The Rehearsal (13 page)

This is a scene from a long time ago. The saxophone teacher looks younger. Her skin is tighter underneath her eyes and the
droopy muzzle lines around her mouth have not yet started to show. Patsy is surrounded by books and papers and ballpoint pens.
Outside it is raining.

The saxophone teacher leans back in her chair and ponders the question doubtfully. “I knew a couple with a baby,” she says
at last, “a baby boy, maybe fourteen months. The father worked all day, came home every night, and the baby would smile and
simper and reach out his little arms and perform for his daddy. But if the mother left for a while, maybe left him with a
relation or a neighbor if she popped out on her own, when she came back the baby would be furious. He would scowl at her and
turn away from her and refuse to be held by her, and howl if she came too close. In the baby’s mind,
she
had no right to go away and leave him. The father’s love was conditional and it had to be fought for. The baby had to win
his father over, and he did. But he saw his mother’s love as rightfully
un
conditional, and when she took it away he felt nothing but injustice and contempt.

“At first,” the saxophone teacher says, “I felt sorry for the mother. I thought the baby was being terribly unfair. But then
I think I changed my mind.”

“You changed your mind?”

“Yes,” the saxophone teacher says. “She had a kind of power too. She had a kind of influence. That’s what I saw, in the end.”

“You haven’t really answered the question,” Patsy says. “I
asked, do you think that as women gain more power in the world
they find love more difficult to attain?”

“No,” the saxophone teacher says. “I object to the wording of the question. I object to the assumption that power and love
are necessarily two discrete things.”

“You
always
object to the question,” says Patsy in mock-irritation. “We never arrive at any answers because you are always objecting
to the question.”

“It’s what you learn at university,” the saxophone teacher says. “At high school they expect answers, but at university all
you’re supposed to do is dispute the wording of the question. It’s what they want. Ask anyone.”

Patsy sighs and brushes a crumb off the dust jacket with the flat of her hand. “Ridiculous,” she says, but she sounds defeated.

“I had a friend in first-year,” the saxophone teacher says, “who would begin every essay the same way. Suppose she was set
an essay on Images of Violence in Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
. She would begin the essay, ‘The problem of violence in Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
is twofold.’ It was always the same. No matter what she wrote on. ‘The problem of nationalism in prewar Britain was twofold.’
Always the same.”

“What if it wasn’t twofold?” Patsy says, scowling afresh at the textbook on the table.

“It always is,” the saxophone teacher says. “That’s the secret.”

“There’s this girl at school,” Bridget says, “who tells these weird lies. The reason I think they’re weird is that I don’t
think she even knows she’s lying when she does it.”

“Which girl?” the saxophone teacher says.

“Willa,” says Bridget vaguely. “But you wouldn’t be able to tell. She’s good.”

Bridget fiddles with her reed for a second and then looks up.

“Like, I always made this mistake,” she says, “whenever I read the word
misled
I didn’t realize it was
mislead
, to lead somebody astray. I thought that there was a word
mizle
which meant to diddle somebody, and if you were
mizled
then it meant you’d been diddled. So I always said
mizled
, not
miss-led
.”

The saxophone teacher’s fingertips are on her saxophone hanging from her neck, and when she moves her hand she leaves gray
ovals of damp that pucker and vanish in seconds.

“This girl, Willa,” Bridget says, “she was in my remedial English last year and heard me say
mizled
out loud and the teacher told me the right way to say it and we all laughed about it, because it was such a stupid mistake.
And then last week we were sitting at lunch, a whole group of us, and Willa starts telling us about how she always thought
mizle
was actually a word, and she says
mizled
instead of
miss-led
. She repeats the whole story back to us as if it’s her own.

“I watched her really carefully,” Bridget says, “and she was looking at me when she said it, all casual and laughing at herself,
and I truly don’t think she knew that she was telling my story. She would have looked guilty or avoided me or something. I
think she’d just heard me make the mistake and she liked the sound of it and after a while she made herself believe that the
story was hers.”

“Did you shame her?” the saxophone teacher says. “In front of everybody?”

“No,” Bridget says. “Everyone would have thought I was lame.”

“So nobody knew she was lying.”

“No.”

“And the next time you say
mizled
by accident, everyone is going to think you only want to be like Willa.”

“Yeah,” says Bridget. “If I make the mistake again.”

“And you know that Willa definitely does not read
mizled
in her head whenever she sees the word
misled
.”

“No,” Bridget says stoutly. “It’s my thing. And anyway she laughed at me in remedial English.”

“Well,” the saxophone teacher says. “It’s certainly not the most heroic story to poach from another person and call your own.
I’m sure I can think of better.” She moves her hand again and the gray finger-spots of damp turn to vapor and melt away.

Bridget is flushed, unable to voice coherently the indignation and even rage she feels toward this liar Willa, the plunderer,
the unashamed thief. Bridget is never rich in tales about herself, however unheroic, yet she is now a fraction poorer, her
life shaved a fraction thinner, her mind a fraction less unique, because of this girl’s theft.

“But now she’s got this memory,” Bridget says, struggling on. “A real memory of it, of every time she’s ever read that word.
And she laughs at herself and says, What an idiot, like she can’t believe how silly she is. And she isn’t. Silly. She knew
the right way to say it the whole time.”

“Maybe she’s just a liar,” the saxophone teacher says.

“But if she doesn’t know that she’s lying,” Bridget says, almost desperately now, “and nobody else knows that she’s lying,
and she’s got this real memory in her head—”

Bridget breaks off, working her mouth like a caught fish.

“Then it might as well be true,” she says at last, and in her distraction flaps her hands against her sides, once, twice,
and then she is still.

“I had Mr. Saladin in fifth form,” Julia says offhand in her lesson on Monday afternoon.

“Did you?” the saxophone teacher says.

“For School Cert music,” Julia says. “I always thought he was just a bit of a nerd.”

“Oh,” the saxophone teacher says in surprise, this concept of a nerdy Mr. Saladin being altogether new to her. She rolls the
idea around the inside of her mouth for a moment.

“She was in my music class that year,” Julia continues, a little dreamily. “Victoria was. That must have been way before they
got together—she wasn’t taking woodwind tutorials then. I remembered that the other day, and ever since I’ve been thinking
and thinking, trying to recall some incident where I remember the two of them together, some incident that I can extract from
the rest of the year and make it mean much more than it actually did.”

“And?”

“Once,” Julia says, “once Mr. Saladin said, Victoria, if you touch that recorder one more time in the next hour you are going
to meet a swift and untimely death, and don’t you dare test me to see if I mean it.” Julia erects the flat-edged arms on her
music stand that hold her music in place. “I should bring it up in counseling,” she says. She snorts inelegantly. “And then
I should cry.”

“What happened in counseling today?” the saxophone teacher says.

“Criticism is constructive, comparison is abuse,” Julia says. “Like, ‘I find your attitude hurtful’—that’s criticism, that’s
okay. ‘I think you are so much like your mother’—that’s comparison, that’s not okay. We learned that first, and then we did
role-plays. Role-play is a useful tool for exploring a situation from a different perspective.”

The saxophone teacher says nothing, waiting for Julia to continue, and strokes the rough ceramic edge of her mug with her
thumb.

“So I put up my hand,” Julia says, “and I go, But what if it’s a same-sex relationship? I go, Surely comparison plays a much
bigger part in same-sex relationships. Like, I’m fatter than you, or I’m more masculine than you, or I’m the mumsy one, or
I’m
the sugar daddy, or whatever. I said to the counselor, If comparison is abuse, does that mean you reckon same-sex couples
are more abusive than ordinary couples?”

Julia rocks back and forth on her shuffling feet, exultant in the pale afterglow of her faulty teenage logic and remembering
the fearful disgusted silence of the classroom, the counselor rubbing at his forehead and the girls scowling back at her across
the void.

“The counselor just goes, Julia, we are not discussing same-sex relationships right now. Mr. Saladin was a man and Victoria
was a girl. Let’s not deviate. And he uses past tense like he always does, as if they’re both dead.”

Julia comes to an end now, picks up her saxophone and begins to play. She has censored the last part of the scene just before
the bell rang, as the girls turned back to face front and the counselor frowned and fished for his notes. One of the beautiful
girls turned around in her seat and hissed, “Why do you always have to bring up things like that? Every class you say something
like that, just to watch how uncomfortable we all get. It’s like you can’t get it out of your head and you say it just for
kicks. It’s disgusting.”

Sometimes, for her own amusement, the saxophone teacher tries to imagine what it would be like if the casting were to change.
She imagines the girl who is playing Bridget in the coveted role of Isolde, and in her mind’s eye she converts the girl, ironing
out her lanky nothing-hair into a glossy sheet that falls sheer from a center part, rosying her cheeks and transforming her
expression into the careless wounded look that has become Isolde’s signature. She adds a silver watch and a delicate silver
link necklace beneath the collar of her school uniform. Isolde’s character
twists this necklace vaguely around her fingertip
from time to time, or else lifts it into her jaw and chews it while she is thinking, the chain link biting into the smooth
skin of both cheeks like a fine silver bridle.

Needless to say, Isolde’s part is not coveted because of any qualities inherent in Isolde herself: Isolde’s part is coveted
because of her proximity to the scandal surrounding her sister. The resounding echo of dishonor and disgrace renders her powerful,
in the same way that the beautiful girls who say “I just need to be alone for a while” are rendered powerful, thereafter attended
at all times by grave concerned servants who flap about and whisper to each other, “I’m worried she might do something to
hurt herself.” Even dim-witted Bridget can see that Isolde’s proximity counts for a great deal.

It makes the saxophone teacher smile to imagine mousy Bridget in Isolde’s role. It makes her think fondly that maybe there
is a glimmer of hope after all for this pale stringy rumpled girl who chews at the end of her hair and wears her kilt just
a fraction too high and tries so desperately hard.

For the role of Bridget the saxophone teacher imagines casting the girl who is currently playing Julia, mentally redressing
her in a school uniform that is musty and overlarge and ever so slightly wrinkled. She imagines the girl’s posture changing,
becoming withdrawn and apologetic, withering in the way that a rind of raw bacon shrinks away from the heat of the pan. The
role of Bridget would be the easiest of the three, because Bridget is a victim, and victims are easy. After playing Julia,
the role of Bridget would be a cinch.

Into the role of Julia the saxophone teacher inserts the round-faced girl who is currently playing Isolde. This transformation
is the hardest to picture, because it is the most subtle. The saxophone teacher reflects that the girl behind Isolde is possibly
too virginal to play Julia: the perfect vanity of Julia’s self-loathing is something that this girl is not yet sullied enough
to grasp.

The saxophone teacher thinks fondly of her students as she sits at the window with her chin on her fist and looks out over
the rooftops and the clouds. Then there is a knock at the door and she puts her mug of black-leaf tea to one side. She smoothes
her trouser leg and says, “Come in.”

The ginkgo tree rises out of a small square patch of earth in the middle of the courtyard. The concrete bulges and crumples
in peaks around the base of the trunk where the tree has shifted in the ground. The fallen leaves are trodden by now into
a yellow-smelling paste, choking the drains and fouling the cobbles with a dirty sallow film.

She is still early, and dimly she can hear the low honk of a tenor sax playing an ascending scale, the sound drifting over
the slate tiles and down into the empty courtyard with its naked ginkgo tree. Rising above the courtyard is the old observatory
tower, closed to the public now, the white-ribbed dome stained a patchy lichen green, the stippled wrought-iron staircase
waxed over with bird droppings and dirt.

The saxophone teacher’s studio is in a sprawling cluster of buildings that once housed the museum and a few obscure departments
of the university. Now the bricked quadrangles and cloisters and narrow unexpected gardens are privately leased, the old exhibition
rooms divided into offices and studio spaces and stores.