Astonish Me by Maggie Shipstead Read Free Book Online Page B

most promising individuals. He flew out before Joan and Harry and bought a house in a place called Valle de los Toros, one of those California towns that melt invisibly into the next, forming a continuous, hundred-mile-long patchwork of coastal domesticity.
    “Really,” Jacob says to Joan as they unpack the kitchen things, “what they’ve done is taken suburbia to the next level, cut out the middleman.” He has emptied a box of newspaper-wrapped dishes, and now he makes a precarious stack of mugs in a cupboard, not bothering to rinse off the ink and dust. “People like to live in places with specific names, so they chopped the sprawl into tiny little pieces and gave each piece some fakey Spanish label. This way, we can all tell ourselves we actually live somewhere—like we have a hometown , like we’re living the wholesome small town life, when really each of us is just one fleck of pig snout in the biggest hunk of real estate sausage ever made.”
    “Appetizing.”
    “You’ll like it. Don’t think too much about it. It’s easy not to think when the weather’s so nice.”
    Joan shuts the cupboard on the dusty mugs. “What do I have to think about anyway? Thinking’s not my thing.”
    “Come on. You know I didn’t mean you specifically. I was making fun of the whole California thing .”
    “Maybe you’re right. I don’t dance anymore. I should try thinking.”
    “What is this? Why are you jumping on me?”
    She shouldn’t trap him, poke at him. He hasn’t done anything wrong. “Sorry,” she says. She searches the kitchen for a way to change the subject. “We don’t have nearly enough stuff to fill these cupboards. It looks like we’re pretending to live here.”
    He takes off his glasses, polishes them on his shirt, and puts them back on. “Sometimes you act like a child.”
    “I said I was sorry.” She sounds more petulant than she intends. She hates to disappoint him. She fears the slow, corrosive trickle of reality into his adulation. There is a silence. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here.” She gestures out the window at their patio, their overgrown lawn, Harry playing in the grass.
    “Do whatever you want. Teach ballet, maybe. Or don’t. Do nothing if you want.”
    Joan stares out the window.
    Jacob goes on. “I don’t know how much more supportive I can be. Literally. I can’t think of anything else I can do for you. Just tell me what you want.”
    “I don’t know. Nothing.” She watches Harry. “It’s the new context. I tell myself I’m making a fresh start, and then I stay the same.”
    “It’s fine to stay the same. I just want you to be content. That’s really it. I don’t have a secret agenda.” He hesitates, plunges. “Most of the time now you’re here with me—really here, invested; it’s not like it was at first—and I think, good, she’s letting me know her, really know her the way people do when they’re married . And then other times you’re so distant it’s like someone’s swapped you out for a forgery.You seem like you’re going through the motions.”
    Joan looks out the window. Harry is collecting dandelion puffs, gathering four or five in his small fist before he puffs out his cheeks and blows them into smithereens. The motions . She has been trained to believe that the motions are enough. Each motion is to be perfected, repeated endlessly and without variation, strung in a sequence with other motions like words in a sentence, numbers in a code. “I’m trying,” she says. She is crying.
    He comes to her and puts his arms around her. “I know. But I wish you didn’t have to try so hard.”
    She rests her face against his shoulder, relieved the conversation is over, that they have moved on to comforting. She knows he wants her to say she loves him. He always wants her to after he has expressed any frustration or dissatisfaction. He is afraid and wants her to soothe him. She doesn’t want to say it. She wants to grasp a barre and