The Rehearsal

THIRTEEN

“Are you good friends with your sister, Isolde?” the saxophone teacher asks mildly one afternoon, after Isolde’s lesson is over and the girl is repacking her case.

“Not really,” Isolde says.

“Do you hang out with her much at school?”

“No. It’s weird when the juniors hang out with the seniors. And she’s got friends in her own year. They don’t like me around.”

“Would she be someone you’d talk to, if you needed someone?”

Isolde flushes scarlet immediately. She turns away from the saxophone teacher and ducks to fiddle with the clasp on her satchel. “Probably not,” she says.

“Okay,” the saxophone teacher says kindly, watching her.

“I don’t know who I’d talk to,” Isolde mumbles.

“Not your friends?”

“No.”

The saxophone teacher waits while Isolde shuffles her music and stuffs it into her backpack.

“Actually it’s kind of weird that Victoria’s so popular,” Isolde says, regaining composure, “because she was ruined. Three years ago, in fourth form. Her friends decided they didn’t really like her and they had a conference about it to decide what to do with her. In the end they just gathered around one lunchtime and told her that she wasn’t allowed to sit with them or talk to them anymore. And then they all ran away.”

“I suppose she moved on and found some new friends,” the saxophone teacher says.

“You can’t, really,” says Isolde. “Once you’ve been dumped by one group. The other groups get suspicious. There’s nothing to do except hang out in the library and always come to class at the last possible moment so it’s not like you’re sitting alone and waiting.

“Most of the girls keep best friends for security,” she adds. “You’ve always got an ally that way, and you’re less likely to be dumped.”

“So how did your sister climb her way back up?” the saxophone teacher asks. “If she really was ruined, as you say.”

“She fell in with some boys,” Isolde says. “She started crossing the road at lunchtime and hanging out with the St. Sylvester boys down by the river. Just her and the boys. That was like her weapon. The girls started coming back to her after that.”

“Have you ever been dumped?” the saxophone teacher says. “By a group, I mean.”

“Nah,” Isolde says. She is wrapped up in her scarf and her coat now, and she shrugs in a general, helpless way to show the conversation has come to a close.

“See you next week,” she says, and just for a moment the saxophone teacher feels a stab of something like sadness, wanting very much to ask Isolde to stay. These weekly half-hour snatches of Isolde’s life are to the sax teacher only the lighted squares of kitchen windows along a dark street, showing a brief and yellowed glimpse into the throat of a house but nothing more.

Isolde has glazed over with politeness now that the lesson has ended, standing near the door with her music case already in her hand. The precious quickened intimacy of the lesson is now lost, and the saxophone teacher can only smile and wave her out and say, “See you Monday, Isolde. Take care.”

Patsy has brought croissants and ham, and a soft yellow cheese which depresses under the blunt edge of the butter knife. Already they have talked for nearly an hour and the saxophone teacher has watched Patsy with a kind of bursting desperate look, straining and wounded like a stuck deer. She looks as if she might burst into tears. Patsy doesn’t seem to be noticing.

“Patsy,” the saxophone teacher says finally. “Do you know something? Whenever I am alone and intimate with anybody else, whenever I am at ease, or making someone laugh, or kissing somebody, or making someone feel truly good—whenever I feel like I am being really successful as a lover, doing it right—at all those times, part of me is wishing that you were watching me.”

“That’s a weird thing to say,” Patsy says, giving the sax teacher a quizzical half-frown. She is already withdrawing, sitting back and bringing the heel of her hand to her cheek to push away a strand of hair and becoming swiftly impenetrable, as if she is determined to misunderstand whatever the sax teacher will say next. All in an instant she is stony and aloof.

“I don’t mean that I wish you were there,” the saxophone teacher says. “What I mean is that everything I do with other people becomes a kind of proof. As if I were invisibly proving something to you. As if I were saying, all the while, This is what you didn’t see in me. This is what you could have had. This is what you missed out on.”

“You want me to be jealous,” Patsy says.

“No,” the saxophone teacher says. “It’s not that I want you to be jealous. I just want you to see me at my best. Sometimes I act as if you really were watching, just to prove it to myself. Sometimes I say things when I’m at my most intimate that don’t even make sense to the person at hand. They’d only make sense to you. If you were watching.”

“Honey,” Patsy says, quietly.

There is a silence.

“Of course I’m going to rehearse all of this in the mirror,” the saxophone teacher says at last. “Before I say it to you. I’ll rehearse it over and over. Until I have the confidence to tell you this, out loud.”

“Tell me about Isolde,” the saxophone teacher says outright, when Julia arrives for her lesson on Monday afternoon.

Julia raises her eyebrows as she wiggles out of her anorak and slings it over the back of the armchair. She is still radiating the cold winter air she has brought into the room with her, and the sax teacher catches it in a brief current, breathing it in like an alien scent.

“Tell me about Patsy,” Julia says.

“Who?” the saxophone teacher says stupidly, letting her arms fall to her sides, and then in irritation she pulls at her sleeve and says, “I mean, I know who Patsy is. I meant why.”

Julia shrugs. “There’s a sign up in my homeroom,” she says, “and it says, Who’s asking the questions in this classroom?”

The saxophone teacher narrows her eyes. “How do you know who Patsy is?”

“All your letters are addressed care of Patsy,” Julia says, pointing. “Is she your lover?”

The saxophone teacher flushes scarlet. “This is Patsy’s studio,” she says in a dignified voice. She twitches her chin up. “Patsy left me the studio.”

“Like in a will?”

“No, she’s not dead. It still legally belongs to her. That’s why the letters are addressed care of her post-box.”

“So she’s not your lover.”

The saxophone teacher taps her fingers on the desk. “Tell me about Isolde,” she says.

Julia runs the tip of her tongue over her bottom lip, and then she says, “We meet in the drama cupboard at school. Nobody’s ever in there, and we wedge the door shut anyway. We make a nest out of nuns’ habits and Nazi uniforms and hoop skirts, and when the bell rings we leave one after the other, with a decent break in between, so nobody notices.”

“And?”

“And what?” Julia says.

“That’s not enough,” the saxophone teacher says. “It’s not enough, just to know that you’re in there. How did you get there? How did it start?”

“Why do you want to know?” Julia says. “You’ll still be on the outside looking in. Even if you know everything, even if you know all the things you shouldn’t, even then you’ll still be on the outside. Why did she leave you this studio?”

They are tense, like two dogs chained apart.

“As a vote of confidence in my music,” the saxophone teacher says. “She taught me saxophone, once upon a time, but she got arthritis early. It started in her thumbs and then spread outward, like a slow and painful inkblot, outward from her thumbs across her hands. She had to stop teaching. She went back to university, and I just took over her studio. I replaced her, I guess. I pay rent to her now.”

“She was your teacher?”

“Once, yes.” The sax teacher hesitates, her hands clutching at her elbows, but then she draws a breath and says quickly, “What do you do in the drama cupboard?”

“Mostly we talk,” Julia says. “There’s only gib board between the drama cupboard and the practice rooms so we have to be quiet. That’s how Mr. Saladin and Victoria got found out, Isolde said. Somebody was in the drama cupboard and they heard them through the wall. It’s always pitch dark in there—we don’t dare to turn on the light because it’ll shine under the door. My favorite thing she does in the dark is she makes her two forefingers into little calipers and she keeps checking to see if I’m smiling, feeling my face in the dark and lying there with her fingers resting, just lightly, at the corners of my mouth. That’s my favorite thing.”

“What do you say? When you talk. What do you say to each other?”

“We talk about the preciousness of it all,” Julia says. “How fortunate we are. How lucky we are that the accident of my attraction coincided with the accident of hers. We just lie there and marvel, and feel each other’s skin, and inside I feel years and years older than I actually am—not like I’m weary or wise or anything, but more like what I’m feeling is so huge it connects me to something still huger, something infinite, some massive arc of beautiful unknowing that is bigger than any kind of tiny trap of time, or space, that might otherwise contain me. It feels like that one moment, that one tiny shard of now, that brief and perfect moment of touching her skin and tasting her tongue and feeling so utterly captured, so caught in her, that moment is all I’m going to need to nourish me for the rest of my life.”

The saxophone teacher has fumbled with her hand to find the edge of the desk, and she sinks back against it weakly.

“But at the same time, the feeling is shot through with a kind of sadness,” Julia says, “a bittersweet and throaty sadness that sits heavy in my gullet and I can’t swallow it down. It’s like I know that I am losing something; that something is seeping away, like water into dust. And it’s a weird idea, the idea that loss—the massive snatching tearing hunger of loss—is something that doesn’t start when a relationship ends, when she melts away and disappears and I know that I can never get her back. It’s a feeling that starts at the very beginning, from the moment we collide in the dark and we touch for the very first time. The innocence of it—the sweetness and purity of it, the shy and halting tenderness of it—that is something that I am only ever going to lose.”

Julia takes a step toward the saxophone teacher. “Is that how you felt?” she says. “With Patsy?”

“Julia,” the saxophone teacher says, and then she doesn’t say anything for a moment. She draws a hand over her eyes. “Patsy,” she says, but then she falters and changes her mind.

“Let me tell you something, Julia,” she says at last. “That moment you’re talking about. That one perfect kiss. It’s all there is. Everything from this point onward is only going to be a facsimile, darling. You will try and re-create that one kiss with all your lovers, try and replay it over and over; it will sit like an old video loop on a television screen in front of you, and you will lean forward to touch the cool bulge of the glass with your forehead and you will feel the ripple-fur of static with your fingers and your cheek and you will be illumined, lit up by the blue-black glow of it, the bursts of light, but in the end you will never really be able to touch it, this perfect memory, this one solitary moment of unknowing where you were simply innocent of who you were, of what you might become. You will never touch that feeling again, Julia. Not ever again.”

“Is that how it is for you?” Julia says. “With Patsy?”

The saxophone teacher expels a breath and says nothing.

“Where’s Patsy now?” Julia says.

“Oh, she still lives in the city,” the sax teacher says, waving a hand vaguely, north by northwest. “We’re just very old friends, Julia. Patsy’s married. We’re just old friends.”

“Married to a man?”

“Yes, to a man.”

“But you were lovers once,” Julia says.

“No.”

“Even once?”

“No.”

“You’re lying.”

“What does it matter anyway, how it was?” the saxophone teacher snaps. “I could only ever tell you how I remember it, never how it was. My wrinkled cheesecloth of a memory, all balled up and mothy with the sunlight glinting through. And you lied about your favorite thing. You stole it from someone else and used it as your own.”

Julia scowls and says nothing. After a moment she tosses her head and says, “You probably know it all anyway, from somebody else.”

Stanley is waiting for Isolde after her lesson. From inside he can hear snatches of a tune played by two saxophones together, one confidently leading, the other duller and shyer and more ordinary. He is nervous. He wishes he’d scripted something to say.

At last the saxophones cease and he thinks he hears, through the open window, the faint rumble of Isolde’s teacher’s voice, and Isolde laughing. He shuffles his feet.

After a few minutes Isolde emerges from the building and trots down the short flight of steps to the courtyard, her saxophone case in her hand. She looks strange: she is smiling too readily and too brightly, and her eyes are sad. Stanley doesn’t notice. He keeps pulling at his collar and his hair, and when he looks at her he doesn’t hold her gaze for long.

“Hey you,” she says. “Did you hear me that time?”

“Yeah,” Stanley says. “You’re pretty good.”

“Want to come to my recital? You don’t have to. It might be boring.”

“Sure,” Stanley says awkwardly. He falls into step beside her, and as they walk out of the courtyard he looks over his shoulder at the saxophone teacher’s window. Is there somebody there, standing by the curtain, looking down at them? Is the next student waiting patiently in the hall for the saxophone teacher to finish watching, smarten her hair, open the door and invite her in? He can’t tell from this distance and soon the window disappears behind the branches of the ginkgo tree.

“My parents will be there,” Isolde says. “They’re really stoked to meet you. Especially Dad. My sister had, like, this weird thing this year where she slept with a teacher and Dad’s really keen to get back to normal or whatever. He’s just stoked you’re not in your thirties and balding and my teacher at school.”

Stanley exhales sharply and almost pulls away from her. There it is: all the information he needed, the clinching information, tumbling out of her mouth in one careless little burst. Too late.

“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” he says.

“Oh,” Isolde says airily. “I don’t know. I’m just sick of it, I guess. It’s all anyone talks about any more—just Victoria and the rape or whatever and how hard it’s been. I just didn’t want to talk about it with you.”

She reaches for his hand and pulls him closer to her as they walk, showing more affection than she has before.

“It’s not a big deal,” she says.

“What do you mean, slept with her teacher?” Stanley says.

“Well, apparently the story is now that she didn’t even sleep with him,” Isolde says. “I don’t know. It keeps changing. She gets all cagey.”

“You must know,” Stanley says. “She’s your sister.”

Isolde gives him an odd look. “I don’t,” she says. “I don’t know anything.”

They walk on in silence for a while.

“Do you talk about me to your sax teacher?” Stanley says. His voice is high and strained.

“I guess,” she says. “I mean, I’ve mentioned you. Music teachers are like therapists, kind of. You meet up once a week and tell them everything you need to tell them and then you disappear again. It’s like therapy.” Her voice is high too, as if she doesn’t believe her own lines.

“What do you say about me?” Stanley says.

“Oh, you know,” Isolde says. Now she looks embarrassed.

Stanley makes a swift decision to tell Isolde half the truth. He stops walking and turns toward her.

“She laid a complaint about me,” he says. “Your teacher. She must have been watching through the window. She complained that I’ve been harassing you—because you’re so young, I guess, and I’m not. Young. I guess that was why.” He breathes heavily and watches her.

Isolde opens her mouth a little but says nothing. She drags her eyes from Stanley’s face and looks at a pasted advertisement on the wall over his shoulder.

“So what do you say about me?” Stanley says, impatient now. “In your lesson.”

“Nothing,” Isolde says quickly.

“You said you mentioned me.”

“Only briefly.”

“So why would she complain? What does she have against me?”

Isolde shoots him a calculating look. “Are you in trouble?” she says.

“I just want to know what you say about me,” Stanley says loudly. In his frustration he is forgetting that he is only telling Isolde half the truth after all. He begins to blame her. He becomes irritated by her open-mouthed stare, the plump curve of her pouting lip, how childlike she seems.

“It’s this thing with my sister,” Isolde says at last. “I suppose she knows how much it affected me. She knows how vulnerable I am, how impressionable I am, how likely it is that I might act out or do something dumb or end up slutting around, just to make myself heard. It happens, when there’s trauma in a family. She’s protecting me, I guess.”

“From me?”

“Well. Yeah. I mean, probably.”

“And you knew.” He is thoroughly angry with her now.

“No,” Isolde says. “I didn’t know. She acted behind my back, like a clinging mother orchestrating the life of her child.”

“This is bullshit,” Stanley says. “You talking to your teacher about me, the two of you together. It’s bullshit.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You must have made me sound like a rapist.”

“I did not make you sound like a rapist!”

“It’s my reputation,” Stanley says. “My reputation at the school which is at stake. Whatever you said, you made her act like that. You made her complain.”

“I did not make her complain!”

“You must have,” Stanley shouts. “You did. With whatever you said.”

Cars are passing. The passengers press their faces to the windows to watch the two of them fight. Stanley has his arms flung wide and Isolde’s hands are crossed over her belly. Finally Stanley makes a scissor motion with the flat of his hand that means enough. He is the first to turn and walk away.

“What would you do,” Julia says, “if I said that you did things to me here, when we were alone? Indecent things. If I confessed to somebody. If I broke down.”

The southerly is gathering above the gables, blackening and bruising and seeming to draw the sky downward. The saxophone teacher crosses the room and turns on the lamp, twitching the curtain against the lowering sky.

“I don’t know what I would do,” she says, without looking at Julia.

“I’d lie,” Julia says, already narrow eyed and pursuing the thought. “I would make up silver lies studded with shards of perfect detail like mosaic splinters, sharp and everlasting, the kind of tiny faultless detail that would make them all sure that what I said was true. I would have alibis. I would bring in other people and teach them a story, and rehearse it so carefully and for so long that soon they’d all start to believe that what they said was actually true.”

“It sounds like a lot of work,” the saxophone teacher says calmly, but her hands and eyes are still and she is watching Julia with all her attention now. “What’s in it for you?”

“It would change what everyone says about me at school.”

“What does everyone—”

“That I like girls,” Julia says loudly. The collar of her school shirt is open and the hollow V of her neck is turning an angry stippled red.

“How?”

“Because if there was some tragic story behind it all,” Julia says, “it would be like a reason or a cause. Like with that girl Victoria.”

“Isolde’s sister.”

“Yeah,” Julia says hotly. “Isolde’s sister. Whatever she does now, if she goes off the rails or whatever, and ends up sleeping with a billion people and drinking heaps and failing all her exams, people won’t think that she’s just a loser or a slut. They’ll know it’s because she’s damaged, because there’s a reason behind everything, which is that she was raped. Whatever she does from now on will just be evidence. So it’s kind of like she’s free. She can do anything and she won’t be responsible. She’s got a reason.”

“That’s a very interesting way of looking at it,” the saxophone teacher says.

“I want a reason,” Julia says. “If it turned out that I was damaged, then it wouldn’t be my fault anymore. It wouldn’t be something gross, it would be something tragic. It would be an effect—an effect of something out of my control. I’d just be a victim.”

“You all want to be damaged,” the saxophone teacher says suddenly. “All of you. That is the one quality all my students have in common. That is your theme and variation: you crave your own victimhood absolutely. You see it as the only viable way to get an edge upon your classmates, and you are right. If I were to interfere with you, Julia, I’d be doing you an incredible favor. I’d be giving you a ticket to authorize the most shameless self-pity and self-adoration and self-loathing, and none of your classmates could even hope to compare.”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying,” Julia says.

The two of them look at each other in silence for a moment.

“What details would you choose to include?” the saxophone teacher says. “Those sharp mosaic-sliver details that would line your alibi like the tight angled coins on a chain-link vest.”

“Nothing physical, at first,” Julia says. “That would be too obvious. The lie would shine too brightly, and they’d find me out. Something psychological. Something insidious and dripping. Some slow erosion that in the end would be far worse, far more subtle and damaging, than any quick backstage fumble or teasing slap.”

“It’s still going to be a lie, Julia,” the saxophone teacher says. “At the heart of it. You won’t be satisfied. At bottom, all it will be is a lie.”

“How do you know?” Julia says. “How do you know how you have influenced me? How do you know I’m not damaged? How do you know I don’t nurse some small criticism, some throwaway comment that you made and have now forgotten but I remember every time I stumble or I fail? A tiny something that will dig deeper and deeper, like a glass splinter working its way from my finger to my heart? Some tiny something that will change the shape of me forever—how can you know?”

For once the saxophone teacher has nothing to say. She looks out the window at the birds.

The saxophone section of the Abbey Grange jazz band is gap-toothed now: first Victoria, who has chosen not to return, and then Bridget, who never will. The cavities have been filled with lesser players, and the chairs shuffled a fraction closer to tighten the curve.

“Bridget would have really liked this,” says first trombone every now and again, knowing that dead people are always very sentimental and always full of joy and appreciation for the simple things. Some of them still weep, not for Bridget, who was unmemorable, but for themselves, imagining that they themselves had died, and how irreplaceable they would be.

The school’s Christian group was tight lipped and private about the sacking of Mr. Saladin and its aftermath; on the subject of Bridget’s death it blossoms. A man’s powerful and senseless attraction to a girl he had been instructed to protect is a human mystery. More marketable is the divine mystery of this one lampless girl mown to extinction in the dewy dark: it is right up their alley, and the Christian group thrives. Advertisements for prayer groups spring up around the school. Enrollments for youth camps run a record high. A Christian pancake stand appears in the quad at lunchtime, managed by a zealous few who roll the pancakes in lemon and sugar and shine brightly with an inner light. They don’t hand out tracts or wise words or a summons to a better life. They hand out pancakes. It’s enough. Soon many of the girls are exchanging their plastic Fuck-me bracelets for nylon bands that invite them, in mnemonic, to consider what a grown man might do if he were one of them, if he were faced with the same choices and confounded by the same desires. Bridget herself had been a sometime member, a wearer of a nylon commitment band—this is a comfort, the girls agree, as they mutely beg their own salvation and reach sideways for each other’s hands.

The lunchtime youth group shifts from a classroom to the school hall to cater for the swell in numbers, and with the counselor long since returned to his frosted cubby between the bursar and the nurse, the youth leaders rise to take his place. They conclude that, in all likelihood, He would do just as they are doing now, and as they regard their bracelets they feel a throb of satisfaction that they possess the single correct answer to the rhetorical question stitched around the band.

In a sense, Bridget comes to eclipse Victoria after all. Victoria’s questionable victimhood, the all-too-visible streak of her own reciprocation cannot, in the end, compete with the indubitable victim of a roadside smash. But the posthumous Bridget is not a singular and universal notoriety, celebrated as Victoria had been celebrated, herself the symbol and the locus of her fame; Bridget is an instrument, subtler and more pliable and vastly more diffused. It’s the best she could have hoped for.

“There was a girl at my high school who died,” the girls will say, years later. “She was hit on her bike coming home from work. God, it was sad. It really affected us, you know? All of us. I hardly knew her, but even so. It was so sad.”

“That’s it, then,” Patsy said, when the saxophone teacher received her teaching diploma. They looked at it, stamped with a blue watermark, silvered and inked and glossy under its pane of glass. “That’s it,” Patsy said, “you’re damned. A lifetime of the world assuming that you are a spinster, a closed thin-lipped efficient spinster who lies spangled and lock-jawed in her bed at nights and has no love or pleasure to light the room. It’s the one truth about music teachers, and everybody knows it: they are alone, always alone, limp and graying in their cold offices and waiting in the dark for their next student like a beggar waiting for a meal. Congratulations!”

They touched glasses lightly and drank.

“But you’re not a spinster,” the saxophone teacher said. She was still looking at the shining diploma, tracing the words with her eyes.

“But everyone still assumes. Or a lesbian. If they are generous, then they assume I am a lesbian.”

“That’s why she asked for that ring,” Brian said, pointing to the penultimate finger on Patsy’s left hand. “She said, Make it the biggest fattest old diamond you can get your hands on. This isn’t just a symbol, it’s a whole bloody advertising campaign.”

“And this is what you came up with,” Patsy said, waving her hand and making a disgusted face, as if the ring was worth nothing. They laughed.

“Anyway, well done, old thing,” Brian said, reaching across and covering the saxophone teacher’s hands with his own. “It all starts here.”

As Isolde unpacks her case the saxophone teacher talks enthusiastically about the upcoming recital, the venue and the other performers, and the chance for everybody to listen to everybody else. Isolde is not listening. She is going to mention the saxophone teacher’s complaint about Stanley. The thought of bringing it up makes her heart thump, and the advance phrasing of the question paralyzes her, consumes her utterly. She senses that the topic is dangerous, that she is somehow backfooted at the outset: she has done something wrong without her knowing, and she will lose.

There is a knock at the door.

“Hang on a minute, Isolde,” the saxophone teacher says serenely. “I think that’s probably Julia.”

“What?” Isolde says.

“I thought we could try the Raschèr duet with both of you together,” the saxophone teacher says. “You’ve each been learning one part and I thought it would be fun to bring them together properly.”

Isolde goes red. She looks at the saxophone teacher without speaking for a moment, and then says, “I didn’t know I was going to play it in a duet.”

“Well,” the saxophone teacher says, “I wasn’t sure if Julia would be able to make this Friday slot. It was kind of a last-minute idea. It really is worth playing against someone else, you know. There’s a whole new enjoyment to be got out of playing with another person.” She doesn’t advance to get the door: she hovers near Isolde, hands on her hips, and surveys her student.

“I would have practiced,” Isolde says. “If I’d known.” Her mouth is suddenly dry.

“You remember Julia, don’t you?” the saxophone teacher says.

“Yes,” says Isolde.

“Wonderful.” The saxophone teacher walks swiftly to the door to release the latch. “Welcome,” she says to the older girl.

“Hello, darling,” Julia says as she sweeps in, and all in an instant Isolde knows that Julia has stepped out of herself and become somebody else entirely: she is performing, and Isolde must too.

“Honey,” she says, and they kiss on the cheek like old friends, like thirty-something friends who were once teacher and pupil, once upon a time. The saxophone teacher has melted into the shadows by the wall.

“I know this is meant to be a rehearsal, Patsy, and there’s work to be done,” Julia says, “but I do need to talk to you. After what happened between us. I’m sorry to spring it on you like this. I’ve been going through what I want to say in my head, over and over, out there in the hall, and I think I just need to spit it all out before I’m too afraid to speak of it. That’s all. Is it weird?”

“It’s not weird,” Isolde says softly, but she takes several steps backward, away from the other woman. Her saxophone is in her hand. Julia’s sax is not yet out of its case, so they appear unevenly matched, Isolde with the bright arm of her instrument held close against her chest and Julia weaponless with her hands upturned to show the white of her palms.

“It just seems so desperately unfair,” Julia says. “That I am marked so indelibly, so ineffaceably, tattooed and blue with the ink of your name across my heart, and that your ink is washable, Patsy. It was always washable, and you knew that all along.”

“Come on, darling,” Isolde says. “You’re talking about just one kiss. You’re talking about a single red-wine-flavor of a kiss, in the dusky dark of one late evening, riding on the giddy thrill of a concert that sent your pulse to racing.”

“Yes,” Julia says, vehemently.

“A one-off.”

“Yes,” Julia says again.

“Come on,” Isolde says again, but weakly now. “We’re overreacting, surely. We’re behaving like teenagers.”

There is a pause and they look at each other.

“I think that this is worse than any other shame,” Julia says. “To be rejected not because of circumstantial reasons, or provisional reasons, or reasons of prior claim, but simply for the unitary and all-quenching reason that I am, and will always be, unwanted. I feel spotlit, pinned against the bright wasteland of a bare stage, with nothing to hide behind, nothing to blame.” She gives a cruel hard little laugh, not her own. After a moment she says, “Can’t you just tell me why? Can’t you just tell me why it’s Brian, and it isn’t me?”

Julia advances several steps. The other girl does not retreat. They are closer now, and Isolde looks her in the eye for a long moment before she speaks.

Isolde says, “I had always imagined that any woman’s choice to be with another woman would be a reactionary choice, defined mostly in the negative by the patterns she is seeking to avoid. It would, I always thought, only be after deciding she does not want men that a woman might conclude that she wants other women. It is a public stance, itself a kind of activism. It is a complaint. It marks a dissatisfaction. It is the kind of attitude only held by a particular type: emphatic, campaigning, radical, the kind of woman who would boycott certain companies on moral grounds, who would picket outside a factory gate.

“I recognize a shade of this quality in you—the hardness of your opinion, your skepticism, the implicit challenge every time you speak. But there is another quality of yours that dawns strangely on me—a childlike helpless quality of vulnerability, a need. It is this quality that has awakened a new possibility in my understanding of the world: that a woman’s choice of another woman might be a free choice in and of itself, not a handicapped pick of second-bests, not a halved choice of remainders once the men have all been censored and removed. This positive definition—that a woman might love another woman simply in and for herself—is what makes me feel nervous.”

“Nervous, why?” Julia says, and takes another step toward her. Instinctively she reaches out with her thin red hand and catches Isolde’s fingertips in hers. Isolde doesn’t pull away. She looks down, watches their hands for a moment, Julia’s bony ink-stained thumb moving in a light caress over her knuckles. Her hands are cold.

“You want me to explain this burgeoning something with Brian,” Isolde says, looking up again, “which may or may not ripen to a fruit. But I don’t think I did actively choose between you, representative of women, and Brian, representative of men. Instead I placed myself in a position where I didn’t have to choose. I let myself be his temptation; I behaved as passively as possible and did nothing as he advanced. It was the marshy fogbound unmapped depths of you that made me nervous, darling. What I wanted was something protected, something proved. I wanted a default feeling, not a nervous uncertain forbidden-place of a feeling where everything was overlaid with fear and even guilt. I don’t want to be seduced. I just don’t want it. I want to be comfortable.”

“How can that be what you want?” Julia says. “How can it be?”

“It is,” Isolde says. “In the end. It just is.”

Julia steps forward and kisses her on the mouth, and all in an instant they’re back in the smoky fug of the bar, and the last number is playing, the last song. They’re in the corner and they’ve just got up to leave, to wrap themselves back into their scarves and their coats and turn their smiling faces to the band as a final show of appreciation, a kind of farewell. Patsy turns to the saxophone teacher to say something but whatever she was going to say dies on her lips. Her eyes flicker down to the saxophone teacher’s mouth, and then the saxophone teacher leans over and kisses her, her gloved fingertips against the other woman’s cheek.

Patsy doesn’t reach out and grab the saxophone teacher’s coat, real fistfuls. She doesn’t slide her hands around and scrabble with the hem of the saxophone teacher’s jumper to slip her hands up and feel the skin of the other woman’s back. She doesn’t step forward so their breasts are touching, so their hips are touching, so the lengths of their bodies are pressed together hard. She doesn’t reach up with her hand and cup the saxophone teacher’s face. She just stands there and receives the kiss, her eyes closed. When the saxophone teacher draws back, she opens her eyes, smiles sadly, gives a nod, and walks away.