The Rehearsal: A Novel

by Eleanor Catton

  “The doors to the practice rooms have little windows of reinforced glass so you can see in,” Bridget says, trying harder this time. Her voice gets louder the harder she tries. “But Mr. Saladin pasted the booking sheet over his, so all you can see is the timetable and little slivers of white light all around the edge if the light’s on inside. When Victoria had her woodwind tutorial all the slivers would go out.”

  “Found it!” says the saxophone teacher, and she holds up a handful of sheet music. “ ‘The Old Castle’ from Pictures at an Exhibition. I think you’ll find this interesting, Bridget. We can talk about why the saxophone never really caught on as an orchestral instrument.”

  The saxophone teacher sometimes feels disgusted with herself for baiting Bridget in this way. “It’s just that she tries so desperately hard,” she said once to Bridget’s mother. “That’s what makes it so easy. If it wasn’t so obvious that she was trying, I might be tempted to respect her a little more.”

  Bridget’s mother nodded and nodded, and said, “Yes, we find that’s often the trouble.”

  Now the saxophone teacher just looks at Bridget, standing there all stringy and rumpled and trying so desperately hard, and raises her eyebrows.

  Bridget reddens with frustration and deliberately skips all the possible lines about Mussorgsky and Pictures at an Exhibition and Ravel and why the saxophone never really caught on as an orchestral instrument. She skips all that and goes straight for a line she likes.

  “They treat it like a dosage,” she says, even louder this time. “It’s like a vaccination where they give you a little slice of a disease so your body can get a defense ready for the real thing. They’re frightened because it’s a disease they haven’t tried on us before, and so they’re trying to vaccinate us without telling us what the disease really is. They want to inject us very secretly, without us noticing. It won’t work.”

  They are really looking at each other now. The saxophone teacher takes a moment to align the pile of papers with the edge of the rug before she says, “Why won’t it work, Bridget?”

  “Because we noticed,” says Bridget, breathing hard through her nose. “We were watching.”

  Monday

  Julia’s feet are always scuffing, and she has a scab around her mouth.

  “They called an assembly for the whole form this morning,” she says, “and the counselor was there, all puffed up like he’d never felt so important in his life.”

  She talks over her shoulder while she unpacks her case. The saxophone teacher is sitting in a slice of cold sun by the window, watching the gulls wheel and shit. The clouds are low.

  “They started talking in these special quiet honey voices like we’d break if they spoke too loud. They go, You’re all aware of the rumors that have been circulating this past week. It’s important that we talk through some things together so we can all be sure of where we’re at.”

  Julia turns on her heel, fits her sax to her neckstrap, and stands there for a moment with her hands on her hips. The sax is slung across her body like a weapon.

  “The counselor is a retard,” she says definitively. “Me and Katrina went once in third form because Alice Franklin had sex in a movie theater and we were scared she’d become a skank and ruin her life by having kids by accident. We told him all about it and how scared we were, and Katrina even cried. He just sat there and blinked and he kept nodding and nodding, but really slowly like he was programmed at a quarter speed, and then when we’d run out of things to say and Katrina had stopped crying he opened his drawer and got a piece of paper and drew three circles inside each other, and wrote You and then Your Family and then Your Friends, and he said, That’s the way it is, isn’t it? And then he said we could keep the piece of paper if we wanted.”

  Julia gives a mirthless snort and opens her plastic music folder.

  “What happened to Alice Franklin?” asks the saxophone teacher.

  “Oh, we found out later she was lying,” Julia says.

  “She didn’t have sex in a movie theater.”

  “No.”

  Julia takes a moment to adjust the spidery legs of the music stand.

  “Why would she lie to you?” the saxophone teacher asks politely.

  Julia makes a sweeping gesture with her hand. “She was probably just bored,” she says. In her mouth the word is noble and magnificent.

  “I see,” says the saxophone teacher.

  “So anyway they go, Maybe we could start the ball rolling by asking if anyone’s got something they want to get off their chest? And one of the girls started crying right then, before anything had even happened for real, and the counselor just about wet his pants with joy, and he goes, Nothing anybody says this morning will go further than this room, or some shit. So this girl starts saying something lame, and her friend reaches over and holds her hand or something sick like that, and then everyone starts sharing and saying things about trust and betrayal and confidence and feeling all confused and scared… and it’s going to be one fuck of a long morning.”

  Julia darts a glance over toward the saxophone teacher to see if the word has any effect, but the saxophone teacher just gives her a wintry smile and waits. Bridget would have balked and fluttered and turned scarlet and wondered about it for a long time afterward, but Julia doesn’t. She just smirks and takes unnecessary care in clipping the slippery pages to the edge of the music stand.

  “So after a while,” Julia says, “the counselor goes, What is harassment, girls?, looking at us all eager and encouraging like when teachers are torn between really wanting you to get the right answer but also really wanting you to be wrong so they can have the pleasure of telling you themselves. Then he goes, speaking softly and solemnly like he’s revealing something nobody else knows, Harassment doesn’t have to be touching, my darlings. Harassment can also be watching. Harassment can be if someone watches you in a way that you don’t like.

  “So I put up my hand and I go, Does it become harassment because of what they watch? Or because of what they imagine while they’re watching? They all looked at me and I went really red, and the counselor touched his fingertips together and gave me this long look like, I know what you’re doing, you’re trying to sabotage the trust thing we’ve got going here, and I’m going to answer your question because I have to, but I’m not going to give you the answer you want.”

  The saxophone teacher stands up finally and picks up her own saxophone as if to say “enough.” But Julia is already saying it, thrust on by a strange sort of red-cheeked momentum.

  “I imagine things when I watch people,” is what Julia says.

  Friday

  Isolde is waiting outside in the hall. She can hear the faint rumble of the saxophone teacher’s voice through the wall as the 4:00 lesson draws to a close. Here in the deserted hallway Isolde takes a moment to enjoy the backstage silence before she is cued to knock and enter. She inhales and with her tongue she tastes the calm and careless privacy of a person utterly unobserved.

  Normally she would be flooded with pre-tutorial dread, leafing through her sheet music, practicing in mime, her eyes following the music on her lap and her splayed hands moving on the empty air. But today she is not thinking about her lesson. She is sitting still and with all her mind trying to preserve and capture a private swollen feeling in the deep well of her chest.

  It is like a little pocket of air has rushed into her mouth and sent a little shiver down her back and tugged at the empty half-basin of her pelvic bone. She feels a prolonged and dislocated swoop in her belly and a yank of emptiness in her rib cage, and suddenly she is much too hot. Isolde feels this way sometimes when she is in the bath, or when she watches people kiss on television, or in bed when she runs her fingertips down the soft curve of her belly and imagines that her hand is not her own. Most often the feeling descends inexplicably—at a bus stop, perhaps, or in the lunch line, or waiting for a bell to ring.

  She thinks, Did I feel this when I saw my sister for the first time as a sex
ual thing? After Dad touched my head and said, This is going to be hard time, these next few weeks, and then left me to watch TV, and after a while Victoria came in and sat down and looked over at me, and then she said, Fantastic, so now everyone knows. And we sat and watched the tail end of some C-grade thriller on the Thursday night special, except I couldn’t concentrate and all I could think was, How? How were you able to turn your head and look hard at him and crane up and kiss his mouth? How were you not paralyzed with fear and indecision? How did you know that he would receive you, gather you up and press hard against you and even give out a little strangled moan like a cry, like a cry in the back of his throat?

  Here in the hallway Isolde is thinking, Did I feel this feeling then, that night? Did I feel this jangled swoop of dread and longing, this elevator-dive, this strange suspended prelude to a sneeze?

  Later maybe she will identify the feeling as some abstracted form of arousal, an irregular toll that plucks at her body now and again, like an untouched string vibrating in harmonic sympathy with a piano nearby. Later she might conclude that the feeling is a little like a hunger-stab, not the gnawing ever-present lust of real hunger, just a stab that strikes like a warning—here and gone. But by then, that time in years to come when she has come to know her body’s tides and tolls and can say, This is frustration and This is lust and This is longing, a nostalgic sexual longing that draws me back to a time before, by then everything will be classified, everything will have a name and a shape, and the modest compass of her desires will be circumscribed by the limits of what she has known, what she has experienced, what she has felt. So far Isolde has experienced nothing and so this feeling does not mean I must have sex tonight or I am still full from last night, still brimming. It does not mean Who must I be in love with, to feel this pull? or Again I am wanting the thing I cannot have. It is not yet a feeling that points her in a direction. It is just the feeling of a vacuum, a void waiting to be filled.

  You can’t tell any of this from Isolde’s face: she is just sitting in the gray half-light, her hands in her lap, looking at the wall.

  Monday

  “I am never quite sure,” the saxophone teacher says, “what is truly meant when the mothers say, I want my daughter to experience what was denied to me.

  “In my experience the most forceful and aggressive mothers are always the least inspired, the most unmusical of souls, all of them profoundly unsuccessful women who wear their daughter’s image on their breast like a medal, like a bright deflection from their own unshining selves. When these mothers say, I want her to fully experience everything that was denied to me, what they rightly mean is, I want her to fully appreciate everything that was denied to me. What they rightly mean is, The paucity of my life will only be thrown into relief if my daughter has everything. On its own, my life is ordinary and worthless and nothing. But if my daughter is rich in experience and rich in opportunity, then people will come to pity me: the smallness of my life and my options will not be incapacity; it will be sacrifice. I will be pitied more, and respected more, if I raise a daughter who is everything that I am not.”

  The saxophone teacher runs her tongue over her teeth. She says, “The successful mothers—musical women, sporting women, literate women, content and brimful women, women who were denied nothing, women whose parents paid for lessons when they were girls—the successful mothers are the least forceful, always. They do not need to oversee, or wield, or pick a fight on their daughter’s behalf. They are complete in themselves. They are complete, and so they demand completeness in everyone else. They can stand back and see their daughters as something set apart, as something whole and therefore untouchable.”

  The saxophone teacher goes to the window to let down the blinds. It is almost dusk.

  Tuesday

  Mrs. Tyke waits in the corridor for ten minutes before the saxophone teacher opens the door.

  “I just wanted to touch base, really,” she says once they are inside, “in light of this dreadful scandal up at the school. I’m thinking of the girls.”

  “I understand,” the saxophone teacher says, pouring out two mugs of tea. One of the mugs has a picture of a saxophonist on a desert island and the words “Sax on the Beach.” The other mug is white and says “Let’s Talk About Sax.” The saxophone teacher returns the jug to its cradle and carefully selects a teaspoon.

  “Mrs. Tyke,” she says, “you would very much like, I think, to sew your children’s hands to your waistband, just to keep them with you always, their little legs swaying when you hurry and trailing on the asphalt when you stroll. If you turned on your heel very fast your children would fan out around you like a sunburst pleated skirt. You would be a goddess in a corset and a bustle, your children radiating out from you like so many graceful little spokes.”

  “I’m thinking of the girls, that’s all,” says Mrs. Tyke. She holds out both hands to receive her mug of black-leaf tea. The saxophone teacher lets the silence creep until Mrs. Tyke bursts out, “I’m just worried about some of the ideas she’s bringing home. They’re ideas she didn’t have before. They stick in the side of her mouth like a walnut, and when she talks I can see glimpses of these ideas—just a flash every so often when she opens her mouth wide—but it’s enough to make me very nervous. It’s like she’s tasting them, or poking them around her mouth with her tongue. They’re ideas she didn’t have before.”

  She blinks dolefully at the saxophone teacher, then shrugs in a helpless fashion and ducks her head to sip her tea.

  “Can I tell you what I think the problem is?” says the saxophone teacher in a special quiet honey voice. “I think you feel a little bit as if that horrible man up at the school, that vile and disgusting man, has left a big fat fingerprint on your glasses, and it doesn’t matter what you’re looking at, all you see is his fingers.”

  She stands up to pace.

  “I know you wanted your daughter to find out about it all the ordinary way. You wanted her to find out behind the bike sheds, or underneath the bleachers on the rugby field, or in Social Studies, the facts written on the whiteboard with a felt-tipped pen. You wanted her to sneak glances at magazines and at movies she wasn’t allowed to see. You wanted her to start off with some sort of blind sticky grope in her mate’s front room on a Saturday night while her friends are outside being sick into flowerpots. That might happen more than once. It might become a phase. But you’d be prepared for it.”

  As Mrs. Tyke watches the saxophone teacher she lets something steal across her face, not something as crude and bold as realization or awakening, but something which registers only as a slackening of her features, a tiny release. It’s such a good performance the saxophone teacher almost forgets she’s acting.

  “You wanted her to finally get a boyfriend in sixth form maybe, some prancing, empty sort of boy you didn’t really like, and you wanted to catch her with him eventually, coming home early because you had a funny feeling, and seeing them on the couch, or on the floor, or in her bedroom among her teddy bears and her frilly pink cushions that she doesn’t really like but she’ll never throw away.

  “I respect these things that you wanted for your daughter,” the saxophone teacher says. “I imagine they must be the things that every good mother wants. It’s a terrible thing that this venomous little man should have stolen your daughter’s innocence so slyly, without ever having laid a finger on her, shoving his dirty little secrets down her throat like candy from a brown paper bag.

  “But what you need to understand, my darling,” she whispers, “is that this little taste your daughter has had is a taste of what could be. She’s swallowed it. It’s inside her now.”

  TWO

  February

  “The first term,” they said, “is essentially a physical and emotional undoing. You will unlearn everything you have ever learned, peeling it off skin by skin, stripping down and down until your impulse shines through.”

  “This Institute,” they said, “cannot teach you how to be an actor. We ca
nnot give you a map or a recipe or an alphabet that will teach you how to act or how to feel. What we do at this Institute is not teaching by accumulation, collecting skills as one might collect a marble or a token or a charm. Here at this Institute we teach by elimination. We help you learn to eliminate yourself.”

  “You may break or be broken,” they said. “This happens.”

  The fat one on the end leaned forward and said, with emphasis, “A good actor makes a gift of himself.”

  “An actor is someone who offers up his body publicly,” they said. “This can happen in one of two ways. The actor can exploit himself, treat his body as a ready and obedient instrument, a product to be sold. At this Institute we do not favor this approach. We do not breed confectioners or clowns. You are not here to sell your body: you are here to sacrifice it.”

  And then they said, “You’re not at high school anymore.”

  February

  “I graduated from the Institute in December,” said the golden boy, his gaze passing from face to face with calm disinterest. “They asked me to come and talk to you guys today about my experience of the program and where I’m headed now and maybe you can ask some questions if you have any.”

  He sat cross-legged on the gymnasium floor like a prophet.

  “God, I envy you guys,” he said, and then he smiled and smiled. “Not too virginal, not too defiled. Sitting there all shiny and pregnant with the best still yet to come.”

  The golden boy looked at them, the tight pale ring of nervous faces and black tee-shirts still creased down the middle with newness.

  “The three years I spent at this Institute didn’t just shape me as an artist. They shaped me as a person,” he said. “This place woke me up.”

  He flushed brightly as if he were describing a lover he had lost.