Astonish Me. Maggie Shipstead

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СКАЧАТЬ has his limits, though. During the months Joan was involved with Arslan Rusakov, Jacob had been in agony. Her other boyfriends, beginning in high school, had irritated and disgruntled but not tortured him; Joan had not appeared to be very attached to the others, had certainly not loved any of them. Then Rusakov came along and swallowed her up, and Jacob’s belief that they would end up together one day, after they’d exhausted the dubious pleasures of trying out people they didn’t love, had begun to dwindle. His mother, who has never liked Joan, made a point of phoning him long-distance when she showed up in magazines or newspapers with Rusakov, and he would go out to the newsstand to see for himself, flipping clumsily through the pages and then staring down at the photos until the guy said, Library’s down the street, buddy. Joan’s letters dwindled to a trickle, and the few she did write only made things worse.

      The mustache guy signals the bartender for another drink, and the bartender, surprisingly, hops to it. “Where’d you meet?”

      “High school. In Virginia.”

      Jacob and his two older sisters had high IQs, and their father, a naval officer, was frequently reposted, allowing their ambitious, unmaternal mother to skip her children forward in school until they were high school freshmen at twelve and college students at sixteen. The great mercy of Jacob’s life was that he grew early (but then stopped—he is not tall) and was a reasonably handsome, affable kid, good enough at baseball and track to avoid classification as an irredeemable nerd. Joan’s locker had been across from his when they were freshmen, and she was so small, so knobby and tentative like a fawn, that at first he had hoped she was young, too.

      “Excuse me,” she had said, appearing beside him on the first day while he fussed with his books and notebooks. “Do you know where room three-nineteen is?” She wore a red and blue plaid dress with a collar and a red belt and peered at him with anxious earnestness, like a tourist asking for directions in a dicey neighborhood.

      “Yeah,” he said. “It’s on my way. I’ll show you.”

      “Are you a sophomore?” she asked as they walked. “How do you know where things are already?”

      “I took a class here last year,” he said, trying to project proprietary confidence. “I got the lay of the land.”

      “Lucky.” She flinched away from a group of older students. “I thought about coming down on a weekend and making sure I knew where to go, but then I thought someone would see me and think I was nuts. You probably think I’m nuts. It’s just, I have a feeling I’m going to do this wrong.”

      “Do what wrong?”

      “Everything. High school.”

      “You’ll be fine. Just act like you’re sure you belong.” He was echoing what his sister Marion had said to him that morning. “Nobody knows any better.” He let a beat go by. “How old are you?”

      “I’ll be fourteen in October. I’m a little young. When’s your birthday?”

      “March,” he said, neglecting to mention that his next birthday would be his thirteenth.

      “Why did you ask?”

      “I was just wondering. You look young.”

      “I hope I always do,” she said with unexpected vehemence. “I do ballet. I can’t be big or old.”

      Jacob, who wouldn’t have minded being either of those things, said, “It might be hard to avoid getting older.”

      “I know that,” she said, sharply again. She was not as meek as she had first appeared, and he liked her more for it. “It only matters how you look.”

      “That’s not true,” he ventured after a moment, “in the big picture.”

      He was afraid he might have offended her, or that she would think he was an annoying goody-goody, but she made a wry face. “I mean in ballet,” she said. “Which is my big picture.”

      They fell into separate groups of friends—Joan’s smallness and prettiness and docility made her popular—but they chatted by their lockers and greeted each other in the halls. Their houses were not far apart, and sometimes they walked together. The ballet studio was on the way to Jacob’s house, and when he didn’t have baseball, he escorted her there, carrying her dance bag. He never went inside, and, in his imagination, the unassuming little storefront was a cloistered place of rites and mysteries. Sheer white curtains covered its front windows, and through them he caught vague, gauzy glimpses of girls in black leotards.

      “Is that your brother?” Jacob heard one of Joan’s friends ask in the lunchroom.

      “Basically,” Joan replied, and he felt both honored and insulted.

      Her nerviness and discipline appealed to him, and he felt protective of her in a way that seemed adult and masculine and new. As the younger brother of two bossy sisters, he was used to being clucked over by girls, but Joan seemed to trust that he could take care of himself and also, as needed, her. He understood that this was a role worth cultivating. Her mother was single and worked and didn’t understand ballet or Joan. Joan’s dance teacher, Madame Tchishkoff, was of the formidable, exacting variety and offered little beyond unyielding rigor and the motivational power of perpetual, implacable disappointment. Joan’s school friends were the kind of pretty girls who clumped together to assert their collective prettiness. They were companions and accessories, not confidantes.

      When Joan was lonely or distressed, it was Jacob she called, and he would take the phone from his scowling mother and retreat into the pantry, closing the flimsy door over the cord, gazing idly at the cans of soup and boxes of crackers while he listened. On the rare afternoons she didn’t have ballet, she summoned him to watch TV and help her with her homework at her house, which was always too dark and didn’t seem to have enough furniture and so felt like a hideout. Jacob’s mother would not allow a television in the house, nor did she approve of Joan’s lack of supervision or of friendships between boys and girls, and so he told her he was staying late at school.

      Joan trusted him with her darkest secret, which was that she had not only found her mother’s diaphragm but become obsessed with checking its presence in the bathroom drawer against what her mother said she was doing on a given night and the sometimes contradictory information offered by her Filofax.

      “See?” she said to Jacob once, having dragged him into the bathroom and opened a drawer with great portentousness, as though revealing the entrance to an Egyptian tomb. He saw cotton balls and shiny makeup compacts, emery boards, nail scissors with handles in the shape of a bird. “It’s gone.”

      “Okay,” he said, baffled by both her emotions and the workings of a diaphragm.

      “She’s doing it!” Joan told him, near tears. “With that man! His name is Rick! He works in her office.”

      To Jacob, this was not information to be cried over but rather to be filed away for later consideration. Joan’s mother was a thin, brusque woman who wore neat suits and pinned her hair in elaborate updos, the mechanics of which eluded him.

      “Don’t worry,” he said. He closed the drawer. Joan stared desolately at its white-painted face, its little ceramic knob in the shape of a rosebud. “It doesn’t have to bother you.”

      He wished he could think of something less dumb to say, less СКАЧАТЬ