The Rehearsal: A Novel

by Eleanor Catton

  “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 they 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.

  Julia raises her eyebrows as she wiggles out of her anorak and slings it over the back of the armchair. She is still radiating the cold winter air she has brought into the room with her, and the sax teacher catches it in a brief current, breathing it in like an alien scent.

  “Tell me about Patsy,” Julia says.

  “Who?” the saxophone teacher says stupidly, letting her arms fall to her sides, and then in irritation she pulls at her sleeve and says, “I mean, I know who Patsy is. I meant why.”

  Julia shrugs. “There’s a sign up in my homeroom,” she says, “and it says, Who’s asking the questions in this classroom?”

  The saxophone teacher narrows her eyes. “How do you know who Patsy is?”

  “All your letters are addressed care of Patsy,” Julia says, pointing. “Is she your lover?”

  The saxophone teacher flushes scarlet. “This is Patsy’s studio,” she says in a dignified voice. She twitches her chin up. “Patsy left me the studio.”

  “Like in a will?”

  “No, she’s not dead. It still legally belongs to her. That’s why the letters are addressed care of her post-box.”

  “So she’s not your lover.”

  The saxophone teacher taps her fingers on the desk. “Tell me about Isolde,” she says.

  Julia runs the tip of her tongue over her bottom lip, and then she says, “We meet in the drama cupboard at school. Nobody’s ever in there, and we wedge the door shut anyway. We make a nest out of nuns’ habits and Nazi uniforms and hoop skirts, and when the bell rings we leave one after the other, with a decent break in between, so nobody notices.”

  “And?”

  “And what?” Julia says.

  “That’s not enough,” the saxophone teacher says. “It’s not enough, just to know that you’re in there. How did you get there? How did it start?”

  “Why do you want to know?” Julia says. “You’ll still be on the outside looking in. Even if you know everything, even if you know all the things you shouldn’t, even then you’ll still be on the outside. Why did she leave you this studio?”

  They are tense, like two dogs chained apart.

  “As a vote of confidence in my music,” the saxophone teacher says. “She taught me saxophone, once upon a time, but she got arthritis early. It started in her thumbs and then spread outward, like a slow and painful inkblot, outward from her thumbs across her hands. She had to stop teaching. She went back to university, and I just took over her studio. I replaced her, I guess. I pay rent to her now.”

  “She was your teacher?”

  “Once, yes.” The sax teacher hesitates, her hands clutching at her elbows, but then she draws a breath and says quickly, “What do you do in the drama cupboard?”

  “Mostly we talk,” Julia says. “There’s only gib board between the drama cupboard and the practice rooms so we have to be quiet. That’s how Mr. Saladin and Victoria got found out, Isolde said. Somebody was in the drama cupboard and they heard them through the wall. It’s always pitch dark in there—we don’t dare to turn on the light because it’ll shine under the door. My favorite thing she does in the dark is she makes her two forefingers into little calipers and she keeps checking to see if I’m smiling, feeling my face in the dark and lying there with her fingers resting, just lightly, at the corners of my mouth. That’s my favorite thing.”

  “What do you say? When you talk. What do you say to each other?”

  “We talk about the preciousness of it all,” Julia says. “How fortunate we are. How lucky we are that the accident of my attraction coincided with the accident of hers. We just lie there and marvel, and feel each other’s skin, and inside I feel years and years older than I actually am—not like I’m weary or wise or anything, but more like what I’m feeling is so huge it connects me to something still huger, something infinite, some massive arc of beautiful unknowing that is bigger than any kind of tiny trap of time, or space, that might otherwise contain me. It feels like that one moment, that one tiny shard of now, that brief and perfect moment of touching her skin and tasting her tongue and feeling so utterly captured, so caught in her, that moment is all I’m going to need to nourish me for the rest of my life.”

  The saxophone teacher has fumbled with her hand to find the edge of the desk, and she sinks back against it weakly.

  “But at the same time, the feeling is shot through with a kind of sadness,” Julia says, “a bittersweet and throaty sadness that sits heavy in my gullet and I can’t swallow it down. It’s like I know that I am losing something; that something is seeping away, like water into dust. And it’s a weird idea, the idea that loss—the massive snatching tearing hunger of loss—is something that doesn’t start when a relationship ends, when she melts away and disappears and I know that I can never get her back. It’s a feeling that starts at the very beginning, from the moment we collide in the dark and we touch for the very first time. The innocence of it—the sweetness and purity of it, the shy a
nd halting tenderness of it—that is something that I am only ever going to lose.”

  Julia takes a step toward the saxophone teacher. “Is that how you felt?” she says. “With Patsy?”

  “Julia,” the saxophone teacher says, and then she doesn’t say anything for a moment. She draws a hand over her eyes. “Patsy,” she says, but then she falters and changes her mind.

  “Let me tell you something, Julia,” she says at last. “That moment you’re talking about. That one perfect kiss. It’s all there is. Everything from this point onward is only going to be a facsimile, darling. You will try and re-create that one kiss with all your lovers, try and replay it over and over; it will sit like an old video loop on a television screen in front of you, and you will lean forward to touch the cool bulge of the glass with your forehead and you will feel the ripple-fur of static with your fingers and your cheek and you will be illumined, lit up by the blue-black glow of it, the bursts of light, but in the end you will never really be able to touch it, this perfect memory, this one solitary moment of unknowing where you were simply innocent of who you were, of what you might become. You will never touch that feeling again, Julia. Not ever again.”

  “Is that how it is for you?” Julia says. “With Patsy?”

  The saxophone teacher expels a breath and says nothing.

  “Where’s Patsy now?” Julia says.

  “Oh, she still lives in the city,” the sax teacher says, waving a hand vaguely, north by northwest. “We’re just very old friends, Julia. Patsy’s married. We’re just old friends.”

  “Married to a man?”

  “Yes, to a man.”

  “But you were lovers once,” Julia says.

  “No.”

  “Even once?”

  “No.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “What does it matter anyway, how it was?” the saxophone teacher snaps. “I could only ever tell you how I remember it, never how it was. My wrinkled cheesecloth of a memory, all balled up and mothy with the sunlight glinting through. And you lied about your favorite thing. You stole it from someone else and used it as your own.”

  Julia scowls and says nothing. After a moment she tosses her head and says, “You probably know it all anyway, from somebody else.”

  Friday

  Stanley is waiting for Isolde after her lesson. From inside he can hear snatches of a tune played by two saxophones together, one confidently leading, the other duller and shyer and more ordinary. He is nervous. He wishes he’d scripted something to say.

  At last the saxophones cease and he thinks he hears, through the open window, the faint rumble of Isolde’s teacher’s voice, and Isolde laughing. He shuffles his feet.

  After a few minutes Isolde emerges from the building and trots down the short flight of steps to the courtyard, her saxophone case in her hand. She looks strange: she is smiling too readily and too brightly, and her eyes are sad. Stanley doesn’t notice. He keeps pulling at his collar and his hair, and when he looks at her he doesn’t hold her gaze for long.

  “Hey you,” she says. “Did you hear me that time?”

  “Yeah,” Stanley says. “You’re pretty good.”

  “Want to come to my recital? You don’t have to. It might be boring.”

  “Sure,” Stanley says awkwardly. He falls into step beside her, and as they walk out of the courtyard he looks over his shoulder at the saxophone teacher’s window. Is there somebody there, standing by the curtain, looking down at them? Is the next student waiting patiently in the hall for the saxophone teacher to finish watching, smarten her hair, open the door and invite her in? He can’t tell from this distance and soon the window disappears behind the branches of the ginkgo tree.

  “My parents will be there,” Isolde says. “They’re really stoked to meet you. Especially Dad. My sister had, like, this weird thing this year where she slept with a teacher and Dad’s really keen to get back to normal or whatever. He’s just stoked you’re not in your thirties and balding and my teacher at school.”

  Stanley exhales sharply and almost pulls away from her. There it is: all the information he needed, the clinching information, tumbling out of her mouth in one careless little burst. Too late.

  “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” he says.

  “Oh,” Isolde says airily. “I don’t know. I’m just sick of it, I guess. It’s all anyone talks about any more—just Victoria and the rape or whatever and how hard it’s been. I just didn’t want to talk about it with you.”

  She reaches for his hand and pulls him closer to her as they walk, showing more affection than she has before.

  “It’s not a big deal,” she says.

  “What do you mean, slept with her teacher?” Stanley says.

  “Well, apparently the story is now that she didn’t even sleep with him,” Isolde says. “I don’t know. It keeps changing. She gets all cagey.”

  “You must know,” Stanley says. “She’s your sister.”

  Isolde gives him an odd look. “I don’t,” she says. “I don’t know anything.”

  They walk on in silence for a while.

  “Do you talk about me to your sax teacher?” Stanley says. His voice is high and strained.

  “I guess,” she says. “I mean, I’ve mentioned you. Music teachers are like therapists, kind of. You meet up once a week and tell them everything you need to tell them and then you disappear again. It’s like therapy.” Her voice is high too, as if she doesn’t believe her own lines.

  “What do you say about me?” Stanley says.

  “Oh, you know,” Isolde says. Now she looks embarrassed.

  Stanley makes a swift decision to tell Isolde half the truth. He stops walking and turns toward her.

  “She laid a complaint about me,” he says. “Your teacher. She must have been watching through the window. She complained that I’ve been harassing you—because you’re so young, I guess, and I’m not. Young. I guess that was why.” He breathes heavily and watches her.

  Isolde opens her mouth a little but says nothing. She drags her eyes from Stanley’s face and looks at a pasted advertisement on the wall over his shoulder.

  “So what do you say about me?” Stanley says, impatient now. “In your lesson.”

  “Nothing,” Isolde says quickly.

  “You said you mentioned me.”

  “Only briefly.”

  “So why would she complain? What does she have against me?”

  Isolde shoots him a calculating look. “Are you in trouble?” she says.

  “I just want to know what you say about me,” Stanley says loudly. In his frustration he is forgetting that he is only telling Isolde half the truth after all. He begins to blame her. He becomes irritated by her open-mouthed stare, the plump curve of her pouting lip, how childlike she seems.

  “It’s this thing with my sister,” Isolde says at last. “I suppose she knows how much it affected me. She knows how vulnerable I am, how impressionable I am, how likely it is that I might act out or do something dumb or end up slutting around, just to make myself heard. It happens, when there’s trauma in a family. She’s protecting me, I guess.”

  “From me?”

  “Well. Yeah. I mean, probably.”

  “And you knew.” He is thoroughly angry with her now.

  “No,” Isolde says. “I didn’t know. She acted behind my back, like a clinging mother orchestrating the life of her child.”

  “This is bullshit,” Stanley says. “You talking to your teacher about me, the two of you together. It’s bullshit.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You must have made me sound like a rapist.”

  “I did not make you sound like a rapist!”

  “It’s my reputation,” Stanley says. “My reputation at the school which is at stake. Whatever you said, you made her act like that. You made her complain.”

  “I did not make her complain!”

  “You must have,” Stanley shouts. “You did. With whatever you
said.”

  Cars are passing. The passengers press their faces to the windows to watch the two of them fight. Stanley has his arms flung wide and Isolde’s hands are crossed over her belly. Finally Stanley makes a scissor motion with the flat of his hand that means enough. He is the first to turn and walk away.

  Monday

  “What would you do,” Julia says, “if I said that you did things to me here, when we were alone? Indecent things. If I confessed to somebody. If I broke down.”

  The southerly is gathering above the gables, blackening and bruising and seeming to draw the sky downward. The saxophone teacher crosses the room and turns on the lamp, twitching the curtain against the lowering sky.

  “I don’t know what I would do,” she says, without looking at Julia.

  “I’d lie,” Julia says, already narrow eyed and pursuing the thought. “I would make up silver lies studded with shards of perfect detail like mosaic splinters, sharp and everlasting, the kind of tiny faultless detail that would make them all sure that what I said was true. I would have alibis. I would bring in other people and teach them a story, and rehearse it so carefully and for so long that soon they’d all start to believe that what they said was actually true.”

  “It sounds like a lot of work,” the saxophone teacher says calmly, but her hands and eyes are still and she is watching Julia with all her attention now. “What’s in it for you?”

  “It would change what everyone says about me at school.”

  “What does everyone—”

  “That I like girls,” Julia says loudly. The collar of her school shirt is open and the hollow V of her neck is turning an angry stippled red.

  “How?”

  “Because if there was some tragic story behind it all,” Julia says, “it would be like a reason or a cause. Like with that girl Victoria.”

  “Isolde’s sister.”

  “Yeah,” Julia says hotly. “Isolde’s sister. Whatever she does now, if she goes off the rails or whatever, and ends up sleeping with a billion people and drinking heaps and failing all her exams, people won’t think that she’s just a loser or a slut. They’ll know it’s because she’s damaged, because there’s a reason behind everything, which is that she was raped. Whatever she does from now on will just be evidence. So it’s kind of like she’s free. She can do anything and she won’t be responsible. She’s got a reason.”