The Rehearsal

behind the branches of the ginkgo tree.

“My parents will be there,” Isolde says. “They’re really stoked to meet you. Especially Dad. My sister had, like, this weird thing this year where she slept with a teacher and Dad’s really keen to get back to normal or whatever. He’s just stoked you’re not in your thirties and balding and my teacher at school.”

Stanley exhales sharply and almost pulls away from her. There it is: all the information he needed, the clinching information, tumbling out of her mouth in one careless little burst. Too late.

“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” he says.

“Oh,” Isolde says airily. “I don’t know. I’m just sick of it, I guess. It’s all anyone talks about any more—just Victoria and the rape or whatever and how hard it’s been. I just didn’t want to talk about it with you.”

She reaches for his hand and pulls him closer to her as they walk, showing more affection than she has before.

“It’s not a big deal,” she says.

“What do you mean, slept with her teacher?” Stanley says.

“Well, apparently the story is now that she didn’t even sleep with him,” Isolde says. “I don’t know. It keeps changing. She gets all cagey.”

“You must know,” Stanley says. “She’s your sister.”

Isolde gives him an odd look. “I don’t,” she says. “I don’t know anything.”

They walk on in silence for a while.

“Do you talk about me to your sax teacher?” Stanley says. His voice is high and strained.

“I guess,” she says. “I mean, I’ve mentioned you. Music teachers are like therapists, kind of. You meet up once a week and tell them everything you need to tell them and then you disappear again. It’s like therapy.” Her voice is high too, as if she doesn’t believe her own lines.

“What do you say about me?” Stanley says.

“Oh, you know,” Isolde says. Now she looks embarrassed.

Stanley makes a swift decision to tell Isolde half the truth. He stops walking and turns toward her.

“She laid a complaint about me,” he says. “Your teacher. She must have been watching through the window. She complained that I’ve been harassing you—because you’re so young, I guess, and I’m not. Young. I guess that was why.” He breathes heavily and watches her.

Isolde opens her mouth a little but says nothing. She drags her eyes from Stanley’s face and looks at a pasted advertisement on the wall over his shoulder.

“So what do you say about me?” Stanley says, impatient now. “In your lesson.”

“Nothing,” Isolde says quickly.

“You said you mentioned me.”

“Only briefly.”

“So why would she complain? What does she have against me?”

Isolde shoots him a calculating look. “Are you in trouble?” she says.

“I just want to know what you say about me,” Stanley says loudly. In his frustration he is forgetting that he is only telling Isolde half the truth after all. He begins to blame her. He becomes irritated by her open-mouthed stare, the plump curve of her pouting lip, how childlike she seems.

“It’s this thing with my sister,” Isolde says at last. “I suppose she knows how much it affected me. She knows how vulnerable I am, how impressionable I am, how likely it is that I might act out or do something dumb or end up slutting around, just to make myself heard. It happens, when there’s trauma in a family. She’s protecting me, I guess.”

“From me?”

“Well. Yeah. I mean, probably.”

“And you knew.” He is thoroughly angry with her now.

“No,” Isolde says. “I didn’t know. She acted behind my back, like a clinging mother orchestrating the life of her child.”

“This is bullshit,” Stanley says. “You talking to your teacher about me, the two of you together. It’s bullshit.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You must have made me sound like a rapist.”

“I did not make you sound like a rapist!”

“It’s my reputation,” Stanley says. “My reputation at the school which is at stake. Whatever you said, you made her act like that. You made her complain.”

“I did not make her complain!”

“You must have,” Stanley shouts. “You did. With whatever you said.”

Cars are passing. The passengers press their faces to the windows to watch the two of them fight. Stanley has his arms flung wide and Isolde’s hands are crossed over her belly. Finally Stanley makes a scissor motion with the flat of his hand that means enough. He is the first to turn and walk away.

Monday

“What would you do,” Julia says, “if I said that you did things to me here, when we were alone? Indecent things. If I confessed to somebody. If I broke down.”

The southerly is gathering above the gables, blackening and bruising and seeming to draw the sky downward. The saxophone teacher crosses the room and turns on the lamp, twitching the curtain against the lowering sky.

“I don’t know what I would do,” she says, without looking at Julia.

“I’d lie,” Julia says, already narrow eyed and pursuing the thought. “I would make up silver lies studded with shards of perfect detail like mosaic splinters, sharp and everlasting, the kind of tiny faultless detail that would make them all sure that what I said was true. I would have alibis. I would bring in other people and teach them a story, and rehearse it so carefully and for so long that soon they’d all start to believe that what they said was actually true.”

“It sounds like a lot of work,” the saxophone teacher says calmly, but her hands and eyes are still and she is watching Julia with all her attention now. “What’s in it for you?”

“It would change what everyone says about me at school.”

“What does everyone—”

“That I like girls,” Julia says loudly. The collar of her school shirt is open and the hollow V of her neck is turning an angry stippled red.

“How?”

“Because if there was some tragic story behind it all,” Julia says, “it would be like a reason or a cause. Like with that girl Victoria.”

“Isolde’s sister.”

“Yeah,” Julia says hotly. “Isolde’s sister. Whatever she does now, if she goes off the rails or whatever, and ends up sleeping with a billion people and drinking heaps and failing all her exams, people won’t think that she’s just a loser or a slut. They’ll know it’s because she’s damaged, because there’s a reason behind everything, which is that she was raped. Whatever she does from now on will just be evidence. So it’s kind of like she’s free. She can do anything and she won’t be responsible. She’s got a reason.”

“That’s a very interesting way of looking at it,” the saxophone teacher says.

“I want a reason,” Julia says. “If it turned out that I was damaged, then it wouldn’t be my fault anymore. It wouldn’t be something gross, it would be something tragic. It would be an effect—an effect of something out of my control. I’d just be a victim.”

“You all want to be damaged,” the saxophone teacher says suddenly. “All of you. That is the one quality all my students have in common. That is your theme and variation: you crave your own victimhood absolutely. You see it as the only viable way to get an edge upon your classmates, and you are right. If I were to interfere with you, Julia, I’d be doing you an incredible favor. I’d be giving you a ticket to authorize the most shameless self-pity and self-adoration and self-loathing, and none of your classmates could even hope to compare.”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying,” Julia says.

The two of them look at each other in silence for a moment.