The Rehearsal

by Eleanor Catton

  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?”

  Another girl got up as this Mr. Saladin was returning to her seat on the floor. The new girl spread her hands and said, “It’s funny to think that I never saw him wake up. I never rolled over to see him still sleeping, never saw his eyelids waxed and still in the pale morning light, never burrowed down into the sweet hot breath of the bed and felt him stir and lift his heavy sleepy arms to let me in. We had no mornings-after. We had no nights, no long uninterrupted nights where we could sleep and sleep and sleep. We had no silence. We never breakfasted together. We never swam together, shopped together, walked to the cinema together; I never called him at work to check when he was due to come home; I never pegged his laundry on the line. I never knew his mother or his nephews or his life.

  “All these are adult things, and they’re all things I never had with him. People say, now, that I was a child wrongfully thrust into an adult’s role. People call it an adult relationship, illicit and untimely and premature. In fact it was the opposite. It was Mr. Saladin who had the adolescent relationship, all backseat whispers and doorway fumbles and getting home before midnight, waiting for the parents to go to sleep or leave the house, sending messages in code and on the sly. I didn’t play the adult. Mr. Saladin played the child.”

  August

  Opening night drew nearer and nearer. Without a central script, the devised performance did not seem to be approaching any kind of finished state, but merely began blooming and swelling in odd places, like an ancient wrinkled party balloon that was being forcibly refilled with breath. Tempers in the group ran high, and fractures began to form around the strongest personalities as the dissatisfied students met in whispering mutinous pairs in doorways around the Institute.

  “Andy strutting around in that costume like that makes me sick,” was how the whispers ran. “Thinks he’s God’s gift to the stage. Every time he walks past I want to stick out a leg and trip him up.”

  “Do you know how hard it is to act in a scene with Oliver if Esther’s around? Today she was practically humping his leg.”

  “If Felix clears his throat like that one more time I swear I am going to clock him.”

  “What is this show, like a two-hour tribute to one guy? Why does Sam get so much stage time? It’s not like he’s the cream of the crop or anything.”

  The real risk was that these dissatisfied students, the whisperers, angry at the comparative insignificance of their parts and sick of the officious prodding from the others in the group, might want so much to disassociate themselves from the performance that on opening night they might intentionally act poorly, calling deliberate attention, through their ham acting, to the distance between the actor and the role. This became a tacit threat; it hung in the air around them, and the actors became wary and mistrusting, hugging their costumes tighter to their chests as if they were trying to hold the fractured shell of their ego in one place with the force of their hands.

  Leaving the Institute after a rehearsal one day, Stanley bundled his bag of take-home props under his arm and threw his head back for a moment to enjoy the pale afternoon sun. He had left quietly, through the backstage area and out the players’ door into the alley, slipping away from his scowling, shadow-eyed classmates who were still arguing as they stacked the chairs away and cleared the rehearsal room for the next morning.

  He rounded the corner into the northern quadrangle and to his surprise came face to face with the girl who had appeared so oddly and suddenly in the wings of the auditorium stage, the wide-eyed schoolgirl who had collided with him in the velvet black. He stalled a moment as he recognized her, again recalling the brief and breathy impact in the dark, the girl gasping and stricken and looking down at him in mute apology as he fell.

  When his scene was over he had returned to the wings to seek her out, but she had disappeared.

  “There was somebody watching,” he had said later to the boy Felix, as in their dressing rooms they wiggled out of their costumes and returned their wigs to the faceless polystyrene heads that lined the top of the dresser. “From the wings. She must have come in by the players’ door. I guess it was open.”

  “Did you tell her to get out?” Felix said, not really interested. He was unlacing his bodice aggressively, and Stanley heard the worn and dirty laces rip.

  “She disappeared,” Stanley said, watching as Felix saw his mistake and swore under his breath. “I guess it’s just weird when people watch from the wings and we don’t know it. It’s like an unfair advantage. If someone had crept in through the foyer and was watching in the stalls I wouldn’t have cared.”

  Isolde was sitting on the slat bench underneath the ginkgo tree. She was wearing her Abbey Grange school uniform, and was swinging her legs slightly as she flicked the pages of a dog-eared novel, curving her body over the book with her hair falling free about her face. As he approached he saw more clearly now how pretty she was, with full cheeks and a pouting mouth and a slender upturned nose that she was stroking absently with one finger as she read. As Stanley neared her she looked up and gave a puzzled start as she recognized him.

  “It’s you,” Stanley said. “From the wings.”

  “Oh, yeah,” the girl said, and drew her lower lip underneath her front teeth. She looked up at him uncertainly, like a puppy waiting to be admonished.

  “You made me miss my cue,” Stanley said, and then they both blushed at his rudeness.

  “Sorry,” Isolde said. “I heard the drum and I just followed the sound. I guess I just wandered in.”

  There was a little pause.

  “It was only a rehearsal,” Stanley said at last. She nodded politely and pressed her lips together in a kind of apologetic smile. Stanley pointed at her music case to change the subject. “What do you play?”

  “Alto saxophone,” Isolde said. “My teacher’s studio is up there.”

  “She must be rich, to afford a studio here,” St
anley said. “The rent is insane. I know because the Drama Institute were going to buy out way more of these buildings than they actually did, but it was too expensive.” He was growing hot with embarrassment now, the unease spreading like a scarlet ink-stain over his chest and into the stippled hollow of his throat. He knew that it would be visible above the open collar of his shirt, spreading up to his chin like an old-fashioned ruff. He wished he had not sought this girl out, that he had walked past her without speaking, maybe even given her a calm and cryptic nod.

  “I don’t know if she’s rich,” Isolde said.

  “Are you any good?” Stanley asked.

  As soon as he said it he felt ashamed at having asked such an unanswerable question of this round-faced, blinking girl. He hoped she would not ask him the same question back. But Isolde only said, “I’m sitting Grade Eight,” and shrugged to show that the question didn’t much matter to her anyway.

  “I hear you guys sometimes,” Stanley said. “Well, probably not you specifically, but the music travels down to where we are.”

  “Yeah, I hear you guys sometimes too,” Isolde said, inexplicably blushing now too. “Mostly drums and shouting.”

  “And screaming probably,” Stanley said, trying to make a joke out of it, but Isolde just smiled and said, “No, I’ve never heard screaming.”

  “Okay,” said Stanley, flapping his arms. “Well, I guess I’ll see you around.” He had meant it to sound aloof, but instead it sounded expectant, as if he were anticipating another chance meeting. He looked away from her to show he didn’t care, out over the cobbles at the pigeons and the banked rim of litter framing the courtyard with a little crust of silver and white.

  “Okay,” Isolde said, giving him a curious look. She made no move to take up her novel again, and followed him with her eyes as he stumbled away from her and across the quad, the bag of props slipping from under his arm.

  June

  “Stanley,” the Head of Acting said, “I want you to become your father.”

  Stanley nodded tentatively. He was standing with his legs slightly apart and his hands behind his back. All the other students were sitting on the floor and looking up at him, hugging their knees tight against their ribs.

  “This is a question-and-answer session,” the Head of Acting said, smoothing the page in front of him calmly with the flat of his hand. He was sitting at a desk to one side, his legs crossed at the knee, one bare white foot rotating slowly to relax the ankle joint. “We are going to start asking questions of you, addressing you directly as if you really are your father. I want you to stay in character for the next half hour. If you don’t know the real answer to any questions asked of you, then make them up. Don’t worry if you have to lie, just don’t break character.”

  Stanley nodded again. He looked down for a moment, drew a breath, and then looked up again with his father’s wry twitching smile. He spread out his hands and said, “Hit me,” and all at once he was guiltless and 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.”