The Rehearsal

SEVEN

The saxophone teacher is waiting for them by the Coke machine. At first Isolde cannot make her out: the Coke machine is the only really memorable landmark in the Town Hall foyer and so it is typically besieged by a throng of waiting strangers who have also arranged to meet friends and family there. Then the crowd thins and Isolde sees her, tall and angular in a brown leather jacket, her hands folded in front of her, studying the people around her with a calm critical up-and-down gaze that Isolde has come to know very well.

“Hi, Isolde,” the saxophone teacher says when she sees her, and smiles. “Did your mum drop you off?”

“Yeah,” Isolde says, feeling strange. She has never seen the sax teacher outside her attic studio, and (the thought registers oddly) never at night. She accepts a program and bends her head to read it, affecting more interest than she feels.

“There she is!” the sax teacher says, waving across the crowd at somebody. “That makes three of us.”

A group of young musicians jostle past, edging between the sax teacher and Isolde so for a brief moment they are separately marooned in the crowd. The musicians sweep by in a cloud of cigarette smoke and perfume, nebulous and bubbling and clutching each other at the elbow with their slender musician fingers.

And then the sax teacher says, “Isolde, do you know my student Julia? Julia has been my student for three years now.”

Isolde looks up. She suffers a sick abdominal jolt of recognition as their eyes meet. Julia’s eyes widen very slightly and her cheeks flush pink.

“Hi,” Isolde says quickly, struggling to mask a dawning bewildered embarrassment, and Julia nods hello, pressing her lips together in a brief and complicated smile.

Out of her school uniform Julia looks older. She is wearing a black cardigan and long black skirt, her hair piled casually at the back of her head and coming loose in wisps around her temples. The dour and surly and willful Julia that Isolde saw in the counseling room is all but gone: somehow now she seems more fragile, as if the care she has taken with her appearance has exposed a sensitivity that she had no cause to exhibit before. Isolde’s heart is beating fast.

“Do you two know each other from school?” the saxophone teacher says curiously, looking from one to the other with new eyes, as if the juxtaposition of the two of them together is making her see elements of each girl that she has never seen before.

“Sort of,” Julia says quickly. “I’ve seen you around anyway.”

“Yeah,” says Isolde. “But I didn’t know you played sax.” For some reason the thought of Julia as the saxophone teacher’s comfortable old-time student is strange to her. She startles herself with the realization that the private confidences and successes and failures that she has shared in her lessons each Friday were, for the saxophone teacher, only one recurring episode in weeks and months and years of shared confidences and successes and failures—that she herself is only one among many. Isolde wonders what Julia tells the saxophone teacher when they are alone.

“Why aren’t you in jazz band?” Isolde asks quickly. Her shyness makes the question sound accusatory. She is aware of the saxophone teacher’s eyes flicking from her to Julia and back again, as if Isolde is the final piece of a puzzle that will enable her to understand Julia, and Julia is the final piece of a puzzle that will enable her to understand Isolde. It makes Isolde hot and uncomfortable, and inside her shoes she squeezes her toes together in frustration.

“I don’t really have school spirit,” Julia says. “I’m not that kind of person, I guess. If there was something smaller and more underground I might give it a go. I’ve thought about starting a band.”

“Oh,” Isolde says, wondering at this new concept that you might be good at something but not have to prove it by playing for the school.

“I played in a band in my first year of university,” the saxophone teacher says. “We had some dreadful name. I can’t even remember what we called ourselves now.”

“Was it the Sax Kittens?” Julia asks. “Was it Sax, Drums and Rock ’n’ Roll?”

“We weren’t nearly that clever,” the saxophone teacher says. “God, we were awful. We used to do this thing at the end of each gig that was really easy but it always got the crowd going. I’d stand next to the guy who played tenor and at the end of the song he’d flip his sax around so I’d blow into it while he was still fingering the notes, so we were both playing the one instrument. I suppose it must have looked quite difficult—people always screamed like we were doing something amazing.”

Julia is grinning now. “You’ve got a dark jazz past,” she says. “You’ve played gigs.”

“I’ve done some things in my time,” the saxophone teacher says, pretending to be haughty.

They both turn to Isolde to let her share in their joke, and Isolde smiles quickly.

“Oh, I remember,” the saxophone teacher says. “We were called the Travesty Players.”

“What does the Travesty Players mean?” says Isolde.

“It’s a term from the theater,” the sax teacher says. “A travesty role is a part which is meant to be played by a person of the opposite sex. So if you were going to play Hamlet, the program would say, ‘Isolde in the travesty role of Hamlet.’ ”

“Oh,” says Isolde.

“Why did you choose it for your band name?” says Julia.

“We were all into gender back then,” the saxophone teacher says cheerfully. “Ask your mother.”

She is lively tonight, but Isolde finds herself shrinking back, finding the intimacy too forceful and defiant, as if the saxophone teacher is a prisoner released for this night only, drawing the girls close to her in a hard and glittering pincer-grip and demanding they share a part in her slender lonely joy. Julia seems at ease, smiling and pressing the saxophone teacher for more details about her dark jazz past, and Isolde regards her jealously.

Her cardigan is buttoned with gold dome buttons and is unraveling slightly at the hem, giving her a careless scholarly look that makes Isolde feel young and clumsy and naïve. She is wearing a silver turquoise ring on her ink-stained nail-bitten fingers, and tight-knit fishnet stockings underneath her skirt. Isolde drinks it all in and then feels oddly disappointed, looking at this newer, more complete version of Julia who is a whole person and not just an idea of a person. She feels jealous and excluded and even betrayed, as if Julia has no right to exist beyond Isolde’s experience of her.

Isolde turns her attention back to the program. The soloist is a foreigner, photographed in black and white with his chin on his fist and his saxophone gleaming against his cheek. He looks moody and implacable and gifted. He is playing in front of the symphony orchestra tonight, and pictured opposite is the conductor, a plump jolly man with his baton loose in his hand like an idle dagger.

“A great soloist,” the saxophone teacher is saying, “is never some perfect airtight freeze-dried package who has studied and studied and studied. A great soloist is always born out of a partnership or a group. A great soloist is always someone who has had something to feed on.”

Julia is listening politely but frowning all the same. Isolde notices that her nibbled skepticism, which at school seemed an index of aggression and dissatisfaction and gloom, now seems an index of something different, a carefulness or guardedness maybe, something more instinctive and less hostile.

“This is the first concert you’ve come to this year, isn’t it, Isolde?” the saxophone teacher says suddenly, and Isolde nods.

“This guy is awesome,” Julia says, flapping the program. “I’ve got all his recordings. Hey, do classical players have groupies? That’s something I definitely need to look into.”

She is trying to be kind to Isolde, but Isolde finds that all she can do is blush and smile and mumble that she’s looking forward to it. She is squeezing her toes together tight.

The gong sounds a gentle arpeggio to remind them to take their seats. The crowd at the Coke machine begins to disperse, and the sax teacher smiles at them both in turn.

“I really hope you find this inspiring,” she says. “This is a special night for me as well—last time I heard this arrangement live I was only a little bit older than you. It woke me up.”

The orchestra is plush and dazzling against the polished wood of the stage. In the first row of the balcony the sax teacher sits between her two students, calm and matriarchal and silent, the two girls sloping off on either side of her so the three of them seem to form a kind of heraldic crest, a heroic grouping that might be placed above a shield to complete a coat of arms. Julia sits with her hands in her lap, watching the flashing silver and gold with an intent glazed blindness, her eyes unmoving as if she is concentrating on holding something very still in her mind. Isolde is more restless, deliberately leaning away from the saxophone teacher lest their elbows touch, and watching the musicians in a detached, musing way, her gaze drifting from the stage and over the dim unsmiling wraith-faces around her.

As Isolde peers vaguely at the pale faces in the audience she thinks about the different ways you can perform the act of listening. Some in the audience have their eyes shut and their faces tilted slightly upward, enjoying the rain of the music on their skin. Some are nodding in a slow, meaningful sort of way, perhaps every four or five bars, as if something is slowly and majestically taking shape before them. Some, like the sax teacher next to her, are simply sitting still.

Isolde thinks how strange it is, that every person in the auditorium is locked in their own private experience of the music, alone with their thoughts, alone in their enjoyment or distaste, and shivering at the vast feeling of intimacy that this solitude affords, already impatient for the interval when they can compare their experience with their neighbor’s and discover with relief that they are the same. Am I hearing the same thing they are hearing? Isolde wonders half-heartedly, but she is distracted from pursuing the thought any further, turning her attention instead to watch an elderly woman in the stalls flounder noisily in her handbag for a tissue or a mint.

Julia is listening in a dreamy, sleepy way, the music drawing from her one slow, definite impression rather than a slideshow series of impressions that she can cobble together later and divide to find the arithmetic mean. She is thinking about Isolde. She can’t quite see her past the stern unmoving profile of the saxophone teacher, just a flash of her knee every time Isolde crosses her leg, but even so she finds her left-hand peripheral vision is sharpened with a tense hyperawareness whenever the younger girl shifts in her seat. She thinks about the long look that she and Isolde shared in the counseling class, probing the thought again and again like a bloody tooth and wondering, as she has wondered many times, where the look might have come from, and where it might lead.

Sometimes when Julia’s thoughts circulate like this she becomes stricken by the irrational fear that she might open her mouth and say exactly what she is thinking, just to spite herself. She thinks of what she would say, if she did say something, and then she bites her lip and fights back a cold rush of fear at the thought of actually saying it.

The saxophone teacher is thinking about Patsy. She is thinking about Patsy in the smoky afterward bar, still with her concert program tucked in her fist, ordering glasses of wine which they will later refill, in a secret giddy way, from a screw-top bottle in Patsy’s handbag. She sees them both folding themselves into a corner, unwrapping scarves and coats and talking about the crowd and the arrangement and the soloist, and then Patsy saying, “What did you imagine?” and already half-laughing in her eagerness.

“I imagined the music was pouring out of the saxophone like water,” the saxophone teacher said, “pouring over the lip of the bell and pooling on the floor at his feet, and the water level was getting higher and higher and the tide was churning stronger and stronger and in the end he had to finish the piece just to save his life. And then we clapped and he started a new piece and I imagined that the sax was sucking his breath out of him, instead of him blowing the air in, and that the mouthpiece was pushing and pushing to get further and further in, that the sax was trying desperately to suffocate him, and he had to keep playing to save his life.”

Patsy laughed and clapped and they touched glasses and drank, and the saxophone teacher said, “What did you imagine?”

“I imagined that noise had the power to seriously hurt you, even kill you,” Patsy said, “depending on the quality of the musicianship. The more elegant the playing, the more total the death. The Town Hall would be like the arena where you were sent if you had done something truly terrible. You’d be marched into the auditorium, strapped down and buckled on to the red velvet seats so tight you couldn’t move. The soloist would be the executioner, playing faster and faster and watching you over the footlights with wet greedy eyes.”

The saxophone teacher laughed and clapped and they touched glasses again and drank, and Patsy said, “That concert changed me forever.”

On Saturday nights Bridget works at the local video store. She sits glumly on a high vinyl stool and watches the lonely people drift from shelf to shelf, keeping one eye on the black-and-white security television that dimly shows the curtained nook where the adult tapes are shelved. The clock says half-past nine. Bridget watches the inching revolutions of the minute hand and listens for the padded thump of a late tape through the dewy drop-slot.

“Hello, Bridget,” somebody says.

Bridget shoves her chewing gum to the side of her mouth and turns her tired head to see Mr. Saladin standing by the door, crisp in beige trousers and a woollen coat. He smiles at her in a boyish way.

“Hi, Mr. Saladin,” says Bridget, brightening and slithering forward off her stool. “I’ve never seen you here before.”

“My nephews live in the area,” says Mr. Saladin. “Two blocks over.”

“Oh,” says Bridget with genuine surprise, because she has never thought of Mr. Saladin as the type of man to have nephews. She regards him a little shyly.

“How is it that you’re allowed to work here? You’re not eighteen,” Mr. Saladin says, folding his gloved hands across his chest. “You must not be allowed to watch half the movies here.”

“I’m not watching them,” says Bridget, “I’m only selling them.”

Mr. Saladin chuckles. “And I suppose after I’ve gone you’re going to look up my record for porno,” he says.

“Probably,” says Bridget, with a rush of gratitude at being granted ownership of the joke. “And I’ll find out how old you really are.”

“Now you’ve gone too far,” Mr. Saladin says, feigning gravity. “That is privileged information. Don’t you dare.”

Bridget giggles and then stifles the sound quickly, covering her mouth with her hand. Behind her, the row of mounted television screens flashes its sequence of silent silver car-wrecks and swift untimely deaths.

“Working on a Saturday night,” Mr. Saladin says, shaking his head. “What happened to drinking and taking drugs and smoking and playing loud music? I must be out of touch.”

Again Bridget’s hand flies to her mouth to smother her laughter. Mr. Saladin smiles, his gaze sliding upward for a second as he is distracted by an image darting by.

The clock moves forward.

Until this precise moment in her life Bridget has understood flirting only as a self-promotional conversational tool, wielded with the intention of winning a short-term companion or a grope. Now as she looks at Mr. Saladin, calm and smiling and unruffled in his clean pressed clothes, his scarf knotted neatly around his throat, his elegant triple-veined leather gloves and his windswept hair, Bridget suffers a lusty rush of bewildered wanting that tightens like a fist in her groin. For the first time in sixteen years she feels impelled to flirt for the sole purpose of ruining somebody else, driven to recklessness by the dim and thrilling notion that here, at least, is a man who will see her in only sexual terms. She reaches out and pinches the laminate edge of the counter between her thumb and her fingertips, rocking back on her heels in a flirty way, offering herself as bait just so she might have the pleasure of watching him bite in vain.

“What are you doing now? Do you have a new job?” she asks. “We miss you at jazz band.”

“For now I’m painting houses,” Mr. Saladin says. “I’m in between things. So the new conductor is putting you through the paces?”

“Mrs. Jean Critchley,” Bridget says. “She’s okay.”

“I know the name,” Mr. Saladin says. “I’ve seen her play live. She’s good.”

“Yeah,” Bridget says casually. Mr. Saladin smiles and looks around him, as if he means to amble off, and so Bridget says all in a hurry, “We had to go to counseling after you left, in case we were damaged. It was lame.”

Mr. Saladin raises his eyebrows. He doesn’t speak for a moment. Then he says calmly, “That doesn’t sound like much fun.”

“It was lame,” Bridget says again, and she almost feels inept, but then she remembers that here, at least, is a man who will understand and forgive her naïveté: to this man, her clumsy adolescence is not a handicap but a prize. The fist in her groin stiffens again, clenching like a swiftly tightened screw.

“Victoria still hasn’t come back to school,” she blurts out before Mr. Saladin can speak again, trying in her gauche and rumpled way to talk casually, like the beautiful girls at school talk casually, tossing their hair over their shoulder and turning out their feet like show ponies. “Has she left for good?”

“No, I don’t think so,” says Mr. Saladin. “I imagine she’ll be back before exams.”

“That’s good,” says Bridget. She smiles in what she hopes is an encouraging way, wanting to show that she is on Mr. Saladin’s side.

“Good to see you, Bridget. Keep on with your music,” says Mr. Saladin. He smiles at her and strolls off toward the neon wall of new releases. “I’ll go and see what you’ve got on offer.”

“It’s two for ten,” Bridget calls out after him.

She stands there for a moment before retreating back to her stool. Out of habit she checks the security screen and sees a couple furtively entering the adult nook, clutching each other and giggling as they trail their fingers along the spines. She watches as the woman selects a title and they laugh at the various postures pictured in miniature on the back. The man says something quietly, and the woman pretends to be furious and slaps at him with the end of her scarf. They laugh.

After Mr. Saladin leaves, Bridget looks up his rental history and is disappointed to find no porno. She learns that he is thirty-one.

After the applause, the three of them sit for a moment in silence. The lights come up over the audience, restoring color to the wraiths, and all around them the crowd begins to shift and laugh and chatter, reaching down for their scarves and their programs and their clutch purses as if released from a spell. The saxophone teacher is lost in a memory and doesn’t stir, her hands limp from the applause, her eyes large and vacant and turned toward the stage. Julia sits forward on her seat and turns to Isolde suddenly, and says, “Do you want a lift home? I’ve got my car here. It’d be no problem.”

Isolde hasn’t yet learned to drive and Julia’s offer makes her feel young and inexperienced and graceless, as if she is being forced to reveal that she can’t read or that she is still afraid of the dark. The older girl seems impossibly mature to Isolde, like Victoria’s friends always seem impossibly mature, powdered and scented and full of secrets and private laughter, contemptuous of little Issie for all that she does not yet know. “Thanks,” is what Isolde says to Julia now, smiling quickly and ducking her head. “That would be great. I was going to have to taxi.”

“I won’t tell your mother,” the saxophone teacher says to Isolde, returning at last from her memory. “I know you’re going to keep the taxi fare she’s given you.”

“How do you know I don’t charge a taxi fare?” Julia says.

The saxophone teacher laughs. “I’ve seen your car, for starters,” she says. She starts chatting about the music, speaking mostly to Julia. Her big hands are spread open as she talks, turning her impression of the concert over and over like a potter at a wheel.

Isolde nods and smiles. She darts a look at Julia, and wonders if Julia had been preparing the offer for some time, sitting silent in the gray dusk of the stage-glow and all the while preparing how best to phrase the question. Do you want a lift home? I’ve got my car here. It’d be no problem.

“It’s not a popular configuration,” the saxophone teacher is saying. Isolde keeps nodding wisely, trying to mask the shrinking sensation in her pelvis, which registers as part exhilaration and part dread. What did the offer mean? Isolde almost imagines the older girl leaning in across the gear shift and the handbrake and reaching out an ink-stained jeweled hand to tuck a wisp of hair behind her ear. She almost imagines it, but in a fleeting shock of panic she snuffs out the thought.

“Pretty inspiring stuff,” the saxophone teacher says in conclusion, slapping the armrests in a jolly way and standing up to join the inching exodus. “Pretty inspiring stuff.”

“Cheers for the concert,” Julia says to the saxophone teacher after they have shuffled their way out of the auditorium and through the marble foyer into the cold. “It was incredible. I’ll be thinking about it all week.”

The saxophone teacher draws the belt of her leather jacket tighter around her waist. “I’ll see you Monday, then,” she says to Julia. “And I’ll see you on Friday,” she says to Isolde. She looks lonely all of a sudden, standing stiffly on the gritty Town Hall steps with the crowd pouring out on either side of her. She is backlit by the reddish velvet light of the foyer behind her, and it strikes Isolde that she is rather pretty. She registers with something a little like triumph that the saxophone teacher is now the outsider, looking down at the girls with a halting expression as if she wants to detain them further but she is uncertain how.

“Sounds good,” Isolde says, and gives a little wave. Julia smiles, and then the two of them turn away from her and walk out into the night.

Mrs. De Gregorio clutches her purse in the crook of her lap while she sips her tea. She sits with her knees together and her thighs elevated a little because she is resting her heels against the crossbar of the chair and only her square toes touch the ground. Her breasts almost reach her lap, and as she sits down she wedges her purse into the gap where her body hinges. The saxophone teacher thinks how very strange it looks, Mrs. De Gregorio curving herself around her purse in this protective way. From where the sax teacher is sitting, she can see only the twin-balled golden clasp peeking out from beneath the soft acrylic bulge of Mrs. De Gregorio’s breast.

She smiles. “What can I do for you, Mrs. De Gregorio?”

“I’ve come about my daughter,” Mrs. De Gregorio says, and as always the saxophone teacher marvels privately at this woman’s performance, this single unitary woman who plays all the mothers so differently, each performance a tender and unique object like the veined clouding on a subtle pearl. “This might seem like a bit of an odd errand,” the woman says, “me marching in here like this to ask you such a personal question, but lately at home we’ve noticed a few changes, and—” Mrs. De Gregorio looks down into her lap and sighs. “She’s just become impossible,” she says at last.

“Let’s start at the beginning, then,” the saxophone teacher says briskly, tugging down her shirttails and smoothing flat the wool of her jersey as if she means business. “First of all—why the saxophone? Why did you choose this particular instrument? The saxophone has connotations, as you know. A saxophone is not a piano or a flute. A very particular type of girl gravitates toward the saxophone, and quite frankly it’s the type of girl who is not very likely to keep the peace. Why did you choose the sax for your daughter?”

“Oh, it was her choice,” Mrs. De Gregorio says, but the saxophone teacher shakes her head and swiftly interrupts her—

“Let’s not play that game, Mrs. De Gregorio. Your daughter is your project, we both know that. The elements beyond your control are really very few indeed. I can see you’re the type of mother who likes to hold the reins. The type of mother who regards her children as free agents is a slapdash mother, a vague uncaring mother who simply doesn’t appreciate a job well done. You are not that person.”

Mrs. De Gregorio nods, a little defeated.

“So you chose this fate for your daughter,” the saxophone teacher continues. “You pushed her toward the instrument of her undoing. You could have had a daughter who played the violin, long-haired and eccentric and quietly confident, but you chose the saxophone. You made that choice.”

“I wanted to say,” Mrs. De Gregorio says, fumbling for the words, “I wanted to say that we’ve noticed a definite change, that’s all. She won’t talk—well. You know what it can be like. And I just wanted to ask what she says to you each week. Whether you might have any clues. A boyfriend or something. Something we could work through, and understand.”

“Why do you think that your daughter would tell me the truth?” the saxophone teacher asks.

“About her studies,” says Mrs. De Gregorio weakly. “Or her life at school. Something like a boyfriend, a problem that we could work through, and understand.”

The saxophone teacher doesn’t speak for a moment, just so Mrs. De Gregorio feels uncomfortable and wishes she hadn’t spoken so freely. Then she says, “But how can you ever know?” She is more brooding now and less abrupt. “How can you ever get to the kernel of truth behind it all? You could watch her. But you have to remember that there are two kinds of watching: either she will know she is being watched, or she will not. If she knows she is being watched, her behavior will change under observation until what you are seeing is so utterly transformed it becomes a thing intended only for observation, and all realities are lost. And if she doesn’t know she is being watched, what you are seeing is something unprimed, something unfit for performance, something crude and unrefined that you will try and refine yourself: you will try to give it a meaning that it does not inherently possess, and in doing this you will press your daughter into some mold that misunderstands her. So, you see, neither picture is what you might call true. They are distortions.”

“Has she said anything?” Mrs. De Gregorio says. “I know it’s an odd question. It’s embarrassing to have to ask. But is there anything we should know about?” Her hand disappears under her breasts, checking that her purse is still tucked into the vast crux of her lap. Her fingers find the wadded leather lump and touch it briefly.

“Oh, Mrs. De Gregorio. I’m her music teacher,” the sax teacher says. She returns her mug to the table and folds her hands.

“But then what do I do?” Mrs. De Gregorio asks with a kind of rising panic. “What options have I left?”

“You could ask your daughter,” the saxophone teacher says. “You could sit down and actually talk to her. But you always run the risk that she might lie.”

“What did you imagine while you were watching?” the saxophone teacher asks when Julia arrives for her lesson on Monday afternoon. “At the concert.”

“I liked the second half better than the first half,” Julia begins, but the saxophone teacher waves her arm impatiently and says, “No, I meant what did you think about while you were watching? What sorts of things were you thinking about?”

Julia looks at her curiously, as if this might be a test. “Why?” she asks.

“It’s a game I used to play with an old friend of mine,” the saxophone teacher says. “We had a joke that the better the performance, the more catalytic the effect. A poor performance might only make you think about what you had for dinner or what you were going to wear when you woke up the next day. But a great performance would make you imagine things you would never have been brave enough to imagine before.”

She is speaking eagerly, like a child. Julia unclips her saxophone case and says, “I was just thinking about the music.”

“Yes, but around that. When your mind drifted. What did you imagine?”

Julia slips her reed out of its gated plastic sheath and holds it for a second. “I imagined what was going to happen,” she said, “when I dropped Isolde home.”

The lights change. The overhead lights and the bright overcast light from the window are doused; a template falls into place in front of a solitary floodlight and the attachment begins to rotate, so that the yellow light is thinly striped and ever changing, playing over the pair of them like passing streetlights striping the dashboard of a moving car. Julia sits down. The streetlights come and go, streaking over her knees and curving away over her shoulder to disappear, and she is dark for a moment before another streak of light rises up to replace the first, and then another, and another, all yellow and forward bending.

“I imagined,” Julia says, “that on the way home we would talk about the concert a bit, and what we thought of it, and the teachers that we had in common at school, and we’d keep coming back to you, to talk about you, because you are the only real thread of connection between us. We’d talk about you for a while back and forth, only we wouldn’t be quite honest, because the most important thing would be to create an attractive impression of ourselves, and what we truly thought didn’t really matter. We’d say whatever things would put us in the best light. We’d lie. All the way home we’d lie to each other, back and forth.”

The saxophone teacher is unmoving. She looks Julia up and down with her eyes only. Her face is like a mask.

“And then I imagined,” Julia says, “that after I killed the engine we would sit there for a moment, not looking at each other, just looking up through the darkness at Isolde’s unlit house. My key ring would still be swinging from the ignition, and we would listen to the sound of the wind whipping the leaves. My mouth would be dry.”

The rotating template has stilled and Julia’s knees are in a square of light which falls through the car window and across her lap. Her face is in shadow. She is sitting stiffly, one leg forward-stretched and cocked at an angle, as if on the brake pedal. Her saxophone is lying on the couch beside her, and she is holding it casually with her left hand, lifting the upper end slightly off the couch, so it looks like her hand is curled casually around the handbrake, her knuckles in the plastic shallow beneath the handle and her wrist loosely arched. With her other hand she plucks at her sternum, testing the tension of an invisible seat belt strap, lifting it carelessly and letting it slap back against her chest.

“And I’d go, You know what everybody says about me. At school and everything. It isn’t true.”

Julia wets her lips with her tongue. She isn’t looking at Isolde: she’s looking out the window, peering into the dark silver of the wing-mirror, one hand still plucking at her strap.

“Isolde goes, I know. She says it really quickly and then she says it again. I know. She’s not looking at me, she’s looking forward, up at the house, and her finger is at her throat, twisting her necklace around and around, cutting all the blood from her fingertip. The end of it has gone gray.” Julia looks back at Isolde again, quickly, and tightens her grip around the handbrake. “And then I go, I was just worried that you might think I was going to come on to you, or jump you when you least expected it or something. I was worried you might think that.”

She reverts to gazing into the wing-mirror, turning her face away.

“Isolde goes, I don’t think that. And I go, Good. And then we sit for a moment, looking up at Isolde’s unlit house and listen for each other’s breath, and then I go, That’s all. That’s all I wanted to say.”

The lights come up a little, just enough to include the saxophone teacher and bring her into the scene. She shifts and crosses her legs. She looks uncomfortable.

“What is it that everyone says about you at school?” she asks reluctantly. Sometimes Julia makes her feel cornered, and she is feeling cornered now.

“Everyone thinks I like girls,” Julia says.

“I see,” the saxophone teacher says. The lights dip back down again, receding back to the single streetlamp casting its square pool of light across Julia’s lap. The saxophone teacher disappears again into the dark.

“We parked the car,” Julia says, “and sat there for a while, and whatever we were talking about sort of trickled away like water until there was nothing left and we just sat and waited for something to happen. My mouth was dry. And then Isolde goes, Do you mind waiting here in the car for a while? My mum thinks Victoria came to the concert with me, and we have to walk in at the same time in case she’s still up.

“And even while she was saying it a car pulled up and stopped a few houses in front of where we were, so both of us were lit red for a moment in the glare of the taillights, and then the lights went off but nobody got out. We watched but the car just sat there. And Isolde goes, She doesn’t know we’re here. She hasn’t seen us. Isolde’s watching the car with a hard tight sort of expression and I don’t want to say anything in case it’s the wrong thing, and then she says, We had it all arranged. Mum dropped both of us off at the concert, and I went in to meet you guys and Victoria went off to meet him. It’s the only way she can still see him. She’s grounded most nights, and none of her friends will cover for her now. I don’t mind.”

The saxophone teacher leans forward in the dark. She is frowning.

“And then Isolde goes, I’d better go. If we sit here for much longer it’ll be weird. I have to go.”

Julia smoothes her knees and tugs again at her seat belt, nodding.

“But she doesn’t go. She stays in the car for a moment longer, and through the back window of the car in front we see Victoria lean over and put her head on Mr. Saladin’s shoulder. It looks awkward, stretched across the gearshift with all this space in between them, and he reaches his arm up and strokes her head. He’s saying something but we can only see their silhouettes. It’s like a shadow-play, and all of a sudden my heart is hammering and I look at Isolde and she looks at me really quickly, but then again, and she says, Please don’t tell anyone, and I say I won’t.”

Julia’s voice has become dry and choked, and her tongue keeps darting out to wet her lips. Spots of crimson have appeared high on either cheek.

“And then she gets out,” Julia says, “and the silhouettes turn around and see her, and then Victoria kisses Mr. Saladin goodbye, not on the mouth. He turns his face to the side so she can kiss his cheek, and then they both smile and maybe even laugh, like it’s a joke. And then the red taillights come on again and Mr. Saladin’s car is gone, and Victoria and Isolde go into the house together. Isolde is the one who unlocks the gate, and while she reaches for the latch Victoria steps into the light and looks at me, really gets a long look at me, and then she says something under her breath to Isolde like she’s unhappy. And then they disappear.”

Julia comes abruptly to an end and looks at the saxophone teacher for the first time. Her mouth is twisted and her expression is sour, as if the performance has made her remember an unpleasant feeling that she would rather have forgotten.

“Was that really what happened?” the saxophone teacher says, as the lights return to normal and Julia reaches for her sax. “Was it Mr. Saladin in the car, Julia? Could you be sure?”

“I was just telling you what I imagined,” Julia says, all of a sudden grouchy and withdrawn and peering suspiciously at the saxophone teacher like she is an enemy. And then she adds, “It was dark.” She picks at one of the keys on her sax, just to hear it clack.

“This could be very important,” the saxophone teacher says.

“It’s what I imagined,” Julia says again, retreating further. She turns away and plays an arpeggio to warm up.

“Julia,” says the saxophone teacher. Her eyes are gleaming. “Tell me what you saw.”

“Nothing,” Julia says, and although she is sullen and inward the saxophone teacher senses in her something like triumph, as if Julia has led her somewhere remote and treacherous only to abandon her. “I dropped her home. She said goodbye. She got out. She shut the door. Nothing happened.”

“Can you remember losing your innocence, Patsy?” the saxophone teacher says.

They are in the afterward bar, Patsy sitting sideways in the booth with her legs up and her brown boots crossed at the ankle. There is a bottle between them, and two glasses, each stained with the pale gray kiss of a woman’s lower lip, like a fingerprint just below the rim.

“Do you mean a specific event?” Patsy says. “The actual loss of it, do you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Losing my virginity?”

“Not necessarily. Just if there was a moment when you ceased to be innocent. The moment you fell. Can you remember your fall?”

Patsy thinks about this quietly for a second. The saxophone teacher raises her wineglass to her mouth and drinks. Patsy is beautiful tonight. Her hair is swept back into a tumbling handful at the nape of her neck, and her eyes are clear and bright. She wears a heavy brass locket, a gift from Brian, an antique and accidental-seeming piece that suits her perfectly, suits the stout capable breadth of her chest and the soft notched hollow of her collarbone. Patsy always suits her clothes, her costume. The image of her is always complete, the saxophone teacher thinks: it is impossible to halve her, undress her, subtract from her. The sax teacher cannot imagine removing the necklace, even in her mind—she can’t imagine Patsy unclothed, Patsy without the trimmings and trappings that she inhabits so completely.

Patsy rolls the stem of her wineglass in her fingers.

“I was never veiled or misted as a kid,” she says slowly. “You know, Santa Claused, Easter Bunnied, cabbage-patched, euphemized. I can’t remember any illusions. I can’t remember ever not knowing. Sex was never really a mystery. And there was no God in our house, so no mystery there. Of course I had first experiences like everybody else, made mistakes like everybody else, repaired and reinvented myself like everybody does. But I can’t remember ever really falling. I can’t remember if I was ever really innocent. I have no nostalgia for a time before.”

She looks up at the saxophone teacher. “Is that terribly sad?” she says, and laughs.

The sax teacher smiles and says nothing, and they both sit quietly for a while, touching their wineglasses with their fingertips, looking away.

“Everything had a precedent,” Patsy says after a time. “Everything I have ever done had a template, a formula, a model, something public and visible and known. I knew the shape of everything I would ever meet, before I met it. The template always preceded the reality, the experience, the personal truth of a thing. I learned about love from the cinema, and from television, and from the stage. I learned the formula and then I applied it. That’s how it happened for me. My whole life.”

She gives another little tinkle of a laugh. “Is that terribly sad?” she says a second time. “Is that very sad?”

Up on the little dais next to the piano the double-bassist leans forward and says into his microphone, “One last song, folks. Here’s one last song.”