Astonish Me. Maggie Shipstead

first to arrive, she helps drag the barres out from the wings. The airplane has left her tight—she can gauge her muscles’ moods perfectly; today they pull at her bones like recalcitrant children—so she leaves her sweatshirt on over her leotard and adds a pair of vinyl shorts, rolling the waist down around her hips. By the time the last dancers arrive and Mr. K claps his hands to begin class, her muscles have begun to relent, and she has a sweat going.

      She is thirty-one now, her body already less tolerant and cooperative than it was. The days when she could party through the night and survive class are long gone. She doesn’t smoke, drinks less, eats well, has cut out drugs except for coke, just a tiny bit before performances and at intermission. Sometimes a bump in the afternoon if she’s having a long day. She travels; she meets people, has lovers but loves only Mr. K; she is applauded. But all of that happens around the periphery of the narrow range of activities—class, yoga, massage, sleep—that will help her remain a dancer. She scrabbles against her inevitable decline, works to retain her strength, stave off injury. She has had stress fractures, torn ligaments, surgery on her left knee. Never in her life, not once, has she danced the way she wishes to, but futility has become an accepted companion. The ideal that lives beyond the mirror makes teasing, flickering appearances but never quite shows itself, never solidifies into something that can be looked at and not just glimpsed. She might surprise it as she whips her head around, spotting during pirouettes, or catch it flitting through one hand or foot. But it never stays.

      The only redemption she finds in age is that she understands so much more than she did when she was twenty and tireless and reckless and resilient. She can express more now; she knows what to express. The critics have noticed. They say she has become a better actress, but she believes the improvement isn’t in her acting but in her ability to feel. Even in Mr. K’s more conceptual works where she is less a character than a kinetic idea, she can convey experience, humanity, emotion. “Less feeling,” he tells her sometimes. “Stop feeling. You won’t die if you don’t feel for a little while. Just dance. It’s only about the steps.” Sad, really, how ballet has such limited use for wisdom. When she’s fifty, she might be the witch in Sleeping Beauty, the nurse in Romeo and Juliet, roles that call for pantomime and heavy makeup, presence more than technique. Margot Fonteyn danced into her fifties, but Elaine is no Fonteyn. Even if she were, she would not choose to carry on for quite so long. A woman old enough to be a grandmother has no business prancing around in a tutu, pretending to be a virginal peasant or princess.

      Onstage, Elaine misses the mirror. Without it she is halved, uncertain of her existence; the dark maw of the theater is a poor substitute. She looks at her shadow on the floor until Mr. K catches her and adjusts her chin with a long, cool finger, saying, “All you will see is a hunchback.” So she watches the rows of arms lifting, the heads swiveling. A ribbon of music unspools from the piano. Slippers brush against the floor. Knees and hips crack. “One,” says Mr. K. “And up, and three, and out, and just the upper body, good, and out, and fifth, and out, and fifth, yes, and turn.”

      During class or rehearsal, he never treats her differently from the others, but in the nighttime quiet, lying side by side in his bed, his hand resting companionably on her stomach, he has told her she is his true muse, she has become his idea of a woman. Idea, not ideal, which she would recognize as a lie. It is the idea of her—the idea of women in general—that obsesses him: their capacity as vessels, their aesthetics, their otherness. He eroticizes them, desires them in a way, but does not lust for them. He lusts for men, she knows, but she has never seen him be lecherous toward the boys in the company. She suspects he feels demeaned by lust. That part of his life is walled off, invisible, underground, nocturnal, private.

      Elaine and Mr. K sleep together often; they have sex rarely, usually only when he is drunk or riding the high of a new ballet. She calls him Mstislav when they are alone, but she still thinks of him as Mr. K. He has suggested that she move in with him, and she supposes she will. They have mossed together. To think she could extricate herself at this point would be delusional. When she was younger, she had been tormented by his indifference in bed, had thought it meant he was always on the verge of abandoning her, and she had tried to hack herself loose from him. She told him she wanted normal love, a husband, monogamy, something she could explain to other people, but then, after a year, when normal turned out to be a disappointment, he made a ballet on her: Catherine the Great.