Astonish Me

“Do you want to go out?” she asks, peering around the door.

Elaine, wrapped in a towel, is brushing her smooth black curtain of hair and studying herself in the mirror of the long makeup table. A plastic cup of wine sits on the counter, surrounded by colorful tiles of eye shadow, rounds of blush, tubs of pancake, fake lashes fanned out in their plastic cases. The wine helps her come down at night. No more than two glasses. “Sure. Where?”

“I don’t know. I thought you’d know.”

Elaine waves her in. “Come in already.”

A few other soloists are still around. One is wiping her eyelids with a cotton ball. Another stands naked, blow-drying her hair. Another lifts her dance bag to her shoulder and walks out, giving Joan’s shoulder a friendly pat as she passes. A wardrobe assistant moves through the room, collecting tights to be washed, straightening costumes on hangers, putting the hangers on a rolling rack. Joan sidles in and perches on the table.

“Do you have anything else to wear?” Elaine asks.

Joan looks down at her jeans and platform sandals, her striped tank top. “No.”

“We should go home first, then.”

“No, Elaine, please, I’ll lose momentum. It doesn’t have to be a big thing. Just a drink out somewhere. I don’t want to go right home.”

“Well. Okay.” Elaine pulls her dance bag out from under the table and paws through it. She thrusts a bundle of purple cloth at Joan. “Here.” Joan unfurls a loose, filmy blouse with a low neck. She strips off her tank top and pulls the blouse on over her bare chest.

“Can you see my nipples though this?” As soon as she has spoken, she regrets drawing attention to her breasts, which are swollen.

Elaine’s eyes are sharp and green and set close against her long, narrow nose, pinning it in place. No change registers in them. “Not really,” she says. She turns to the naked dancer with the blow dryer. “Yvette, do you have anything I could borrow to wear out?”

“I have a little dress,” the girl says.

It is a very little dress, and yellow, but it suits Elaine, as most things do. “Do you want to come to a party?” Elaine asks Yvette.

The girl, who is zipping up another little dress, blinks as slowly and mechanically as a doll as she considers. “Yes,” she says. “That would be very nice.” Joan is disappointed even though she likes Yvette, finds her dippy and harmless. Yvette was born in France and retains traces of an accent and of continental diffidence even though she has lived in New York since kindergarten. But Joan is becoming nostalgic in anticipation of the end of her ballet life and had imagined the night as belonging to her and Elaine, a memory just for the two of them, although Elaine will probably vanish as soon as they get wherever they’re going. She has a way of vaporizing at parties, being immediately absorbed into the revelry.

Outside, the three of them find a taxi heading downtown. The city’s summer breath rushes forcefully in through the windows, smelling of garbage and gasoline, and they recline in the warm air, saying little, worn out but also energized, their blood circulating smoothly, as though the performance had swept their veins clean. Joan is already too hot in her jeans and borrowed top. She envies the others’ little dresses even though their bare legs must be sticking to the grimy vinyl seat cover. The driver peeks in the mirror, the silver rim of his glasses catching red and green sparks from the traffic lights. He handles the wheel gently, cautiously, with his plump hands. Most cabbies flirt a bit when the dancers are out together, make some suggestion about where they should go, comment on how nice they all look, but he doesn’t. He takes his glances in the mirror, like someone peeping over a fence.

The party is near Astor Place, in a brick building with peeling yellow paint and a fire escape made out of rust. It is not Elaine’s usual sort of glitzy, careening, pill-popping party but something else, just a party, a humid crowd of languid people gathered in a smoky apartment. Edith Piaf warbles from the stereo. Joan didn’t need to have worried about Yvette. The girl takes the French music as a sign of welcome and sets off for the table of bottles in the far corner, greeting strangers as she goes with little sideways bonjours.

“Drink?” Elaine says.

“No, I need to drop weight.”

Elaine takes a pack of cigarettes from her purse. “Want one?”

“No, thanks.”

A knowingness hovers around Elaine’s pursed lips and raised eyebrows as she lights up.

About Yvette, Joan says, “I don’t know why she still does this French act.”

“She’s just French enough to pretend to be French. I don’t know—look at her. It works. I should think it’s obnoxious, but I don’t.”

They look together through the people. At the makeshift bar, Yvette is smiling up at a tall and gorgeous black man. She cuts her eyes to the side, murmurs something out the corner of her mouth, making him lean in.

“I’m going to get a drink,” Elaine says. “And hopefully a very tall man.”

Joan grabs her arm. “No, don’t. I’ll never see you again. You’ll disappear.”

“This place is tiny.”

“You have a way.”

“Come with, then. Five steps that way. We can rope ourselves together first if you want.”

Joan follows. “How did you know about this party?”

“I went home with the guy whose apartment this is a couple months ago, and then I ran into him the other night. He said he was having a thing. I wasn’t going to come, but then you … he’s—where is he?—oh, he’s that one.” She points through the crowd to a pale head with full pale lips and small pale eyes. The head, partially obscured by a woman’s red curls, nods in a courtly way, smiles slyly. It is the smile of a man who knows women like to think they are being amusing.

“He’s handsome.”

“Isn’t he? I thought so.” Elaine pours bourbon into a mug and offers the bottle. “You sure?”

Joan shakes her head. “All your men are handsome.”

“I would not call this guy one of my men. I would call him … Christopher? I’m not sure. I should have asked when I saw him again, but it seemed impolite. Maybe we can delicately find out from someone here.”

“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.