The Rehearsal (17 page)

Stanley was at a loss for what to say.

“I know it’s a horrible thing to have to imagine,” the Head of Movement said, “but I’m trying to make a point. I’m just trying
to point out that if a person is standing onstage in front of an auditorium full of people then ‘real’ is a useless word.
‘Real’ describes nothing on stage. The stage only cares whether something
looks
real. If it
looks
real, then whether it is real or not is immaterial. It doesn’t matter. That’s the heart of it.”

“That’s not what you told us in Movement class,” Stanley said, with rising anger. “You said what was important was truth and
not sincerity. All that stuff you said about mime. I
believed
all that.”

The Head of Movement sighed and pressed his fingers to his lips. “No,” he said, and paused for a moment, shaking his head
and gathering his thoughts together. He drew a weary breath. “No. We’re talking about two different things now.

“Stanley,” he said, “think how you would feel if you acted in a play in which your character had to die, and after the performance
everybody came up to you and said I really believed you, I really honestly believed that you had died. I saw you dead onstage
and I felt myself thinking, Oh my God, he’s actually
dead
. You would be rapt. It would be the best possible compliment anybody could give you: that your pretence, your big game
of
let’s-pretend, looked so real that somebody actually thought it
was
real.”

“But
I’m
real,” Stanley said, realizing to his displeasure that he was again on the verge of tears. “My performance might be pretend,
but I’m not.”

“That’s exactly it,” said the Head of Movement swiftly. “If you are a good actor, you will be using
your
emotions, displaying
your
laughter,
your
tears,
your
sexuality,
your
insecurities. There’s always this doubleness at play. You and the character you are playing both have to be transparent.
You have to look through the one to see the other. That is why being an actor is such a difficult job. It really is you up
there.”

“But there
wasn’t
any doubleness today,” Stanley cried out. His voice was high and tight and choked. “It was just him. It was his shirt they
ruined. It was his breath. It was his hair. They were hurting
him
.”

“You’re angry because they betrayed you,” the Head of Movement said simply. “They lured you into feeling something truthful
and real, and then they destroyed it in front of you.”

“They betrayed
him
!” Stanley shouted.

The Head of Movement sighed and looked down at his hands.

“Why is this not a problem for you?” Stanley said after a moment, still breathing quickly. “How can it be okay by you that
something like this is able to happen?”

“I understand your anger,” the Head of Movement said. “Please believe that it wasn’t meant to happen in the way that it happened.
In fact I don’t think the boys properly understood what they were doing. The manifesto of the Theater of Cruelty is really
a lot more complicated and interesting and life-affirming than its name suggests.” He closed his eyes, recalling a loved passage
to his mind, and said, “ ‘I have therefore said “cruelty” as I might have said “life” or “necessity” because I want to indicate
that there is nothing congealed about it, that I turn it into a true act, hence living, hence magical.’ ” He opened his
eyes
and smiled sadly at Stanley. “Artaud,” he said, “in his own words.”

Stanley sat for a moment, breathing heavily and feeling stalemated. He tried to remember what they had been talking about
a few minutes earlier, to renew his argument and try to force the Head of Movement out of this tired apologetic apathy.

“I like that you had the courage to talk to me,” the Head of Movement said now. “I’ll be speaking to each of those students
very seriously so they really understand the emotional impact of what they did.” He blinked at Stanley and waited. The minute
hand moved forward with a solemn
thock
.

When the Head of Movement was younger he acted for the Free Theater, a mothy ragged band of minstrels and failed gypsies who
squatted in derelict houses and camped in parking lots and traveled around the country each year to perform at prisons and
rural schools. On the wall above his head were a few snapshots from those days showing greasepaint and street-side juggling
and oil-drum fires and scratched guitars. Now he sat bowed with age and a clinging fatigue, reaching up to stroke his thin
hair with a dry wrinkled palm, crisp and graying and faded like a piece of parchment left too long in the light.

“Has it ever happened to you?” Stanley said suddenly. “Like the rape thing. Have you ever gone to see a play where something
real happens and everyone just watches and thinks it’s part of the play?”

“Yes,” the Head of Movement said. “A long time ago. I saw a man die of a heart attack. He was old. The curtain came down,
that’s all. They asked us to leave. Everyone left very quietly.”

“Who was he playing when he died?” Stanley asked.

“Oh, it was an obscure little play that didn’t do especially well, as I recall,” the Head of Movement said, leaning back in
his chair and looking at the ceiling to better conjure up the memory. He was relieved not to have to look at Stanley anymore.
“Everything was rather beautiful, in a funny kind of way. He died in the last
scene of the play and on closing night. We didn’t
know at the time that he was dead—we thought perhaps a stroke. It didn’t look fatal from where I was sitting. But we read
about it the next day in the papers.”

The Head of Movement was rarely asked to recall scenes from his life in this way, and he savored the feeling.

“The character he was playing was a man who has become rich by impersonating people and forging things and lying. Late in
his life he returns home and finds that his family have no memory of him. It was as if he had never existed as a real man.
That was roughly the way the story went.

“I suspect that his character was going to die anyway,” the Head of Movement said, “in the final few pages. But of course
I never saw the ending.”

The saxophone teacher is waiting for them by the Coke machine. At first Isolde cannot make her out: the Coke machine is the
only really memorable landmark in the Town Hall foyer and so it is typically besieged by a throng of waiting strangers who
have also arranged to meet friends and family there. Then the crowd thins and Isolde sees her, tall and angular in a brown
leather jacket, her hands folded in front of her, studying the people around her with a calm critical up-and-down gaze that
Isolde has come to know very well.

“Hi, Isolde,” the saxophone teacher says when she sees her, and smiles. “Did your mum drop you off?”

“Yeah,” Isolde says, feeling strange. She has never seen the sax teacher outside her attic studio, and (the thought registers
oddly) never at night. She accepts a program and bends her head to read it, affecting more interest than she feels.

“There she is!” the sax teacher says, waving across the crowd at somebody. “That makes three of us.”

A group of young musicians jostle past, edging between the sax teacher and Isolde so for a brief moment they are separately
marooned in the crowd. The musicians sweep by in a cloud of cigarette smoke and perfume, nebulous and bubbling and clutching
each other at the elbow with their slender musician fingers.

And then the sax teacher says, “Isolde, do you know my student Julia? Julia has been my student for three years now.”

Isolde looks up. She suffers a sick abdominal jolt of recognition as their eyes meet. Julia’s eyes widen very slightly and
her cheeks flush pink.

“Hi,” Isolde says quickly, struggling to mask a dawning bewildered embarrassment, and Julia nods hello, pressing her lips
together in a brief and complicated smile.

Out of her school uniform Julia looks older. She is wearing a black cardigan and long black skirt, her hair piled casually
at the back of her head and coming loose in wisps around her temples. The dour and surly and willful Julia that Isolde saw
in the counseling room is all but gone: somehow now she seems more fragile, as if the care she has taken with her appearance
has exposed a sensitivity that she had no cause to exhibit before. Isolde’s heart is beating fast.

“Do you two know each other from school?” the saxophone teacher says curiously, looking from one to the other with new eyes,
as if the juxtaposition of the two of them together is making her see elements of each girl that she has never seen before.

“Sort of,” Julia says quickly. “I’ve seen you around anyway.”

“Yeah,” says Isolde. “But I didn’t know you played sax.” For some reason the thought of Julia as the saxophone teacher’s comfortable
old-time student is strange to her. She startles herself with the realization that the private confidences and successes and
failures that she has shared in her lessons each Friday were,
for the saxophone teacher, only one recurring episode in weeks
and months and years of shared confidences and successes and failures—that she herself is only one among many. Isolde wonders
what Julia tells the saxophone teacher when they are alone.

“Why aren’t you in jazz band?” Isolde asks quickly. Her shyness makes the question sound accusatory. She is aware of the saxophone
teacher’s eyes flicking from her to Julia and back again, as if Isolde is the final piece of a puzzle that will enable her
to understand Julia, and Julia is the final piece of a puzzle that will enable her to understand Isolde. It makes Isolde hot
and uncomfortable, and inside her shoes she squeezes her toes together in frustration.

“I don’t really have school spirit,” Julia says. “I’m not that kind of person, I guess. If there was something smaller and
more underground I might give it a go. I’ve thought about starting a band.”

“Oh,” Isolde says, wondering at this new concept that you might be good at something but not have to prove it by playing for
the school.

“I played in a band in my first year of university,” the saxophone teacher says. “We had some dreadful name. I can’t even
remember what we called ourselves now.”

“Was it the Sax Kittens?” Julia asks. “Was it Sax, Drums and Rock ’n’ Roll?”

“We weren’t nearly that clever,” the saxophone teacher says. “God, we were awful. We used to do this thing at the end of each
gig that was really easy but it always got the crowd going. I’d stand next to the guy who played tenor and at the end of the
song he’d flip his sax around so I’d blow into it while he was still fingering the notes, so we were both playing the one
instrument. I suppose it must have looked quite difficult—people always screamed like we were doing something amazing.”

Julia is grinning now. “You’ve got a dark jazz past,” she says. “You’ve played
gigs
.”

“I’ve done some things in my time,” the saxophone teacher says, pretending to be haughty.

They both turn to Isolde to let her share in their joke, and Isolde smiles quickly.

“Oh, I remember,” the saxophone teacher says. “We were called the Travesty Players.”

“What does the Travesty Players mean?” says Isolde.

“It’s a term from the theater,” the sax teacher says. “A travesty role is a part which is meant to be played by a person of
the opposite sex. So if you were going to play Hamlet, the program would say, ‘Isolde in the travesty role of Hamlet.’ ”

“Oh,” says Isolde.

“Why did you choose it for your band name?” says Julia.

“We were all into gender back then,” the saxophone teacher says cheerfully. “Ask your mother.”

She is lively tonight, but Isolde finds herself shrinking back, finding the intimacy too forceful and defiant, as if the saxophone
teacher is a prisoner released for this night only, drawing the girls close to her in a hard and glittering pincer-grip and
demanding they share a part in her slender lonely joy. Julia seems at ease, smiling and pressing the saxophone teacher for
more details about her dark jazz past, and Isolde regards her jealously.

Her cardigan is buttoned with gold dome buttons and is unraveling slightly at the hem, giving her a careless scholarly look
that makes Isolde feel young and clumsy and naïve. She is wearing a silver turquoise ring on her ink-stained nail-bitten fingers,
and tight-knit fishnet stockings underneath her skirt. Isolde drinks it all in and then feels oddly disappointed, looking
at this newer, more complete version of Julia who is a whole person and not just an idea of a person. She feels jealous and
excluded and even betrayed, as if Julia has no right to exist beyond Isolde’s experience of her.

Isolde turns her attention back to the program. The soloist is a foreigner, photographed in black and white with his chin
on his fist
and his saxophone gleaming against his cheek. He looks moody and implacable and gifted. He is playing in front
of the symphony orchestra tonight, and pictured opposite is the conductor, a plump jolly man with his baton loose in his hand
like an idle dagger.

“A great soloist,” the saxophone teacher is saying, “is never some perfect airtight freeze-dried package who has studied and
studied and studied. A great soloist is always born out of a partnership or a group. A great soloist is always someone who
has had something to feed on.”

Julia is listening politely but frowning all the same. Isolde notices that her nibbled skepticism, which at school seemed
an index of aggression and dissatisfaction and gloom, now seems an index of something different, a carefulness or guardedness
maybe, something more instinctive and less hostile.

“This is the first concert you’ve come to this year, isn’t it, Isolde?” the saxophone teacher says suddenly, and Isolde nods.

“This guy is awesome,” Julia says, flapping the program. “I’ve got all his recordings. Hey, do classical players have groupies?
That’s something I definitely need to look into.”