The Rehearsal

by Eleanor Catton

  Stanley nodded again.

  “What happened, Stanley?” the Head of Movement said. “What’s all this about?”

  Stanley looked up quickly to meet the Head of Movement’s gaze, and then drew his eyes away, turning his head to look at the framed posters and theater programs above the filing cabinet. They were ordered chronologically, lined up like a simple recipe for the Head of Movement’s life, the plotted path to where he sat right now at his empty desk with his bare feet together and a frown upon his face.

  “I don’t know,” Stanley said at last. “I don’t know anything about a saxophone teacher.”

  “I said music teacher.”

  Stanley drew in his breath sharply and again glanced at the Head of Movement, even quicker this time, as if the tutor’s haggard face was either very hot or very bright, and his eyes could not stand to rest for long.

  “I knew she played sax,” he said quietly, and the words were like a horrible admission, a statement of guilt. A little cough in the back of his throat broke the last word in two.

  “I assume you are keeping quiet so as not to incriminate yourself,” the Head of Movement said coldly, after another wretched pause.

  “I just—”

  In truth Stanley simply had nothing to say. He shrugged, more to communicate helplessness than insolence, but the Head of Movement’s eyes flashed and Stanley saw that the gesture had angered him. The Head of Movement’s coldness somehow amplified now, and he pressed his palms flatter upon the tabletop.

  “Because the young girl in question is in the fifth form,” the Head of Movement said, “you understand that she is not yet sixteen.”

  Stanley was still nodding.

  “Because she is not yet sixteen,” the Head of Movement said, “you understand that any form of sexual relations an adult might have, or have had, with this girl would be a crime. I’m speaking in my capacity as your tutor here.”

  Stanley nodded again. He was vaguely aware that he had gone white and that his mouth had started to fill with saliva in an awful tongue-shrinking preface to vomiting. He felt nauseous and all of a sudden found his sense of smell sharpened acutely: he could smell the damp wool of his tutor’s jacket hanging on the back of the door, the paper twist of nuts on the dresser, cold coffee pooling in the bottom of a cold mug. He felt his head reel.

  The Head of Movement surveyed him for a moment. He had a wide-eyed straining look about him, as if the worst was still to come. He leaned forward, puckering his lips slightly in a dry kiss as he made a careful choice of words.

  “Stanley,” he said, “I want you to think about something very carefully. You don’t have to answer, I just want you to think about it. If the parents of this young girl ended up being in the audience when you produce your first-year production at the end of this week, would it change anything? If they were there?”

  It was a strange question and Stanley didn’t understand it. He stared at the Head of Movement blankly and said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “This girl that you have been—”

  “Isolde.”

  “Yes. She has a sister, am I right?”

  “I don’t know,” Stanley said. “Why?”

  The Head of Movement was now looking at him with open disgust. “Oh, come on, Stanley, let’s not dance around like this. This is ridiculous.”

  Stanley swallowed and reached up to wipe a film of sweat from his upper lip. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I must be missing something.”

  “Isolde’s sister’s name is Victoria,” the Head of Movement snapped. “Does that ring any bells?”

  Stanley stared at him for only a brief half-second before he realized—and the realization descended upon him like the awful downward shudder of a guillotine. Victoria, he was screaming. Victoria, the celebrity focus of their production, snipped from a column in the newspaper, snatched up and stolen and grafted on to all the posters, black and red, The Bedpost Queen. Would it change anything if Victoria’s parents were there—that was the Head of Movement’s question.

  And then the second blade of realization fell, if possible more horrible than the first. They think Isolde is a pawn, Stanley thought, a pawn that I wielded to get information for the play. My pawn.

  “Of course, I am not supposed to know anything about the content of the first-year devised theater production,” the Head of Movement was saying, “and really I do know very little about what you are rehearsing and working on. But I can’t avoid walking past an open door every so often, or hearing a scrap of conversation in the hall. You understand.”

  Stanley sat shrinking in his clammy seat, trying with difficulty to swallow the nausea that was rising like a hard stone in the back of his throat.

  “Does Isolde know?” he said stupidly.

  “About what?” the Head of Movement said.

  “About the production. What it’s about, and what we’re doing.”

  “I have no idea,” the Head of Movement said. “I have only spoken to the saxophone teacher. We were discussing the situation, and she explained the family had had a difficult year, given the scandal surrounding the older daughter’s rape. I recognized the name and made the connection myself.”

  Stanley was furiously trying to think back to all the conversations he’d had with Isolde—had he ever mentioned it? Had he ever said Victoria’s name?

  “Are you going to tell them?” he asked. “Are you going to ring the parents?”

  “I think that’s for you to think about, Stanley. As I said, you’re an adult, and you can deal with this yourself.”

  “What about the music teacher? What if she’s rung them already?” he said. He had never seen Isolde’s saxophone teacher, but he imagined her as a vicious oily shadow standing by the curtain and looking down past the branches into the courtyard below.

  “I don’t know,” the Head of Movement said. He was looking at Stanley oddly now. “So you’re saying you didn’t know,” he said. “About the sister.”

  “No,” Stanley said. He felt himself shrivel further. How stupid was he? He had never even asked this girl’s last name. He had never asked—about her family, about her life at home, about the house where she woke up and showered and ate breakfast and practiced her saxophone with the scruffy leaves of her sheet music around her on the floor: these were scenes he had never imagined. He had never imagined this girl beyond the time he had spent with her: she had simply been—what? A function of himself, maybe. She had simply presented a role for him to fill.

  The Head of Movement said, “But you did have a relationship with this young girl.” He enunciated carefully, placing a slight emphasis upon young, as if he were pressing his fingerprint upon the word.

  “Not… I mean… it wasn’t… she consented,” Stanley said. “Yes, we had a relationship.”

  “Until she’s sixteen, Stanley, her consent doesn’t count for much,” the Head of Movement said. He drew away and looked down his nose at Stanley as if he meant to wash his hands of the whole affair.

  “They can’t come,” Stanley said. “The parents. They can’t be there. They can’t know about it.”

  “No,” the Head of Movement said. “They can’t.”

  “What are we going to do?” Stanley asked. “Do we cancel?”

  “The play is not my responsibility,” the Head of Movement said. “The ticket sales are not my responsibility. This girl is not my responsibility. My job is only to let you know what you need to know. I don’t make people’s choices my business. I don’t want to know what you did with this girl. But if this is in any way damaging to the Institute—I’m compelled to act.”

  Stanley nodded dumbly.

  “Really, Stanley,” the Head of Movement said at last, for the first time expressing real exasperation at this pale and twitching victim seated before him in the small room. “I mean, how could you not know that somebody was watching you? For Christ’s sake. You must have been being bloody careless, if somebody was watching the whole time.”

 
September

  “Stanley,” Isolde said, “do you want to go all the way with me? Some time?”

  Stanley ran his finger down her cheek. Deep inside he was irritated at her for even mentioning it, for giving the prospect a shape, a voice. It seemed indecent. He would have preferred to leave the act unmentioned until it was over. He would have preferred not to speak at all, to stop her mouth with his and tug at her cuffs and her waistband and unpeel her swiftly like a ripe fruit. Her question was logistical, organizing, reductive. He would not have asked it. He was a romantic.

  “Do you think we’re ready?” Stanley said, cunningly answering her question with a question, but looking at her with such a grave and contrite expression that she would be fooled into thinking he was truly engaging with the matter at hand.

  “Yeah,” Isolde said. She began to smile before she’d finished the word, and then he was smiling back at her and moving in to kiss her and laugh with her, laugh against her, his teeth against hers.

  “I do too,” Stanley said. “I think we’re ready.”

  “Do you want to?” Isolde said shyly.

  “Course I want to,” Stanley said. “I was only waiting until you were sure. I didn’t want to put any pressure on you. I wanted you to be the one to ask.”

  This wasn’t really true, but he was pleased with the way it sounded.

  October

  The Head of Movement’s office door was open, and Stanley didn’t knock. He padded up to the doorframe and lingered there for a moment before he began to speak.

  “I should have failed,” he said. “That’s all I wanted to say. I should have failed the Outing. I told someone outright that I was doing an acting exercise. I even told her I was doing Joe Pitt.”

  The Head of Movement looked up at him, the light from his desk-lamp drawing down the shadows around his eyes and his mouth. “Why?” he said, making no move to gesture Stanley inside, and so Stanley remained at the doorway with his hands tugging at the straps of his backpack, moving his weight from foot to foot.

  “Because otherwise she might have thought that Joe Pitt was really me,” Stanley said. “I didn’t want her to think that.”

  The Head of Movement sighed and rubbed his face with his hands.

  “Stanley,” he said, “why are you telling me this? You don’t want a failing grade on your card. It’ll be a mark against you. If this was weighing on your conscience, why didn’t you just resolve to do better next time? Why would you choose to sabotage yourself?”

  “To make you respect me,” Stanley said.

  “To make me respect you,” the Head of Movement said.

  Stanley was breathing quickly. “To make you see me,” he said. “To make you see me when you look.”

  The Head of Movement looked at the boy and wondered if he should relent. Stanley’s throat was tight and he quavered when he spoke, but underneath his nervousness there was that persistent thread of self-congratulation, even now. The Head of Movement felt a flicker of anger. Even now, he thought. Even now the boy is performing, and adoring his performance, adoring himself.

  “Every year there’s someone like you, Stanley,” he said. “And someone just like you will come along and fill the hole that you leave when you move on. Every word that comes out of your mouth—they’re just lines. They’re lines that you’ve learned very carefully, so carefully you’ve convinced yourself they are yours, but that’s all they are. They’re lines I’ve heard many times before.” The Head of Movement tossed his head suddenly, and snapped, “Why don’t you see me when you look? I could ask that of all my students. All my selfish cookie-cutter students who troop in and out each year like a dead-water tide.”

  “What about that boy you were with in the art department? Is he a cookie-cutter student too?” Stanley asked sourly.

  There was a pause. The Head of Movement raised his eyebrows.

  “The boy I was with in the art department?” he said.

  “The masked boy from the Theater of Cruelty,” Stanley mumbled. “Nick.”

  “What do you want to know about Nick?”

  “Is he a cookie-cutter student too?” Stanley was thoroughly embarrassed now.

  The tutor looked him up and down and almost laughed. “Maybe so,” he said. “But he’s like me. He’s like I once was. I listen to him speak, and watch him move, and it is like a kind of rebirth. I can relive myself, through him. I can be new again just by watching.”

  Stanley looked at the floor and didn’t speak.

  “Thank you for coming to me today,” the Head of Movement said, after a moment. His voice was cold and his face had closed. “We will amend your records to show a failing grade.”

  THIRTEEN

  Friday

  “Are you good friends with your sister, Isolde?” the saxophone teacher asks mildly one afternoon, after Isolde’s lesson is over and the girl is repacking her case.

  “Not really,” Isolde says.

  “Do you hang out with her much at school?”

  “No. It’s weird when the juniors hang out with the seniors. And she’s got friends in her own year. They don’t like me around.”

  “Would she be someone you’d talk to, if you needed someone?”

  Isolde flushes scarlet immediately. She turns away from the saxophone teacher and ducks to fiddle with the clasp on her satchel. “Probably not,” she says.

  “Okay,” the saxophone teacher says kindly, watching her.

  “I don’t know who I’d talk to,” Isolde mumbles.

  “Not your friends?”

  “No.”

  The saxophone teacher waits while Isolde shuffles her music and stuffs it into her backpack.

  “Actually it’s kind of weird that Victoria’s so popular,” Isolde says, regaining composure, “because she was ruined. Three years ago, in fourth form. Her friends decided they didn’t really like her and they had a conference about it to decide what to do with her. In the end they just gathered around one lunchtime and told her that she wasn’t allowed to sit with them or talk to them anymore. And then they all ran away.”

  “I suppose she moved on and found some new friends,” the saxophone teacher says.

  “You can’t, really,” says Isolde. “Once you’ve been dumped by one group. The other groups get suspicious. There’s nothing to do except hang out in the library and always come to class at the last possible moment so it’s not like you’re sitting alone and waiting.

  “Most of the girls keep best friends for security,” she adds. “You’ve always got an ally that way, and you’re less likely to be dumped.”

  “So how did your sister climb her way back up?” the saxophone teacher asks. “If she really was ruined, as you say.”

  “She fell in with some boys,” Isolde says. “She started crossing the road at lunchtime and hanging out with the St. Sylvester boys down by the river. Just her and the boys. That was like her weapon. The girls started coming back to her after that.”

  “Have you ever been dumped?” the saxophone teacher says. “By a group, I mean.”

  “Nah,” Isolde says. She is wrapped up in her scarf and her coat now, and she shrugs in a general, helpless way to show the conversation has come to a close.

  “See you next week,” she says, and just for a moment the saxophone teacher feels a stab of something like sadness, wanting very much to ask Isolde to stay. These weekly half-hour snatches of Isolde’s life are to the sax teacher only the lighted squares of kitchen windows along a dark street, showing a brief and yellowed glimpse into the throat of a house but nothing more.

  Isolde has glazed over with politeness now that the lesson has ended, standing near the door with her music case already in her hand. The precious quickened intimacy of the lesson is now lost, and the saxophone teacher can only smile and wave her out and say, “See you Monday, Isolde. Take care.”

  Friday

  Patsy has brought croissants and ham, and a soft yellow cheese which depresses under the blunt edge of the butter knife. Already t
hey have talked for nearly an hour and the saxophone teacher has watched Patsy with a kind of bursting desperate look, straining and wounded like a stuck deer. She looks as if she might burst into tears. Patsy doesn’t seem to be noticing.

  “Patsy,” the saxophone teacher says finally. “Do you know something? Whenever I am alone and intimate with anybody else, whenever I am at ease, or making someone laugh, or kissing somebody, or making someone feel truly good—whenever I feel like I am being really successful as a lover, doing it right—at all those times, part of me is wishing that you were watching me.”

  “That’s a weird thing to say,” Patsy says, giving the sax teacher a quizzical half-frown. She is already withdrawing, sitting back and bringing the heel of her hand to her cheek to push away a strand of hair and becoming swiftly impenetrable, as if she is determined to misunderstand whatever the sax teacher will say next. All in an instant she is stony and aloof.

  “I don’t mean that I wish you were there,” the saxophone teacher says. “What I mean is that everything I do with other people becomes a kind of proof. As if I were invisibly proving something to you. As if I were saying, all the while, This is what you didn’t see in me. This is what you could have had. This is what you missed out on.”

  “You want me to be jealous,” Patsy says.

  “No,” the saxophone teacher says. “It’s not that I want you to be jealous. I just want you to see me at my best. Sometimes I act as if you really were watching, just to prove it to myself. Sometimes I say things when I’m at my most intimate that don’t even make sense to the person at hand. They’d only make sense to you. If you were watching.”

  “Honey,” Patsy says, quietly.

  There is a silence.

  “Of course I’m going to rehearse all of this in the mirror,” the saxophone teacher says at last. “Before I say it to you. I’ll rehearse it over and over. Until I have the confidence to tell you this, out loud.”

  Monday

  “Tell me about Isolde,” the saxophone teacher says outright, when Julia arrives for her lesson on Monday afternoon.