The Rehearsal (5 page)

The Head of Improvisation plucked a tennis ball from the
canvas bag at her side and tossed it across the group at one of the
hopefuls. The boy caught the ball in the heels of both hands. “Don’t look at the Head of Acting,” the Head of Improvisation
said. “Pretend he isn’t there. Look at me.”

She held her palms open and the boy tossed the ball sheepishly back. The Head of Acting made a savage little note on his clipboard
with his pen.

“Let’s think about the ancient world for a second,” the Head of Improvisation said, shifting to tuck her legs underneath herself.
“In the ancient world a statue of Apollo or Aphrodite did not exist to trick people into thinking that the statue really
was
the god, or even that the statue really was a true
likeness
of the god. The function of the statue was simply a site of access. The statue existed so people could approach or experience
the god
at that site
. Yes? Is everyone with me?”

She tossed a tennis ball to another hopeful, who flinched but managed to catch it and lob it carefully back. The Head of Improvisation
caught it and held it in both hands for a moment, pushing thoughtfully at the balding fur, indenting the hard rubber of the
ball and letting it snap back against her hand.

“So this statue is definitely not the
real thing
,” she continued. “The statue is not Apollo himself—anybody would agree with that, right? And it’s not a facsimile of the
real thing either. It’s not a likeness of Apollo, a clue to what Apollo might
actually
look like, or what clothes he might
actually
wear. It’s neither of those things. The statue is only a site which makes worship possible. It is a site which makes it unnecessary
to seek that particular connection elsewhere. That’s all. Why is what I’m saying important?”

She tossed the tennis ball at a girl across the group.

“Is it because that’s what theater is?” the girl said quickly, catching the ball neatly with her fingertips and pausing to
answer the question before lobbing it back. “Theater isn’t real life, and it isn’t a perfect copy of real life. It’s just
a point of access.”

“
Yes
,” the Head of Improvisation said, catching the ball and slamming it decisively into the palm of her other hand.

The girl smiled quickly and darted a look at the Head of Acting to see if he had seen her triumph. He wasn’t watching.

The Head of Improvisation said, “The stage is not real life, and the stage is not a copy of real life. Just like the statue,
the stage is only a place where things are
made present
. Things that would not ordinarily happen are made to happen on stage. The stage is a
site
at which people can access things that would otherwise not be available to them. The stage is a place where we can witness
things in such a way that it becomes unnecessary for us to feel or perform these things ourselves. What am I talking about
here?”

The question was too specific, and the hopefuls frowned at her in silence and pursed their lips to show they didn’t know.
The Head of Improvisation was almost quivering. She scanned their faces quickly but without disappointment, already pursed
and half-smiling as if the answer was waiting to bubble up and out of her in a kind of overflow of joy.

“Catharsis,” she said at last, crowing out the word. “Catharsis is what I am talking about. Catharsis is a word that all of
you should know. Catharsis is the thing that makes
your
job worthwhile.”

In the foyer there were two porcelain masks rising like glassy conspirators out of a porcelain basin filled with water. Comedy
was turned away, staring with gleeful dead eyes down the corridor past the secretary’s office and the trophy cabinet and the
loos. Tragedy craned upward. The tragic mask was supported by two brass pipes that ran up out of the water behind the jaw
and the cheekbone and into the porcelain under-rim of each
staring tragic eye. When the fountain was turned on, these pipes
sucked the water up out of the basin and forced the tragic mask to cry.

There was a film of brassy grime around the waterline and at the bottom of the basin a few hopeful silver coins. On the pedestal
underneath the basin was a plaque which said:

The Mind Believes What It Sees

and Does What It Believes:

that is the secret of the fascination

When he saw the pair of masks Stanley’s first thought was that some people turned the corners of their mouth down when they
smiled and some people smiled when they were very unhappy. He was not looking at the masks now. He stood by the fountain with
his hands in his pockets and frowned into the basin as he tried to dull the sick thump of his heart. The water had not yet
been switched on and the surface was tight and smooth like the skin of a drum, the blue-veined porcelain masks dry and discolored
in the still of the morning.

Stanley was almost an hour early, unable to bear any longer the tiny orbit around his bedroom as again and again he flattened
his hair and checked over his application form and felt in his bag for the hard laminated edge of his audition number that
he would later pin to his chest with a pair of tiny golden safety pins. The foyer was empty. The secretary’s office was closed
and shuttered and all the arterial corridors were dark. He stood very still and tried to ride out his nervousness, as if it
were seasickness or hypochondria or a phantom chill.

He heard the soft thud of the auditorium door and turned to see a boy approaching, red faced and disheveled and carrying
an
ancient disc gramophone, the fluted brass horn angled over his shoulder. It looked heavy. He was clutching the gramophone
against him with both hands underneath its felted base, peering around it to check his way was clear and stepping delicately
as he picked his way down the dark corridor.

“Hey,” he called, “are you a techie? You don’t have a key to the main office, do you?”

“Sorry,” Stanley said. “I’m here for the audition.”

The boy peered at him. “Oh, you’re one of the hopefuls,” he said dispassionately. “I forgot it was that weekend already. You
nervous?”

Stanley shrugged. “Yeah,” he said. He flapped his arms a couple of times and tried to think of something adequately general
to say, but nothing came. “Are you an actor?” he asked instead.

“No, I’m Wardrobe,” the boy said. “We’re just packing out
The Beautiful Machine
. Closing night last night and they need the theater tomorrow.”

“What’s
The Beautiful Machine
?” Stanley asked. The boy had halted at the foyer’s periphery, and it felt a little odd, the two of them calling out across
such a large and marble space.

“The first-year devised theater project,” the boy said. “It’s kind of like proving yourself to the Institute, going off and
doing something completely on your own in your first year. The things they come up with would blow your mind. They put it
on properly at the end of the year, lights and everything.”

“Oh,” Stanley said.

“You should have gone,” the boy said. “Closing night last night. It was kickass.” He nodded toward the gramophone he was carrying.
“Lots of musical guys in the batch this year so we went with a sort of a musical thing, really diverse and abstract. If you’d
seen it, it would’ve blown your mind.”

Stanley watched the boy inflate, and noted the shift from
they
to
we
. He sensed that
diverse
and
abstract
were key words, buzz words that had the power to set the speaker apart and mark him
as one of the chosen. This boy was studied
in his carelessness, tossing his head like a pony and turning his hip out so he stood like a model in a menswear magazine.

“This your first time auditioning?” the boy asked. He moved now, walking over to the secretary’s office door and bending at
the knee to place the gramophone carefully on the floor below the wall of oiled golden pigeonholes. Stanley heard the voice
of his high-school drama teacher: Move as you say your line, not after you say it.

“Yeah,” he said. “Should I be worried?”

“Nah,” the boy said coolly. “Just relax and have fun and don’t try too hard. It’s way less of a big deal than everyone makes
out.”

“Did you have to audition for Wardrobe?”

“No.”

Stanley waited, but the boy didn’t say anything further. He straightened up and tried the door of the secretary’s office half-heartedly,
but it was locked. He looked again at Stanley.

“The thing that’s strange about this place,” he said, “is that nobody has anything terrible to say. Even the ones who don’t
get in—have you talked to the ones who don’t get in?”

“No,” Stanley said.

“They always say, I know I want it now. I’ve seen a glimpse of what goes on in there and I might not have got in but I’ve
got a fire in me now and by God I’m going to work and work and try again next year and I’m going to keep auditioning until
I get in. They say, What an honor and a privilege to have been able to audition with these amazing people, spend a weekend
at the Institute and get a glimpse into where real talent comes from. They say, That place is truly a place of awakening.
Do you find that weird?”

Stanley shrugged uncertainly. He had stepped back a half-step while the boy was speaking and he could feel the radiating cool
of the porcelain basin against the small of his back.

“Nobody gives the finger as they walk out the door. Nobody says, Thanks a fucking heap. Nobody says, I didn’t want to come
to your pissant ugly school for dicks anyway. Nobody says, Bullshit I’m not as good as that guy, or that guy, you tell me
exactly why I didn’t get in. Nobody says anything terrible at all. Do you honestly not find that weird?”

“It’s a prestigious school. I guess people just feel really strongly about that,” said Stanley.

“Yeah,” said the boy, contemptuous all of a sudden, and visibly dismissing Stanley as a person with nothing to offer and nothing
to say. “Anyway, good luck. Might see you round here next year.”

“Yeah,” said Stanley. He felt ashamed of his own dullness but he was too preoccupied with his anxiety about the audition to
care. He turned back to the fountain and shoved his hands viciously back into his pockets, listening until he heard the boy’s
footsteps dwindle away down the corridor and finally the heavy velvet thump of the auditorium door.

The morning paper reads
Teacher Denies Sex With Student
.

“Poor Mr. Saladin,” says the saxophone teacher. “Poor Mr. Saladin, with his slender hands and his throbbing lonely heart and
his face like—”

“It doesn’t show his face,” interrupts Patsy, who is feeling cranky. “He’s holding his jacket over his head.”

The phone rings.

“They imagine it all the same,” says the saxophone teacher, “the thirsty mothers with their sad black eyes. They imagine sharp
little teeth and a wet gulping swallow. They imagine small bluish pouches underneath his eyes.”

Patsy contemplates the article with her head on one side. She dabs her finger absentmindedly at the crumbs on her plate.

“I completely understand, Mrs. Miskus,” the saxophone teacher is saying into the phone. “Oh goodness no, I never met
the man,
but let me tell you something about him all the same.” (Patsy gets up now, fishes for her coat. The saxophone teacher follows
her with her eyes as she talks.) “Mr. Saladin left a legacy behind him, a special breed of wide-eyed, fascinated, provocative
mistrust which has swept through my students like a virus. The violated girl is shadowed by whispers and elbows and blind
aching jealousy everywhere she walks. When the lights go out, the parents cry and ask each other what did he
do
to her, but the girls are burning with a question of their own: what did
she
do? What does she know now that makes her so dangerous, like the slow amber leak of a noxious fume?”

Patsy wiggles into her coat, waves, blows a kiss. She is leaving.

“They try to imagine her stroking his face and arching her neck and whispering things, special things that nobody’s ever said
before. They try to imagine her up against the wall of the music room, breathing fast and shallow with her eyes closed and
her hands clenched in fists on the wall above her head. They try to imagine the ordinary things, like How about lunchtime?,
or I couldn’t sleep last night, or I like the shirt with the stripes better. They think maybe now when she clutches her arms
across her chest, when she smoothes her hair down at the side, when she suddenly falls silent and bites her lip hard, they
think maybe these things mean something now that they didn’t mean before. They try to imagine, Mrs. Miskus. They try to imagine
what these things might mean.”

The saxophone teacher is silent now, listening, fingering the phone cord. The door slams in the stairwell.

“I understand,” she says after a while. “Your poor fragile sensible daughter feels dirty by association and she wants to put
as much distance as she possibly can between herself and that horrible man. You tell her I have a space on Tuesday at three.”

A notice goes up to say that rehearsals will resume. A new conductor has been found for jazz band and senior jazz ensemble
and orchestra, identified in bold type as Mrs. Jean Critchley. The unnecessary naming serves to emphasize the
Mrs.
and the
Jean
.

“Course they got a woman,” says first alto darkly. They are standing in the corridor in a bedraggled clump.

“I liked Mr. Saladin,” says Bridget in her stringy unfashionable way.

“Is he in prison already?” says first alto.

“Probably under house arrest,” says double bass. “So he doesn’t reoffend.”

“Bullshit,” says first trombone. “He’ll just be at home in his pajamas watching daytime television.”

They run out of things to say and spend a moment regarding the name of Mrs. Jean Critchley, identified in bold type.