Astonish Me. Maggie Shipstead

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      “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.

       November 1978—Chicago

      As Jacob crosses the quad, shuffling home through new snow, he is seized by a rebellious impulse to stop at a bar. Not that he doesn’t want to see Joan and the baby, and not that having a quiet beer by himself would be a crime, but the enormous obligations that have arrived abruptly (and, one could argue, prematurely) with his new status as a family man have recalibrated his sense of himself, made him ashamed of his moments of selfishness and guilt stricken whenever he feels a twinge of resentment. He wants so badly to satisfy and delight Joan in all possible ways and to be a good father to Harry that he is not certain there should be space left over for wanting a beer. Or solitude. Or freedom, which is unmistakably a thing of the past.

      He has never been one to fetishize freedom, though. Since he can remember, he has pursued obligation and commitment, which is why, at twenty-four, he is already into the fourth year of his doctorate. That he is, at twenty-four, also already the father of an infant son and already married to a woman he has coveted since it first occurred to him to covet women, might not have been part of his original plan, but he can’t claim he hadn’t been an enthusiastic participant in Harry’s conception or that he hadn’t wanted to marry Joan, at least as far as he was capable of imagining marriage, since he was a high school kid desperately playing it cool.

      The snow is the first serious one of the year. It settles in strips on naked tree branches, builds white doilies on the stone traceries of Gothic windows. In the summer, the façade of Green Hall is bearded with Boston ivy, and a wreath of leaves surrounds Jacob’s office window, giving the light a pleasantly verdant quality, like the inside of a tree house. But now, in late November, the vine is a withered caul of twigs, tapping and scratching at the walls. Jacob changes trajectory, heading for a dank subterranean bar he likes and away from the tiny apartment where Joan and Harry are waiting. The apartment has a demonic radiator that shrieks in defiance when Jacob tries to turn it off and incubates all the fetid baby smells and makes his hair brittle and his skin itchy. Joan, who is always cold, likes the radiator and will not let him call the super. She takes a reptilian solace in its heat, perching neatly sideways atop the flaking silver coils.

      The mug of Old Style the bartender coaxes from the tap is mostly foam but is delivered with a look that discourages Jacob from complaining. He is happy, anyway, to be sitting on a stool with a ripped vinyl cover, resting his elbows on sticky Formica, gazing at pocked dartboards and a jumble of Bears and Cubs ephemera. There is a TV behind the bar, but it’s angled so only the bartender can watch. Light flickers over the ranks of bottles.

      The woman Jacob was dating before—and, truthfully, during and for some time after—Joan paid her fateful visit had introduced him to this place. Liesel, a Ph.D. student in chemistry. There is one other guy at the bar: thirtyish, with a mustache, on the beefy side, sipping whiskey.

      “Great place, isn’t it?” Jacob remarks. His stolen hour, now that he has committed to it, is making him expansive and giddy.

      “Yeah,” the guy says, “a real hidden gem.” He has a strong Chicago accent and a plump face that suggests, in a friendly way, that bullshit would be unwelcome.

      “I used to come here with an ex,” Jacob says.

      “Yeah?”

      “It was kind of her spot. I haven’t been here since we broke up.”

      “Bad breakup?”

      “It wasn’t great.” Then, wanting to clarify, Jacob adds, “I married a ballet dancer.”

      At ballet dancer, the guy’s smile seems to snag on something. “Yeah?” the guy says. “Like a professional?”

      Jacob nods. “Yeah.”

      The fact that Joan is a dancer impresses most men and rankles most women. Was a dancer, although he has no plans to tell this stranger she is retired. When Joan was pregnant, Jacob had thought she might try to go back to ballet after the baby, but she said flatly that she couldn’t. Her career had run its course. She will teach, but she will not perform. Elaine sent them tickets to the Joffrey not long before Harry was born. On the way home, Joan had cried on the El, clasping her thin arms around her belly, but she only shook her head when Jacob said it didn’t have to be over for her. He didn’t understand, she said. She had never been that good, anyway, she said, and to keep trying would be pathetic.

      There is, in this decision, a loss for Jacob he would never admit to her. For as long as he has known Joan, since they were almost children, she has lived a double life, as a dancer and as a civilian, and her retirement means she has been reduced in some essential way. He will miss seeing her onstage, displayed so beautifully at the front of all СКАЧАТЬ