Astonish Me by Maggie Shipstead Page B

This girl this morning told me—Never mind. It’s not important, only gross.”
    “I want to hear.”
    “No, I can’t say it out loud. It’ll make me feel sick. Forget it. We’re going to his dacha up the Hudson more. He’s different there. Nicer. The butterflies and wildflowers mellow him out. I keep expecting him to start wearing belted shirts like Tolstoy. He says he’ll marry me when I retire. I think he just wants to feel like less of an old queen.”
    “God. Do you want to marry him?”
    “I don’t want to marry anyone else. Maybe that’s half the battle. And I don’t want children. They deform the body.”
    Joan adjusts her cardigan. “No kidding.”
    “At least you’ve grown titties. Does Jacob want more?”
    “Titties or children? No to boobs, I think, but yes to kids. We’ve been trying, but nothing.”
    “How long?”
    “A year and a half.”
    “You want more, too?”
    Jacob wants to go to a fertility doctor—just to see , he says. Joan won’t. She tells him they should be grateful for what they have. She doesn’t want to know. Reprieved from the burden of another baby, she has mourned the lost possibility more than she would have expected. “I do and I don’t. I can live with either.”
    Elaine eyes her. Her shrewdness is more on the surface than it used to be. She seems shrewd and also weary, like a dictator who has weathered more than one coup and anticipates more. “Did you know that Arslan and Ludmilla split?” Elaine says.
    “No.” Joan sits back. She feels a sour satisfaction and an odd disappointment. “I’m impressed they made it as long as they did.”
    “I don’t think they’ve been together much the past few years.”
    Joan lights another cigarette, offers the pack to Elaine. They angle their streams of smoke away from each other. “When did you fall in love with him?” Elaine asks.
    “Arslan?”
    “Jacob.”
    “I saw him across the village square, and we did a big dance for all the peasants.” She hopes Elaine will be bought off by the joke, but Elaine waits without smiling. Joan looks away, says, “Little by little. It’s an accumulation of ordinary things.”
    “Romantic.”
    Joan bristles. “It is, in a way.”
    “Romance is irrelevant, anyway.” Elaine smokes. “At least for me. I prefer collaboration. Speaking of, did you see Arslan’s special on PBS? Rusakov and Friends or whatever it was?”
    “I saw the beginning,” Joan says, irritated that Elaine keeps bringing up Arslan, irritated at herself for being irritated. For a momentshe is nostalgic for her failed friendship with Sandy, Sandy’s lack of interest in her past. “Cheesy. That top hat. Do you think he’ll ever come back to the company?”
    “I doubt it. I’ve heard he’s happy in Europe. They throw money at him. They can’t get enough of the weird ballets he’s making. I saw one in Milan—it was just him and a huge red rubber ball and a white ramp. It was actually fantastic.” Elaine looks up at the sky. “It’s so hot out.”
    “You should have come in February.”
    “But what else?” Elaine asks after a pause. She sits straight in her chair, arms square on the rests like a brooding empress. “What else is there?”
    “Nothing really.” Joan smiles, melancholy, thinking that friendships go through cycles of extinction, that perhaps she and Elaine won’t be able to evolve quickly enough. “I’m boring.”
    “No,” Elaine says without conviction.
    “I am.”
    “You have Harry. Harry’s not boring.”
    Joan stubs out her cigarette and allows herself a half smile. She has made Harry, and Elaine will never have anything like him. “He’s just a little boy.”
    “But maybe he’ll be a dancer.”
    “Maybe,” Joan says. “Who knows. He doesn’t have to be.”
    “Won’t you mind if he never tries?”
    “Not at all.”
    “Not true. But what else?”
    There is too much to tell. Explaining themselves would be impossible, even an attempt would be exhausting, and