inclined attentively toward the fast-moving mouth of a blond woman in a paisley jumpsuit.

Joan says, “Will you introduce me to Christopher?”

JOAN LIES AWAKE. Beside her, the man sleeps. Even his snores are polite and well formed. His name is Tom, not Christopher. Probably some other Christopher had swum through Elaine’s nocturnal world, crossing bubble trails with this handsome Tom, an assistant professor of Old and Middle English at NYU. His bed is surprisingly clean and nice smelling for a single man with bohemian tastes. Joan wonders if he will be the second-to-last man she ever sleeps with.

The yellow night drops a window-square on the pale sheet. Tom makes a rough sound in his sleep that might be Old or Middle English. The cells continue to multiply. Joan rests her palm against her belly, trying to divine the exact spot where life has been planted like a tulip bulb. Usually when she is in bed with a strange man—there haven’t been so many—she has trouble sleeping because she is preoccupied by the nearness of the unfamiliar body that has been recently and intimately explored and is now remote, locked away in sleep. But Tom holds no curiosity for her. She strokes her own skin, wonders what time it is. His wrist with his watch is under his pillow, and she doesn’t see a clock in the room. When the sun rises she will make her way home and then, later, to class. She wonders how many more times she will go to class. When she stops dancing, class will continue on without her, every day except Sunday, part of the earth’s rotation. The piano will swoop and clatter, and Mr. K will say No, girl, like this to dancers who are not her. Her empty spot at the barre will heal over at once. But she wants a few more days, a week or two. She wants the cells to grow in time to the piano, to Mr. K’s clapping hands, his one pa pa pa, two pa pa pa, and UP pa pa pa, to the rhythm of her battements. Until now, even when surrounded by twenty women dressed just like her, moving in unison with her, she has always been lonely, but the cells give her a feeling of companionship. For the first time she can remember, she is not afraid of failing, and the relief feels like joy.

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