The Rehearsal

even guilty, like I am handing a loaded pistol to a child.”

“All actors are perverted by their profession,” the Head of Acting replied, shaking out his newspaper and folding it crisply along the existing seam. “We inflate their egos to make up for everything about them that gets trampled and broken. You’re not damaging them, Glenda. You’re just softening the blow.”

Most of Stanley’s friends from school had now dispersed, swallowed up by the local university and the polytechnic or packed off overseas to pursue better chances somewhere else. Stanley buried himself at the Institute. The first-years were required for long hours each day, and more and more often Stanley found reason to come into the buildings on the weekends, nosing around the script library or taking a book up to the viewing gallery above the dance hall, where he could watch the weekend school groups take classes in ballet and rope work and basic tissue. He found a flat with two other first-year actors, thin solemn figures who, like him, had let all the other bones of their lives fall away. He became consumed by the Institute so totally and wholeheartedly that he sometimes thought about the sour-faced boy from Wardrobe with the ancient gramophone in his arms. He had seen the boy several times on his way to and from the art department, always hauling cans of paint and bags of fabric scraps and half-finished puppets stuck with pins.

At home the boys talked nothing but acting, film and theater, and street performance and revolution, snug in the shell of their own irrelevance but all of them giddy as if they were standing together and alone on the edge of a new uncharted world. They talked long into the night and drafted plays on greasy scraps of newsprint and imagined what marvelous lies they might one day be paid to tell.

“When they write our biographies,” his housemates said, “when they write our biographies, all this will be in the opening chapter, the chapter before the big break, before we get famous, before everything starts happening. And this is the chapter that everyone will find really interesting and inspiring, because it will show that we are just people like everyone else, people who started from an ordinary beginning, people who were once poor and struggling and earning an ordinary wage. In that way, this chapter will be the most interesting chapter of the whole book.”

Stanley began to look at himself differently, cherishing the parts of himself that he might be able to use, delicately prodding himself for weaknesses, both fearful and hopeful that he might cause himself to bruise or break. His father, who had never before figured very prominently in his daily life, began to surface as a source of tragedy to be mined and exploited and spent. In class he talked about his father more and more. Gradually and unconsciously Stanley began to regard himself as a tragic figure—not a victim of the ordinary lash of adolescence, but a person more profoundly wronged, a kingly figure, an emotional hero. At night he sighed and pounded his pillow and sometimes cried.

“Always the arriviste,” the Head of Acting said in the staff-room, with a kind of paternal amusement. “We get them too late. That’s the problem. We should have a school for sixteen-year-olds. They’d get their degree at nineteen. They’d have to drop out of high school to audition. It’d do them good.”

“They’re already formed by the time they enroll,” said the Head of Voice. “Psychically formed. Morally formed. Everything happens so early now.”

“And they love themselves so dearly,” the Head of Improvisation said. She tugged sharply at her wool and sent the ball rolling away under the table. “That’s the hardest thing to break.”

In the students’ cafeteria on the floor below, the first-years were clumped together in a similar debate. Stanley picked thoughtfully at his gray slip of pork as he listened.

“You have to admire people that come here,” one of them was saying, “people that choose to put themselves on display, people that choose to play with the very aspects of themselves that make them the most vulnerable. These people are the bravest people in the world.”

April

A fine mist of slanting rain was falling, darkening the slate and beading the swollen moss with a thin film like a silver dew. Stanley was sprawled on one of the vinyl couches that lined the corridors of the technical wing, lying on his back with his legs wrapped around the radiator pipe and reading, his thumb spread over the top edge of the spine to hold it open.

“Are you doing your reading for Early Modern?” said one of the first-year girls, coming up beside him and flopping down on to the floor.

“Yeah,” Stanley said, shifting his thumb slightly to hold his place on the page. “I’ve got The Revenger’s Tragedy. What have you got?”

“The Alchemist,” the girl said, pulling her bag open and taking out a dog-eared copy of the play. “I haven’t started. What’s yours about?”

Stanley thought for a second, and then said, “It’s about a man who puts on a disguise in order to avenge the death of someone he loves, but after his revenge is complete he finds out that he can’t take the disguise off. He’s become this person he’s pretended to be for so long.” He flipped the book around to take another look at the cover, which showed a cloaked man attempting to ravish a skeleton. The skull was brightly painted in peach and scarlet, the cheekbones rouged and the eye sockets ringed in glossy black.

“Cool,” the girl said, thoroughly unmoved. She sighed and stretched out her legs, reaching down to grip her toes with both hands. “Dance class yesterday actually annihilated me,” she said. “I hobbled all the way home. Like actually hobbled.”

“Yeah,” Stanley said. He stalled a second, trying to think of something to say next. He almost began to say how much the dance class had made him sweat, but stopped himself with the words already in his throat. He almost began to chatter in a self-deprecating way about his fitness, but stalled again and instead cast around for something to say about the dance tutor or the class itself, but he took too long to come up with something and at all once he froze in the compounded panic of realizing he had paused for too long. The girl shifted and began to stretch her other leg. The rough-edged copy of The Alchemist fell sideways off her lap and on to the floor.

“All the dance tutors at this place are sadists,” she said. “Look at that bruise.”

Stanley looked. Slender fingers of gray and purple carved across her hip and melted into a reddish cloud above the bone. She stroked the bruise impressively with one finger, her other hand peeling back the waistband of her tracksuit to expose the skin.

“Wow,” Stanley said.

“But I do bruise really easily,” the girl said. She tucked the bruise back under her waistband and resumed stretching her leg.

“Hey, this play is actually really good,” Stanley said, loosening his tongue and trying for a second time. He flapped his copy of The Revenger’s Tragedy half-heartedly against his leg. “It’s so grisly and sick.”

The girl glanced at the cover briefly. “Is that the one where the guy nails the other guy’s tongue to the floor with his dagger?”

“Yeah!” Stanley said. “And while he’s dying he’s forced to watch his wife having sex with his bastard son.”

“Yeah, I know that scene,” the girl said.

Her indifference seemed to close the conversation completely, slamming it shut with a slap that left no echo. She sighed. Stanley tapped his fingers and wondered briefly if he should reopen his book and keep reading. He compromised by turning the book over and rereading the blurb on the back.

“Did you bruise after yesterday?” the girl said after a moment, looking at Stanley with a narrow-eyed interest and flicking her eyes over him, up and down.

“I just sweated a lot,” Stanley said, feeling as he said it a wash of resignation, as if he had known he would say it all along. “Dance class makes me sweat.”

“Gross,” the girl said, and touched her bruise again through the fabric of her waistband, cupping her fingers carefully around her hip.

March

“Let’s see some chemistry,” said the Head of Acting, and nodded at them both to begin.

This time Stanley was sitting on a park bench with his feet tucked underneath him, drawing his shoulders up to his ears against the cold. The air was crisp and ginkgo-smelling.

“I’ve seen you here before,” Stanley said, “on your way to your music lesson, stepping around the leaves.”