The Rehearsal (11 page)

“I didn’t like you,” Stanley said. “I didn’t like you for detaining me at this never-ending stage of nervous silence and nothing-talk
and worry. I didn’t want what you were offering. I stayed because I was angry and I wanted to show you that I thought that
you were boring. I wanted to make you
feel
boring.”

The Head of Acting was watching them impassively. Stanley could see him out of the corner of his eye, holding his head very
still.

“I’d already decided,” the girl said. “He wouldn’t have known that. As soon as I saw him I decided the way it was going to
be. He never had a chance.”

“Why do you want to be an actor, my boy?” Stanley’s father asked. The capillaries were standing out in his cheeks in bold
little threads. Stanley could tell he was drunk only by the way he ducked his head slightly every time he blinked.

“They asked me that in my audition,” he said. He watched his father refill his wineglass, and suddenly didn’t feel like being
honest. “I just want to have fun with it, I guess.”

“Not in it for fame and fortune?”

“Oh,” Stanley said, watching as his father reached across the table and emptied the bottle into his own glass. “No. It’s more
of a… no. I just want to have fun.”

“Good man,” said Stanley’s father. “I’ve got a joke you might like.”

“Yeah?” Stanley said. This was his least favorite part of the evening. He tried to read his father’s wristwatch from across
the table. They had already ordered dessert, tiny splashes of cream and color on vast white plates, and soon his father would
be hailing a pair of taxis and slipping fifty dollars into his breast pocket and clapping him on the shoulder and walking
away. Outside the street was slick and oily with rain.

“What’s the most common cause of pedophilia in this country?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sexy kids.”

“That’s funny.”

“It’s good, eh?”

“Yeah.”

“I got it off a client. Have I told you about him? The one with the angel voices. You’ll love this, Stanley. This guy is honestly
something else.”

Stanley sometimes tried to imagine what it would be like to live in the same house as his father, to see him every day, to
walk past him dozing on the couch or brushing his teeth or squinting into the fridge. Their yearly outing was always at a
different restaurant, and Stanley could catalog his relationship with his father in a string of names: The Empire Room, The
Setting Sun, Federico’s, La Vista. Sometimes his father rang him on the telephone, but the two-second delay of the international
line made him sound distant and distracted and Stanley always worried he was talking too little or too much.

“You were an accident,” was how his father explained it many restaurants ago. “Our relationship was casual, respectful, and
very brief. She found out she was pregnant and decided to keep you, even though my practice was moving to England and it was
likely I’d never come back. I said I would keep in touch and help out wherever I could. And I saved your life—she was going
to call you Gerald. I stepped in.”

“Thanks,” Stanley said.

“No problem,” said his father, waving a piece of squid. “But believe me, sperm is a serious business.”

Stanley looked at him now, drunk and flamboyant and mischievous and laughing at his own story. He was a little afraid of his
father. He was afraid of the way the man delivered his opinion, afraid of the crafty watchful antagonism that left Stanley
uncertain whether he was meant to argue or agree. His million-dollar insurance policy idea was a typical trap, a raw
slice
of bloody bait laid out with a flourish and a double-crossing smile. Did his father expect him to second-guess the idea? Was
he supposed to follow through with it, or admonish his father for being macabre and coarse? Stanley didn’t know. He reached
into his pocket and touched the edge of the glossy brochure from the Institute.

“Well, I think that’s us,” his father said, returning his glass to the table and reaching up to smooth his lapel with his
hand. “This time next year, my boy, you will have become a sensitive and feeling soul.”

“Tell us about yourself, Stanley,” said the Head of Acting. He made an abrupt gesture with his hand. “Anything. Doesn’t have
to be relevant.”

Stanley shifted his weight to the other leg. His heart was thumping in his rib cage. The panel was sitting against a wall
of high windows so their faces were all in shadow and Stanley had to squint against the glare.

“I don’t know whether I’m any good at feeling things,” he said. His voice was tiny in the vast space. “Nothing big has happened
to me yet. Nobody has died, nothing terrible has happened, I’ve never really been in love or anything. In a funny way I’m
kind of looking forward to something terrible happening, just so I can see what it’s like.”

“Go on,” said the Head of Acting when Stanley faltered.

“I was always a bit jealous of people who had real tragedy in their lives,” he said. “It gave them something to feed on. I
felt like I had nothing. It’s not like I want anyone in my family to die, I just want something to overcome. I want a challenge.
I think I’m ready for it.”

He was trying to look at them all equally.

“In high school I kind of tried things on,” he said, “just to see what it was like. Even when I got mad or upset or had a
fight with someone, it was like I was just trying it on, just to see how far I could push it. There’s always this little part
of me that’s not mad, that stays sort of calm and interested and amused.”

“Good,” said the Head of Acting abruptly. “Tell us why you want to be an actor.”

“I want to be seen,” said Stanley. “I don’t really have a bigger answer than that. I just want to be seen.”

“Why?” said the Head of Acting, his fountain pen hovering above the page.

Stanley said, “Because if somebody’s watching, you know you’re worth something.”

“Thanks all for coming in, people,” the counselor is saying as Isolde walks in. He raises his palms like he is a politician
or a priest. “I’d really like to build on some of the issues that we raised in our last session. I thought that today we could
talk about taking control.”

The room is almost full. Isolde looks around for a seat, nodding tersely at a few of her sister’s friends who look at her
with sad round eyes as if they are imagining themselves in her shoes and feeling very sorry for themselves indeed. Isolde
scowls. She slips into a chair and tries to scrunch down as low as possible. The counselor smiles at her, a horrible rubbery
proud smile that makes Isolde’s skin creep, and she quickly looks away, down at her fingernails and the worn tatty cuffs of
her school jersey. She suffers being questioned and patted and caressed by the girl sitting behind her, a stout motherly figure
who was Victoria’s
tennis partner in intermediate school and once shared a paper bag of sweets with Isolde under the trees
at the end of the lawn.

The girl settles back into her chair like a fat tufted hen, and Isolde can hear her say to the girl sitting next to her, “They’re
keeping her in the dark I reckon. Makes sense.”

“Who can tell me what the issue is here?” the counselor is saying, spreading his arms to include them all. “It starts with
B,” he adds, silencing the girls who are about to volunteer possible answers that do not start with B. The girls lean back
and think of all the B words they have heard the counselor use.

“
Boundaries
,” the counselor croons at last, and there is a collective exhalation. “Boundaries, people.”

Isolde sits very still and gives nothing away, folding into herself and glassing over as if she is pushing her face into a
mask. Vultures, she thinks to herself, using her mother’s word. Her mother had said it when she saw the contented headlines
in the morning paper. Vultures, she said, and then swooped down and ripped off the front page, but ineffectually so the column
headline was vertically halved and the piece that remained read
Teacher Sex
. Vultures, Isolde thinks now, as the whispers eddy around her and the counselor smiles his plump greasy smile.

The counselor is saying, “Maybe you might let this sort of thing happen because you just don’t know how else to respond.”

Isolde sighs and wishes she were dead.

“Why do I have to go?” she asked her mother last night, slapping the pink form down next to the chopped onions and the flour.
“It’s seventh formers and music students and then
me
. I’ll be the only fifth former there and everyone will know and it’s
humiliating
. They all pity me and I hate it.”

Isolde’s mother chewed at her lip in the way she did when she knew she was out of her depth.

“I suppose you could refuse to go, honey,” she said distractedly, “but it might end up seeming like you were taking a stand.
You might draw attention to yourself, and that might not be what you want. It might be better for you to just go along and
put your head down. I’m not sure. You decide.” She smiled in a vague but encouraging way. “Poor lamb,” was the last thing
she said before turning back to the onions, her disinterest settling over her daughter like a damp chemical mist over a household
fire.

Isolde snatched back the pink form and stalked out of the room. “I have to go to counseling because of you,” she snapped as
she passed Victoria in the hall.

“Why?” Victoria asked, stopping and looking thoroughly surprised.

“Because they want to quarantine,” Isolde shouted. “They want to keep us all in one place so the sickness won’t spread and
they can figure out a vaccine. They want to put us in a concrete yard and take our clothes off and hose us down and scrub
us with sandpaper and turpentine and rags made from old Y-fronts that have turned gray. It’s like you’ve left big inky handprints
on all of us, everyone you’ve ever met, but especially me, I’m the most inky, I’m like dripping ink, it’s running down my
legs and arms and off my fingertips and pooling wider and wider on the floor.”

Victoria stood there in the hall with the last of the sunlight slanting across her face and didn’t say anything for a while.
Isolde breathed raggedly and glared at her, and stood just inside her bedroom door, her hand on the door edge and ready to
slam it on cue. Then Victoria said, “Sorry.”

“You bloody aren’t,” Isolde said. She slammed the door.

“Does anybody want to say anything before we kick off?” the counselor is saying now, and one of the girls in the back row
calls out, “I do.”

Isolde is still broody and wrapped up in herself and doesn’t turn around when the girl begins to speak. She hears her say,
“I don’t agree that Mr. Saladin wanted to gain control,” but it takes a moment before she registers what the girl is actually
saying.

The girl says, “Sleeping with a minor isn’t exciting because you get to boss them around. It’s exciting because you’re risking
so much. And taking a risk is exciting because of the possibility that you might
lose
, not the possibility that you might win.”

Isolde turns around to look at her.

The speaker is a seventh former, a hard-edged ink-spotted girl who smokes lonely cigarettes by the goalposts of the soccer
field and sits in after-school detention with a satisfied smirk on her face to show that everything is going precisely as
she has planned. She is a loner, too bright for the slutty girls and too savage for the bright girls, haunting the edges and
corners of the school like a sullen disillusioned ghost and pursued by frightened vicious rumors that she is possibly probably
gay
.

The fact that the rumors about Julia are unsupported by witness or report means that Julia’s sexuality remains an elusive
property, threatening but not entirely quantifiable, predatory in an unpredictable, unpreventable way. Julia herself, surly
and caustic and isolated by her headphones and her paperbacks and the curtain of hair across her face, never chooses to actively
dispel the whispers that shadow her. If she is provoked she might scowl and give the finger, but provocation isn’t in fashion
right now, so mostly she is simply left alone.

Now, while the girls watch Julia as if she is a carnival act and the counselor tugs nervously at the tuft of hair at the nape
of his neck, Isolde becomes aware that the atmosphere in the room is changing. A cold dawning fear is rising from the girls
like a scent. The belated threat posed by the now absent Mr. Saladin is plainly diminished in the face of this more insidious
and unnameable threat posed by Julia. It is not simply the voicing of the opinion that frightens them. Julia is an infiltrator,
a dangerous and volatile mole who might without their knowledge have a
crush
on any one of them, who might at any moment be
imagining
any one of them—there are no counseling sessions to prepare the girls against the advances of one of their own.

“The fact that Victoria was underage and virginal or whatever wasn’t exciting because he could exercise more power over her,”
Julia is saying. “It was exciting because he stood to lose so much more if anyone found out.” She cocks her head to emphasize
the shock value. “He wouldn’t just lose her. He would lose everything.”

Isolde looks her up and down in fascination. As she contemplates what Julia is saying, she begins for the first time to feel
an interest in Mr. Saladin: Mr. Saladin, who saw in her sister something worth pursuing, who whispered things that nobody
had ever said before, who risked and lost everything he had.

Why did Mr. Saladin choose Victoria? Isolde finds herself considering the question properly for the first time. She pictures
her sister’s round cherry pout and round wide eyes, and the flash of red satin whenever she leans over and exposes the artful
low waistband of her school kilt. She pictures Victoria in jazz band, leaning forward to turn the page with her sax slung
slantwise across her body, the weight of the instrument pulling the neckstrap downward and tight against her sternum so that
the upper end of the instrument lies brightly golden between the blue woollen swell of her breasts. And then Isolde thinks,
Why did Victoria choose Mr. Saladin?