dropped, awkward and untrusting, both hands clutching at the flying harness and craning nervously to check the winch. They walked across the stippled bridge that connected the fly-floors, looking down at the stage far below and reaching out to touch the thick braided cables that ran back and forth. The flies were at least twice the height of the proscenium arch, and the Head of Acting showed them how an entire panel of scenery could be flown up into the space above the stage to hang there, ready and waiting for the cue to drop. He activated the lift in the orchestra pit and they watched the floor of the pit rise up to meet the level of the stage. He showed them the heavy motorized chain underneath the false stage floor that activated the revolve, and then he switched the revolve on and they let themselves be carried around in silent powerful orbit, standing braced like stiff-legged pawns as the red mouth of the auditorium flashed by again and again.
The Head of Lighting came forward and showed them the templates that could turn light into dappled water and wind, the gauzes that gave the illusion of distance, the lights that could make you beautiful or villainous or old, and the followspot with its thick steel handle that could track an actor around the stage. He showed them how to make sunlight and moonlight and counterfeit flames. He showed them how to turn indoors into outdoors and back again.
They stood underneath the steel lighting rig and looked up at the heavy black instruments hanging like a cloud of bats from the pipes, the black barn-doors that shuttered and blinkered the bulbs all folded and unfolded like countless bat-wing membranes settling in sleep. The instruments were each clamped to the rig with a steel yoke which allowed the shuttered beam to be directed anywhere over the stage: the Head of Lighting demonstrated, slipping colored gels expertly in and out of the gel frame holder and pulling the yokes to and fro. He straddled the top of his dented ladder with his ankles hooked around the topmost steps to hold him steady, squinting down at them and plucking at his brown beard with his free hand as he spoke.
The first-years were then shown the lesser secrets: the door-slam, a little wooden box with a heavy sliding bolt that could simulate door-slamming sounds from backstage, and the rain box, a little box filled with dried peas for simulating rain-sounds—“Before everything was digitalized,” the Head of Acting said with a nostalgic gravity, as he shook the box and filled the air with the sound of gentle drumming rain. He showed them up close how the false perspective of the painted flats contrived to make the stage area bigger than it actually was. He showed them the grooves and runnels into which the flats could slip, the ancient pulley that hauled at the red curtain, and the curved cyclorama at the back of the stage that gave the space a never-ending vastness, as if it went back and back forever.
“The auditorium is a sacred space,” the Head of Acting said at last, looking gravely at them as they stood in the middle of the flooded stage and breathed in the sweet dusty smell of hot lights and generated fog. “We do not hold classes in here. It is only when we come to dress rehearsal that you are allowed to use this space. You may not come in here alone.”
The first-years all nodded. Stanley was standing at the back of the group, still craning upward into the vast blackness of the flies and trying to remember everything they had been shown. He was a little in awe of the Head of Acting, but underneath it all he wasn’t sure he liked the man very much. There was something cold and pulsing about his manner that reminded Stanley of a lizard or a frog. He had never touched the Head of Acting’s ropy liver-spotted hands, but in his mind he imagined them to be cold and moist and snatching.
They all waited for the Head of Acting to say more, but he just drew his heels together and spread his arm to gesture them off the stage, signaling that the tour had come to a close.
The first-years filed quietly past him and he watched them go, down the wheeled aluminum steps into the stalls, up the aisle past the rows and rows, and finally out into the marble light of the foyer. When they were gone he moved to the stage manager’s cubicle to kill the lights. He stood with his hand on the cool gray lever, and out of habit cleared his throat and called out a warning up into the flies: “Going dark.”
Stanley walked out of his final audition feeling light-headed. He paused at the fountain in the foyer to steady himself and gripped the basin with both hands. He breathed quietly for a moment, looking past the porcelain masks into the foggy middle-distance of a recent memory, and after a moment he realized he was being observed. He straightened and gave the spectator a rueful sort of smile. She was an older woman, maybe the secretary, framed like a news-anchor behind the high administration desk in the foyer and watching him with her cheek propped upon her palm.
“You’ll be wishing you brought a hip flask,” she said. “Just had your audition, I guess.”
“Does everybody look like this?” Stanley said, emphasizing his already crippled posture with a little jerk of his spine and holding his hands limp. The woman laughed.
“More or less,” she said. “You have to watch the ones who look too happy. In my experience the ones who look too confident afterwards are the ones who don’t usually get in.”
“Oh,” Stanley said, drawing himself up slightly.
“I suppose it’s your first time auditioning,” the woman said. “Some kids try out three, four, five times. It makes you think what they’re doing with their lives in the meantime, just waiting all those years to finally get in.”
“Yeah,” said Stanley. “Yeah, wow. It is my first time.”
“They didn’t shake you up too much?” the woman said. “They can be quite mean, in the beginning. To break you in.”
She seemed bored, sitting there with her head on her hand in the echoing cavern of the foyer. All the surfaces were bare and clean, and the car park was empty through the high wall of glass.
“Nothing too painful,” Stanley said. “Nothing I didn’t deserve, probably.”
The woman laughed. Stanley watched her laugh. It struck him for the very first time that there were qualities of beauty that were unique to women, qualities that teenage girls could not possess: kindness lines around the eyes and mouth, a certain settling of the body, a weariness of poise and pose that was indefinably sexual, like the old glamour of a dusty taffeta dress or a piece of costume jewelery with a rusted clasp. The thought had not occurred to him before. He had supposed (though never truly consciously) that a woman was only attractive insofar as she resembled a girl; that her attractiveness fell away, by degrees, through her twenties and thirties until it was buried by middle age; that the qualities that women sought were always the qualities they once had, a backward striving that was ultimately doomed to fail. He had supposed that men slept with women their own age only because they could not snare anybody younger, or because they were still married to the sweetheart of their youth; he had not supposed that weary, veined and pear-shaped women were attractive in and for themselves—they were a second-best, he had imagined, a consolation prize. Now, with a weak stirring in the nerve-wracked cavity of his chest, he saw this woman through a different lens.
She was wearing makeup, a thin line of black behind the lashes of her upper eyelid that must have been straight and uniform when she stretched her eyelid out flat to apply the liner, but when she released the skin to blink and appraise herself the line had puckered, giving her a blurred, slightly clownish look that made Stanley think of an old and kindly whore. As she smiled he saw that her incisor was rimmed with the gunmetal gray of an ancient filling. The skin on the back of her hands was loose enough to frame the tendons and the veins, and her knuckles were pouchy whorls of white. A manufactured tan on her collarbone and on the V-shaped glimpse between her breasts gave the skin a fibrous look: the wrinkle-weave traveled both horizontally and vertically so the skin was soft and infinitely lined, like worn suede.
For the first time in his life Stanley saw that a woman was not simply a failed and hopelessly outmoded girl. She was a different creature entirely from the glossed and honeyed girls in the audition room: those girls, Stanley thought, could never play this woman until the day they became her, and from that day onward they could never play a girl.
“You’re right about the hip flask,” he said. “I reckon I’ll walk out of here and straight into the pub.”
“Have one for me,” the woman said. “And good luck. If luck counts for anything.”
Stanley passed through the double doors and out into the drowsy warmth of the late afternoon. As he turned the corner and left the gabled heights of the Institute behind, he thought to himself that he was probably the twentieth student that day to have exited the audition room, passed through the foyer, walked by the administration desk and exchanged words with the secretary before leaving the building. He wondered what she had said to the others, and how she had said it, and what they had thought when they looked her in the eye.
“Let’s see some chemistry,” the Head of Acting said, and nodded for them both to begin.
