Astonish Me. Maggie Shipstead

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СКАЧАТЬ were normal, “The worst part about being injured is how smug my mom is about the whole thing.”

      He closed his eyes against the glare of the sun. “Yeah?”

      Joan nodded. “The other day she circled an ad for a typing course and left it on my pillow. I wanted to hit her.”

      “You can’t do that.” He dug in the ice chest and busied himself pouring out cups of vodka punch.

      “Hit her?”

      “Type.”

      She smiled ruefully. “With my mom, it’s like she’s missed the whole point of my entire life. I work myself to death at something that’s really actually important, and all she wants is for me to be a secretary. It’s not like I know if ballet’s going to work out, but I have to believe or else there’s no point.”

      “At least,” Jacob said, trying to focus on the problem at hand, to be, in spite of everything, a good friend, “you know that what you want was your idea in the first place. My parents brainwashed me into the fine citizen I am today.”

      “What do you mean? You don’t want to go to Georgetown?”

      “No, I do. But I’m not sure I wanted to be skipped ahead and put in extra classes and all that. I don’t know. It’s done. I get to leave home early, so I should be grateful.”

      “Sometimes I wonder,” Joan said, her mouth red from the punch, “how you’re supposed to know if you’re really feeling what you think you’re feeling. Like how do we know everybody sees colors the same way, you know? Do we all feel ‘happy’ the same way?”

      Jacob shrugged.

      “In ballet,” she went on, “when something’s really beautiful, I feel a lot, but not happy or sad, really. Just a feeling. With goose bumps. I like it.” After a moment, she sighed and rolled onto her stomach, resting her forehead on her arms. “If I can’t dance, I know I won’t die, but it feels like I will.”

      He rolled over onto his stomach, too. “It’ll work out.”

      She turned her head so they were looking at each other. “You’re the only person who takes care of me. You think I don’t notice, but I do.” Her punch-stained mouth was as inviting as red velvet.

      Later he would not believe that he had simply scooted across his towel and put his mouth on her red one, lunged at her, really. The desire was so pure it set his teeth on edge. He pushed her over onto her back with an insistence he didn’t know he was capable of. Her arms went up around his neck; her hands clasped the back of his head; he sprawled across her. Some seconds passed before he became aware that her hands had dropped to his chest and were pushing at him. He lifted his face slowly, unwillingly.

      She looked stricken, panicked. “I can’t,” she said.

      His frustration produced an abrupt and furious certainty that he had been cruelly wronged. “What do you mean you can’t?” he demanded. “Of course you can.”

      She shook her head, opened her mouth, but said nothing.

      He couldn’t stop himself from saying, “You’re a selfish tease, and I’m sick of it.”

      She sat up. Her small face was hard, knowing. “Oh, I see. You’re not really my friend. You were just hoping to get some all this time. Didn’t you have anything better to do? Isn’t there someone else you could follow around? You’re such a kid.”

      “No one cares about you like I do,” he said. The core of his anger had gone cool, and he felt an appalling flicker of the remorse that would follow. “I’m the one who takes care of you. You said so yourself. But what does that get me? Nothing.”

      “What does that get you?” she repeated. “What do you think it should get you, Jacob?” She flopped flat onto her back, limp, legs apart. “Here you go. Here’s the grand prize. Buffet’s open. Help yourself. Go ahead.”

      He looked down at her and couldn’t help but consider kissing her again. Instead, he wrapped his arms over his head and pulled his knees to his chest. In the past, when he had imagined kissing her, his worst-case scenario—also his most likely scenario—had ended with humiliation. He would plant an exploratory kiss; she would balk, embarrassed; he would be humiliated. He had not anticipated the lunge, the greedy engine driving him through the kiss toward more and more. “What’s wrong with me?” She didn’t say anything. He looked at her. “Really. What’s wrong with me? You go out with other guys. I know you like me more than them, but you let them kiss you.”

      “Nothing’s wrong with you,” she said. “Usually.” Whatever debt might have been between them had been erased, or reversed, by the word tease. She owed him no explanation for why she didn’t love him the way he wanted her to. “Let’s just forget about this. Let’s go home.”

      “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

      “I know,” she said. “Let’s forget about it.” But when he extended his hand to help her up, she waved him off.

      “You’ll get sand in your cast.”

      “You’re the one who wanted to go to the beach,” she said and set off over the dunes.

      They saw each other that summer but not often. Jacob was scrupulously respectful. Joan made a show of joking about all the girls he would get in college. Georgetown had gone coed the previous year. There was malice to the way she showered him with affectionate mockery, but he endured it, thinking about how he would leave in August and get some perspective. That would be a relief. Their friendship was no longer a thing in itself. They were warily circling a different thing, something that might exist or might not.

      Then he left and heard nothing from her, and for a time he thought their relationship, whatever it was, might have run its course. He missed her, but he also felt a self-congratulatory satisfaction in having outgrown her. He learned to play racquetball. He drank beer. He decided on psychology, much to the disappointment of his mother, who had been pushing for medicine. He dated a girl named Sarah and lost his virginity to her. Everything was fine, and then, late one night, drunk, he wrote his first letter to Joan.

      THE DOOR OPENS and a woman comes into the bar on a burst of cold air. She is bundled in a sheepskin jacket with epaulettes of snow and a purple scarf. An ear-flapped lumberjack hat is pulled low on her brow. She stops short. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she says, staring at Jacob from between hat and scarf like a knight peering out of a suit of armor.

      “Liesel?” he says. “Is that you under there?”

      In answer, she unwraps her scarf from around her broad, shrewd milkmaid’s face. “Ta da,” she says. Before he can process what is happening, she goes and kisses the mustache guy on the lips. The guy raises his glass at Jacob.

      Liesel pats the guy on his beefy pectoral. “This is my boyfriend, Ray.”

      “Hey,” Jacob says.

      “Ray, this is my ex-boyfriend, Jacob.”

      “Yeah,” Ray says, “I’d guessed.”

      “Really?” Liesel looks between them. “How?”

      “He СКАЧАТЬ