The Rehearsal

“Not necessarily. Just if there was a moment when you ceased to be innocent. The moment you fell. Can you remember your fall?”

Patsy thinks about this quietly for a second. The saxophone teacher raises her wineglass to her mouth and drinks. Patsy is beautiful tonight. Her hair is swept back into a tumbling handful at the nape of her neck, and her eyes are clear and bright. She wears a heavy brass locket, a gift from Brian, an antique and accidental-seeming piece that suits her perfectly, suits the stout capable breadth of her chest and the soft notched hollow of her collarbone. Patsy always suits her clothes, her costume. The image of her is always complete, the saxophone teacher thinks: it is impossible to halve her, undress her, subtract from her. The sax teacher cannot imagine removing the necklace, even in her mind—she can’t imagine Patsy unclothed, Patsy without the trimmings and trappings that she inhabits so completely.

Patsy rolls the stem of her wineglass in her fingers.

“I was never veiled or misted as a kid,” she says slowly. “You know, Santa Claused, Easter Bunnied, cabbage-patched, euphemized. I can’t remember any illusions. I can’t remember ever not knowing. Sex was never really a mystery. And there was no God in our house, so no mystery there. Of course I had first experiences like everybody else, made mistakes like everybody else, repaired and reinvented myself like everybody does. But I can’t remember ever really falling. I can’t remember if I was ever really innocent. I have no nostalgia for a time before.”

She looks up at the saxophone teacher. “Is that terribly sad?” she says, and laughs.

The sax teacher smiles and says nothing, and they both sit quietly for a while, touching their wineglasses with their fingertips, looking away.

“Everything had a precedent,” Patsy says after a time. “Everything I have ever done had a template, a formula, a model, something public and visible and known. I knew the shape of everything I would ever meet, before I met it. The template always preceded the reality, the experience, the personal truth of a thing. I learned about love from the cinema, and from television, and from the stage. I learned the formula and then I applied it. That’s how it happened for me. My whole life.”

She gives another little tinkle of a laugh. “Is that terribly sad?” she says a second time. “Is that very sad?”

Up on the little dais next to the piano the double-bassist leans forward and says into his microphone, “One last song, folks. Here’s one last song.”

EIGHT

May

The day after the Theater of Cruelty lesson Stanley ran into the victim of the exercise on the main staircase. The boy was walking quickly with his head down, taking the stairs two at a time. His hair was cropped close to his skull now, to even up the patch on the crown that the masked boy had snipped. The shorter cut didn’t quite suit him. He looked a little frightened, his ears and forehead protruding too obviously from under the shrunken cap of hair. He was wearing a new shirt.

“Hey,” Stanley said, reaching out a hand to stall him.

The boy turned guilty eyes up at him and nodded a shy hello.

“I just wanted to say that I went and complained,” Stanley said. His voice sounded huge in the stairwell, spiraling up and up to the floors above and ringing clear and hollow in the vertical shaft like the pealing of a bell. “About what happened. I went to the Head of Movement and complained.”

“Thanks,” the boy said quietly. “But it’s all right now. It was just a dumb thing.” He made as if to continue downstairs, but Stanley stopped him, moving closer and cornering him so he was trapped flat, pinioned against the banister with nowhere to go.

“I’m going to talk to the Head of Acting as well,” Stanley said. “I can’t believe that nobody else is doing anything about this. It’s disgusting. What they did to you was disgusting. And nobody cared.”

The boy looked at Stanley inscrutably for a moment. He reached back with both hands for the banister, and stood there with his arms behind him, tugging gently on the handrail. Then he said, “I was a plant.”

“What?” Stanley said.

“I was a plant. The main guy—Nick, the guy in the mask—he asked me and arranged it all beforehand. I knew they were going to pick me, and I knew what was going to happen, mostly. I knew about the water, and he said they might slap me around a bit. I thought it would be funny. Just for a laugh.”

Stanley was frowning. “But you bolted.”

“I didn’t know they were going to go that far,” the boy said. “My shirt and everything. Cutting my hair. He only told me about the water-trough. I thought it would be okay. I thought I’d help them out or whatever. I said yes.”

“Is there always a plant?” Stanley said. “Every year?”

“I guess,” the boy said. He jerked his gaze away, past Stanley’s shoulder and down the stairs. “They’d never get away with it otherwise.”

“They shouldn’t get away with it.”

“Yeah,” the boy said, and shrugged. “It was just an exercise. It was only to make a point.”

“But why?” Stanley said. He spoke with more aggression than he intended. He felt the same dawning feeling of helplessness that he had felt in the Head of Movement’s office. In his confusion he was scowling at the boy, and now the boy scowled back.

“I was just helping them out. They needed someone for their project. It’s no big deal.”

“What about your shirt?” Stanley said. “Your shirt was a big deal.”

The boy gripped the banister tighter. He was flushing. He clenched his jaw, and his shorn golden cap of hair moved angrily backward on his scalp.

“Hey look, I appreciate your concern, all right,” he said, “but I’m not like a little bandwagon, you know, or some sort of a just cause that you can fight for. It was my fault, I should have asked them what they were planning on doing. It’s no big deal. You didn’t have to complain.”

“They hurt you!” Stanley shouted.

“Yeah, and came and found me afterward,” the boy said loudly. “After they’d taken off their masks and it was all over, and we talked and everything, and we sorted everything out. It’s not your problem. You weren’t there.”

Stanley looked at the boy for a second and then stepped aside to let him through. The boy ducked his head and muttered, “Thanks anyway.” He slipped past Stanley, bounded down the stairs and disappeared.

Stanley looked up through the high mullioned window that lit the stairwell, and breathed heavily. He found his hands were balled into fists and he vaguely felt like hitting something, but he wasn’t sure what he wanted to hit, or even why. He stepped back as a flood of second-year actors thundered down the stairs, and as the crowd dwindled he looked up to see the Head of Acting descending calmly in their wake, holding under his arm a bundled mainsail, patched and rat-tailed and studded around its edge with reef-point eyelets filmed with rust. He looked preoccupied.

“Stanley,” he said as he approached. “You’re the man who wanted to see me, is that right?”

“It’s all right. I sorted it out with the Head of Movement,” Stanley said, stepping respectfully aside. “It’s all sorted out now.”

May

“This is an exercise in control and communication,” the Head of Movement said. “I want you all to divide into pairs and face each other. Starting with your palms together and your feet square, you will begin to move in exact tandem, each the mirror image of the other. You can move however and wherever you like, but I want to be able to walk among you and not be able to tell who is leading and who is following.”

The class lumbered to its feet and Stanley found himself paired with the girl who had been sitting nearest to him. They smiled at each other quickly as they turned to face each other, and Stanley felt his heart leap. He felt a little stab of self-contempt and frowned to quash the feeling. He turned back to look at the Head of Movement, narrowing his eyes to show the girl that he was listening hard, and that he intended to take the lesson very