The Rehearsal

FOUR

The gymnasium was not a gymnasium but a fluid space, a space that seemed to inhale and exhale and settle around the shapes and figures on the floor. There was a giant accordion made of steel that compressed the plastic bleachers against the wall, and dusty heavy drapes that could divide the space into thirds and quarters and fifths. The stage was formed of many chalky footprinted podiums that could be rearranged or stacked or upended or tiered, depending. Today the drapes were all pushed to the sides and the podiums stacked against the wall in a hasty barricade. The space was clean and full of light.

“Mime is literal embodiment,” said the Head of Movement once the doors had closed. “To mime an object is to discover its weight and volume and thus its meaning.” He was weighing something in his hand as he spoke, something invisible and heavy. “If we occupy each other, we begin to truly understand each other,” he said. “The same is true for all things. Mime is a path to understanding.”

He turned over whatever he was holding in his hand.

Everyone was taut and straining and watchful, waiting for an opportunity to say something clever or profound or interesting that would set them apart from the other hopefuls and secure the approval of the tutor. Some of them were nodding slowly with their eyes narrowed to communicate insight and deep reflection. Some were waiting for the tutor to reference something they had a particular knowledge of, so they could snare him afterward and force a conversation. Stanley was sitting on the outer rim, alert and upright but sneaking careful sideways glances at the other hopefuls whenever he could.

“The first and most important point,” the Head of Movement said, “is that you must start with a thing itself, not with an idea of a thing. I can see what I am holding in my hand. I can see its weight, its shape and its texture. It doesn’t matter if you can see it yet or not: the important thing is that I can.”

They all strained to see the invisible thing he was holding in his hand. Every pair of eyes followed the Head of Movement as he moved slowly back and forth. He was barefoot, like all the tutors at the Institute, and when he took a step his foot rolled from the heel to the ball in a slow feline movement, lazy and deliberate at once. His feet were milky and lean.

The Head of Movement said, “Many of us fear women. We are afraid of woman as woman, longing for her as virgin or as madonna or as whore. It is not by becoming a woman that we will address this fear. It is by becoming the things she touches, the spaces she moves through, the fractured gestures that are not signs in themselves but are nonetheless hers and thus a part of her. If we discover the weight of these small things, then she will appear not as an idea but as a life and a totality.”

He paused at this, and ran his tongue over his bottom lip. The hopefuls shifted uncertainly, wondering whether they were supposed to argue, and for a moment nobody spoke.

Stanley had gone to an all-boys high school and he felt the presence of the girls in the group acutely. They studded his peripheral vision like scattered diamonds, but when he looked around the room his gaze passed casually over them, in the same way that he might self-consciously pass over a cripple or a drunk and pretend not to notice, pretend not to flinch. He waited uncomfortably for one of the girls to say something, maybe even to object. He looked at the floor.

“I don’t fear women,” one of the boys called out at last, and there was a ripple of relieved laughter.

The Head of Movement nodded. “Stand up,” he said. “I am going to tell you a little about yourself.” He folded his arms across his chest suddenly, forgetting about the invisible thing that he had been holding in his hand, and the invisible thing disappeared.

The boy got to his feet. He was thin and freckled, his rib cage peaking a little at his sternum and his hip bones thrusting out above the tight gathered waistband of his tracksuit pants. His shoulders and ankles and knees all looked a little too large, like he was a paper figure held together at the joints with brass pivot pins.

“Go for a walk,” the Head of Movement said. “Go on. Walk around for a while.”

The boy started walking. The Head of Movement watched him in silence for an entire circuit of the gymnasium, following him with his eyes, his arms folded and his face still. When the boy had lapped the gymnasium completely, the Head of Movement fell into step behind him and began to imitate him. He withdrew like a tortoise into himself, shoving his chest out and his shoulder blades together, keeping his upper body rigid while he walked so his arms fell awkwardly from his shoulders, and paddling with each step as if he were walking underwater. They walked in tandem in this way for a while, the boy looking unhappily over his shoulder and unhappily sideways at the other hopefuls watching from the floor, newly conscious of his big feet and his peaked chest and his stiff paddling arms.

“You may stop now,” the Head of Movement said finally. “Thank you.” He turned to the group. “Can someone please tell me something about my performance of this young man’s walk,” he said.

The hopefuls shifted awkwardly but nobody spoke.

“My performance was a parody,” the Head of Movement said after a long pause. “It could only ever be a parody because I do not know this young man. I am old and comfortable and I don’t really understand his nervousness, or his uncertainty, or his hope. I cannot possibly understand these things just by watching him walk for fifteen seconds. In parodying this young man I disperse all possible complexity. I reduce him and I insult him. Your performances will be insulting too if you do not truly understand what you are pretending to be.”

The gymnasium was very quiet. The Head of Movement said, “You cannot mime what you don’t understand. You cannot penetrate death, or God, or a woman. To attempt any of these things is to aim for sincerity rather than truth. Sincerity is not enough for students of this Institute. Sincerity is a word for hawkers and salesmen and hacks. Sincerity is a device, and we do not deal in devices here.

“Mime,” he said. “We will begin very simply. Everybody up.”

“At the Institute we encourage our students to have sex,” the Head of Acting said. “You need to know your body in this profession. You need to know yourself. You need to explore all parts of you. However, graduates of the program will probably tell you it is not a good idea to sleep with each other. This is a small pool, and in any case, two actors together is always a terrible thing.”

There was a little rustle of delight as the students looked around at each other to compress their lips and roll their eyes and giggle faintly at the prospect, and just for an instant any coupling, any combination of any pair among them, was possible. In this instant they all became potent, latent, cusping, even the ill-formed and sexless ones who would later be shunned or overlooked. Their hearts beat faster.

“We encourage you to explore the reaches of your body, test its limits and its scope,” the Head of Acting went on. “We encourage you to get fit, to fall in love, to get hurt, to masturbate.”

He enjoyed the collective flinch, manifested in a kind of sudden unmoving sternness, all of them looking gravely forward in silent straining proof that they were mature enough to hear the word out loud. Boys who, four months ago, would have snickered and reached for the collar of their nearest friend to swipe and then shove his head away, who would have yelled out a name at random, and laughed as the named boy scowled and flushed and hunched down further in his plastic bucket-seat, who would be swiftly and silently adding genitals to every conceivable diagram in the fifth-hand textbook spread open on his lap—these boys were silent and respectful and their eyes were wide.

The girls in the crowd were silent too, holding their jaws rigid and their eyes still. Only boys could be wankers and tossers and jerks: boys were exponents of this solitary function by default, a common fact which softened the shaming, and prevented any indicted boy from being truly alienated or destroyed. For the girls, however, this territory remained inexplicably taboo. Four months ago they would have simply frowned, taken on a pinched and nauseated look perhaps, and shaken their heads very faintly, to forever banish the topic from their lunchtime circle on the dusty grass. Now they were uneasy: they heard the Head of Acting speak the word out loud and were suddenly fearful, lest such a flat and prudish denial of the act was somehow—in the eyes of a man they all sought to impress—wrong. Somehow in the short summer between high school and the world beyond, a cosmic dial had turned: self-knowledge was now a quality that lent a girl a kind of husky darkness, a careless self-sufficiency, an appeal that was worldly and yearning and jaded all at once. The girls sat stiff and tense on the gymnasium floor and tried to look as casual and as solemn as they could.

This was the Head of Acting’s method: to make sacred everything these students might regard profane, and then challenge any one of them to blanch, or laugh. It worked. The students looked up at him, all of them without the usual proud mechanisms that would make them need to cry, Everybody masturbates but me.

“Good,” the Head of Acting said softly. “Now everybody get up and form a circle.”

In their haste to leap up and obey him they were clumsy and flat-footed and gauche. They scrabbled to unknot themselves and form a ring. The Head of Acting watched them fumble, and he smiled.

“What do you think, Martin?” the Head of Acting said, tapping his fountain pen against his cheek. “I thought Number 12 was very teachable.”

“Willing,” said the Head of Movement. “Eager without being impatient. I’d say definitely a Maybe.”

“Too many on Maybe,” said the Head of Voice, spinning the whiteboard so the others could see. “We need to start making some definite decisions or we’ll be here all night.”

“It’s because there are more and more Maybes each year,” said the Head of Acting irritably. “The kids are losing something. Twenty years ago, kids were soft and supple and compliant. Now they’re like planks of wood. Everywhere you look you see fucking Maybes.”

He threw himself back into his swivel chair, and the suspension caught him, buoying him back up again so he bobbed crossly for a moment until the momentum died.

At the top of the whiteboard the Head of Improvisation had written Ambition, Teachability, Sociability, Talent in her cramped sideways hand. The words tapered as they advanced across the board, so Ambition was written much larger than the rest, and Talent narrowed to a spearhead against the raised silver lip of the frame. The Head of Acting tilted his head back and regarded the petering list down the length of his nose. Sociability was new. It had been Collegiality for a number of years, and Courage for many years before that. It had been Courage when he had first started teaching. The changes marked a devolution, the Head of Acting thought.

“Teachability,” he said aloud. “For the boys, it means their potential to be taught about themselves, about their own bodies. For the girls, it means their potential to forget, to be able to forget everything they’ve been taught about themselves and about their bodies.”

“Oh, come on,” the Head of Improvisation said. “You act as if the boys and girls are utterly different species.”

“I’m just aware that there are differences.”

“I don’t think the differences are that huge. How about this boy—Number 12. How are this boy’s chances and choices any different from any of the girls’?”

She was cross with the Head of Acting tonight, cross with the pointed sulky air of profound disappointment that was his by rights, as Director of the Institute and possessor of the casting vote. He was sulking majestically, like a spoiled king.

“Well,” the Head of Acting said, “he’s not concerned about his beauty, for one thing. He’s not concerned that every role he takes will flatter him, that every photograph will be backlit and soft focused, forever. He’s willing to be ugly for the sake of his art.”

“Which is all very convenient,” the Head of Improvisation snapped, “because all the unbeautiful roles, all the character roles, are written for men anyway.”

From across the table the Head of Movement watched them bicker, and wondered at his own stance. He thought he saw a surly vein of misogyny in the older man, swollen over the years into a bluish pucker at his temple that never quite disappeared, and he thought he saw an exposed nerve in the woman, some hypersensitivity, some indecent raw form of hysteria that made him want to wince and look away. The Head of Movement often felt like this: marooned between two points of view, suspended. He sighed.

“Let’s not intellectualize this too much,” the Head of Improvisation said at last, repenting. “What’s important is that the boy is humble and receptive enough to be able to try different things, to stretch himself and grow, as an actor.”

“Humility,” the Head of Acting said. “That’s what it should say then, up there. If that’s what we’re looking for.”

The others were silent. The Head of Movement rubbed his face with his hands.

“All right. This isn’t helping,” the Head of Voice said. “We agree Number 12 is teachable. What else?”

They observed the photograph of Number 12, affixed to his application form with a paper clip. He looked slightly wistful, wide eyed with long pale lashes and blond hair.

“My note on Number 12 was Vulnerable,” said the Head of Improvisation.

“I saw that too,” said the Head of Acting. “I wrote down Virginal.”

“Nice,” said the Head of Improvisation. “We can work with that.”

They were being deliberately polite with each other now. They’ll accept him in a moment, the Head of Movement thought. They’ll accept the boy and it will be simply for show: as a show of deference on his part, as a show of graciousness on hers.

“I’d be prepared to make him a Yes,” said the Head of Acting. “Martin?”

The Head of Movement shrugged. When he was younger this used to excite him, selecting the choicest students from the pool like a gourmand at a spice market, rolling the possibilities around on his tongue, full of hope and ambition for the year ahead. This year as he pawed through the application forms he felt bleak and even a little ashamed of himself, as if he was selling a product he knew to be without use or value. He had been teaching for too long.

He nodded finally. “Yes for me,” he said.

“All in favor?” said the Head of Acting, turning to include the others.

They all raised their pens gravely. The Head of Voice nodded a curt satisfied little nod and pulled the whiteboard toward her. She uncapped her pen and wrote Stanley’s name in large square letters at the top of Yes.

Stanley clutched his Yes letter as he waited in the Green Room to be called upon. The other hopefuls sat around him, perched upon armchairs or stacked wooden forms, or on the swivel chairs that were fixed at intervals in front of the cracked and dusty mirror. Stanley caught sight of himself and realized how frightened he was, stiff in his pressed shirt with a new haircut and long bloodless hands. His gaze slid to the left and he made unexpected eye contact with the boy sitting next to him. They both looked away quickly, ashamed at having been caught observing themselves in such a private way.

Stanley swung his ankles against the crossbar of his stool and looked about him. There was an even split between boys and girls. The final class of twenty always comprised ten of each, so neither the boys nor the girls really regarded the other as a rival: each sex was competing in parallel, vying only against their own. As a result the girls were cautious and deceitful with each other but bright and flirtatious with the boys; the boys, in turn, laughed loudly and publicly when they were addressed but in the meantime they sat apart from each other and watched the girls form their swift bonds of togetherness and false sympathy with something between bewilderment and scorn.

Stanley was watching the girls now. Even as rivals they were pressing together, sowing shallow seeds of friendship and community: “I know it won’t happen,” they said, “but I hope we all get in. I hope we all do. Wouldn’t it be amazing, if the tutors came out and said, Let’s take them all?” The girls said, “Even if some of us don’t get in, we’ll stay in touch,” and some of them said, “I don’t have a chance, really. Not against you guys. I cried in the first audition when you did that piece about the hope chest. You’re so much better than me it’s not even funny.” The girls said, “Underneath it all I just want to be liked by everyone, liked and even loved.” One girl was massaging another’s shoulders. She ground the heels of her hands into the shoulder blades of her rival, her adversary, a girl whom she had only lately met, and in a low voice she said, “You’ll be awesome. You were awesome at the first audition. You’ll get in, no problem.”

Later Stanley would arrive at the opinion that girls were naturally more duplicitous, more artful, better at falsely sheathing their true selves; boys’ personalities simply shone through the clearer. It was that female art of multitasking, he would conclude, that witchy capacity that girls possessed, that allowed them to retain dual and triple threads of attention at once. Girls could distinguish constantly and consciously between themselves and the performance of themselves, between the form and the substance. This double-handed knack, this perpetual duality, meant that any one girl was both an advertisement and a product at any one time. Girls were always acting. Girls could reinvent themselves, he later thought, with a sour twist to his mouth and his free hand flattening the hair on his crown, and boys could not.

Which would be harder for the tutors, he wondered now, choosing between the girls or choosing between the boys? Did they have a different set of criteria for each, a different benchmark that took into consideration this fundamental difference between these unitary blunted boys and these many-headed Hydras, the girls? He realized with a kind of underwater flinch that all the girls in the room were beautiful, all of them glossy and svelte like variations on a theme. The boys, by contrast, were mostly odd and ordinary, not yet grown into their faces and their shoulders and their hands, some of them greasy and brash, some of them thin and spotted and hoarse. Looking around, it seemed to Stanley as if the boys were here to audition for ten different character parts in a play, and the girls were all auditioning for a single role. He got up and moved away.

The room was a mess: costume racks, painted flats, trunks, scaffolds and ladders, swollen cardboard boxes, paint cans, shrouded furniture. On the auditorium wall there were shelves and shelves of faceless polystyrene heads wearing helmets and bonnets and crowns, and in the corner a rusted suit of armor standing with his pelvis forward and his hands upon his hips.

Every five or ten minutes another number was called. The caller was a sharp gray woman who struck each name off her clipboard with relish, and watched them between strikes with pity and mild curiosity, as if they were gladiators dressed up to die.

“Number 5,” she called now.

Number 5 jumped to his feet and trotted nervously out of the room. The others watched him go.

“What if this is part of the test?” said Number 14 once the door had shut. “What if they’re videoing us now and watching us on live feed just to see how we bond?”

“What if there isn’t even an audition at all?” said Number 61. “We just get taken out of the room one by one once they’ve watched us for long enough, and then they tell us to go home.”

“Like rats,” said Number 14, as if in summary. They fell silent.

A few of the boys were pacing around the room, trying to stamp out their nervousness and peering at the framed photographs on the wall just for something to do. The photographs showed the class groups that had passed through the Institute, year by year, becoming sharper and more focused as the technology advanced, so the most recent groups shone wetly with a crispness and a brightness that the older classes did not possess. Stanley looked at the faces of all these people who had been opened up, awakened, broken and prevented from forming a crust, and wondered how many of them had now surrendered and become ordinary. In the photographs they looked hard and confident, bright in their theater makeup and their pinned-up costumes, and flushed with the thrill of opening night. He followed the photographs along the length of the wall and saw soldiers, monks, orphans, pirates, housewives, gods, samurai, and a group of silent watchmen in stern feathered masks that for some reason made him shiver.

“Number 33, you’re up,” came the call.

When they all had first arrived, the Head of Acting swept in, distracted and tilting his face oddly as if he was used to wearing bifocals.

“One of the questions we are going to ask you today,” he said briskly, “is why you want to attend this Institute, and why you want to become an actor. I am telling you this in advance so you can think hard about your answer. Let me say that all I am looking for is a truthful answer to this question. I do not want you to tell me that the theater fills you with a noble and holy passion just because you think that is the answer with which you can win. I want you to tell me the truth.

“Let me explain what I mean,” said the Head of Acting, still looking at them down the length of his long nose. “I auditioned for a place at this Institute nearly forty years ago. When I arrived for my audition and waited in this Green Room like you are all waiting here now, I was not filled with a noble and holy passion for the theater. I only knew that drama school sounded like more fun than university, and I thought it would probably mean less work. I was wrong about the work,” he added, and smiled faintly.

“The real reason I enrolled in any tertiary education at all was that I knew that teenage girls always like university boys better. I had been a scrawny and awkward and unsuccessful teenager and I wanted a second chance. I thought I would enroll in some college, buy a car and try for a girlfriend.

“I am telling you this about myself,” the Head of Acting said in his calm distracted way, “because I don’t want you to stand in front of the panel and lie. I want you to tell the truth, even if the truth is boring or embarrassing or contemptible. I don’t care what you say, as long as it’s you and as long as it’s real.” He swept a look over them all, smiled a tiny smile and said, “Good luck.”

Stanley moved from the Class of ’61 photograph to the Class of ’62 photograph and suddenly saw the Head of Acting. He was young and a little thinner but wore the same unfocused expression, as if he was watching something over the photographer’s shoulder that none of the others could see. They were all dressed in military uniforms, and the Head of Acting was kneeling at the front with a rifle in his lap, his peaked cap pushed back on his head, showing a darkly oiled curl of hair. Stanley leaned in for a closer look, and wondered if this square-jawed soldier ever found a girl.

From the damp-smelling foam-lined pit underneath the trapdoor ran a low reinforced passage left and right, and beyond the orchestra pit was another passage that ran underneath the first rows of the stalls in the audience. These passages invisibly framed the orchestra pit, forming a kind of underground moat that offered two quick and unseen paths between the wings on either side of the stage. The outer passage crawled between the ancient foundations of the auditorium, lit along the floor by a dusty string of fairy lights that sometimes winked on and off if the control box was accidentally knocked. The tunnel was narrow and low, the mortar bleeding thickly from between the cement bricks and brushing rough on either shoulder as you passed, the dry itch candyfloss of under-floor insulation wisping out between the joists. The inner passage was lined with gib-board, and narrower still: if two actors met in the middle they had to perform a quick shuffling rotating embrace, like an animate turnstile revolving in the dark.

The secrets of the auditorium were revealed to the first-years in the second week of the school year. They filed silently through the passages, inspected and tested the trap, hoisted themselves up into the flies, and dropped, awkward and untrusting, both hands clutching at the flying harness and craning nervously to check the winch. They walked across the stippled bridge that connected the fly-floors, looking down at the stage far below and reaching out to touch the thick braided cables that ran back and forth. The flies were at least twice the height of the proscenium arch, and the Head of Acting showed them how an entire panel of scenery could be flown up into the space above the stage to hang there, ready and waiting for the cue to drop. He activated the lift in the orchestra pit and they watched the floor of the pit rise up to meet the level of the stage. He showed them the heavy motorized chain underneath the false stage floor that activated the revolve, and then he switched the revolve on and they let themselves be carried around in silent powerful orbit, standing braced like stiff-legged pawns as the red mouth of the auditorium flashed by again and again.

The Head of Lighting came forward and showed them the templates that could turn light into dappled water and wind, the gauzes that gave the illusion of distance, the lights that could make you beautiful or villainous or old, and the followspot with its thick steel handle that could track an actor around the stage. He showed them how to make sunlight and moonlight and counterfeit flames. He showed them how to turn indoors into outdoors and back again.

They stood underneath the steel lighting rig and looked up at the heavy black instruments hanging like a cloud of bats from the pipes, the black barn-doors that shuttered and blinkered the bulbs all folded and unfolded like countless bat-wing membranes settling in sleep. The instruments were each clamped to the rig with a steel yoke which allowed the shuttered beam to be directed anywhere over the stage: the Head of Lighting demonstrated, slipping colored gels expertly in and out of the gel frame holder and pulling the yokes to and fro. He straddled the top of his dented ladder with his ankles hooked around the topmost steps to hold him steady, squinting down at them and plucking at his brown beard with his free hand as he spoke.

The first-years were then shown the lesser secrets: the door-slam, a little wooden box with a heavy sliding bolt that could simulate door-slamming sounds from backstage, and the rain box, a little box filled with dried peas for simulating rain-sounds—“Before everything was digitalized,” the Head of Acting said with a nostalgic gravity, as he shook the box and filled the air with the sound of gentle drumming rain. He showed them up close how the false perspective of the painted flats contrived to make the stage area bigger than it actually was. He showed them the grooves and runnels into which the flats could slip, the ancient pulley that hauled at the red curtain, and the curved cyclorama at the back of the stage that gave the space a never-ending vastness, as if it went back and back forever.

“The auditorium is a sacred space,” the Head of Acting said at last, looking gravely at them as they stood in the middle of the flooded stage and breathed in the sweet dusty smell of hot lights and generated fog. “We do not hold classes in here. It is only when we come to dress rehearsal that you are allowed to use this space. You may not come in here alone.”

The first-years all nodded. Stanley was standing at the back of the group, still craning upward into the vast blackness of the flies and trying to remember everything they had been shown. He was a little in awe of the Head of Acting, but underneath it all he wasn’t sure he liked the man very much. There was something cold and pulsing about his manner that reminded Stanley of a lizard or a frog. He had never touched the Head of Acting’s ropy liver-spotted hands, but in his mind he imagined them to be cold and moist and snatching.

They all waited for the Head of Acting to say more, but he just drew his heels together and spread his arm to gesture them off the stage, signaling that the tour had come to a close.

The first-years filed quietly past him and he watched them go, down the wheeled aluminum steps into the stalls, up the aisle past the rows and rows, and finally out into the marble light of the foyer. When they were gone he moved to the stage manager’s cubicle to kill the lights. He stood with his hand on the cool gray lever, and out of habit cleared his throat and called out a warning up into the flies: “Going dark.”

Stanley walked out of his final audition feeling light-headed. He paused at the fountain in the foyer to steady himself and gripped the basin with both hands. He breathed quietly for a moment, looking past the porcelain masks into the foggy middle-distance of a recent memory, and after a moment he realized he was being observed. He straightened and gave the spectator a rueful sort of smile. She was an older woman, maybe the secretary, framed like a news-anchor behind the high administration desk in the foyer and watching him with her cheek propped upon her palm.

“You’ll be wishing you brought a hip flask,” she said. “Just had your audition, I guess.”

“Does everybody look like this?” Stanley said, emphasizing his already crippled posture with a little jerk of his spine and holding his hands limp. The woman laughed.

“More or less,” she said. “You have to watch the ones who look too happy. In my experience the ones who look too confident afterwards are the ones who don’t usually get in.”

“Oh,” Stanley said, drawing himself up slightly.

“I suppose it’s your first time auditioning,” the woman said. “Some kids try out three, four, five times. It makes you think what they’re doing with their lives in the meantime, just waiting all those years to finally get in.”

“Yeah,” said Stanley. “Yeah, wow. It is my first time.”

“They didn’t shake you up too much?” the woman said. “They can be quite mean, in the beginning. To break you in.”

She seemed bored, sitting there with her head on her hand in the echoing cavern of the foyer. All the surfaces were bare and clean, and the car park was empty through the high wall of glass.

“Nothing too painful,” Stanley said. “Nothing I didn’t deserve, probably.”

The woman laughed. Stanley watched her laugh. It struck him for the very first time that there were qualities of beauty that were unique to women, qualities that teenage girls could not possess: kindness lines around the eyes and mouth, a certain settling of the body, a weariness of poise and pose that was indefinably sexual, like the old glamour of a dusty taffeta dress or a piece of costume jewelery with a rusted clasp. The thought had not occurred to him before. He had supposed (though never truly consciously) that a woman was only attractive insofar as she resembled a girl; that her attractiveness fell away, by degrees, through her twenties and thirties until it was buried by middle age; that the qualities that women sought were always the qualities they once had, a backward striving that was ultimately doomed to fail. He had supposed that men slept with women their own age only because they could not snare anybody younger, or because they were still married to the sweetheart of their youth; he had not supposed that weary, veined and pear-shaped women were attractive in and for themselves—they were a second-best, he had imagined, a consolation prize. Now, with a weak stirring in the nerve-wracked cavity of his chest, he saw this woman through a different lens.

She was wearing makeup, a thin line of black behind the lashes of her upper eyelid that must have been straight and uniform when she stretched her eyelid out flat to apply the liner, but when she released the skin to blink and appraise herself the line had puckered, giving her a blurred, slightly clownish look that made Stanley think of an old and kindly whore. As she smiled he saw that her incisor was rimmed with the gunmetal gray of an ancient filling. The skin on the back of her hands was loose enough to frame the tendons and the veins, and her knuckles were pouchy whorls of white. A manufactured tan on her collarbone and on the V-shaped glimpse between her breasts gave the skin a fibrous look: the wrinkle-weave traveled both horizontally and vertically so the skin was soft and infinitely lined, like worn suede.

For the first time in his life Stanley saw that a woman was not simply a failed and hopelessly outmoded girl. She was a different creature entirely from the glossed and honeyed girls in the audition room: those girls, Stanley thought, could never play this woman until the day they became her, and from that day onward they could never play a girl.

“You’re right about the hip flask,” he said. “I reckon I’ll walk out of here and straight into the pub.”

“Have one for me,” the woman said. “And good luck. If luck counts for anything.”

Stanley passed through the double doors and out into the drowsy warmth of the late afternoon. As he turned the corner and left the gabled heights of the Institute behind, he thought to himself that he was probably the twentieth student that day to have exited the audition room, passed through the foyer, walked by the administration desk and exchanged words with the secretary before leaving the building. He wondered what she had said to the others, and how she had said it, and what they had thought when they looked her in the eye.

“Let’s see some chemistry,” the Head of Acting said, and nodded for them both to begin.

“I met him last week on the damp satin dance floor at the inter-school ball,” she said. The words tumbled out of her too quick, too early, before she had swallowed her nervousness and found her rhythm. “Everyone was balled up in a tight knot near the stage, forming a human noose around the girl and the boy in the middle. It’s so the teachers can’t see in. From the outside it looks horrible, all tight and pushing and pushing, like they’re trying to watch a cock fight or a captured bear. They all take turns in the noose. I was down the other end, just watching, and he walked up to me and asked me very quietly if I wanted a drink.”

She was sitting on the edge of the podium, her ankles hooked over each other, kicking out her legs in an idle, gentle way so her heels bounced and bounced. Stanley was standing a little way off with his hands in his pockets, watching her calmly.

“Soon I will walk you home in the bluish dark and ask if your hands are cold just for a reason to touch you,” Stanley said.

“He asked me if I wanted a drink,” the girl said again. She wasn’t looking at him. She had found her rhythm now, and her eyes were flashing. “I thought that meant he had some alcohol so I said, Yes. We’re breath-tested now, at the door before we walk in, we have to say our name and our address, and always there’s that little spasm of fear that you feel, coming out of nowhere, in case it comes up positive. Some of the boys take cameras in, just so they can fill empty film canisters with rum and drink it once they’re inside. Or they strap hip flasks to the inside of their legs. Most of them just bring pills. I thought he meant he had some alcohol so I said, Yes. He disappeared.”

“Even as I saw you I was disappointed,” Stanley said. “Can anything come of such an ordinary beginning? I asked myself. I looked at you and I thought of all the things you aren’t. Even before I spoke to you I was angry at you for not being more than you are.”

“He came back,” the girl said, “and I almost laughed. He had gone and bought us both a Coke, still all dewy and frosted from the fridge behind the bar, and he opened mine up for me with this quiet little flush of pride, like he was some black-and-white hero lighting my cigarette and fixing my drink just the way I like it. We talked for a while about leaving school and going to university and he told me he wanted to be an actor, and we watched the noose for a while.”

“I didn’t like you,” Stanley said. “I didn’t like you for detaining me at this never-ending stage of nervous silence and nothing-talk and worry. I didn’t want what you were offering. I stayed because I was angry and I wanted to show you that I thought that you were boring. I wanted to make you feel boring.”

The Head of Acting was watching them impassively. Stanley could see him out of the corner of his eye, holding his head very still.

“I’d already decided,” the girl said. “He wouldn’t have known that. As soon as I saw him I decided the way it was going to be. He never had a chance.”

“Why do you want to be an actor, my boy?” Stanley’s father asked. The capillaries were standing out in his cheeks in bold little threads. Stanley could tell he was drunk only by the way he ducked his head slightly every time he blinked.

“They asked me that in my audition,” he said. He watched his father refill his wineglass, and suddenly didn’t feel like being honest. “I just want to have fun with it, I guess.”

“Not in it for fame and fortune?”

“Oh,” Stanley said, watching as his father reached across the table and emptied the bottle into his own glass. “No. It’s more of a… no. I just want to have fun.”

“Good man,” said Stanley’s father. “I’ve got a joke you might like.”

“Yeah?” Stanley said. This was his least favorite part of the evening. He tried to read his father’s wristwatch from across the table. They had already ordered dessert, tiny splashes of cream and color on vast white plates, and soon his father would be hailing a pair of taxis and slipping fifty dollars into his breast pocket and clapping him on the shoulder and walking away. Outside the street was slick and oily with rain.

“What’s the most common cause of pedophilia in this country?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sexy kids.”

“That’s funny.”

“It’s good, eh?”

“Yeah.”

“I got it off a client. Have I told you about him? The one with the angel voices. You’ll love this, Stanley. This guy is honestly something else.”

Stanley sometimes tried to imagine what it would be like to live in the same house as his father, to see him every day, to walk past him dozing on the couch or brushing his teeth or squinting into the fridge. Their yearly outing was always at a different restaurant, and Stanley could catalog his relationship with his father in a string of names: The Empire Room, The Setting Sun, Federico’s, La Vista. Sometimes his father rang him on the telephone, but the two-second delay of the international line made him sound distant and distracted and Stanley always worried he was talking too little or too much.

“You were an accident,” was how his father explained it many restaurants ago. “Our relationship was casual, respectful, and very brief. She found out she was pregnant and decided to keep you, even though my practice was moving to England and it was likely I’d never come back. I said I would keep in touch and help out wherever I could. And I saved your life—she was going to call you Gerald. I stepped in.”

“Thanks,” Stanley said.

“No problem,” said his father, waving a piece of squid. “But believe me, sperm is a serious business.”

Stanley looked at him now, drunk and flamboyant and mischievous and laughing at his own story. He was a little afraid of his father. He was afraid of the way the man delivered his opinion, afraid of the crafty watchful antagonism that left Stanley uncertain whether he was meant to argue or agree. His million-dollar insurance policy idea was a typical trap, a raw slice of bloody bait laid out with a flourish and a double-crossing smile. Did his father expect him to second-guess the idea? Was he supposed to follow through with it, or admonish his father for being macabre and coarse? Stanley didn’t know. He reached into his pocket and touched the edge of the glossy brochure from the Institute.

“Well, I think that’s us,” his father said, returning his glass to the table and reaching up to smooth his lapel with his hand. “This time next year, my boy, you will have become a sensitive and feeling soul.”

“Tell us about yourself, Stanley,” said the Head of Acting. He made an abrupt gesture with his hand. “Anything. Doesn’t have to be relevant.”

Stanley shifted his weight to the other leg. His heart was thumping in his rib cage. The panel was sitting against a wall of high windows so their faces were all in shadow and Stanley had to squint against the glare.

“I don’t know whether I’m any good at feeling things,” he said. His voice was tiny in the vast space. “Nothing big has happened to me yet. Nobody has died, nothing terrible has happened, I’ve never really been in love or anything. In a funny way I’m kind of looking forward to something terrible happening, just so I can see what it’s like.”

“Go on,” said the Head of Acting when Stanley faltered.

“I was always a bit jealous of people who had real tragedy in their lives,” he said. “It gave them something to feed on. I felt like I had nothing. It’s not like I want anyone in my family to die, I just want something to overcome. I want a challenge. I think I’m ready for it.”

He was trying to look at them all equally.

“In high school I kind of tried things on,” he said, “just to see what it was like. Even when I got mad or upset or had a fight with someone, it was like I was just trying it on, just to see how far I could push it. There’s always this little part of me that’s not mad, that stays sort of calm and interested and amused.”

“Good,” said the Head of Acting abruptly. “Tell us why you want to be an actor.”

“I want to be seen,” said Stanley. “I don’t really have a bigger answer than that. I just want to be seen.”

“Why?” said the Head of Acting, his fountain pen hovering above the page.

Stanley said, “Because if somebody’s watching, you know you’re worth something.”