Trust Exercise

by Susan Choi

  Sarah and David have torrents of accusations they have hoarded for weeks, to unleash on each other. Now their fury deserts them. “Hey,” David says, a hot blush rising out of his polo shirt collar.

  At the sight of that blush, Sarah’s own chest seems to swell and implode. Heartbreak doesn’t flow through the heart but along that frail shallow canal of the sternum.

  “Hi,” Sarah says, staring at his sternum where it hides from her under his shirt. She longs to lay her head there in repose from this agonized longing.

  “Where are you going?” he asks.

  “I don’t know,” she says honestly.

  They reenter the shop together. Its workspace takes up the full height of the building. Circular saw, band saw, splintered scrap plywood, sawdust on the floor. At its far side, a steep ladderlike staircase leads up to a mezzanine level of storage; at the back of the storage area, a door opens onto the second-floor hallway, a realm of musicians’ rehearsal rooms. Over the summer, someone has cleared out all the old flats and dismantled set pieces and other detritus and the storage mezzanine is quite empty. They pass out the door in the opposite wall and now stand in the second-floor hallway. Sarah crosses the hall to the double doors leading into the band room. These double doors are set back from the hallway a couple of feet so they form a wide, shallow alcove; she tries the double doors, which are locked. When she turns back, David catches her mouth with his, pressing her into the alcove’s corner so she feels the protruding door hinges bite into her arm. Not protected or hidden at all; back pressed into the corner, she can see the whole length of the hallway. There is only the chance that none of their classmates will wander this way. These thoughts crawl along the bottom of her mind, clear but disregarded, as she devours David’s mouth with her own. This is his power over her: not his cock or his hands but his mouth. Cock and hands are precocious enough. They belong to a fortunate, confident man, and have traveled in time for unguessable reasons to append themselves to a teenager. Unlike them his mouth is not a foreign power; it’s her own missing part. Seeing him for the first time, last year, she had stared with recognition at his mouth, at its unhandsome, simian quality, his lips slightly too wide for his narrow boy’s face. His mouth is nothing like hers because made for hers; her first time kissing him had been the first experience of her life that had exceeded expectation.

  Gasping for breath, she takes his skull between her palms and fills the whorl of his ear with her tongue, because she’s learned this disables him, even more than when she struggles to take his whole cock in her mouth. Then, some indelible scruple or shame interferes with his pleasure, while her tongue in his ear makes him swoon. They’d even made this a joke, in the course of their summer: they called it his kryptonite. Now he moans, unrestrained, and literally falls to his knees, pulling Sarah down with him. With his free hand he yanks open his jeans, fumbles his thick erection through the vent in his boxers. Her clothes have no such apertures, it’s necessary to pull off her jeans entirely, at least from one leg, which means removing a boot, then her panties as well; heaving breath, they’re both tugging and yanking her clothes in the middle of the black-and-white checkerboard floor of the hallway with all the unself-conscious diligence they might have brought to stretching canvas across the wood frame of a scenery flat. Then Sarah is naked, from the toes of one foot to her waist, and the hot, slippery fit is accomplished; despite their fierce mutuality to this point, they’re both shocked to find themselves copulating in a public space of their high school, and now they bear down even more frantically, until with awful wrenchings of his face David comes, in his throes knocking Sarah’s head unexpectedly hard against the door of the band room, which is now at her back. At almost the same time they hear another door open and quickly slam shut: the door to the shop mezzanine.

  They’re both trembling, their fingers useless as sausages, as they restore themselves into their clothes. They don’t exchange another word; Sarah does not even know whether their eyes meet and part as they peel off in different directions, neither going back through the shop mezzanine door. David strides toward the rear stairs that will lead to the loading dock entrance, Sarah turns the corner to the main hallway and goes down the wide central stairs, across the piazza, back through the theatre’s doors.

  “Where’ve you been?” Joelle says, then starts laughing. “You bad girl.” She hands Sarah her compact, and Sarah stares at her mouth in its dusty porthole. Her lipstick is rubbed off, her lips swollen and tender-appearing, strangely large for her face, like his mouth.

  * * *

  AT LAST, THE ends and the means seem to match.

  They have a new Movement teacher, who will teach them to move. They will learn to move by moving; they will learn to free their movements by free movement. The Movement teacher’s mission is so simple Sarah finds it idiotic. There is something else about the Movement teacher Sarah vaguely dislikes. She’s not sure how to feel when she realizes her dislike stems from the fact that the new teacher is female. Mr. Kingsley, Mr. Browne, Mr. Freedman, Mr. Macy who does set design, dramaturgy, and theatre history: all men. Ms. Rozot will teach them Movement. From the moment they meet her, they all disrespect her, covertly. Something in Mr. Kingsley’s gaze, as he introduces Ms. Rozot, warns them: they may mock her but they’d better keep it quiet.

  She is a dancer and “multidisciplinary performer,” and she trembles with joy at the prospect of being their teacher. “Teaching is a sacred trust,” she gushes. “You are the future.” Despite their secret disrespect they are secretly flattered. They’ll give her a chance.

  Since the tryst in the second-floor hallway, David has severed the wire. There is no longer even anger as a point of connection. His gaze backpedals from Sarah’s like a magnet escaping its likeness. He has mastered the trick of existing elsewhere even when they are in the same room. An alien lives in his body; amnesia has sponged clean his brain. With each confirmation that David has vanished, Sarah feels more anguished and exposed, as if her moment of desperate abandon were still going on with the whole gaping class in attendance. Movement class will be held in the Black Box; they arrive as the Seniors are leaving, and Sarah sees David pausing with Erin O’Leary. Erin is a Senior, petite and blond, her flawless face grave with the consciousness of her preeminence. Erin has a film credit, a SAG card. She drives a pale blue Karmann Ghia convertible. The sheer quantity of her superiorities is laughable; she’s like an implausible fictional character. Her tiny body, with its ideal, tiny hips and tiny breasts and compact little ass, drags generalized attention like a net. The boys, even the Senior boys, fear her: she is rumored to date real, established actors whom she meets on her “sets.” The girls loathe her. She travels in a cylinder of rarefied air, untroubled by her social isolation: she’s only here because it’s trashy to drop out of high school. Next year, she’ll attend Juilliard.

  “Where are you headed?” David says to Erin.

  “Restoration Comedy. You?”

  “Movement.”

  “Ugh, I hated it. We ought to get showers.”

  “Oh, you’re okay,” David says, to which Erin laughs charmingly. She is so perfectly, adorably small that the crown of her glossy blond head barely grazes his chin. She gazes up at him, contentedly submissive. A girl who can do anything she wants. Can date a Sophomore if she wants. Anoint him.

  Sarah plows into the Black Box, blind with revelation. Her cheeks, armpits, and crotch squirm with needles of heat, her familiar stigmata. Within the fist of her chest, her ribs snap like so many dry twigs. “Welcome!” Ms. Rozot is exulting. “Welcome to Movement.” Right away Ms. Rozot has them leave their chairs, their books and jackets and purses, and come down to the great square platform of the stage. Sarah has difficulty relinquishing her pile of books, folders, spiral-bound notebooks, the tattered, fractionally digested paperback of Tropic of Cancer on the top of the heap like a cake decoration; she has been pressing the pile to her chest like a shield or a bandage, and giving it up she feels physical pain. Her chest
groans at the fresh exposure. She can hardly stand straight. David is somewhere behind her, she can feel him there—looking at her? When she can’t turn around and look back? Perhaps they’re all looking at her. They all know her dilemma. Yesterday, trying to escape David’s baffling absence, which she now understands, she’d climbed up to the fly rail and instead of solitude found Pammie, Pammie’s face blotched and sticky with tears. Twenty-four feet in the air, they’d had no recourse but to speak to each other, two girls compelled by their classwork to a level of intimacy far beyond what they shared with the rest of the world, and yet also two girls who had never once traded a single superfluous word. “You love him, don’t you,” Pammie said.

  The Black Box was just as it sounded, a black box of a room with a large platform stage at the center low enough to require no stairs, four sets of riser seating on each side, and aisles around the platform and around the sets of risers. During performances, black drapery made the aisles behind the risers backstage, four velvet hideaways also clandestinely useful at times, but today the drapery is furled, the box is open to its walls and its faraway ceiling, crisscrossed by the lighting catwalks. They are to walk, walk, walk—move, move, move!—all through this marvelous space; they must make themselves free to explore every inch. Not the catwalks or ladders, no. [Laughter.] “All right, you are all very clever! You will explore all terrestrial inches. In literature, there is an idea called automatic writing. You write without resting your pen. The pen must keep moving and moving; perhaps it is writing ‘Why the fuck do I have to keep writing?’” [More laughter, shocked and charmed, at her profanity. Her profanity, tinged as it is with her accent, is more charming than shocking. Is it possible they could respect her?] “Well, this unbroken movement, of the pen, unlocks the secrets within. And if the pen can do this, then how much more the whole body? Let your body lead you. Your only order to it: never stop moving. Otherwise, it is in charge! I will help you with music.”

  Oh, no, they can’t respect her. It’s perfectly ridiculous. And the music she’s playing! Cat Stevens. The Moody Blues. Satirically, then, they walk, walk, walk!—making faces at each other, swinging their arms, bouncing on the balls of their feet, speeding up comically so they’re marching like robots. Whenever Norbert and Colin pass each other, they make absurd faces. Then, when they pass each other again, they both make absurd faces and leap in the air, still without breaking stride. This behavior spreads, evolves. Most of the boys adore Monty Python, and embarrass the girls at lunch with their flawlessly recalled and completely unfunny enactments of skits, by which they, the performers, are slain with hilarity. In the Black Box, the boys do “silly walks,” and then pratfalls-in-motion to show they are slain with hilarity. By and large, the girls grow increasingly serious as the boys grow increasingly ludicrous. The girls no longer walk, they glide, they skim, they slice. The music changes to classical stuff without words. The girls begin taking on speed. An additional layer is added: high speed without hitting one another. They are weaving a mad tapestry with their movements; some unpredictably change direction in the hope of collisions. No matter what they do, no matter how subversively they do it, Ms. Rozot cries from the sidelines:

  “Good!

  “Move! Move! MOVE!

  “Ah—you are making something.”

  Indeed they are. Somehow, silliness dies. All the theatrical forms of movement—the “silly walks” and pratfalls, but also the arm-swinging (“I am carefree!”) and the deliberate direction-changing (“I am a rogue!”)—leach out of the room. Unexpected collectivity has slowly emerged in its place. Perhaps most important, embarrassment has been given up. Without their having noticed it, they’re no longer embarrassed. Their speed has equalized until they’re all traveling at about the same rate. Their winding paths, their cloverleafs and hairpins and loops, knit some underlying pattern as if they learned this maypole dance beside their parents as children, as if it binds them to something, and makes of them something.

  Sarah’s face is streaming tears. At the point where she ought to curve left or curve right she goes straight, and plunges out the Black Box doors and down the hall, running, her speed snatching the tears from her face.

  There’s a single toilet stall at the back of the girls’ dressing room, off stage right, which no one ever uses except during performances. Sarah locks herself in and succumbs, her whole body folded and violently jerking as if she’ll throw up in the bowl. Her mind startles her with the wish to be dead. To be dead, instead of in pain. Suicide, she realizes, isn’t opting out of the future, it’s opting out of the present, for who can see more of the future than that? Reference to the future, to its unbroken promise, is the reflex of those for whom the future’s mirage still exists. Such people are lucky, deceived.

  As if Sarah’s thoughts had conjured her, Ms. Rozot comes into the dressing room and insists on discussing the future. Sarah cannot imagine how, apart from her own mind’s self-defeating wizardry, this unwanted hippie Frenchwoman could have located her in this bathroom. Ms. Rozot is brand-new to the school. More than half the school’s experienced students and teachers do not even realize this bathroom exists. Outside the stall door Ms. Rozot says, “Sa-rah? Sa-rah?” mispronouncing both a’s the same way, like the “o” sound in “odd.” “Sarah, are you in there? Are you in pain?”

  “Please leave me alone!” Sarah sobs angrily. Why is solitude so fucking hard to achieve? If only she had a car, she thinks for the billionth time. She would lock all the doors and just drive.

  “Sarah, I want to share with you something. I think it will help you. Young people like you experience pain more intensely than those of us just a bit older. I speak of emotional pain. Your pain is greater, in duration and strength. It is harder to bear. This is not a metaphor. It is a fact, of physiology. Of psychology. Your emotional sensitivity—it is superior to that of your parents, your teachers. That is why these years of your life, when you are fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, are so difficult, but also so important. That is why developing your talent at this age is so crucial. This heightened emotional pain is a gift. A difficult gift.”

  Despite herself, she’s listening. “Are you saying,” she manages after a while, “that in the future, when I’m older, things won’t hurt as much?”

  “Yes, exactly. But Sarah, I am saying something else. Don’t turn away from the pain. When you are older, yes, you will be harder. That is a blessing and a curse.”

  Ms. Rozot does not insist Sarah open the door, and this alone opens Sarah. They linger, she does not know how long, on their opposite sides of the door. “Thank you,” she whispers at last.

  “Please take your time,” says Ms. Rozot, departing.

  * * *

  IT’S BEEN OBVIOUS from the beginning who are Broadway Babies and who aren’t. Those who truly can sing, who can give them the old razzle-dazzle, who live for that one singular sensation, have for the most part drawn attention to themselves from the first day of school. They cluster around the Black Box piano during rainy-day lunchtimes and sing The Fantasticks. They wear the Cats sweatshirts to school that they got on their holiday trip to New York. Some of them, like the Junior named Chad, are enviably serious musicians who can not only sing but play Sondheim, for real, from sheet music. Some of them, like Erin O’Leary, don’t just sing but dance like Ginger Rogers, having apparently put on tap shoes at the same time as they took their first steps.

  Sarah’s failure to be Erin O’Leary used to be a point of pride, if a wobbly one. Now Sarah is furious with her coarse heavy hair, the opposite of Erin’s dandelion floss, with her wide hips the opposite of Erin’s trim ones, with her big unskilled feet in their dirty misused ballet flats the opposite of Erin’s miniature ones which make scissoring blurs through the air. Sarah is furious with the faltering squawk of her voice, the opposite of Erin’s “songbird.” Historically, Theatre students like Sarah (and David) who couldn’t sing or dance solaced themselves with Uta Hagen, Beckett, and Shakespeare. They reminded themselves they were s
erious Theatre Artists, that Broadway was cheeseball one end to the other. Of course they kept this knowledge to themselves, out of respect for Mr. Kingsley and genuine awe for his musical talent. They were never troubled by their condescension, or at least Sarah wasn’t. But now that it’s mainstage auditions again, all of them are reminded, some of them more painfully than others, of how much they’re exalted by big musicals. David loves Jesus Christ Superstar, knows all the words, sings along tunelessly with the album when he is alone. Sarah has the same secret relationship to Evita. They are serious; but how much better if they also could sing, if they could startle and move their classmates on those rainy days standing around the piano? If, implored by Mr. Kingsley, they could deign to play Christ, or Evita—for the good of the show, given that they were best for the role?

  Such secret talent isn’t theirs, however. They remind themselves—though not in conversation, for David and Sarah don’t speak to each other, or have any idea where the other is sitting, so many rows distant as to be reduced to just a dark head tilted over a book, remote and indifferent and hateful and completely ignored (in fact, not even noticed)—of how corny Guys and Dolls is, how glad they both are to be taking a pass on auditions, how much more absorbing they’re finding Endgame (David) or the first scene of King Lear, beyond which she has never yet managed to penetrate (Sarah). They do not share these similar feelings, the similarity having no meaning for them. They do, of course, actually watch the auditions, their hearts in their mouths, almost sick with vicarious hope.