The Rehearsal

“And Mr. Saladin,” she continues, relentlessly. “Mr. Saladin, who need only have waited for the midnight stroke in five months’ time, the stroke that would transform Victoria from a child into an adult as surely as a carriage into a pumpkin, or a saddled horse into a dirty common kitchen mouse. It could have even been a birthday present, if he had only waited. At our counseling sessions we learned that Mr. Saladin’s crime was, first and foremost, impatience. We learned that the moral is: They stumble that run fast.”

The mothers are captivated.

“No, we didn’t,” Julia says. “We didn’t learn that at all.”

She speaks like a magician or a ringmaster.

“We learned that everything in the world divides in two: good and evil, male and female, truth and falsehood, child and adult, pleasure and pain. We learned that the counselor possessed a map, a map that would make everything make sense. A key. Like in a theater program where you have the actors’ names on one side and the list of characters on the other—some neat division that divides the illusive from the real. We learned that there is a distinction—that there is always a distinction—between the performance and the performer, the reality and the lie. We learned that there is no middle ground.”

Julia surveys her audience.

“Only those who watch,” she says, “and those who suffer being watched.”

The mothers don’t dare to rustle.

“But the counselor lied,” Julia says. “You lied. You lied about the pain of it, the unsimple mess of it, immeasurably more thorny and wretched and raw than you could ever remember, with the gauze veil of every year that passes settling over your eyes, thicker and thicker until even your own childhood dissolves into the mist.”

The saxophone teacher is watching Julia from the side of the stage. She has a lump in her throat and a tight aching feeling in her chest. It might be pride.

“Just think,” Julia is saying, “Victoria is probably with Mr. Saladin tonight, right now, laid out in an adolescent flush of pleasure somewhere, while her sister and her parents sit in the bruising dark of an auditorium on the other side of town. She is probably naked and crooning and stretched over him with her body limp and butter-slick. He is probably whispering into her hair the dwindling number of days until she becomes her own self, the day when her body becomes her own, the day when her body becomes his own. He is probably stroking her with the callused heel of his weathered adult hand.”

She looks at the mothers.

“And you wish you were there,” Julia says softly. “You wish you were there.”

Saturday

Isolde and Julia are alone against the black cloth of the stage. There is no set or scenery. They are both wearing their school uniform, but differently: Isolde’s is clean and pressed, and Julia’s is limp and darned and grubby and artful. They look across at each other.

Isolde says, “Is it because I didn’t learn to love myself that I chose to bury myself instead in the reassuring strangeness of a body that was without that essential similarity which would force me to compare? With you I would have been doubled, intensified, mirrored back. With him our differences canceled out to nothing.”

“Yes,” Julia says. “But that’s only part of it.”

Isolde says, “Is it because I was scared, then? Is it because there wasn’t a template for it, and the unexpected hugeness of my i

“Yes,” Julia says.

“I’ve never felt like that before, Julia,” Isolde says. “Scared like that.”

“Don’t worry,” Julia says. “You never will again.”

The lights change.

“I remember being in your car outside my house,” Isolde says, “both of us sitting there in the pale gray of the streetlight with our seat belts holding us apart, our seat belts crossed over our chests, strapping us against the crocodile vinyl, holding us flat. And you turned to look at me and gave a little bit of a laugh, like you were really nervous, and you bit your lip and let some of your hair fall across your face and you didn’t tuck it back. And then you said, Can I just…? and you let the question die and you reached up your hand to cup underneath my chin, reaching right over, straining against your seat belt that was pulling you back, reining you in, holding you there. I was so scared. I remember licking my lip. I remember my mouth was dry. I remember you kissed me.”

“A one-off,” Julia says.

“My fall.”

And Julia says, “My fall.”

Isolde says, “What will happen to you now?”

Julia pulls her gaze away from the other girl and looks out over the wraith-faces of the audience. She doesn’t speak for a moment. Then she says, “All I can expect, I guess. Slow fade to black.”

October

“It’s too easy,” Stanley’s father says as he steps from the taxi. “Oh, Stanley, it’s too easy, and I’m going to say it anyway.”

He steps over the gutter and spreads his arms for a hug, wrapping Stanley up tightly. Stanley can smell the familiar blush of cologne on his father’s shirt.

“What’s too easy?” Stanley says when they have separated, and the taxi has turned the corner and disappeared.

“You’ve improved on my own methods,” Stanley’s father says. “You’ve taken my ideas and run with them, turned them into something I couldn’t have dreamed up myself. I’m flattered and impressed and a little ashamed that you don’t have more sense.”

“Are you talking about the insurance thing?” Stanley says.

“Absolutely I am.”

“Because I rang up the insurance companies,” Stanley says. “I rang up a few. I asked them about your idea to make a million, and it won’t work.”

“Of course it won’t work. I was just having a tease, and shame on you for following through, by the way,” Stanley’s father says. “But this—”

He laughs and spreads out his arms. Above the double doors of the foyer an enormous glossy ba

“This is brilliant,” Stanley’s father says. “And it’s hilarious. But I’ll be surprised if you last a week in performance. They’ll shut you down tomorrow night probably.”

“That might not be such a bad thing,” Stanley says.

“Are you in trouble?”

“Yes.”

“Need some help?” his father says, for once not using his therapy ma

“Yes,” Stanley says, more quietly. “I’ve been accused of something.”

“Excellent,” his father says. “You can tell me over di

October

“In your organizer,” Isolde says, “your black organizer with the gold stripe, I found an article snipped out of the front page of the newspaper. The headline read Teacher Denies Sex With Student. Only it wasn’t just the article, it was a photocopy of the article, a photocopy of a photocopy, with key phrases highlighted in yellow, maybe by you.”

Stanley is sitting a little way off, his head in his hands.

“Half of the article was familiar to me,” Isolde says, “the half that had clung to the folded spine of the newspaper when my mum swooped down and tried to rip off the front page, when she said Vultures, Vultures, and she crushed the torn piece into a ball. After she left the room I read the left-behind slice with the headline Teacher Sex and all the words disjointed and coming apart from each other, and piece by piece I tried to put it back together, the sharp-edged fragments of my sister’s love.”