The Rehearsal: A Novel

by Eleanor Catton

  “That’s a very interesting way of looking at it,” the saxophone teacher says.

  “I want a reason,” Julia says. “If it turned out that I was damaged, then it wouldn’t be my fault anymore. It wouldn’t be something gross, it would be something tragic. It would be an effect—an effect of something out of my control. I’d just be a victim.”

  “You all want to be damaged,” the saxophone teacher says suddenly. “All of you. That is the one quality all my students have in common. That is your theme and variation: you crave your own victimhood absolutely. You see it as the only viable way to get an edge upon your classmates, and you are right. If I were to interfere with you, Julia, I’d be doing you an incredible favor. I’d be giving you a ticket to authorize the most shameless self-pity and self-adoration and self-loathing, and none of your classmates could even hope to compare.”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying,” Julia says.

  The two of them look at each other in silence for a moment.

  “What details would you choose to include?” the saxophone teacher says. “Those sharp mosaic-sliver details that would line your alibi like the tight angled coins on a chain-link vest.”

  “Nothing physical, at first,” Julia says. “That would be too obvious. The lie would shine too brightly, and they’d find me out. Something psychological. Something insidious and dripping. Some slow erosion that in the end would be far worse, far more subtle and damaging, than any quick backstage fumble or teasing slap.”

  “It’s still going to be a lie, Julia,” the saxophone teacher says. “At the heart of it. You won’t be satisfied. At bottom, all it will be is a lie.”

  “How do you know?” Julia says. “How do you know how you have influenced me? How do you know I’m not damaged? How do you know I don’t nurse some small criticism, some throwaway comment that you made and have now forgotten but I remember every time I stumble or I fail? A tiny something that will dig deeper and deeper, like a glass splinter working its way from my finger to my heart? Some tiny something that will change the shape of me forever—how can you know?”

  For once the saxophone teacher has nothing to say. She looks out the window at the birds.

  Wednesday

  The saxophone section of the Abbey Grange jazz band is gap-toothed now: first Victoria, who has chosen not to return, and then Bridget, who never will. The cavities have been filled with lesser players, and the chairs shuffled a fraction closer to tighten the curve.

  “Bridget would have really liked this,” says first trombone every now and again, knowing that dead people are always very sentimental and always full of joy and appreciation for the simple things. Some of them still weep, not for Bridget, who was unmemorable, but for themselves, imagining that they themselves had died, and how irreplaceable they would be.

  The school’s Christian group was tight lipped and private about the sacking of Mr. Saladin and its aftermath; on the subject of Bridget’s death it blossoms. A man’s powerful and senseless attraction to a girl he had been instructed to protect is a human mystery. More marketable is the divine mystery of this one lampless girl mown to extinction in the dewy dark: it is right up their alley, and the Christian group thrives. Advertisements for prayer groups spring up around the school. Enrollments for youth camps run a record high. A Christian pancake stand appears in the quad at lunchtime, managed by a zealous few who roll the pancakes in lemon and sugar and shine brightly with an inner light. They don’t hand out tracts or wise words or a summons to a better life. They hand out pancakes. It’s enough. Soon many of the girls are exchanging their plastic Fuck-me bracelets for nylon bands that invite them, in mnemonic, to consider what a grown man might do if he were one of them, if he were faced with the same choices and confounded by the same desires. Bridget herself had been a sometime member, a wearer of a nylon commitment band—this is a comfort, the girls agree, as they mutely beg their own salvation and reach sideways for each other’s hands.

  The lunchtime youth group shifts from a classroom to the school hall to cater for the swell in numbers, and with the counselor long since returned to his frosted cubby between the bursar and the nurse, the youth leaders rise to take his place. They conclude that, in all likelihood, He would do just as they are doing now, and as they regard their bracelets they feel a throb of satisfaction that they possess the single correct answer to the rhetorical question stitched around the band.

  In a sense, Bridget comes to eclipse Victoria after all. Victoria’s questionable victimhood, the all-too-visible streak of her own reciprocation cannot, in the end, compete with the indubitable victim of a roadside smash. But the posthumous Bridget is not a singular and universal notoriety, celebrated as Victoria had been celebrated, herself the symbol and the locus of her fame; Bridget is an instrument, subtler and more pliable and vastly more diffused. It’s the best she could have hoped for.

  “There was a girl at my high school who died,” the girls will say, years later. “She was hit on her bike coming home from work. God, it was sad. It really affected us, you know? All of us. I hardly knew her, but even so. It was so sad.”

  Tuesday

  “That’s it, then,” Patsy said, when the saxophone teacher received her teaching diploma. They looked at it, stamped with a blue watermark, silvered and inked and glossy under its pane of glass. “That’s it,” Patsy said, “you’re damned. A lifetime of the world assuming that you are a spinster, a closed thin-lipped efficient spinster who lies spangled and lock-jawed in her bed at nights and has no love or pleasure to light the room. It’s the one truth about music teachers, and everybody knows it: they are alone, always alone, limp and graying in their cold offices and waiting in the dark for their next student like a beggar waiting for a meal. Congratulations!”

  They touched glasses lightly and drank.

  “But you’re not a spinster,” the saxophone teacher said. She was still looking at the shining diploma, tracing the words with her eyes.

  “But everyone still assumes. Or a lesbian. If they are generous, then they assume I am a lesbian.”

  “That’s why she asked for that ring,” Brian said, pointing to the penultimate finger on Patsy’s left hand. “She said, Make it the biggest fattest old diamond you can get your hands on. This isn’t just a symbol, it’s a whole bloody advertising campaign.”

  “And this is what you came up with,” Patsy said, waving her hand and making a disgusted face, as if the ring was worth nothing. They laughed.

  “Anyway, well done, old thing,” Brian said, reaching across and covering the saxophone teacher’s hands with his own. “It all starts here.”

  Friday

  As Isolde unpacks her case the saxophone teacher talks enthusiastically about the upcoming recital, the venue and the other performers, and the chance for everybody to listen to everybody else. Isolde is not listening. She is going to mention the saxophone teacher’s complaint about Stanley. The thought of bringing it up makes her heart thump, and the advance phrasing of the question paralyzes her, consumes her utterly. She senses that the topic is dangerous, that she is somehow backfooted at the outset: she has done something wrong without her knowing, and she will lose.

  There is a knock at the door.

  “Hang on a minute, Isolde,” the saxophone teacher says serenely. “I think that’s probably Julia.”

  “What?” Isolde says.

  “I thought we could try the Raschèr duet with both of you together,” the saxophone teacher says. “You’ve each been learning one part and I thought it would be fun to bring them together properly.”

  Isolde goes red. She looks at the saxophone teacher without speaking for a moment, and then says, “I didn’t know I was going to play it in a duet.”

  “Well,” the saxophone teacher says, “I wasn’t sure if Julia would be able to make this Friday slot. It was kind of a last-minute idea. It really is worth playing against someone else, you know. There’s a whole new enjoyment to be got out of playing with another person.�
�� She doesn’t advance to get the door: she hovers near Isolde, hands on her hips, and surveys her student.

  “I would have practiced,” Isolde says. “If I’d known.” Her mouth is suddenly dry.

  “You remember Julia, don’t you?” the saxophone teacher says.

  “Yes,” says Isolde.

  “Wonderful.” The saxophone teacher walks swiftly to the door to release the latch. “Welcome,” she says to the older girl.

  “Hello, darling,” Julia says as she sweeps in, and all in an instant Isolde knows that Julia has stepped out of herself and become somebody else entirely: she is performing, and Isolde must too.

  “Honey,” she says, and they kiss on the cheek like old friends, like thirty-something friends who were once teacher and pupil, once upon a time. The saxophone teacher has melted into the shadows by the wall.

  “I know this is meant to be a rehearsal, Patsy, and there’s work to be done,” Julia says, “but I do need to talk to you. After what happened between us. I’m sorry to spring it on you like this. I’ve been going through what I want to say in my head, over and over, out there in the hall, and I think I just need to spit it all out before I’m too afraid to speak of it. That’s all. Is it weird?”

  “It’s not weird,” Isolde says softly, but she takes several steps backward, away from the other woman. Her saxophone is in her hand. Julia’s sax is not yet out of its case, so they appear unevenly matched, Isolde with the bright arm of her instrument held close against her chest and Julia weaponless with her hands upturned to show the white of her palms.

  “It just seems so desperately unfair,” Julia says. “That I am marked so indelibly, so ineffaceably, tattooed and blue with the ink of your name across my heart, and that your ink is washable, Patsy. It was always washable, and you knew that all along.”

  “Come on, darling,” Isolde says. “You’re talking about just one kiss. You’re talking about a single red-wine-flavor of a kiss, in the dusky dark of one late evening, riding on the giddy thrill of a concert that sent your pulse to racing.”

  “Yes,” Julia says, vehemently.

  “A one-off.”

  “Yes,” Julia says again.

  “Come on,” Isolde says again, but weakly now. “We’re overreacting, surely. We’re behaving like teenagers.”

  There is a pause and they look at each other.

  “I think that this is worse than any other shame,” Julia says. “To be rejected not because of circumstantial reasons, or provisional reasons, or reasons of prior claim, but simply for the unitary and all-quenching reason that I am, and will always be, unwanted. I feel spotlit, pinned against the bright wasteland of a bare stage, with nothing to hide behind, nothing to blame.” She gives a cruel hard little laugh, not her own. After a moment she says, “Can’t you just tell me why? Can’t you just tell me why it’s Brian, and it isn’t me?”

  Julia advances several steps. The other girl does not retreat. They are closer now, and Isolde looks her in the eye for a long moment before she speaks.

  Isolde says, “I had always imagined that any woman’s choice to be with another woman would be a reactionary choice, defined mostly in the negative by the patterns she is seeking to avoid. It would, I always thought, only be after deciding she does not want men that a woman might conclude that she wants other women. It is a public stance, itself a kind of activism. It is a complaint. It marks a dissatisfaction. It is the kind of attitude only held by a particular type: emphatic, campaigning, radical, the kind of woman who would boycott certain companies on moral grounds, who would picket outside a factory gate.

  “I recognize a shade of this quality in you—the hardness of your opinion, your skepticism, the implicit challenge every time you speak. But there is another quality of yours that dawns strangely on me—a childlike helpless quality of vulnerability, a need. It is this quality that has awakened a new possibility in my understanding of the world: that a woman’s choice of another woman might be a free choice in and of itself, not a handicapped pick of second-bests, not a halved choice of remainders once the men have all been censored and removed. This positive definition—that a woman might love another woman simply in and for herself—is what makes me feel nervous.”

  “Nervous, why?” Julia says, and takes another step toward her. Instinctively she reaches out with her thin red hand and catches Isolde’s fingertips in hers. Isolde doesn’t pull away. She looks down, watches their hands for a moment, Julia’s bony ink-stained thumb moving in a light caress over her knuckles. Her hands are cold.

  “You want me to explain this burgeoning something with Brian,” Isolde says, looking up again, “which may or may not ripen to a fruit. But I don’t think I did actively choose between you, representative of women, and Brian, representative of men. Instead I placed myself in a position where I didn’t have to choose. I let myself be his temptation; I behaved as passively as possible and did nothing as he advanced. It was the marshy fogbound unmapped depths of you that made me nervous, darling. What I wanted was something protected, something proved. I wanted a default feeling, not a nervous uncertain forbidden-place of a feeling where everything was overlaid with fear and even guilt. I don’t want to be seduced. I just don’t want it. I want to be comfortable.”

  “How can that be what you want?” Julia says. “How can it be?”

  “It is,” Isolde says. “In the end. It just is.”

  Julia steps forward and kisses her on the mouth, and all in an instant they’re back in the smoky fug of the bar, and the last number is playing, the last song. They’re in the corner and they’ve just got up to leave, to wrap themselves back into their scarves and their coats and turn their smiling faces to the band as a final show of appreciation, a kind of farewell. Patsy turns to the saxophone teacher to say something but whatever she was going to say dies on her lips. Her eyes flicker down to the saxophone teacher’s mouth, and then the saxophone teacher leans over and kisses her, her gloved fingertips against the other woman’s cheek.

  Patsy doesn’t reach out and grab the saxophone teacher’s coat, real fistfuls. She doesn’t slide her hands around and scrabble with the hem of the saxophone teacher’s jumper to slip her hands up and feel the skin of the other woman’s back. She doesn’t step forward so their breasts are touching, so their hips are touching, so the lengths of their bodies are pressed together hard. She doesn’t reach up with her hand and cup the saxophone teacher’s face. She just stands there and receives the kiss, her eyes closed. When the saxophone teacher draws back, she opens her eyes, smiles sadly, gives a nod, and walks away.

  FOURTEEN

  October

  “Preliminary thoughts?” the Head of Acting says in the foyer, as the two of them slap their ticket stubs against their wrists and gaze over at the crowd around the drinks counter. “Or apprehensions, even?”

  “Only apprehensions,” the Head of Movement says. He doesn’t smile.

  “They’re a motley bunch, this year,” the Head of Acting says in his darting, distracted way. “I am definitely ready to be surprised.”

  “What was their prop? The playing card,” the Head of Movement says, answering his own question and rubbing the back of his neck with his hand. “It’s too easy. The aesthetic is half the battle in devised theater anyway.”

  “I’m still prepared to be surprised. Let’s go in.”

  The heavy doors of the auditorium have opened finally and the flush bolts are being drawn down by a skinny porter, an underling from Wardrobe who has been dressed as an Ace of Spades. He is stiff in his painted sandwich board and careful face-paint as he bends down to clip open the door. He shoves the bolts into their flush sockets and then straightens and adjusts his headpiece, a tight black bonnet that fits like a swimming cap around his skull. He smiles carefully. The tutors hand him their pink-edged stubs, and one after the other pass under the arch and into the stalls.

  Saturday

  “Thank you all so much for coming,” the saxophone teacher says into the dark. Her v
oice is higher than its usual pitch, and oddly strained, although she does not look nervous and her hands at her sides are still. “It really is wonderful you’ve all made the time to come.” She looks down to draw a breath, and then continues.

  “Like all the thirsty mothers present,” she says, “tonight each of you will see exactly what you want to see and nothing more. Even now you will be aching for me to leave the podium so your daughters can file onstage and each of you can have the great comfort, one by one, of seeing your existing attitudes confirmed.”

  Out in the dark someone coughs, giving confidence to someone else, who clears their throat in a relieved echo of the first.

  “I like to encourage all the parents to think of a recital as a public display of affection—you’re familiar with the term—in the sense that the performances can never be any more than an indication or a hint,” the saxophone teacher says. “But I must impress upon all of you that it would be invasive and wrong to expect to truly see your daughter when you attend this recital. As mothers, you are barred from sharing in the intimacy and privacy of her performance.”

  The saxophone strap around her neck is caught on the side of her collar, tugging it outward and downward to show the thin milky skin of her chest.

  She says, “If you were not the mothers of these girls, you might be able to see them differently, as both a person and a kind of a person. If you were not mothers, and if you were looking very carefully, you might be able to see a role, a character, and also a person struggling to maintain that character, a person who decided in the first place that that particular character was who they were going to be.