“Why do you think that your daughter would tell me the truth?” the saxophone teacher asks.
“About her studies,” says Mrs. De Gregorio weakly. “Or her life at school. Something like a boyfriend, a problem that we could work through, and understand.”
The saxophone teacher doesn’t speak for a moment, just so Mrs. De Gregorio feels uncomfortable and wishes she hadn’t spoken so freely. Then she says, “But how can you ever know?” She is more brooding now and less abrupt. “How can you ever get to the kernel of truth behind it all? You could watch her. But you have to remember that there are two kinds of watching: either she will know she is being watched, or she will not. If she knows she is being watched, her behavior will change under observation until what you are seeing is so utterly transformed it becomes a thing intended only for observation, and all realities are lost. And if she doesn’t know she is being watched, what you are seeing is something unprimed, something unfit for performance, something crude and unrefined that you will try and refine yourself: you will try to give it a meaning that it does not inherently possess, and in doing this you will press your daughter into some mold that misunderstands her. So, you see, neither picture is what you might call true. They are distortions.”
“Has she said anything?” Mrs. De Gregorio says. “I know it’s an odd question. It’s embarrassing to have to ask. But is there anything we should know about?” Her hand disappears under her breasts, checking that her purse is still tucked into the vast crux of her lap. Her fingers find the wadded leather lump and touch it briefly.
“Oh, Mrs. De Gregorio. I’m her music teacher,” the sax teacher says. She returns her mug to the table and folds her hands.
“But then what do I do?” Mrs. De Gregorio asks with a kind of rising panic. “What options have I left?”
“You could ask your daughter,” the saxophone teacher says. “You could sit down and actually talk to her. But you always run the risk that she might lie.”
Monday
“What did you imagine while you were watching?” the saxophone teacher asks when Julia arrives for her lesson on Monday afternoon. “At the concert.”
“I liked the second half better than the first half,” Julia begins, but the saxophone teacher waves her arm impatiently and says, “No, I meant what did you think about while you were watching? What sorts of things were you thinking about?”
Julia looks at her curiously, as if this might be a test. “Why?” she asks.
“It’s a game I used to play with an old friend of mine,” the saxophone teacher says. “We had a joke that the better the performance, the more catalytic the effect. A poor performance might only make you think about what you had for dinner or what you were going to wear when you woke up the next day. But a great performance would make you imagine things you would never have been brave enough to imagine before.”
She is speaking eagerly, like a child. Julia unclips her saxophone case and says, “I was just thinking about the music.”
“Yes, but around that. When your mind drifted. What did you imagine?”
Julia slips her reed out of its gated plastic sheath and holds it for a second. “I imagined what was going to happen,” she said, “when I dropped Isolde home.”
The lights change. The overhead lights and the bright overcast light from the window are doused; a template falls into place in front of a solitary floodlight and the attachment begins to rotate, so that the yellow light is thinly striped and ever changing, playing over the pair of them like passing streetlights striping the dashboard of a moving car. Julia sits down. The streetlights come and go, streaking over her knees and curving away over her shoulder to disappear, and she is dark for a moment before another streak of light rises up to replace the first, and then another, and another, all yellow and forward bending.
“I imagined,” Julia says, “that on the way home we would talk about the concert a bit, and what we thought of it, and the teachers that we had in common at school, and we’d keep coming back to you, to talk about you, because you are the only real thread of connection between us. We’d talk about you for a while back and forth, only we wouldn’t be quite honest, because the most important thing would be to create an attractive impression of ourselves, and what we truly thought didn’t really matter. We’d say whatever things would put us in the best light. We’d lie. All the way home we’d lie to each other, back and forth.”
The saxophone teacher is unmoving. She looks Julia up and down with her eyes only. Her face is like a mask.
“And then I imagined,” Julia says, “that after I killed the engine we would sit there for a moment, not looking at each other, just looking up through the darkness at Isolde’s unlit house. My key ring would still be swinging from the ignition, and we would listen to the sound of the wind whipping the leaves. My mouth would be dry.”
The rotating template has stilled and Julia’s knees are in a square of light which falls through the car window and across her lap. Her face is in shadow. She is sitting stiffly, one leg forward-stretched and cocked at an angle, as if on the brake pedal. Her saxophone is lying on the couch beside her, and she is holding it casually with her left hand, lifting the upper end slightly off the couch, so it looks like her hand is curled casually around the handbrake, her knuckles in the plastic shallow beneath the handle and her wrist loosely arched. With her other hand she plucks at her sternum, testing the tension of an invisible seat belt strap, lifting it carelessly and letting it slap back against her chest.
“And I’d go, You know what everybody says about me. At school and everything. It isn’t true.”
Julia wets her lips with her tongue. She isn’t looking at Isolde: she’s looking out the window, peering into the dark silver of the wing-mirror, one hand still plucking at her strap.
“Isolde goes, I know. She says it really quickly and then she says it again. I know. She’s not looking at me, she’s looking forward, up at the house, and her finger is at her throat, twisting her necklace around and around, cutting all the blood from her fingertip. The end of it has gone gray.” Julia looks back at Isolde again, quickly, and tightens her grip around the handbrake. “And then I go, I was just worried that you might think I was going to come on to you, or jump you when you least expected it or something. I was worried you might think that.”
She reverts to gazing into the wing-mirror, turning her face away.
“Isolde goes, I don’t think that. And I go, Good. And then we sit for a moment, looking up at Isolde’s unlit house and listen for each other’s breath, and then I go, That’s all. That’s all I wanted to say.”
The lights come up a little, just enough to include the saxophone teacher and bring her into the scene. She shifts and crosses her legs. She looks uncomfortable.
“What is it that everyone says about you at school?” she asks reluctantly. Sometimes Julia makes her feel cornered, and she is feeling cornered now.
“Everyone thinks I like girls,” Julia says.
“I see,” the saxophone teacher says. The lights dip back down again, receding back to the single streetlamp casting its square pool of light across Julia’s lap. The saxophone teacher disappears again into the dark.
“We parked the car,” Julia says, “and sat there for a while, and whatever we were talking about sort of trickled away like water until there was nothing left and we just sat and waited for something to happen. My mouth was dry. And then Isolde goes, Do you mind waiting here in the car for a while? My mum thinks Victoria came to the concert with me, and we have to walk in at the same time in case she’s still up.
“And even while she was saying it a car pulled up and stopped a few houses in front of where we were, so both of us were lit red for a moment in the glare of the taillights, and then the lights went off but nobody got out. We watched but the car just sat there. And Isolde goes, She doesn’t know we’re here. She hasn’t seen us. Isolde’s watching the car with a hard tight sort of expression and I don’t want to say anything in cas
e it’s the wrong thing, and then she says, We had it all arranged. Mum dropped both of us off at the concert, and I went in to meet you guys and Victoria went off to meet him. It’s the only way she can still see him. She’s grounded most nights, and none of her friends will cover for her now. I don’t mind.”
The saxophone teacher leans forward in the dark. She is frowning.
“And then Isolde goes, I’d better go. If we sit here for much longer it’ll be weird. I have to go.”
Julia smoothes her knees and tugs again at her seat belt, nodding.
“But she doesn’t go. She stays in the car for a moment longer, and through the back window of the car in front we see Victoria lean over and put her head on Mr. Saladin’s shoulder. It looks awkward, stretched across the gearshift with all this space in between them, and he reaches his arm up and strokes her head. He’s saying something but we can only see their silhouettes. It’s like a shadow-play, and all of a sudden my heart is hammering and I look at Isolde and she looks at me really quickly, but then again, and she says, Please don’t tell anyone, and I say I won’t.”
Julia’s voice has become dry and choked, and her tongue keeps darting out to wet her lips. Spots of crimson have appeared high on either cheek.
“And then she gets out,” Julia says, “and the silhouettes turn around and see her, and then Victoria kisses Mr. Saladin goodbye, not on the mouth. He turns his face to the side so she can kiss his cheek, and then they both smile and maybe even laugh, like it’s a joke. And then the red taillights come on again and Mr. Saladin’s car is gone, and Victoria and Isolde go into the house together. Isolde is the one who unlocks the gate, and while she reaches for the latch Victoria steps into the light and looks at me, really gets a long look at me, and then she says something under her breath to Isolde like she’s unhappy. And then they disappear.”
Julia comes abruptly to an end and looks at the saxophone teacher for the first time. Her mouth is twisted and her expression is sour, as if the performance has made her remember an unpleasant feeling that she would rather have forgotten.
“Was that really what happened?” the saxophone teacher says, as the lights return to normal and Julia reaches for her sax. “Was it Mr. Saladin in the car, Julia? Could you be sure?”
“I was just telling you what I imagined,” Julia says, all of a sudden grouchy and withdrawn and peering suspiciously at the saxophone teacher like she is an enemy. And then she adds, “It was dark.” She picks at one of the keys on her sax, just to hear it clack.
“This could be very important,” the saxophone teacher says.
“It’s what I imagined,” Julia says again, retreating further. She turns away and plays an arpeggio to warm up.
“Julia,” says the saxophone teacher. Her eyes are gleaming. “Tell me what you saw.”
“Nothing,” Julia says, and although she is sullen and inward the saxophone teacher senses in her something like triumph, as if Julia has led her somewhere remote and treacherous only to abandon her. “I dropped her home. She said goodbye. She got out. She shut the door. Nothing happened.”
Saturday
“Can you remember losing your innocence, Patsy?” the saxophone teacher says.
They are in the afterward bar, Patsy sitting sideways in the booth with her legs up and her brown boots crossed at the ankle. There is a bottle between them, and two glasses, each stained with the pale gray kiss of a woman’s lower lip, like a fingerprint just below the rim.
“Do you mean a specific event?” Patsy says. “The actual loss of it, do you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Losing my virginity?”
“Not necessarily. Just if there was a moment when you ceased to be innocent. The moment you fell. Can you remember your fall?”
Patsy thinks about this quietly for a second. The saxophone teacher raises her wineglass to her mouth and drinks. Patsy is beautiful tonight. Her hair is swept back into a tumbling handful at the nape of her neck, and her eyes are clear and bright. She wears a heavy brass locket, a gift from Brian, an antique and accidental-seeming piece that suits her perfectly, suits the stout capable breadth of her chest and the soft notched hollow of her collarbone. Patsy always suits her clothes, her costume. The image of her is always complete, the saxophone teacher thinks: it is impossible to halve her, undress her, subtract from her. The sax teacher cannot imagine removing the necklace, even in her mind—she can’t imagine Patsy unclothed, Patsy without the trimmings and trappings that she inhabits so completely.
Patsy rolls the stem of her wineglass in her fingers.
“I was never veiled or misted as a kid,” she says slowly. “You know, Santa Claused, Easter Bunnied, cabbage-patched, euphemized. I can’t remember any illusions. I can’t remember ever not knowing. Sex was never really a mystery. And there was no God in our house, so no mystery there. Of course I had first experiences like everybody else, made mistakes like everybody else, repaired and reinvented myself like everybody does. But I can’t remember ever really falling. I can’t remember if I was ever really innocent. I have no nostalgia for a time before.”
She looks up at the saxophone teacher. “Is that terribly sad?” she says, and laughs.
The sax teacher smiles and says nothing, and they both sit quietly for a while, touching their wineglasses with their fingertips, looking away.
“Everything had a precedent,” Patsy says after a time. “Everything I have ever done had a template, a formula, a model, something public and visible and known. I knew the shape of everything I would ever meet, before I met it. The template always preceded the reality, the experience, the personal truth of a thing. I learned about love from the cinema, and from television, and from the stage. I learned the formula and then I applied it. That’s how it happened for me. My whole life.”
She gives another little tinkle of a laugh. “Is that terribly sad?” she says a second time. “Is that very sad?”
Up on the little dais next to the piano the double-bassist leans forward and says into his microphone, “One last song, folks. Here’s one last song.”
EIGHT
May
The day after the Theater of Cruelty lesson Stanley ran into the victim of the exercise on the main staircase. The boy was walking quickly with his head down, taking the stairs two at a time. His hair was cropped close to his skull now, to even up the patch on the crown that the masked boy had snipped. The shorter cut didn’t quite suit him. He looked a little frightened, his ears and forehead protruding too obviously from under the shrunken cap of hair. He was wearing a new shirt.
“Hey,” Stanley said, reaching out a hand to stall him.
The boy turned guilty eyes up at him and nodded a shy hello.
“I just wanted to say that I went and complained,” Stanley said. His voice sounded huge in the stairwell, spiraling up and up to the floors above and ringing clear and hollow in the vertical shaft like the pealing of a bell. “About what happened. I went to the Head of Movement and complained.”
“Thanks,” the boy said quietly. “But it’s all right now. It was just a dumb thing.” He made as if to continue downstairs, but Stanley stopped him, moving closer and cornering him so he was trapped flat, pinioned against the banister with nowhere to go.
“I’m going to talk to the Head of Acting as well,” Stanley said. “I can’t believe that nobody else is doing anything about this. It’s disgusting. What they did to you was disgusting. And nobody cared.”
The boy looked at Stanley inscrutably for a moment. He reached back with both hands for the banister, and stood there with his arms behind him, tugging gently on the handrail. Then he said, “I was a plant.”
“What?” Stanley said.
“I was a plant. The main guy—Nick, the guy in the mask—he asked me and arranged it all beforehand. I knew they were going to pick me, and I knew what was going to happen, mostly. I knew about the water, and he said they might slap me around a bit. I thought it would be funny. Just for a laugh.”
&n
bsp; Stanley was frowning. “But you bolted.”
“I didn’t know they were going to go that far,” the boy said. “My shirt and everything. Cutting my hair. He only told me about the water-trough. I thought it would be okay. I thought I’d help them out or whatever. I said yes.”
“Is there always a plant?” Stanley said. “Every year?”
“I guess,” the boy said. He jerked his gaze away, past Stanley’s shoulder and down the stairs. “They’d never get away with it otherwise.”
“They shouldn’t get away with it.”
“Yeah,” the boy said, and shrugged. “It was just an exercise. It was only to make a point.”
“But why?” Stanley said. He spoke with more aggression than he intended. He felt the same dawning feeling of helplessness that he had felt in the Head of Movement’s office. In his confusion he was scowling at the boy, and now the boy scowled back.
“I was just helping them out. They needed someone for their project. It’s no big deal.”
“What about your shirt?” Stanley said. “Your shirt was a big deal.”
The boy gripped the banister tighter. He was flushing. He clenched his jaw, and his shorn golden cap of hair moved angrily backward on his scalp.
“Hey look, I appreciate your concern, all right,” he said, “but I’m not like a little bandwagon, you know, or some sort of a just cause that you can fight for. It was my fault, I should have asked them what they were planning on doing. It’s no big deal. You didn’t have to complain.”
“They hurt you!” Stanley shouted.
“Yeah, and came and found me afterward,” the boy said loudly. “After they’d taken off their masks and it was all over, and we talked and everything, and we sorted everything out. It’s not your problem. You weren’t there.”
The Rehearsal: A Novel Page 15
