The Rehearsal

see the musicians emerging from the hidden half-door in the wall to take their places in front of their instruments. As they sit down they disappear from Isolde’s view.

“Queen of Spades,” Isolde’s father reads out loud, and then takes his reading glasses off and says “What about this, eh?” and elbows Isolde in a jovial sort of way.

“Maybe we shouldn’t have come on opening night,” Isolde’s mother says, tucking her knees sideways to let a young couple pass. “If he’s nervous.”

“I told you, he doesn’t know I’m coming tonight anyway,” Isolde says. She is craning around to look at the crowd. She watches a throng of senior students from the Institute flood into a wedge of seating in the rear of the stalls and suddenly feels foolish that she has brought her parents with her. The acting students are all clasping each other and hugging and gesticulating madly as they talk amongst themselves. Isolde imagines pushing her way backstage to surprise Stanley at the end of the night, knocking on his dressing-room door and waving shyly as she stands on the threshold with the actors shrieking and shouting up and down the corridor behind her, and all at once she suffers a horrible feeling of dread.

“We don’t have to go backstage,” she says out loud, to reassure herself. “I can just call him tomorrow.”

She hasn’t spoken to Stanley since the fight on the side of the road.

“Isn’t it posh,” Isolde’s father says. “Look at that plasterwork on the arch. That’s a beautiful job.”

The band starts up and the house lights begin to fade.

“I wish I’d got some mints now,” Isolde’s mum says. “I hope there’s a half-time.”

October

“It’s always—and only—vicarious,” the Head of Movement is saying, drumming his fingers impatiently on the glossy cover of the program that is lying on his knee. The cover shows a caricatured girl in pigtails and a school uniform, and the title of the play: The Bedpost Queen. The Head of Acting is craning around to look out over the crowd, and isn’t really listening, but the Head of Movement is speaking with a strange tight urgency that cannot wait for an audience, and anyway the words are mostly for himself. He says, “You never get around that aspect. Even at your most effective, your most vivacious and inspirational, you’re always just… looking on.”

September

“Do you know something?” Stanley’s father says, leaning down the couch toward Isolde. She turns her head, so they are profiled there against the cream: her delicate upturned pout, his sunken cheek and lantern jaw.

“When I do a group therapy session,” Stanley’s father says, “for my work—say if I have six or seven or more clients in a room, maybe a whole family if that’s what I’m working on—my policy at first is to say absolutely nothing. I ask questions, invite people to speak, bring up issues, but I say nothing about what I think. I don’t even hint. I do this for the first session, and the second.

“By the end of the second everyone’s itching. They want to know who this guy is, this psychologist who only listens, sits and listens and sometimes asks a question, always a mild question, never provocative, never acute. I cost too much, I’m too well known, just to listen. They become wary of me. They bicker among themselves and then look sideways, daring me to act.

“I leave early, always. I never stick around. I never invite them to know me better. I hold them apart, away from me, and by the third session when I walk into the room they’re like mice. All their dissension has melted away and their attention is focused entirely on me, on me absolutely. And then—” Stanley’s father pinches his fingertips together and then releases them like a puff of smoke. “After that, I can say anything,” he says. “The third session is golden. They listen to whatever I say. They hear me.”

“Does this story have a moral that has something to do with virginity?” Isolde says, a little nervously.

“No moral,” Stanley’s father says. “I don’t do morals. I do dirty jokes, and I do stories to pass the time.”

“Good,” Isolde says. She turns away, and the shadows on her face disperse as she is swallowed by the glaring fog of the footlights and beyond.

Stanley’s father looks at her with compassion and says, “Virginity is a myth, by the way. There is no on–off switch, no point of no return. It’s just a first experience like any other. Everything surrounding it, all the lights and curtains and special effects—that’s all just part of the myth.”

Isolde turns back to look at him and all the shadows return, flooding back to fill the dark side of her face so she is once again halved, like a waning moon.

Stanley’s father smiles. He says, “Stop believing.”

Saturday

“But still the counseling sessions persisted,” Julia is saying, “clinging to the school calendar like a baked stain that nobody was willing to chip away. Still we met to discuss the dubious rape of the girl who unbuttoned her shirt collar right down to the central white rosebud of her bra. We sat together and talked about the girl who sucked on a red lollipop at lunchtime rehearsal and let the boiled candy ball tug her lower lip down ever so slightly, so her mouth opened and you could see the moist rolling of her tongue.

“And Mr. Saladin,” she continues, relentlessly. “Mr. Saladin, who need only have waited for the midnight stroke in five months’ time, the stroke that would transform Victoria from a child into an adult as surely as a carriage into a pumpkin, or a saddled horse into a dirty common kitchen mouse. It could have even been a birthday present, if he had only waited. At our counseling sessions we learned that Mr. Saladin’s crime was, first and foremost, impatience. We learned that the moral is: They stumble that run fast.”

The mothers are captivated.

“No, we didn’t,” Julia says. “We didn’t learn that at all.”

She speaks like a magician or a ringmaster.

“We learned that everything in the world divides in two: good and evil, male and female, truth and falsehood, child and adult, pleasure and pain. We learned that the counselor possessed a map, a map that would make everything make sense. A key. Like in a theater program where you have the actors’ names on one side and the list of characters on the other—some neat division that divides the illusive from the real. We learned that there is a distinction—that there is always a distinction—between the performance and the performer, the reality and the lie. We learned that there is no middle ground.”

Julia surveys her audience.

“Only those who watch,” she says, “and those who suffer being watched.”

The mothers don’t dare to rustle.

“But the counselor lied,” Julia says. “You lied. You lied about the pain of it, the unsimple mess of it, immeasurably more thorny and wretched and raw than you could ever remember, with the gauze veil of every year that passes settling over your eyes, thicker and thicker until even your own childhood dissolves into the mist.”

The saxophone teacher is watching Julia from the side of the stage. She has a lump in her throat and a tight aching feeling in her chest. It might be pride.

“Just think,” Julia is saying, “Victoria is probably with Mr. Saladin tonight, right now, laid out in an adolescent flush of pleasure somewhere, while her sister and her parents sit in the bruising dark of an auditorium on the other side of town. She is probably naked and crooning and stretched over him with her body limp and butter-slick. He is probably whispering into her hair the dwindling number of days until she becomes her own self, the day when her body becomes her own, the day when her body becomes his own. He is probably stroking her with the callused heel of his weathered adult hand.”

She looks at the mothers.

“And you wish you were there,” Julia says softly. “You wish you were there.”

Saturday

Isolde and Julia are alone against the black cloth of the stage. There is no set or scenery. They are both wearing their school uniform, but differently: Isolde’s is clean and pressed, and Julia’s is limp and darned and grubby and artful. They look across at each other.

Isolde says, “Is it because I didn’t learn to love myself that I chose to bury myself instead in the reassuring strangeness of a body that was without that essential similarity which would force me to