The Rehearsal (8 page)

“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.

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.