Astonish Me

“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 said he was married to a ballet dancer.”

“Do you tell everyone?” Liesel asks Jacob with scorn and amusement. “You should get cards printed up and go around tossing them in people’s laps on the El. Anyway, I thought I got custody of this place.”

“I wanted a beer,” he said. “It’s too cold to walk anywhere else.”

They have not spoken much for a year, not since he dumped her, which he had only done because, perplexingly, she had not dumped him after he told her about Joan’s pregnancy. She takes off her jacket and turns it inside out over a barstool; snow drips off it onto the floor. The bartender sets a beer in front of her.

Her wispy blond hair, recently and unwisely cut to chin length, lies limp against her head, but the cold has flushed her cheeks and lips in a way that makes him think of sex. He chides himself for being so predictably horny, like a lab subject responding to stimuli. Since Harry’s birth, Joan has not been interested in sex, but, for Jacob, the relentlessness and insistence of the baby’s physical being draws constant attention to bodies and skin and nakedness and his own maturity and virility. He finds himself getting turned on in the most inappropriate situations, such as by a pissed-off ex, in front of her boyfriend.

Liesel doesn’t attract him as strongly as Joan, but he likes her looks, which are ruddy and earthy. She had tried to couch their breakup as a rejection of her appearance. Sorry I’m not a ballerina, she’d said, bending the last word into a long, sarcastic sine wave.

“What do you do, Ray?” he asks.

“I’m a cop.” Ray smiles.

Liesel leans against him, and he wraps an arm around her waist and tucks his fingers into her pocket. “No more academics for me,” she says. “I can’t take all the narcissism and insecurity.”

“Fair enough,” Jacob says.

“Really, though, what are you doing out drinking all by yourself?” Liesel asks.

He has no answer, of course, beyond his simple desire to be drinking and by himself and not at home. But to say this would suggest discontentment. One of Jacob’s greatest fears is that his life will not appear intentional. Had he subconsciously wanted to run into Liesel? Maybe. But only to use her as a reminder that he is happy. “I was supposed to meet a colleague, but I’m afraid I’m being stood up.”

“A colleague,” Liesel says, imitating his haughty tone. “How unfortunate.”

It is, Jacob realizes, time to leave. “I should go.”

“Great running into you.” Liesel smiles. “Here in my favorite bar. What a coincidence.”

When he opens the door, piled-up snow falls inside. “Nice move!” calls the bartender. But there is nothing Jacob can do. He clambers out into the cold, wedging the door closed behind him as best he can. The stairs are buried under a ramp of powder, and he climbs carefully, clinging to the frigid handrail, probing for each step. At the top, in a streetlamp’s soft orange circle, he pauses, enjoying the cold, which settles on his body like a weight. He turns for home.

A BLAST OF heat strikes him when he opens the door, and he strips off his coat before he even takes the key out of the lock. Joan is sitting on the floor with her back against the hissing radiator and her legs open in a wide V around the blanket where Harry is sitting upright, unsupported, in a diaper and a University of Chicago T-shirt, studying an assortment of rattles strewn around his plump legs. They turn to look at Jacob, Joan with the absorbed, private smile she gets around the baby, Harry with grave hesitation that turns to open-mouthed delight, showing his gums and two bottom teeth.

“Hello, sweethearts,” Jacob says, tugging his sweater over his head and stepping on the heels of his boots to pry them off.

When he stoops to kiss Joan’s cheek, he slides his hand down the neck of her shirt. She gave up on breast-feeding as abruptly and conclusively as she had quit dancing, even when the doctor said she should keep trying. Jacob suspects she had simply disliked it. Her breasts are bigger than they were before Harry but still no more than gentle hillocks on her chest, self-supporting, nothing pendulous. She looks up at him, not lusty, mildly amused. He tweaks her nipple. “Knock it off, they’re sore.”

“Do you know how many times we’ve had sex?” he asks her. “Ever?”

“I’m not keeping a tally.”

“Thirty-six. Eight when you came to visit. Twenty-one when you were pregnant. Seven since the baby.” He lies down on the floor, curved on his side, his body closing the wedge of her legs, penning Harry in, who cranes around to look at him and tips over.

“Oops,” Joan says to the baby. Harry sweeps his limbs like four oars.