The Rehearsal (38 page)

“I wish I’d got some mints now,” Isolde’s mum says. “I hope there’s a half-time.”

“It’s always—and only—vicarious,” the Head of Movement is saying, drumming his fingers impatiently on the glossy cover of
the program that is lying on his knee. The cover shows a caricatured girl in pigtails and a school uniform, and the title
of the play:
The Bedpost Queen.
The Head of Acting is craning around to look out over the crowd, and isn’t really listening, but the Head of Movement is
speaking with a strange tight urgency that cannot wait for an audience, and anyway the words are mostly for himself. He says,
“You never get around that aspect. Even at your most effective, your most vivacious and inspirational, you’re always just…
looking on.”

“Do you know something?” Stanley’s father says, leaning down the couch toward Isolde. She turns her head, so they are profiled
there against the cream: her delicate upturned pout, his sunken cheek and lantern jaw.

“When I do a group therapy session,” Stanley’s father says, “for my work—say if I have six or seven or more clients in a room,
maybe a whole family if that’s what I’m working on—my policy at first is to say absolutely nothing. I ask questions, invite
people to speak, bring up issues, but I say nothing about what I think. I don’t even hint. I do this for the first session,
and the second.

“By the end of the second everyone’s itching. They want to know who this guy is, this psychologist who only listens, sits
and listens and sometimes asks a question, always a mild question, never provocative, never acute. I cost too much, I’m too
well
known, just to listen. They become wary of me. They bicker among themselves and then look sideways, daring me to act.

“I leave early, always. I never stick around. I never invite them to know me better. I hold them apart, away from me, and
by the
third
session when I walk into the room they’re like mice. All their dissension has melted away and their attention is focused
entirely on
me
, on me absolutely. And then—” Stanley’s father pinches his fingertips together and then releases them like a puff of smoke.
“After that, I can say anything,” he says. “The third session is golden. They listen to whatever I say. They hear me.”

“Does this story have a moral that has something to do with virginity?” Isolde says, a little nervously.

“No moral,” Stanley’s father says. “I don’t do morals. I do dirty jokes, and I do stories to pass the time.”

“Good,” Isolde says. She turns away, and the shadows on her face disperse as she is swallowed by the glaring fog of the footlights
and beyond.

Stanley’s father looks at her with compassion and says, “Virginity is a myth, by the way. There is no on–off switch, no point
of no return. It’s just a first experience like any other. Everything surrounding it, all the lights and curtains and special
effects—that’s all just part of the myth.”

Isolde turns back to look at him and all the shadows return, flooding back to fill the dark side of her face so she is once
again halved, like a waning moon.

Stanley’s father smiles. He says, “Stop believing.”

“But still the counseling sessions persisted,” Julia is saying, “clinging to the school calendar like a baked stain that nobody
was willing to chip away. Still we met to discuss the dubious rape of the girl who unbuttoned her shirt collar right down
to the central white rosebud of her bra. We sat together and talked about the girl who sucked on a red lollipop at lunchtime
rehearsal and let the boiled candy ball tug her lower lip down ever so slightly, so her mouth opened and you could see the
moist rolling of her tongue.

“And Mr. Saladin,” she continues, relentlessly. “Mr. Saladin, who need only have waited for the midnight stroke in five months’
time, the stroke that would transform Victoria from a child into an adult as surely as a carriage into a pumpkin, or a saddled
horse into a dirty common kitchen mouse. It could have even been a birthday present, if he had only waited. At our counseling
sessions we learned that Mr. Saladin’s crime was, first and foremost, impatience. We learned that the moral is:
They stumble that run fast
.”

The mothers are captivated.

“No, we didn’t,” Julia says. “We didn’t learn that at all.”

She speaks like a magician or a ringmaster.

“We learned that everything in the world divides in two: good and evil, male and female, truth and falsehood, child and adult,
pleasure and pain. We learned that the counselor possessed a map, a map that would make everything make sense. A key. Like
in a theater program where you have the actors’ names on one side and the list of characters on the other—some neat division
that divides the illusive from the real. We learned that there is a distinction—that there is
always
a distinction—between the performance and the performer, the reality and the lie. We learned that there is no middle ground.”

Julia surveys her audience.

“Only those who watch,” she says, “and those who suffer being watched.”

The mothers don’t dare to rustle.

“But the counselor lied,” Julia says. “You lied. You lied about the pain of it, the unsimple mess of it, immeasurably more
thorny and wretched and raw than you could ever remember,
with the gauze veil of every year that passes settling over your
eyes, thicker and thicker until even your own childhood dissolves into the mist.”

The saxophone teacher is watching Julia from the side of the stage. She has a lump in her throat and a tight aching feeling
in her chest. It might be pride.

“Just think,” Julia is saying, “Victoria is probably with Mr. Saladin tonight, right now, laid out in an adolescent flush
of pleasure somewhere, while her sister and her parents sit in the bruising dark of an auditorium on the other side of town.
She is probably naked and crooning and stretched over him with her body limp and butter-slick. He is probably whispering into
her hair the dwindling number of days until she becomes her own self, the day when her body becomes her own, the day when
her body becomes his own. He is probably stroking her with the callused heel of his weathered adult hand.”

She looks at the mothers.

“And you wish you were there,” Julia says softly. “You wish you were there.”

Isolde and Julia are alone against the black cloth of the stage. There is no set or scenery. They are both wearing their school
uniform, but differently: Isolde’s is clean and pressed, and Julia’s is limp and darned and grubby and artful. They look across
at each other.

Isolde says, “Is it because I didn’t learn to love myself that I chose to bury myself instead in the reassuring strangeness
of a body that was without that essential similarity which would force me to
compare
? With you I would have been doubled, intensified, mirrored back. With him our differences canceled out to nothing.”

“Yes,” Julia says. “But that’s only part of it.”

Isolde says, “Is it because I was scared, then? Is it because there wasn’t a template for it, and the unexpected hugeness
of my innocence, the sheer and terrible abyss of my unknowing, was simply too alien, too frightening? It was just too big
for me—too big for me to hold inside myself, like something perfect or tragic or sublime.”

“Yes,” Julia says.

“I’ve never felt like that before, Julia,” Isolde says. “Scared like that.”

“Don’t worry,” Julia says. “You never will again.”

The lights change.

“I remember being in your car outside my house,” Isolde says, “both of us sitting there in the pale gray of the streetlight
with our seat belts holding us apart, our seat belts crossed over our chests, strapping us against the crocodile vinyl, holding
us flat. And you turned to look at me and gave a little bit of a laugh, like you were really nervous, and you bit your lip
and let some of your hair fall across your face and you didn’t tuck it back. And then you said, Can I just…? and you let the
question die and you reached up your hand to cup underneath my chin, reaching right over, straining against your seat belt
that was pulling you back, reining you in, holding you there. I was so scared. I remember licking my lip. I remember my mouth
was dry. I remember you kissed me.”

“A one-off,” Julia says.

“My fall.”

And Julia says, “My fall.”

Isolde says, “What will happen to you now?”

Julia pulls her gaze away from the other girl and looks out over the wraith-faces of the audience. She doesn’t speak for a
moment. Then she says, “All I can expect, I guess. Slow fade to black.”

“It’s too easy,” Stanley’s father says as he steps from the taxi. “Oh, Stanley, it’s too easy, and I’m going to say it anyway.”

He steps over the gutter and spreads his arms for a hug, wrapping Stanley up tightly. Stanley can smell the familiar blush
of cologne on his father’s shirt.

“What’s too easy?” Stanley says when they have separated, and the taxi has turned the corner and disappeared.

“You’ve improved on my own methods,” Stanley’s father says. “You’ve taken my ideas and run with them, turned them into something
I couldn’t have dreamed up myself. I’m flattered and impressed and a little ashamed that you don’t have more sense.”

“Are you talking about the insurance thing?” Stanley says.

“Absolutely I am.”

“Because I rang up the insurance companies,” Stanley says. “I rang up a few. I asked them about your idea to make a million,
and it won’t work.”

“Of course it won’t work. I was just having a tease, and shame on you for following through, by the way,” Stanley’s father
says. “But
this
—”

He laughs and spreads out his arms. Above the double doors of the foyer an enormous glossy banner,
Opening Night!
, snaps in the wind and strains fatly convex against the roped eyelets fixed along the balcony rail. Posters showing a girl
in a school uniform coyly sliding a playing card into the pocket of her dress are taped to both doors of the foyer.

“This is brilliant,” Stanley’s father says. “And it’s hilarious. But I’ll be surprised if you last a week in performance.
They’ll shut you down tomorrow night probably.”

“That might not be such a bad thing,” Stanley says.

“Are you in trouble?”

“Yes.”

“Need some help?” his father says, for once not using his therapy manner, but instead peering at Stanley with a curious half-smile,
as if he is very proud.

“Yes,” Stanley says, more quietly. “I’ve been accused of something.”

“Excellent,” his father says. “You can tell me over dinner. Let’s get Chinese.”

“In your organizer,” Isolde says, “your black organizer with the gold stripe, I found an article snipped out of the front
page of the newspaper. The headline read
Teacher Denies Sex With Student
. Only it wasn’t just the article, it was a photocopy of the article, a photocopy of a photocopy, with key phrases highlighted
in yellow, maybe by you.”

Stanley is sitting a little way off, his head in his hands.

“Half of the article was familiar to me,” Isolde says, “the half that had clung to the folded spine of the newspaper when
my mum swooped down and tried to rip off the front page, when she said Vultures, Vultures, and she crushed the torn piece
into a ball. After she left the room I read the left-behind slice with the headline Teacher Sex and all the words disjointed
and coming apart from each other, and piece by piece I tried to put it back together, the sharp-edged fragments of my sister’s
love.”

Stanley is unmoving, clutching his temples in his hands and squatting like a boxer resigned to lose the fight.

“So I read the article,” Isolde is saying, “photocopied and whole, with the key phrases highlighted, phrases like Received
Special Tuition, and Temporarily Removed From School. I wondered why it was in your organizer, slipped inside with your bus
pass and your library receipts and your favorite sonnets written by hand. I decided it was probably an exercise you were
doing
at school, just an exercise, something about scandal in the news.”

In a sudden fluid motion Isolde draws herself up and pulls her elbows in to her sides.

“But
now
,” she says, “now I know what really happened. I know now that you saw an opportunity in me. I know now that I am a pawn,
a shining pawn advancing all the way to the furry cardboard nether-edge of the playing board to be transformed into a queen—a
queen for you, a queen for your performance and your production and your career. I know now that something in me betrayed
her after all, some small streak of sameness or familiarity that made you see
her
when I turned my head and bit my lip and tucked my hair back, and all at once you saw all the things in me that you could
use. I know that you thought to yourself, Her proximity to her sister counts for a great deal.”

Isolde draws herself up tighter, as if she is gathering in all the threads of herself, all the fraying pieces, wadding herself
up in order to be able to continue. When she speaks her voice is half-stifled with a kind of muted hurt that makes Stanley
throb and look away.

“I am serving a double purpose for you,” Isolde says. “That kind of unknowing doubleness that halves me down the middle and
carves me into two: a benefit and a use. You want to harness my proximity, squeeze me dry, hoard up all the little stained-glass
splintered facts about Victoria that make up everything I know. You want the complete story, for yourself. You want my sister,
but you don’t want her whole: you want her shadow, her reflection, her image that bleeds out into the newsprint on the front
page. You want the air around her and the spaces she moves through and the things that brush her as she passes by. And that’s
why you want me.”

“Isolde,” Stanley says in a low voice that is muffled by his hands. “You aren’t being used. Nothing about you has been used,
or used up.”