The Rehearsal

THREE

The morning paper reads Teacher Denies Sex With Student.

“Poor Mr. Saladin,” says the saxophone teacher. “Poor Mr. Saladin, with his slender hands and his throbbing lonely heart and his face like—”

“It doesn’t show his face,” interrupts Patsy, who is feeling cranky. “He’s holding his jacket over his head.”

The phone rings.

“They imagine it all the same,” says the saxophone teacher, “the thirsty mothers with their sad black eyes. They imagine sharp little teeth and a wet gulping swallow. They imagine small bluish pouches underneath his eyes.”

Patsy contemplates the article with her head on one side. She dabs her finger absentmindedly at the crumbs on her plate.

“I completely understand, Mrs. Miskus,” the saxophone teacher is saying into the phone. “Oh goodness no, I never met the man, but let me tell you something about him all the same.” (Patsy gets up now, fishes for her coat. The saxophone teacher follows her with her eyes as she talks.) “Mr. Saladin left a legacy behind him, a special breed of wide-eyed, fascinated, provocative mistrust which has swept through my students like a virus. The violated girl is shadowed by whispers and elbows and blind aching jealousy everywhere she walks. When the lights go out, the parents cry and ask each other what did he do to her, but the girls are burning with a question of their own: what did she do? What does she know now that makes her so dangerous, like the slow amber leak of a noxious fume?”

Patsy wiggles into her coat, waves, blows a kiss. She is leaving.

“They try to imagine her stroking his face and arching her neck and whispering things, special things that nobody’s ever said before. They try to imagine her up against the wall of the music room, breathing fast and shallow with her eyes closed and her hands clenched in fists on the wall above her head. They try to imagine the ordinary things, like How about lunchtime?, or I couldn’t sleep last night, or I like the shirt with the stripes better. They think maybe now when she clutches her arms across her chest, when she smoothes her hair down at the side, when she suddenly falls silent and bites her lip hard, they think maybe these things mean something now that they didn’t mean before. They try to imagine, Mrs. Miskus. They try to imagine what these things might mean.”

The saxophone teacher is silent now, listening, fingering the phone cord. The door slams in the stairwell.

“I understand,” she says after a while. “Your poor fragile sensible daughter feels dirty by association and she wants to put as much distance as she possibly can between herself and that horrible man. You tell her I have a space on Tuesday at three.”

A notice goes up to say that rehearsals will resume. A new conductor has been found for jazz band and senior jazz ensemble and orchestra, identified in bold type as Mrs. Jean Critchley. The unnecessary naming serves to emphasize the Mrs. and the Jean.

“Course they got a woman,” says first alto darkly. They are standing in the corridor in a bedraggled clump.

“I liked Mr. Saladin,” says Bridget in her stringy unfashionable way.

“Is he in prison already?” says first alto.

“Probably under house arrest,” says double bass. “So he doesn’t reoffend.”

“Bullshit,” says first trombone. “He’ll just be at home in his pajamas watching daytime television.”

They run out of things to say and spend a moment regarding the name of Mrs. Jean Critchley, identified in bold type.

“She sounds like a bitch,” says first alto, voicing what they are all thinking anyway.

“I went to see Mr. Partridge about an extension after school yesterday,” Isolde says. “He was in his office, and when I came in he sort of exploded out of his desk and said, Let’s talk in the hallway, come on, out. They all do that now. They’re afraid of enclosed spaces.”

The saxophone teacher watches her and thinks, This is the dawn of a new Isolde, a hardened deadened Isolde who has witnessed the dirty and perverted glamour of the world but still nurses a tiny kernel of doubt because she has not yet felt what she has heard and seen.

“Anyway we went out into the hallway,” says Isolde. She swings her saxophone around so it is hanging limply off one shoulder like a schoolbag, both hands at her shoulder holding the strap. She shifts her weight to the other leg and sticks her hip out and blinks her big eyes, converting in an instant into a sweet and undeserving victim. The lights change, becoming duller and more diffuse, until Isolde is standing in the creamy lilac light of a late-afternoon school corridor with all the lockers hanging empty and open and the chip packets scudding across the floor like silver leaves.

“So I go, I was just wondering if I could get an extension or whatever, because things have been so hard at home—”

And she seamlessly slides her sax off her shoulder and into her arms, holding it loosely underneath the bell with both hands, and pressing it flat against her pelvis in a casually protective way, as a man might hold a folder against himself, standing in a corridor with a student in a shaft of creamy lilac light after all the others have gone home.

The saxophone teacher reflects how much she enjoys these changes, when Isolde slips out of one person and becomes another. Bridget is good at voices, but with Isolde the performance is always physical and total, like the unexpected shedding of a skin. The saxophone teacher shifts in her chair, and nods to show she’s listening.

“And he shakes his head at me,” Isolde says, broadening now, rocking back on her heels and sucking in her belly so her chest inflates, “and he goes, Isolde, I am not the kind of teacher who ingratiates myself with my students in order to gain their love. That is not my style. I am the kind of teacher who gains popularity by picking a scapegoat. I do this in each and every class I teach. If I was to grant you an extension I would be a hypocrite and I would undermine my own methods.

“He goes, Isolde, when I set out to gain the love of a student, I do not begin by granting them an extension when they don’t really need one. I begin by cultivating a culture of jealousy in my classroom. Jealousy is a key component to any classroom environment, because jealousy means competition and competition means excellence. It is only in a jealous classroom that a true and fervent love can blossom.

“It is only once I am sure my students are well placed to become very jealous of each other that I pick my scapegoat. Picking a scapegoat is not easy, Isolde. It is not as easy as granting an extension to a student when they don’t really need one. Picking a scapegoat is a very difficult and delicate task. The trick—” and she brandishes her saxophone now, jabbing it into the air to emphasize what she is saying “—is not to pick the girl that everybody already genuinely dislikes. This will induce the other students to pity the scapegoat, and to become contemptuous of me because I am being cruel. I don’t want to be cruel to my students.

“The trick is to pick the least original girl in the room. You want someone unoriginal because you want to be sure that they will behave exactly the same way every time you use them. You want someone unoriginal because you need them to be dull enough to believe that they are being singled out on the strength of their own comic merits. You need them to believe that the laughter you generate is inclusive laughter.

“Isolde, he goes, I am a good teacher who is loved by my pupils. I gain their collective love by choosing a sacrificial victim on behalf of them all, not by currying favor with every individual student. It is a good method and I am a good teacher. I don’t want to give you an extension because your sister had sex and everyone found out and I feel sorry for you. I’ve explained my reasons. I’m sorry.”

The lights fade back in. Isolde comes gracefully to an end and reattaches her saxophone to her neckstrap, ready for the lesson.

“So you didn’t get an extension,” the saxophone teacher says as she rises.

“No,” Isolde says. “He goes, What you need to learn, Isolde, is that life just isn’t fair.”

It is a new and popular tradition at this secular school to purchase short-snouted plastic Coca-Cola bottles from the tuck shop, and then retrieve with a fingernail the little blue disc with a stiff rim that sits snugly on the underside of the bottle’s cap. The girls hold this blue disc up to their lips and with their front teeth they bite a hole in the greasy plastic center to pierce the flesh. They are then able to rip out the middle of the disc so that only the rim remains. Gently they tug at this little translucent hoop of plastic, turning it around and around in their hands, pulling at it tenderly so it stretches wider and wider and the thin hoop becomes a pale band of ribbon through which they can slip their hand. The girls then wear these plastic ribbons on their wrists.

Popularly they are known as “Fuck-me bracelets.” It is a mark of a girl’s daring to fashion such a bracelet for herself from the aqua seal of a Coca-Cola bottle neck, for whoever breaks the bracelet, however accidentally, thereby enters into a contract with the wearer. Sometimes at parties a boy will lean over to kiss a girl and with his free hand he will scrabble at her wrist to try to break the Coca-Cola seal. Most often the girl will feel him trying to snap the bracelet and she will pretend to struggle, knowing what the breaking of the seal will mean: she will feign resistance and twist her wrist away from him to make the bracelet snap the sooner. Once it has snapped they know that they must go through with it to the very end.

It is a shameful thing to break your own bracelet. The girls snicker at the prospect, and alienate anyone clumsy enough to catch the side of the thin plastic band on a doorframe or on the buckle of her backpack so it snaps.

One of the girls says, “They found a Fuck-me bracelet in Mr. Saladin’s tutorial room. Under the piano. It was broken.”

This isn’t true.

“Thanks all for coming in, people,” says the counselor above the scraping and shuffling, raising his palms like he is a politician or a priest. “I’d really like to build on some of the issues that we raised in our last session. I thought that today we could talk about taking control.”

Julia is sitting at the back, low down in her chair, with her arms folded and her ankles crossed and her hair falling across her face. She watches as the other girls trip in from the cold, linking arms with their favorite friends so they advance across the room in a rectangular squadron of favorites. They negotiate seating with whispers and nudges and a desperate narrow-eyed panic, always fearful of one day occupying the terrible seats on the periphery which force you to lean across and be forever asking “What? What’s so funny? What did she say?”

Julia watches them slot into place around the current locus of popularity and wit with a feeling of contempt and mild jealousy. Most of the girls are seventh formers, contemporaries of the violated girl and infected only by vague proximity. The rest are the music students, more critically infected and so personally summoned by a solemn pink slip photocopied over and over and signed by the counselor in a delicate whispery hand.

The door opens and Julia sees to her surprise the sister of the violated girl holding her pink summons gingerly in her fist and checking the brass numeral on the plate above the doorknob. Isolde is only in fifth form, too young for jazz band and orchestra and senior jazz ensemble, and as she enters the room she nods at a few of the girls who must be her sister’s friends. The counselor smiles approvingly as she enters, showing them all that he is terribly proud of her, in the way that one might be terribly proud of a mascot or a flag.

Watching Isolde tuck her hair behind one ear and cast around sourly for a seat, Julia feels a flicker of interest in this girl, now thrust forever into her sister’s arched and panting shadow, and wonders what she’s thinking.

As Isolde sits down, the girl sitting behind her leans forward and gives her shoulders a squeeze, slipping her thumbs into the hollows of Isolde’s collarbones and whispering, You okay? in a hot pitying whisper. Isolde squirms away from the girl’s hands, nodding, and says something in reply that Julia can’t quite hear. The girl shakes her head, gives Isolde a pat and retreats with a motherly sigh. She turns immediately to pluck at the sleeve of the girl on her left, who is already leaning in to listen.

Julia watches the breathy whispers gather and spread up and down the row behind Isolde, and studies the hard impassive look on Isolde’s face.

“Would you jump off a bridge just because your friends were jumping off bridges?” the counselor is saying. It’s his favorite question and he asks it routinely, his voice ringing and triumphant as if he has just performed a marvelous checkmate.

Julia watches Isolde shift slightly in her chair. She is staring at the counselor dully, frowning but not really listening, her lips slack and slightly pouted. She has the same round cheekbones and innocent round eyes as her sister, but while Victoria’s roundness is a fullness, unapologetic and open and challenging, on Isolde it gives her the plump candied expression of a spoiled child. Isolde wears her own face like it is a fashion accessory that she knows looks better on everybody else.

“For some people,” the counselor is saying, “seduction is a means of gaining attention. Seduction is a cry for help, a last and desperate attempt to make a real connection with another human being.” He wags his plump finger at them all, ranged around him in a tartan half-circle with their neckties loose and their smooth velvet legs crossed at the knee. “These lonely and damaged people,” he says, “may seek out physical and sexual connections that they do not truly want but they cannot live without. These are the people you must beware of.” He pauses for effect. “Mr. Saladin was one of these people.”

Julia looks over at Isolde but she is still staring at the counselor in the same blank way. Julia wonders if it is an act. She tries to think what it would be like to be Isolde, coming home from school each day like an envoy from a forbidden place, stepping around her sister, watching her across the dinner table as she mashes her potato into a glum paste, walking past the closed door of her bedroom, still with its faded peeling stickers and strip of stolen security tape, passing her toweled and dripping in the hall. Julia imagines a pinched weeping mother and a father picking at his tie as if it’s strangling him. She imagines urgent phone calls and people shouting in whispers and a damp shifting silence. She imagines Isolde in the middle of it all, trying to watch television or polish her school shoes or pick through the funny parts of the newspaper, alone and insulated by a patch of dead air like a ship in the eye of a storm.

Julia watches as Isolde examines her fingernails serenely and nibbles at a cuticle.

“This terrible case of child abuse,” the counselor is saying, “is a classic case of how seduction can be wielded as a means of gaining control. In preying upon this girl Mr. Saladin destroyed her right to the ownership of her own body. He abused his position of power as a teacher. He wielded his position of power to gain control.”

He has moved the lectern aside, and leans casually against a desk edge, one hand in his pocket balled into a fist so it stretches the fabric across his pelvis and tugs gently at the zipper of his fly. With his other hand he plucks at the air as if he is conducting a piece that is very modern and very moving.

“My goal for today,” he says smoothly, “is to talk about the ways in which I can help you guys to learn to take control. Does anybody want to say anything before we kick off?”

They all shake their heads and smile at him, shifting in their seats like roosting hens. Then Julia says, “I do.”

Everyone except Isolde turns to look at her in a rustling swoop. Julia blinks calmly and says, “I don’t agree that Mr. Saladin wanted to gain control.”

The counselor frowns and reaches up to tug a tuft of hair at the nape of his neck. “You don’t,” he says.

“No, I don’t,” Julia says. “Gaining control isn’t the exciting part. Sleeping with a minor isn’t exciting because you get to boss them around. It’s exciting because you’re risking so much. And taking a risk is exciting because of the possibility that you might lose, not the possibility that you might win.”

The girls look her up and down, and marvel with a collective disgusted fascination. Their expression is the expression of any popular girl who takes time to regard an unpopular girl while she is speaking. They watch Julia as if she is a carnival act: intriguing, but it might make you feel a little sick.

“It’s like gambling,” Julia says, even louder. “If you make a bet that you’re almost positively certain you’re going to win, it’s not going to cost you much adrenaline. It’s not that exciting and it’s not that much fun. But if you make a bet where all the odds are against you and there’s just a tiny, tiny glimmer of a chance that you might make it, then you’re going to be pumping. There’s a higher possibility that you might lose. It’s the possibility you might lose that gets you excited.”

The girls start to shift and mutter, but Julia’s gaze stays fixed on the counselor, her eyes shiny and narrowed and hard. The counselor is looking at his shoes.

“The fact that Victoria was underage and virginal or whatever wasn’t exciting because he could exercise more power over her,” Julia says. “It was exciting because he stood to lose so much more if anyone found out.” Julia has a way of cocking her head to emphasize the shock value. “He wouldn’t just lose her,” she says. “He would lose everything.”

There is a small pause and then another rustling swoop as all the girls turn back to look at the counselor. He looks up, tugs again at his tuft of hair, and sighs.

“I think we’ve deviated from the point,” he says. “What we’re concerned with here is the power imbalance. We’re concerned with the fact that, as a teacher, Mr. Saladin abused his position of power by seeking out a relationship with a student.”

“We’ve only deviated from your point to my point,” Julia snaps. “And anyway, isn’t every relationship a power imbalance in some way?”

The counselor quickly turns back to the group before Julia can open her mouth to say more. “What do you guys think?” he asks, trying to make eye contact only with the least combative and least articulate girls in the room. “Any thoughts? Agree? Disagree?”

A few girls raise their hands and begin to speak, and Julia loses interest immediately. She scowls at the counselor, and then fishes a biro out of her pocket and begins to doodle on the back of her hand as if she doesn’t care. After a while she looks up, and to her sudden thudding surprise Isolde is looking at her. Her expression is no longer childish and candied. Her head is turned slightly so she is looking half over her shoulder like a cold and careless queen with her neck all standing out in ropes.

Julia flushes under her collar and censors herself too late. Her heart is beating very fast. All of a sudden she feels too big for her own body, clumsy and stupid and lumpish, and the feeling washes over her all at once in a horrible thrill.

They hold each other’s gaze for a moment, and then Isolde looks away.

Isolde and Victoria are watching television. Isolde is curled in the cat-furred hollow of the armchair with her legs hugged to her chest and her head upon the arm. Victoria is lying on the sofa with one leg cocked and the remote control held lightly between her finger and her thumb. Their father has just come through the room and crumpled Isolde’s toes in his big hand and said, Goodnight, slugs. Their mother has just called out from the stairway, Bed by eleven please. Their counterpointed footsteps, light and heavy, have just dwindled away up the stairs, and they have just shut their bedroom door with a faint and knuckled click.

Victoria says, “What about that group of boys you used to hang out with? Are they still pissing about with you guys?”

She speaks with the unrequited prerogative of an older sister’s demand for the whole truth. As the elder, Victoria’s perspective on her little sister’s life is always that of a recent veteran, knowing and qualified and unshockable. It is as if, at each new stage, Isolde merely picks up another hand-me-down costume that Victoria has grown out of and cast behind her, and as she struggles with the arm-holes Victoria is entitled to enter the dressing room and watch. When Isolde gets her first period, fits her first bra, plants her first kiss, chooses a dress for her first ball—at all these milestones Victoria is, or will be, present. If not, the elder sister is then always entitled to ask, Why didn’t you tell me, Issie, why?

By contrast, little Isolde would never dare ask Victoria what really happened behind the tiny pasted window of the rehearsal-room door. She would never dare ask for details—the life under his clothes, his breath, the touch of him. She would never ask, Was he nervous, Toria? or Who reached out first? or Did you talk together first, for weeks and weeks—about yourselves, about what you wanted and what you didn’t have? All these are questions Isolde is not allowed to ask. She could not ask, Why didn’t you tell me? when Victoria snared her first lover, began her first affair, broke her first promise, or shed, for the first time, tiny blossom-drops of virgin blood, for all of these slender landmarks are part of a terrain in which the younger sister does not yet belong.

Later, when Isolde is Victoria’s age, and Victoria is still two steps ahead, at university maybe, and living elsewhere, smoking her first papered twist of weed, walking home from her first one-night stand with her sandals slung over her wrist, for the first time deciding what, in truth, she is going to be—then, perhaps, Victoria might tell her what really happened. Not every detail, because by then Victoria will be airy and deliberately removed, waving her hand and saying, “I just think Mum and Dad were cunts about that whole thing,” or “God, that was ages ago.” She might say, “We were going to run off together, but in the end he went back to his old girlfriend. I ran into him on the street a few months ago. He’s fatter than he was.”

But speaking of it now would be impossible. Isolde thinks that it would be like flipping a chapter ahead in a book that she was reading, to press Victoria for a detail, or an answer, or a map. Victoria’s life will always be two paces ahead, now and forever, and if Isolde saw the road before she had to walk upon it herself she would simply be a cheat.

“Yeah, but it means you’ll never make the same mistakes as me,” Victoria says, unwilling to let Isolde feel she has the poorer lot.

“No,” Isolde says, “I will make the same mistakes, but by the time I do they won’t seem interesting because you’ll already have done it, and I’ll only be a copy.”

“Yeah… no,” says Victoria. “You’ve got it better. Mum and Dad are way stricter with me than they are with you. They waste all their energy on me and by the time you come along their standards have dropped and they can’t be bothered any more.”

“Yeah… no,” says Isolde. “I have to pretend to be the baby, and that sucks.”

“Yeah, but when I was six I was getting crayons and chalk for Christmas, and when you were six you got a pink tennis racket in a pink glitter sleeve. The older they get, the richer they get. You had way more stuff to play with than I ever did.”

“Yeah, but that’s just it. I’m always compared to you. You aren’t compared to anybody, because you always do things first.”

“That’s balls,” Victoria says. “When’s the last time they compared you to me?”

The conversation is a comfort, because underneath it all they know that at least they occupy a place, the older and the younger, a place they each fill as closely and completely as Isolde’s body fills the ancient cat-worn dip in the old armchair by the wall. Underneath it all they know that it is more a thing of necessary equilibrium than any sort of failed facsimile. Each sister claims not a mirror copy but a rough-edged ill-formed twisted half of their parents’ attention and command.

“What about that group of boys you used to hang out with?” is Victoria’s question now, and Isolde says, “Nah, I don’t know. All the St. Sylvester boys are dicks, I reckon.”

“That’s what I thought,” Victoria says. “When I was your age.”

There is a strange mood in the rehearsal room as the jazz band assemble their instruments and unfold their music stands. It’s the first time they’ve met for practice in three weeks, and privately everyone feels betrayed—not by Mr. Saladin, who was always jovial and tousled and called them Princess or Madam, but by Victoria, who fooled them all by pretending to be one of them.

The girls are silent as they collectively suffer the gross humiliation of being the last to know. They feel a dawning indignation that all along Victoria must have watched them founder and said nothing, that all along she sat among them in silent smug possession of her secret. Now they are compelled to remember with embarrassment their own harmless shy flirtations with Mr. Saladin, every remembered happy-flutter feeling poisoned now by the knowledge that he was already hers and already stolen. They remember their woodwind tutorial when he punched the air and said, That’s what I’m talking about and grinned his boyish grin, in the quad at lunchtime when he briefly joined their game of hacky-sack and then ran off with the hacky when he started to lose, before jazz practice when he strolled over and started talking about the Shakespeare Festival and the chamber music contest and the changes to the summer uniform—

“He said she looked good in her summer uniform, way back in the first term,” says first trombone as she empties her spit valve on to the carpet. “I was standing right there, as well.”

It is a mark of the depth of their wounding that they are pretending they suspected it all along. Everything that they have seen and been told about love so far has been an inside perspective, and they are not prepared for the crashing weight of this exclusion. It dawns on them now how much they never saw and how little they were wanted, and with this dawning comes a painful reimagining of the self as peripheral, uninvited, and utterly minor.

“He had this thing he did,” the percussionist is saying, “if they were lying in the dark together, if he was talking into the dark and he wasn’t sure whether she was smiling. He would make his forefingers into little calipers and he would keep reaching over to check the corners of her mouth. Sometimes he would lie on his side and he would keep his fingers there, just lightly, as they talked on and on into the dark. They used to laugh about it. It was a thing he did.”

Bridget is in the corner, lifting her sax out of its gray furred cavity and fitting the mouthpiece together absently. Last week she bought a number of different reeds from different manufacturers to test, numbering each one with a tiny red numeral to remind her which is which. She removes one from its plastic sheath and checks the tiny inked number before screwing it tight. The reed is harder than she has been used to, and probably her tongue will bleed.

“My gypsy girl,” says second trumpet. “That’s what he called her. My gypsy girl.”

The bell rings. There is a vague flurry of chair-scraping and shuffling and they all aim their half-eaten sandwiches at the wastepaper bin and then settle into their concentric half-circle, ready for the conductor to arrive.

“They got her to admit that it had been going on since last year,” says tenor sax. “She had to give a statement to the police and everything.”

And then they are silent for a while, dwelling separately on the unhappy realization that they, above all others, are the ones who have been deceived.

“If you imagined yourself in French plaits and a pressed school kilt, playing ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ on tenor sax at the seventh-form prize-giving and standing coyly in a pool of yellow light, then I’m afraid you made the wrong choice.” The saxophone teacher’s fingernails are blood-red today, and gently tapping. “The saxophone does not speak that language. The saxophone speaks the language of the underground, the jaded melancholy language of the half-light—grimy and sexy and sweaty and hard. It is the language of orphans and bastards and whores.”

Bridget stands with her sax limp in her hands like a wilted flower.

“The saxophone is the cocaine of the woodwind family,” the sax teacher continues. “Saxophonists are admired because they are dangerous, because they have explored a darker, more sinister side of themselves. In your performance, Bridget, I see nothing grimy or sexy or sweaty or hard. Everything I see is scrubbed shiny pink and white, sedated and sanitized like a poodle at a fair.”

“Okay,” Bridget says unhappily.

Tap-tap goes the bloody fingernail on the side of the mug.

“What do you think makes a good teacher, Bridget?”

Bridget draws her lips in between her teeth as she thinks. “I guess talent,” she says lamely. “Being good at what you’re teaching.”

“What else?”

“I guess being patient.”

“Shall I tell you what makes a good teacher?”

“Okay.”

“A good teacher,” the saxophone teacher says, “is somebody who awakes in you something that did not exist before. A good teacher changes you in a way that means you cannot go back even if you might want to. Now you can practice and learn the pattern of the notes and have good control over your instrument and you will be able to play that piece very competently, but until you and I can work together to challenge and awaken and change some part of you, competent is all that piece will ever be.”

“I was just trying it out how Mrs. Critchley said,” Bridget blurts out. “She’s Mr. Saladin’s replacement. We had jazz band today.”

The sax teacher narrows her eyes briefly, but all she says is, “Is that Jean Critchley?”

“She’s Mr. Saladin’s replacement,” Bridget says again.

“I’ve seen her play live. She plays trumpet.” The saxophone teacher is suddenly withdrawn, her voice cold and calm and careful, looking Bridget up and down as if she is seeking visible signs of treachery.

“Why didn’t you apply?” says Bridget, her eyes widening with the thought.

“I don’t like high schools,” says the saxophone teacher.

“She doesn’t look like a Mrs. Jean Critchley. She has red glasses and she wears baggy tee-shirts with leggings and sneakers. First thing she said,” Bridget says, brightening now, “first thing she said was, All right, shut up so I can talk about myself. I’m the teacher who comes after the teacher who had the affair. Let’s blow it all out of the water now so we can get on and make some music and have some fun. And you can all relax right away. They made me promise not to have an affair with any of you.”

Bridget blinks innocently at the saxophone teacher. She is good at voices.

“Did anyone laugh?” the saxophone teacher says.

“Oh, yeah,” says Bridget. “Yeah, everyone likes her a lot.”

“So they laughed. They laughed at the sheer ridiculousness of it. The prospect that Mrs. Jean Critchley might seduce one of you, might draw any one of you toward her by subtle and insidious means, might push one of you against the music-cupboard door and press her cold cheek against yours so her lips are almost touching the feathered lobe of your ear. The prospect that one of you might want her, even, and pick her out as an object and a prize. That one of you might blush every time she looks at you, might stammer and stumble and take every opportunity to divert through the music block in the hope of brushing past her in the hall.”

“Yeah,” Bridget says. “She blew it all out of the water, so we could get on and make some music and have some fun.”

“So you got on and made some music and had some fun.”

“Yeah,” Bridget says again.

“And Mrs. Jean Critchley suggested that you play this piece like an ice-cream jingle.”

“She didn’t say that.” Bridget senses she’s winning, in some obscure way, and draws herself up a little higher. “She just said, Sometimes it’s not about originality. Sometimes it’s just about having fun.”

The saxophone teacher is frowning. Inside she asks: does she feel jealous? She reminds herself that Bridget is her least favorite student, the student she mocks most often, the student she would least like to be. She reminds herself that Bridget is lank and mousy, with a greasy bony face and a thin hookish nose and pale lashes that cause her to resemble a ferret or a stoat.

She is jealous. She doesn’t like the idea of Mrs. Jean Critchley, who is jovial and flat footed and forever appealing to her students to just have fun. She doesn’t like the idea of Bridget having a basis for comparison, an occasion to see her, the saxophone teacher, in a new and different light. She doesn’t like it.

“Let’s move on,” she says. “I think it’s time to try something new. Something a little harder, that will make you struggle a little more and re-establish which one of us is truly in control out of you and me. Okay?”

“Okay,” Bridget says.

“Let me find a Grade Eight piece,” the saxophone teacher says. “One that Mrs. Critchley won’t have any cause to comment on.”

Isolde falters after the first six bars.

“I haven’t practiced,” she says. “I don’t have an excuse.”

She stands there for a moment, her right hand splayed over the keys and damply clacking. The shifting tendons in her hand make her skin stretch white and purple.

The sax teacher looks at her and decides not to fight her. She moves over to the bookshelf and lifts the plastic hood off the record player. “Let me play you that recording, then,” she says. She selects a record from the pile and says, “Tell me what happened at school today.”

“They wanted to cancel Sex Ed,” Isolde says gloomily. “In light of recent events. They took Miss Clark out into the hallway, and the principal was there and we could hear the whole thing. We’re not supposed to call it Sex Ed. We’re supposed to call it Health.”

The saxophone teacher lowers the needle with a crackle and a low hiss. It’s Sonny Rollins playing “You Don’t Know What Love Is” on tenor sax. The record trembles like a leaf.

“What is it that you learn in Health?” asks the saxophone teacher as they sit back to listen.

“We learn about boys,” says Isolde in the same flat voice. “We put condoms on wooden poles. We learn how to unroll them so they won’t break. Miss Clark showed us how much they can stretch by putting a condom over her shoe.”

Isolde lapses into silence for a moment, remembering Miss Clark struggling to stretch a condom over the toe of her sensible flat-soled shoe, hopping and red-faced and puffing with the effort. “There it goes!” she said triumphantly in the end, and wiggled her foot so they could all see. She said, “Never believe a boy who says it won’t fit. You say to him, I saw Miss Clark put a condom over her whole shoe.”

The music is still playing. Isolde is only half-listening, looking out over the rooftops and the chimneys and the wires.

“We don’t really learn much about girls,” she says. “Everything we learn about boys is all hands-on 3-D models and cartoons. When we learn about girls it’s always in cross-section, and they use diagrams rather than pictures. The stuff about boys is all ejaculations, mostly. The stuff about girls is just reproduction. Just eggs.”

In truth the classes are patched and holey, hours of vague unhelpful glosses and line drawings and careful omissions which serve to cripple rather than assist. Most of the girls now lack a key definition in this new and halting lexicon of forbidden words, some slender dearth of understanding that will later humiliate them, confound them, expose them, because it is expected now that their knowledge is complete. They envisage rigid perpendicular erections and a perfect hairless trinity for the male genitals, groomed and gathered in a careful bouquet. They have not heard of the glossy sap that portends the rush of female drive. They know ovulate but not orgasm. They know bisexual but not blow. Their knowledge is like a newspaper article ripped down the middle so only half of it remains.

“Is it useful?” asks the saxophone teacher. “Do you learn things you didn’t know before?”

“We learned that you can only feel one thing at one time,” says Isolde. “You can feel excitement or you can feel fear but you can never feel both. We learned why beauty is so important: beauty is important because you can’t really defile something that is already ugly, and to defile is the ultimate goal of the sexual impulse. We learned that you can always say no.”

The two of them sit in that self-conscious half-profile demanded by music-lesson etiquette. Facing each other squarely feels too familiar and standing side by side feels too formal, as if they are amateur actors onstage for the first time, fearful of turning their faces away from the auditorium lest their performance be lost. So they position themselves always at forty-five degrees, the angle of the professional actor who includes both the stage and the audience and holds in delicate balance that which is expressed and that which is concealed.

The Sonny Rollins track has the thin gritty sound of an old recording.

“You can take the record home if you think you’d find it inspiring,” the saxophone teacher says kindly. “I really think you’d suit playing tenor.”

“We don’t have a record player,” Isolde says.