she wouldn’t be screwed for a few years until she found someone else. Why would they let you take out life insurance on a kid? It doesn’t even make sense. They’d know you were up to something.”
“I’m just talking about the possibility, though,” Stanley said, slipping into first-person ownership after all. “I mean, the idea’s possible. Something to think about. If you could pull it off.”
All in an instant he remembered a scene from two restaurants ago, La Vista, the two of them silhouetted against a wall of frosted glass and ivy and an artful water fountain that dribbled and never ran dry. His father wiped his mouth on a bunched handful of linen and said, “Want to hear the worst dirty joke I have ever come across in my entire life? I promise you won’t have heard it.”
The restaurant was quiet. The couple opposite were chewing and looking out the window. Stanley dabbed at his mouth. He said, “Yeah.”
“I’m warning you. It’s pretty bad. Shall I tell it?”
“Yeah.”
“All right. What do you get if you cover a six-year-old kid with peanut butter?”
“I don’t know,” Stanley said.
“An erection.”
There had been a long pause, Stanley’s father grinning with his eyebrows up, unmoving, like a clown. The woman opposite had looked across at Stanley casually, meeting his gaze and then lazily drawing her eyes away and returning to the silent dissection of her meal. He wasn’t sure if she had heard. He slid his gaze back to his father, his grinning expectant father, and switched on a smile. His own smile felt horribly false, as if the corners of his mouth were clothes-pegged or fish-hooked, and for a second they were both silent, both of them grinning, both of them still. Finally Stanley nodded, and his father said, “It’s pretty out there. Right?”
“Yeah.”
“That the worst one you’ve ever heard?” His father’s head was tilted at a jaunty angle, and he was rocking merrily in his chair.
“Probably,” Stanley said. “Probably the worst.”
The memory came unbidden into Stanley’s mind and he scowled more deeply now, feeling freshly betrayed. His audience was scowling back at him across the mirrored depth of the tabletop which showed them waxy and foreshortened.
“Nobody would ever let you profit from the death of some kid,” one of them said. “It just wouldn’t happen. Nobody would allow it to happen.”
Stanley shrugged his shoulders and looked away, out over the other tables in the cafeteria, as if the conversation had finished and he didn’t care. “You’re taking it the wrong way,” he said, without looking at any of them. He scratched his cheek carelessly, his eyes roving around the room and his mouth bunched and faintly sneering in the defiant pout of a child. He said, “You’re taking it too literally. It was just meant to be a joke.”
“What is a taboo?” the Head of Acting asked, his voice ringing out in the vast room. The group was sitting cross-legged in a circle, clutching their cold white-dusted toes, their faces grayed and ghostly in the diffused light.
Somebody said, “A taboo is something you want but you can’t have.”
“A taboo is something that’s forbidden because it’s disgusting.”
“Or because it’s sacred.”
“A taboo is something we’re not allowed to talk about.”
“A taboo is something that makes people feel uncomfortable.”
“A taboo is something that we’re not ready for.”
This last interjection was from the girl sitting on the Head of Acting’s right-hand side. When she spoke he started in surprise and sought her out with his clear pale eyes, and after a moment he smiled a rare and unexpected smile. “Something that we’re not ready for,” he repeated. “Good.”
They talked about magic and ritual and sacrifice for a few minutes, and then the Head of Acting asked, “Is death a taboo?” He looked searchingly at each of them in turn. “Once upon a time death was a great taboo. Is it still?”
Stanley sat and frowned at the floor. The Head of Acting’s pale darting gaze unnerved him. The tutor asked every question with majesty and a pointed reservation, as if emphasizing the profundity of the issues at stake and reminding them that none of them was really capable of a meaningful answer. The cold simplicity with which the Head of Acting spoke made something flutter in Stanley’s pelvis, as if the forbiddenness was amplified somehow by the tutor’s detachment: it was as if the Head of Acting was being deliberately casual, Stanley thought, like a veteran reprobate offering a cigarette to a child and pretending not to notice the child’s blush, and shrug, and stammer.
There was something powerfully strange about the conversation as a whole, as if taboo itself was a forbidden subject. Stanley had the vague sense that they were being tempted, and none of them quite understood how. He squirmed and waited for the flutter in his pelvis to pass. Most of the students, like him, were looking uncomfortable, sitting with their eyes cast down and waiting for the tutor to pounce.
“Stanley,” the tutor said, pouncing. “Is death a great taboo?”
Stanley made his hands into fists and pressed his knuckles into the floorboards as he thought.
“No,” he said at last. “Not anymore.”
“Why?”
“Because people pretend to die all the time,” Stanley said. “I watch people pretending to die every time I turn the television on.”
“So?” said the Head of Acting, but he looked eager, and his lips were drawn back.
Stanley said, “If death was a great taboo, then pretending to be dead would have consequences.”
The Head of Acting gave a brisk satisfied nod and turned back to the group. Stanley drew a breath. He was sweating.
“Let me tell you about my father’s death,” the tutor said. “He died in his own bed, and after his death my family spent one evening with his body before he was taken away. I had heard about rigor mortis. I found it an interesting concept, but I was also a little suspicious of it, as if it might be an old wives’ tale, something archaic that didn’t happen anymore.
“I sat by my father’s bed and watched over him, and every hour or so I would sneak forward and give him a little poke, just a little poke with my index finger, in the fold of skin underneath his cheekbone where his skin was all pouchy and soft. I kept touching his cheek like this, routinely, waiting for the stiffness to set in. And after a while it did. I leaned forward and poked at his cheek and it was hard as a board.
“It was the delay that I found frightening,” he said. “He was soft for so long, and then it was like somebody flipped a switch. The delay frightened me. The delay between two of death’s symptoms—rigor mortis and the stopping of the heart. All of a sudden I saw death not as something solitary and final but as an incremental process, a slow accumulation of symptoms, a gradual stepping-down. I had never thought of death in this way before.”
They were watching him warily now.
“This is a very personal memory for me,” the Head of Acting said, “because I had always imagined that at the death of my father I would feel very great sadness, even hysteria, that I would cry and cry like I’d seen my sisters cry, that afterward I would feel a deep longing for what was irreplaceable about my father, and I would have to work to rebuild my life as normal. I imagined that after it happened I would take time to think about my own mortality, but with a new appreciation and reverence for the brevity of life.” The Head of Acting’s voice was steady but his voice was very soft, and somehow intensified by the hush, like the savage clear-blue flame of a gas hob turned low.
“But that didn’t happen for me,” he said. “I didn’t cry. I didn’t feel a great sadness, and I quickly replaced everything about him that I needed to. My own mortality was just as it had ever been, that was all. I thought I knew how I would react to the death of my father, and I was wrong.
“Like Stanley,” the Head of Acting said, quickening and shifting into a new, brisker gear, “any one of you can turn on your television set and watch somebody pretend to die. You all will have seen thousands of deaths which are
