The Rehearsal

unapologetic and mischievous.

“How well do you know your son Stanley?” the Head of Acting asked first.

Stanley raised his eyebrows and smiled. “He’s a good kid. We swap dirty jokes, that’s our thing. We get along fine.”

“What kind of dirty jokes?”

“Oh, we try and shock each other, back and forth. It’s just a game we play.” Stanley smiled again and looked at the Head of Acting coolly, as if he could see right through him, as if all of the Head of Acting’s wants and fears and hopes and faults were laid bare to him. The Head of Acting looked impassively back.

“Tell me one of the jokes that you’ve told your son,” he said.

“What’s the best thing about sleeping with a minor?”

“I don’t know,” said the Head of Acting politely.

“Getting paid eight dollars an hour for babysitting.”

There is a smothered giggle from one of the students on the floor. Stanley turned to flash him a smile. “Good, eh?” he said, twisting both wrists around to shake out his cuffs the way his father often did. “But it’s getting harder and harder to come up with anything original. I have my secretary look them up for me. Best job she’s ever had, she reckons.”

There was another ripple of laughter from the floor. Stanley grinned and drew himself up a little higher, placing both hands on his stomach and stroking the fabric of his shirt downward again and again. He contrived to make the movement look almost absentminded.

“Tell me one of the jokes that Stanley has told you,” the Head of Acting said.

Stanley paused and thought for a moment. “Can’t recall, sorry,” he said at last.

“Would you say you have a good relationship with Stanley?”

“We don’t see each other that often,” Stanley said, “but he’s a good kid. Good sense of humor. A bit sensitive maybe, but that isn’t going to hold him back. We get along fine.”

“What’s your son good at?”

“Stanley?” Stanley said, buying time the way his father would buy time. “He’s pretty well liked everywhere he goes, I think. He did well to get into drama school. Is he a good actor? I don’t know. You could probably tell me that.”

“So what would you say he was good at?”

“The arts,” Stanley said doubtfully, thinking hard. “He’s a romantic. He got that from me. He sure as hell didn’t get it from Roger.”

“Is Roger his stepfather?”

“Yes.”

“What’s he like?”

“Mild,” said Stanley. “Laughs even if he doesn’t think it’s funny. Runs out of things to say and then looks frightened, tries to escape. Sure he’s a nice man though. I wouldn’t marry him. But he’s a nice man.”

“Is he a good father to your son?”

“He’s a good stepfather to my son.”

“All right,” the Head of Acting said, turning to include the rest of the group huddled at Stanley’s feet. “Let’s open up the floor. Any of you can start asking Stanley’s father questions. Anything you like.”

“Do you see yourself in Stanley?” called out a girl in the front row.

“He’s a little more careful than I was at his age perhaps. He’s an innocent kid. I wasn’t as innocent as he is.”

“Do you think he’s still a virgin?” This was from one of the tousled boys in the back. The Head of Acting looked around sharply, but Stanley didn’t flinch. He shrugged and smiled.

“There’s a certain manner about him,” he said. “Something unspoiled. I couldn’t say. Wouldn’t want to say.”

“What’s the worst thing about him? His worst fault?”

Stanley looked down at the floor and drew his lips between his teeth to think. “Trusting people too much,” he said at last. “Trusting people who aren’t worthy of being trusted.”

“Have you told him that’s what you think?”

“No,” Stanley said. He flapped his arm irritably. “What would be the point of that? He needs to make mistakes or he’ll never get anywhere. And that’s not the sort of father I am.” He tossed his head impatiently and twitched out his cuffs again.

“What do you think Stanley thinks of you?”

“I think that underneath it all I disappoint him,” Stanley said. “He’s disappointed and he’s angry because on one level he really wants to rebel against me. He wants to tear down everything I stand for, make me see myself for what I am, but he can’t. I’m not that person in his life. He doesn’t need to rebel against me, because I’m not the one who makes the rules. I’m just the outsider, the man who turns up every now and again. If he tried to really rebel against me I’d just laugh at him. I think he resents me for that. It’s a disappointment to him.”

“You can see all that?” asked one of the boys from the floor with a pointed skepticism, as if to imply that Stanley wasn’t quite remembering the rules of the exercise. The Head of Acting was sitting back with his arms folded, watching Stanley intently with narrowed eyes.

“Yes,” Stanley said simply. He spread his hands again. “I’m a psychologist. It’s my job to see things.”

August

“We’ve got information!” the boy Marcus was crying out when Stanley slipped into the rehearsal room and took his seat on the floor. “Polly had a friend of a friend who was the abused girl’s best friend, and she knew basically everything. We interviewed her and wrote everything down!” He waved a little notebook in the air, flushed with his own success.

“What’s some of the stuff?” somebody called out.

“Like, he was her music teacher,” Marcus said, flipping open his notebook in excitement, “and she took private woodwind tutorials with him, for alto sax. And when they drove anywhere she used to lie on the floor in the backseat with a rug over her. And in his spare time he painted in oils, just as a hobby, only he never painted her because it would be evidence and he wasn’t that stupid. But he wanted to, he said, God he wanted to, because when she came all the blue-map veins on her sternum and her throat would all come up, rise to the surface of her skin just for an instant, and he always said that if he could capture her at just that moment, it would be the best thing in the world he had ever done. He knew it instinctively. They had a joke that he could do a series of paintings, an exhibition. He said he had never seen anything like it, someone who changed so much in that split- second instant, as they came. It was his favorite thing about her.”

Marcus flipped through his notebook, turning over the pages.

“Oh, there’s so much,” he said, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “We can use all of it. It’s so good, and there’s so much. We should buy this girl a present to say thank you. Polly knows her through orchestra.”

“We’ll make sure to get her complimentary tickets for opening night,” Felix said, already making a note on the side of his jotter. “And a voucher for nibbles.”

“Read out the rest,” someone called out. “Read out everything.”

August

Near the end of the first-year calendar was an underlined event described simply as “the Outing” and carefully timetabled so that the first-, second- and third-year actors were all required to participate together. The actors all assembled in the gymnasium, the second- and third-years smug and aloof in the security of having performed the exercise before.

The sixty-odd students were each assigned by the Head of Acting a part from a play. He had appointed the parts carefully, choosing students who bore a temperamental or physiological likeness to the characters he knew so well, and he smiled as he read each name off the long list he had penned into his notebook. “Henry, I’d like you to play Torvald,” he said. “I’m looking forward to seeing your Torvald. I’m guessing it’s going to be a very interesting mix”—as if Henry and Torvald were transparent overlays that could be placed upon each other to form an amalgam, a newer, brighter image that would be better and more vibrant than either the boy or the man on his own.

“Claire,” he was saying now, and turning to one of the third-years perched on the edge of the crowd. “I’ve