Stanley’s father was smiling his therapy smile.
“I couldn’t have picked it,” Stanley said at last. “The boy at my school. He was hit on his skateboard coming home from the shop. Out of all of them, I’d never have picked him.”
“Shame,” his father said. He didn’t say anything further. He toyed with his fork and reached for his wine and watched Stanley over the frail rim of the glass as he drank.
Stanley fingered the drama school brochure unhappily. He was hot and uncomfortable in his suit jacket, like a chicken trussed up to roast. “What about me?” he said. “Can you see what’s going to happen before it happens?”
His father leaned forward and stabbed the tablecloth with a bony white finger.
“I can see,” he said, “you are going to have a great year. You’re going to be great.”
October
“Acting is not a form of imitation,” the Head of Improvisation said briskly, after the hopefuls had assembled in a ragged cross-legged ellipsis on the rehearsal-room floor. Near the door the Head of Acting was hovering with his clipboard, watching with a studied indifference and pinching his pen in his fingers as he measured the worth and quality of each student against the next.
The Head of Improvisation said, “Acting is not about making a copy of something that already exists. The proscenium arch is not a window. The stage is not a little three-walled room where life goes on as normal. Theater is a concentrate of life as normal. Theater is a purified version of real life, an extraction, an essence of human behavior that is stranger and more tragic and more perfect than everything that is ordinary about me and you.”
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.”
October
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
October
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 c
alling 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.
THREE
Thursday
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.”
Friday
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.
“She sounds like a bitch,” says first alto, voicing what they are all thinking anyway.
Friday
“I went to see Mr. Partridge about an extension after school yesterday,” Isolde says. “He was in his office, and when I came in he sort of exploded out of his desk and said, Let’s talk in the hallway, come on, out. They all do that now. They’re afraid of enclosed spaces.”
The saxophone teacher watches her and thinks, This is the dawn of a new Isolde, a hardened deadened Isolde who has witnessed the dirty and perverted glamour of the world but still nurses a tiny kernel of doubt because she has not yet felt what she has heard and seen.
“Anyway we went out into the hallway,” says Isolde. She swings her saxophone around so it is hanging limply off one shoulder like a schoolbag, both hands at her shoulder holding the strap. She
shifts her weight to the other leg and sticks her hip out and blinks her big eyes, converting in an instant into a sweet and undeserving victim. The lights change, becoming duller and more diffuse, until Isolde is standing in the creamy lilac light of a late-afternoon school corridor with all the lockers hanging empty and open and the chip packets scudding across the floor like silver leaves.
“So I go, I was just wondering if I could get an extension or whatever, because things have been so hard at home—”
And she seamlessly slides her sax off her shoulder and into her arms, holding it loosely underneath the bell with both hands, and pressing it flat against her pelvis in a casually protective way, as a man might hold a folder against himself, standing in a corridor with a student in a shaft of creamy lilac light after all the others have gone home.
The saxophone teacher reflects how much she enjoys these changes, when Isolde slips out of one person and becomes another. Bridget is good at voices, but with Isolde the performance is always physical and total, like the unexpected shedding of a skin. The saxophone teacher shifts in her chair, and nods to show she’s listening.
“And he shakes his head at me,” Isolde says, broadening now, rocking back on her heels and sucking in her belly so her chest inflates, “and he goes, Isolde, I am not the kind of teacher who ingratiates myself with my students in order to gain their love. That is not my style. I am the kind of teacher who gains popularity by picking a scapegoat. I do this in each and every class I teach. If I was to grant you an extension I would be a hypocrite and I would undermine my own methods.
“He goes, Isolde, when I set out to gain the love of a student, I do not begin by granting them an extension when they don’t really need one. I begin by cultivating a culture of jealousy in my classroom. Jealousy is a key component to any classroom environment, because jealousy means competition and competition means excellence. It is only in a jealous classroom that a true and fervent love can blossom.