Astonish Me. Maggie Shipstead
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cokehead crescent moon at Studio 54 and peeked through the doorway to the orgy room at Plato’s Retreat and been guided by more than one guy who knows a guy who knows a guy through downtown deadlands and up secret stairs to illegal parties in cavernous lofts. Elaine doesn’t look like a ballerina when she’s out—she turns slinky and loose on the dance floor, matching the steps of whatever man materializes in front of her—but Joan is too precise, too reserved, too square. She has tried drugs, but they leave her clinging to a banquette or crouched in a bathroom stall, immobilized by anxiety.
Elaine ingests a steady but restricted diet of cocaine without apparent consequence. The key, she has said to Joan, is control. Control is the key to everything. Elaine has a strict limit for coke, a regimen. She will do a bump before a performance for confidence and maybe another at intermission if she’s dragging. She will do a line or two—never more than two—once or twice (no more than twice) a week when she’s out, and she will substitute coke for lunch when she wants to drop a few pounds. She’s not greedy about the high, doesn’t want it all the time, just wants the boost of it. If she’s short on money and doesn’t have a man who’s supplying her, she will cut it out entirely. No problem. That way it is a routine, something already managed, and the drug will not interfere with what’s important, which is dance.
Elaine always has men but is never in love, except with Mr. K, the artistic director, who also believes in regimens. Their love can be managed, must be managed. Joan had been surprised by how kind Elaine was during the tumultuous futility of her affair with Arslan, how patiently she listened as Joan plotted with a conspirator’s intensity the hypothetical events, realizations, and declarations that, if they occurred, would ensure Arslan’s lasting devotion. Arslan! A man who had never been faithful to anyone and did not seem to love her. Maybe Elaine enjoyed the proximity to unmanageable love, the whoosh of it brushing by, the spectacle of someone else losing control. She must crave those things or else she wouldn’t have such an appetite for nightlife. Joan wonders what she will think—possibly already thinks—about the pregnancy.
The sweepers are moving through the theater, clacking their dustpans. The audience has gushed, marveling, out onto Columbus Avenue. Arslan and Ludmilla have slipped away through the stage door. Tomorrow will start with company class. Almost every day starts with class, and those that don’t are shapeless and problematic. Only what’s left of the night separates Joan from more stretching, more dancing, from the genteel swoop and clatter of the piano, everyone at the barres while Mr. K patrols, sweater tied over his shoulders, saying, And open, and two, and again, lengthen your leg and UP, stay, stay, stay. No, girl. Like this.
Joan should sleep while she can, but she isn’t ready to go back to the apartment. She sleeps in a twin bed against the far wall of their small living room. For privacy, she tacked a sheet of printed Indian cotton high to the wall and draped it down over her bed to form a kind of tent, but the sheet only makes the room seem squalid and ramshackle. Which it is, in a way. The apartment is a crash pad, somewhere to go between classes and performances, between men, somewhere to recover from the hot spots.
She finds Elaine in the soloists’ dressing room.
“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