The Rehearsal (37 page)

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.

“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.

“Thank you all so much for coming,” the saxophone teacher says into the dark. Her voice 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.

“There are people who can only see the roles we play, and there are people who can only see the actors pretending. But it’s
a very rare and strange thing that a person has the power to see both at once: this kind of double vision is a gift. If your
daughters are beginning to frighten you, then it is because they are beginning to acquire it. I am speaking mostly to the
woman beneath Mrs. Winter, Mrs. Sibley, Mrs. Odets, and the rest,” she adds, “the actor I pretend not to see, the woman who
plays all women, all the women but never the girls, never the daughters. The role of the daughter is lost to you now, as you
know.”

She is gesturing with one hand cupped and empty and upturned. The mothers are nodding.

“Let me introduce my first student now,” she says, “a student of St. Margaret’s College who has been studying with me for
almost four years. Please let’s put our hands together and welcome to the stage Briony-Rose.”

“Stanley?” the boy Felix says, pausing at the door of the Green Room and looking in with an air of officious concern. “Are
you all right?”

“I’m going to bail,” Stanley says into the mirror. His face is white. “I can’t do this. The girl’s parents are in the audience.
I
can’t do it. I’m going to do a runner. I don’t want to be an actor anymore. I can’t follow through. It’ll bugger up the
production, but I can’t do it, I’m sorry. I can’t.”

“You’re nuts,” Felix says in what he believes to be a soothing voice. “Think of all the money we’ve spent. If we don’t get
box office it’ll come out of everyone’s pocket. Everyone will hate you. You can’t pull out now.”

“I’ll move,” Stanley says. “I’ll move away for a while until everyone has forgotten.” He wants to put his face in his hands,
but he has already been through the makeup line and he knows his lipstick and powder will smudge. He howls suddenly and slaps
the vanity with both hands. “Why are they here? Why? What kind of sadist parents actually want to see a play about their daughter
getting physically abused?”

“What?” Felix says, listening properly for the first time. “You mean the parents of the actual girl? The Victoria girl?”

Stanley moans in reply and kicks the radiator hard. He feels a stab of welcome pain shoot up his calf and linger there.

“Rubbish,” Felix says. “How would they even know about it? Nobody knows what it’s about. It’s opening night. Not even the
tutors know. Where did you hear that?”

Stanley turns doleful eyes to Felix and then shakes his head. “I’ve seen them,” he says. “In the foyer. With her little sister.”

There is a pause. Then Felix says, “What kind of sadist parents—”

“She’s come to see me,” Stanley says. “Isolde’s come to see me. As a surprise.”

“Who?” Felix says, by now thoroughly bewildered.

“Isolde,” Stanley says. “Oh, God. And she brought her parents. She doesn’t know what it’s about, she doesn’t know about Victoria
or any of it, and they’re just about to—oh, God. I can’t do it. Not in front of them.”

There is a glimmer of panic in Felix’s eyes as it dawns upon him that Stanley might really make good his word and run
away.
He looks quickly over his shoulder down the dressing-room corridor, and then says, “Your parents here tonight?”

Stanley gives another howl. “My dad,” he says. “To make matters a whole fucking lot worse. My dad.”

“Mine too,” Felix says. Then he says, tentatively, “If the girl’s parents really are here, Stanley, they’ve got to be prepared
to be shocked. You can’t actually buy tickets to a show like this and expect to keep your… your innocence. You can’t. They
must know what they’re in for. And they’re not kids.”

“But they don’t know what it’s about yet,” Stanley says. “It’s opening night. Where in the fucking program does it say that
this is a play about their daughter? It doesn’t. They’re coming to see me, as a surprise.” He looks again at himself in the
mirror. The makeup artist has done a good job, powdering over his blond eyebrows and drawing in black arches that are higher
and more angular than his own. He has a little red pout, and all the natural shadows of his face are thickened with gray:
the creases around his mouth, the hollows of his cheeks, under his chin. His eyes are ringed with black.

Felix is still looking thoroughly confused. “On the bright side,” he says, trying hard to reclaim the situation, “you’re absolutely
unrecognizable in your costume and everything. If that’s what you’re worried about. With the parents.”

“Yeah,” Stanley says. Underneath his makeup his jaw is set and his eyes are red and his face is pale, but in the mirror the
pouting caricature that is Stanley’s reflection twitches his head and even seems to smile.

Isolde and her parents are already on stage when the lights come up, Isolde on the far end of the settee and leaning still
further outward, over the arm, every inch of her body craning away
from the other two figures on stage: a stout mustached
father and a bony mother who buttons all the way to the top.

“What you need to understand,” Isolde’s mother says, “is that this little taste of what could be is inside you now. You’ve
swallowed it up, like candy from a brown paper bag.”

“What you need to understand,” Isolde’s father says, “is now that we know about it, it won’t happen anymore.”

“Remember that the only difference between you and any of the others,” Isolde’s mother says, “is at what price, and under
what circumstances, you are prepared to yield.”

Stanley and his father enter, through the frosted French doors in the middle of the false backdrop, preceded by Victoria who
has her palm out like she is showing the way.

“He’s here,” she says unnecessarily, making more of the line than she ought to, because it is her only one and she wants to
be seen. The mother makes a flapping motion with her hand and Victoria exits, walking with the pursed self-conscious walk
of an actor who has too small a part and so has practiced a single move to excess.

The group stand stationary for a moment, Stanley and Isolde looking at each other with an intense smoldering glare that is
lost to everyone in the upper circle and in the restricted-viewing sections of the stalls.

Then Isolde’s father says stiffly, “I was just about to say, now that we’re here, let’s sort this out in a civilized way,
like adults. But just as it was on the tip of my tongue I realized that the word
adults
wasn’t entirely appropriate, given the circumstances.”

There is a silence. Stanley’s father is the first to sit down.

“The purpose of this recital,” the saxophone teacher says, “is really to let the students speak for themselves, as it were.
It is
really just a vehicle to let them voice their own growth, their own awakening, lay it bare like a virgin at an altar
for all of you to see. While you are watching tonight, a good question to ask yourselves might be, What is this performance
telling me about the performer? What naked shape emerges out of the rarefying mist of this girl’s music? What private things
are being offered, and what private things are being betrayed?”

Julia is sitting in the second row with her sax held loosely on her lap, waiting for her cue to rise and take the stage.

“I mention this,” the saxophone teacher is saying, “because my next student has had a very difficult year. Many things have
happened to complicate this girl’s life this year, and if we are very lucky we will see some of these tragic and beautiful
things reflected in her performance tonight. Through her misery, every note she plays for you will become a lyric, and she
will conjure up much more than a sense of longing and of loss. If we are very lucky, and this is my hope, then we will be
able to see the vast extent of the hardship she has endured this year: we will see the unspeakable incest of two women together,
played out before us like a rare recording stolen from a vault. You will have to listen carefully.”

Julia’s palms are cold and sweaty, and she wipes them roughly on the knees of her trousers.

“And just before I welcome Julia to the stage,” the saxophone teacher says, “can I just thank all the mothers here tonight
for allowing me the strange satisfaction that is got by saying something that nobody hears.”

“You didn’t say he had the main part, Issie,” Isolde’s father says. He points to the program. “Look, his name’s right at the
top.”

“He hasn’t told me anything,” Isolde says. “He even said don’t
bother coming. I guess he was nervous.” She is looking up at
the stage, tense with vicarious pre-show nerves. The lights are on in the orchestra pit and she can see the musicians emerging
from the hidden half-door in the wall to take their places in front of their instruments. As they sit down they disappear
from Isolde’s view.

“Queen of Spades,” Isolde’s father reads out loud, and then takes his reading glasses off and says “What about this, eh?”
and elbows Isolde in a jovial sort of way.

“Maybe we shouldn’t have come on opening night,” Isolde’s mother says, tucking her knees sideways to let a young couple pass.
“If he’s nervous.”

“I told you, he doesn’t know I’m coming tonight anyway,” Isolde says. She is craning around to look at the crowd. She watches
a throng of senior students from the Institute flood into a wedge of seating in the rear of the stalls and suddenly feels
foolish that she has brought her parents with her. The acting students are all clasping each other and hugging and gesticulating
madly as they talk amongst themselves. Isolde imagines pushing her way backstage to surprise Stanley at the end of the night,
knocking on his dressing-room door and waving shyly as she stands on the threshold with the actors shrieking and shouting
up and down the corridor behind her, and all at once she suffers a horrible feeling of dread.

“We don’t have to go backstage,” she says out loud, to reassure herself. “I can just call him tomorrow.”

She hasn’t spoken to Stanley since the fight on the side of the road.

“Isn’t it posh,” Isolde’s father says. “Look at that plasterwork on the arch. That’s a beautiful job.”

The band starts up and the house lights begin to fade.