He was imperfectly paraphrasing, and the words were lopsided and unlikely in his mouth.
“Something good of it—like making a million dollars off some kid coming off his skateboard on the way home from school?”
“Maybe,” Stanley said. “Maybe, yeah.”
“That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard of,” one of them said. “Life insurance is all about having a backup in case the person you depend on dies. Like if my dad died, my mum would be screwed because she needs his salary to survive, to pay the mortgage and the bills and all that. So life insurance would pay out if he died, just so she wouldn’t be screwed for a few years until she found someone else. Why would they let you take out life insurance on a kid? It doesn’t even make sense. They’d know you were up to something.”
“I’m just talking about the possibility, though,” Stanley said, slipping into first-person ownership after all. “I mean, the idea’s possible. Something to think about. If you could pull it off.”
All in an instant he remembered a scene from two restaurants ago, La Vista, the two of them silhouetted against a wall of frosted glass and ivy and an artful water fountain that dribbled and never ran dry. His father wiped his mouth on a bunched handful of linen and said, “Want to hear the worst dirty joke I have ever come across in my entire life? I promise you won’t have heard it.”
The restaurant was quiet. The couple opposite were chewing and looking out the window. Stanley dabbed at his mouth. He said, “Yeah.”
“I’m warning you. It’s pretty bad. Shall I tell it?”
“Yeah.”
“All right. What do you get if you cover a six-year-old kid with peanut butter?”
“I don’t know,” Stanley said.
“An erection.”
There had been a long pause, Stanley’s father grinning with his eyebrows up, unmoving, like a clown. The woman opposite had looked across at Stanley casually, meeting his gaze and then lazily drawing her eyes away and returning to the silent dissection of her meal. He wasn’t sure if she had heard. He slid his gaze back to his father, his grinning expectant father, and switched on a smile. His own smile felt horribly false, as if the corners of his mouth were clothes-pegged or fish-hooked, and for a second they were both silent, both of them grinning, both of them still. Finally Stanley nodded, and his father said, “It’s pretty out there. Right?”
“Yeah.”
“That the worst one you’ve ever heard?” His father’s head was tilted at a jaunty angle, and he was rocking merrily in his chair.
“Probably,” Stanley said. “Probably the worst.”
The memory came unbidden into Stanley’s mind and he scowled more deeply now, feeling freshly betrayed. His audience was scowling back at him across the mirrored depth of the tabletop which showed them waxy and foreshortened.
“Nobody would ever let you profit from the death of some kid,” one of them said. “It just wouldn’t happen. Nobody would allow it to happen.”
Stanley shrugged his shoulders and looked away, out over the other tables in the cafeteria, as if the conversation had finished and he didn’t care. “You’re taking it the wrong way,” he said, without looking at any of them. He scratched his cheek carelessly, his eyes roving around the room and his mouth bunched and faintly sneering in the defiant pout of a child. He said, “You’re taking it too literally. It was just meant to be a joke.”
July
“What is a taboo?” the Head of Acting asked, his voice ringing out in the vast room. The group was sitting cross-legged in a circle, clutching their cold white-dusted toes, their faces grayed and ghostly in the diffused light.
Somebody said, “A taboo is something you want but you can’t have.”
“A taboo is something that’s forbidden because it’s disgusting.”
“Or because it’s sacred.”
“A taboo is something we’re not allowed to talk about.”
“A taboo is something that makes people feel uncomfortable.”
“A taboo is something that we’re not ready for.”
This last interjection was from the girl sitting on the Head of Acting’s right-hand side. When she spoke he started in surprise and sought her out with his clear pale eyes, and after a moment he smiled a rare and unexpected smile. “Something that we’re not ready for,” he repeated. “Good.”
They talked about magic and ritual and sacrifice for a few minutes, and then the Head of Acting asked, “Is death a taboo?” He looked searchingly at each of them in turn. “Once upon a time death was a great taboo. Is it still?”
Stanley sat and frowned at the floor. The Head of Acting’s pale darting gaze unnerved him. The tutor asked every question with majesty and a pointed reservation, as if emphasizing the profundity of the issues at stake and reminding them that none of them was really capable of a meaningful answer. The cold simplicity with which the Head of Acting spoke made something flutter in Stanley’s pelvis, as if the forbiddenness was amplified somehow by the tutor’s detachment: it was as if the Head of Acting was being deliberately casual, Stanley thought, like a veteran reprobate offering a cigarette to a child and pretending not to notice the child’s blush, and shrug, and stammer.
There was something powerfully strange about the conversation as a whole, as if taboo itself was a forbidden subject. Stanley had the vague sense that they were being tempted, and none of them quite understood how. He squirmed and waited for the flutter in his pelvis to pass. Most of the students, like him, were looking uncomfortable, sitting with their eyes cast down and waiting for the tutor to pounce.
“Stanley,” the tutor said, pouncing. “Is death a great taboo?”
Stanley made his hands into fists and pressed his knuckles into the floorboards as he thought.
“No,” he said at last. “Not anymore.”
“Why?”
“Because people pretend to die all the time,” Stanley said. “I watch people pretending to die every time I turn the television on.”
“So?” said the Head of Acting, but he looked eager, and his lips were drawn back.
Stanley said, “If death was a great taboo, then pretending to be dead would have consequences.”
The Head of Acting gave a brisk satisfied nod and turned back to the group. Stanley drew a breath. He was sweating.
“Let me tell you about my father’s death,” the tutor said. “He died in his own bed, and after his death my family spent one evening with his body before he was taken away. I had heard about rigor mortis. I found it an interesting concept, but I was also a little suspicious of it, as if it might be an old wives’ tale, something archaic that didn’t happen anymore.
“I sat by my father’s bed and watched over him, and every hour or so I would sneak forward and give him a little poke, just a little poke with my index finger, in the fold of skin underneath his cheekbone where his skin was all pouchy and soft. I kept touching his cheek like this, routinely, waiting for the stiffness to set in. And after a while it did. I leaned forward and poked at his cheek and it was hard as a board.
“It was the delay that I found frightening,” he said. “He was soft for so long, and then it was like somebody flipped a switch. The delay frightened me. The delay between two of death’s symptoms—rigor mortis and the stopping of the heart. All of a sudden I saw death not as something solitary and final but as an incremental process, a slow accumulation of symptoms, a gradual stepping-down. I had never thought of death in this way before.”
They were watching him warily now.
“This is a very personal memory for me,” the Head of Acting said, “because I had always imagined that at the death of my father I would feel very great sadness, even hysteria, that I would cry and cry like I’d seen my sisters cry, that afterward I would feel a deep longing for what was irreplaceable about my father, and I would have to work to rebuild my life as normal. I imagined that after it happened I would take time to think about my own mortality, but with a new appreciation and reverence for the
brevity of life.” The Head of Acting’s voice was steady but his voice was very soft, and somehow intensified by the hush, like the savage clear-blue flame of a gas hob turned low.
“But that didn’t happen for me,” he said. “I didn’t cry. I didn’t feel a great sadness, and I quickly replaced everything about him that I needed to. My own mortality was just as it had ever been, that was all. I thought I knew how I would react to the death of my father, and I was wrong.
“Like Stanley,” the Head of Acting said, quickening and shifting into a new, brisker gear, “any one of you can turn on your television set and watch somebody pretend to die. You all will have seen thousands of deaths which are not deaths but merely people pretending. If I said right now, ‘You have been shot!’ you would all roll around on the floor and clutch your bellies and twitch and moan, and what you would be doing—all you would be doing—is copying a copy.
“What I am asking of you for homework,” he said, “is not to prepare a performance of death, for most of you have no first-hand knowledge of what it means for somebody to truly die. Instead I would like each of you to prepare a performance of your most intimate experience. You will place yourself at the mercy of this experience by showing this intimate moment to the rest of the group. The aim of this exercise is to see how we can use these terribly private experiences as a form of emotional substitute when we come to act a scene or a situation that we don’t understand.”
There was a grudging silence. Everybody tried not to look at everybody else. They quickly tried to think up all the relatively unpainful moments of their lives that they would be prepared to re-create in front of the class and pretend that it was the most intimate experience of their lives.
The Head of Acting let the silence gather for a moment. Lazily he thought, What would happen if one of them performed a scene from one of my classes? What if the most intimate moment in one of these kids’ lives was actually a connection with me, some kind of precious moment with me, and they had the gall to re-create it in class in front of the rest of them? He pursed his lips as he weighed the possibility in his mind. He thought, It would never happen. None of them would dare.
“I myself have used the memory of my father’s death many times in my acting career,” the Head of Acting said at last. “I have recalled it, I have re-imagined it, I have replayed it until the memory is sucked of all useful juice and I have learned something. I used it as Løvborg. I used it as Kent. I used it as the Chief Tragedian, believe it or not. I used it as Algie.”
On the floor, Stanley was thinking of his own father: he pictured him with them now, leaning against the barre with his hands in his pockets and winking solemnly at Stanley as he caught his eye above the sea of nodding heads on the gymnasium floor. He would hate the Head of Acting, Stanley thought, and he imagined what his father would say now: That’s right, worship the things that break you down. Worship the deaths and the divorces, and learn to listen to your own sufferings above all other noise. That’ll put everything into a nice healthy perspective for you. Just the ticket. Stanley imagined his father shaking his head and laughing in a disgusted, helpless sort of a way, shrugging his shoulders under the gray pilled sports jacket he always wore when he was with a client at work.
But perhaps he wouldn’t. Perhaps his father would jerk his thumb at the Head of Acting and say, I have to hand it to him. It’s people like this guy who eventually give employment to people like me. Let him screw you all up, slowly but surely. After you’ve robbed yourselves of everything that’s spontaneous and good about your lives, after all that, I’ll have twenty new clients to fix. So go ahead. I’m right behind you, son. I’m right behind all of you. Dig deep.
“If the memory is one of sin,” the Head of Acting was saying, his voice ringing out now as if he were quoting from a beloved text, “afterward you will be free of this sin. It is a kind of redemption.”
Stanley wondered whether he had done anything in his life that required redemption. He felt ashamed that nothing came to mind. He wished he had a secret, a dark blooming ink-stain of a secret that he could brood over and shrug away.
Finally, with the minute hand on twelve o’clock, the Head of Acting said, “I have one final question before we close. What is the last taboo? The taboo that is graver and more sacred than all others?”
“Sex,” somebody said. The answer sounded cheap, and some of the students frowned and shifted and looked at the floor and thought hard. Stanley felt a stirring in his groin again, and he stiffened, wanting very much to leave the room and disappear. Then the girl sitting on the Head of Acting’s right-hand side looked up and said, “Incest is the last taboo.”
The bell rang. The Head of Acting said, “You may go.”
August
It took the best part of a morning for twenty students to reenact the most intimate scene of their lives. Most of them chose a key moment from their parents’ divorce. Some attempted a sexual encounter or a scene of public shame. One of the girls brought a pile of pizza boxes on to the stage. She chewed through each slice until it was mush and then spat it out into a white bowl she held under her arm. She wept and wept, and had chewed her way through three cold pizzas before the Head of Acting finally clapped his hands and said, “Good. Thank you. We can work with that.”
A bleakness descended on the class as the morning wore on. Stanley was one of the last to perform, and he clutched his little paper bag of props against him as he watched the performers replace each other, one after another, all of them weeping and shouting and caressing invisible lovers with the backs of their trembling hands.
“When I was sixteen,” a girl was saying now, “I was going through the drawers in my dad’s desk to find a compass for a math project. I came across this photo of my dad in the bath with a little kid. I didn’t recognize the kid, or the bath. I flipped it over but there was nothing on the back. I showed my mum.”
She yanked down the handle of an old retractable map affixed to the top of a spattered freestanding whiteboard. The map unrolled. The girl had stuck an enormous painted rendering of the photograph to the map-roll. Her father was bearded and laughing, throwing his head back and showing the secret scarlet of his throat. The girl affixed the handle of the map to a hook at the bottom of the whiteboard to hold it open, and stepped back.
“He had two families,” she said. “That’s how we found out. He’d had this affair with this woman years ago and she got pregnant, and then she got pregnant again, and again, and all of a sudden he had two families, two batches of kids. He divided his time between the two, I guess. When we found out, he didn’t try and explain or anything. He just up and left. I haven’t seen him since. I wouldn’t want to. Mum destroyed the photo so I had to make a copy. So this is him with the third kid of the new batch.”
Stanley stared up at the fleshy father in the bath, grossly out of proportion, with his fingers wrapped thick and pink around the small figure of a baby, laughing in the pale soapy lagoon between his legs. The Head of Acting was nodding and writing furiously on his jotter pad. Stanley watched the girl roll up the giant painting and descend quietly from the stage.
A boy began to describe the worst fight his parents had ever had. He was one of the comedians of the group, cheerfully self-deprecating and witty and successful with the girls, and as he spoke the class visibly relaxed and brightened, and sat up with a new generosity and willingness to laugh. The Head of Acting turned to a fresh sheet and looked up at the boy over his glasses, his head tilted and his finger-pads splayed on the desk in front of him.
“And that was the point,” the boy was saying, “where Dad goes, You are a neurotic, compulsive woman and one of these days you are going to need to accept that. He really screamed it, and it was a bit frightening just for a moment because my dad’s a really quiet, patient sort of a person. After that something just broke. Mum ran off, she really ran away from him, right down the corridor into her study, and slammed the door. We thought the fight must be over, but ten minutes later or
so she opened the door again with her head so high and proud, like this—” he demonstrated, holding his arms out like a ballerina “—with her arms full of paper, and she’d typed it out, the whole phrase, in thirty-six point, and she’d got fifty copies printed. She put it up everywhere. She hid copies in his briefcase and in all his pockets. She pinned it to the noticeboard in the kitchen. Everywhere in our house there were these signs that said, You are a neurotic, compulsive woman and one of these days you are going to need to accept that.”
Everybody laughed. The boy gave them a quick thumbs-up and then made as if to return to his seat on the floor.
“Stay there a second, Oliver,” the Head of Acting said. He wasn’t smiling. “Why did you choose this as your most intimate memory?”
The boy shrugged and shoved his hands into his pockets. “I guess because it was the day I learned about revenge,” he said, and everyone laughed again.
“Really?” the Head of Acting said. “Or was it because the easiest thing in the world for you is to make everybody laugh? And you chose the easy option, took the easy way out, instead of choosing to actually share yourself in a sincere and honest way?”
The room had gone quiet. Everyone picked at the floorboards with their fingernails and avoided looking at the comedian Oliver, who was still standing with his hands in his pockets and scuffing the soles of his shoes upon the stage. Stanley watched the defensive smile flicker like a flame at the corners of the boy’s mouth.