The Rehearsal: A Novel

by Eleanor Catton

  “I said that,” she says, “because Bridget was my least favorite student. I said that because I didn’t care for Bridget much at all.”

  The memory dissolves and her vision sharpens once again.

  “What have you learned in counseling?” she says, rounding on Isolde with a savage, narrowed look, and the girl blinks and straightens and returns invisibly to herself.

  Isolde is not sure what answer she should give. As she hesitates and paws uncomfortably at the sax around her neck she thinks about the girl, the one assembly and one half-masted flag, the never-scheduled counseling sessions about her death, and the paper cutout convenience grief that some of the older girls wielded for a week or so, just to earn a half-hour’s freedom and a pass to the nurse.

  The saxophone teacher is still looking hard at Isolde, waiting for an answer.

  Isolde says, quietly and full of shame, “In counseling we all mourn everything that was irreplaceable about my sister. We grieve for everything about Victoria that is now lost.”

  Monday

  Julia comes straight to her lesson from afternoon detention. She is almost late, and when the saxophone teacher opens the door Julia is still red faced and sweating a little, her cycle helmet trailing from her wrist.

  “My teacher is an arsehole,” she says in summary, once they are inside. “Mrs. Paul is an arsehole. They have to write a reason on the detention slip, and I said, Why don’t you write, ‘Saying out loud what everyone was thinking anyway.’ So she made it double. I fucking hate high school. I hate everything about it.”

  “Why did you get detention in the first place?” the saxophone teacher says admiringly, but Julia just shakes her head and scowls. She takes a moment to unwrap and to fish for her music, and the saxophone teacher stirs her tea and tilts her head as she waits.

  “When you leave, and all of this is over,” the sax teacher says, “you will always have one schoolteacher you will remember for the rest of your life, one teacher who changed your life.”

  “I won’t,” Julia says. “I’ve never had a teacher like that.”

  “You will have,” the saxophone teacher says. “Once you’ve got a few years’ distance and you can look back cleanly. There will be some Miss—Miss Hammond, Miss Gillespie—there will be some teacher you remember above all the others, one teacher who rises a head above them all.”

  Julia is still looking skeptical. The saxophone teacher waves her arm and continues.

  “But how many teachers are lucky enough to have had one student who changed their lives?” she asks. “One student who really changed them. Let me tell you something: it doesn’t happen. The inspiration goes one way. It only ever goes one way. We expect our teachers to teach for the love of it, to inspire and awaken and ignite without any expectation of being inspired and awakened in return; we expect that their greatest and only hoped-for joy would be, perhaps, a student returning after ten or twenty years, dropping by one morning to tell them just how much of an influence they were, and then disappearing back to the private success of their own lives. That’s all. We expect our teachers every year to start anew, to sever a year’s worth of progress and forged connection, to unravel everything they’ve built and move back to begin work on another child. Every year our teachers sow and tend another thankless crop that will never, ever come to harvest.”

  “I’m not a child,” Julia says.

  “Young adult,” the saxophone teacher says. “Whatever you like.”

  “I’ve never been inspired or ignited,” Julia says.

  “But you see my point,” the sax teacher says.

  “No I don’t,” Julia says sourly. “You get paid. It’s just like any other job.”

  The sax teacher leans forward and crosses her legs at the knee.

  “Your mother,” she says, “wants a progress report. She wants me to describe how I have inspired you, how I have awoken you, how I have coaxed you on to a glorious path toward excellence and industry and worth. Secretly she also wants me to tell her just how much you have inspired me—not directly, but in a roundabout, subtle way, as if I’m a little abashed, made a little vulnerable, as if we’re talking about something dreadfully taboo. She wants me to lie, a little.”

  “So lie.”

  “She wants,” the saxophone teacher continues, “what all the mothers want. She wants me to tell her that you and I have a special rapport, that you tell me things you wouldn’t tell anybody else. She wants me to tell her that I see something in you, Julia, that I haven’t seen in years. She wants me to say that our relationship functions for both of us as a shared or double birth—not the mere instruction of a pupil, but the utter opening of one person to another.”

  “So give her what she wants,” Julia says. She is stubborn and difficult today, still wearing the injustice of her double detention like a surly veil around her face. She stands ready with her saxophone fitted around her neck.

  “All right, let’s get started,” the saxophone teacher says, not without irritation. “Play me something loud.”

  Thursday

  “I think two of my students are having a love affair,” is what the saxophone teacher would say to Patsy if Patsy were here. It would be brunch, as it always is with Patsy, and it would be a Thursday, and the sun would be shining slantwise through the tall windows and filling the apartment with lazy dusty light.

  “With each other, you mean?” Patsy would say, leaning forward and putting both elbows on the table and her chin upon her hands.

  “Yes,” the saxophone teacher says. “I introduced them at the concert. They’re schoolmates—well, one girl is two years older, but they attend the same school.”

  “Oh, yes,” says Patsy, “there always has to be an age difference at the beginning. With same-sex relationships. It’s an initiation rite. You need an inequality of experience or you never get anywhere.”

  “Really?” says the saxophone teacher.

  “Definitely,” says Patsy. “If you don’t have gender roles to fall back on, you need the power to be organized somehow. You need a structure. Teacher and pupil. Predator and prey. Something like that.” She throws her head back and laughs suddenly, a clear, delighted laugh that peals out in the tiny flat like a bell.

  “I knew you would laugh,” the saxophone teacher says. She’s petulant today, and cross with how Patsy has been tossing her hair over her shoulder and sucking the smear of butter off her index finger and behaving for the most part like a person who thoroughly enjoys being desired.

  “Have they said anything to you?” Patsy says.

  “Not directly, but—well, you know.”

  “Showing all the symptoms.”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  Patsy ponders this for a moment in a contented sort of way and then asks, “Is it the girl who had the sister in the newspaper?”

  “Yes—the younger girl, Isolde. Her older sister was abused.”

  “That makes it even more likely, then,” Patsy says.

  “Does it?”

  “Definitely. For all sorts of reasons.”

  The two of them sit for a moment in silence. The newspaper is spread over the breakfast things, peaking over the jam jar and the syrup bottle, creased and grease-spotted with marmalade and oil. There is a single strawberry left in the bottom of the thin plastic punnet, flat edged like the snout of a cold chisel and frosted white with unripeness.

  “I just want to get to the truth behind it. That’s all. The kernel of truth behind everything,” the saxophone teacher says suddenly, into nothing.

  Friday

  “Dad’s trying to connect,” Isolde says, with the special weariness that she reserves for parental efforts to connect. “It’s part of his rebuilding thing. He wants to know more about us. Both of us.”

  “Is that good?” the saxophone teacher says.

  “Last night he comes in while I’m watching TV and goes, Hey, Isolde. Do you have a boyfriend?” Isolde snickers unkindly. “I only laughed because he said Hey. So jolly and
casual, like he’d practiced it in the mirror or something. I said, Yes, and he clapped his hands and said, Well great, let’s have the man around for dinner.”

  “You said Yes?” the saxophone teacher says. She has stiffened and is looking at Isolde with her head cocked and one hand hanging limp from the wrist, like a caricature of a startled pet.

  “Yeah,” Isolde says suspiciously, tucking her hair behind her ear. “It’s only been a few weeks, but yeah.”

  The saxophone teacher makes a little twitching motion with her hand, gesturing Isolde onward. Isolde rolls her tongue out over her bottom lip and regards the saxophone teacher a moment longer before continuing.

  “Everything’s about eating together now,” she says. “Eating together as a family solves everything. We do it like a ritual—nobody’s allowed to touch their food until everyone’s sat down, and then we all thank Mum and pass the sauce and whatever. Dad says eating together is the answer. If we had eaten together from the beginning, then Victoria would never have bumped accidentally-on-purpose into Mr. Saladin in the hall and let her breasts rub against his chest for the briefest half-second before stepping back and saying, Oh sorry, I’m such a klutz. If we’d eaten together from the beginning then Mr. Saladin would never have bitten his lip and ducked his head whenever Victoria looked at him—that shy-schoolboy flirt effect that he’d been using since the eighties but it still worked a charm. If we’d eaten together, Victoria would never have sucked on his fingertips and pushed her tongue down into the V between his first two fingers and made him gasp. None of it would have happened.”

  “I didn’t know you had a boyfriend,” the sax teacher says.

  “And none of us ever have anything to talk about at the table,” Isolde says. “Not even Dad. He just ends up spieling about his work and everyone switches off and tries to eat as fast as possible.”

  “How did you meet him?” the sax teacher says.

  “By accident,” Isolde says. “Just around.”

  “He should come to the recital next month,” the saxophone teacher says, still peering at Isolde with a new hard look on her face. “Come and watch you play.”

  “Yeah,” Isolde says, bending the word like a sucked harmonica note so she manages to sound indifferent and aloof.

  “Is he in your year at school?” the sax teacher says.

  “Oh no,” Isolde says smugly, “he’s left school. He’s an actor. At the Drama Institute,” and she waves an airy hand out the curtained window to the buildings on the far side of the courtyard.

  The lights change suddenly and the saxophone teacher can see it, playing out like someone else’s home video in front of her, furry and striped with grainy black.

  “He’s an actor,” Isolde’s father is saying.

  “That’s what I said,” Isolde says.

  “He’s at the Drama Institute.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Only first-year, Dad,” Isolde says, trying to look charming.

  “I certainly hope he doesn’t expect you to have sex with him.”

  “Dad.”

  “Because you’re only fifteen,” Isolde’s father says, speaking loudly and clearly as if Isolde is partly deaf. “If you were to sleep with him, that would be a crime.”

  “Dad!”

  “I’m going to ask you now,” Isolde’s father says, his eyes wide, “I’m going to ask you now, and I want you to give me a straight answer. Have you slept with him?”

  “Dad, stop it, it’s gross.” Isolde is inspired by a rare shaft of genius, and says, “It’s like you want to even everything out, play it fair, do by me as you’ve done by Victoria. Crime for crime. Stop it.”

  “Why are you sidestepping my question?”

  “Why are you talking to me like that? Can’t I talk to Mum?”

  “You’ve slept with him.”

  “Great. You’ve decided. Now you’ll never believe me whatever I say anyway.”

  “You’re only fifteen.”

  “Can I talk to Mum?”

  “Isolde,” says Isolde’s father sadly, “I never had sisters. Throw me a bone.”

  The lights return to normal, restoring a yellowish afternoon light to the studio, and the saxophone teacher blinks as if awakening.

  “The Institute,” she says. “That’s supposed to be very hard to get into, isn’t it? He must be rather good.”

  TWELVE

  September

  Was he supposed to undress her first, or wait to be undressed? He didn’t like the idea of undressing her first—it seemed greedy, and the thought of remaining clothed while stripping her naked unnerved him—he imagined someone walking in, and what they would think. Would it happen piece by piece, like a polite duel—her shirt then his, her bra then his singlet, all the way down? Or were they supposed to undress themselves separately, and then come together after they had both been transformed? Stanley’s heart was thumping as he led her to the bed and they sat down on its edge, kicking off their shoes in tandem and shuffling sideways to embrace each other and lie down.

  He had imagined this moment many times previously, but Stanley realized now that he had imagined the scene mostly in closeup, arching and rearing and heavy breathing and skin. What was supposed to happen now? He tried to negotiate swinging himself on top of the girl without kneeing her in the groin. He was wooden, like someone obeying a director’s instruction or responding to a cue. He floundered, shifting his weight to one side and back again, and he had a sudden, unflattering vision of himself from above, kneeling with one arm thrashing behind his back to find the slipping duvet and pull it back over his shoulders against the draught. He felt a surge of anger at his own ineptitude, and almost viciously he slipped a hand inside her shirt, just to prove he was up to the task. He felt her ribs rise up sharply at his touch.

  Stanley was wishing that he was much older than he was. He wished that he was a man, and not a boy, a man who was easy with himself and could strip a girl and laugh and know that what he was doing was right. He wished that he was a man who could place his finger on this girl’s lips and say, Now I am going to make you come. He wished that he was a man who could use the word “cunt,” who could speak it aloud and easily, in a way that would make a girl admire and worship him. He wished that he was a man at home with his body, a man who could say, You are beautiful, and know that the words would have meaning because he spoke as a man and not a boy.

  Stanley slithered his hand down her belly, down past the little scooped slit of the girl’s navel, hatted by a fold of skin that shrank to a tight little nib as she raised her arms up above her head. She reached to pull his head down to hers and craned up to kiss his mouth. His hand was scrabbling at the button of her fly. He was ashamed at himself for moving so quickly but impelled all the same by a helpless wish for self-annihilation, a desire for the scene to somehow go on without him so he could withdraw. The denim was stretched tight and flat over the bones of her pelvis, and he had to bend the buttonhole cruelly sideways to wrench the button through. It gave. He drew down the zipper and with his fingers felt the thin cotton of her briefs, buoyed up by the tufted whorl of her pubic hair. He felt surprise. Had he imagined her hairless, like a doll?

  The girl was breathing faster. He slipped his hand inside her briefs and cupped the wiry mound of her pubis with the heel of his hand, arching his wrist to loosen the waistband of her jeans. Carefully he moved to part the seam of her, hot against the cool of his fingers. He wanted to speak. He wanted to whisper something that would break the awful fumbling quick-breathed silence that was filling the room, the mousy rustle of his hand.

  Stanley found himself watching the scene from the position of a camera, and he began caring too deeply about what he might look like from above, or from the side—he tried to be sleeker, to thrash less, to push the hair gently off the girl’s face and let his fingers trail around her jawbone and touch the soft furry pouch of her earlobe, like he had seen done in the cinema so many times
. It didn’t seem to be working.

  “My arm’s dead, sorry,” the girl whispered apologetically, and wiggled it free.

  “Shit,” Stanley said.

  “What’s wrong?” the girl said in surprise, drawing the duvet up around her and tucking it carefully under her arms as she withdrew.

  “I don’t—”

  “You don’t know what to do?”

  “No,” Stanley said, a little too savagely. “No, I know what to do.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” the girl said, pushing his hair off his face with the rough heel of her hand. The action was coarse and tender at the same time, and Stanley was humbled, feeling her easily achieve the truth of the action when he had found it so difficult. “Just give me a cuddle. Come here.”

  He crept across the bed and she opened up the duvet to let him in. They lay there for a while, Stanley’s heart thumping, the girl’s hands moving up and down the curve of his shoulder blade and into the thin hair at the nape of his neck.

  “I didn’t think it would be like this,” Stanley said, without thinking.

  The girl raised herself up on an elbow and said, “What?”

  Stanley realized he had sounded rude, and said hastily, “I mean me. I didn’t think I would be like this.”

  That sounded even worse, and he seethed for a moment in frustration and self-contempt. What he had meant to say was that all the films and television programs he had ever seen that might have schooled him for this moment had placed him in the position of the outsider, the snug and confident voyeur who is able to imagine himself in place of the hero but is never physically required to act. Now he felt utterly unscripted, marooned, desperate for the girl to act first so that he would only have to follow and the burden of decision would not fall to him.

  “It’s your first time,” the girl said, and a note in her voice changed, becoming softer, even maternal. She gathered him up closer to her and he burrowed in. “Silly old duffer,” she said, and rubbed the top of his head with her knuckles. “You’ll be all right.”