The Rehearsal

obscured to the rest of the room by a cluster of colonial furniture that had been carried to the art department for painting and left over the weekend to dry. All around him was the sweet smell of acrylic paint, as always at the Institute laced with detergent so the paint could be easily removed when the production closed.

Stanley bent over his costume. In his research for the production he had come to know his card very well: he knew that in the traditional French deck of cards the Queen of Spades was supposed to represent Joan of Arc, and in the game of Hearts the Queen of Spades was so unlucky she was known as the Black Bitch. He knew that she was the only queen to carry a scepter as well as a daisy flower, and for that reason she was sometimes called the Bedpost Queen. He had pored over the court cards in his deck at home for such a long time that he found the red-and-black images appearing after he closed his eyes at night. He disentangled the bobbin finally from the thready mess below the foot, and snipped the stray threads away. He pinched the end of the bobbin-thread in his fingers to pull it through the notch in the bobbin-holder, and heard the spool spin cleanly.

The door opened and Stanley caught a faint swell of music from the dance hall near the foyer, where a group of schoolchildren were taking their Saturday lessons in jazz.

“In here, then,” he heard somebody say, “Nobody should disturb us in here. It’s a bugger they’re using the staffroom. Sit down there if you like.”

The voice belonged to the Head of Movement. Stanley was still intently returning the bobbin to its tiny hinged cavity in the base of the sewing machine, a scrap of thread in his mouth, and he did not reveal himself at once. He wound the wheel at the side of the sewing machine and watched the needle plunge down to retrieve the bobbin-thread, bringing it up in a little scarlet loop that he flicked up with the tip of his scissors and tugged gently outward. He was so intent on the task that when it was done the Head of Movement and his guest were already in mid-conversation, speaking easily and with great relief, as two people who have longed for time alone to talk.

“They all want it,” the Head of Movement was saying. “Not just the first-years—everyone, right up until the day they leave.”

“Why doesn’t the school offer that sort of thing, then? One-on-one tutorials or whatever. If it’s what the students want.”

As slowly as he could, Stanley leaned sideways around the edge of his cubicle and saw, through the tiny sliver of view between an upended wing armchair and a sideboard, the central figure from the Theater of Cruelty exercise, the masked boy from second year who had slapped and shorn and nearly drowned his victim on the stage. Stanley watched him for a second, his smooth face unmasked now and taut with eager concentration as he listened to the Head of Movement speak.

“With you,” the Head of Movement was saying, “I think that this Institute will fall short in several respects. That’s what I wanted to say yesterday—I recommend something postgraduate, even an internship. The mime school. You’re going to be unfinished at the end of next year. Unfinished and hungry.”

The Head of Movement was speaking earnestly but without the clipped, rehearsed quality that usually characterized his speech. Stanley regarded the pair of them jealously through his sliver. The boy was sitting with his leg hiked up under him and his fingers stroking the frayed upholstery, nodding carefully as the Head of Movement spoke, and suddenly it struck Stanley what was so odd about the situation: they are friends, he thought in wonder.

“I value your opinion completely,” the unmasked boy said, leaning in close, and in that instant Stanley remembered the golden boy, greased and glittering like an artificial dish sprayed with lacquer to be photographed for a cuisine magazine. The golden boy had gleamed, and this boy was gleaming now.

Stanley swallowed and felt a bitter injustice in his throat. He recalled a vision of himself, in the Head of Movement’s office, pushing away tears as he shouted in complaint. Even now he felt a flicker of self-congratulation that he had responded to the Theater of Cruelty exercise in that violent way. Why hadn’t the Head of Movement been impressed, then? Why hadn’t the tutor relaxed into a rare and sudden intimacy, inspired by Stanley’s fragile openness to confess a vulnerability of his own? Why this boy, Stanley thought, this smooth-faced unmasked boy who was no better or worse than the rest of them?

“It’s funny,” the Head of Movement was saying now, “in many ways you’ve really… well. Woken me up, I suppose.”

“My growth is projected on to him… it is found in him,” the unmasked boy quoted, and through his secret sliver Stanley saw both of them smile.

“Shared or double birth,” the Head of Movement said. “Not the instruction of a pupil but utter opening to another person.” He was silent a moment, and then he added, “Well remembered.”

They sat there and looked at their shoes, enjoying the shallow silence of the room. Behind the cold discolored flank of the sewing machine, Stanley watched and felt bitter. He waited two long hours, with cramp in both knees and a terrible hunger gnawing at his insides, until the boy and the Head of Movement finally ended their conversation and left the room.

July

“Let’s improvise it,” one of the first-year boys suggested. “Let’s start with what we had last week and see where that goes. I really liked what was happening with the two characters together, both of them saying things that the other doesn’t really hear, like neither of them is fully present for the other.”

“We’ll just start rolling,” one of the girls said. “First Mr. Saladin and then the girl, rotating like that. Anyone can get up at any time. Anyone can play either of them, doesn’t matter who. We’ll just try and keep the scene moving and see what happens.”

“We’ll get a real dialogue going.”

“That’s right.”

There was a brief pause as everyone digested the formula and swiftly began to prepare what they would later say. Then one of the boys got to his feet. He transformed into a different person as he stood up, a man rising like a phoenix out of the pallid, ashy figure that had been the boy. Once he was standing, hands on hips and his jaw thrust back and his bare feet apart and solid on the floor, nobody doubted who he had become.

The man said, “When the girls spoke of it, they said all the way, as if the process was a passage, a voyage, some sort of ritual first crossing of a dimly charted sea. Victoria said those words to me—all the way. She asked a question. She asked, Do you want to go all the way with me? as if her departure were already scheduled, her moorings already cast, and I could simply choose to board and join her, to sail away with her and disappear. All the way, she said. Every inch of it. Every inch of that windblown ocean-salted bucking rolling passage. Every inch.”

He sat down. There was the briefest of pauses again, and then Stanley stood up. He stood with his weight on one leg like a girl, one arm crossed over his chest and holding his hip, the other gesticulating with a crooked elbow and a flat palm.

“He took a long time to answer the question,” Stanley said. “At first he gave this little shout of a laugh and gathered me up into him and kissed my crown. Sometimes when he kissed me he’d make this keening sound in the back of his throat, like a puppy almost, some kind of ghostly underwater voicing of some deep-felt feeling, right inside. Once he burrowed his head into the pilled blue wool of my armpit and moaned out loud and he said, I just feel so blessed, Victoria. I feel so incredibly, incredibly blessed. We were sitting there on the cream leather sofa in his living room and I said, Do you want to go all the way with me? and he said, Oh, you precious, precious little girl. Not yet. Not just yet. Let’s just enjoy the innocence for a moment, before it dissolves and we can never have it back again. Let’s just take this moment to enjoy how much is still to come.”

Stanley sat down. All around him the students were stern and glassy. They had only half-listened to his performance, all of them preoccupied already with the inward rehearsal of what they would say when they got up in front of the rest, and how they would contrive to make the words seem spontaneous and unrehearsed and pure.

One of the girls got up. Like any girl who tries to play a grown man, her performance was disproportionate and slightly embarrassing. She let her voice deepen and placed her feet wide apart and assumed a manner that was overly earnest and gruff. She raised her chin and said, “Could it have been one of the others, if this girl had never dared? Could it just as easily have been the girl to her right or left, another saxophonist in the front row of the jazz band, some girl whose breasts were smaller, whose gaze was sharper, whose fingernails were squatter, maybe, and poorer in shape, whose jersey was coming unraveled at the hem? All of them have smiled at me, looked hard at me, laughed with me. When we won our section at the high school jazz festival, some of them even hugged me. Would it have been different, with one of them?”