Текст книги "Rehearsal"

Автор книги: Eleanor Catton

Соавторы: Eleanor Catton
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TWELVE

September

Was he supposed to undress her first, or wait to be undressed? He didn’t like the idea of undressing her first—it seemed greedy, and the thought of remaining clothed while stripping her naked unnerved him—he imagined someone walking in, and what they would think. Would it happen piece by piece, like a polite duel—her shirt then his, her bra then his singlet, all the way down? Or were they supposed to undress themselves separately, and then come together after they had both been transformed? Stanley’s heart was thumping as he led her to the bed and they sat down on its edge, kicking off their shoes in tandem and shuffling sideways to embrace each other and lie down.

He had imagined this moment many times previously, but Stanley realized now that he had imagined the scene mostly in closeup, arching and rearing and heavy breathing and skin. What was supposed to happen now? He tried to negotiate swinging himself on top of the girl without kneeing her in the groin. He was wooden, like someone obeying a director’s instruction or responding to a cue. He floundered, shifting his weight to one side and back again, and he had a sudden, unflattering vision of himself from above, kneeling with one arm thrashing behind his back to find the slipping duvet and pull it back over his shoulders against the draught. He felt a surge of anger at his own ineptitude, and almost viciously he slipped a hand inside her shirt, just to prove he was up to the task. He felt her ribs rise up sharply at his touch.

Stanley was wishing that he was much older than he was. He wished that he was a man, and not a boy, a man who was easy with himself and could strip a girl and laugh and know that what he was doing was right. He wished that he was a man who could place his finger on this girl’s lips and say, Now I am going to make you come. He wished that he was a man who could use the word “cunt,” who could speak it aloud and easily, in a way that would make a girl admire and worship him. He wished that he was a man at home with his body, a man who could say, You are beautiful, and know that the words would have meaning because he spoke as a man and not a boy.

Stanley slithered his hand down her belly, down past the little scooped slit of the girl’s navel, hatted by a fold of skin that shrank to a tight little nib as she raised her arms up above her head. She reached to pull his head down to hers and craned up to kiss his mouth. His hand was scrabbling at the button of her fly. He was ashamed at himself for moving so quickly but impelled all the same by a helpless wish for self-annihilation, a desire for the scene to somehow go on without him so he could withdraw. The denim was stretched tight and flat over the bones of her pelvis, and he had to bend the buttonhole cruelly sideways to wrench the button through. It gave. He drew down the zipper and with his fingers felt the thin cotton of her briefs, buoyed up by the tufted whorl of her pubic hair. He felt surprise. Had he imagined her hairless, like a doll?

The girl was breathing faster. He slipped his hand inside her briefs and cupped the wiry mound of her pubis with the heel of his hand, arching his wrist to loosen the waistband of her jeans. Carefully he moved to part the seam of her, hot against the cool of his fingers. He wanted to speak. He wanted to whisper something that would break the awful fumbling quick-breathed silence that was filling the room, the mousy rustle of his hand.

Stanley found himself watching the scene from the position of a camera, and he began caring too deeply about what he might look like from above, or from the side—he tried to be sleeker, to thrash less, to push the hair gently off the girl’s face and let his fingers trail around her jawbone and touch the soft furry pouch of her earlobe, like he had seen done in the cinema so many times. It didn’t seem to be working.

“My arm’s dead, sorry,” the girl whispered apologetically, and wiggled it free.

“Shit,” Stanley said.

“What’s wrong?” the girl said in surprise, drawing the duvet up around her and tucking it carefully under her arms as she withdrew.

“I don’t—”

“You don’t know what to do?”

“No,” Stanley said, a little too savagely. “No, I know what to do.”

“It doesn’t matter,” the girl said, pushing his hair off his face with the rough heel of her hand. The action was coarse and tender at the same time, and Stanley was humbled, feeling her easily achieve the truth of the action when he had found it so difficult. “Just give me a cuddle. Come here.”

He crept across the bed and she opened up the duvet to let him in. They lay there for a while, Stanley’s heart thumping, the girl’s hands moving up and down the curve of his shoulder blade and into the thin hair at the nape of his neck.

“I didn’t think it would be like this,” Stanley said, without thinking.

The girl raised herself up on an elbow and said, “What?”

Stanley realized he had sounded rude, and said hastily, “I mean me. I didn’t think I would be like this.”

That sounded even worse, and he seethed for a moment in frustration and self-contempt. What he had meant to say was that all the films and television programs he had ever seen that might have schooled him for this moment had placed him in the position of the outsider, the snug and confident voyeur who is able to imagine himself in place of the hero but is never physically required to act. Now he felt utterly unscripted, marooned, desperate for the girl to act first so that he would only have to follow and the burden of decision would not fall to him.

“It’s your first time,” the girl said, and a note in her voice changed, becoming softer, even maternal. She gathered him up closer to her and he burrowed in. “Silly old duffer,” she said, and rubbed the top of his head with her knuckles. “You’ll be all right.”

They lay there for a while, listening as the ice-cream truck pulled into the street and sounded its theme tune for the children to hear. The truck whined away down the road, and it was quiet again.

“That was it,” Stanley said, looking up for the first time, into the lights.

“That was what, Stanley?” the girl said, rolling over and touching him lightly on the lower curve of his back with her fingertips. “That was what?”

“That was the most intimate scene of my life,” Stanley said. “Right then. That was it.”

August

“Cue Mr. Saladin!” one of the students shouted. “King of Spades! Where the hell are you, Connor?”

There was a commotion in the wings, unseen, and then the King of Spades appeared, red faced and trotting, ejected so swiftly from the parted cloth it was as if he had been physically launched.

“Sorry,” he called out wildly in the direction of the pit. He cast about to find his mark on the floor, two pieces of tape crossed in a pale X like a cartoon Band-Aid.

“Get your bloody game on,” someone shouted.

They watched with contempt and satisfaction as the King of Spades found his mark, drew himself up and took a breath. The stiff waxy breastplate of his costume had come untied on one shoulder and so hung at an odd angle across his chest. He had forgotten his gloves and his sword, but it was too late now.

The onstage students sighed and retraced their steps to give the boy his cue again. They said, “But look at it from another point of view. She lost her virginity, and in good time, before it began to cling unfashionably like a visible night-rag. She snared an older man. She achieved celebrity. And now she has a secret which everyone craves to know: a sexual secret, the best kind of secret, a vortex of a secret that tugs and tugs away at her edges so she’s never quite there. Oh, don’t pity Victoria. Pity poor lonely Mr. Saladin, who has tasted the bright ripe fruit of youth and purity, and now nothing else will do.”

There was a kettle-drum clash from the orchestra pit, on the beat. Its effect on the King of Spades was dramatic. He crumpled, as if he had been clubbed between the shoulder blades, and all in an instant he became crippled and fragile and old. As he began to speak and the lesser characters reformed like children around his knees, one of the boys in the stalls leaned over to whisper, “He’s still playing it for laughs. It won’t work if he plays it for laughs.”

The King of Spades said, “There was something so very endearing about it, right back in the beginning. The way she played it, out of a textbook, big moon eyes and an open collar, and her skirt hitched up to show her knee. It was so touchingly amateur. It was like a child’s painting, imperfect and discordant and poorly executed and crying out to be celebrated, to be pinned to the wall or the fridge, to be complimented and fawned over and adored.”

He trailed his foot and looked down at the floor and smiled secretly to himself, as if he was remembering something infinitely private. The band in the orchestra pit had struck up a jazzy pulse, drums and double-bass and the throaty murmur of a tenor saxophone.

He said, “In ten years’ time she will be able to look at a man in cold blood and think, We are compatible. She will think, given your generosity of spirit, given your ability to provide me with the emotional shelter I need, given your particular wry and self-deprecating sense of humor, your interest in silent film, given the things you like to cook, and your tendency toward pedantry, and the things you do to pass the time—given all of this, I can conclude that we’re compatible. Over the course of her life she will gradually compile this dreary list of requisites. Year by year she will reduce the yawning gulf of her desire to the smallness of a job vacancy: a janitor, or a sentry, or a drone. The ad will say, Wanted. That’s all.”

The King of Spades shrugged.

“But with me she didn’t have a formula,” he said. “She didn’t know her appetites, didn’t recognize the jumping pulse that leaped and leaped in the scarlet recess of her throat. Every time we touched she was finding out something new—not about me, but about herself, her tides and tolls, her responses, the upturned vase of emptiness she carried around inside her always, like something unfinished or unmade.”

Behind him there were shadow-figures arched and clawing behind mullioned screens. They were silhouettes, crisply lit and dark against the white cloth, and they were all the shapeliest of the first-year students, chosen for their linear form, their profile. They were hand-picked by the others, who squinted until they saw only the positive outline and could judge the massy contour on its own.

The jazz band eased into the main theme now, the recurring motif of the production, and the seething crowd on stage reformed into another shape, another scene. The lights changed and the music changed, and the King of Spades was swallowed by the crowd.

“You missed out a bit,” one of the stage managers said, when the King of Spades at last heard his cue to exit and bowed out, stage right. He was holding a sheaf of papers fixed together with a bulldog clip, and he shook the papers in the King of Spades’ shadowed face. He said, “You missed out that whole section where he says, How can I protect these girls and excite them at the same time?”

September

“Has anything ever gone wrong?” Stanley said. “In the devised production? Like, the pistol was loaded and nobody even knew it was real. Or the flying harness was unclipped, or somebody fell from the fly-floors and slammed into the action in the middle of the stage. Some tragic story that happened almost too long ago to remember.”

“You’re nervous,” Oliver said, as he slid into the seat opposite. He pulled an apple out of his backpack and began tossing it back and forth between his hands.

“There’s just something scary about being let loose,” Stanley said. “Without the tutors watching or anything, just us on our own for months and months. And I just wondered if anything’s ever gone terribly wrong. Like in a Lord of the Flies kind of a way.”

“You’re worried you’re going to be impaled on the spikes of your wimple,” Oliver said, taking a cheerful bite and grinning across at Stanley as he chewed. “Suffocated by that big black dress. Death by habit.”

“So nothing’s ever gone wrong?”

“Well, if not, maybe this year’s the year.” Oliver enjoyed Stanley’s frowning distress for a moment longer, then reached across and slapped him on the arm. “Hey man, you’re awesome in that role. Everyone always says so as soon as you leave the room.”

“I didn’t mean that,” Stanley said. He drummed his hands on the tabletop and sighed.

August

Stanley left the Institute buildings at a brisk trot, hugging a long woollen trench coat around his body. He was wearing a suit and tie, and his shoes were shined brightly black. He took the stairs two by two, broke apart from the rest of the group and set off across the quadrangle with his head inclined and his shoulders slightly bowed, his hands clenched in fists inside the pockets of his coat. He walked swiftly, and soon he had left the rest of the group and was walking down the boulevard alone.

Behind him, a motley clutch of characters from Tennessee Williams, Steven Berkoff, Ionesco and David Hare milled about briefly before settling upon an objective and dispersing likewise. One of the girls had costumed herself in a taffeta dress that was cut above the knee, and she looked uncomfortable and underdressed in the chill of the afternoon. Her bare legs were blood mottled and the fine fur on her arms was standing on end.

Stanley had resolved to circumnavigate the park, detouring to avoid the children’s playground, then looping carefully around the lake and returning to the Institute buildings from the opposite side. He withdrew further into the collar of his shirt and lengthened his stride. He supposed he was probably being followed: the Heads of Acting, Movement, Improvisation and Voice had all left the premises earlier that morning to station themselves around the city quarter.

“You mustn’t leave the bounded area,” the Head of Acting had said again and again, tapping the illuminated area with his forefinger and looking down past the steel arm of the projector at the shifting mass of students straining in their seats. He was dressed in canvas trousers and an open-necked shirt, looking only slightly jauntier than usual but nevertheless infected by the same giddy thrill of disguise as the students, some of whom were almost unrecognizable in their pinned costumes and period hair.

Stanley turned off the boulevard and passed through the blunt-tipped iron gates into the botanical gardens. A suited man passed him on the gravel path and gave him a long look. Stanley almost looked away, but quickly remembered he was Joe Pitt, and looked hard at the man for the longest possible instant, not breaking his gaze until he had passed. He felt an unpleasant flicker of guilt at the deception that did not dissolve when the man rounded the corner of the hothouse and disappeared. Stanley thought he saw out of the corner of his eye the Head of Improvisation sitting on a park bench in a pool of sunlight and holding a newspaper on her lap. He drew his coat tighter around himself and walked on.

Pretending to be somebody else gave Stanley a curious feeling of privacy in himself. The inner thoughts and processings of his character, visible only as he chose to make them visible, across his face and in the lie of his hands and through the curve of his posture, enclosed his own thoughts like an atmosphere, parceling the real Stanley up beneath a double-layered film, the inner and the outer Joe Pitt. He felt snug, as if tightly curled within a nut, safe in the knowledge that nobody could truly see him beneath the double fog of his disguise.

“Hello,” said a small voice, and suddenly there was the girl from the wings, the music-lesson girl, coming toward him with her saxophone case slung over her shoulder like a quiver. She grinned, the first properly uncensored grin he had seen on her face, and said, “Are you following me?”

“If I was following you, wouldn’t I be walking behind you?” Stanley said.

“I meant stalking.” The girl was still grinning, now flicking her gaze up and down Stanley’s overcoat, which was a little too large for him, the sleeves hanging over his fingertips as if he was a child dressing up in the clothes of his father.

“Oh. I’m doing an acting exercise for drama school,” Stanley said without thinking. As soon as he’d said it, he awaited a sinking feeling in his stomach: he’d failed the exercise; someone would surely have seen and noted it. “If you tell anyone that you are doing an exercise, or describe the Institute or your profession in any way,” the Head of Acting had said, “it goes without saying that you will automatically fail.”

“I have to stay in character all morning,” Stanley said, rushing on. “Those are the rules.” The sinking feeling didn’t come. He felt curiously lighter, standing here in the park with this pretty upturned girl, and he flapped his oversized coat around him and laughed.

“Do you want to get a coffee later?” he asked. “When I’m done being Joe Pitt.”

“Okay,” Isolde said shyly. “Who’s Joe Pitt?”

“Well, he dresses like this,” Stanley said. “And beyond that, I couldn’t really say.”

“You’re not doing a very good job of being him then,” Isolde said.

“I guess not.”

Stanley located the feeling of lightness: he felt real, more real than he had felt in months.

“How do I know you’re not acting now?” Isolde said, which was almost a cliché but he forgave her because of his feeling of lightness and because of how pretty she looked, with her pink ears and her woollen coat and her mittens clapped together against the cold.

“How do I know that you’re not?” Stanley said.

Isolde smiled and made a funny gesture, turning out her hands and lifting herself up onto her tiptoes to show that her whole body didn’t know. Stanley felt a rush of happiness surge over him like a tide.

“I guess that’s a risk we’re going to have to take, then,” he said.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the Head of Improvisation approaching.

“I have to go and finish my walk now,” he said. “But I’ll wait for you under the ginkgo tree.”

“I finish at five,” Isolde said.

“I know,” Stanley said. “I’ve been watching.”

July

“You have to follow through with the action to the very end,” the Head of Movement called out crossly. His tired hand was smoothing the hair on his crown, over and over. “Right now it’s obvious that you both know the scene is about to end, and you relax before the lights go down. It’s only a split-second thing, but it matters. You have to give the illusion that the scene is going to keep going on, behind the curtain. You have to follow through with the action to the very end. Again.”

Stanley and the girl again assumed their position, Stanley standing with his palm cupped against the girl’s cheek and his index finger slipped inside the tight little bud of her ear. They said their lines again, and tried not to loosen or slacken their bodies as the scene came to its invisible end.

“It is what I want. This is what I want,” was Stanley’s last line, and he gave her jaw a tight little shake with the clutch of his hand, for emphasis. The girl looked up at him. The scene ended.

Stanley’s face was close to hers and her cheek was in his hand. He followed the action through: he leaned down and kissed her like he meant it.

“Oh, for God’s sake!” the Head of Movement exploded, and the two of them jumped hastily apart. “When did I say kiss her? I said, Follow through with the action to the very end.”

“I thought that was what you meant,” Stanley said, with hot embarrassment, looking out past the lights. The girl wiped her mouth and looked at the floor.

“We are not going to have the curtain come down on the two of you pashing like a couple of kids!” the Head of Movement shouted. “Think about the scene, man!”

The Head of Movement did not usually yell. He was generally less vicious than the Head of Acting, less inclined to shame or fracture his students, less given to little bursts of irritation or cold contempt. But today he was scratchy, surly and tight chested as if short of breath, and as he glared up at the pair of them from his seat in the stalls he was smothered by a vast glove of anger and blame.

“What is it?” he said. “Just leaped at the opportunity, I suppose? What?”

The boy had a wounded look. He had been expecting congratulations, probably, praise for his physical commitment to the scene, his willingness to put personal considerations aside in the name of his art; he had been shamed, moreover, and shamed in front of a girl. The Head of Movement might well have destroyed all possibility of a relationship between the pair by this public shaming that caused them to flush and leap apart. The tutor knew it, and didn’t care. He was suddenly immensely irritated at them both, the boy with his fair lashes and vulnerable pout, the girl with her practiced look of nervous naïveté, worn thin.

“I just thought that’s what you meant,” Stanley said again. “Sorry.”

The Head of Movement did not speak for a moment. They were looking at him with faint pity now, he thought, as any teenager looks at an adult they believe to be utterly incapable of lust. They were looking at him as if they believed their awkward dry fumble against the fold of the curtain had somehow made him jealous; as if their collision had made him yearn for some lost youthful spontaneity of touch, and his outburst had only marked his dissatisfaction, his recognition of his own immeasurable loss. The Head of Movement felt disgusted. He wanted to turn his head and spit on the floor. He wanted to mount the seven steps to the stage and tear them from their cocoon of self-absorption and conceit. He wanted to shout and make them see that he was not jealous, that he could not be jealous of any pathetic hot-light kiss between two ill-made brats, and if anything what he felt was a profound nausea at what he had been forced to watch.

“Again,” said the Head of Movement sourly, and threw himself back into his chair.

September

Stanley was waiting for Isolde under the ginkgo tree when she emerged from her lesson, trotting down the sunken stone steps and across the courtyard to embrace him and kiss him briefly on the mouth.

“Look at you, you little gypsy,” Stanley said as he stepped back. “All your bags and everything.”

“Fridays are horrible,” Isolde said. “Sax and PE and art all in the same afternoon.”

“Gypsy girl.”

Isolde exhaled and flapped her arms and then grinned at Stanley, a broad, honest grin that lit her up completely. It was the same unashamed openness that had lured Mr. Saladin to Victoria, only it was transplanted here on to her sister, the same smile on a different face. Stanley leaned forward and kissed her on the nose.

“So when am I going to hear you play?” he said.

“I thought you could hear from down here in the quad.”

“But I’m never sure which sax is you and which is your teacher,” Stanley said with a grin. “I might be thinking you’re much better than you actually are.”

“Our saxes actually have really different voices,” Isolde said. “If you know to listen for that sort of thing. My mouthpiece is vulcanized rubber and hers is metal. The metal piece makes a really different sound.”

“Like how speaking voices are different from each other.”

“Yeah,” Isolde said. “Right. Like the difference between a woman and a girl.”

The stone building behind them was now unlit, all the curtains pulled and the lights doused. Inside, the offices were locked for the night and cooling now in the gathering dusk. On the attic level the saxophone teacher’s window was dark, as if she had locked the studio after Isolde’s departure and departed herself for the night, but if you looked up through the ginkgo branches you would see an inky figure standing by the curtain and looking down into the courtyard at the pair standing together under the ginkgo tree. Stanley and Isolde did not look up. Stanley crushed Isolde in a one-arm hug and together they walked away, talking quietly with their heads together, until they were swallowed by the cloisters and the branches, and they disappeared.

September

“Do you know why you are here?” the Head of Movement said as Stanley sat down.

“Probably my Outing,” Stanley said, hazarding a guess.

The Head of Movement raised his eyebrows and twitched up his chin sharply. “Your Outing?” he said.

“I must have failed the exercise,” Stanley said, suddenly realizing that he should be cautious, and trying to look a little more innocent and perplexed.

“I don’t think so,” the Head of Movement said. “I have your report from the Head of Improvisation and she said she was very much impressed. You were Joe Pitt.”

“Yeah,” Stanley said.

“I believe her report was very admiring.”

“Oh.”

Stanley tried to shrug and smile, but all he managed was a shiver and a grimace.

“Were you expecting to fail?” the Head of Movement asked, peering at him closely.

“No,” Stanley said quickly. “So I guess I don’t know why I’m here.”

The Head of Movement sat back and placed the palms of his hands on the desk before him. He was wearing a long-practiced look of grave disappointment, and Stanley’s heart began to hammer. The Head of Movement said, “Somebody has complained about you. Somebody has laid a very serious complaint about you. Do you know what that might be?”

Stanley looked bewildered. “No,” he said. “Who? What was it?”

The Head of Movement did not speak immediately. He looked at Stanley with something between pity and disgust, and Stanley felt himself shrivel.

“A music teacher who teaches in a studio in the north quad,” he said, “laid a complaint with us that you had been harassing her students.”

“What?” Against his will Stanley felt himself begin to flush.

“Harassing her students,” the Head of Movement went on. “In particular a young girl in the fifth form. Does this mean anything to you?”

Stanley sat for a moment without speaking.

“Nothing?” the Head of Movement said.

He drew the silence out between them carefully, like a measured breath. There was a dreadful sinking feeling in the pit of Stanley’s stomach. He sat and stared at the glossy sheen of the table under the Head of Movement’s hands, and said nothing.

“Normally,” the Head of Movement said, “we wouldn’t intervene in a case like this, of course. Normally we’d treat you like an adult and expect you to sort it out of your own accord. But the fact that this music teacher has taken up the issue directly with us—you see that we are compelled to talk with you about it. You see that.”

“Yes,” Stanley said automatically, and he nodded his head.

“The music teacher was very concerned about her students’ safety, given the proximity of her studio to this Institute,” the Head of Movement said.

Stanley nodded again.

“What happened, Stanley?” the Head of Movement said. “What’s all this about?”

Stanley looked up quickly to meet the Head of Movement’s gaze, and then drew his eyes away, turning his head to look at the framed posters and theater programs above the filing cabinet. They were ordered chronologically, lined up like a simple recipe for the Head of Movement’s life, the plotted path to where he sat right now at his empty desk with his bare feet together and a frown upon his face.

“I don’t know,” Stanley said at last. “I don’t know anything about a saxophone teacher.”

“I said music teacher.”

Stanley drew in his breath sharply and again glanced at the Head of Movement, even quicker this time, as if the tutor’s haggard face was either very hot or very bright, and his eyes could not stand to rest for long.

“I knew she played sax,” he said quietly, and the words were like a horrible admission, a statement of guilt. A little cough in the back of his throat broke the last word in two.

“I assume you are keeping quiet so as not to incriminate yourself,” the Head of Movement said coldly, after another wretched pause.

“I just—”

In truth Stanley simply had nothing to say. He shrugged, more to communicate helplessness than insolence, but the Head of Movement’s eyes flashed and Stanley saw that the gesture had angered him. The Head of Movement’s coldness somehow amplified now, and he pressed his palms flatter upon the tabletop.

“Because the young girl in question is in the fifth form,” the Head of Movement said, “you understand that she is not yet sixteen.”

Stanley was still nodding.

“Because she is not yet sixteen,” the Head of Movement said, “you understand that any form of sexual relations an adult might have, or have had, with this girl would be a crime. I’m speaking in my capacity as your tutor here.”

Stanley nodded again. He was vaguely aware that he had gone white and that his mouth had started to fill with saliva in an awful tongue-shrinking preface to vomiting. He felt nauseous and all of a sudden found his sense of smell sharpened acutely: he could smell the damp wool of his tutor’s jacket hanging on the back of the door, the paper twist of nuts on the dresser, cold coffee pooling in the bottom of a cold mug. He felt his head reel.

The Head of Movement surveyed him for a moment. He had a wide-eyed straining look about him, as if the worst was still to come. He leaned forward, puckering his lips slightly in a dry kiss as he made a careful choice of words.

“Stanley,” he said, “I want you to think about something very carefully. You don’t have to answer, I just want you to think about it. If the parents of this young girl ended up being in the audience when you produce your first-year production at the end of this week, would it change anything? If they were there?”

It was a strange question and Stanley didn’t understand it. He stared at the Head of Movement blankly and said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

“This girl that you have been—”

“Isolde.”

“Yes. She has a sister, am I right?”

“I don’t know,” Stanley said. “Why?”

The Head of Movement was now looking at him with open disgust. “Oh, come on, Stanley, let’s not dance around like this. This is ridiculous.”

Stanley swallowed and reached up to wipe a film of sweat from his upper lip. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I must be missing something.”