The Rehearsal: A Novel

by Eleanor Catton

  “Everyone else here has really shared something,” the Head of Acting said. “They have willingly shown themselves at their most vulnerable. They have relived the most painful and most sacred moments of their lives, and laid them out for us to see. That’s a brave thing to do. There’s been a lot of trust in this room this morning. I don’t see a lot of trust in you, Oliver. Playing to your strengths isn’t brave. You knew everyone was going to laugh, big deal.”

  Oliver was nodding now, chagrined and visibly straining to get down off the stage and melt back into the seated crowd so he could ponder his disgrace in private. He had known this was coming. All the first-years endured a breaking-in of this sort, a forcible public fracture of their ego-mold in the interest of rebuilding a more versatile self. About half the first-years had been targeted so far, and the rest sat glumly and waited for their own turn.

  “Do you have a girlfriend, Oliver?” the Head of Acting asked.

  “Yes.” She was part of the first-year batch and his eyes sought her out briefly in the crowd.

  “Is there any aspect of your relationship with your girlfriend which you would not want the rest of the group to see?”

  The boy turned back to the Head of Acting. He paused and looked at the tutor suspiciously for a brief moment. “Yes,” he said again, but Stanley thought to himself that he could not very well say no. The girl looked faintly stricken, as if anticipating some forced revelation that would cheapen or destroy her, but all the same the boy’s admission gave her a rush of pleasure and she almost smiled, looking quickly around at her classmates to see if they were jealous.

  “That is what intimacy means,” the Head of Acting said. “Intimacy is all the moments that you would be unwilling to share.”

  The Head of Acting looked at the boy Oliver and tapped his fountain pen against his desktop in a disapproving way.

  “You can get down,” he said at last. “But I haven’t finished with you.”

  The Head of Acting was sitting behind the students, arranged sideways behind a small writing-desk, with his long legs folded and one palm absentmindedly stroking his calf as he wrote. He watched the shamed Oliver return to his seat next to his girlfriend on the floor, and then capped his pen crisply.

  “Stanley,” he said. “Up you get.”

  NINE

  Friday

  Julia’s cue cards are swollen at the edges from the damp of her hands.

  “The girls are like wax models in a living tableau: it’s always the same scene and they’re always in the same configuration,” she is saying. “Whoever is the most sexed-up functions as the snare. The snare is always in the middle. She can’t be too near the edge or she’d be an easy target.”

  A crisp spotlight nails Julia flatly to the wall.

  “The snare is not necessarily the most beautiful,” she says, “but she is always the most provocative. Sometimes the snare will do things that will shame or embarrass the other figures, mostly by adopting a crass or deliberately scandalous manner. That’s a normal part of her role.

  “The most beautiful girl sits to one side of the snare, and she is known as the prize. The prize is characterized by her untouchability. She is often the only figure in the tableau to be in a stable long-term relationship. The objective of this relationship is always to emphasize her untouchability. Typically the prize is clean and successful and unknowable.

  “Standing behind the snare and the prize is the manager. The manager orchestrates all movements within the tableau. The manager is often hard to spot: methods of management naturally differ from group to group. Some common methods of covert management include the use of wit or cruelty, or sometimes the adoption of a motherly persona.

  “All other figures in the tableau are the aspiring servants of this central trio. They are used as foils, scapegoats or canned laughter.”

  Julia has a peculiar flat way of delivering her lines sometimes, as if somebody has forced her to read them and she wants to make clear her private feelings of contempt.

  “The depressing fixity of this tableau,” she says in conclusion, “makes it clear to us why girls value reincarnation and reinvention above all things.”

  Monday

  There are no counseling sessions about Bridget’s death. A flag is retrieved from the sports cupboard, ironed, and hauled to half-mast where it spends a glum week slapping against the rusted flagpole. The girls move around the campus in a vast ghostly drift. They are ashamed that they feel nothing and so respectfully they affect to feel very much. They self-consciously contemplate their own mortality as they watch the raindrops travel down the glass. They sigh and take too long in the toilet cubicle, and say to each other, “I think I need to be alone for a while.”

  “It’s the little things,” Julia hears a girl say to her friend while they wait in the line for the tuck shop. “It’s the little things that you remember.”

  In assembly the counselor says, “Bridget was a very special person.” He says special in the same way he says important, cupping his lips around the word as if he is trying to suck an acorn and unwittingly conferring its opposite meaning. In the auditorium, girls who never knew Bridget nod their tremulous assent and pluck at the sleeves of their neighbors for support.

  In the staffroom the teachers discuss a memorial for Bridget. Somebody suggests a mural. Somebody suggests a commemorative plaque in the music corridor, to honor her commitment to the jazz band. The weeks go by.

  In the meantime Isolde’s sister, Victoria, returns to school.

  Friday

  “You and Julia seem to get on very well,” the saxophone teacher says after Isolde has trundled in and unwrapped her scarf and pulled off her mittens.

  “Yeah,” Isolde says. She flaps her arms about. “God, it’s cold!”

  “Do you see her much around school?”

  “I guess,” Isolde says. “The seventh formers have their own commonroom and their own study lounge and stuff. We’re not allowed in. Hey, I tracked down some of the recordings of that guy we saw—they’ve got a whole bunch at the library.”

  “Good,” the saxophone teacher says. “And?”

  “Awesome,” Isolde says. “Made me want to start playing with other people, like properly.”

  “You could join Julia’s underground band.”

  “She’d be way better than me,” Isolde says. “Hasn’t she been learning for ages?”

  “She’s sitting her letters this year,” the saxophone teacher says. “I must say I was so pleased you two got on so well. Is she a friend of your sister’s at school?”

  “God no,” Isolde says with a snort. “Victoria’s friends are… I was going to say brain-dead. No. They’re just… much more girly.”

  “Julia’s not girly?”

  “No way.”

  “What’s the opposite of girly?” the saxophone teacher asks, thinking to herself that only matters of social hierarchy or branding ever produce this sort of conviction in her students.

  Isolde reflects for a moment, twirling her necklace around her finger. “Hard-core,” she says at last, pronouncing the word definitively, as if to deny all other options.

  “So Julia is hard-core,” the saxophone teacher says.

  “Hey, there was something I was going to ask you about one of the albums I got out,” Isolde says, reaching down to rummage in her bag. “I brought it along.”

  The saxophone teacher scowls. She wants a performance. She wants the lights to change, becoming the red tail-glow of Mr. Saladin’s car, and she wants to see Isolde all lit up red for a second before Mr. Saladin kills the engine and the lights go out and Isolde is sitting in the low half-light of the streetlamp in the darkened car, and she wants to hear Isolde say—

  “It’s just the voicing on this particular track,” Isolde says now, unearthing the disc and flipping it over to find the track title. “Do you mind if I play it?”

  “Of course not, go ahead,” the saxophone teacher says, sitting down gracefully and watching Isolde stab at t
he stereo and insert her disc. She masks her disappointment, reaching over for her cooling cup of tea and watching Isolde feel for the power button, sweeping over the dials on the stereo front with light patting fingertips as if she is blind.

  Isolde turns the volume knob and the music begins and, as it does, the lights change, the overhead bulb fading to black in time with the upward swell of the saxophone. The two of them are in perfect darkness for a moment, and then the lights come slowly up again. They are now reddish and warm, dim and pocketed as if cast by scattered lamps in booths and tables at a backwater bar. The music is lazy and chromatic and low. The saxophone teacher lets out a little sigh of contentment, and settles back to watch.

  “When we walked away from you,” Isolde said, “this is the tune we heard, coming out of one of those little smoky afterward bars in the alleys by the Town Hall. There was a gig somewhere, not the kind of jostling sweaty gig where everyone’s fighting to use their elbows, but just some three-man band jamming away the hours in a quiet bar. Julia turns to me and says, Do you want to get a drink? and I must have nodded because the next thing we’re pushing open this foggy door and walking into a warm late-night café—”

  Isolde pushes the volume knob up a little bit and the music swells, as if a door has just been opened—

  “—and they’re playing drums and double bass and keyboards, all of them barefoot and happy, and the drummer is leaning over to talk to the man at the bar while he plays.”

  The saxophone teacher nods as she pictures the bar in her mind: she knows it very well, the stained diamond pattern of the wallpaper, the dark paneling that ends in an elegant lip at shoulder-height, the reddish brass lamps collared to the wall and bleeding artful fingers of rust in downward rays. It’s Patsy’s favorite place to sit and drink, and the sax teacher has spent hours in that sticky shadowed corner over the years. She can see the ornate plaster frame of the mirror behind the bar, chipped gold and peeling, and the brass plaques on the lavatory doors, spotted gray with age.

  “We walk in,” Isolde is saying, “and Julia says sit down. She’ll order drinks for the both of us, so I go and fold myself into a corner booth, peeling off my coat and my scarf and checking my reflection in the dark glass of the window by the door. I watch as she leans over the bar and says something to the barman, and she picks up her change and two glasses, and he waves his half-cut lemon at her and says, Get away from me! and they both laugh. She slips into the booth and says, Sorry, I didn’t even ask, is red okay? And I don’t want to say that mostly what I drink is vodka or rum mixed with fruit syrup to mask the taste, and the only time I’ve had red wine is when we stole a bottle from Nicola’s mum and decanted it into half a bottle of Coke so you wouldn’t be able to tell.”

  Isolde’s mouth is dry. She wets her lips.

  “I take a sip,” she says, “and it’s foul, fouler than when we mixed it half with Coke and drank it under the bleachers on the rugby field. I ask Julia if she’s turned eighteen yet and she looks a bit annoyed, as if she’d rather talk about something else. She says she has, last week. It was her birthday last week. I say the wine is good. Then we start talking about you, what we think of you, probably because you’re the only real thread of connection between us.”

  The music is crooning and uncomplicated. The saxophone teacher can see it: the cheerful aging three-man band, stepping with their bare feet over the yellow extension leads, the double-bass player nodding and smiling over the glossy wooden shoulder of his one-legged woman-shape, the pianist leaning in and out of the light, the drummer dropping down to a one-handed beat for a couple of bars as he reaches over to take a drink from a sweaty beaded glass of beer, golden under the tasseled fringe of a lamp.

  “Afterward,” says Isolde, “after we finish our drinks, we’re walking down the street toward her car and I’m a bit light-headed. I’m laughing too much. And then Julia says, Most of the girls at school are afraid of me, a bit. It’s nice that you’re not scared.”

  Isolde stops. She’s in a yellow pool of streetlight now, wide eyed and short of breath, with her fingers clasping convulsively at the cuffs of her jersey. The music slips into a new accelerated phase, becoming more insistent and discordant. Isolde stiffens.

  “I looked at her and I said, I am a bit. I am a bit scared. But it wouldn’t be worth it if I wasn’t.”

  Isolde gives a little cry, a strangled involuntary half-sob that afterward will be the only thing the saxophone teacher can remember.

  “And Julia looks at me,” she says, “and then grabs the sleeves of my coat, real fistfuls, grabs the fabric and pulls me toward her really hard. And I think I remember there’s one tiny moment before we come together, it’s like we stalled for a moment just at the last instant, and I could feel her breath on my upper lip, sweet and hot and quickly panting. I could smell the black spice of the wine in the small pocket of space between us, and then she kissed me.”

  Isolde isn’t looking at the saxophone teacher; she’s looking out, out over the mossy rooftops and the clustered antennae and the pigeons wheeling and wheeling against the sky.

  “Only it wasn’t a kiss how I thought it would be,” she says. “She took my bottom lip between hers, and she bit me. She bit my bottom lip, but not so it hurt, more like she was tearing at it very gently, pulling at it with her teeth. And I guess I kind of pulled my head back and gave this gasp and opened my mouth a bit and she still had my bottom lip in her teeth, not so it hurt, really tenderly, like she’d captured it and she couldn’t bear to let it go.

  “And then we were up against the wall,” she says, “and I remember my eyes were closed and my hands were clenched in fists on the wall above my head and Julia presses up against me and her hands are pushing and pushing to find the skin underneath the bottom of my jumper, and then she slides her cold hands up my back and she whispers all salty and hot into my ear, I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe it. I can’t tell if this is my fantasy or yours.”

  The lights ease back up again, just as the track on the disc comes to a chordal close. Isolde moves over to the stereo and ejects the disc before the next track has time to begin. The sax teacher wipes her face, pulling her hand down over her chin so the soft skin of her cheeks is drawn downward for a brief moment, like a sad clown.

  Tuesday

  “I understand that this is something you couldn’t possibly have prepared yourself for,” the saxophone teacher says to Bridget’s mother. “I’m shocked myself. I feel partly it’s because Bridget was so dull. I always imagine that the ones who die are the interesting ones, the wronged ones, the tragic ones, the ones for whom death would come as a terrible, terrible waste. I always imagine it as a tragedy. Bridget’s death doesn’t quite seem to fit.”

  Bridget’s mother fiddles with the button on the cushion. She looks gray. There is a jeweled stack of gold on the penultimate finger of her puffy left hand, trapped between two swollen knuckles and sunk into her finger like a tattoo or a brand. She pushes the cushion impatiently off her lap and shakes her head in a despairing way.

  “If she’d been more original,” Bridget’s mother says, “it might have been easier. If she’d been more original, you see, then we might have worried that she might commit suicide one day. Then at least we would have thought about her death. We would have prepared ourselves for the possibility just by imagining. But someone as unoriginal as Bridget would never think of suicide. She just wouldn’t be clever enough to consider it an option.”

  “Yes,” says the saxophone teacher. “I saw that too. Despair is not something that Bridget would have been clever enough to feel.”

  They sit quietly for a while. Down in the courtyard the pigeons are fighting.

  “And how do you prepare yourself for an accident?” Bridget’s mother says limply, mostly to herself. “How do you prepare yourself for a car speeding in the dark?”

  After a while the saxophone teacher says, “Do you have other children?”

  “Oh, a boy,” says Bridget�
��s mother. “Older. He doesn’t live at home anymore.”

  “I suppose you called him on the telephone.”

  “Yes,” says Bridget’s mother.

  “I suppose he’s coming up for the funeral.”

  “Oh, the funeral,” Bridget’s mother says. She lapses into silence again and then she says, “I just didn’t think this was going to happen. I wasn’t ready. I’m still not ready. It’s not fair.”

  Friday

  “Do you know,” Patsy says in a dreamy voice, swaying at the table with her chin upon her fist, “the moments when I’m the most dishonest with Brian are usually the ones when he believes I’m at my most intimate.”

  “What do you mean?” says the saxophone teacher. She is sitting stiffly, with her saxophone held upright on her knees. It is a long time ago. She is still holding the instrument with a careful reverence, gingerly even, with both hands, as if it is a new wife and not yet fingerprinted or commonplace.

  “I’ll be sitting there and thinking how much he is irritating me,” Patsy says, “maybe if he’s sniffing when he reads, sniffing and sniffing, every half page. And then he’ll look up and smile at me and I’ll feel compelled to say something, in case what I was thinking was in some way visible to him. So I’ll panic and in my guilt I’ll say, It’s so lovely that we can sit here in silence and read like this. It’s so peaceful. I love doing this with you. Which is virtually the opposite of what I really mean. It happens so much. I’ll be thinking how he really is getting rather fat, and then I’ll feel guilty for thinking such an ungenerous thought, so I’ll panic and blurt out, I love you. I’m always motivated by the oddest things.”

  “But you do love Brian,” the saxophone teacher says, mostly because she feels it ought to be said. She has only met Brian once so far, at a recital in the old university chapel. He shook her hand and praised her performance and spoke in a booming voice about the renovations to the tapestry and paneling, twinkling down at her from his great height as if enjoying her lack of interest very much. Patsy flitted in and out and slapped at him and said, again and again, “Come on, Bear, she doesn’t want to hear about that.”