The Rehearsal

TEN

“So we agree that sexuality is an issue that we’re all interested in, at least,” the boy Felix said loudly, the first time the first-years met to discuss the devised theater project and the King of Diamonds playing card. Felix was bossy and pert and did not understand the humor of what he had just said, scowling at a pair of boys on the far lip of the circle who faintly snickered.

“I liked the idea of using found stories,” one of the girls said. “From the media and our communities and all that, taking them and using them and making them theatrical. I liked that idea.”

“All right,” Felix said graciously, drawing with a fat felt-tipped pen a spiky cloud around the word SEXUALITY. The others watched. At the beginning of the year Felix had labored to snare the role of the group’s organizing mind, to the irritation of most of the students, who looked at the tiny protrusion of his tongue as he wrote and felt they could do better.

“Then what about that story that Grace brought in?” Felix said when he had completed the bubble. “The teacher–student thing at Scabby Abbey.”

He used the nickname to show them that although he was organizing the group, they were not allowed to resent him or regard him as a teacher-figure.

“My sister’s at Abbey Grange,” one of the boys said. “In sixth form. She reckons they don’t know the half of it yet. What she heard was that after all the girl’s friends found out, the teacher kept them quiet for a few months by paying them out. Mostly buying them booze, on behalf.”

“But wasn’t the girl a seventh former? So most of her friends would have been eighteen anyway.”

“It’s what I heard,” the boy said, shrugging.

“How did they get caught in the end?” somebody asked.

“I heard it was another teacher,” the boy said. “The guy had been dating someone else on staff, and then they broke up and she was the one who found him with the girl. That’s what Polly said.”

“I thought it was her friends,” one of the girls said. “They caught on and went to the principal and dobbed her in.”

“I heard that it wasn’t just the one girl who was abused,” somebody said, “it was a whole bunch of them—he was playing them all at the same time. She was just the one who got caught.”

“Do we know whether anything actually happened?” one of the girls put in. “What if nothing actually happened between her and the teacher at all?”

“They had evidence. Like there were some of her clothes at his house. And there was a toothbrush.”

“A toothbrush doesn’t mean rape,” the girl said, with a sharp little laugh. “A toothbrush means the opposite of rape. It doesn’t even mean a one-night stand. A toothbrush means you’ve got foresight. It’s like if they found pajamas at his house, little girly flannel pajamas, pastel pink with a pattern of clouds. It can’t be evidence. It’s an investment. A toothbrush is an investment.”

There was a silence as they all digested this new concept.

Then one of the boys said, “Wasn’t he like sixty?”

“He wasn’t that old. There was a photo in the paper last week. He’s got brown hair.”

“So we don’t really know very much at all,” Felix said crossly, swiping his fringe away from his face. He was feeling the helpless boiling irritation of an officious person struggling to control a group too large and original for him. He uncapped his pen and wrote ISSUES at the top of his butcher’s sheet.

“We need to make really awesome use of the card itself,” one of the girls said. “Playing cards need to be an integral part of the performance, not just some little byproduct scene that’s tacked on.”

“I think that’s a given,” Felix said. “Well, let’s talk about the card then, and the different ways we could use it.” He underlined the word ISSUES, recapped his pen with a careful snap and looked expectantly at them all.

“Just the one card, or the whole pack?”

“I reckon the whole pack,” somebody said. “It’s a really great aesthetic for costuming and we can use it to shape the play kind of, like if we have four acts, each with a suit name, or thirteen scenes that each have a card name in a particular suit.”

“That’s a good idea.”

“Yeah! We can dress up like the court cards, with their weapons and stuff. Don’t they all have weapons?”

“What if we made up a game? A card game that we could use as the focus of the play. If you draw a red card you will be attracted to women. If you draw a black card you will be attracted to men.”

“Yeah, and every individual card could stand for some sort of particular—I don’t know. Some sort of particular habit or trait or something. Something to do with sexuality or whatever.”

“If you draw His Nobs, you leave before the morning?” one of the boys said, and everyone laughed.

“What’s His Nobs?”

“One of the jacks in cribbage.”

“Hang on,” said Felix, scribbling. “We’re going too fast.”

“We’re going fine,” one of the boys said. “You’re just writing too slow.”

Felix felt his authority begin to ebb. He scowled and wished he had appointed a scribe.

“What if we make the whole play a kind of fantasy, like set in a fantasy world or whatever, where as soon as you turn a certain age you have to draw a card?”

“You get sent to a fortune-teller or something—”

“Like a tarot reader.”

“Yeah! It’s like a coming-of-age ritual thing. A rite of passage.”

“The card becomes like your identity card. You keep it with you always.”

“You can’t show it to anybody.”

“So queens might mean drag or something, and if you drew a queen you’d have to take up drag.”

“Queen—like drag queen!”

“That’s what I meant.”

“Is that what we really believe, though?” Stanley said. “Do we really believe it’s like that—that your identity is dealt out to you, given to you the moment you grow up, and from then on it becomes your—your motif or something? Like a badge?”

“Yeah,” the first boy said. “Do you not believe that?”

Stanley opened his mouth but then closed it again. He wasn’t sure.

“But doesn’t that mean you’d have one card for the rest of your life?” somebody said.

“Yes,” the emphatic boy said. “Unless you gamble it away. In a high-stakes game of chance. In a deadly game of chance in an underground bar, where you run the risk of ending up with nothing.”

“We could do that really well.”

“It would dramatize really well.”

“Really steam-punk.”

“I reckon.”

“Anyway,” one of the girls said crossly, “it doesn’t matter what we actually believe. It’s a great idea. The Head of Acting would go nuts for it. It’s just the sort of crossover thing he loves.”

“What do you mean, crossover?”

“With the teacher–student thing. Using stories from the media. Did anyone see the production a few years back about the witch hunt, and they had actors in disguise all through the audience pretending to be members of the public?”

“Yeah, I saw that.”

“Until you didn’t know who was acting and who wasn’t, all around you. It was really scary, actually. The season totally sold out. They had to extend by a week.”

There was a small hush as they all imagined extending their opening season by a week. Felix had stopped writing and was looking around with his pen limp in his hand.

“I like the Abbey Grange idea,” someone said.

“So do I.”

“What are we going off, though? Just a few articles in a local paper? That isn’t enough.”

“We’ll have to research it. We’ll have to find out more.”

“Because at the end of it everything collapses,” one of the girls said. “For the girl, the victim, the one who was abused. It all comes down around her like a castle of cards.”

The blinds were open on the corridor side when Stanley and the girl passed, carrying their costumes down to the art department. They heard the noise and turned their heads, and then they stopped and moved closer to the glass, to watch.

A boy was howling, squirming and bent almost double with his hands at his groin. The Head of Voice was crouched over him, leaning right over with her feet planted sturdy and apart and her cheek against his, and her plump arms around him, clasping him tight. She was muttering urgently and inaudibly into his ear as he howled. His howl was unpitched and irregular and ever-changing, morphing into a guttural hum, a throaty kind of gurgle, even a bat-shriek that was too high and whispery to be heard. He appeared to be trying to twist away from the Head of Voice but she was clamped tightly to his back and the boy could only writhe and struggle. His eyes were closed.

“What’s happening to him?” Stanley whispered.

“Remedial Voice,” the girl whispered back. “He’s working through a lot of stuff from when he was a kid, I think. Really bad stuff that’s all locked inside.”

The boy was slack faced and open mouthed and his expression showed no pain, but the noise he was making was raw and brutish and full of hurt. It was frightening, this terrible noise coming out of this boy’s calm unworried throat. If it weren’t for the leaping of his Adam’s apple, Stanley would have thought the noise recorded.

“It’s horrible,” Stanley said.

The girl shot him a disdainful look, as if he couldn’t hope to understand. “Better than releasing it any other way,” she said. “Putting kittens in a microwave or whatever.”

“Is that what he’s doing? Releasing it?”

“Course,” the girl said, and tossed her head. “That’s her specialty. Head of Voice. People hire her out, outside the Institute—she goes to people’s private homes and stuff. It’s like a special type of therapy. She’s really good.”

They watched the boy howl for a while, thrashing stiffly with the dead weight of the Head of Voice clamped around him. His expression changed. He peeled his lips back so all his teeth were exposed and his nose was wrinkled in a snarl, and inside his mouth the hump of his tongue rose up, quivering and taut. He snapped his jaw and barked a little, short gasping barks from the back of his throat like a cough. The Head of Voice had begun crooning in his ear now, a gentle private lullaby that welled up underneath the frenzied barking and caused the boy to wither and gasp. Stanley felt suddenly ashamed.

“Come on. We should go,” he said, and tore his gaze away. The girl was already gone.

One Saturday afternoon in spring Stanley was huddled in a cubicle in the empty art department and trying without success to untangle the bobbin on his sewing machine. He was near finishing his Queen of Spades costume, sewing in a large waxy piece of cardboard behind the patterned front of the bust to give himself a more angular thrust. He had spent all morning struggling with the wire halo that fitted around his forehead. The headpiece was spangled with wire spokes designed to lift the geometric wimple higher off his head. After nearly five hours squinting at the seams and bruising his fingertips as he molded the rough end of the wire, he was finally satisfied that the effect was rather good. He was wearing the wimple now as he bent over the sewing machine, obscured to the rest of the room by a cluster of colonial furniture that had been carried to the art department for painting and left over the weekend to dry. All around him was the sweet smell of acrylic paint, as always at the Institute laced with detergent so the paint could be easily removed when the production closed.

Stanley bent over his costume. In his research for the production he had come to know his card very well: he knew that in the traditional French deck of cards the Queen of Spades was supposed to represent Joan of Arc, and in the game of Hearts the Queen of Spades was so unlucky she was known as the Black Bitch. He knew that she was the only queen to carry a scepter as well as a daisy flower, and for that reason she was sometimes called the Bedpost Queen. He had pored over the court cards in his deck at home for such a long time that he found the red-and-black images appearing after he closed his eyes at night. He disentangled the bobbin finally from the thready mess below the foot, and snipped the stray threads away. He pinched the end of the bobbin-thread in his fingers to pull it through the notch in the bobbin-holder, and heard the spool spin cleanly.

The door opened and Stanley caught a faint swell of music from the dance hall near the foyer, where a group of schoolchildren were taking their Saturday lessons in jazz.

“In here, then,” he heard somebody say, “Nobody should disturb us in here. It’s a bugger they’re using the staffroom. Sit down there if you like.”

The voice belonged to the Head of Movement. Stanley was still intently returning the bobbin to its tiny hinged cavity in the base of the sewing machine, a scrap of thread in his mouth, and he did not reveal himself at once. He wound the wheel at the side of the sewing machine and watched the needle plunge down to retrieve the bobbin-thread, bringing it up in a little scarlet loop that he flicked up with the tip of his scissors and tugged gently outward. He was so intent on the task that when it was done the Head of Movement and his guest were already in mid-conversation, speaking easily and with great relief, as two people who have longed for time alone to talk.

“They all want it,” the Head of Movement was saying. “Not just the first-years—everyone, right up until the day they leave.”

“Why doesn’t the school offer that sort of thing, then? One-on-one tutorials or whatever. If it’s what the students want.”

As slowly as he could, Stanley leaned sideways around the edge of his cubicle and saw, through the tiny sliver of view between an upended wing armchair and a sideboard, the central figure from the Theater of Cruelty exercise, the masked boy from second year who had slapped and shorn and nearly drowned his victim on the stage. Stanley watched him for a second, his smooth face unmasked now and taut with eager concentration as he listened to the Head of Movement speak.

“With you,” the Head of Movement was saying, “I think that this Institute will fall short in several respects. That’s what I wanted to say yesterday—I recommend something postgraduate, even an internship. The mime school. You’re going to be unfinished at the end of next year. Unfinished and hungry.”

The Head of Movement was speaking earnestly but without the clipped, rehearsed quality that usually characterized his speech. Stanley regarded the pair of them jealously through his sliver. The boy was sitting with his leg hiked up under him and his fingers stroking the frayed upholstery, nodding carefully as the Head of Movement spoke, and suddenly it struck Stanley what was so odd about the situation: they are friends, he thought in wonder.

“I value your opinion completely,” the unmasked boy said, leaning in close, and in that instant Stanley remembered the golden boy, greased and glittering like an artificial dish sprayed with lacquer to be photographed for a cuisine magazine. The golden boy had gleamed, and this boy was gleaming now.

Stanley swallowed and felt a bitter injustice in his throat. He recalled a vision of himself, in the Head of Movement’s office, pushing away tears as he shouted in complaint. Even now he felt a flicker of self-congratulation that he had responded to the Theater of Cruelty exercise in that violent way. Why hadn’t the Head of Movement been impressed, then? Why hadn’t the tutor relaxed into a rare and sudden intimacy, inspired by Stanley’s fragile openness to confess a vulnerability of his own? Why this boy, Stanley thought, this smooth-faced unmasked boy who was no better or worse than the rest of them?

“It’s funny,” the Head of Movement was saying now, “in many ways you’ve really… well. Woken me up, I suppose.”

“My growth is projected on to him… it is found in him,” the unmasked boy quoted, and through his secret sliver Stanley saw both of them smile.

“Shared or double birth,” the Head of Movement said. “Not the instruction of a pupil but utter opening to another person.” He was silent a moment, and then he added, “Well remembered.”

They sat there and looked at their shoes, enjoying the shallow silence of the room. Behind the cold discolored flank of the sewing machine, Stanley watched and felt bitter. He waited two long hours, with cramp in both knees and a terrible hunger gnawing at his insides, until the boy and the Head of Movement finally ended their conversation and left the room.

“Let’s improvise it,” one of the first-year boys suggested. “Let’s start with what we had last week and see where that goes. I really liked what was happening with the two characters together, both of them saying things that the other doesn’t really hear, like neither of them is fully present for the other.”

“We’ll just start rolling,” one of the girls said. “First Mr. Saladin and then the girl, rotating like that. Anyone can get up at any time. Anyone can play either of them, doesn’t matter who. We’ll just try and keep the scene moving and see what happens.”

“We’ll get a real dialogue going.”

“That’s right.”

There was a brief pause as everyone digested the formula and swiftly began to prepare what they would later say. Then one of the boys got to his feet. He transformed into a different person as he stood up, a man rising like a phoenix out of the pallid, ashy figure that had been the boy. Once he was standing, hands on hips and his jaw thrust back and his bare feet apart and solid on the floor, nobody doubted who he had become.

The man said, “When the girls spoke of it, they said all the way, as if the process was a passage, a voyage, some sort of ritual first crossing of a dimly charted sea. Victoria said those words to me—all the way. She asked a question. She asked, Do you want to go all the way with me? as if her departure were already scheduled, her moorings already cast, and I could simply choose to board and join her, to sail away with her and disappear. All the way, she said. Every inch of it. Every inch of that windblown ocean-salted bucking rolling passage. Every inch.”

He sat down. There was the briefest of pauses again, and then Stanley stood up. He stood with his weight on one leg like a girl, one arm crossed over his chest and holding his hip, the other gesticulating with a crooked elbow and a flat palm.

“He took a long time to answer the question,” Stanley said. “At first he gave this little shout of a laugh and gathered me up into him and kissed my crown. Sometimes when he kissed me he’d make this keening sound in the back of his throat, like a puppy almost, some kind of ghostly underwater voicing of some deep-felt feeling, right inside. Once he burrowed his head into the pilled blue wool of my armpit and moaned out loud and he said, I just feel so blessed, Victoria. I feel so incredibly, incredibly blessed. We were sitting there on the cream leather sofa in his living room and I said, Do you want to go all the way with me? and he said, Oh, you precious, precious little girl. Not yet. Not just yet. Let’s just enjoy the innocence for a moment, before it dissolves and we can never have it back again. Let’s just take this moment to enjoy how much is still to come.”

Stanley sat down. All around him the students were stern and glassy. They had only half-listened to his performance, all of them preoccupied already with the inward rehearsal of what they would say when they got up in front of the rest, and how they would contrive to make the words seem spontaneous and unrehearsed and pure.

One of the girls got up. Like any girl who tries to play a grown man, her performance was disproportionate and slightly embarrassing. She let her voice deepen and placed her feet wide apart and assumed a manner that was overly earnest and gruff. She raised her chin and said, “Could it have been one of the others, if this girl had never dared? Could it just as easily have been the girl to her right or left, another saxophonist in the front row of the jazz band, some girl whose breasts were smaller, whose gaze was sharper, whose fingernails were squatter, maybe, and poorer in shape, whose jersey was coming unraveled at the hem? All of them have smiled at me, looked hard at me, laughed with me. When we won our section at the high school jazz festival, some of them even hugged me. Would it have been different, with one of them?”

Another girl got up as this Mr. Saladin was returning to her seat on the floor. The new girl spread her hands and said, “It’s funny to think that I never saw him wake up. I never rolled over to see him still sleeping, never saw his eyelids waxed and still in the pale morning light, never burrowed down into the sweet hot breath of the bed and felt him stir and lift his heavy sleepy arms to let me in. We had no mornings-after. We had no nights, no long uninterrupted nights where we could sleep and sleep and sleep. We had no silence. We never breakfasted together. We never swam together, shopped together, walked to the cinema together; I never called him at work to check when he was due to come home; I never pegged his laundry on the line. I never knew his mother or his nephews or his life.

“All these are adult things, and they’re all things I never had with him. People say, now, that I was a child wrongfully thrust into an adult’s role. People call it an adult relationship, illicit and untimely and premature. In fact it was the opposite. It was Mr. Saladin who had the adolescent relationship, all backseat whispers and doorway fumbles and getting home before midnight, waiting for the parents to go to sleep or leave the house, sending messages in code and on the sly. I didn’t play the adult. Mr. Saladin played the child.”

Opening night drew nearer and nearer. Without a central script, the devised performance did not seem to be approaching any kind of finished state, but merely began blooming and swelling in odd places, like an ancient wrinkled party balloon that was being forcibly refilled with breath. Tempers in the group ran high, and fractures began to form around the strongest personalities as the dissatisfied students met in whispering mutinous pairs in doorways around the Institute.

“Andy strutting around in that costume like that makes me sick,” was how the whispers ran. “Thinks he’s God’s gift to the stage. Every time he walks past I want to stick out a leg and trip him up.”

“Do you know how hard it is to act in a scene with Oliver if Esther’s around? Today she was practically humping his leg.”

“If Felix clears his throat like that one more time I swear I am going to clock him.”

“What is this show, like a two-hour tribute to one guy? Why does Sam get so much stage time? It’s not like he’s the cream of the crop or anything.”

The real risk was that these dissatisfied students, the whisperers, angry at the comparative insignificance of their parts and sick of the officious prodding from the others in the group, might want so much to disassociate themselves from the performance that on opening night they might intentionally act poorly, calling deliberate attention, through their ham acting, to the distance between the actor and the role. This became a tacit threat; it hung in the air around them, and the actors became wary and mistrusting, hugging their costumes tighter to their chests as if they were trying to hold the fractured shell of their ego in one place with the force of their hands.

Leaving the Institute after a rehearsal one day, Stanley bundled his bag of take-home props under his arm and threw his head back for a moment to enjoy the pale afternoon sun. He had left quietly, through the backstage area and out the players’ door into the alley, slipping away from his scowling, shadow-eyed classmates who were still arguing as they stacked the chairs away and cleared the rehearsal room for the next morning.

He rounded the corner into the northern quadrangle and to his surprise came face to face with the girl who had appeared so oddly and suddenly in the wings of the auditorium stage, the wide-eyed schoolgirl who had collided with him in the velvet black. He stalled a moment as he recognized her, again recalling the brief and breathy impact in the dark, the girl gasping and stricken and looking down at him in mute apology as he fell.

When his scene was over he had returned to the wings to seek her out, but she had disappeared.

“There was somebody watching,” he had said later to the boy Felix, as in their dressing rooms they wiggled out of their costumes and returned their wigs to the faceless polystyrene heads that lined the top of the dresser. “From the wings. She must have come in by the players’ door. I guess it was open.”

“Did you tell her to get out?” Felix said, not really interested. He was unlacing his bodice aggressively, and Stanley heard the worn and dirty laces rip.

“She disappeared,” Stanley said, watching as Felix saw his mistake and swore under his breath. “I guess it’s just weird when people watch from the wings and we don’t know it. It’s like an unfair advantage. If someone had crept in through the foyer and was watching in the stalls I wouldn’t have cared.”

Isolde was sitting on the slat bench underneath the ginkgo tree. She was wearing her Abbey Grange school uniform, and was swinging her legs slightly as she flicked the pages of a dog-eared novel, curving her body over the book with her hair falling free about her face. As he approached he saw more clearly now how pretty she was, with full cheeks and a pouting mouth and a slender upturned nose that she was stroking absently with one finger as she read. As Stanley neared her she looked up and gave a puzzled start as she recognized him.

“It’s you,” Stanley said. “From the wings.”

“Oh, yeah,” the girl said, and drew her lower lip underneath her front teeth. She looked up at him uncertainly, like a puppy waiting to be admonished.

“You made me miss my cue,” Stanley said, and then they both blushed at his rudeness.

“Sorry,” Isolde said. “I heard the drum and I just followed the sound. I guess I just wandered in.”

There was a little pause.

“It was only a rehearsal,” Stanley said at last. She nodded politely and pressed her lips together in a kind of apologetic smile. Stanley pointed at her music case to change the subject. “What do you play?”

“Alto saxophone,” Isolde said. “My teacher’s studio is up there.”

“She must be rich, to afford a studio here,” Stanley said. “The rent is insane. I know because the Drama Institute were going to buy out way more of these buildings than they actually did, but it was too expensive.” He was growing hot with embarrassment now, the unease spreading like a scarlet ink-stain over his chest and into the stippled hollow of his throat. He knew that it would be visible above the open collar of his shirt, spreading up to his chin like an old-fashioned ruff. He wished he had not sought this girl out, that he had walked past her without speaking, maybe even given her a calm and cryptic nod.

“I don’t know if she’s rich,” Isolde said.

“Are you any good?” Stanley asked.

As soon as he said it he felt ashamed at having asked such an unanswerable question of this round-faced, blinking girl. He hoped she would not ask him the same question back. But Isolde only said, “I’m sitting Grade Eight,” and shrugged to show that the question didn’t much matter to her anyway.

“I hear you guys sometimes,” Stanley said. “Well, probably not you specifically, but the music travels down to where we are.”

“Yeah, I hear you guys sometimes too,” Isolde said, inexplicably blushing now too. “Mostly drums and shouting.”

“And screaming probably,” Stanley said, trying to make a joke out of it, but Isolde just smiled and said, “No, I’ve never heard screaming.”

“Okay,” said Stanley, flapping his arms. “Well, I guess I’ll see you around.” He had meant it to sound aloof, but instead it sounded expectant, as if he were anticipating another chance meeting. He looked away from her to show he didn’t care, out over the cobbles at the pigeons and the banked rim of litter framing the courtyard with a little crust of silver and white.

“Okay,” Isolde said, giving him a curious look. She made no move to take up her novel again, and followed him with her eyes as he stumbled away from her and across the quad, the bag of props slipping from under his arm.

“Stanley,” the Head of Acting said, “I want you to become your father.”

Stanley nodded tentatively. He was standing with his legs slightly apart and his hands behind his back. All the other students were sitting on the floor and looking up at him, hugging their knees tight against their ribs.

“This is a question-and-answer session,” the Head of Acting said, smoothing the page in front of him calmly with the flat of his hand. He was sitting at a desk to one side, his legs crossed at the knee, one bare white foot rotating slowly to relax the ankle joint. “We are going to start asking questions of you, addressing you directly as if you really are your father. I want you to stay in character for the next half hour. If you don’t know the real answer to any questions asked of you, then make them up. Don’t worry if you have to lie, just don’t break character.”

Stanley nodded again. He looked down for a moment, drew a breath, and then looked up again with his father’s wry twitching smile. He spread out his hands and said, “Hit me,” and all at once he was guiltless and unapologetic and mischievous.

“How well do you know your son Stanley?” the Head of Acting asked first.

Stanley raised his eyebrows and smiled. “He’s a good kid. We swap dirty jokes, that’s our thing. We get along fine.”

“What kind of dirty jokes?”

“Oh, we try and shock each other, back and forth. It’s just a game we play.” Stanley smiled again and looked at the Head of Acting coolly, as if he could see right through him, as if all of the Head of Acting’s wants and fears and hopes and faults were laid bare to him. The Head of Acting looked impassively back.

“Tell me one of the jokes that you’ve told your son,” he said.

“What’s the best thing about sleeping with a minor?”

“I don’t know,” said the Head of Acting politely.

“Getting paid eight dollars an hour for babysitting.”

There is a smothered giggle from one of the students on the floor. Stanley turned to flash him a smile. “Good, eh?” he said, twisting both wrists around to shake out his cuffs the way his father often did. “But it’s getting harder and harder to come up with anything original. I have my secretary look them up for me. Best job she’s ever had, she reckons.”

There was another ripple of laughter from the floor. Stanley grinned and drew himself up a little higher, placing both hands on his stomach and stroking the fabric of his shirt downward again and again. He contrived to make the movement look almost absentminded.

“Tell me one of the jokes that Stanley has told you,” the Head of Acting said.

Stanley paused and thought for a moment. “Can’t recall, sorry,” he said at last.

“Would you say you have a good relationship with Stanley?”

“We don’t see each other that often,” Stanley said, “but he’s a good kid. Good sense of humor. A bit sensitive maybe, but that isn’t going to hold him back. We get along fine.”

“What’s your son good at?”

“Stanley?” Stanley said, buying time the way his father would buy time. “He’s pretty well liked everywhere he goes, I think. He did well to get into drama school. Is he a good actor? I don’t know. You could probably tell me that.”

“So what would you say he was good at?”

“The arts,” Stanley said doubtfully, thinking hard. “He’s a romantic. He got that from me. He sure as hell didn’t get it from Roger.”

“Is Roger his stepfather?”

“Yes.”

“What’s he like?”

“Mild,” said Stanley. “Laughs even if he doesn’t think it’s funny. Runs out of things to say and then looks frightened, tries to escape. Sure he’s a nice man though. I wouldn’t marry him. But he’s a nice man.”

“Is he a good father to your son?”

“He’s a good stepfather to my son.”

“All right,” the Head of Acting said, turning to include the rest of the group huddled at Stanley’s feet. “Let’s open up the floor. Any of you can start asking Stanley’s father questions. Anything you like.”

“Do you see yourself in Stanley?” called out a girl in the front row.

“He’s a little more careful than I was at his age perhaps. He’s an innocent kid. I wasn’t as innocent as he is.”

“Do you think he’s still a virgin?” This was from one of the tousled boys in the back. The Head of Acting looked around sharply, but Stanley didn’t flinch. He shrugged and smiled.

“There’s a certain manner about him,” he said. “Something unspoiled. I couldn’t say. Wouldn’t want to say.”

“What’s the worst thing about him? His worst fault?”

Stanley looked down at the floor and drew his lips between his teeth to think. “Trusting people too much,” he said at last. “Trusting people who aren’t worthy of being trusted.”

“Have you told him that’s what you think?”

“No,” Stanley said. He flapped his arm irritably. “What would be the point of that? He needs to make mistakes or he’ll never get anywhere. And that’s not the sort of father I am.” He tossed his head impatiently and twitched out his cuffs again.

“What do you think Stanley thinks of you?”

“I think that underneath it all I disappoint him,” Stanley said. “He’s disappointed and he’s angry because on one level he really wants to rebel against me. He wants to tear down everything I stand for, make me see myself for what I am, but he can’t. I’m not that person in his life. He doesn’t need to rebel against me, because I’m not the one who makes the rules. I’m just the outsider, the man who turns up every now and again. If he tried to really rebel against me I’d just laugh at him. I think he resents me for that. It’s a disappointment to him.”

“You can see all that?” asked one of the boys from the floor with a pointed skepticism, as if to imply that Stanley wasn’t quite remembering the rules of the exercise. The Head of Acting was sitting back with his arms folded, watching Stanley intently with narrowed eyes.

“Yes,” Stanley said simply. He spread his hands again. “I’m a psychologist. It’s my job to see things.”

“We’ve got information!” the boy Marcus was crying out when Stanley slipped into the rehearsal room and took his seat on the floor. “Polly had a friend of a friend who was the abused girl’s best friend, and she knew basically everything. We interviewed her and wrote everything down!” He waved a little notebook in the air, flushed with his own success.

“What’s some of the stuff?” somebody called out.

“Like, he was her music teacher,” Marcus said, flipping open his notebook in excitement, “and she took private woodwind tutorials with him, for alto sax. And when they drove anywhere she used to lie on the floor in the backseat with a rug over her. And in his spare time he painted in oils, just as a hobby, only he never painted her because it would be evidence and he wasn’t that stupid. But he wanted to, he said, God he wanted to, because when she came all the blue-map veins on her sternum and her throat would all come up, rise to the surface of her skin just for an instant, and he always said that if he could capture her at just that moment, it would be the best thing in the world he had ever done. He knew it instinctively. They had a joke that he could do a series of paintings, an exhibition. He said he had never seen anything like it, someone who changed so much in that split-second instant, as they came. It was his favorite thing about her.”

Marcus flipped through his notebook, turning over the pages.

“Oh, there’s so much,” he said, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “We can use all of it. It’s so good, and there’s so much. We should buy this girl a present to say thank you. Polly knows her through orchestra.”

“We’ll make sure to get her complimentary tickets for opening night,” Felix said, already making a note on the side of his jotter. “And a voucher for nibbles.”

“Read out the rest,” someone called out. “Read out everything.”

Near the end of the first-year calendar was an underlined event described simply as “the Outing” and carefully timetabled so that the first-, second- and third-year actors were all required to participate together. The actors all assembled in the gymnasium, the second- and third-years smug and aloof in the security of having performed the exercise before.

The sixty-odd students were each assigned by the Head of Acting a part from a play. He had appointed the parts carefully, choosing students who bore a temperamental or physiological likeness to the characters he knew so well, and he smiled as he read each name off the long list he had penned into his notebook. “Henry, I’d like you to play Torvald,” he said. “I’m looking forward to seeing your Torvald. I’m guessing it’s going to be a very interesting mix”—as if Henry and Torvald were transparent overlays that could be placed upon each other to form an amalgam, a newer, brighter image that would be better and more vibrant than either the boy or the man on his own.

“Claire,” he was saying now, and turning to one of the third-years perched on the edge of the crowd. “I’ve chosen Susan from A Bed Among the Lentils for you. You’re playing out of your age range a bit, but I think you’ll manage beautifully.”

The rules of the exercise were relatively simple. The students were asked to leave the grounds of the Institute and disperse into the four city blocks that surrounded the Institute buildings. They had to remain in character for two hours. They were to be let out in small staggered batches, one batch leaving as another returned, over a period of three days. The tutors and the off-duty actors would be patrolling the city blocks, appearing to perform ordinary activities, like shopping and ordering coffee and jogging and meeting each other on the street to talk, but all the while observing the actors as they performed.

Dora. Septimus. Martha. Bo. The list went on. Stanley looked out the window and allowed his mind to wander, and soon found that he couldn’t distinguish the names of the characters from the names of the students assigned to become them.

“Stanley,” the Head of Acting called, jolting him out of his reverie. He looked up, but the Head of Acting wasn’t addressing him. “Stanley from A Streetcar Named Desire,” he was saying, and a student on the floor was nodding vigorously and scribbling down the name of the role in the margin of his exercise book. Stanley sighed and looked down at his hands.

“I know that some of these roles are easier than others,” the Head of Acting said, “and with some of these characters it’s hard to imagine them out of the context of the play. But remember that every performance is an interpretation. You can be as imaginative as you like. It’s up to you what you want to wear, whether you want to try an accent, whether you want to change your appearance to better suit your role.”

Stanley’s gaze slid sideways to the Head of Movement, standing like a patient shadow behind the Head of Acting, his ankles together and his heels against the wall. He was smiling faintly and nodding his head, but the movement looked automatic, like a weighted pendulum keeping indulgent time behind a pane of glass. He saw the Head of Movement wink at one of the students on the floor, and turned his head quickly to follow his gaze and seek out the recipient of the wink. He was too late to tell. He looked back at the Head of Movement and saw him smile and look carefully down at the floor.

The Head of Acting had reached the first-year group, and all around him his classmates were being branded one by one. Harry Bagley. George. Moss. Irene.

Stanley was assigned the part of Joe Pitt. “Read the play first,” the Head of Acting advised, and smiled a tiny smile before returning to his list. Somebody in the crowd giggled faintly and Stanley blushed, wondering what sort of person Joe Pitt was. He wrote the name on a fresh page of his organizer and then tucked the book into his bag.

“How long are you in town for?” Stanley asked after they had ordered. His father was busy scratching something into his electronic notebook and he didn’t answer immediately. He stabbed at the screen, folded the notebook away, and shook out his cuffs.

“Sorry, champ,” he said. “You said?”

“How long are you down for?”

“Just the weekend. I’m speaking at the conference tomorrow and then we fly out. I’ve got a joke for you. What’s the difference between acne and a Catholic priest?”

“I don’t know,” said Stanley.

“Acne only comes on your face after puberty.”

“Dad, that’s revolting,” Stanley said. He thought, A taboo is something that’s forbidden because it’s sacred.

His father held up his hands in surrender. “Too far?”

“Yes,” Stanley said. Or because it’s disgusting. He scowled despite himself and took a drink of water.

“Tell me about you, then,” his father said. “Tell me about drama school. Oh! I forgot—I’ve got something for you. I cut it out of the newspaper this morning.” He thumbed through his briefcase until he found a wad of newspaper, folded in eighths. He passed it across the table to Stanley and hummed merrily as he waited for Stanley to read it.

The headline read Girl’s Death “Terrible Waste.” The article was brief.

“You know the girl?” his father said when he’d finished. He was expectant, his eyes the gleeful half-moons of the laughing Comedy mask in the foyer of the Institute.

Stanley looked at the article again, and swallowed. “You’re going to tell me that this was the million-dollar girl.”

His father laughed. “Stanley,” he said, “this was the million-dollar girl. Did you know her?”

“What if I did?” Stanley said. “What if I did, and this was how I found out, and you’ve just been horribly insensitive to both of us?”

Stanley’s father reached across to twitch the page out of Stanley’s hands. “It’s just a bit of fun,” he said, tucking the wad back into his briefcase. “I thought you’d laugh. Don’t look at me like that.”

He shook his finger playfully at Stanley, and reached for his tumbler. “Anyway, if you did know her,” he said, “then I’d be congratulating you, because you’d have picked her from the start and you’d have taken out a policy.”

“That girl is a real person somewhere,” Stanley said.

“That girl is a corpse somewhere,” his father corrected. He gave Stanley a stern critical look, as if gravely disappointed and seeing him truly for the first time. He said, “I really thought you’d laugh.”