The Rehearsal (10 page)

“The real reason I enrolled in any tertiary education at all was that I knew that teenage girls always like university boys
better. I had been a scrawny and awkward and unsuccessful teenager and I wanted a second chance. I thought I would enroll
in some college, buy a car and try for a girlfriend.

“I am telling you this about myself,” the Head of Acting said in his calm distracted way, “because I don’t want you to stand
in front of the panel and lie. I want you to tell the truth, even if the truth is boring or embarrassing or contemptible.
I don’t care what you say, as long as it’s
you
and as long as it’s real.” He swept a look over them all, smiled a tiny smile and said, “Good luck.”

Stanley moved from the Class of ’61 photograph to the Class of ’62 photograph and suddenly saw the Head of Acting. He was
young and a little thinner but wore the same unfocused expression, as if he was watching something over the photographer’s
shoulder that none of the others could see. They were all dressed in military uniforms, and the Head of Acting was kneeling
at the front with a rifle in his lap, his peaked cap pushed back on his head, showing a darkly oiled curl of hair. Stanley
leaned in
for a closer look, and wondered if this square-jawed soldier ever found a girl.

From the damp-smelling foam-lined pit underneath the trapdoor ran a low reinforced passage left and right, and beyond the
orchestra pit was another passage that ran underneath the first rows of the stalls in the audience. These passages invisibly
framed the orchestra pit, forming a kind of underground moat that offered two quick and unseen paths between the wings on
either side of the stage. The outer passage crawled between the ancient foundations of the auditorium, lit along the floor
by a dusty string of fairy lights that sometimes winked on and off if the control box was accidentally knocked. The tunnel
was narrow and low, the mortar bleeding thickly from between the cement bricks and brushing rough on either shoulder as you
passed, the dry itch candyfloss of under-floor insulation wisping out between the joists. The inner passage was lined with
gib-board, and narrower still: if two actors met in the middle they had to perform a quick shuffling rotating embrace, like
an animate turnstile revolving in the dark.

The secrets of the auditorium were revealed to the first-years in the second week of the school year. They filed silently
through the passages, inspected and tested the trap, hoisted themselves up into the flies, and dropped, awkward and untrusting,
both hands clutching at the flying harness and craning nervously to check the winch. They walked across the stippled bridge
that connected the fly-floors, looking down at the stage far below and reaching out to touch the thick braided cables that
ran back and forth. The flies were at least twice the height of the proscenium arch, and the Head of Acting showed them how
an entire panel of scenery could be flown up into the space above the
stage to hang there, ready and waiting for the cue to
drop. He activated the lift in the orchestra pit and they watched the floor of the pit rise up to meet the level of the stage.
He showed them the heavy motorized chain underneath the false stage floor that activated the revolve, and then he switched
the revolve on and they let themselves be carried around in silent powerful orbit, standing braced like stiff-legged pawns
as the red mouth of the auditorium flashed by again and again.

The Head of Lighting came forward and showed them the templates that could turn light into dappled water and wind, the gauzes
that gave the illusion of distance, the lights that could make you beautiful or villainous or old, and the followspot with
its thick steel handle that could track an actor around the stage. He showed them how to make sunlight and moonlight and counterfeit
flames. He showed them how to turn indoors into outdoors and back again.

They stood underneath the steel lighting rig and looked up at the heavy black instruments hanging like a cloud of bats from
the pipes, the black barn-doors that shuttered and blinkered the bulbs all folded and unfolded like countless bat-wing membranes
settling in sleep. The instruments were each clamped to the rig with a steel yoke which allowed the shuttered beam to be directed
anywhere over the stage: the Head of Lighting demonstrated, slipping colored gels expertly in and out of the gel frame holder
and pulling the yokes to and fro. He straddled the top of his dented ladder with his ankles hooked around the topmost steps
to hold him steady, squinting down at them and plucking at his brown beard with his free hand as he spoke.

The first-years were then shown the lesser secrets: the door-slam, a little wooden box with a heavy sliding bolt that could
simulate door-slamming sounds from backstage, and the rain box, a little box filled with dried peas for simulating rain-sounds—“Before
everything was digitalized,” the Head of Acting said
with a nostalgic gravity, as he shook the box and filled the air with
the sound of gentle drumming rain. He showed them up close how the false perspective of the painted flats contrived to make
the stage area bigger than it actually was. He showed them the grooves and runnels into which the flats could slip, the ancient
pulley that hauled at the red curtain, and the curved cyclorama at the back of the stage that gave the space a never-ending
vastness, as if it went back and back forever.

“The auditorium is a sacred space,” the Head of Acting said at last, looking gravely at them as they stood in the middle of
the flooded stage and breathed in the sweet dusty smell of hot lights and generated fog. “We do not hold classes in here.
It is only when we come to dress rehearsal that you are allowed to use this space. You may not come in here alone.”

The first-years all nodded. Stanley was standing at the back of the group, still craning upward into the vast blackness of
the flies and trying to remember everything they had been shown. He was a little in awe of the Head of Acting, but underneath
it all he wasn’t sure he liked the man very much. There was something cold and pulsing about his manner that reminded Stanley
of a lizard or a frog. He had never touched the Head of Acting’s ropy liver-spotted hands, but in his mind he imagined them
to be cold and moist and snatching.

They all waited for the Head of Acting to say more, but he just drew his heels together and spread his arm to gesture them
off the stage, signaling that the tour had come to a close.

The first-years filed quietly past him and he watched them go, down the wheeled aluminum steps into the stalls, up the aisle
past the rows and rows, and finally out into the marble light of the foyer. When they were gone he moved to the stage manager’s
cubicle to kill the lights. He stood with his hand on the cool gray lever, and out of habit cleared his throat and called
out a warning up into the flies: “Going dark.”

Stanley walked out of his final audition feeling light-headed. He paused at the fountain in the foyer to steady himself and
gripped the basin with both hands. He breathed quietly for a moment, looking past the porcelain masks into the foggy middle-distance
of a recent memory, and after a moment he realized he was being observed. He straightened and gave the spectator a rueful
sort of smile. She was an older woman, maybe the secretary, framed like a news-anchor behind the high administration desk
in the foyer and watching him with her cheek propped upon her palm.

“You’ll be wishing you brought a hip flask,” she said. “Just had your audition, I guess.”

“Does everybody look like this?” Stanley said, emphasizing his already crippled posture with a little jerk of his spine and
holding his hands limp. The woman laughed.

“More or less,” she said. “You have to watch the ones who look too happy. In my experience the ones who look too confident
afterwards are the ones who don’t usually get in.”

“Oh,” Stanley said, drawing himself up slightly.

“I suppose it’s your first time auditioning,” the woman said. “Some kids try out three, four, five times. It makes you think
what they’re doing with their lives in the meantime, just waiting all those years to finally get in.”

“Yeah,” said Stanley. “Yeah, wow. It is my first time.”

“They didn’t shake you up too much?” the woman said. “They can be quite mean, in the beginning. To break you in.”

She seemed bored, sitting there with her head on her hand in the echoing cavern of the foyer. All the surfaces were bare and
clean, and the car park was empty through the high wall of glass.

“Nothing too painful,” Stanley said. “Nothing I didn’t deserve, probably.”

The woman laughed. Stanley watched her laugh. It struck him for the very first time that there were qualities of beauty that
were unique to women, qualities that teenage girls could not possess: kindness lines around the eyes and mouth, a certain
settling of the body, a weariness of poise and pose that was indefinably sexual, like the old glamour of a dusty taffeta dress
or a piece of costume jewelery with a rusted clasp. The thought had not occurred to him before. He had supposed (though never
truly consciously) that a woman was only attractive insofar as she resembled a girl; that her attractiveness fell away, by
degrees, through her twenties and thirties until it was buried by middle age; that the qualities that women sought were always
the qualities they once had, a backward striving that was ultimately doomed to fail. He had supposed that men slept with women
their own age only because they could not snare anybody younger, or because they were still married to the sweetheart of their
youth; he had not supposed that weary, veined and pear-shaped women were attractive in and for themselves—they were a second-best,
he had imagined, a consolation prize. Now, with a weak stirring in the nerve-wracked cavity of his chest, he saw this woman
through a different lens.

She was wearing makeup, a thin line of black behind the lashes of her upper eyelid that must have been straight and uniform
when she stretched her eyelid out flat to apply the liner, but when she released the skin to blink and appraise herself the
line had puckered, giving her a blurred, slightly clownish look that made Stanley think of an old and kindly whore. As she
smiled he saw that her incisor was rimmed with the gunmetal gray of an ancient filling. The skin on the back of her hands
was loose enough to frame the tendons and the veins, and her knuckles were pouchy whorls of white. A manufactured tan on her
collarbone and on the V-shaped glimpse between her breasts gave the skin a fibrous look: the wrinkle-weave traveled both horizontally
and vertically so the skin was soft and infinitely lined, like worn suede.

For the first time in his life Stanley saw that a woman was not simply a failed and hopelessly outmoded girl. She was a different
creature entirely from the glossed and honeyed girls in the audition room: those girls, Stanley thought, could never play
this woman until the day they became her, and from that day onward they could never play a girl.

“You’re right about the hip flask,” he said. “I reckon I’ll walk out of here and straight into the pub.”

“Have one for me,” the woman said. “And good luck. If luck counts for anything.”

Stanley passed through the double doors and out into the drowsy warmth of the late afternoon. As he turned the corner and
left the gabled heights of the Institute behind, he thought to himself that he was probably the twentieth student that day
to have exited the audition room, passed through the foyer, walked by the administration desk and exchanged words with the
secretary before leaving the building. He wondered what she had said to the others, and how she had said it, and what they
had thought when they looked her in the eye.

“Let’s see some chemistry,” the Head of Acting said, and nodded for them both to begin.

“I met him last week on the damp satin dance floor at the inter-school ball,” she said. The words tumbled out of her too quick,
too early, before she had swallowed her nervousness and found her rhythm. “Everyone was balled up in a tight knot near the
stage, forming a human noose around the girl and the boy in the middle. It’s so the teachers can’t see in. From the outside
it looks horrible, all tight and pushing and pushing, like they’re trying to watch a cock fight or a captured bear. They all
take turns in the noose. I was down the other end, just watching,
and he walked up to me and asked me very quietly if I wanted
a drink.”

She was sitting on the edge of the podium, her ankles hooked over each other, kicking out her legs in an idle, gentle way
so her heels bounced and bounced. Stanley was standing a little way off with his hands in his pockets, watching her calmly.

“Soon I will walk you home in the bluish dark and ask if your hands are cold just for a reason to touch you,” Stanley said.

“He asked me if I wanted a drink,” the girl said again. She wasn’t looking at him. She had found her rhythm now, and her eyes
were flashing. “I thought that meant he had some alcohol so I said, Yes. We’re breath-tested now, at the door before we walk
in, we have to say our name and our address, and always there’s that little spasm of fear that you feel, coming out of nowhere,
in case it comes up positive. Some of the boys take cameras in, just so they can fill empty film canisters with rum and drink
it once they’re inside. Or they strap hip flasks to the inside of their legs. Most of them just bring pills. I thought he
meant he had some alcohol so I said, Yes. He disappeared.”

“Even as I saw you I was disappointed,” Stanley said. “Can anything come of such an ordinary beginning? I asked myself. I
looked at you and I thought of all the things you aren’t. Even before I spoke to you I was angry at you for not being more
than you are.”

“He came back,” the girl said, “and I almost laughed. He had gone and bought us both a Coke, still all dewy and frosted from
the fridge behind the bar, and he opened mine up for me with this quiet little flush of pride, like he was some black-and-white
hero lighting my cigarette and fixing my drink just the way I like it. We talked for a while about leaving school and going
to university and he told me he wanted to be an actor, and we watched the noose for a while.”