Astonish Me

“You’re right,” Jacob tells him, “but it’s also a bad name people call each other to be mean. Probably you should just avoid saying it.” He sits back up, and the Wheelocks surface too.

Joan is fighting the giggles and losing. For a long minute she turns away, shielding her face while the others watch in silence. It’s the tension, Jacob knows. In high school she would laugh when someone got yelled at in class. When she looks up, her eyes are red and watering. “Sorry,” she says to Gary and Sandy, her face crimping with the effort of seriousness. “I didn’t even know he knew that word.”

“He owes Chloe an apology,” Gary says.

“As far as he knew, he was being factual,” says Jacob. “If we make a big deal out of it, we only draw attention to it.”

Joan trembles in her chair, tears rolling down her cheeks. He can’t look at her or he’ll laugh too.

Gary runs his tongue over his incisors, close mouthed, making a gorilla face. “Thanks for the parenting lesson, but Chloe needs to know she’s respected.”

“He’s not being a misogynist. They’re playing puppies.”

“I don’t see what’s funny.”

Joan plunks her elbows down on the table, making the china rattle, and presses her face into her hands. Jacob feels himself being pulled after her as though by a tether. As he tries not to laugh, he makes an accidental strangled sound, which sends him shooting off the edge. He lists toward her and presses his face into her shoulder. She leans back against him, shaking, and rests one hand on top of his head, lightly gripping his hair. “I’m sorry,” he wheezes. “I’m sorry. It’s contagious.”

Whether it is a blessing or curse that the contagion spreads to Sandy, Jacob doesn’t know. Probably a blessing for him and a curse for her, as Gary singles her out as the target of his most stern and outraged glaring. The children are laughing too, under the table. They are all in it together until, inevitably and abruptly, control filters back, and they pull themselves upright, hot faced, spent, vaguely ashamed.

“Got that out of your systems?” Gary asks. He has an air of beleaguered dignity, like the only sober one in a room full of drunks.

“I’m sorry,” Joan says. “I just lost it.”

Sandy waves her hands. “It feels so good to laugh like that.”

Gary’s narrow eyes cut to her, and the woman cringes. In his agitated state, Jacob is acutely aware of the guilty, animal way Sandy’s back hunches and she flashes a grimace, exposing her teeth.

“What were you saying before?” she asks Jacob. “I was interested.”

“I don’t remember.” Jacob gropes for the lost thread of his thoughts, his euphoria draining away.

“Something about passion.”

“Oh. Right. Well. My basic point was that people tend to make opportunities for themselves when they love something. Look at Joan. She saw a picture of Margot Fonteyn in a magazine when she was four and said, ‘I want to do that.’”

With the air of scoring a point, Gary asks, “Did you want to be a psychologist when you were four?”

Joan dabs her eyes one last time with her napkin, rises, and begins clearing their plates. Jacob has noticed their ongoing refusal to acknowledge her dancing. When he mentioned it to Joan, she brushed him off, saying she’s not a dancer anymore, she doesn’t need anyone to make a big deal about it. “No,” Jacob says, resisting the urge to ask if Gary had played Mall Leasing Office as a kid, “but I was always interested in people and the way their minds work.” He twists in his chair, watching his wife. Everything she does is elegant, including carrying dirty dishes for a pair of boors. “Joan, tell them how you remember feeling when you saw that picture.”

“I was so little.”

He holds out his hand, beckoning her back from the kitchen. “Tell them.”

She comes closer, uncertain, like a fawn, her cheeks flushed from laughing. Even those few steps betray her as a dancer. She hasn’t lost her turned-out, precise walk. She is so upright, so deliberate; her head is supported so regally by her long neck.

“It’s silly,” she says, “but I just loved her. I loved this woman I’d never met. I didn’t even know what to call her or why she was up on her toes. I wanted an explanation. I had to find out what that picture meant.”

The Wheelocks look at each other. Gary raises his eyebrows slightly, skeptically. “Well,” he says, “it’s getting late.”

Sandy puts a hand on his arm. “No, Joan has to have cake.”

“Did you ask her if she wants cake?”

“It looks delicious,” Joan says.

“Joan was the one who helped Arslan Rusakov defect,” Jacob persists, avoiding his wife’s eyes so as not to see her surprise that he would bring up Rusakov. “Did she tell you that? She drove the getaway car. Have you heard of him?”

“I read the newspaper every day,” Gary says. “Of course I’ve heard of him.”

Sandy is staring after Joan, who has retreated to the kitchen. “Joan, you never said.”

“It’s ancient history.” Joan’s voice floats back from the kitchen. “It could have been anyone. I just did what some strangers told me to do. Should I light these candles?”

“You can’t light your own birthday candles,” Sandy says.

“EVERY FAMILY HAS a mythology,” Jacob says in bed, lying on his side with his arms folded across his chest. His pillow pushes his glasses away from his face at a funny angle. Joan has always found his postures of relaxation to be odd and stiff, and this one is no exception. He looks like a tipped-over mummy.

“How so?”

“You know, everyone has a role and an epithet and a story about how they came to be who they are.”

“Epithet?”

“Like, ‘Unappreciated-Genius Gary.’”

“Hmm.” Joan considers. She has always liked it when Jacob comes up with these theories. They become games to play, puzzles to solve. Lying on her back, she stretches her arms up and eyes them critically, letting her elbows and wrists curve out so she is holding an oval of air, her fingertips almost touching. Her arms are still thin enough, but she is losing tone. She drops them. “Perfectionist Joan.” She points a finger at him before he can protest. “It’s what you think.”

“Then what am I?”

They stare at each other, and Joan senses they are both trying to gauge how truthful the game should be. “Gentle Jacob,” she offers.

“Jacob the Nerd.”

“Jacob the Gentle Nerd?”

He smiles, and she can see that he will not offer up one of the labels they know would be more accurate: Jacob the Proud, Jacob Who Does Not Make Mistakes. It must have cost him to mention Arslan to Gary. He says, “Perfectionist isn’t the first word I think of when I think of you.” His tone is mild, but the game has turned dangerous.

“No? What is?”

He rolls onto his back, looks at the ceiling. She likes his profile: his strong chin with its dense, clipped beard, his long nose with a bump just below the bridge. “Unobtainable.”

“Oh, Jacob. I have been obtained.”

Behind his glasses, his eyes briefly close. “You know what I mean. It’s vestigial.”

She considers climbing on top of him, kissing him, but he will recognize the cheapness. She could tell him there is no one she would rather be married to, that her love is growing, but slowly, accumulating imperceptibly the way trace minerals in dripping water build rock structures in caves, and it would all be true. But what he wants is impossible—he wants to change the past, for everything to happen in the right order. He wants them to love each other equally, but he is afraid of what it would be like if they did.

“I haven’t laughed like that in a long time,” she says. “I used to lose it in high school when someone would get in trouble. Remember? It was the same at ballet. If Tchishkoff really tore into someone, I’d get the giggles. I felt like a monster. Some poor girl would get ripped apart, and I’d have to leave because I was laughing so hard. What is that?”